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Few things throw me out of a film more than bad backdrops or wrong-looking topography. A location has to more or less look the part or forget it.

I’ve no problem with the Philippine jungle standing in for Vietnam in Apocalypse Now, or Spain’s Almeria section subbing for the Old Southwest in those Sergio Leone westerns, or David Lean building a temporary set at Spain’s Playa del Algarrobico as a stand-in for World War I-era Aqaba. The locations seemed right plus I didn’t know any better so no worries. But if I do know better, watch out.

The “Florida” setting of the Seminole Ritz hotel in Some Like It Hot, for example, is impossible. Southern Florida is flat as a pancake, and yet we can see the hills of San Diego’s Point Loma in the distance during the “Cary Grant in a sailor hat meets Sugar” beach scene.

I hated it when Robert DeNiro, John Cazale, John Savage and those other factory-mill goons went hunting in rural Pennsylvania, and they wound up near the rocky peaks of Mount Baker in the state of Washington. I immediately checked out of that awful film when I saw those effing mountains.

One of the worst all-time offenders is Franklin Schaffner‘s Planet of the Apes. Charlton Heston‘s rocket ship crash lands in what might be Arizona’s Lake Powell or maybe somewhere in the Mexican Sonoran desert. And then we’re at the Fox ranch in Malibu Canyon, and then we journey to the high-cliff California coast and suddenly we’re in what remains of New York City…adjacent to Zuma State Beach at Point Dume.

As Evelyn Mulwray‘s Japanese gardener says about her salt-water pond and how it affects nearby plants, “Velly velly bad.”

And yet I don’t go out of my way to be a hard-ass. If a film is set in Oklahoma, the scenery only has to resemble Oklahoma. Which is why Fred Zinneman‘s Oklahoma! (’55), which was actually shot in the green-grass sections of Arizona, passes muster.

16 months hence Errol Morris and Robert McNamara‘s The Fog of War will be officially 20 years old, and I’m wondering what our wonderful cancel culture fanatics would say about it today. “This film coddles a war criminal!…normalizes and rationalizes mass murder!,” etc.

I still regard The Fog of War as one of the most emotional docs I’ve ever seen. Phillip Glass‘s techno score is one of the most haunting ever created for a non-narrative feature.

Even in its meticulous recountings of wartime strategies and mistakes that led to mass killings on an almost unimaginable scale, The Fog of War is fraught with feeling…with ache and nostalgia and puddles of regret and candid admissions that cut like knives.

The combination of Robert McNamara stating that while working for Col. Curtis LeMay during World War II he was “part of a mechanism” that fire-bombed and murdered 100,000 Tokyo citizens, and his story of the B-29 captain who was furious that the 5000-foot bombing altitude led to the death of his wing-man, and in recounting LeMay’s response McNamara starts to choke up. 100,000 Tokyo citizens burned to death across 15 square miles, and McNamara weeps about a single Air Force guy who caught a bullet.

If that doesn’t get you emotionally, I don’t know what would. Alternately startling, numbing, unnerving…I’ve never forgotten it.

In early ’04 The Fog of War won the Best Feature Doc Oscar.

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Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) is only three months older than Jett (born in March ’88), and as I watched him talk last night on Real Time with Bill Maher a voice was telling me that Torres is future Presidential material. Well-spoken, sensibly liberal, intelligent, very good-looking, LGBTQ, a moderate temperament.

I know next to nothing about the guy, but my gut is saying he could be Obama 2.

Torres will be old enough to run next year — he turns 35 in March ’23. If Biden’s numbers are too deep in the toilet bowl to make a successful ’24 campaign seem feasible, somebody else will have to run against Trump, and nobody wants Kamala Harris as the heir apparent. Because she’ll lose. But Torres could run and win. Seriously. The oldest President in history succeeded by the youngest…it has a ring!

African-American voters who were too homophobic to give Pete Buttigieg a chance might think twice when it comes to Torres. Do I hear support for a Torres-Buttigieg ticket? If elected they could tap Barack as a top White House honcho — a senior adviser-in-chief & permanent West Wing honcho.

The only thing that bothered me last night was when Torres said he’d never heard of Steven Spielberg‘s West Side Story. A gay guy who’s never heard of a new film version of one of the biggest stage musicals of all time?

What is this strange urgent compulsion that some people have to keep Kristen Stewart in contention for the Best Actress Oscar, at least in their own minds? Whatever the root of it, Variety Oscar handicapper Clayton Davis seems to be singing from the same hymn book as Variety film critic Owen Gleiberman (i.e., “she might pull through because now she’s an underdog…go, Kristen…we’re rooting for you!”).

Two days ago I mentioned that my very first viewing of The Godfather, Part II happened on 12.20.74 (opening day outside of NYC). It was a matinee showing inside an unheated theatre “somewhere north of downtown Stamford,” I wrote. A few hours later director Rod Lurie explained that the venue was probably the Ridgeway Theatre (52 6th Street, Stamford, CT 06905). It was part of the Ridgeway Mall. It turns out that the Greenwich-residing Lurie went to see Francis Coppola‘s Oscar-winning sequel to The Godfather later that very same day. He was 12 at the time**. The Ridgeway had opened in 1951, and closed its doors in 2001. An LA Fitness spa now occupies the same turf.

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The running time of Matt Reeves‘ The Batman is 175 minutes. I for one am disappointed. I want a Reeves-Batman flick that will run no less than 200 minutes (3 hrs., 20 mins.). I also want an overture, intermission, entr’acte and exit music. Seriously — if you’re gonna go big and weighty, shoot for the moon.

Jordan Ruimy: “Supposedly heavily inspired by Fincher’s Zodiac.”

I’ve never felt so completely burned by a Bluray as I was last week when Kino Lorber’s The Paradine Case arrived. Large sections of it are speckled to death. I’m not talking about a Criterion-style swampy mosquito grainstorm, but a baffling suggestion of micro-sized digital sleet — a literal attack upon the film by billions of icy snowstorm specks.

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Kino Lorber is a highly respected outfit, and I’ve been delighted with scores of their Bluray releases over the years. It just doesn’t figure that they would release a classic 1940s film looking as badly as this. (And a Hitchcock yet!) I toughed it out until the end, but what a ripoff.

Imagine that I’m Ben Affleck, and that I’m doing an interview with some obsequious junket journalist, and that the journalist has just asked which performance I’m most proud of…which single performance has, by my standards, hit the mark in a more incisive and commanding way than any other before or since?

I would say without hesitation that my finest performance is the young, go-getter, fortunate-son, guilt-stricken attorney in Roger Michel‘s Changing Lanes (’02).

The Paramount release was filmed 20 years ago, when I was roughly 29.

My “alcoholic basketball coach in San Pedro” performance in The Way Back is my second favorite in terms of all-around pride, subtle technique and emotional revelation, followed by my “husband under suspicion of murder” performance in Gone Girl. My fourth-place would be my action-commando turn in J.C. Chandor‘s Triple Frontier.

I would refuse to answer a follow-up question about which performances I’m most ashamed of, if any. I have a few failures under my belt, sure, but I wouldn’t discuss them with some mealy-mouthed junket whore.

My favorite non-performative performance was on Real Time with Bill Maher, way back in 2014.

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Earlier today Rachel Zegler performed a passionate reading of a portion of Britney Spears‘ recent angry letter to her younger sister, Jamie Lynn Spears. (Nobody cares about the particulars.) Almost immediately Zegler was kicked, gouged and lashed by woke Twitter for showing a lack of sensitivity. And of course she apologized for this.

What Zegler was doing, of course, was seizing upon an acting opportunity, which is what actors often like to do. I happen to feel that she showed more range and angularity and emotional intrigue in this reading than she showed in all of West Side Story, which limited her to playing a willful Puerto Rican innocent. Seriously — Zegler reminded me of Faye Dunaway in Network or Mommie Dearest. I am now more impressed by Zegler’s acting chops than I was before today.

Is this a fan thing or semi-official or what? Because a sunset shot of an oil-field grasshopper doesn’t get it. Not a tragedy, just try again.

I love this snap of the Times Square New Year’s Eve celebration as 1963 gave way to ’64. What a seminal moment in which everyone and everything was about to change. A huge social tremor had either begun to be felt or would soon be felt. The whole world was about to shake and shudder.

JFK had been murdered only five weeks earlier. The Beatles were slated to arrive in New York City five weeks later (on 2.7.64). Bob Dylan had began to shake off his folkie and protest movement attitudes and would record Another Side of Bob Dylan in May ’64. The best films of ’63 pointed to social complexities and shadowed ambiguities (Hud, The Haunting, This Sporting Life, The Servant, Lilies of the Field, Contempt, The Birds, 8 and 1/2, The Leopard, Billy Liar, From Russia With Love). The Gulf of Tonkin incident was exactly eight months away. Roughly a year later Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement began, and thereby kicked off the wave of student protests that defined much of the ’60s and early ’70s.

The era of Doris Day was finished and she probably didn’t know it at the time, although Move Over Darling! costars James Garner and Chuck Connors (playing the Cary Grant and Randolph Scott roles) probably had an inkling.

No more cultural earthquake moments would happen during the remainder of the 20th Century. But three would happen during the first 17 years of the 21st Century — the 9/11/01 World Trade Center attacks, the election of Barack Obama in November ’08, and the election of Donald Trump in November ’16.

Since that last milestone life in these United States has been a steady drip-drip-drip of hell, more or less. I would almost have the tumultuous ’60s and ’70s all over again. Did we live in a calmer, more humane, less anguished country back then? Perhaps not, but every so often I dream of a life without wokesters or Covid, and a tear forms in my eye.

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Until 90 minutes ago I was completely ignorant of the apparent fact that Michael Curtiz‘s Young Man With A Horn (’50), a melodramatic pseudo-biopic about Bix Beiderbecke, who self-destructed at the grand old age of 28, was once titled Young Man of Music.

Wiki excerpt: In her authorized biography, Doris Day described her experience making the film as “utterly joyless”, as she had not found working with Kirk Douglas to be pleasant. Douglas said that he felt her ever-cheerful persona was only a “mask” and he had never been able to get to know the real person underneath. Day countered that while Douglas had been “civil”, he was too self-centered to make any real attempt to get to know either her or anyone else.