Am I missing something? Why would anyone claim that Donald Trump has little to worry about because the activities of the three guys whom Robert Mueller indicted this morning — Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, George Papadopoulos — don’t throw direct shade upon him? Mueller has thrown the book at Manafort and Gates and the former in particular (tax dodging, money laundering, failing to file as a foreign agent) as part of a squeeze play. He’s holding Manafort’s feet to the fire in order to persuade him to flip on Trump. Fairly basic stuff. This plus an announcement that Papadopoulos has pled guilty and has been helping prosecutors in a “proactive” way (i.e., wearing a wire?). When and if Manafort winds up being sentenced to jail, Trump will probably pardon him. On the other hand more than a few of Manafort’s criminal charges are state-level, I’ve read, and Trump has no power over that state prosecutors. And this is all just starting to happen. Sooner or later, Trump’s string will run out. Would he dare fire Mueller? If he does, he only hastens his demise.

“Far from a conventional biographical documentary, Arthur Miller: Writer, which had its world premiere in Telluride, offers a highly personal portrait of the American playwright who died in 2005. Rebecca Miller, herself an acclaimed filmmaker (Personal Velocity, Maggie’s Plan), is also Miller’s daughter by his third wife, photographer Inge Morath. Rebecca narrates the film herself and includes her own interviews with her father, which she filmed over the last 25 years of his life. As she says at the start of the film, she has been working on the project “almost my entire adult life.” The result is fascinating, often moving, if also incomplete. It will premiere on HBO next spring.” — from Stephen Farber‘s 9.9.17 Hollywood Reporter review. An invitational screening will happen a few days hence in West Hollywood.

I too thought it strange and perverse when I read that Kevin Spacey has decided to simultaneously (a) “sincerely apologize” for having allegedly assaulted Star Trek: Discovery star Anthony Rapp 31 years ago, when Rapp was 14 and Spacey was 27, and (b) come out as a gay man. It seemed inappropriate and opportunistic to have done so.

Not to mention the fact that Spacey announcing his sexual orientation hardly qualifies as surprising or even noteworthy to anyone on the planet. If someone wants to play his or her career cards from the alleged safety of the closet, fine — no one’s business but their own. But no one should out themselves while responding to an allegation of sexual assault on a minor.

“Coming-out stories should not be used to deflect from allegations of sexual assault,” Sarah Kate Ellis, president and CEO of GLAAD, said in a statement. “This is not a coming-out story about Kevin Spacey, but a story of survivorship by Anthony Rapp and all those who bravely speak out against unwanted sexual advances. The media and public should not gloss over that.”

Earlier today Michelangelo Signorile wrote a pretty strong piece about this for the Huffington Post.

I’ve been shooting pellets at Rob Reiner‘s LBJ, which pops this Friday (11.3). I saw it a few weeks ago at the Toronto Film Festival, and remarked that it feels like a dutiful, going-through-the-motions thing. I’ve mentioned that Woody Harrelson looks strange under that heavy makeup, and that his accent sounds more like Carson Wells, the bounty hunter he played in No Country For Old Men, than the speaking style of the nation’s 36th President.

But the main stopper (and the more I think about this the more confounding it seems) is Reiner’s bizarre decision to focus on roughly the same period covered by Jay Roach‘s Emmy-winning All The Way (HBO, 5.21.16), or LBJ’s Vice-Presidential years, JFK’s assassination in Dallas, and pushing through the ’64 Civil Rights bill. If Reiner had focused on LBJ’s Vietnam War-related downfall (’66 to ’68), he could have mined dramatically unexplored territory (outside of the realm of documentaries, I mean) and delivered a seriously sad tale that would’ve really hit home.

Anyone who’s seen David Grubin‘s LBJ, the four-hour PBS American Experience doc, knows what I’m talking about. Observations in the doc’s prelude say it all: Johnson’s saga is “a tragedy…he’s the central character in a struggle of moral importance ending in ruin” due to the Vietnam War.” [Johnson] was a “thoroughly American president, a man who reflected American moods and attitudes and contradictions and trends, and when he failed, it was America’s failure.” These two especially: “Few Presidents would suffer such a swift and tragic fall” and “this was a man who was so big, who reached so far and made it and then let the whole thing crumble…I think it’s one of the great stories of history.”

Reiner knew that Robert Schenkkan‘s All The Way had made a big impact on the Broadway stage, and obviously knew while he was preparing his project that an HBO version of the play, in which Bryan Cranston would repeat his Tony Award-winning performance, would beat him to the punch. But instead of switching gears and focusing on Johnson’s tragic demise, Reiner decided to mine almost the exact same territory. What was he thinking?

LBJ was in some ways a man of coarse appetites and whims, a hill-country Texan who occasionally muttered the N-word, and yet he grew out of the mentality of a Southern segregationist in the pocket of oil interests and became the most dynamic and accomplished social liberal of the 20th Century, certainly in terms of pushing through social legislation. But it all went to hell as he sank further and further into the swamp of Southeast Asia.

I wasn’t aware that The Silence of the Lambs (which is now 26 and 3/4 years old, having opened on 1.30.91) needed a 4K restoration. On top of which this trailer makes the colors look a bit bleachy. They’re certainly darker and warmer on the Bluray that I own. Remember that Jack Crawford is based on real-life FBI criminal profiler John Douglas, the author of the book that provided the basis for David Fincher‘s Mindhunter. For whatever reason Jonathan Demme‘s film will re-open in England on 11.3.17. I don’t see the point. Jodie Foster will probably never snag another role with as much built-in emotional resonance as Clarice Starling. (I’d honestly forgotten that Julianne Moore played the same character ten years later in Hannibal.) Foster was 28 when Lambs was filmed — she’ll turn 55 on 11.19. Director Jonathan Demme passed last April, at age 73.

“I’ll tell you what I want. I want to walk around New York City at a fairly vigorous clip. I want to love and support my wife and my sons every way I can. I want to sail into the mystic. I want to stay in touch with everyone and offer as much offer affection, trust, intellectual engagement and friendship as I reasonably can. I want to live forever. I want good health, and to me that also means good spiritual health. I want to keep most of my hair and never grow breasts or a pot belly. I want Japanese or South Korean-level wifi wherever I go. I want to read and know everything. I want to bask in love, family, friendship and the purring of my three cats until the end of time. I want several pairs of slim ass-hugging jeans. I want to be clean shaven. I want well-made shoes, preferably Italian suede or Bruno Magli or John Varvatos. I want to keep all my Blurays forever. I want fresh gourmet food but in modest portions. I want color, aromas, travel. I want challenging hiking trails in high Swiss places. I know it’s not possible, but I’d prefer to always be in the company of slender people. I want to zoom around on my Majesty and use the Mini Cooper only when it rains or when I need to buy a lot of groceries. I want mobility and adaptability and the smell of great humming, rumbling cities. I want European-style subways, buses, trains, rental cars. I want a long Norman Lloyd-type life, and I insist that my mental faculties stay electric and crackling forever. I’ll always want a couple of folly-loaded Jackery battery chargers for my iPhone 6 Plus. I want occasional bowls of plain yogurt and a constant supply of fruit and vegetables. I want beautiful scenery from time to time. I want to hang with golden retrievers and other high-affection dogs. I want to be up early and go to bed late every day of my life, and take 45-minute naps around 4 pm. And I’ll always want a 65-inch OLED along with an Oppo Bluray player with region-2 capabilities plus Amazon, Vudu, Netflix and everything else on a Roku player. And I always want little packets of strong Italian Starbucks Instant somewhere nearby. And I want to re-visit Venice, Prague, Rome, Paris, Arcos de la Frontera and Hanoi every two or three years. I don’t want to get my head chopped off but I want to visit the Middle East (Turkey, Israel, Jordan, Iran) as well as Russia, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria and Ukraine before long, preferably on a motorcycle or at least by train.” — An earlier version of this, a riff on a “Carlos the Jackal” quote, was posted on 11.29.14.

I’ve never heard of cats eating anything acidic, much less seen it with my own eyes. Earlier today Anya, our five-month-old Bluepoint Siamese female, ate two chunks of freshly sliced tomato. I was astonished.

The great Dennis Hooper died seven and a half years ago, and Nick Ebeling‘s Along For The Ride is…what, the 13th or 14th documentary about the guy? In 1980 I showed up for an interview with Hopper at a midtown Manhattan hotel. We were supposed to chat about Out of The Blue, Hopper’s first directorial effort since The Last Movie, which had been a total calamity. Blue was actually a fairly decent film, but Hopper didn’t come down to the lobby at the appointed time, probably because he was doing lines in his hotel room. I finally gave up and left. Ebeling’s doc is mainly about the making of The Last Movie. It’ll play during a special Dennis Hopper retrospective event at the Metrograph on 11.3 before opening in Los Angeles on 12.8.

I’m filling out my Sundance press accreditation form this weekend. This led to memories of last January’s festival, and a particularly awful time I had watching Alexander Moors‘ The Yellow Birds, an Iraq War PTSD drama. Jason Hall‘s Thank You For Your Service deals with nearly the exact same subject, but in a way that I found ten times more affecting and effective. Maybe because I didn’t have to deal with Alden Ehrenreich, whose gloomy-Rabbinical-student performance all but sank Yellow Birds.

As far as I can tell Yellow Birds never found a North American distributor. Which, if true, suggests that buyers felt the same way I did. Like me they probably sat in their Eccles seats in a state of numb submission, toughing it out and waiting for something (anything!) interesting to happen.

How can the Sundance guys approve films like The Yellow Birds and yet turn down well-made genre flicks, which they’ve been known to do from time to time? It just reenforces the idea that the term “Sundance film” is not a myth. John Cooper and Trevor Groth are known for preferring a certain kind of solemn, squishy, angsty, social-issue, ahead-of-the-curve, relationshippy black-gay-transgender politically correct film.

If Sundance had been going in ’73 and Lamont Johnson‘s The Last American Hero had been submitted, they would’ve turned it down because it’s got too many car chases and is about rednecks smuggling moonshine.

The Yellow Birds is about the investigation of the death of an Iraq War combatant named “Murph” (i.e., Daniel Murphy, played by Tye Sheridan), but more precisely about evasions and suppressions on the part of Murph’s PTSD-aflicted comrade, John Bartie (Ehrenreich), when he returns home.

Murph’s mom Maureen (Jennifer Aniston) naturally wants to know what happened, and Bartie’s mom Amy (Toni Collette) is seriously concerned about her son’s totally withdrawn, zombie-like manner. There’s also a Sergeant Sterling (Jack Huston) with his own buried trauma issues, and a CID investigator (Jason Patric) with a persistent interest in what happened between Murph and John.

The Yellow Birds has moments of visual beauty but is otherwise disappointing — it doesn’t connect or sink in. And the ending is seriously weak tea.

After it ended I ran into a Los Angeles guy who runs a film series, and so I briefly shared my reservations about the film and Ehrenreich in particular. He said he “liked” The Yellow Birds and so did the people he was sitting with, and that Ehrenreich’s ability to reanimate Han Solo wasn’t an issue as far as Yellow Birds is concerned.

This morning Jordan Ruimy sent along a straw poll about the “best current film directors.” Reddit was the principal launch site for the poll. Out of 24,469 votes cast as of 12:45 pm Pacific the highest rated director is…Denis Villeneuve? 1442 votes or 5.88% of the total. Weird. I was under the impression (a) that Blade Runner 2049 is admired but far from universally loved, (b) that some were as annoyed by Arrival as I was, and (c) that many viewers felt that Emily Blunt picking up some strange Latino guy in a bar and bringing him home in Sicario made no sense at all.

Villeneuve is admired — I get that — but there’s a dissenting community out there. Nonetheless Reddit readers have spoken — bow down to the new King Shit.

I’ll allow that Villeneueve is an accomplished, well-respected helmer, but should he really rate higher than (my personal preferences among the straw poll names, numbering 30 or thereabouts but not in this order) Roman Polanski, Michael Haneke, Martin Scorsese, Kathryn Bigelow (despite Detroit), James Cameron, the Coen brothers, Fernando Meirelles, Walter Salles, Tony Gilroy, Pawel Pawlikowksi, David O. Russell, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Alexander Payne, Alfonso Cuaron, David Fincher, Kenneth Lonergan, Steven Soderbergh, Alejando Gonzalez Inarritu, Guillermo del Toro, Matt Reeves, Bennett Miller, Cristian Mungiu, Darren Aronofsky, Phillip Noyce, Wes Anderson, Steve McQueen, Christopher Nolan, Asghar Farhadi and Cary Fukunaga?

The poll is kind of weird in a few ways. One, why aren’t the names listed alphabetically? Two, where is Call Me By Your Name‘s Luca Guadagnino? (After A Bigger Splash and with everyone waiting with bated breath for his two-and-a half-hour Suspiria remake, it’s derelict to not include him.) Three, if you’re dead you obviously can’t be among the best “current” film directors so why is Abbas Kiarostami included?

My cream-of-the-croppers again, but this time in order of preference:

1. Asghar Farhadi. 2. Luca Guadagnino. 3. Alejando Gonzalez Inarritu. 4. Cristian Mungiu. 5. Darren Aronofsky. 6. Joel and Ethan Coen. 7. David Fincher, 8. Martin Scorsese, 9. Kathryn Bigelow (despite Detroit), 10. Chris Nolan, 11. James Cameron, 12. Alfonso Cuaron, 13. Pawel Pawlikowski, 14. David O. Russell, 15. Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 16. Guillermo del Toro, 17. Matt Reeves, 18. Bennett Miller, 19. Roman Polanski, 20. Michael Haneke, 21. Steve McQueen, 22. Wes Anderson, 23. Steven Soderbergh, 24. Tony Gilroy, 25. Phillip Noyce, 26. Fernando Meirelles, 27. Cary Fukunaga, 28. Kenneth Lonergan, 29. Michael Haneke, 30. Walter Salles.

Among A.O. Scott’s remarks: “An atmosphere of paranoia and political suspicion…The Manchurian Candidate launched a paranoid style….something you have to decode, figure out, possibly not trust…Oliver Stone‘s JFK was ahead of its time…where we live now is in a destablized, uncertain, somewhat suspicious and paranoid relationship to reality…we’re all in the mindset of assuming that there must be a conspiracy…9/11, Benghazi or anything else…that there’s some kind of secret story that’s not being told… some kind of truth that’s being obscured.”

There’s this dispiriting notion afoot in Hollywood culture right now, which is that a film isn’t marketable if it’s “just” a drama, “just” a crime thriller, “just” a touching story about a desperate woman in a jam, etc. By this jaded formula new movies made in the mold of Chinatown, The Parallax View, Kramer vs. Kramer, No Way Out and Mississippi Burning (if someone was dumb enough to do this) would all go straight to cable.

The thinking, as everyone knows, is that only big-event movies can open theatrically, and everything else has to go straight to Netflix or Amazon or HBO or some other home-media option. The lowbrows and none-too-brights go to the plexes for their lowest-common-denominator, jizz-whizz, porno-violent franchise fantasy bullshit (Jigsaw, Tyler Perry’s Boo 2!, Geostorm, Happy Death Day) while smarter, older, more cultivated viewers prefer to watch new films at home on their 60-inch monitors.

This, at least, is how it seems to be. The theatrical realm has been so mongrelized and generally degraded by the big studios. Multiplexes have essentially become FX funhouses, indoor amusement parks, places where lower life forms (i.e., the dregs of society) congregate. Every now and then a really good film will do well financially, but more and more, it seems, films that are spirit-drainers or flat-out painful to sit through sell a lot of tickets also.

And then you turn around and watch David Fincher‘s excellent Netflix miniseries Mindhunter, and you think “well, who cares if the theatrical experience has become simultaneously degraded and over-priced? I just finished watching all ten episodes of Mindhunter, and I was riveted all the way through. Way more satisfying than most theatrical features I’ve seen this year.”

Obviously my situation is special. I’m going to continue to see worthwhile or semi-worthwhile films all year long at festivals and press screenings, so I’m not dealing with the same kind of hard choices that upscale, well-educated ticket-buyers are facing. But if I wasn’t an accredited journalist I’d probably be saying “Jesus, I don’t know about theatrical any more…I’m getting sick of superhero flicks and I hate effects-driven material, and more and more I’m thinking ‘fuck it…I’ll watch what I want to watch at home.”

On Thursday night I paid $17 and change to see Jason Hall‘s Thank You For Your Service, a character-driven struggling-vets drama. No, I didn’t love it but I respected what it was putting out and was once again taken by another first-rate Miles Teller performance, and at no time did it make me feel angry or frustrated. But there weren’t many people in the theatre, I can tell you. 25 or 30 at most.

TYFYS opened yesterday on 2054 screens and made about $1.5 million, averaging about $733 per situation. George Clooney‘s Suburbicon is doing worse — 2046 screens, earned $1.1 million yesterday, averaging $538 per screen. The completely respectable, undeniably well made Only The Brave, which opened last weekend (10.20), is naturally doing worse this weekend — $1,055,000 yesterday, $409 per screen.