I’ve explained repeatedly over the last few years that nobody pushes my loathing button like Ben Mendelsohn, i.e., Ben Sweat or Ben Smoke. But no HE commenters have ever said “yowsah, agreed, thanks for pointing this out.” It’s all been on the level of “jeez, weirdo — you really have some kind of problem with this guy, huh?” All alone on Repulsion Island. But now I have a friend, an ally — SBS.com’s Cameron Williams. He’s written a 4.10 piece titled “Going Full Mendo — An Investigation Into The Rise of Australia’s Favorite Sweaty, Smoking Master of Scumbags, Ben Mendelsohn.”

Finally! Somebody saw!

“Nobody dangles a cigarette from their mouth on screen like Ben Mendelsohn,” Williams begins. “The actor defies the laws of physics to keep it hanging from his lips for an unnatural amount of time. There’s sometimes the added difficulty curve of lighting the cigarette at the same time. These are the nuances Mendelsohn brings to each performance.

“Mendelsohn has built a career playing rogues using his downtrodden, laid-back style of acting. His approach was [once] classified by comedians Tony Martin and Mick Molloy as going ‘Full Mendo’. Mendelsohn has become an in-demand actor by doing this. There have been varying degrees of Mendo over the years, but Full Mendo is the one we want. A master of ‘less is more’, his characters move low and slow to control their status in any situation, and it makes Mendelsohn a magnetic screen presence.

“Mendelsohn’s big break-out was Animal Kingdom (’10), an Australian crime drama where he played Andrew ‘Pope’ Cody, a criminal on the run from the law living in Melbourne being protected by his crime family. Pope is one of the definitive scumbags of Mendelsohn’s career who turned the word ‘mate’ into a terrifying acceptance of criminal collusion. Mendelsohn also flipped the perception of what the criminal underworld in Australia looks like. Forget the stereotypical suits — Aussie gangsters do it in boardshorts, thongs and a stained t-shirt.

There are four ways to mount a smart-phone gripper for your car — (a) dashboard, (b) windshield suction-cup, (c) clip-on magnetized and (d) sticking a stabilizing device inside your CD player, which no one uses anymore because they’re all streaming or aux-jacking from their smart phones. I have both a magnetic holder (which necessitated buying a magnetized iPhone 6 Plus protective cover) and a CD-player device. The problem with the latter is that they’re cheaply made (or at least the ones I examined in an auto-parts store a couple of weeks ago were) and therefore fragile, and so the mount falls to the floor when you cough or stare at it too hard. Any way you slice it everyone needs one of these damn things, for GPS navigation if nothing else. You can’t balance your phone in your lap or hold it in your hand while you drive with the other. You’d think someone would make a really good, BMW-level model that isn’t made of the cheapest and most brittle plastic.

There is no Fate of the Furious. It doesn’t exist in my head or this realm, and anyone who pays to see it this weekend is a stupid animal, and the 65% of Rotten Tomato critics who gave it a left-handed, “what the hell” pass can never be forgiven.

Posted on 12.12.16: “The fact that I adore grimly serious fast-car movies means that I have no choice but to loathe the Fast and Furious franchise, and to condemn F. Gary Gray‘s The Fate of the Furious (Universal, 4.14.17) sight unseen. Because this franchise has steadfastly refused to invest in any semblance of road reality, and has thereby locked me out of the action time and again.

“Because I really love that low-key Steve McQueen machismo thing. I worshipped the driving sequences in Nicholas Winding Refn‘s Drive. Those screeching, howling tires and clouds of smelly white smoke in their wake. The kind we can really believe in. Hey, guys? McQueen is looking down from heaven, and he thinks you’re all pathetic. Particularly Diesel and Johnson.”

Posted on 4.2.15 (and the dates don’t matter because the Furious franchise is a steady sewage stream): “When a big, stupid, assaultive franchise flick is about to open and break the box-office, as is the case with [fill in the Furious blank], most critics play it smart by ‘reviewing’ with a light touch. Like smirking bullfighters, they toy with the beast rather than plunge a lance. ‘What’s the point of actually taking this one on?,’ they seem to be saying. ‘A pan will just make me and my newspaper or website look old-fogeyish and out of touch with the megaplexers.’

Posted from Park City on 1.28.17: “I saw enough of Amanda Lipitz‘s STEP to absorb the basic scheme. Despite a raggedy approach it’s a spunky, engaging, ‘we’re black and proud and headed for college if we can earn good enough grades and somehow manage the financial aspect’ thing. It’s about hard work, high hopes, heart, family, ups and downs, etc.

“Shot in late 2015 (or a few months after the Baltimore unrest sparked by the death of Freddie Gray), the doc focuses on three senior girls at the Baltimore Leadership School for Young Women who are members of the stepdance team, and are known as the “Lethal Ladies of BLSYW.”

“The most magnetic of the three is Blessin Giraldo, a spirited looker who’s looking to attend college away from Baltimore, where she’s seen some tough times both at home (her mother suffers from depression) and elsewhere, except she’s having scholastic difficulties and is therefore putting her future in some jeopardy.

“The second most interesting is the brilliant Cori Grainger, a shy, cautious type hoping to attend Johns Hopkins University on a full scholarship. Bringing up the rear is Tayla Solomon, whose single mom is a corrections officer. Like Blessin, Tayla also isn’t earning high-enough grades, at least at one point in the saga.

“Just because someone is dead does not mean they have changed. [But] you should never say bad things about the dead, you should only say good so…Joan Crawford is dead. Good.” — actual Bette Davis quote, delivered in the wake of Crawford’s death on 5.10.77.

Early today a journalist friend mentioned that Kathryn Bigelow‘s Detroit (Annapurna, 8.4) may be a politically correct tinderbox waiting to ignite. Me: “Because Bigelow is white, you mean?” She: “It sounds nuts and yeah, sooner or later the comintern and their SJW agendas will trigger a backlash, but right now a film about a black riot directed by a white woman probably means a firestorm, or at least some pushback.” Me: “So who should’ve directed this? Dee Rees [i.e., the Mudbound helmer]?” She: “Black and gay…yeah, that’s two boxes checked. Although it would be even better if she was transgender [laughs], but yeah, she’d have been great.” Me: “The fact that Bigelow is a seriously gifted director who cares a lot about the right and wrong in this 50-year-old situation…that’s secondary? What matters is that she’s white? Anyone who would straightfacedly object to her helming of Detroit because of her pigmentation is categorically insane.” She: “This is how people think now, the way it is. And the British thing…John Boyega and Will Poulter playing Americans, that’s also a hurdle.” Me: “These people are in serious need of medication.”

Another journo pal says there may actually be something to this (i.e., an adverse p.c. reaction might happen) because there were no black people involved in a senior capacity behind the camera. Unfuckingbelievable

It seems obvious that the script for Barry Levinson‘s The Wizard of Lies, written by Sam Levinson, Sam Baum and John Burnham Schwartz (and based on the same-titled book by Diana B. Henriques), is top-tier. And that the performances — particularly Robert De Niro as Bernie, Michelle Pfeiffer as Ruth Madoff and Alessandro Nivola as Mark — are up there also. The HBO premiere is on 5.20, or five weeks off. At this stage HBO is surely offering online access to select press…no? I’ll be in NYC between 5.5 and 5.11 — perhaps a theatrical Manhattan premiere around then? Principal photography began on 8.31.15. Costarring Hank Azaria, Nathan Darrow, Sydney Gayle and — unusual move — Henriques playing herself.

How did Luke Skywalker, whose voice was so chirpy and Tom Sawyer-ish when young, manage to grow this raspy, grizzled sound without drinking Jack Daniels and smoking unfiltered Gitanes for 40 years? I think I’m done with Skellig Michael, no offense — too many shots of those green craggy cliffs. Rey and Luke in training. “What do you see?” Luke asks. “Light…darkness..the same old visionary Jedi mumbo jumbo razmatazz.” Luke’s kicker: “It’s time for the Jedi…to end.” Meaning exactly what, asshole? You can’t arbitrarily “end” a fraternity of souls with the ability to harness wondrous magical energy that always was and will be. Same old running, jumping and standing still. Same old hundreds of spacecraft swarming through the heavens in close proximity. Same old explosions. Same old Disney paycheck motivations. I’m down with Oscar Isaac’s Poe Dameron, but The Force Awakens told us that there’s no reason whatsoever for Adam Driver‘s Kylo Ren to wear a Vader-like mask…none!

Reminder: All serious filmmakers understand that they’re prohibited from using one of those “abrupt shocking wakeup followed by hyperventilating” moments. Just as they’re forbidden to use a “lead actor in CG-driven action-fantasy film does swan dive off a skyscraper or a tall cliff” shot.

Zak’s biopsy results came back today, and he doesn’t have skin cancer. Rather he has (or had) some kind of systemic fungus infection in his system. The name of the problem is cryptococcus neoformans — a localized or systemic fungal infection, contracted through the nasal passages, and from there passes into the brain, eyes, lungs and other tissues. He just has to take daily pills for a month or two, and then he’ll be out of the woods.

Amir Bar Lev‘s Long Strange Trip (Amazon, 241 minutes) is a first-rate chronicle of a great, historic American band. Don’t let the four-hour running time stop you because this time the length fits the scale of the tale. This is one sprawling, Olympian, deeply dug into, nook-and-cranny achievement.

It takes the time to fully explain the appeal of Grateful Dead music and the whole Deadhead ’80s culture thing, which I paid no attention to when it was happening. I loved the frequent use of Frankenstein clips and echoes, and I adored Al Franken‘s comments (“I’m not a Dead authority but a fan”) during the last third.

And I laughed out loud when Robert Hunter recites the “Dark Star” lyrics — “Dark star crashes, pouring its light into ashes / Reason tatters, the forces tear loose from the axis / Searchlight casting for faults in the clouds of delusion / Shall we go, you and I while we can / Through the transitive nightfall of diamonds?” — and asks “what is not clear about that”?

The Dead were brilliant at making sloppy haphazard chops sound mesmerizing and anthem-like, but according to their ex-manager Sam Cutler they were mostly terrible in business matters, at least in the early days. But the decision to let fans tape all the shows during the ’80s was genius.

Act One (’65 to ’71 or thereabouts) is a good, comprehensive mid-to-late-’60s history lesson — efficient, amusing, well-honed and sometimes great. But Act Two (or the last two hours) really brings it home. This is where the heart is, what turned the light on — the thing that told me what Amir Bar Lev is really up to.

The last 15 or 20 minutes of Long Strange Trip is about the sad druggy wind-down and death of Jerry Garcia, and that saga seems to end four or five different times. But it finally gets there and poignantly at that.

Long Strange Trip is more about what happened inside — creatively among the band members, managers and hangers-on, and particularly among the Deadhead throngs in the ’80s — than any kind of rote, surface-y rundown of their performing and recording history (this happened, that happened).

Whenever I’m in any kind of tough spot or tight corner, I always say to myself, “How would Steve McQueen handle this if it was happening in Bullitt?” This is truly the basis and the reasoning behind most of my public behaviors — I pretend I’m Frank Bullitt and act accordingly. But let’s take this idea to the next step and imagine something else. We’re on that Pan Am jet at the end of Bullitt, waiting to depart San Francisco Int’l airport, and instead of Albert “Johnny Ross” Renick sitting in that window seat it’s Bullitt, off to Italy and a romantic rendezvous with Jacqueline Bissett.

But suddenly a couple of security guys come up the aisle and tell Bullitt that his ticket is invalid, and that he’ll have to leave his seat and catch another flight. Bullitt argues, shakes his head, refuses to leave. The security guys finally grab him and yank him out of his seat, and this is how Bullitt responds. Two questions: If Bullitt had made these sounds when the security guys grab him, what would happen to McQueen’s super-stud image with moviegoers and how popular would Bullitt have been at the box-office?

Imagine that scene in The Big Sleep when Humphrey Bogart‘s Philip Marlowe is talking to John Ridgely‘s Eddie Mars inside Arthur Geiger’s Laurel Canyon home. Mars calls in his boys, Pete and Sydney, and tells them to frisk Marlowe. But Marlowe flinches when Pete starts searching and before you know it they’re punching each other on the floor. Except Pete lands a couple of good ones and Marlowe gets rattled and starts howling. Be honest — how would this scene affect Bogart’s reputation as a chain-smoking, two-fisted tough guy?

Charlton Heston‘s Judah Ben-Hur is sitting pensively in the belly of a Roman battleship as Jack Hawkins‘ Quintus Arrius inspects the crew. Something about Ben-Hur intrigues Arrius. To test his character Hawkins lashes the oarsman’s back with a whip, and Heston, to Hawkins’ surprise, reacts with a series of screams. If Heston had howled like a little bitch, would he have won the Best Actor Oscar and would Ben-Hur have won for Best Picture?