Posted by Stephen Farber, 9.9.17: “In Ian McEwan‘s The Children Act (A24, sometime this fall), Emma Thompson plays a High Court judge who specializes in family law cases. And she delivers what has to be one of the most nuanced and moving performances of her entire career. The film is also notable for showcasing another superb performance, by up-and-coming actor Fionn Whitehead (Dunkirk). But his is essentially a strong supporting role, whereas Thompson appears in virtually every scene.

“Adam Henry (Whitehead) is suffering from leukemia. Doctors believe that a blood transfusion will save his life, but Adam and his parents are Jehovah’s Witnesses, and their religion prohibits the mixing of blood. Since Adam is only 17, he is not deemed an adult, so he cannot decide for himself what he wants to do, though he claims to share his parents’ religious beliefs. Fiona hears the opinions of doctors as well as Adam’s parents, but then she makes the unconventional decision to visit Adam in the hospital, where she discovers an extraordinarily intelligent boy who happens to share her own love of music.

“Weighing the medical and religious issues, she ultimately decides to save Adam’s life by ordering the transfusion.

“That is far from the end of the story, however. After his release from the hospital, Adam seeks out Fiona, eager to become much closer to the woman who saved his life. Needless to say, this provokes turmoil for both of them. Fiona has chosen not to have children, so the relationship with Adam awakens some deeply buried regrets about her own life choices.”

I’m trying to imagine some kind of professional acrimonious situation in which I would actually try to harm another journalist’s livelihood — his or her access to screenings or festivals, let’s say — or diminish his or her advertising revenue. I’m trying to imagine even considering this kind of ugly behavior, but I can’t. It’s not in me. I’ve never tried to interfere with a fellow journalist trying to find work or generate this or that form of income. I’ve never whispered in an editor’s ear, “Don’t hire this or that critic”…ever.

Are there a few journalist-critics whom I don’t personally like all that much? Sure, a few, but I’ve never tried to harm them professionally. Ever.

This is how I was in high school, actually. I would never put anyone down, or at least no one who hadn’t put me down first. I would never huddle with the weasels in my clique and sneer at some other kid because we didn’t like cut of his jeans. People do this in high school all the time, of course, and then they go on to do it in the workplace. People talking shit about others is a national pastime. Some people can be real vipers when they put their minds to it.

Have I ever acted in an ugly or unbecoming fashion? Yes, I’ve slipped a few times, and I sincerely apologize for this. But I’ve never tried to hurt a fellow journo in the pocketbook. Ever.

I’m mentioning this because a couple of critics tried to do this to me last weekend. They actually called or wrote this or that publicist or film festival or distributor and said, “Please help us snuff this guy out…we don’t like him and we want him dead.” They actually did this. Because they dislike me personally. Which, in and of itself, is fine with me. I don’t like them either, but that’s where it stays.

Worse, there’s one distributor whose ad director, based on my correspondence, may have actually said to one of these would-be assassins, “Sure thing, we hear you, we’ll join your cause.” Words fail.

Aahh, the pleasure of being awakened at 7 am by a grotesque, sputtering, hornet-buzzing chainsaw….some baseball-cap-wearing dude strapped into a nearby palm tree, vigorously and relentlessly slicing off dead palm fronds….eeeyowwawwoowwwaaagghhh! Thanks, guys. Why didn’t Randy Newman mention this aspect?

If you’re unlucky enough to have a grunt-level job of any kind, you sometimes have to get up at 5 or 5:30 am…agony! Which means if you need seven or eight hours you have to crash at 9 or 10 pm…Jimmy Kimmel on YouTube! To bed at 10 pm, up at 5 am, start trimming palm trees at 7 am, lunch at 11:30 am, back to work at noon, back to the garage at 3 pm or so. Take a shower, chill, have dinner at 6:30 or 7 pm, watch some TV, start to droop around 8 or 8:30 pm. Rinse, wash, repeat…over and over with the years dissolving until you’re too old to hack it. It’s a wonderful life. I would be looking into painless forms of suicide before my 40th birthday. Hell, my 30th.

“The Horror, The Horror!”, posted on 9.17.17: “I suffered through a few recurring-theme nightmares in my early childhood. Gorillas, drowning in quicksand, boxer dog chefs walking around on their hind legs and wielding carving knives, frying in the electric chair. But none of these generated the feelings of dread and terror that I developed in my teens and 20s over the prospect of a blue-collar, wage-earning life.

“For many years I was absolutely horrified by the idea of having to get up at 6 am and report to work by 8 am or earlier, and being stuck with a physically demanding manual-labor job, especially in cold weather. My father was an advertising guy who always wore a suit. He commuted on a train and was never expected at the office before 9 or 9:30 am. That, to me, was a civilized, managable approach to work and earning a salary. Grunt-level blue-collar work always struck me as a brutal, punishing activity — the kind of work that was guaranteed to make you feel miserable and frustrated and drive you to drink in your off-hours.

Boiled down, the Donald Trump “make America white again” nightmare — fascistic bully-boy mindset, Putin-suckling, dismantling of democracy, catering to the stupidest sector of the electorate, attacks on press, Charlottesville, anti-immigrant policies, trade-tariff wars, Scott Pruitt‘s destruction of the environment — was ushered in by the failure of Hillary Clinton to run an effective presidential campaign.

Every day I wake up shattered by the spreading Trump miasma, but I also curse Hillary’s name — every damn day. She did this to us. She and her centrist, Democratic-establishment cronies.

I voted for Hillary like any sane person, but she lost because she was a testy, dislikable, highly conflicted candidate without that natural charisma, but more specifically because of nine factors:

(a) The James Comey letter, (b) that awful secretive nature which led to the private email server, (c) nodding with approval as DNC honcho Debbie Wasserman Schultz schemed, rigged & plotted against Bernie Sanders, (d), that entirely justified, 100% accurate “deplorables” comment, (e) fainting during that World Trade Center memorial service, (f) that cackle, (g) those eye bags, (h) choosing Tim Kaine as her VP rather than Bernie or Elizabeth Warren, and (i) failing to campaign more aggressively in Wisconsin and Michigan.

But the biggest killers were the Comey letter, the fainting, the “deplorables,” the plotting-against-Bernie thing, choosing Kaine and the personal-style trifecta — that awful cackle, that braying voice and that testy substitute-teacher vibe combined with the eye bags.

She did this — she allowed the most odious, fiendish, openly fascistic and wantonly destructive president in the nation’s history to seize power and take us all down in the process.

Speaking of unrelated nightmares: https://hollywood-elsewhere.com/2017/08/brief-nightmare/

Rosemary’s Baby opened exactly 50 years ago today. All my life I’ve understood that the fictional building that Guy and Rosemary Woodhouse move into at the very beginning (i.e., the Dakota in real life) is called the Branford. In fact novel author Ira Levin called it the Bramford, the first syllable coming from Bram Stoker.

Yesterday the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative released a report that said an overwhelming majority of film critics — 78% — are male, and only 22% are female. So there’s a bias and under-representation factor to contend with. So the people who do the hiring have to start hiring fewer guys and more gals…right? One question: given that (a) film critics have been getting pink-slipped left and right over the last decade or so, certainly from print media excepting the trades, and (b) those that have full-time reviewing gigs for websites will never be paid a flush salary unless they work for a major news org or rise to the rank of editor, how many diehard cineastes really want to be a film critic in the first place? It’s a very tough racket.

Staircases to Nowhere: Making Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining” — a 55-minute documentary endorsed by The Kubrick Estate and Warner Brothers. Directed by Howard Berry. Interviews from nine crew members — 1st A.D. Brian Cook, producer Jan Harlan, camera technician Mick Mason, post-production sound guy Ray Merrin, second-unit guy Doug Milsome, camera operator Kelvin Pike, scenic artist Ron Punter, continuity girl June Randall and Warner Bros, publicity exec Julian Senior.

HE to Criterion management: Judging by screencaptures posted by DVD Beaver’s Gary W. Tooze, there’s a serious amount of teal-tinting in your Midnight Cowboy and Bull Durham Blurays. I haven’t bought your Midnight Cowboy or been sent a Bull Durham review disc, but they seem to have parachuted down from the Planet Tralfamadore.

I think it’s fair to ask if Criterion is going to recall these discs, as you did with your Dressed to Kill Bluray after following director Brian De Palma‘s request to narrow the images. Mistakes occasionally happen, and Dressed To Kill was one such occasion. Now it’s happened again, twice.

The DVD Beaverscreen captures make the case — the teal tint on both discs looks grotesque.

I’m making attempts to reach Bull Durham director Ron Shelton, who signed off on the teal tint. There has to be some reason why he did so, though I can’t imagine what it could have been. I’ve also sent along to a message to Kevin Costner.

It doesn’t appear as if the Bluray-reviewing community will say anything about the teal issies. So far the silence has been deafening. As mentioned, the teal-tinting seems just as bad on Midnight Cowboy, and yet on 6.4.18 High Def Digest reviewer Matthew Hartman didn’t even MENTION the teal factor. Like it’s not a factor at all. This is dereliction, pure and simple.

From the get-go, analysts were saying that the Trump administration’s case against the AT&T/Time Warner merger was quite unusual. The government usually tries to block horizontal mergers, but not this time. The Justice Dept.’s attempt to block this particular merger was, of course, driven by Donald Trump‘s antagonistic attitude toward CNN. “AT&T owns the pipes and the wires, Time Warner owns the content,” etc. The merger will enable the two giants to “enhance each other,” as the argument does. And now Trump has lost. The deal has been approved without conditions.

Yesterday Deadline‘s Mike Fleming reported that Ben Affleck and director Gavin O’Connor are “circling” The Has-Been, a Hoosiers-like basketball coach drama with elements that reflect Affleck’s own personal history.

Written by Brad Ingelsby, The Has-Been would star Affleck as “a former basketball all-star who has lost his wife and family foundation in a struggle with addiction” — an echo of what Affleck himself has been going through. Affleck’s character “attempts to regain his soul and salvation by becoming the coach of a disparate, ethnically mixed high school basketball team at his alma mater.”

If they want to really tell an Affleck tale they’ll set the high school in the Boston area, no?

The Has-Been might “happen on a fast-track” via Warner Bros., Fleming wrote. Affleck would produce along with Jennifer Todd, Mark Ciardi, Gordon Grey, O’Connor and Inglesby.

Fans of Hoosiers will recall a similar personal-struggle plotline. A basketball coach with a spotty past (Gene Hackman) trying to overcome personal demons and get back in the game. Working with a high-school team, having to overcome various forms of resistance, having to summon all of his inner resources and discipline, etc.

The other Hoosiers echo, of course, is Dennis Hopper‘s performance as the town drunk, which led to a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nom.

Affleck’s most recent film is J.C. Chandor‘s Triple Frontier, which began shooting on 3.19.18. The drug-trafficking drama costars Oscar Isaac, Adria Arjona, Charlie Hunnam, Garrett Hedlund and Pedro Pascal.

I never understood the speculation that Dexter Fletcher, who took over as director of Bohemian Rhapsody last December in the wake of Bryan Singer‘s firing, might wind up with the final “directed by” credit.

Fletcher finished the Queen biopic over the course of 16 days last January, but Singer oversaw pre-production from July to September 2017 and then directed principal photography from mid September ’17 until late November, or roughly 10 weeks. How could the contribution of a two-week guy be credited more highly than a ten-week guy, not counting pre-production?

Not surprisingly, Bohemian Rhapsody producer Graham King has told Empire magazine that the directing credit will go to Singer, not Fletcher.

(l.) Bohemian Rhapsody director Bryan Singer; (r.) fill-in director Dexter Fletcher.

 From Collider‘s Adam Chitwood, quoting King’s Empire statement:

“Bryan Singer is the credited director of the film. Basically, Bryan had some personal issues going on. He wanted to hiatus the movie to deal with them, and the movie had to get finished. That was what it came down to…it wasn’t about reinventing the wheel. We needed someone who would have some creative freedom, but work inside a box. [Fletcher] did us a real favor.”

The undercurrent in the Singer removal involved concerns about inappropriate off-screen behavior a la Kevin Spacey. Everyone was presuming that some kind of allegation would blow up in the wake of Singer’s dismissal, which happened because he left the set after friction with star Rami Malek and other cast members. A sexual assault lawsuit against Singer was filed on 12.7.17. It pointed to an alleged incident that happened in 2003.