Methinks President Trump‘s anti-John McCain rants will fester and simmer and come home to roost in the ’20 election. Obviously an idiotic move on his part. Sure to engender a split between pro-Trump bumblefucks and traditional pro-McCain, pro-military service VFW loyalists.

One thing that always bugged me about Filmstruck is that they never seemed to specifically state that their films were streaming at 1080p. I assumed as much, but sometimes films stream at 720p or even (God forbid) 480p, depending on the breaks. There’s also the forthcoming option, obviously, of 4K streaming. Let’s hope that the Criterion Channel guys have learned from Filmstruck’s blithe disregard and will specifically state what file sizes they’ll be offering — no more crapping around.

The Criterion Channel is coming April 8! https://t.co/4YJthFTTyC ✨ pic.twitter.com/lXQxAXlSTS

— Criterion Collection (@Criterion) March 22, 2019

If I was in charge of maximizing Rocketman revenues, I would simply split the difference — for the more liberal-minded U.S. and European markets, I would include the 40-second scene in which Elton John (Taran Egerton) and his manager John Reid (Richard Madden) exchange a little erotic current, but for the allegedly homophobic territories in question I would distribute a version of the film without these 40 seconds.

I wouldn’t feel very good about this, but Paramount stockholders would approve, I think. And gay culture would be in fine shape the morning after.

Guy Lodge sez: “Please tell me again how homophobia isn’t the default position for absolutely everything. Egerton and Madden should refuse to do any promo for the film if that scene is cut. Simple as that.”

Ștefan Iaonco sez: “The problem [always] arises if companies want to distribute films in places like China, Africa, the Middle East. They either go ‘true to the gay’ and accept it [as a] North America & Europe-only distribution [situation], or, if they want global sales, they straight-wash. It’s art vs. commerce.”

Nobody knows who Eddie Albert is these days. People began to forget about him 30 years ago. Mention his name and those with a vague inkling will say Green Acres. I think of his performances in a lot of World War II films (there was one in which he fell out of an airplane at 10,000 feet) as well as roles in Roman Holiday (’53), Teahouse of the August Moon (’56) and Oklahoma! (’55)…what else?

The best thing Albert ever did was play Cybill Shepherd‘s disapproving dad in this scene from Elaine May‘s The Heartbreak Kid (’72). The back-and-forth between Albert and Charles Grodin goes on for four or five minutes. Albert was nominated for Best Supporting Actor because of this one scene.

BTW: Back in the ’70s and ’80s nobody was better at playing smarmy, self-assured, soft-spoken assholes than Grodin.

Did director Chad Stahelski and screenwriters Derek Kolstad, Shay Hatten, Chris Collins and Marc Abrams not get the HE memo? Last year I wrote at least twice that any movie dialogue that begins with the words “you have no idea” will be automatically discredited and shitcanned. The movie will, I mean. But they went right ahead and used it anyway.

Will John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum (Lionsgate, 5.17) blow chunks? An unfair question, agreed, but this, after all, is the second sequel. I was down with the novelty of the original but I found Chapter 2 draining, to put it mildly. In my 2.11.17 review, I noted that “a vapor cloud of stupidity hangs over this film at every turn.”

Is there something about The Best of Enemies (STX, 4.5) that doesn’t quite work or…? I’m just not sensing any special current or exceptional energy. No screening invites from Sunshine Sachs, no Sundance Film Festival showings, no advance buzz to speak of. Based on Osha Gray Davidson‘s “The Best of Enemies: Race and Redemption in the New South”, it’s about some kind of mano e mano that led to a rapproachment between civil rights activist Ann Atwater (Taraji P. Henson) and Ku Klux Klan leader C.P. Ellis (Sam Rockwell) in 1971. Sorry but I’m sensing a disturbance in the force. A liberal do-goody vibe.

The Best of Enemies Movie Premiere #WeAreDPS @DurhamPublicSch @TherealTaraji looks Amazing! pic.twitter.com/1oduhQzxMP

— Chanel Sidbury (@DPS_K12C_I) March 19, 2019

I briefly reviewed Anthony Maras‘ Hotel Mumbai (Bleecker Street, 3.22) during last September’s Toronto Film Festival. It’s a decent enough re-capturing of the 2008 Mumbai attacks, which were carried out by Islamic Pakistani terrorists.

“Directed by Anthony Maras, it’s fairly realistic and well-ordered as far as it goes, and occasionally suspenseful. But tonally it’s like Irwin Allen and Ronald Neame‘s The Poseidon Adventure or Jack Smight‘s Airport 1975.

“You know the type of film I’m describing — an unsettling if somewhat superficial exercise about wealthy people and devoted staffers trying to escape death but with no underlying attitude or undercurrent on the part of the director. This happens and then that happens, etc. The ’70s disaster film that Hotel Mumbai should have tried to measure up to is Richard Lester‘s Juggernaut, but that wasn’t in the cards.”

Posted on 3.22.18: “Quentin Tarantino is not a docu-dramatist. He doesn’t do research, realism or history. He’s a creator of alternate Quentinworld fantasies. His last three films have mined the past — Inglourious Basterds, Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight — and each time he’s reimagined and re-dialogued history in order to transform it into his own brand of ’70s exploitation cinema. Why should QT play his cards any differently with the saga of Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Sharon Tate and the Manson family?”

S. Craig Zahler‘s Dragged Across Concrete (3.22) is a dead fucking brilliant exercise in slow-burn, element-by-element, ultra-violent urban action melodrama. It’s longish (158 minutes) and methodical and about as riveting as this kind of step-by-step ensemble crime film gets. It may be the best rightwing (if morally corrupted) urban action flick since Man on Fire. It takes its time, you bet, but once the disparate characters and plot threads start falling into place and it all starts to pay off like a slot machine, watch out.

It offers the best snarly-tough-guy performance from Mel Gibson in ages, another excellent turn from Vince Vaughn (his best since that True Detective criminal he played during season #2) and a serious pop-through turn by Tory Kittles, who looks like a slightly older Jussie Smollett.

Dragged Across Concrete is like a politically conservative Jackie Brown without the mellow, likably laid-back lead performances from Robert Forster and Pam Grier, although Gibson and Vaughn are kind of brusquely charming in their roguishly rightwing, fuck-all deadpan way. Like Jackie Brown it waits and waits and reflects and reflects and then talks and talks and talks some more, and then finally, around the 100-minute mark, wham.

It’s basically a talkfest thing that waits until Act Three to bring out the hardware and spill the vino. At 154 minutes, Jackie Brown is only four minutes shorter.

On the other hand, Quentin Tarantino never wrote a scene in which bank robbers cut open a dead guy’s stomach cavity and then his actual stomach in search of a swallowed key, especially with one of them saying “don’t cut open the liver…the smell is awful, especially a black guy’s.” What?

If you have any regard for this kind of thing — spare and lean, character-rich, laconic Peckinpah on painkillers, well-crafted dialogue, violent, far from lazily paced but in no particular hurry, flicked with despair and anxiety and every character being either a behind-the-eight-baller or a victim — Dragged Across Concrete is absolutely essential viewing.

The urban action thriller handbook says you always accelerate the pace when the third act arrives. Zahler is one of those “fuck the handbook” types. Just before a climatic bank robbing scene he suddenly shifts our attention to a late 30something bank officer (Jennifer Carpenter) returning to work after maternity leave. And yet she can’t bear the thought of a nine-hour absence from her infant son, and so she returns to her apartment for a final snuggle before heading to work. That’s all I’m going to describe, but I will never forget this character.

Hats off to Summit Entertainment for doing a brilliant job of muffling or minimizing the buzz on this startling film, which I regard as easily the second best of 2019’s first quarter, right behind Kent Jones‘ Diane (IFC Films, 3.29).

To my knowledge Summit has screened Concrete twice (in Lionsgate’s West L.A. screening room) over the last few days. I had to appeal to a fellow journalist to obtain a screening link. Costar Vince Vaughn will do a discussion following a Hollywood Arclight screening this evening. I’d love to drop by and “cover”, but only on my own dime. A Summit rep said they have no journo comps.

The word around the campfire is that Joe Biden is not only about to announce his Presidential candidacy but that he may also preemptively announce that recently defeated Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams will be his vice-presidential running mate. The immediate reaction will be, of course, (a) “whoa, bold move”, (b) “instantly establishes his 21st Century progressive credentials” and (c) “We love you, Joe!”

In fact it’s a sign of desperation. Only a 70something, semi-doddering, neck-wattled candidate who’s afraid of being perceived as yesterday’s news and over-the-hill would do such a thing. It would essentially be a kind of Bidenesque, liberal community, higher-brain-cell-count version of what John McCain did when he tapped Sarah Palin to be his running mate back in the summer of ’08.

Plus the fact that Abrams — in HE’s judgment one of the most brilliant and charismatic lightning-rod liberal politicians around today, in the hallowed realm of Beto O’Rourke and Pete Buttigieg…the notion of Abrams being one heartbeat away from the Presidency (and especially with Uncle Joe nudging 80 if and when he takes office in January 2021) will scare the bejeesus out of your white pot-bellied hinterland bumblefuck voting community. Not to mention the Jenny Craig/weight watchers crowd.

Rob “Rpatz” Pattinson (The King, High Life, Good Time) and overpraised Widows costar Elizabeth Debicki will costar alongside bland BlacKkKlansman star John David Washington in Christopher Nolan’s next big whop-bop-a-loo-bop-a-lop-bam-boom.

None of these guys have that galvanizing X-factor movie-star chemistry…none of ’em. Debicki was reasonably compelling in Widows as far as it went, but calm down. She’s almost 6′ 3″, but she has the aura of a part-time Bloomingdale’s salesperson. Rpatz is a good hombre and a hard-working indie-realm costar but he’ll never hit a mainstream homer — we all know that by now. And Washington is tepid dish water. The Nolan film in question will pop on 7.17.20.

Jordan Peele‘s Get Out was about a covert and malignant plot on the part of wealthy, Obama-supporting Anglos to turn blackfolk into obedient zombies through hypnosis. The basic message was “whiteys might act friendly and profess to understand and applaud black culture, but they’re actually Satan’s spawn.”

Us (Universal, 3.22), Peele’s soon-to-open followup, is about…well, not exactly another whitey conspiracy but something close to that.

Once again innocent blackfolk (or the vacationing Wilson family, played by Lupita Nyong’o, Winston Duke, Shahadi Wright and Evan Alex) are being viciously preyed upon, only this time by house-of-horror reflections of themselves — by spooky, raspy-voiced, scissor-wielding dopplegangers dressed in red jumpsuits. Moreover, the red jumpsuits are part of a coordinated nationwide army of predatory fiends. But why? To what end?

In turns out that the inspiration behind all of this feral, howling, over-acted viciousness is another white-person scheme — the up-with-people, let’s-all-hold-hands-and-love-each-other vibe behind Hands Across America, the 1986 nationwide charity organized by the evil Ken Kragen and supported by USA for Africa, a charity org that promoted “We Are The World” (and was prominently allied with the nominally black Michel Jackson).

The message is something along the lines of “corporate whiteys and their allies might talk about love and togetherness and communal giving, but they’re actually killers of the African spirit so, you know, keep them at a distance…in fact, you might want to arm yourself with a pair of extra-large scissors.”

Yes, the doppleganger plague also happens to the Tylers, a white family that’s friendly with the Wilsons (Elisabeth Moss is the mom). This obviously dilutes the racial scheme to some extent. But Us is about the Wilsons and Ken Kragen is the wicked Beelzebub behind it all, so don’t invest too much in the “innocent whiteys are suffering too” aspect. White rabbits are all over this film (particularly in the third act) and…well, you figure it out.

After a half-hour set-up in Santa Cruz with a particular focus on the city’s beachfront amusement park (which I haven’t visited in 30 years), Us turns into Night of the Living Dead Dopplegangers meets Karyn Kusama‘s The Invitation. Kusama’s 2015 thriller is a far better film that Peele’s, but they have a similar attitude about abstract cosmic malevolence.

How good is Lupita? She’s excellent — the absolutely valiant hero of this jumbled, lurching, hazy-minded horror pic. How likely is it that she’ll end up as a Best Actress contender, as Variety‘s Marc Malkin recently suggested? No fucking way. It’s just a Jamie Lee Curtis terrified-victim performance. Update: I’ve just learned that men in freshly laundered white outfits are currently searching for Malkin as we speak.

Is Us boring? No — it’s engaging as far as it goes. It plays its own horror music, dances to its own choreography, snaps and snarls in ways that will make you sit up and say to yourself, “Whoa, that was striking.” But it’s not that clever or brilliant. It’s approvable but calm down.

Time Out‘s Joshua Rothkopf has compared Us to John Carpenter‘s The Fog (’80), the somewhat disappointing follow-up to the hugely successful Halloween. That’s about right.