This evening, or roughly six hours hence, Hollywood Elsewhere will finally see Mission: Impossible — Fallout (Paramount, 7.27). Which led me this morning to read David Edelstein’s 7.23 Vulture review, and his somewhat dismissive description of Tom Cruise (i.e., Ethan Hunt) as “cocky” and “generally unlovable.” Which is true, I suppose, and yet Cruise remains on a short list of bona fide Hollywood movie stars who deliver heft and consequence.

Who are the real-deal movie stars of the present, Cruise aside? Denzel Washington, Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Meryl Streep, Dwayne Johnson (dented), Robert Downey, Jr., Jennifer Lawrence (dented), Will Smith (seriously dented), Tom Hanks (although his last gasp of star-power oxygen happened over 15 years ago, with the release of Sam Mendes‘ Road to Perdition), Samuel L. Jackson and who else?

Liam Neeson, I suppose, to a lesser extent. Adam Sandler is done. Julia Roberts is a “name,” obviously, but she hasn’t been a super-power for a full decade if not longer. Bruce Willis is mostly about the paycheck these days, overly willing to make crap.

Consider a 2.6.18 Observer piece by Brandon Katz, titled “Movie Stars Are Dead and They’re Never Coming Back.”

Key passage: “It isn’t about the names these days — it’s about the property.”

Paul Degarabedian, senior media analyst for ComScore: “The idea of star power used to be in global audience recognition, a major star in a movie might ensure global success here and in the international marketplace. But with the advent of big-concept movies, franchise ensembles like Fast and Furious and Marvel and big-budget blockbusters, the concept and marketing is now what gets people excited. Merely having a movie star is no longer a guarantee of box office success. Now, big stars need a concept in concert with that star power to create excitement.”

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Trump loyalists either don’t care about pernicious Russian influence over Donald Trump or are even half okay with it. That’s because Russia, a repressive, authoritarian, anti-liberal white-guy regime, appears to be in league with Trump’s “make America white again” agenda. Rich white authoritarians of the world unite, or something along those lines.

“Trump may have grudgingly admitted that Russia did the [2016 campaign meddling] deed, but nobody should be surprised if he starts shedding doubt on it all over again. Maybe, just maybe, he can’t admit that Moscow tried to put him in the Oval Office because he’s under strict instructions not to.” — from Blake Hounshell‘s 7.20 Politico piece, “Why I’m No Longer a Russiagate Skeptic.”

Tronc, Inc., owner of the money-losing New York Daily News, announced today that half of the tabloid’s editorial staff is being axed. Out the door are editor-in-chief Jim Rich, managing editor Kristen Lee and 40-something others. “We are fundamentally restructuring the Daily News,” a Tronc email announced. “We are reducing today the size of the editorial team by approximately 50 percent and re-focusing much of our talent on breaking news — especially in areas of crime, civil justice and public responsibility.”

In other words, the Daily News, which I wrote weekly Hollywood articles for in ’94 and ’95, will be hiring younger, cheaper staffers to save dough. The 99-year-old publication has been losing $30 million annually, for God’s sake. The News will continue to publish for an unspecified time period (perhaps another two or three years or longer…who knows?), but the storied editorial character and muscle fibre will be somewhat downgraded if not absent, and the overall future is sure to be less and less kind to any enterprise that uses printing presses and dead-tree pulp to deliver content.

I’m very, very sorry. I’ve loved and worshipped the Daily News my whole life. My son worked as an intern for Daily News columnists George Rush and Joanna Molloy back in ’05. My heart warms every time I disembark at JFK Airport and see those blessed Manhattan dailies stacked inside a Hudson News store. But the end of the print era has been coming for a long, long time.

Gussie: “If you ain’t eatin’ Wham, you ain’t eatin’ ham.” James Blandings (realizing his life has just been saved): “Muriel! Give Gussie a ten-dollar raise!” — from Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (’48).

The robust and magnetic Louise Beavers, a popular supporting actress throughout the ’20s, ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, almost always played servants. I know, I know, but those were the kinds of of Hollywood roles that were open to actresses of color in the old days, and Beavers (along with Lillian Randolph, Hattie McDaniel and a few others) picked that limited fruit from the tree and ran with it.

That was the semi-unfortunate part. The fortunate or beneficial aspect was that Beavers was very, very good at projecting spunk, charisma, kind-heartedness. By today’s rulebook it’s safer to under-praise films that featured non-white domestic help characters (i.e., if you’re too admiring the comintern might conclude that you approve of the old order), but as Jean Anouilh wrote in Becket, “Honor lies in the man, my prince, not in the towel.” Beavers (whose last four films were Tammy and the Bachelor, The Goddess, All the Fine Young Cannibals and The Facts of Life) was a pulsing talent and apparently a great soul.

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I was riveted by Costa-Gavras‘ Missing when I first saw it in January 1982. I reciprocated with as much positive ink as I could generate as the editor of The Film Journal and an occasional freelance contributor to Us. Beloved Manhattan publicist Renee Furst, who was handling NYC press for Universal, got me an interview with the renowned Greek-French director. I was also friendly at the time with costar Keith Szarabajka. (We had worked together at the Spring Street Bar & Grill two or three years earlier.) I wound up watching it three or four times that year, and have caught it on video…oh, a couple of times since. But never in high-def. That chasing-the-white-horse moment is burned in my brain.

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The career of M. Night Shyamalan has gone through two phases. First was the unnerving, heir-to-Hitchcock, nine-year run that began with 1999’s The Sixth Sense and ended with ’08’s The Happening, and which also included Unbreakable (’00), Signs (’02 — arguably his best), The Village (’04) and Lady in the Water (’06).

Then came a less exacting, somewhat more desperate phase in which he started pandering to genre-friendly popcorn audiences rather than make films with his own unique stamp. Like everyone else I had issues with M. Night’s phase #1 films, but at least they seemed to come from a place inside his own creative soul, which is more than you can say for his phase #2 output.

Shyamalan has cranked out five phase #2 films over the last eight years, including his upcoming Glass (Universal, 1.18.19). The Last Airbender (’10) was a critical disaster; ditto After Earth (’13) with Will Smith and his son Jaden. I didn’t even pay attention to The Visit (’15), a found-footage thing. Nor did I catch Split (’16), a sequel to Unbreakable in which James McAvoy played a psychotic superhuman beast named Kevin Wendell Crumb.

Now comes Glass, another Unbreakable flick (third in a trilogy) with Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson reprising their David Dunn and Mr. Glass roles, and joined by the persistent McAvoy plus Anya-Taylor Joy (victim) and Sarah Paulson (psychiatrist).

I know it’s hard to stand alone and make films with your own specific flavor and worldview, and that everyone has to adjust to changing tastes and currents and, you know, get along with moronic studio execs. But I yearn for the days when “directed by M. Night Shyamalan” meant “directed by an eerie auteur who for better or worse makes his own kind of movie, and who brings a certain signature and personality to the table.”

We’re living in a slow-motion Roland Emmerich movie about nature’s wrath. At least 11 wildfires are raging inside the Arctic Circle as the hot, dry summer turns an abnormally wide area of Europe into a tinderbox. Vietnamese farmers are migrating out of the Mekong Delta due to rising sea levels caused by climate change. Things are tough all over, and even the climate-change deniers understand deep down that extreme weather (which opens the door to economic hardship and occasional devastation) is becoming the norm.

I believe that the primal selfishness that has always fueled wealthy conservatives (us before them, occupy the high ground, defend our enclaves from angry multicultural hordes) is getting worse and worse. Righties might challenge or dismiss climate-change science in public, but deep down they’re acting as if a worldwide apocalypse is right around the corner. They seem to believe that social constraints are weakening and that a sense of chaotic desperation will gradually worsen among the have-not classes, and that the safest approach right now is to stockpile as much wealth as possible, enforce governmental regulations that weaken the middle and lower classes, reduce compassion and decency, build higher walls and hire more security consultants.

The widely respected L.A.-based food critic Jonathan Gold passed yesterday from pancreatic cancer. He was only 57. I never met Gold, but felt as if I half-knew him through Laura Gabbert‘s City of Gold, a 2016 doc that I didn’t catch until it hit cable/streaming. And I certainly felt a kinship with Gold through his writing, which was always finely phrased, concise, aromatic and delicious.

Gold wrote about the “glorious mosaic” of L.A. cuisine, occasionally focusing on bucks-up, tourist-trade establishments but mostly on choice, small-time restaurants, food stands and food trucks serving less-than-glamorous neighborhoods. Quality was where he found it. But Gold was first and foremost a man of the world, an Anthony Bourdain-level gourmand and humanist who found wonder and joy in great dishes, and you felt that in every observation and side comment.

Boston Globe‘s Devra First: “Gold expanded our possibilities and introduced us to one another through food. He changed our ideas about what restaurant criticism is and should be, about what good food is and why. Although he wrote about L.A., his perspective reaches far beyond that city.

“Perhaps the most tangible difference he made was in the lives of the people he wrote about — immigrants cooking the dishes of their homeland, making ends meet until Gold came along and changed their fortunes. In City of Gold they talk about how his review completely rearranged things, how they can now afford to send their children to school. They also say that they didn’t fully understand what they were doing until they saw it reflected back at them through Gold’s words.

“As I wrote in a review of the movie, ‘He is the anti-Anton Ego, and the anti-Donald Trump — a distiller who writes from a place of love and generosity, a celebrator of the best kind of immigrant story.’ With the death of Anthony Bourdain last month, the food world has lost two of its great humanists.'”

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I thought Gareth Edwards‘ Godzilla (6.16.14) was half-tolerable if you ignored the ending. Edwards was going to direct the forthcoming Godzilla, King of the Monsters (5.31.19), but then he bailed, presumably because he wasn’t happy with some aspect of the development. I can smell trouble from this trailer. Just knowing it’s been directed and co-written by Michael Dougherty (Trick r Treat, Krampus) is warning enough.

“The new story follows the heroic efforts of the crypto-zoological agency Monarch as its members face off against a battery of god-sized monsters, including the mighty Godzilla, who collides with Mothra, Rodan and the three-headed King Ghidorah. When these ancient super-species — thought to be mere myths – rise again, they all vie for supremacy, leaving humanity’s very existence hanging in the balance.” — Warner Bros. and Legendary synopsis.