On Wednesday morning the Morning Joe team aired a video of Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein schmoozing, cavorting and thick as thieves at some kind of easy-pickings Mar-a-Lago party in ’92.

Trump has portrayed himself as estranged from Epstein since the billionaire’s criminal history of soliciting and sexual trafficking recently re-surfaced; the video indicates that Trump has been lying about this, at least as far as the early ’90s were concerned.

In a 10.29.02 New York magazine profile of Epstein, Trump was quoted as follows: “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

The late David Ferrie, a JFK assassination conspiracy suspect by the sights of Jim Garrison.

The thing that got my attention, and I mean a visual aspect that leapt right out in a WTF sense, is the apparent fact that Trump was wearing extra-dark, seemingly dyed eyebrows during that Mar-a-Lago party, which happened when Trump was 46 and Epstein was 39.

In the God-knows-how-many-thousands-of-photos snapped of Trump before and after this ’92 soiree, he’s never had these weird black caterpillars. They initially reminded me of the ones worn by Akim Tamiroff in For Whom The Bell Tolls or those Martin Scorsese cat eyebrows.

Before he became a blonde Trump’s hair was medium light brown, and swarthy brows aren’t exactly characteristic of people with fair Germanic complexions.

Then it hit me…of course! These are the inky, paste-on eyebrows worn by Ferrie, a suspect in the mid ’60s Jim Garrison investigation of the JFK assassination.

You’re reading about a new film and thinking about the contributors. What filmmakers of consequence (directors, actors, screenwriters, producers, directors of photography) instill, in this instance, feelings of uncertainty or trepidation? Or dread? Based, obviously, on their past work.

I’m not talking about actors whose faces need punching. That’s a separate consideration. I’m talking about strong creatives who, without any calculated malice aforethought, have rubbed your sensibilities the wrong way. This doesn’t make them bad people or unworthy industry professionals. It simply means that their names make you go “uh-oh.”

For me, the two biggest threats in this regard (and I don’t mean this in a cruel or dismissive way) are cinematographers Janusz Kaminski and Bradford Young — the former for his relentless use of desaturated color plus milky light shafts pouring through large windows, the latter for his devotion to under-lighting (leading to palettes of pea-green murk and mine-shaft ink).

One of the burdens of being a big-deal creative with a noteworthy signature is that you won’t please everyone. That goes with the territory.

From World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy:

The Safdies‘ Uncut Gems
James Gray‘s Ad Astra
Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit
Fernando Meirelles‘ The Pope
Pablo Larrain‘s Ema
Hirokazu Kore-eda‘s The Truth
Bill Condon’s The Good Liar
Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story
Steven Soderbergh’s The Laundromat
Noah Hawley’s Lucy in the Sky
Bong Joon-Ho’s Parasite
Celine Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire
Michael Angeo Covino’s The Climb
Werner Herzog’s Family Romance LLC
Agnes Varda’s Varda by Agnes

I’d be comme ci comme ca if there was an option to retain the old design, but of course there isn’t.

I didn’t see Alejandro Landes‘ Monos (Neon, 9.13) during last January’s Sundance Film Festival, where it won the World Cinema Dramatic Special Jury Award. Right away you’re thinking “okay, this guy has it.” Compositionally, impressionistically. William Golding‘s Lord of the Flies meets jungle-ritual cruelty and perversity. That line of country.

From Keith Uhlich’s Hollywood Reporter review: “The hands of fate have bestowed a raw deal on the young protagonists of Landes’ bleak, rather ghastly Monos.

“Sporting names like Rambo (Sofia Buenaventura), Lobo (Julian Giraldo), Bum Bum (Sneider Castro) and Patagrande (Hannah Montana alum Moises Arias, hard-left-turning into gun-toting psychopathy), these youths and barely-teens are beholden to a mysterious rebel force known only as The Organization, which is conducting terrorist strikes against some ill-defined powers-that-be in South America.

“This President constantly attempts to distract by flame-throwing…by lighting fires around race and ethnicity. How low can he go? He needs to go back from where he came from” — Queens — “and leave that office.”

Kamala Harris is a fully considered, well-measured adult, which President Trump has never been. And a more thoughtful and articulate speaker than he. Which isn’t difficult. And when riled up, she can be just as combative and jabby. Which is good and necessary.

But the tone and timbre of her voice, conversationally or in the delivery of speeches, isn’t especially transporting, much less soothing. Which isn’t a problem for me, but it may be for some.

Who among the current Democratic contenders has the rousing oratorical command that President Obama had? No one, but the best among them — certainly the catchiest phraser and arguably the most eloquent — is Pete Buttigieg.

Put another way, who’s Mr. King Shit in terms of 2019/20 Democratic Presidential campaign funding? Oooh yeah.

“…and the other four are fucked.”

Two nights ago I watched “The Bad Mother,” or the sixth episode of the second season of Big Little Lies. The tension levels are definitely intensifying. The critical setting was a courtroom dispute in which Meryl Streep‘s Mary Louise Wright, mother of the late Perry Wright (Alexander Skarsgård), is hoping to gain custody of the two children of Nicole Kidman‘s Celeste Wright, whose erratic, heeby-jeeby behavior (principally characterized by her guilt, Ambien dosage and sexual promiscuity) is cause for basic concern.

The best moment happened when Streep’s attorney Ira Faber (Dennis O’Hare) interrogated Celeste with one zinger question after another.

The season finale (“I Want To Know”, #7), in which Kidman will interrogate Streep in some kind of go-for-broke fashion, happens this Sunday.

The “flyboard”, a gas-powered jetpack/hoverboard, was invented by French water-craft rider Franky Zapata, founder of Zapata racing. It can stay in the air for 10 minutes. Probably not cost effective as we speak, and wouldn’t a platoon of flying soldiers be easy to pick off by snipers?

On 7.3 I assessed the Baz Luhrmann / Elvis Presley casting situation, as reported by Deadline‘s Mike Fleming. Four contenders had recently screen-tested for the Presley role in Luhrmann‘s biopic about the relationship between the iconic rock star and Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks), and it was my view that three of them — Ansel Elgort, Miles Teller and Harry Styles — weren’t right.

My judgment was that 28 year-old Austin Butler (The Dead Don’t Die, the grubby and psychotic Tex Watson in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time In Hollywood) seemed “the most interesting possibility among the four.” Today Fleming reported that Luhrmann had agreed and gone with Butler.

I wish I had a quarter for every time I’ve written “they’d never make this film today,” but there’s no present-tense director or producer who would or could make anything like Richard Lester‘s The Three Musketeers (’73) and The Four Musketeers (’74), which I regard as a single entity. Nobody.

That ace-level cast (Michael York, Oliver Reed, Frank Finlay, Richard Chamberlain, Charlton Heston, Geraldine Chaplin, Faye Dunaway, Christopher Lee, Simon Ward, Raquel Welch) plus that jaunty, dryly satirical Richard Lester flavoring mixed with David Watkin‘s period-appropriate cinematography, Michel Legrand‘s score plus the superb sets and costumes and half-realistic, half-slapstick fight choreography.

Actor/Comedian Greg Proops on The Four Musketeers, posted by FilmStruck on 9.5.17:

I was speaking last Friday to a critic acquaintance about The Lion King, and she mentioned something that struck me. She said that there was something dead and soulless in the eyes of certain beasts. I hadn’t been sufficiently interested to catch last week’s all-media screening, but the dead-eye thing woke me. “Really?” I said. “Now I want to see it!”

This view has been widely shared, particularly in the cases of Simba and Mufasa. Time Out‘s Joshua Rothkopf said that the Lion King characters are “akin to stuffed trophies mounted on the wall…they’re lifelike, yes, but somehow not alive.” Forbes‘ Scott Mendelson observed that “the ‘animals’ can’t act, and they sure as heck can’t emote.”

A few weeks ago Martin Scorsese expressed concern about the digital “dead eye” syndrome in the matter of The Irishman, which uses extensive CG to de-age Robert De Niro and other significant characters.

Scorsese’s view were shared in a 5.29 Guardian piece by Caspar Salmon: “[Scorsese] said that there was a problem with keeping his actors’ eyes expressive, adding: ‘Does [the technique] change the eyes at all? If that’s the case, what was in the eyes that I liked? Was it intensity? Was it gravitas? Was it threat? And then how do we get it back? I don’t know.”

Where is the HE community on this aspect? I still haven’t seen it.