Cleaning rain gutters is one of the most miserable chores I’ve ever had to do, especially if you live in the Northeast and you’re scooping out that sickening, ice-cold mush on a windy, freeezing day any time between late November and mid-April. While standing on an extension or step ladder, of course, with your cheeks turning red from the cold and your teeth chattering as you mutter profanities and generally curse God, the earth, your life, your father (the ogre who made you do this) and definitely the trees for dumping their leaves in the first place. And of course, you always have peel back the frozen chicken-wire mesh that’s been attached to the gutters to keep the leaves out, which is to say “not really.” You also have to dump the frozen glop into a bucket or plastic garbage bag, which means you have to climb down and dump the contents into a trash can every five or ten minutes. The only way your hands can stand the cold is to wear two sets of gloves — plastic dishwashing gloves covered by winter or all-weather work gloves. I’m getting angry all over again just thinking about this. This was my life in my mid teens. Awful.

Craig William Macneill’s Lizzie (Saban/Roadside, 9.14) “features two protagonists, the title character (Chloe Sevigny), daughter of Fall River, Massachusetts’s wealthiest family, and the Irish maid, Bridget Sullivan (Kristen Stewart), the only person known to be at home (besides the victims) at the time of the August 1892 murders.

“Bridget was always a key figure in the Borden saga. She almost certainly lied about Lizzie’s comings and goings, and her hasty departure for points unknown (possibly Ireland) the day after the murders was odd, to say the least. (There was no indication that she was about to lose her cleaning job –— I can think of at least two rooms in the house that needed a good scrubbing.) But Lizzie puts Bridget at the center of the action, where an ax-blow to the head signals a blow against sexual assault and patriarchal oppression.” — from David Edelstein’s Vulture review, posted on 1.22.18.

“I spent most of the running time waiting for Lizzie to grab the hatchet and wrap things up already.” — from Sara Stewart‘s N.Y. Post review, posed on 1.30.18.

Pic has a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 70%…not too bad, has some merit, etc.

QAnon are followers of “Q,” an anonymous person or group of morons who claim to be privy to government secrets. The Q theology is “a stew of various but connecting conspiracy theories that generally hold President Trump as a conquistador battling a cabal of anti-American saboteurs who have taken over government, industry, media and various other institutions of public life in a plan to…well, the overarching goals of the nefarious actors are not clear.

“The supposedly classified Q information has been revealed on the 4chan and 8chan message boards and spread around mainstream internet platforms like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. Q has attracted people — the exact number is hard to know — eager to consume his ‘bread crumbs,’ or new details in a sprawling web of conspiracy theories.

“Q claims to be a government insider exposing an entrenched, international bureaucracy that is secretly plotting all sorts of nefarious schemes against the Trump administration and its supporters. The character uses lingo that implies that he or she has a military or intelligence background.” — from “What Is QAnon: Explaining the Internet Conspiracy Theory That Showed Up at a Trump Rally,” posted in the N.Y. Times on 8.1.18.

The London Film Festival has selected Jon Baird and Jeff Pope‘s Stan & Ollie as a closing-night attraction…fine. But that photo of John C. Reilly and Steve Coogan posing in classic L & H garb is at least partly misleading. It suggests that the film is about the comedy duo in their early to late ’30s heyday (Pardon Us, Bonnie Scotland, Our Relations) when in fact the film is about a last hurrah tour of England and Ireland in 1953, when they were in their early 60s.

The Stan & Ollie premiere will happen on 10.21. Entertainment One (eOne) will present simultaneous preview screenings at cinemas across the UK. The film will open wide on 1.11.19. No U.S. bookings or film festivals? How about a Netflix or Amazon deal? A closing-night slot at any festival is always worrisome, but especially so at the London Film Festival.

Oliver Hardy (John C. Reilly) and Stan Laurel (Steve Coogan) in 1930s Hollywood mode — a look that doesn’t reflect the 1953 setting

Reilly and Coogan as the comic duo during their 1953 farewell British Isles tour.

Boilerplate: “Developed by BBC Films, the film is set in the twilight of Laurel and Hardy’s careers, and will focus on their farewell tour of Britain’s variety halls in 1953.

“Their shtick — Stan the wide-eyed ingénue, Ollie the pompous fool, their meticulously rehearsed physical routines and their charming musical numbers — had made them superstars all over Europe, South America and beyond. However, a split from their controlling mentor (i.e., Hal Roach), the vagaries of studio politics and a run of poorly received films had resulted in their star falling. A series of acrimonious divorces, alimony battles and Oliver Hardy’s failing health didn’t help.

“The British tour was supposed to relieve some of the gloom and, despite numerous glitches, the public loved them. Audiences grew and grew as word spread that Laurel and Hardy were back and as funny as ever. As audiences swelled, so did morale. But as their careers and friendship blossomed, disaster struck as Ollie suffered a heart attack. He tried to carry on performing on the tour, but it became clear that he was too ill. Replacement performers were found to fill in but, without Stan and Ollie’s charm and warmth, the shows simply weren’t the same.

“Stan was offered the chance to perform alone, but refused. He realized that neither worked without the other, that they were so much more together than they were apart. Appreciating the sacrifice made by his friend, Ollie roused himself from his sickbed for a few last, triumphant performances, the very last of their extraordinary career.”

Today White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders refused to walk back the president’s assertion that reporters are “the enemy of the people.” While President Trump tweeted on 7.19 that “the real enemy of the people [is] the Fake News Media,” his daughter Ivanka said earlier today that she does “not” believe that the media deserves that label. Sanders ignored that statement when questioned by CNN’s Jim Acosta, and stood by the President’s statement. After the Sanders exchange Acosta tweeted that he was “totally saddened by what just happened.” He called Sanders’ refusal to reject the characterization of the press as an enemy as “shameful.”

I’ve been on the Scotty Bowers trail for about a year now, and so when the Brigade guys asked if I wanted to talk to Matt Tyrnauer, director of Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood, I figured “why stop now?” We met at BUILD studios (corner of Broadway and East Fourth Street), and retired to a kind of green room with free soft drinks and energy bars. Our chat lasted 29 minutes, give or take. A good interview, if I do say so myself. Then I watched Matt sit for an on-camera BUILD interview.

I’ve explained this six or seven times, but most of Tyrnauer’s surprisingly intimate, low-key, non-gossipy film is about old Scotty — a 90something, white-haired pack rat who owns two homes in the Hollywood hills and lives with a good-natured, seen-and-heard-it-all wife who loves him — and only intermittently about the mostly gay and bi movie stars and celebrities (Cary Grant, Spencer Tracy, Walter Pidgeon, Vivien Leigh, Charles Laughton, Vincent Price, Katharine Hepburn, Noël Coward, James Dean) who regarded Scotty as a trusted pimp and pleasure-giver who could and did set them up with same-sex lovers.

After studying Bowers for 98 minutes and listening to him talk about how terrifying things were for gay and bi actors in the intensely homophobic ’40s, ’50s and ’60s, and considering the affection he has for his old gay friends and the strong feelings and immense respect they have for him…after the film is over you’ll probably be convinced, as I was, that Scotty is no bullshitter.

Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood opens tomorrow at the IFC Center.

Again, the mp3.

I’ve never seen Dennis Hooper‘s The Last Movie, which has been commonly regarded for decades as a legendary artistic embarassment and financial catastrophe, not to mention the film that killed Hopper’s directing career for over a decade. And yet it’s playing for a week at the Metrograph, starting tomorrow. And I’m asking myself “how many opportunities am I likely to have in the coming years to see this infamous creation in an allegedly restored condition on a first-rate theatre screen?” The answer may be “never again,” and so I’m tempted to catch a late afternoon show.

This is partly due to a near-breathless Village Voice review by Bilge Ebiri, titled “Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie Is as Essential as Cinema Gets.” He calls it “one of the great lost films of the ’70s,” a statement that deftly sidesteps whether or not it’s any good.

Dennis Hopper in The Last Movie.

He also says that The Last Movie “benefits from multiple viewings the way 2001: A Space Odyssey or Eraserhead or The New World do; you catch through-lines and details you’d missed earlier, while also developing new mini-fascinations and obsessions. It’s the rare film that seems both clearer and completely different with each viewing. The representational fissures of cinema — the tension between the real and the imaginary, between imitation and inspiration — have been woven into its very fabric.”

Toward the end of the review Ebiri calls The Last Movie Hopper’s “greatest ruin and his greatest triumph,” and says that it leads the viewer to “ask whether anyone but Hopper, the veteran character actor who became an unlikely counterculture figure after Easy Rider, could have made this film. And could The Last Movie have had any other fate than to [send Hopper] off to wander the winds of infamy, a man become a myth, and a myth become a man?”

See what I mean? Ebiri’s prose quickens the pulse. How bad could The Last Movie be? It has to be worth at least one viewing, right?

Then I came upon a sentence that gave me pause: “There is an excellent documentary about this chaotic, destructive period in Hopper’s life, called American Dreamer, which is also a lost classic.” Uhm, no…wrong. I saw American Dreamer back in 2010 and here’s a portion of my review, which I titled “American Boob“: “I was stunned by the doc’s shapeless sloppiness, and amused and repelled by its portrait of Hopper as a bearded, drug-fried horndog on the verge of destroying his directing career with the abomination that was The Last Movie.

Based on the 1974 James Baldwin novel and set in early ’70s Harlem, If Beale Street Could Talk (Annapurna, 11.30) is about how a young African-American couple deals with a false accusation in 1970s Harlem.

The main protagonists are Tish (Kiki Layne), a 19 year-old, and Fonny (Stephan James), a 22 year-old sculptor, and their extended family. Fonny is unjustly accused of raping a Puerto Rican woman, Victoria Rogers (Emily Rios), and is sent to prison. Soon after Tish discovers she’s pregnant. She, her family and her lawyer struggle to find evidence that will free Fonny before the baby is born.

Pic was directed and adapted by Barry Jenkins (Moonlight). The costars includes Regina King (as Tish’s mom) Colman Domingo, Dave Franco, Ed Skrein, Finn Wittrock, Diego Luna, Pedro Pascal and Emily Rios. No Venice or Telluride screenings; Toronto only.

A guy who’s heard from a guy who saw Beale Street says it’s “art-housey…very theatrical and in line with Fences. Feels mostly like Barry adapting a book that was very personal to him. Even smaller than Moonlight and told in overlapping voiceovers, saturated cinematography and lots of montage. Stephan James is said to be the best in show and very charming. The fact that this film deals with sexual assault in an inconclusive manner may turn out to be an issue in this, the #MeToo era.”

Here’s a Blackfilm report from Wilson Morales.

Imagine being complacent enough to actually consider buying tickets to see Jaume Collet-Serra‘s Jungle Cruise when it opens on 10.11.19. Imagine being that pliant, that willing. The Disney pic has been shooting in Hawaii since late May.

Dwayne Johnson mentions the example of The African Queen, which was released 67 years ago, and the Charlie Allnut and Rose Sayer characters (played by Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn) that Johnson and Emily Blunt‘s characters (Frank and Lily) are presumably based upon.

What percentage of the potential Jungle Cruise audience has even heard of The African Queen, much less seen it? What percentage of this percentage would care one way or the other? The culture that knows and cares about classic 20th Century cinema is fading fast.

Boilerplate: “Frank, a boat captain, takes his sister and her brother on a mission into a jungle to find a tree believed to possess healing powers. All the while, the trio must fight against dangerous wild animals and a competing German expedition.”

While reading through the Elia Kazan Facebook thread that I mentioned yesterday, I came upon a story about a chat between director Joseph L. Mankiewicz and Marlon Brando on the set of Julius Caesar. It was April of 1952, and news about Kazan having named names in front of HUAC was just getting around. (Not “fresh” names though — Kazan confirmed names that the committee already had.) Brando was aghast, devastated. “What will I say when I see him again?” he asked Mankiewicz. “I truly loved that man, but look what he’s done.” Mankiewicz said something to the effect of “don’t judge or shun him…open your heart and give him a hug…he’s the same man you knew before, and I’m sure he had his reasons.”

In his autobiography A Life, Kazan wrote “I don’t hold people’s faults against them [and] I ask their tolerance for mine.” In the winter of late 1953 and early ’54, or roughly 20 months after Kazan’s testimony, he and Brando joined forces on On The Waterfront, which came to be regarded in some quarters as Kazan’s explanation for the occasional righteousness of testifying against former friend and colleagues. Brando was around when Kazan has given his honorary Oscar in 1999, but he never said a word for or against. They never worked together again after Waterfront.

(l. to r.) Elia Kazan, Marlon Brando, Julie Harris, James Dead on the set of East of Eden, sometime in mid to late 1954.

I finally saw Boots Riley‘s Sorry To Bother You yesterday afternoon. I agree with the admirers — it’s a piece of wildly-out-there satire that warrants everyone’s attention and respect. I laughed from time to time and admired the Brittania Hospital-meets-Idiocracy surrealism, but I just didn’t care for the Oakland prison colony vibe (especially after sitting through the tedious, Oakland-based Blindspotting). As much as I got off on Riley’s edge and flamboyance and inventive sidestepping of the usual-usual, I didn’t want to “live” in this film. And that’s a key thing.

I was saying to myself, “Yup…a clever, smart living-in-the-21st-Century-horror flick with a trippy sense of style…thumbs up.” But at the same time it’s basically a film about pervasive tyranny — about economic desperation and miserable 30somethings surrounded by a system that’s trying to turn them into drones and slaves. Yes, there’s a rebellion aspect but the tone is nonetheless dominated by the oppressors. I was feeling uncomfortable less than ten minutes in, and actually doubly so as I knew that if I wrote anything even half-negative that Glenn Kenny would accuse me of being a Grand Wizard.

And yet at the same time I wanted to escape. I’m sorry but I did. Sorry To Bother You made me feel like Steve McQueen in Papillon. It made me feel like a shrieking man-horse, writhing on the floor. I loved Lakeith Stanfield‘s deadpan performance and laughed every time he spoke in his pee-pee “white voice” (actually David Cross‘s), but I liked the presence of Jermaine Fowler more…sorry. Tessa Thompson is obviously fetching (especially since she announced that she’s having an affair with Janelle Monae) but lacks range. Armie Hammer was brought in to satirize his white Winklevoss master-of-the-universe vibe…whatever.

Can I get out of this? I “liked” and “admired” Sorry To Bother You — it’s definitely a film with an attitude of its own and a lot of tricks up its sleeve, and I completely agree that it’ll win all kinds of indie-centric awards early next year. But I’ll never watch it again because on a certain level I felt as if Riley and his cast were more into taking than giving. I nodded glumly at the vision being presented, but I felt as if some essential liquid enzyme was draining out of me as I sat there in my Village East auditorium. I’d rather jump off a 300-foot rocky cliff than become a telemarketer, and this film made me feel as if I was literally stuck doing that.

I had roughly the same reaction to Sorry To Bother You as I did to Steven Soderbergh’s Unsane, which I half liked. The difference is that Sorry is a lot funnier and crazier.