The idea, obviously, is to proclaim that red-hat troglodytes don’t own Americanism, patriotism or the flag. Or, more to the point, that by embracing the Cheeto agenda they’re anything but patriotic. It’s a nice looking cap, but the concept doesn’t quite work. 50 years after the birth of the rural Republican reactionaries and the Southern Strategy, the flag has lost its honor. Like Christianity, it’s been tainted if not poisoned by the right.

Barack Obama and Joe Biden as gray-haired Hardy Boys…love it.

In a just-published Hollywood Reporter interview by Stephen Galloway, First Man director Damian Chazelle indicates that his approach to this saga of Neil Armstrong and the first manned landing on the moon was about veering away from the cinematic swoonings of La-La Land. Like Dustin Hoffman‘s decision to play the scuzzy Ratso Rizzo in the wake of his breakout success as the clean-cut Benjamin Braddock, Chazelle wanted to switch gears and not repeat himself.

“Instead of turning to similarly themed films — even ones he admired, such as Apollo 13 and 2001: A Space Odyssey — Chazelle drew inspiration from documentaries like For All Mankind and Moonwalk One, where hard facts and precise details were ‘baked into the archival.’

“‘We watched movies like Battle of Algiers and The French Connection,” says editor Tom Cross. ‘A lot of our conversations had to do with the Maysles and D.A. Pennebaker and Frederick Wiseman [all celebrated documentarians], and those cinema verite documentaries of the 1960s — how they were put together and the ways you could join shots in such a way that it felt emotionally continuous, but actually wasn’t.”

First Man (Il Primo Uomo) will have its first-anywhere showings on Wednesday, 8.29, at the Venice Film Festival.

Ozark star-director Jason Bateman is an HE reader, which is one reason why I’ve always paid special attention to whatever he’s up to, including the paycheck comedies. Another reason is that his performances are usually on the dryly ironic, underplayed side. A third reason is that he’s an above-average director (Bad Words, The Family Fang). Which is why I felt kinda badly as I wrote the following email, which I sent him this morning:

I have an apology to make. A big one. I try and watch as much well-reviewed cable fare as I can fit into my schedule, but between all the movies and filings and researchings and constant deadlines and whatnot, I don’t see everything. I tend to be picky. Plus I’m occasionally reluctant to get into series because of the long-haul commitment of eight to ten hours. Plus I have a prejudice about drug-dealing melodramas, especially if some of the characters are redneck biker types with tattoos and missing teeth. This is one reason why I avoided Breaking Bad; the other was that it costarred an actor I often referred to as “tennis-ball head,” and whom I can’t stand.

These are no excuses — I’m just telling you how I play it sometimes.

Last night I finally sat down and watched the first two episodes of Ozark (two of the four that you directed over the course of season #1) and was pretty much blown away. Which is to say hooked and committed. Marty Byrde is your best character, ever; ditto your best performance ever, in anything.

Clean, unfettered, no-nonsense direction. And the writing! Hats off to the decision by screenwriters Bill Dubuque and Mark Williams to give almost every character (even the lowest, scurviest ones) something arresting or eloquent or off-angled to say. I love it when everyone is sharp and clever and has sussed all the angles, regardless of their age (Marty’s two kids are great) or genetic inheritance or educational background. I was engrossed, riveted, satisfied.

I don’t know at what point I was finally sold, but I think it was the moment when the body of Laura Linney‘s boyfriend slammed into the pavement at 150 miles per hour. And I loved how you didn’t build up to this or show the cartel goons pushing him out — your character is just approaching the building, going over what he’ll say to his cheating wife, and WHUP!

Hats off, bowing down, obeisance before power.

“On Tuesday afternoon, the American public was treated to an astonishing split-screen moment…as [President] Trump’s former campaign chief was convicted by a federal jury in Virginia of multiple crimes carrying years in prison at the same time that his longtime personal lawyer pleaded guilty in federal court in New York to his own lengthy trail of criminality, and confessed that he had committed at least some of the crimes ‘at the direction of’ Mr. Trump himself.

“Let that sink in: Mr. Trump’s own lawyer has now accused him, under oath, of committing a felony.

“Only a complete fantasist — that is, only President Trump and his cult — could continue to claim that this investigation of foreign subversion of an American election, which has already yielded dozens of other indictments and several guilty pleas, is a ‘hoax’ or ‘scam’ or ‘rigged witch hunt.'” — from 8.21 N.Y. Times editorial, “All The President’s Crooks.”

Sink into that Hold The Dark vibe, that feeling of fog and dread, Jeffrey Wright‘s getting-grayer-and-grayer beard, the atmosphere of damp, drippy snow covering everything, “oowwwwooooohhh!”

A statement from Asia Argento about that N.Y. Times sexual assault-and-payoff story was posted this morning by New York‘s Ashar Ali. She denies she ever had any sexual encounter or relationship with Jimmy Bennett, claims that Bennett is/was a financially unstable shakedown artist and asserts that she and late boyfriend Anthony Bourdain (whom she names as “Antony” at one point in the statement) decided to pay Bennett off anyway to keep the allegedly spurious allegation out of the press.

Who gives an alleged shakedown artist over $300K? And what’s that final paragraph about? N.Y. Times columnist Bari Weiss doesn’t address it, but her general take on L’Affaire Argento is worth reading.

Yesterday HE’s Paranoid Bush tweeted that someone like myself “could write an entertaining if deeply inane Bill Simmons-y article about how the major romcom actresses of the 1990s, and how no one back then would have predicted Sandra Bullock would have the most significant staying power.”

At 54, Bullock has lasted longer in the box-office limelight and is still a fairly big draw, but romcom-wise all actresses age out. Most female romcom (or straight romance) stars enjoy a 10 to 15-year run until they hit 40 or thereabouts, and then their younger replacements move in.

Bullock became a marquee name in the mid ’90s with Speed, and then built her romcom (or straight romantic) brand with While You Were Sleeping, Two If by Sea, Hope Floats, 28 Days, Miss Congeniality, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, The Lake House and The Proposal. Since that 2009 film she’s been more of a comedy star with occasional dramatic detours.

The top three ’90s romcom stars were Bullock, Meg Ryan and Julia Roberts. Ryan torpedoed herself with bad plastic surgery, of course. Roberts’ ’90s romcom run lasted from Pretty Woman (’90) to Runaway Bride (’99). She eventually graduated into somewhat older or middle-aged woman roles (mothers, detectives, business executives) starting around a dozen years ago.

Bullock, Ryan and Roberts’ contenders were Alicia Silverstone, Julia Stiles, Drew Barrymore and Cameron Diaz.

Silverstone peaked with Clueless, of course, and that was pretty much it. Stiles has a three-year romcom run in the late ’90s with 10 Things I Hate About You, Down to You and Save the Last Dance. Barrymore’s run was a late ’90s-to-late aughts thing — The Wedding Singer, Home Fries, Never Been Kissed, Riding in Cars with Boys, 50 First Dates, Lucky You, He’s Just Not That Into You. Diaz launched in the mid ’90s with The Mask, My Best Friend’s Wedding and There’s Something About Mary and kept it going into the early to mid aughts with The Sweetest Thing, In Her Shoes and The Holiday.

I for one am keen to see Noah Baumbach‘s untitled divorce movie, which Netflix will release…you tell me. Costar Ray Liotta provided a capsule synopsis in a Business Insider interview that ran a couple of months ago.

“Yeah…I’m a lawyer in it,” Liotta said. “Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson‘s characters are going through a divorce, he comes to me and I’m a lawyer who explains all these ways we can get stuff out of her in the divorce, and he’s, like ‘No, that’s too aggressive.’ So he ends up going to court, and there he realizes that Scarlett has a lawyer who’s really aggressive. So then he’s, like, ‘Oh, shit’ and he comes back to me to represent him.”

That Norman Mailer quote: “You don’t know a woman until you’ve met her in court.”

Principal photography happened between January and March earlier this year. Laura Dern also costars.

I noted last year that for a majority of journos with tight travel schedules and a pile of deadlines, the four-day Telluride Film Festival is actually a three-day if not a two-and-a-half-day festival. Which means that out of 30 films typically scheduled, go-getters can maybe catch 14 or 15, tops. And that’s if you’re really aggressive about it. If you’re only moderately aggressive you’ll wind up seeing 10 or 12.

The fest doesn’t begin until mid-Friday afternoon (i.e., post Patron’s Brunch), which affords an opportunity to see two or three films during the remainder of that day. Three or four pics are catchable on Saturday and Sunday for a likely total of 10 or 11 by Sunday midnight, and maybe a couple more on Monday before leaving town. And you have to review everything as you go along.

On top of which Telluride often schedules the highest-interest films against each other so you’re always missing out on Peter in order to see Paul. On top of which are the dinners and parties.

I’m given to understand that the following films are locked for Telluride ’18: Alfonso Cuaron‘s Roma, Damien Chazelle‘s First Man, Mike Leigh‘s Peterloo, Orson Welles‘ The Other Side of the Wind, Yorgos Lanthimos‘ The Favourite, Olivier Assayas‘ Non-Fiction, Marielle Heller‘s Can You Ever Forgive Me?, Jason Reitman‘s The Front Runner, David Lowery‘s The Old Man and the Gun, Yann Demange‘s White Boy Rick, Karyn Kusama‘s Destroyer, Joel Edgerton‘s Boy Erased, Pawel Pawlikowski‘s Cold War and Hirokazu Kore-eda‘s Shoplifters. (14)

HE solution to Telluride gridlock: With everyone arriving on Thursday afternoon, the festival should begin on Thursday night with hottie screenings at all the venues (Chuck Jones, Werner Herzog, Palm, Galaxy, Pierre, Backlot) starting at 7 pm and then again at 9:30 or 10 pm. Hell, stage a midnight screening or two. And then more hottie screenings on Friday morning starting at 8:30 or 9 am. Those who wish to attend the Patrons picnic could squeeze it in around 11 or 11:30 am, but a full load of screenings would continue for those who’d rather catch films than eat.

By launching on Thursday night and starting screenings early on Friday morning, four or five fresh opportunities to catch the must-sees would be on every visiting critic’s plate. And for those who might prefer to take a more leisurely, old-time approach, they can still start things off with the picnic and then the first Patrons screening at the Chuck Jones at 2:30 pm, and no harm done.

Now doesn’t that make sense?

Less than a month into Donald Trump‘s presidency, Meryl Streep tore into that sociopathic blowhard during a wonderfully feisty speech at a Human Rights Campaign event in Manhattan on Saturday, 2.11.17. And this was more than eighteen months ago — things are much worse now.

If any of the apparent female contenders for the Democratic president nomination (Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand) were to deliver a speech today with even half of Streep’s passion, oratorical precision and pizazz, she/they would have the nomination all but sewn up. But of course, none of them are in Streep’s class. Aspiring but no cigar.

If Streep were to run for president…I’m just saying. We had a former B-level actor in the Oval office in the ’80s. We have a reality TV huckster in the White House now. What about an Oscar-winning actress? Why not?

The SJW admonishers and virtue signallers were out in full force yesterday. When an ethical-moral issue surfaces (such as Asia Argento having reportedly paid off a now 22-year-old actor over an apparent issue of sexual assault when he was a minor, and her apparent #MeToo hypocrisy in having done so), the Twitter police immediately huddle and establish the p.c. perimeters, usually within two or three hours of such a story breaking.

Soon after the Argento story popped last weekend, the tut-tutters had articulated the proper public (i.e., social media) posture. Once that process was completed, posting a view that diverged even slightly from their own was likely to attract slings and arrows.

In my case I was pummelled for suggesting that the victim in question had reacted to Argento’s alleged sexual manipulation in a way that diverged from the generally understood behavior of most teenaged actors, from my own teenaged experience and from that of Mickey Rooney. I basically expressed the same view as a certain SNL skit on a similar subject. In almost no time I became in some circles the poster boy for the “wrong” way to assess the Argento matter. I show you the times in which we live.