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Jordan Ruimy‘s Best Films of Martin Scorsese poll popped yesterday. Ruimy tallied the preferences of 114 critics, and the top three — no surprise — are Goodfellas, Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. I’m sorry but those are vaguely boring, right-down-the-middle choices. The Des Moines Realtors Association would’ve picked these.

HE’s top three are Raging Bull, The Wolf of Wall Street and The Last Temptation of Christ.

The two least admired Scorsese films on Ruimy’s list are Boxcar Bertha and Who’s That Knocking On My Door?, which got no votes.

The voted-upon Scorsese flicks with the lowest counts are The Color of Money, New York, New York and The Aviator, which snagged one vote each. Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Shutter island and Gangs of New York got two votes each. Cape Fear got 3, Kundun, 4 and Silence, 7.

HE’s three least favorite Scorsese flicks are Kundun, Shutter Island and The Aviator.

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Around the 57-minute mark of Stanley Kubrick‘s Spartacus, there’s a magnificent matte painting shot of Rome. What makes it special isn’t just the painting of the ancient city by Peter Ellenshaw, but the filmed inserts of gesturing extras dressed in Roman garb.

According to IndexFX, “All but one of the Spartacus matte paintings were done at Universal’s matte painting department under the supervision of Russell Lawson.

“But for the establishing shot showing a view of Rome, Kubrick requested that the painting be done by Ellenshaw, who at that time was the head of matte painting at Disney Studios.”

Here’s an Academy Museum site focused oh the Ellenshaw painting.

Question: What are some other old-school matte paintings blended with live action…ones that really stand out, I mean?

Among many others I recently participated in Scott Feinberg’s “The 100 Greatest Film Books of All Time” survey, the results of which popped in The Hollywood Reporter today (10.12).

What’s the next great topic for a Hollywood expose or tell-all? Six years ago I suggested a book called “Super-Vomit: How Hollywood Infantiles (i.e., Devotees of Comic Books and Video Games) Degraded Theatrical and All But Ruined The Greatest Modern Art Form“?

Here’s another idea — a recent-history book one about how censorious, ultra-sensitive wokesters all but suffocated the film business during the woke terror era (2016 to present)?

Here are the books I put on my top-25 Feinberg list:

(1) Sam Wasson’s “The Big Goodbye” (making of Chinatown book)

(2) Stephen Bach‘s “Final Cut: Dreams and Disasters in the Making of Heaven’s Gate”

(4) Mark Harris‘s “Pictures at a Revolution”

(5) John Gregory Dunne‘s “The Studio”

(6) Leo Braudy‘s “The World in a Frame”

(7) Thomas Schatz‘s “The Genius of the System”

(8) David McClintick‘s “Indecent Exposure”

(9) Otto Freidrich‘s “City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940s“,

(10) Julie Salamon‘s “The Devil’s Candy,”

(11) Jack Brodsky and Nathan Weiss‘s “The Cleopatra Papers”

(12) David Thomson‘s “Suspects“ + “The Whole Equation

(13) William Goldman‘s “Which Lie Did I Tell?”

(14) Peter Biskind‘s “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls” and “Down and Dirty Pictures.”

(15) Charles Fleming‘s “High Concept: Don Simpson and the Hollywood Culture of Excess,”

(16) William Goldman‘s “Adventures in the Screen Trade”,

(17) the audio version of Robert Evans‘ “The Kid Stays in the Picture”,

(18) James B. Stewart‘s “Disney War“

(19) Peter Biskind‘s “Seeing is Believing”

(20) Thomas Doherty‘s “Hollywood’s Censor” (the book about Joe Breen)

(21) Jake Ebert and Terry Illiot‘s “My Indecision Is Final”

(22) Nancy Griffin and Kim Masters‘ “Hit and Run: How Jon Peters and Peter Guber Took Sony for a Ride in Hollywood“,

(23) Bruce Wagner‘s “Force Majeure“,

(24) David Thomson‘s “Warren Beatty and Desert Eyes: A Life and a Story“

(25) Nathaniel West‘s “The Day of the Locust”

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Lawmen: Bass Reeves is a new western series (Paramount +, 11.5) about a tough, well-respected lawman in the Arkansas and Oklahoma Indian territories during the post-Civil War Years.

The series was created by showrunner Chad Feehan, executive produced by Taylor Sheridan, and stars David Oyelowo (who also produced). Costarring Dennis Quaid, Forrest Goodluck, Lauren E. Banks, Barry Pepper, Grantham Coleman, Demi Singleton.

I don’t know how many episodes are in store but the writers won’t need to invent much as Reeves lived quite a life. The trailer makes it feel Deadwood-y.

What I haven’t figured is why the first word in the title is Lawmen.

Wiki excerpt: “Reeves worked for 32 years as a federal peace officer in the Indian Territory, brought in some of the most dangerous fugitives of the time, and was never wounded despite having his hat and belt shot off on separate occasions.

“In addition to being a marksman with a rifle and revolver, Reeves developed superior detective skills during his long career. When he retired in 1907, Reeves had on his record thousands of arrests of felons, some accounts claiming over 3000. According to his obituary, he killed 14 outlaws to defend his life.”

Reeves was portrayed by Delroy Lindo in The Harder They Fall (’21).

A pre- and post-Civil War saga of the expansion and settlement of the American West.

Or perhaps a 21st century version of How The West Was Won…something along these lines?

There’s been some confusion about how many parts but I guess it’s down to two.

An apparently questionable passage from Kevin Costner‘s Wiki page reads as follows: “In August 2022, Costner began production on Horizon: An American Saga, a Western epic that will be split into at least four films, each just under three hours in length“…uhhm, no?

“Costner plans on the films being released over a series of months,” the excerpt explained. “Costner will act as director of the project and said the film was [first] proposed as an event television series. Production on the first film was expected to last at least 220 days, but was completed by November 2022. Production of the next films was underway by May 2023.”

The Horizon Wiki page calls it “an upcoming two-part American epic Western film co-written, produced, directed by and starring Kevin Costner. Costner also leads an extensive cast comprising of Sienna Miller, Sam Worthington, Jena Malone, Abbey Lee, Michael Rooker, Danny Huston, Luke Wilson, Isabelle Fuhrman, Jeff Fahey, Will Patton, Tatanka Means, Owen Crow Shoe, Ella Hunt, and Jamie Campbell Bower.

“Described as a two-part event, Chapter 1 will be released on June 28, 2024. Chapter 2 will later be released on August 16, 2024.”

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This striking Vogue cover photo is about as good or glammy as it will probably ever get for Lily Gladstone…photography, lighting, the right angle, wardrobe…it all came together.

Leo looks great also…pushing 50 in actuality, he looks like his mid to late 30s.

After being attacked by Bobby Peru for allegedly diminishing Gladstone and her Killers of the Flower Moon performance, I responded thusly:

My conveying an honest, thought-through reaction to Gladstone’s KOTFM performance is not an act of diminishment. It’s a fairly rendered opinion.

My choosing to ignore the New Academy Kidz mindset…an attitude that rewards social-justice bonafides over traditional acting or film-making standards…this is not an attempt to diminish Gladstone. The white-guilt wokester choke hold has been an active political ingredient since 2016 or ’17, certainly by ’18.

My stating plainly that Gladstone talks with a rural (aka “shitkicker”) Montana accent…that’s a fact. You can call it diminishing but I wouldn’t point fingers if someone said that I speak with a slight northern New Jersey twang (which I do). Was it diminishing to say that JFK spoke with a Boston accent**? Or that Stephen King speaks with a reedy Maine accent? Or that Flannery O’Connor sounded like Savannah? Or that Jimmy Carter has a rural Georgian way of speaking? Or that LBJ sounded like the Texas hill country?

My stating an obvious political fact, which is that wokesters like Clayton Davis are promoting Gladstone for Best Actress, and that this is primarily about an opportunity to celebrate her Native American identity — my calling a spade a spade in this regard is not a form of diminishment. It’s a fact.

I’ve said over and over that Gladstone is good enough in KOTFM but she’s certainly not wowser. Mainly because all she mostly does is glare and seethe and lie in bed. Because the script doesn’t give her any big crescendo moments. She doesn’t even get to slap Leo’s face or sharply condemn what he and his evil uncle have done to some of the oil-rich Osage natives.

** It would be diminishing if I wrote that JFK spoke with a pretentious Hahvahd or Boston Irish clam-chowder-slurping accent.

I still say that a towering Elvis Presley (Jacob Elordi) and a teeny-weeny Priscilla Presley (Cailee Spaeny) is visually jarring. They just look weird together. Director Sofia Coppola should have cast to minimize height disparity — a shorter Elvis or a taller Priscilla.

The real-life Elvis and Priscilla were separated by eight inches of height — Elvis was 6’0″ and Priscilla was (and presumably still is) 5’4″. But in the film, the former Priscilla Beaulieu (later Presley) is played by the 59-inch-tall Spaeny (roughly the size of an eight-year-old) and Elvis is played by the 77-inch-tall Elordi.

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Shawn Levy and Steven Knight‘s All the Light We Cannot See (Netflix limited series, 11.2) is a danger-fraught World War II saga. Set in Paris and Saint-Malo, it’s mainly about four characters — Marie-Laure Le Blanc (Aria Mia Loberti), a blind French teenager; her father Daniel Le Blanc (Mark Ruffalo); a teenaged German lad named Werner Pfennig (Louis Hofmann); and Marie-Laure’s great uncle Etienne (Hugh Laurie).

Levy and Knight adhered to woke casting requirements by not choosing the best skilled actress to play Marie-Laure (wokesters feel that traditional acting or “pretending” is ungenuine), but Loberti because of her real-life “legal” blindness.

Wiki page: “Loberti landed the part after a global search for a blind and low-vision actor. A fan of the book, she auditioned after learning about the search from a childhood orientation and mobility teacher. Despite no acting training, Loberti beat out thousands of submission to secure the role; it is her first ever acting role and was her first audition.”

The critics are hating it.

HE to community: One of the below sploogies has called Poor Things a “sex positive” film, and that’s fine. But what exactly does this mean? Can a film be “sex negative,” and if so how does it qualify as such? A woman in an ‘80s or ‘90s Woody Allen film asked “Is sex dirty?”, and Allen’s character answered “It is if you do it right.”

And 100% proud of having crafted this identity or calling card or however you want to describe it.

Will RFK, Jr.’s reported independent presidential candidacy siphon away more votes from Trump or Biden? That is the question. Let there be no doubt that RFK’s alleged plan to become the new Ralph Nader or Ross Perot is a total dick move. Odious, self-aggrandizing, shameful.