What turn of events could have suddenly made it clear to Ben Affleck that he can no longer direct and star in The Batman (which has always struck me, by the way, as a comically brain-dead title)? Affleck and Warner Bros. had been contractually committed to Affleck wearing both hats for the last 18 months so what changed their thinking?

I’ll tell you what happened. Live By Night happened.

I didn’t have that many issues with Affleck’s 1930s-era gangster flick (Robert Richardson‘s fine cinematography certainly made it one of the handsomest crime dramas I’ve ever seen), but the fact that Live By Night, which Affleck directed and starred in, lost $75 million plus the general critical impression that it felt a bit staid and listless and lacked that essential snap (32% Rotten Tomatoes, 49% Metacritic) must have scared the shit out of Warner Bros. honcho Kevin Tsujihara.

Affleck is obviously a skilled, Oscar-winning director-writer but somehow or other he developed cold Batman feet and Tsujihara was nervous enough about the possibility that Affleck might deliver Batman By Night that they both figured “fuck it, let’s not risk it…not this time.”

If you’re any kind of Zodiac fan, you know that David Fincher’s 162-minute Director’s Cut is the only version worth seeing or discussing. The original theatrical cut ran 157 minutes. The five-minutes-longer Director’s Cut offers expansions in ten scenes, and most importantly includes the black-screen musical time passage sequence.

No self-respecting cinefile would even consider watching the Philistines-only theatrical cut, and yet Cinefamily will be screening the 157-minute version on Thursday, 2.9, in honor of the film’s 10th anniversary. (In fact Zodiac opened on 3.2.07.) There’s still time to fix this. If Cinefamily doesn’t acknowledge error and announce that they intend to screen the 162-minute cut, they have no honor.

A 3.16.08 analysis by moviecensorship.com’s “Frankie“: “The five minutes of new footage edited back into the film will only go detected by either the filmmakers or Zodiac‘s die-hard fans. One will have to scrutinize over Zodiac‘s already-long 162 minute run time like it was the Zapruder film to catch all of the added scenes, which are mostly additional transitional cues and/or longer beats during the second act’s end-run-around of an investigation, culminating in the most noticeable of ‘new’ sequences — an extended ‘musical segue”‘ from the 1970s to the 1980s.

“But because Zodiac is a film about the consequences of details – big or small – about how even those filed under plain-slight can easily slip through the cracks, the new footage serves as another means by which Fincher enhances his audience’s viewing experience, aligning itself well with the investigation Zodiac’s detectives conduct.”

In what universe does an overweight, balding, pasty-skinned physician have even a wisp of a chance of scoring with a group of nubile 20something nymphs on a Greek island? In the actual world a guy like this might strike up a casual conversation with vacationing beach hotties…maybe, if the women were bored and God smiled for perversity’s sake.  

For whatever reason an increasing number of cutting-edge filmmakers are refusing to accept that unattractive people live in a hole of muted misery for the most part, and that their lot in life, at best, is to only fraternize among themselves.  (Unless they’re rich, famous or brilliant.)  The universal law about birds of a feather flocking together for thousands of years can’t be changed just because a director-screenwriter (i.e., Suntan‘s Argyris Papadimitropoulos) decides to imagine otherwise.

Last night Orange Orangutan fired acting Attorney General Sally Yates for declaring that the Justice Department would not defend Trump’s executive order on immigration. Shameless, sphincter-smooching White House spokesperson Sean Spicer explained that Yates “betrayed the Department of Justice” by refusing to defend Trump’s order. The statement added that Yates, a career prosecutor whom Trump named as acting attorney general, is “weak on borders and very weak on illegal immigration.” Dana Boente, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, was named as acting attorney general.”

“After 45 years of scattershot liberal protest, the Academy Awards are now the perfect bully pulpit from which to address the already glaring moral calamity of Donald Trump’s presidency,” Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman has written in a 1.30 thinkpiece.

“Certainly, a balance needs to be struck: The point of the evening is to celebrate the movies nominated, and politics shouldn’t overshadow that. But I do believe that politics can blend with that. America will be watching — in greater numbers, I suspect, than we’ve seen for a long time. And not just blue-state America. I mean Trump voters too (do you think that none of them went to see La La Land?), and also swing voters, who may already be feeling a touch of buyer’s remorse, and who may have begun to peel off from the Trump crusade.

“What’s required is a way to speak truth — artfully and memorably, the way Meryl Streep did — to the Oscar-night viewers who are movie lovers who are citizens who have the power to change America. What’s required is a moment that can translate into a meme of protest. A lot of liberals have already begun to realize [that] the only way to defeat Donald Trump is to fight fire with fire — and on Academy Awards night, that means fighting show business with show business.”

“You can get technical. You can talk about grain. You can talk about the depths of color registration. You can talk about the ‘sensuousness’ of film as compared to digital. But here’s the big mystery for me. There are films I’ve seen a dozen times that have always affected me emotionally, have devastated me, [but] just do not have the same effect on me when I see them projected digitally. I can’t explain that. It’s the same movie, the same story. But there’s something different. I am really struck by this. We react to these formats differently on an emotional level.” — Toronto Bell Lightbox senior programmer James Quandt talking to National Post‘s Calum Marsh.

Posted on 1.30.15: “Not so long ago I would have swooned at the idea of savoring a parade of black-and-white widescreen classics in their original celluloid splendor. Nobody is a bigger fool for this format than myself. Why, then, would I be ducking BAMcinematek‘s “Black & White ’Scope: American Cinema” (2.27 through 3.19), a 21-film series of widescreen monochrome masterpieces, if I was living in New York? Because 15 of the 21 are being shown in 35mm, and we all know what that means — dirt, scratches, pops, possibly too-dark illumination or murky images, occasionally weak sound, reel-change marks, etc. There’s just no romance left in film projection. That was then, this is now. Digital exactitude or nothing.”

Yesterday I drove down to the LAX Muslim immigration demonstration around 3 pm. A real alpha-fraternity thing — raucous, wonderful, beautiful, loud, adamant, open, spirited. They do manifs in Paris all the time, but this one (part of a nationwide response to Trump-Bannon’s anti-Muslim immigration executive order) felt like something else. This was the second event of this type that I joined within the past 8 days, the first being the Park City Women’s March, and once again I felt imbued with a feeling of hope and even euphoria. I must have waved, hello’ed and arm-patted 50 or 60 strangers. We were all there together, all as one.

What did it boil down to? Reassuring theatre + a reminder that hundreds of thousands of others around the country were marching and chanting against the Beast.

Conclusion of a 1.29 Medium.com piece by Yonatan Zunger: “The Trump administration is testing the extent to which the Department of Home Security (and other executive agencies) can act and ignore orders from the other branches of government. This is as serious as it can possibly get: all of the arguments about whether order X or Y is unconstitutional mean nothing if elements of the government are executing them and the courts are being ignored. Yesterday was the trial balloon for a coup d’état against the United States. It gave them useful information.”

I’ve recently developed this thing for underwhelming Rolling Stones B-side tracks from the ’60s, particularly “Sad Day” and “I Don’t Know Why.” I love that almost-but-not-quite quality. Very few Stones’ songs are about loser attitudes and self-pity, but these two qualify in spades. The great Richie Unterberger of allmusic.com has tapped out some excellent notes on both [after the jump].

If there was even a semblance of moral order and just desserts in the universe, the people behind this “meet the happy Trump family!” Us cover piece — editor-in-chief Michael Steele, for one — would be arrested, tried, convicted and pilloried. What could be lower at this stage of the game than to normalize a brutish authoritarian regime that has almost immediately (within the last ten days) thrown the U.S. and its institutions into chaos? And things are only just beginning. This cover will be a yoke around Steele’s neck for the rest of his life; ditto Wenner Media.

Me: Not to take anything away from the great Denzel Washington, but why didn’t Casey Affleck win the Best Actor SAG award last night? He’s been blitzkreiging that category for weeks, picking up 30something Best Actor trophies thus far. And all of a sudden Denzel surges ahead. Denzel was and is flat-out brilliant in Fences, but be honest — were you thinking the same thing I was thinking?

Friend: I don’t think that’s why. Denzel had never won a SAG award. That said, Manchester overall seems to have lost some steam.

Me: SAG stuck right to the predicted script with everything else, including the Hidden Figures surge, and yet they decide to ignore the longstanding Affleck inevitability and go for Denzel because they were exceptionally mindful about Denzel having been empty-handed and wanted to be…what, magnanimous?

Hooray for the Hidden Figures team! La La Land still wins the Best Picture Oscar, of course, but cheers to Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, Janelle Monae, Theodore P, Merlfi, Kevin Costner (who wasn’t there), etc.

Ryan Gosling‘s reactions as Emma Stone stumbled and stammered her way through her acceptance speech [after the jump] are priceless.