In the ambitious but mediocre Blindspotting (Lionsgate, now playing), the sympathetic, Oakland-residing Colin (Daveed Diggs) is trying to stay out of trouble over the final three days of his parole status. Early on he’s sitting in a parked truck as he witnesses a beat cop (Officer Molina, played by Ethan Embry) shoot a fleeing dude in the back, apparently killing him. Colin is shocked, naturally, but his failure to mask his feelings told me that Blindspotting would be a second-tier film.

I stayed to the end and I was right — Blindspotting isn’t good enough.

Colin is only a few feet away from Officer Molina and slightly above. If you’ve ever witnessed a violent altercation the first thing you want to do is not throw any kind of shade or judgment upon the aggressor. Don’t look at the cop or, better yet, duck out of sight. What does Colin do? He eyeballs the cop with a look of complete terror. His wide-eyed expression says “my God, you just shot an innocent dude in the back! Soon as I’m outta here I’m gonna report your ass, physical description and all.” Colin is literally staring a hole in the cop’s forehead. Which is the dumbest thing he could possibly do. What if Officer Molina is a hair-trigger type and looking to shoot someone else?

Right then and there I said, “okay, fuck this movie…I can’t abide this level of stupidity.” Diggs (who also produced and cowrote the script) and director Carlos López Estrada decided it was more important to emotionally telegraph how scared and upset Colin is rather than trust the audience to assess the malice on their own. This is what not-good-enough filmmakers and dramatists do — underline, over-explain, assume the audience needs help.

A few minutes later I felt even more turned off by Colin’s longtime best friend Miles (Rafael Casal), a violent, hair-trigger, gun-wielding asshole who’s always threatening to start shit about the slightest personal offense or otherwise do something that might attract the attention of the bulls. Right away you’re wondering “is Colin as stupid as he seems for hanging with this asswipe, or is he just temporarily stupid?”

Casal, a 32 year-old playwright and performance poet, is pretty good at playing an asshole — I’ll give him that. He relies on a broad caricature of Oakland street blackitude — machismo shit talk, constant strut, a mouthful of gold fillings, flashing pistols, drop-of-a-hat hostility, etc.

In the view of Hollywood Reporter critic Todd McCarthy “the volcanically emotive Miles” is “a character so brainlessly compulsive and violent that he becomes pretty hard to take after a while.”

During the first half-hour of Mission: Impossible — Fallout (Paramount, 7.27), there’s a sequence in which Tom Cruise and Henry Cavill do a HALO jump (high altitude low open) over Paris. Before Monday night’s Lincoln Square screening director Chris McQuarrie explained that the sequence was shot for real — Cruise and a dp with a head-mounted camera did over 100 jumps at magic hour. The sequence is awesome in just about every respect.

Hollywood Elsewhere totally salutes this kind of commitment to realism, and especially Cruise’s moxie. The man is a machine. But let’s also be honest — this scene probably could have been faked with wires and green screen and nobody would have known the difference. Nobody trusts visual effects and stunts any more. Over the last quarter-century the trust factor has been totally blown. Everyone assumes they’re being deceived, at least to some extent. Especially in a big-studio adventure thriller.

In 2005, Werner Herzog said the following about conveying physical reality on-screen: “I tried to explain that I wanted to have the audience know that at the most fundamental level it was real. Today when you see mainstream movies, in many moments, even when it’s not really necessary, there are special effects. It’s a young audience, and at six and seven kids can identify them…they know it was a digital effect, and normally they even know how they were done. But I had the feeling I wanted to put the audience back in the position where they could trust their eyes.”

This is what McQuarrie and Cruise tried to do in the HALO scene — get us to trust the fact that the physical performing is 100% genuine, right there in the moment, three or four miles high. HE fully respects and salutes this effort, even if it doesn’t quite feel all-the-way honest.

Example: Cruise and Cavill’s plan is to parachute right onto the roof of the Grand Palais des Champs-Élysees. No high-pressure undertaking ever goes precisely according to plan, and yet they do exactly this. A more realistic scenario would have one of them missing the Palais and splashing into the Seine, or maybe landing in a nearby city park (Square Jean Perrin) and alarming a couple of pedestrians.

Except for Jennifer Kent‘s The Nightingale and Carlos Reygadas‘ Nuestro Tiempo, all 2018 Venice Film Festival picks had been guessed or spitballed by HE. 12 major competition films plus the two Orson Welles features plus Bradley Cooper‘s A Star Is Born = 15 in all, not counting the mid-levels and peripherals:

Major Competition (12): Roma (d: Alfonso Cuaron), First Man, (d: Damien Chazelle); Doubles Vies (aka EBook) (d: Olivier Assayas); The Sisters Brothers (d: Jacques Audiard), The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (d: Ethan and Joel Coen); 22 July (formerly Norway) (d: Paul Greengrass); Suspiria (d: Luca Guadagnino); Work without Author (d: Florian Henkel Von Donnersmark); The Nightingale (d: Jennifer Kent); The Favorite (d: Yorgos Lanthimos); Peterloo (d: Mike Leigh); Sunset (d: Laszlo Nemes).

Mid-Level Competition (8): Vox Lux (d: Brady Corbet); The Mountain (d: Rick Alverson); Capri-Revolution (d: Mario Martone); What You Gonna Do When The World’s On Fire? (d: Roberto Minervini); Freres Ennemis (d: David Oelhoffen); Neustro Tiempo (d: Carlos Reygadas); At Eternity’s Gate (d: Julian Schnabel); Killing (d: Shinya Tsukamoto).

Special Wellesian, Non-Competitive Events (2): The Other Side Of The Wind (d: Orson Welles); They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead (d: Morgan Neville)

Non-Competitive (5): A Star Is Born (d: Bradley Cooper), Mi Obra Maestra (d: Gaston Duprat); A Tramway in Jerusalem (d: Amos Gitai), Dragged Across Concrete (d: Craig Zahler), Shadow (d: Zhang Yimou).

Variety‘s Kris Tapley is proclaiming that Joel and Ethan Coen‘s The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is no longer a six-part Netflix anthology series but a feature film using an anthology structure? Am I reading this right?

So a few months ago the Coens said to Netflix, “Sorry, guys, but that western anthology series we sold you on, that six-segment concept that might’ve run somewhere between three and six hours…sorry but we prefer the idea of a feature film with a six-chapter structure.”

In other words the Coens wrote six segments that would have minimally run a half-hour (or possibly 45 minutes or an hour) each, and then decided to trim each segment down to, what, 20-minute vignettes for a grand narrative total of 120 minutes plus main titles and end credits? And now they’re debuting the feature at the Venice Film Festival with Tapley and others hailing a new potential Best Picture contender?

10:10 pm update: “Actually, it was always a feature script,” a friend informs. “Then they had the idea to cut it up into a six-part series. One assumes that, in the end, this proved easier said than done.”

I don’t know if this is how Tim Blake Nelson will appear in Joel and Ethan Coen’s The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, but he definitely looks, uhm, ornery and scraggly.

Way back in the summer of ’17, when this here thang was a Netlix anthology series, the six segments were described as follows:

(1) “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” — The story of a singing cowboy named Buster Scruggs (Tim Blake Nelson);

(2) “Near Algodones” — A high-plains drifter whose own fecklessness dogs his attempts at bank robbery and cattle driving, costarring James Franco, Ralph Ineson and Stephen Root;

(3) “Meal Ticket” — The story of an actor and impresario of a traveling show;

(4) “All Gold Canyon”– A prospector (possibly Tom Waits) happily finds a gold seam but then unhappily finds an evil encroacher;

(5) “The Gal Who Got Rattld” — The story of two trail bosses on the Oregon Trail and a woman on the wagon train who needs the help of one of them and who might be a marriage prospect for the other, w/ Zoe Kazan and Jackamoe Buzzell; and

(6) “The Mortal Remains” — Five very different passengers find themselves on a stagecoach to a mysterious destination w/ Tyne Daly, Saul Rubinek.

Liam Neeson and Brendan Gleeson are also listed as costars.

Here’s the thang: With the exception of Franco and Neeson, none of the Buster Scruggs cast members are leads — they could all be compassionately described as off-center, eccentric, funny-looking character types. So right off the top the film is charisma-challenged. No Josh Brolin, no Javier Bardem, no Frances McDormand, no Tommy Lee Jones, no George Clooney, no Jeff Bridges, no Hailee Steinfeld.

Official Coen statement: “We’ve always loved anthology movies, especially those films made in Italy in the ’60s” — i.e., RoGoPaG — “which set side-by-side the work of different directors on a common theme. Having written an anthology of Western stories we attempted to do the same, hoping to enlist the best directors working today. It was our great fortune that they both agreed to participate.”

A high-def version of Hal Ashby‘s Shampoo has been streamable on Amazon for about three years, but on 10.16, for the first time, a Criterion Bluray of a “4K digital restoration” will go on sale. Given what’s recently happened with Criterion’s Midnight Cowboy and Bull Durham Blurays, I’m honestly scared that Criterion will add a strong teal tint to the color. Is a brand-new Warren Beatty interview among the extras? Or perhaps with screenwriter Robert Towne? Of course not. It will, however, include a video chat between critics Mark Harris and Frank Rich plus an essay by Rich.

I can’t divulge the location, but Hollywood Elsewhere will be there in spirit if not physically. And I’ll apparently be interviewing director Matt Tyrnauer when he arrives in Manhattan early next week.

Yes, I’m a serious fan of Matt Tyrnauer‘s Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood (Greenwich, 7.27), in part, I suppose, because I’ve always found good backroom gossip irresistible, but mostly because I really and truly believe Scotty Bowers was a sexual go-between for gay or bisexual Hollywood stars in the 1940s, ’50s, ’60s and ’70s. And because I admire Scotty’s intrepid attitude about everything.

“The sexual proclivities of some of the biggest stars of that era — Cary Grant, in particular — were well known to the town’s insiders,” Tyrnauer told Brooks Barnes in a 7.16 N.Y. Times article. “But people still gasp. That says so much about the enduring power of the Hollywood myth machine.”

According to the calculations of World of Reel’s Jordan Ruimy, the following Canadian and international premieres at the 2018 Toronto Film Festival are probably Telluride-bound: Alfonso Cuaron‘s Roma, Pawel Pawlikowski‘s Cold War, Damien Chazelle‘s First Man, Olivier Assayas‘ Non-Fiction, Hirokazu Kore-eda‘s Shoplifters, Marielle Heller‘s Can You Ever Forgive Me?, Matteo Garrone‘s Dogman, Jason Reitman‘s The Front Runner, David Lowery‘s The Old Man and the Gun, Elizabeth Chomko‘s What They Had (an international premiere in Toronto because it premiered at Sundance, not because of Telluride) and Yann Demange‘s White Boy Rick.

Apparently not going to Telluride because they’re listed as TIFF world or international premieres: Barry Jenkins‘ If Beale Street Could Talk (a surprise given that Jenkins is a longtime Telluride friend and former volunteer), Steve McQueen‘s Widows (latest pic from the winner of 2013 Best Picture Oscar gets the brushoff), Felix Von Groeningen‘s Beautiful Boy, Bradley Cooper‘s A Star Is Born (Tom Luddy and Julie Huntsinger have reservations?), Lee Chang-dong‘s Burning, Nadine Labaki‘s Capernaum, Asghar Farhadi‘s Everybody Knows, Dan Fogelman‘s Life Itself, Laszlo Nemes‘ Sunset and Jacques Auduiard‘s The Sisters Brothers.

I saw Kevin Kurslake‘s Bad Reputation, a life-and-times-of-Joan Jett doc, during last January’s Sundance Film Festival. It tells her scrappy story in a thorough, relatively straightforward fashion, and therefore earned my admiration. The whole tale, start to finish, warts and all. Eight years ago I saw and mostly liked Floria Sigismondi’s The Runaways; I would classify Bad Reputation as a respectable complement to that film, and an essential sit if you’re any kind of fan.

I had one slight issue, and that’s the decision by Kurslake to sidestep — i.e., not directly address — Jett’s sexuality. It’s not as if her tough, hard-rock, leather-clad butchy persona hadn’t been telegraphed all along, but it still seems odd that it wouldn’t be discussed at all in a wide-open, this-is-me portrait such as this one. In a 1.29.18 review Autostrada’s “Fonseca” wrote that “Jett’s sexuality isn’t relegated to its own very special narrative segment [in the doc], and that’s because it’s everywhere — as it should be for a rock star, and as it should be for all of us.” If you say so, but it still feels like avoidance. To go by Bad Reputation, Jett not only never fell in love — she never even got laid.

BMG Films is releasing the doc sometime in September.

You can tell right off the bat that Jonah Hill‘s Mid ’90s (A24, 10.19) is an exception of one kind or another. It sure doesn’t feel like just another Los Angeles skateboard flick. You can sense a focus on character and kid culture and ’90s minutiae. Fast and loose and raggedy — the rhythms and the atmosphere feel right.

Pic is set in the lower West L.A. region — Palms, Culver City, Venice — and partly focused on a Motor Ave. skateboard shop. (Born in ’83, Hill grew up in the Cheviot Hills neighborhood or just north of these regions.) Sunny Suljic (The Killing of a Sacred Deer) has a certain X-factor thing going, and I love that Hill has Lucas Hedges playing a bit of a domineering-shit older brother instead of the usual gentle-sensitive guy from Lady Bird, Boy Erased and Manchester By The Sea. Katherine Waterston plays Suljic’s somewhat unstable mom.

Directed and written by Hill; shot by Christopher Blauvelt (Indignation) in HE’s own 1.37 aspect ratio (boxy is beautiful) and edited by Nick Houy.

With the British historical drama Peterloo (Amazon, 11.9), director Mike Leigh is veering into the kind of militant political material previously owned by Ken Loach (Land and Freedom, Bread and Roses, The Wind that Shakes the Barley, Jimmy’s Hall). It also feels like an early 19th Century version of Paul Greengrass‘s brilliant Bloody Sunday (’02).

Leigh is recreating the notorious Peterloo Massacre of 1819, in which government troops killed roughly 15 demonstrators and injured hundreds more. 60,000 citizens from Manchester and surrounding towns had assembled in St. Peter’s Field to demand Parliamentary reform and an expansion of voting rights, and local government officials freaked.

The massacre happened a good 20 years before the intensifying of the Industrial Revolution, 26 years before the birth of Eugene Debs, 45 years before the first stirrings of the British Labour movement, and 48 years before the publication of Karl Marx‘s “Das Kapital.”