Presumably a few have seen Benny and Josh Safdie‘s Good Time. HE would be delighted to post whatever negative assessments you’d care to forward. (Okay, positive reviews are fine too.) And if anyone wants to shit on Marc Webb and Allan Loeb‘s The Only Living Boy in New York, feel free.

A well-written passage from A.O. Scott‘s N.Y. Times review of Good Time: “The Safdies are as clever and crafty as Robert Pattinson‘s Connie is inept and impulsive. Good Time moves smartly and propulsively to the stressed-out strains of Daniel Lopatin’s edge-of-a-heart-attack score. The smudgy, grimy urban landscape — emergency rooms, fast-food restaurants, blocks of modest, over-mortgaged, squeezed-together houses — is shot (by Sean Price Williams) with a fastidious avoidance of prettiness.

“The story doesn’t twist and turn so much as squirm and jump like an eel in the bottom of a rowboat. The biggest surprises confirm what an unbelievable slimeball Connie is. He’s about as hard to root for as any movie outlaw you can think of.”

Second reposting of my 5.26 17 Cannes review: “The Safdie brothers know how to whip action into a lather and keep the kettle boiling, and there’s no doubt that Good Time felt like the punchiest and craziest film to play during the festival, which is why so many critics, underwhelmed by a relatively weak lineup, responded with such fervor. But I can’t abide stupidity, and after 40 minutes of watching these simpletons hold up a bank and run around and ruthlessly use people to duck the heat I was praying that at least one of them would get shot or arrested. I can roll with scumbags and sociopaths, but I need a little something I can relate to or identify with. If the repulsion factor is too strong, I check out. And that’s what I did in this instance. And good riddance.”

Martin Guigui‘s 9/11 (Atlas, 9.8) might be an okay thriller (who knows?) but does anyone want to see it? Charlie Sheen has always been a professional-grade actor — presence, gravitas, good instincts — but of all the middle-aged males who could’ve starred in this thing, Sheen is…well, not the best choice. Honest admission (and please don’t take this the wrong way but this trailer implanted a thought): If Sheen himself had, God forbid, been a victim of the WTC attacks, he would be remembered today as the guy who’d starred or costarred in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Platoon, Wall Street, Eight Men Out, Major League, The Rookie, Hot Shots!, Hot Shots! Part Deux and Being John Malkovich. But post-9/11 he started to become someone else, and this second incarnation began to happen about 15 years ago, or beginning with his marriage to Denise Richards and his empowering eight-year run with Two and A Half Men. I’m basically saying that Guigi’s 9/11 film needed a star with less baggage…that’s all. The costars are Whoopi Goldberg, Gina Gershon, Luis Guzmán, Jacqueline Bisset.

In a follow-up statement on today’s racial violence in Charlottesville, which included an incident of vehicular assault that resulted in the death of at least one person, President Donald Trump put the blame “on many sides.” In other words, the counter-protestors were as much to blame as the scurvy racist scumbags who assembled the white-power rally in the first place. Trump naturally didn’t mention the motives behind the rally, but he did lament that “no child should ever be afraid to go outside and play or be with their parents and have a good time.” Then he pivoted and boasted about his administration’s accomplishments — “absolute record employment, unemployment the lowest its been in 17 years, companies pouring into our country…we have so many incredible things happening in our country, so when I watch Charlottesville to me it’s very, very sad.”

Videos showing Friday’s heated debate between Bounce TV’s Ed Gordon and Trump aide Omarosa Manigault, an alleged “advocate on issues concerning African-Americans” but clearly an ambitious woman seeking a career bump, are of terrible quality. Were they captured on iPhone 3GS devices? And most of them are vertically framed. You can’t tell me that the National Association of Black Journalists, which hosted the event, didn’t hire a professional videographer.

It would suggest one thing if the attacking vehicle was a Prius, but….

Video of car hitting anti-racist protestors. Let there be no confusion: this was deliberate terrorism. My prayers with victims. Stay home. pic.twitter.com/MUOZs71Pf4

— Brennan Gilmore (@brennanmgilmore) August 12, 2017

What happened last night and today in Charlottesville (including the just-reported vehicular plow-through) was pretty much inspired by the “White Americans First” beliefs and policies of President Donald Trump. No question about that. Trump has been flashing coded green lights at the haters since the start of the ’16 campaign. White-trash American culture was alive and well before Trump began fanning the flames, but the Charlottesville discord bears his name and his brand. The message Trump tweeted this morning was a pallid, completely insincere bromide. Quoting a John August tweet: “These tiki torch assholes are your people, chanting your name.”

So many things have gone downhill or been degraded in our culture, but I never thought badminton rackets and shuttlecocks would be among them. Baseball mitts, hardballs and wooden bats feel just as good as they did when I was a kid, and a lot of other sporting equipment — basketballs, squash rackets, golf clubs, footballs, tennis balls — hasn’t changed. But badminton rackets (or at least the ones that I recently bought in a Big 5 Sporting Goods store) are small and thin and cheaply made, and shuttlecocks are made of run-of-the-mill plastic. Yes, you can buy a nice classic badminton racket and feathered shuttlecocks, but you have to search around online. They’ve become a connoisseur thing. Like saddle shoes.

Just a note of gratitude to those who did the supportive and generous thing over the last three days. I wasn’t sure how this would play, but 97% of the responses were about respect and tribute and even love. A nice warm vibratey feeling all through your gutty wuts. Like I said earlier this week, the Jimmy Stewart-in-Vertigo thing won’t last forever but it’ll be a thing for a while. Late October, early November. I just want to say thanks, thanks and thanks again.

I loved Armando Iannucci‘s In The Loop and I’ve enjoyed watching Veep from time to time, but I’m not getting the Death of Stalin thing. Based on Fabien Nury and Thierry Robin‘s graphic novel “The Death Of Stalin,” and so what? Soviet apparatchiks scrambling for position in the wake of Stalin’s passing? Who cares what a demimonde of paranoid Russian assholes were up to 64 years ago? It may be “funny” on its own terms, but why? Featuring Steve Buscemi, Jason Isaacs, Jeffrey Tambor, Rupert Friend, Andrea Riseborough, Simon Russell Beale, Paddy Considine, Michael Palin, Olga Kurylenko, Paul Whitehouse and Adrian McLoughlin. Playing at TIFF 2017, opening in the U.K. on 10.20, getting a U.S. release via IFC Films sometime…what, in March?

The downish critical response to Matt Ruskin‘s Crown Heights (Amazon/IFC, 8.25) is shameful. At the very least it’s harsh. I know an absorbing, well-paced docudrama when I see one, and yet some of the nyah-nyahs have pissed on it. It certainly deserves an aggregate rating in the 80s, and yet it currently has a 62% Rotten Tomatoes score and a 52% on Metacritic.

This is a believable, tightly woven, emotionally engaging tale of a real-life Brooklyn guy, Colin Warner, who did 20 years in the slam for a murder he didn’t commit. The fact that it deals straight cards, that every scene counts (it runs only 94 minutes) and that it pays off with one restrained, affecting performance after another (especially from co-leads Lakeith Stanfield and Nnamdi Asomugha) are three reasons why it won the Audience Award for U.S. Dramatic Film at last January’s Sundance Film Festival.

Is Crown Heights as moody and atmospheric as HBO’s The Night Of, which tells a vaguely similar tale and which all the critics flipped for? No, but that’s partly because The Night Of ran eight fucking hours. (The always admirable Bill Camp costarred in both.) The Night Of said the same thing over and over — “If the system decides to fuck you, you’re fucked…and even if you’re freed one day you’ll still be fucked because prison life has turned you into a criminal.” Crown Heights is about shit out of luck, bad breaks, friendship, character and persistence.

For me, Crown Heights made the evils of institutionalized racism seem a lot sadder and far more disturbing than two viewings of Detroit did.

Is Crown Heights as psychologically studied and unsettling as Alfred Hitchcock‘s The Wrong Man (’56), which told approximately the same tale minus the racial context and nearly 20 years of jail time? No, but the Crown Heights narrative is more gripping than the Hitchcock — it holds you on a beat-by-beat, “what’ll happen next?” basis. The Wrong Man, a dull commercial failure, is a grim slide experience — a stacked-deck, can’t-win scenario that offers little hope for a reversal of fortune. Innocent Henry Fonda is accused, interrogated, fucked over and put through hell, and it never stops. Until the clouds finally part at the very end, that is.

In the case of at least two relatively recent Criterion Blurays, Only Angels Have Wings and His Girl Friday, the tech guys darkened images that were slightly or distinctly brighter on previous Blurays and DVDs.  Criterion has an occasional fetish for inkiness in the black-and-white realm. Two HE reviews, “Dark Angels, Black Barranca, Noir All Over” and “Inky, Grain-Smothered Friday Doesn’t Deliver Decent Bump”, complained about this.

And now, to judge by a new DVD Beaver review, the Criterion guys have gone all dark and inky on their forthcoming 4K-scanned Rebecca Bluray (due on 9.5.17).

Review quote: “Like their 2001 480p DVD, the image [on the new Criterion Bluray] is darker than [previous] digital releases. From our experience and comments from transfer specialists, ‘darker’ is usually more accurate to the theatrical presentation. You can see from the screen captures that the Criterion shows less information in the frame [and yet] the Criterion actually shows more on the top.”

Look at George Sanders‘ Jack Favell in these DVD Beaver-captured images. The lighter version is from the 2012 MGM Bluray (which I am totally happy with — thank God there’s a fine-looking Rebecca that hasn’t been inked up) and the darker, of course, is from the Criterion. What kind of sick-fuck cineaste would prefer the darker image? It looks as if heavy thunderstorm clouds are passing over Manderley, and that Favell is about to get soaked.

2017 Criterion Bluray version.

2012 MGM Bluray version.