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The late William Sylvester (1.31.1922 – 1.25.95) became a semi-legendary figure when he played Dr. Heywood R. Floyd, the smug and officious National Council of Astronautics official from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Almost a comically flavorless and dull-minded bureaucrat, Floyd didn’t do or say much — he just flew up from earth to visit Clavius, the moon base, to see about the recently discovered black monolith that had been “deliberately” buried under the moon’s surface some four million years earlier.

One other significant role that Sylvester played was in Gorgo (’61). Sylvester portrayed Sam Slade, a seafaring adventurer of some sort who, along with Cpt. Joe Ryan (Bill Travers), captures Baby Gorgo, a huge prehistoric reptile who is brought to London for public exhibition. Everything seems fine until Ma Gorgo — a much, much larger beast — visits and trashes the city in order to save her son.

I’ve never seen Gorgo but my understanding is that it’s a tolerable mønster flick, but generally second tier. I’m thinking of Sylvester because a new Gorgo Bluray is currently for sale.

…that Colman Domingo‘s performance as Bayard Rustin in Rustin (Netflix, 11.3) will be a bold-as-brass, James Baldwin firecracker-type thing (which the trailer suggests), it seems to me that a film about an historical civil-rights-movement leader who was both Black and gay…that’s two checked boxes right there…plus a film that was launched by Barack and Michele Obama‘s Higher Ground Productions…that’s a third box-check given the urge to show obeisance to the Obamas within liberal circles, etc.

Should we give the possessory credit to the Obamas or director George C. Wolfe?

During his second term in the White House, Barack posthumously awarded Rustin with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. At the 11.20.13 ceremony, Obama presented the award to Walter Naegle, Rustin’s surviving longtime romantic partner.

The almost entirely all-black cast includes Chris Rock as Roy Wilkins and Jeffrey Wright as Rep. Adam Clayton Powell.

Rustin will have its first-anywhere debut at Telluride. If Barack and Michelle don’t fly in and take a few bows, the troops will be bitterly disappointed.

…and a black floral-print shirt (fairly similar to Montgomery Clift‘s Hawaiian-style shirt that he wore in From Here to Eternity) under what looks like a Brian DePalma safari jacket.

I respect and admire the blending of a noir palette with a watercolor effect, which may have been achieved via standard photo manipulation using Average Joe software…the kind you can buy on any iPhone.

David Fincher‘s The Killer premieres at the Venice Film Festival on Sunday, 9.3 — six days hence. It will open in “select” theatres on Friday, 10.27. The Netflix debut happens on Friday, 11.10.

Marketing tag line: “After a fateful near miss an assassin battles his employers, and himself, on an international manhunt he insists isn’t personal.”

This evening I tried again with John Ford‘s The Informer> (’35), and in so doing experienced something like an epiphany. It surprised the hell out of me, but there was no mistaking what I was feeling. For the first time I accepted the foolishness and rank idiocy of Victor McLaglen‘s Gypo Nolan — surely one of the most loathsome lead characters in movie history, and a pathetic, bellowing drunk to boot.

For the first time I cut Gypo a break and took off my black hooded mask.

My first viewing….good God, Ford’s classic is 88 years old now…my first viewing (late-night TV, possibly WOR-TV) happened when I was ten or eleven, something like that; my most recent before tonight was 20 years ago.

I’ve never felt anything but admiration for the various elements — McLaglen’s Oscar-winning lead performance, Dudley Nichols‘ finely-chiselled screenplay (the film only runs 91 minutes), the magnificent fog-shrouded cinematography by Joseph August (Twentieth Century, Gunga Din,The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Portrait of Jennie), Max Steiner‘s haunting score and the supporting performances by Margot Grahame, Heather Angel, Preston Foster, Una O’Connor and Joe Sawyer.

It all fuses together so well, but all my life I’ve had a hugely difficult time with the deplorable Gypo. And yet something happened this time. Something ineffably sad that found its way inside. By the end I felt so sorry for this poor alcoholic idiot that I was strangely unable to despise him. I could only shake my head in sorrow.

And that final church scene after he’s been shot four or five times in the gut, bleeding to death…that scene got me all the more. When Gypo stumbles into a church and finds Frankie’s mother (Merkel) and says with that pleading, nearly whispering, wounded-ox voice, “Twas I who informed on your son, Mrs. McPhillip…forgive me.” And the poor woman does for some reason, and then comforts him with “you didn’t know what you were doin’.” Gypo stands and spreads his arms before a crucifix, calls out to the man he betrayed and condemned to a brutal death (“”Frankie! Your mother forgives me!”), clutches his midsection, drops to the church floor and dies.

If I’d been Mrs. McPhillip I would have said, “You’ll get no forgiveness from me, Gypo. And from the looks of you, you won’t be needing any soon. Just let go…just let it go. There’s nothin’ more for it, Gypo. Just go to sleep.”

But somehow this evening, and for the first time in my life, Merkel’s forgiving eyes and words melted me down.

I thought of two relatively recent similar films (a protagonist enduring terrible guilt after ratting out a comrade) — Yuval Adler and Ali Waked‘s Bethlehem (’13) and Shaka King‘s Judas and the Black Messiah (’21) about FBI informant William O’Neal (Lakeith Stanfield) having inadvertently aided in the murder of Fred Hampton.

Amazon should be ashamed of itself, by the way, for streaming an HD version of The Informer with a horizontally stretched aspect ratio — it should be presented in the original boxy (1.33 or 1.37) but is streaming at 1.85 or 16 x 9 or something close to that.

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I’ve no intention of seeing Dune: Part Two no matter when it gets released. It had been slated to open on 11.17.63, and before that on 11.3.23, and prior to that on 10.20.23. It’s now scheduled to open on 3.15.24, or roughly seven months hence. Because of the SAG/AFTRA strike. Whatever.

There’s a new Rebecca Keegan THR article about Sofia Coppola‘s Priscilla (A24), and the support she got from Priscilla Presley, whose life with Elvis Presley from age 14 to 24 (barely pubescent girlfriend to wife-mother) is the subject of the film.

Repeating for emphasis, the article says that the Tinkerbell-sized (4’11”) Cailee Spaeny plays Priscilla “from age 14 to age 24.”

In other words Coppola’s film omits the last three years of Elvis and Priscilla’s strained and occasionally tempestuous relationship (they separated in February 1972 and divorced the following year), not to mention Presley’s untimely death in August ’77.

Priscilla wasn’t around at the time, of course, but c’mon…it’s about her long relationship with Presley and Coppola ignores his death, which happened only four years after their 1973 divorce?

To go by Keegan, the film’s 14-year saga happens between Priscilla’s first meeting with Elvis in 1959 at a party in Germany (she was born in May 1945) and sometime in mid 1969, or roughly two years after their Las Vegas wedding on 5.1.67. Exactly nine months later the now-deceased Lisa Marie Presley was born (2.1.68).

A few weeks or months later Priscilla “began taking private dance lessons” while the constantly-catting-around Elvis was filming Live a Little, Love a Little (released on 10.23.68), and she fell heavily for the instructor, identified only as “Mark” in Priscilla’s “Elvis and Me.” They did the nasty but not for long.

Priscilla had another, longer-lasting affair with Afro-haired karate instructor Mike Stone in ’72, but that, apparently, was after her separation from Elvis. There was apparently some back-and-forth, some push-pull variance of feeling. Presley forcefully had sex with Priscilla after he got wind of the Stone affair, or something like that. They did, however, divorce the following year. And yet they were seen holding hands after it was finalized.

The forceful-sex story seems to contradict reports that Elvis declined to have sex with Priscilla after Lisa Marie’s birth. (He apparently had some kind of bizarre hangup about mothers being used goods.) As many Presley biographers have reported, Elvis was totally into jailbait, or young teens starting around the age of 14.

All in all, Coppola’s film bypasses a lot of dramatic potential. It doesn’t even include their separation and divorce…c’mon.

Keegan’s story ends with this paragraoh: “[Last] May, Coppola screened the film for Priscilla. ‘When I saw the movie, I tried to separate myself and live it as if I was just a fan or just someone that’s wanting to see the movie,’ she says. ‘At the end, I actually…I was quite emotional. Only being 14. You look back and you go, ‘Why me? Why am I here? Why am I driving in a limo, going through the gates of Graceland with Elvis?’”

She meant that? Priscilla, 78, knew who Elvis was as well as his many biographers, and she was actually wondering why she was being driven through the gates of Graceland at age 14 or 15 or whenever it was?

It goes without saying that Keegan never mentions the bizarre 18-inch height disparity between Spaeny and Jacob Elordi, who plays Elvis in Coppola’s film.

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 a ten-year-old) and Elvis is played by the 77-inch-tall Elordi.

There is one term that sums up the “Bradley Cooper‘s prosthetic nose in Maestro is a form of Jewface anti-Semitism” on Twitter/X.

That term is “deranged, saliva-spraying, ethnic-aggressive lunacy.”

In May ’22 Variety‘s Clayton Davis complained about Carey Mulligan being miscast because a Brit shouldn’t play a Chilean or Costa Rican. Where is Clayton on Bradley’s schnozz? Has he joined his fellow firebrands in standing up against this?

Twitter/X statement from Jamie, Alexander and Nina Bernstein: “It breaks our hearts to see any misrepresentations or misunderstandings of Bradley’s efforts…it happens to be true that Leonard Bernstein had a nice, big nose. Bradley chose to use makeup to amplify his resemblance, and we’re perfectly fine with that. We’re also certain that our dad would have been fine with it as well.”

Sometime in the mid ’90s the late Robert Evans shared a biological observation with me: “When you get older your nose gets bigger, your ears get bigger and longer and your teeth get smaller.”

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We’ve all sampled food-and-atmosphere moments to die for…perfect transitional serenity…that quietly radiant feeling in which the place and the warmth (and not just the climatorial kind) are so calming and poignant that time itself has seemingly stopped…much more than just sitting at a table…enveloped by bliss and rapture.

Two nights ago I happened upon a brief video of such a moment…12 years and three months ago (late May 2011) on a calm and sunny day in Venice, Italy…placid, a gentle breeze, the faint sound of water lapping at pilings…sitting at an outdoor table at Trattoria San Basilio, a fairly small (you could even call it tiny) restaurant, waterside in southern Dorsoduru…no tourists, no madding crowd…Calle del Vento, 1516, 30123 Venezia VE, Italy.

Right now I feel as strongly about this moment as Mr. Bernstein felt about the girl in the white dress on the Staten Island ferry.

Video shot on a Canon camera….the quality of iPhone videos wasn’t good enough back then…good God, I was still filing on Movable Type!

In the tradition of James Agee, Otis Ferguson, Andre Bazin, Francois Truffaut, Andrew Sarris, Manny Farber, Pauline Kael, Penelope Gilliat, Todd McCarthy, Joseph McBride and Owen Gleiberman…kidding.

TikTok or Movietok? Maddi Moo = Maddie Koch + many others. Posted in the N.Y. Times on 8.15, written by Reggie Ugwu.

We may not be talking about empty coke bottle realms, but we’re certainly not talking about much in the way of savvy insight or, like, extensive film knowledge.

Cocaine Bear review.

Check out the moustachioed boyfriend!

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Halfway through her q & a transcript (8.14) with Sound of Freedom director Alejandro Monteverde, Variety‘s Tatiana Siegel asks whether he has any regrets about casting QAnon nutter Jim Caviezel in the lead role.

Monteverde: “I try to never look back into any regrets because there’s nothing I can do about it now. Jim came to the set. I’ve never seen somebody so committed and so professional on set. He came in and really bled for the film.”

Siegel’s follow-up question, obviously, should have gone something like this: “So your film won a fair amount of respect for sticking to the basics, for being a lean and mean thriller that was almost entirely free of rightwing talking points, and it’s made a ton of money — $173 million in the U.S. and Canada, which is higher than the domestic tally of Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning.

“So given all the this accomplishment and begrudging respect from at least the fair-minded critics and pundits out there, what is your understanding about why Angel Studios and Caviezel arranged a special golf-club screening for Donald Trump, who, you may have heard, is a proven criminal, a salivating sociopath and a deranged, egomaniacal Mussolini who’s under three criminal indictments and is facing a fourth in Georgia?

“Why, in short, did Angel and Caviezel poison the well by doing this? Why invite Hannibal Lecter into the chicken coop?

There can be no final closure on the life and career of the late and great William Friedkin until someone in the Friedkin camp spills the beans about what actually happened with the French Connection censorship thing.

They can’t just leave this confounding, weird-ass episode hanging in the air. C’mon, spill it already…give it up!

Woke-censoring his own Oscar-winning film runs so contrary to who and what Friedkin was his entire life, or certainly since he became big in the early ’70s…totally insane. Maybe, strange as it sounds, he approved it or even instigated it. Maybe he’d gone squishy on some level…I don’t know.

Either way the facts have to come out. Someone in authority has to say “this is why it happened, and why the woke-censored version is streaming only in the U.S. but not Canada or the British isles or other territories.” And when the French Connection 4K disc comes out, the entire film has to be represented. C’mon, please…air it out once and for all and put this stupid issue to bed.