For a likely Best Picture Oscar nominee, this is fairly unusual. Edward Berger’s film opened theatrically only a month ago (10.25). Pops on 12.17.

From Owen Gleiberman‘s 11.25 review of Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi‘s Beatles ’64 (Apple +, 11.29):

“Another thing that sets Beatles ’64 apart is that the film is full of incisive commentary: latter-day reminiscences by several of those fans, as well as meditations on the meaning of it all by figures like David Lynch, Joe Queenan, Jamie Bernstein, and Smokey Robinson, who speaks with fierce perception about the nature of women’s unguarded emotionalism in dictating the shape of pop-music culture.

“Whether it’s Jamie Bernstein (Leonard’s daughter) talking about how she dragged the family TV into the dining room to watch the Sullivan show, or David Lynch evoking what it is that music like that of the early Beatles does to you, or Betty Friedan, in an old TV clip, speaking with daunting eloquence about how the Beatles incarnated a new vision of masculinity that threw over the old clenched model, these testimonials color in the consuming quality of our collective passion for the Fab Four.

“Early on, there’s a sequence of the Beatles in transit, each of them putting on headphones that let them hear recordings of their voices. There’s something touchingly metaphorical about that. The Beatles would preside over a world where projections of who they were took on a life weirdly separate from themselves. The documentary shows you that they understood this, instinctively, from day one.

“Seated in their ‘prison’ of a suite in the Plaza, whiling away the hours (scenes that might have been the model for “A Hard Day’s Night”), always cutting up with that whimsical Liverpool put-on that takes everything just so lightly, as if it weren’t real, they were perfectly positioned, as personalities, to become the eye of the new media storm.”

Forget that “no one is above the law” stuff. Ominous thunderclouds are rumbling overhead. The ghouls are running the show. Merrick Garland, this is on you…wimp.

I wasn’t a Brad Pitt admirer at first. Over his first five years of prominence he struck me as a pretty boy without much going on inside — Thelma & Louise (’91), A River Runs Through It (’92), Legends of the Fall (’94), Interview with the Vampire (’94). Even in Se7en, I was telling myself, he radiated cheap hot-dog vibes…a certain lightweight petulance.

But then I bought the Se7en Criterion laser disc and listened to the commentary tracks (Pitt, David Fincher, Morgan Freemanm, Andrew Kevin Walkr), and the stuff that Pitt shared turned me around. After listening all the way through I told myself “okay, I underestimated Pitt…he’s a fairly bright and committed guy…he’s okay, not a lightweight…he seriously cares about the quality of Se7en and all the intense effort that went into it.”

The below was recorded in ’95 for Criterion. This particular commentary (edited) is not available on DVD or Bluray. Here’s the longer, unedited version.

Only now can it be told…

It happened at least a year and a half ago, and possibly longer than that. I was chatting with the renowned director-writer Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton, Duplicity, Andor, Beirut) inside the AMC Lincoln Square IMAX theatre. It was prior to a hot-shot invitational screening, and we were standing next to our seats and shooting the usual shit.

After a few pleasantries Gilroy sat down and I turned to face the huge screen, and I somehow tipped over a bit, and then quickly tried regain my balance…nope. Perhaps my heavy leather computer bag was a factor, but the IMAX theatre seats are built upon a very steep grade — something close to 45 degrees — and so I tumbled forward and fell like a crash test dummy upon the row of seats in front of me.

Although it was no big deal in terms of bruisings or physical injury, I felt slightly embarassed because, you know, who loses his fucking balance and falls over a row of seats just before the start of an IMAX screening with a gathering of hot-shot journalists sitting and standing around nearby? I was Chevy Chase doing a Gerald R. Ford.

But you know what? Gilroy saw everything and didn’t say a word. Didn’t even raise an eyebrow. He knew it was a galumphy thing to have done but he maintained his poker face and kept his cool, and in so doing he kept mine.

Another friend might have shouted “oh my God…Jeff! Jeff! Are you okay?”, and in so doing would have prompted others to take notice or ask what had happened, and the next day it might have been a topic of derision and belittlement on the Six O’Clock News. But the taciturn and unshakable Gilroy said zip and nobody else did either (no yelps or “oops!”), and our lives went on as if nothing had happened.

Last week writer Vincenzo Barney revealed in a Vanity Fair article that Cormac McCarthy, the late author of Blood Meridien and No Country for Old Men, indulged in a years-long affair with a teenaged be-bop baby.

The woman in question is the now 64-year-old Augusta Britt, whom the celebrated author first met in ’76 or thereabouts, when she was 16 and he was 42.

McCarthy and Britt consummated the deal a year later. She was his “single secret muse”, etc. McCarthy died last year at age 89.

Conventional wokeism naturally asserts McCarthy groomed and exploited a presumably naive young woman, but Britt has insisted otherwise.

McCarthy from heaven: “Condemn all you want but as America was celebrating its Centennial and beyond, it was a be-bop baby for me-hee…a be-bop baby for me.”

Zero Day (Netflix, 2.20.25) is an upcoming American political thriller television series created by Eric Newman, Noah Oppenheim and Michael Schmidt. “A political conspiracy thriller centering on a devastating global cyberattack”, etc. Directed by Lesli Linka Glatter, it costars Robert De Niro and Lizzy Caplan.

Vanity Fair: “Zero Day was conceived, written, and filmed before Donald Trump won reelection as president; he’ll return to the White House for his second term a few weeks before the show’s premiere.

“In other words, Zero Day will launch in an unnervingly appropriate political context, fresh after an election cycle that highlighted Oppenheim’s notion of competing realities. “I’m obviously disappointed as a Democrat that we didn’t win. But as a filmmaker, and as someone who is considering the best window of release for this show, we definitely wanted to get far enough away from the inauguration so that we didn’t get lost in the jet wash of political reportage that’s going to come out,” Newman says. “There are honest people in government who make hard choices and do the right thing—and my hope is that this will be an aspirational component of our show.”

“A vocal (and colorful) Trump critic, Robert De Niro demurs when asked how the show will — or should — be viewed in light of this month’s election.

“By the time you get to the end of Zero Day’s first episode, you’d be forgiven for assuming the show was written very recently, with a clear intention to model itself on the American political scene’s current main characters. De Niro’s Mullen is tapped to lead a Patriot Act–style commission in response to the terrorist attack, resisting pressure to pin it on Russia given current relations and the nature of the cyberwarfare. His perspective gets muddied as he starts showing signs of cognitive decline, recalling the fierce debate surrounding Joe Biden’s candidacy for reelection before he took himself off the ballot.

“From there, more parallels emerge. Mullen’s daughter, Alexandra (Lizzy Caplan), is a relatively progressive member of Congress whose popularity and forthrightness on Instagram signals her as a rising, AOC-esque star. His chief adversary, meanwhile, is Evan Green (Dan Stevens), an inflammatory basement-dwelling commentator clearly inspired by the likes of Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro.

“The sitting US president Mitchell is portrayed by Angela Bassett, notable in the wake of Americans again rejecting the chance to elect the first female president in Kamala Harris.”

“We did not expect Biden’s cognitive issues to become a campaign issue. We did not expect a Black woman to become the candidate,” Newman says. “If anything, in my mind, [President Mitchell] was more based on Michelle Obama or something.”

…and he doesn’t even mention the twin identity campaigns of Lily Gladstone, who ran as a lead after clearly playing a supporting role in Killers of the Flower Moon, and Emilia Perez’s Karla Sofia Gascon, whose titular character is a strong presence but not a lead — Zoe Saldana has that honor.

Why did Wilson omit even a mention of these two? I’ll tell you why. Because he’s chicken, or because his editors are.

It’s as if Cormac McCarthy dreamt it up.

But as this photo was Facebook-posted yesterday (The Far Side) and then commented on by over 400 persons, my honest response is as follows:

I’m down with immodest beach garb as a rule, but there comes a time when nature doesn’t encourage modesty — it demands it. Not only should this headstrong, free-spirited woman not wear a bikini on a beach, but she shouldn’t even glance in the bathroom mirror when she’s toweling off from a shower.

Sorry, no offense.