I’ve been in but mostly out on director Karyn Kusama — loved Girlfight, hated Aeon Flux, loathed Jennifer’s Body but found The Invitation a truly fascinating creepout. The latter is why I caught her latest, Destroyer, early this afternoon.

I felt three ways about it. One, I respected Kusama’s intention to out-badass every other badass rogue cop flick ever made. Two, I hated watching it. And three, for over an hour I was filled with self-loathing for being too chicken to leave.

It’s a complex L.A. crime tale about Erin Bell (Nicole Kidman), a wasted, walking-dead Los Angeles detective trying to settle some bad business and save her daughter from a life of crime and misery. It unfolds through a complex, pain-in-the-ass flashback structure, and is punctuated by all kinds of nihilistic, hard-boiled behavior by the mostly criminal flotsam characters.

Nicole Kidman as Detective Erin Bell in Destroyer.

Destroyer has guns, uniformed cops, blood, a scene in the Westwood Federal building cafeteria, purple ink, ugly asshole criminals with sickening haircuts, drugs, a handjob given to a dying criminal slob, a bank shootout, blah blah. Everything in this well-made if godforsaken film is scuzzy. Everyone and everything is covered in the stuff. Even I felt scuzzed out from my seat in the tenth row of the Herzog. Scuzzed and miserable.

Inner dialogue: “I’m in a beautiful Rocky Mountain town, surrounded on all sides by hotshot Hollywood types and cool rich people, and I’m in hell.”

30 minutes after it began I was going “oh, God, help me.” At the one-hour mark I had decided that stepping over six or seven persons sitting to my right would be too awkward, and at the same time a contrary voice was telling me “don’t do it, Jeff…tough it out.” At the 90-minute mark I was thinking “maybe if I take a short nap I’ll feel better when I awake and will enjoy the film a tiny bit more.” Then I decided “fuck it” and exited past two people to my left. I ducked out under the hanging velour curtain…freedom!

The movie is mostly about the way Kidman looks in this thing, like a combination vampire-zombie with dark eye bags and a complexion that suggests a heroin habit mixed with twice-daily injections of embalming fluid. Plus a Desolation Row, gray-streaked hair style.

Kidman and Kusama are saying “have you ever seen such a badass, hardass undercover female cop in your moviegoing life? Even in a zombie movie?” HE answer: No, I’ve never seen a cop character who looks this wasted, this dead-to-the-world, this gutted, this excavated, this George Romero, this Bela Lugosi-ish. Hats off!

Every Destroyer actor gives the kind of performance that makes you feel like your soul is draining out of the hourglass…Kidman, Sebastian Stan, Tatiana Maslany, Bradley Whitford, Toby Kebbell, Scoot McNairy and Jade Pettyjohn. Hats off to them all.

Now that Telluride screenings are flying fast and furious I’m going through the usual homina-homina-homina. No time to write anything, squeezed from both ends, Macbook Pro batteries dying too soon, Jean-Luc Godard‘s Breathless. It’s 6 am as we speak. I crashed just after 1 am and awoke four hours later to get a jump on things, but I couldn’t make myself get out of bed until 5:30 am. I have to catch the gondola up to the Chuck Jones at 8 am to catch a 9 am screening of Alfonso Cuaron‘s Roma. I feel as if a bear is scratching at the door of my room and going “mwwaagghhh!…more reviews, more coverage…Instagram and Twitter posts aren’t enough, bitch…mwaaghhAWNNN!”

Last night I saw Damien Chazelle‘s First Man at 7pm, followed by Jason Reitman‘s The Front Runner at 10 pm. Both were (and probably still are) wowser thumbs-up immersions, but I have to say that Reitman’s film delivered a slightly bigger jolt in that I wasn’t sure how it would play (it’s a sharp, highly believable, exacting, well-acted, tip-top adult thing in all respects) whereas Chazelle’s film had been praised to the heavens in Venice. I therefore knew First Man would be dealing strong cards, but it was quite the surprise to realize by midnight that both films are heavy hitters.

The Front Runner is an exacting, brilliantly captured political tragedy, and easily Reitman’s best since Up In The Air. Yes, a Reitman comeback movie, and a good one at that. The 40-year-old director totally knocked it out of the park with Thank You For Smoking, Juno and Up In The Air but then seemed to lose that special touch over the last nine years. Now it’s returned. At least by my sights.

Gosling, Foy, Chazelle in Venice three days ago.

Hugh Jackman, Jason Reitman in Herzog theatre lobby last night around 9:40 pm.

The Front Runner reminded me at times of Michael Ritchie‘s The Candidate and sometimes surpassing that 1972 political drama in terms of believable campaign minutiae and a general drill-bit focus on the hundreds of little docudrama-like details that convince, divert and persuade. It also reminded me a bit of Mike Nichols‘ Primary Colors and James Vanderbilt‘s Truth, a first-rate politics-and-journalism film that was unjustly given the bum’s rush.

Hugh Jackman is totally first-rate as 1988 presidential contender Gary Hart — the ’80s liberal superstar in the Kennedy mold whom everyone angrily turned on at when his campaign totally fell apart over a brief, sloppily-arranged affair with a well-educated wannabe campaign worker Donna Rice. (She’s 60 now!)

But the screenplay, based on Matt Bai‘s “All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid” and co-written by Bai, Reitman and Jay Carson, portrays Hart in much more sympathetic terms — a guy who sadly screwed himself out of a shot at the White House over a mere dalliance but who had a real point when he argued that the media’s National Enquirer-like fixation on a sexual side issue that meant nothing and was nobody’s business to begin with was by far the greater mistake or misstep. Jackman makes you feel the rage about this.

The Hart-Rice affair was uncovered by Miami Herald reporters. Yesterday a friend from the Herald wrote to ask if the film identifies them chapter and verse, and I responded as follows: “The Miami Herald is completely and fully identified and the relationship between the Herald and Gary Hart is depicted as deeply antagonistic, especially on the Herald’s part. Kevin Pollack plays publisher Bob Martindale and Steve Zissis plays Tom Fiedler, one of the Herald reporters who chased the story. The Herald effort comes off as dogged but ultimately sleazy. This is not a positive portrait of the Herald or the press in general.

First Man is an intense, unconventional, psychologically penetrating take on the experience of Neil Armstrong (Ryan Gosling) and his wife, Janet Shearon (freckly-skinned Claire Foy, whom I last saw in Steven Soderberg‘s Unsane) from the early to late ’60s, culminating in the historic moon-landing mission of July 1969.

It’s no Ron Howard movie, that’s for sure — jarring, louder, lonelier, scarier, and well removed from that emotionally familiar, somewhat jingoistic universe of dramatic ups and downs that we all recall from Apollo 13.

I was seriously impressed with First Man because it’s really quite different — a kind of 16mm art film approach to an epic journey, an intimate, indie-styled, deeply personal movie writ large and loud with a rumbling, super-vibrating soundtrack. I agree with Owen Gleiberman‘s view that it’s the Saving Private Ryan of NASA space epics. The last 40 minutes or so (the 1967 fire tragedy to Neil and Janet’s post-mission meeting in an isolation area) are truly outstanding and suspenseful as fuck. It’s surely one of the measures of top-flight filmmaking that I was tense and worried about the success of a 50 year-old triumphant mission from 50 years ago.

And that rightwing “why have they ignored the planting of the American flag?” complaint is bullshit. The film shows two shots of the flag plus Neil’s kid raising the flag plus a shot of Neil saluting, or so it seemed to me.

Foy delivers the conventional emotional currents, calling Neil on his emotionally constipated bullshit but Gosling acts the hell out of Neil. Everything he does and says is very internal but you can read him in every scene. Don’t let anyone tell you that Foy owns this film — she does in an outwardly familiar sense but Gosling is doing something much braver and more intense in its own way.

Oh, the shaking, the throbbing, the rumbling, the overall loudness….wuuhhhrrrrnnannnggg…bang, bang, BANG, BUHNNG, WHAM, CLANG, ROAARRRRRRRMMMMmmmmm!

At Aretha Franklin memorial, Michael Eric Dyson to President Trump (starting at 1:12): “[You] orange apparition, you lugubrious leech, you dopey doppelganger of deceit and deviance, you lethal liar, you dimwitted dictator, you foolish bastard!”

David Lowery‘s The Old Man & The Gun (Fox Searchlight, 9./28) suffers, I’m afraid, from a bad case of the gentle blahs. Or, more precisely, from the congenials. It won’t hurt to sit through it, and it’s nice to watch Robert Redford glide through a mild-mannered bank robber film without anything bad or scary or challenging happening to him. Or to costars Casey Affleck, Sissy Spacek, Danny Glover, Tom Waits and Tika Sumpter, for that matter.

A fictionalized, fable-like story of Forrest Tucker (Robert Redford), a real-life bank robber and prison escape artist, the film plays it light and mild all the way, and I’m sorry but it doesn’t put food on the plate. Because nothing really happens, no one is threatened or put to the test, nobody risks anything, nobody bares their soul…zip.

It’s a movie about comfort and conviction (i.e., an old guy loves robbing banks and so that’s what he does) and mild vibes and incredible good luck. Robbery after robbery after robbery, and nothing really happens to anyone. Okay, Tucker gets caught. Once. And then he gets out. And then…okay, I won’t spoil. But nothing happens.

I’m open to a movie about a polite and kindly thief who knows how to treat a lady (Phillip Borsos‘ The Grey Fox was an excellent film in this regard) but I didn’t believe a word of Lowery’s film. Not a damn word. Tucker robs banks without flashing a gun or threatening to shoot anyone, and nobody ever says “nope, I won’t give you the bank’s money” or “fuck you…if you want the dough you’re gonna have to shoot me.” A craggy-faced career criminal pulls off a couple of dozen robberies, and they’re all a walk in the park.

If Forrest Tucker had been a black dude, he would have been killed early on. In his youth, I mean. Cop bullets.

Almost all of The Old Man & The Gun is set in the early ’80s, and so Affleck, who plays a Texas detective, isn’t allowed to wear the ten-day-beard look — that didn’t happen until the mid to late ’80s, and only in the coastal cities at that. And I found the idea of a Texas detective being married to an African American woman (Sumpter) in ’81 highly unlikely. Not unheard of, mind, but things were different in this country 37 years ago, especially in conservative regions.

Orson Welles‘ The Other Side of the Wind has screened at the Venice Film Festival, and the critical reaction seems to be “fascinating…we get it…worth seeing…makes you feel a little woozy but so what?”

We’ve all known for months that when it finally shows, The Other Side of the Wind will have to be given a fair amount of slack. Orson has to be welcomed back to earth with a certain “wonderful to see you again, we love you no matter what” attitude. Then again you can’t be too kid-gloves. Before you sit down to review anything, you have to ask yourself the age-old question, “Am I a man or a mouse? Am I a rock, a gentle reed that bends in the wind, or a piece of dandelion fuzz?”

I spoke yesterday morning to a guy who’d recently seen it, and I could sense that he didn’t know quite how to process the jumbled entirety, much less render a short, bottom-line reaction. I promise that no matter what I think when I finally see it, I will be as respectful and obliging as possible without being too twinkle-toes.

The printed Telluride schedule has Welles’ film showing just once (Saturday at 9 am at the Palm), which I definitely can’t attend. Maybe a screening or two will be added in one of the TBA slots.

From Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman: “An eccentric, rather choppy, but highly watchable movie, and Orson Welles is quite alive in it. You can feel the intensity of his DNA in its sinister atmosphere of garish noir depravity. [But] Evoking Touch of Evil and Citizen Kane isn’t the same thing as matching their artistic power.

“So is it a good movie or a bad one? A fascinating jumble or a searingly told story? A work of art or a curio? Let’s say that it’s a little of all those things.

Remember the second-to-last scene of A Face in The Crowd? A live broadcast of a hugely popular TV show hosted by Lonesome Rhodes’ (Andy Griffith) has come to an end, and the closing credits are rolling. In a moment of arrogance, the demagogic Rhodes looks into the camera and, presuming the studio mikes have been turned off, tells his millions of loyal fans that he thinks they’re low and stupid. It triggers his downfall, or at least the beginning of the end.

I was thinking this morning that if a similar thing happened with Donald Trump, it could hurt him badly with the deplorables. Maybe. Consider, for example, a recently posted Jonathan Chait article, “Trump Is a Snob Who Secretly Despises His Own Supporters“:

“Conservatives have spent decades depicting liberals as coastal snobs. Entire campaigns were built from this theme, from Michael Dukakis’s ‘Harvard Yard boutique’ to various Democrats failing to display the requisite enthusiasm for Nascar. Every image of Barack Obama in the right-wing media cast him gazing downward imperiously, a pose that conservatives seemed to think captured his contempt for the good people of the heartland.

“Given the attention they have lavished on such picayune details as John Kerry’s failure to order cheesesteak properly, it’s not even possible to imagine what they would do with direct evidence of a president disdaining his attorney general’s University of Alabama law degree and regional accent. Imagine one of those scenes from a ’90s action movie where the bad guys are wearing night-vision goggles in the dark, and then suddenly faced with blinding light.

“But as is so often the case, the accusation that was made falsely against Democrats turns out to be true of Trump. For all his vaunted populism, Trump is filled with contempt for average people in general and his own supporters in particular.”

Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman both admires and is vaguely irked by Alfonso Cuaron‘s Roma, The Hollywood Reporter‘s Todd McCarthy is somewhere between levitated, knocked flat and tickled pink.

“For all its dust and flow and sprawl, there’s hardly a moment in Roma that isn’t orchestrated for our observance from on high,” Gleiberman observes, “and that’s one reason why a lot of people are likely to hail it as some sort of masterpiece.

“Roma is no mere movie — it’s a vision, a memory play that unfolds with a gritty and virtuosic time-machine austerity. It’s a Proustian reverie, dreamed and designed down to the last street corner and scuffed piece of furniture.

“Yet I actually think it’s far from a masterpiece, because as a viewing experience it has a slightly hermetic coffee-table-book purity. Every moment comes at you in the same methodically objective and caressing Zen way.”

“Roma may not be the memoir film many might have expected from such an adventurous, sometimes raunchy, sci-fi/fantasy-oriented filmmaker,” McCarthy allows, “but it’s absolutely fresh, confident, surprising and rapturously beautiful.

“It becomes clear soon enough that Cuaron’s stance here is that of a poetic curator of memories. The shimmering, silvery monochromatic images summon up moments and experiences with crystalline vividness.

“Taking over as cinematographer himself and working without the incomparable DP Emmanuel Lubezki for only the second time in his career, the director here relies upon the use of slow lateral pans to move from one event to another.

“This creates the opposite effect of quick cutaways and reaction shots, producing instead a feeling of the continuity of life, an indication of one experience or encounter leading to another, of everything being related, an establishment of certain events that will ultimately lead to a repository of permanent memories as opposed to evanescent ones.”

Collider‘s Jeff Sneider is reporting that Damon Herriman, the guy playing the demonic Charles Manson in Quentin Tarantino‘s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, is also playing Manson in season #2 of David Fincher’s upcoming em>Mindhunter series. Sneider reports that “while Herriman’s casting in the Tarantino film was announced first, he was actually cast in Mindhunter much earlier, and in fact “already shot his scenes in July.” In other words, Tarantino was almost certainly told about Herriman’s Mindhunter performance (perhaps by Fincher himself) and decided “what the hell…I want someone good playing Manson and this guy is that.” Will Netflix start streaming Mindhunter before the Tarantino film pops on 7.26.19? Sneider is doubtful.

If I’d been in Tarantino’s shoes I would have cast…I was going to say Bob Odenkirk as Manson, but he’s too old now. Certainly to play the 1969 version.

The first screener I received this year was for Sebastian Lelio‘s Disobedience, the first-rate, finely acted, highly emotional Orthodox Jewish lesbo drama with Rachel Weiss, Rachel McAdams and Alessandro Nivola. (My default mini-review.) The screener for Morgan Neville‘s widely praised Mr. Rogers doc arrived yesterday.

Nobody knows anything except for the fact that Ethan Hawke and Glenn Close are brilliant in First Reformed and The Wife, respectively. I feel like a wuss for allowing Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil to nudge me into making predictions based on almost nothing but gut feelings, intuition, insect antennae vibrations, hairs on the back of my neck, little devils and angels whispering on my shoulders (except in the cases of Close and Hawke).

But you know what? A lot of these names are going to be top contenders anyway. Because people want what they want, and they can sense things. On top of which I am occasionally Zoltar, the all-knowing channeller, award-season mystic and Academy whisperer. Please tell Zoltar what’s coming that he’s missing, etc.

Comment from a guy who hears things, gets around, knows a thing or two: “The long drive must be affecting your mind. Lakeith Stanfield for Sorry to Bother You????? Single worst movie I have seen all year. Green Book‘s Viggo Mortensen AND Mahershala Ali, with Viggo in front position of those two.”