A respectful salute to the late John McCain, the ex-Navy pilot who endured much agony as a P.O.W in Hanoi from ’67 to ’73, the long-serving U.S. Senator from Arizona (elected in ’87) who ran against and lost to Sen. Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election, and whose climactic thumbs-down vote on last year’s attempted repeal of Obamacare pretty much saved the day.

The 81 year-old McCain died a couple of hours ago from brain cancer. Condolences to family, friends, colleagues and supporters. An imperfect but reasonably good fellow as far as as his conservative principles and necessary allegiances allowed.

The closest I ever was to McCain in a physical proximity sense was during my two visits to Hoa Lo prison (i.e., “Hanoi Hilton”) in 2012 and again in ’16. My first stirrings of understanding and even compassion in a political-tribulation sense came from Ed Harris‘s casual, low-key portrayal of McCain in Jay Roach‘s Game Change, an HBO drama about the behind-the-scenes Sarah Palin nightmare during the ’08 election.

I respect the courage it took to vote against the Obamacare repeal — hats off — and I deeply admire the way McCain handled that ignorant woman who called Obama “an Arab” during a McCain political rally. Ditto the way he conceded to Obama with grace and eloquence on the evening of 11.4.08, and how he conveyed to his Arizona supporters that booing and other expressions of contempt for President-elect Obama weren’t cool and wouldn’t be tolerated.

McCain faced his Hanoi ordeal with steel, defiance and tenacity. He toughed it out like a champ so let’s all raise a glass, but I have to say that I don’t think the word “hero”, which many of the news stories are using to describe McCain, correctly applies.

“We have the problem that they tell us Logan is a great movie. Well, it’s a great superhero movie. It still involves people in tights with metal coming out of their hands. It’s not Bresson. It’s not Bergman. But they talk about it like it is. I went to see Logan ’cause everyone was like ‘this is a great movie’ and I was like really? No, this is a fine superhero movie. There’s a difference but big business doesn’t think there’s a difference. Big business wants you to think that this is a great film because they wanna make money off of it.” — Ethan Hawke quoted on 8.23 by The Film Stage‘s Rory O’Connor.

The same thing is happening now with reports about Disney pushing Ryan Coogler‘s Black Panther as a serious Best Picture contender. I wouldn’t be surprised if it lands a Best Picture nomination — in fact I’m predicting flat-out that it will.

But it can’t win, of course. One, it doesn’t really kick into gear until the last hour. And two, it’s basically a Marvel movie adhering to the same basic story beats that other Marvel flicks have followed, the difference being the native African representation factor and the whole historic pride thing that goes along with that, and of course the huge box-office factor. At the end of the day it’s going to win the Best Popular Film Oscar — we all know that.

As I understand it (and I’ve only been thinking about it for the last 20 or 30 minutes) a honey badger is someone who just wants to swagger or slither around and get all kinds of glowing attention while doing so. He or she may proclaim this or that belief or philosophy, but he/she is actually fairly elastic as long as his/her ego is being sufficiently stroked and a fair amount of money and privelege is part of the deal.

N.Y. Times columnist Frank Bruni has posted a conversation with filmmaker Errol Morris. The subject is rightwing sociopath Steve Bannon and Errol’s new film, American Dharma, which basically makes Bannon the center of attention and offers him a platform to spew all he wants about whatever.

Bruni: “Did [Bannon] try to feel you out at all about what political perspective you’d be coming from or have any fears about that?”

Morris: “I don’t think that he had fears about that. He’s a honey badger.”

Bruni: “Sorry?”

Morris: “Honey badgers don’t care.”

Bruni: “I also had the feeling, watching him in the movie, and I’ve had this feeling watching him elsewhere, that he’s a creature of extraordinary vanity, and you were giving him a microphone. Is that fair?”

Morris: “I think that is more than fair.”

During last night’s chat with John Brennan, Bill Maher said something about the Trump miasma having put America and Americans in the midst of one of the three biggest critical crossroad moments in our nation’s history, the first two being the Revolutionary War and the Civil War.

It’s now clear that a highly significant minority (i.e., the entire country outside the cities) is ready to abandon the basic tenets of democracy and for that matter sanity in order to submit to a crime-family autocrat who at least, they’re telling themselves, is trying to preserve a semblance of white-male dominance as they remember it from the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s and ’80s. Beast that he is, Trump’s supporters are rationalizing that at least he’s standing foursquare for heartland white culture (or claiming as much) and trying to prevent the multiculturals and LGBTQs from gaining too much ground.

From “How Far America Has Fallen,” a N.Y. Times opinion piece by columnist Roger Cohen, posted on 8.24:

“The thing about all the shocking Trump revelations is that they are already baked into Trump’s image. His supporters, and there are tens of millions of them, never had illusions. I’ve not met one who did not have a pretty clear picture of Trump. They’ve known all along that he’s a needy narcissist, a womanizer, a lowlife, a liar, a braggart and a generally miserable human being. That’s why the Access Hollywood tape or the I-could-shoot-somebody-on-Fifth-Avenue boast did not kill his candidacy.

“There’s a deeper question, which comes back to the extraordinary Western landscape and the high American idea enshrined in it. Americans elected Trump. Nobody else did. They came down to his level. White Christian males losing their place in the social order decided they’d do anything to save themselves, and to heck with morality. They made a bargain with the devil in full knowledge. So the real question is: What does it mean to be an American today? Who are we, goddamit? What have we become?

If you’re any kind of movie Catholic, you need to do the Point Blank Walker walk (clop, clop, clop, clop, clop, clop, clop) at least once after arriving at LAX. No walking with friends or family — you have to do it solo in one of those long, linoleum-floored passageways between the upstairs arrival area and the baggage carousels. There are at least one or two remaining. The one I clop-clopped on this morning is part of the American Airlines terminal. I shot some video, but I got the aspect ratio wrong. Very embarassing.

Whatever the word may be on Felix van Groeningen’s Beautiful Boy, it’s still essential viewing. Even with Chalamet on HE’s temporary shit list for throwing Woody Allen under the bus plus taking the Kyle MacLachlan role in Denis Villeneuve‘s sure-to-be-tiresome Dune. I wouldn’t dream of passing on it in Toronto. Good people (including Cameron Crowe) tried to make Beautiful Boy for years — there has to be an arresting theme or undertow of some kind, not to mention the presumably affecting performances.

It was significantly cheaper to take a JFK-to-LAX flight that stopped in Las Vegas. This town is always friendly but so corporate, so red-state, so overweight and fried foody. A cab from McCarran to the nearby McCarran Best Western (almost a stone’s throw on the map) cost me $13…really? (Airport fee, taxes, graft.) And the driver got snitty over the tip. I spoke to four women from Spain who flew here last weekend for a vay-cay…really? The Goodfellas Bail Bonds TV ad is something to wake up to at 4:45 am, lemme tell ya.

I want to be with my people, my herd, my culture. Telluride in five days, and then Toronto after that.

And a concisely phrased, straight-shooting one at that.

Posted from 35,000 feet, American Airlines flight from JFK to Las Vegas: Over the years I’ve developed an ability — call it a knack — of reading between the lines of Venice Film Festival reviews, and thereby discerning what’s really being said. Because there’s often a certain amount of political deference and ass-covering mumbo jumbo in any trade review of any Venice premiere.

Case in point: Those overly obliging Variety and Hollywood Reporter reviews of Downsizing, posted from Venice. It wasn’t until that Alexander Payne film hit Telluride that a few cut-the-crap assessments (including my own) began to be posted.

I’ve also developed sensors (i.e., insect antennae) that can spot movies aimed at film snobs a mile away — highly intelligent films with an ultra-refined or uncompromised aesthetic that just lifts you out of your seat (i.e., Cold War). Except sometimes they’re coupled with a lack of interest in providing any semblance of an emotionally engaging current or, failing that, at least an attempt to meet the viewer halfway.

We all know what dweeb cinema is and we all know what dweeb elites look and talk and dress like. They’re a breed apart, a club, a cloistered semi-secret order with their own way of being and relating, a fraternity that insists that applicants prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that they are fundamentally opposed to the concept of commonly-defined movie pleasure.

That said, I wouldn’t want to live in a world without film snobs because their influence delivers a much-needed cultural counter-balance to philistine-idiot popcorn movies. (Note: portions of the preceding were originally posted in a piece called “Dweeb Manifesto,” dated 11.29.15.)

I caught Susan Lacy‘s Jane Fonda in Five Acts (HBO, 9.24) during last January’s Sundance Film Festival, and fell for it big-time. It’s fairly conventional in the vein of any number of comprehensive, smoothly professional feature-doc portraits that we’ve all seen before, and yet unique in that it microscopes Jane Fonda‘s journey, breaking it down into a five-act structure and delivering, in a very intimate and relatable sense, an epic 80-year saga.

Four of the five decades were shaped or strongly influenced by the men in her life, she admits; it’s only the current fifth chapter in which Fonda has totally stood her own ground.

Every now and then you run into people you feel a special current with, and Fonda, for me, is one of them. Largely, I guess, because we were both raised by dismissive, emotionally aloof fathers and have more or less educated ourselves, and I don’t know what else…similar cockatoo attitudes about food, a certain alertness of mind, a fill-the-schedule attitude?

Her aura is steady and…what, steely? Tough, tenacious, non-retiring, pays close attention. You have a feeling she’d be okay in an earthquake.

I could talk about 150 different subjects with Fonda and barely scratch the surface. I could ask her 30 or 40 questions about every movie she’s been in, and plenty about films I’ve heard she considered but never made. I could ask her about those 1965 beach parties at Roddy McDowall‘s home. I could ask her about Warren Beatty. I could ask her about everyone, everything…the Klute shoot with Donald Sutherland, that visit with Harvey Milk, her experiences with Sydney Pollack (whom I knew somewhat), making Barefoot in the Park with Redford, why she decided not to do Cameron Crowe‘s Elizabethtown. (Smart decision as it turned out.)

One of my all time favorite films of the aughts, written by Ted Griffin and Nicholas Griffin: Clip #1 and clip #2.