The decision by Ocean’s 8 director and co-writer Gary Ross (and co-writer Olivia Milch) to name Sandra Bullock‘s lead character “Debbie” Ocean is an indication of where they and this stupid-ass, cash-grab franchise spinoff is coming from. Seriously….Debbie Ocean? What, she’s the sister of George Clooney‘s Danny Ocean who’s been waiting her turn? Debbie is a name for harried stay-at-home moms and lightweight girls who text and shop and read popular fiction between flights. Debbie means compliance, keeping your head down, servitude, going along. Debbie Dingbat, Debbie Does Dallas…that line of country. Women of substance with the D name call themselves Deborah. If Ross and Milch had any kind of coolness current they would recognize the absurdity of giving the head of a team of women thieves a Barbie Doll name and go instead with Millicent, Maxie, Hortense, Sassafras or Alicia…anything but fucking Debbie. Ocean’s 8 will open 17 months from now, on 6.8.18.

The Ocean’s 8 team (l. to r.): Lou (Cate Blanchett), Nine Ball (Rihanna), Amita (Mindy Kaling), Constance (Awkwafina), Rose (Helena Bonham Carter), Daphne Kluger (Anne Hathaway), and Tammy (Sarah Paulson).

A day or two ago Russian publisher Novaya Gazeta reported that Russian intel officer Sergei Mikhailov was arrested, dragged out of a meeting with a bag over his head, and hasn’t been seen or heard from since. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow reported or passed along that Mikhailov was charged with treason.

It’s also come out that Ruslan Stoyanov, a cybersecurity official with a private firm, was recently arrested on “suspicion of treason.”

Yesterday I tweeted and Facebook-posted a Telegraph story, written by Robert Medick and Robert Verkaik, that said a British asset who may have leaked to Christopher Steele the existence of Donald Trump’s alleged pee-pee blackmail video is now dead, apparently murdered.

Look at the face of PBS News Hour interviewer Jeffrey Brown during this Manchester By The Sea piece, which posted three days ago. He’s really, really fascinated by director-writer Kenneth Lonergan, which seems to indicate that Brown has only recently gotten into the film. Who waits this long to pay attention to a great movie? From my perspective Manchester, which has earned $41 million domestic, is over a year old and by any measure enjoyed its movie-culture peak during the Telluride-Toronto-New York film festival cycle, which was four months ago, and again when it opened last month. And yet two out of three moviegoers will tell you it’s depressing. No — it’s called sad, and the morons refuse to get or accept that. Best description ever, from Boston Globe critic Ty Burr: “A ghost story about a man who’s still alive.”

The psychology behind Donald Trumps’s Muslim immmigration ban “is not just limited to the United States,” Iranian director Asghar Farhadi has said in a statement. “In my country hardliners are the same. For years on both sides of the ocean, groups of hardliners have tried to present to their people unrealistic and fearful images of various nations and cultures in order to turn their differences into disagreements, their disagreements into enmities and their enmities into fears. Instilling fear in the people is an important tool used to justify extremist and fanatic behavior by narrow-minded individuals.

“However, I believe that the similarities among the human beings on this earth and its various lands, and among its cultures and its faiths, far outweigh their differences. I believe that the root cause of many of the hostilities among nations in the world today must be searched for in their reciprocal humiliation carried out in its past and no doubt the current humiliation of other nations are the seeds of tomorrow’s hostilities.

I’ve said over and over since Roman Polanski’s September ’09 Zurich bust and all the other ludicrous harassments that followed that the now 83-year-old director is an Art God who gets a pass, at least from this quarter. The man has been lashed and bruised for over 40 years because of a single selfish incident**, one that he did 70something days in prison for before hightailing it when the presiding judge reneged on a plea deal (the whole sordid saga was recounted in Marina Zenovich‘s Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired). Samantha Geimer, the victim in the mid ’70s rape case, said two years ago that Polanski “said he did it, he pled guilty, he went to jail…I don’t know what people want from him.”

But there’s no stopping the SJW pitchforkers. When RoPo was recently nominated to serve as president of the 2017 Cesar Awards French feminists (including the webmasters of Osezlefeminisme pushed back strongly enough to cause Polanski to withdraw. In a 1.26.17 Le Figaro interview the 81 year-old Alain Delon said that Polanski should be praised, not trashed. “If I were asked to preside over the Caesars in his place, I would not go, in solidarity with Polanski,” Delon added. “Every time he goes across the street, [are] we going to talk to him about 1970?”

The only problem with Delon’s support, of course, is that he’s a rabid right-winger.

Snowstorms are wonderful and cold weather builds character, but warm weather is really nice to come back to. What a balmy feeling as I emerged from my Las Vegas-to-Burbank Southwest flight and stepped onto the tarmac…the late afternoon sun about to set, inhaling that familiar Los Angeles stink, that soft olfactory caress of healthy flora, soot, car fumes, terra firma and Del Taco dumpsters. It actually became a little cool as the sun went down, but I felt so comforted by the hometown vibe that the first thing I did after dropping my bags was to hop on the bike and just feel the breeze as I wove my way through traffic. I get around, and a lot faster than anyone in a car. I’m Neal Casady, the young Alain Delon, Ray Hicks, Charles Bukowski, Henry Miller…a free man in Paris.

Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil to Hollywood Elsewhere‘s Jeffrey Wells: “CONGRATS to Kevin Polowy for reaping 100% perfect score predicting the PGA awards! CONGRATS also to Tariq Khan, Joyce Eng and Sasha Stone for Best Scores predicting ACE Eddies: 100%. SAG Awards are TONIGHT — Please make sure we’ve got YOUR predix! Competition is FIERCE!”

Wells to O’Neil: What about the Muslim immigration ban protest at LAX? I’m not trying to be an asshole — I really feel that the Muslim protest thing is the only thing that matters now.

Sidenote: On top of which the competition isn’t fierce. SAG’s ensemble award will go to either Moonlight or the surging Hidden Figures. Manchester‘s Casey Affleck will naturally land the Outstanding Male Performance award and La La‘s Emma Stone will take the Outstanding Female Performance honor, Moonlight‘s Mahershala Ali will take Best Supporting Male and Fences’ Viola Davis will win the Best Supporting Actress prize.

Maybe O’Neil was referring to “fierce” competition on the TV side.

Time constraints caused by schedule overlap kept me from seeing all of Amanda Lipitz‘s STEP last night (I caught 55 minutes’ worth), but I saw enough to absorb the basic scheme and appreciate that despite a slightly 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.

We’re all familiar with docs and narratives about high-school strivers. The best of them are rough and real but also comforting and inspiring. We can do this if we really believe in ourselves and work our asses off and if fate or God smile, etc. STEP feels like one of the better ones. It ends, of course, with a competitive performance finale, the outcome of which gives you a nice “fuck yeah!” feeling. (Or so I was told by a guy who saw the whole thing.)

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.

Last night I caught my last two films of the 2017 Sundance Film festival– Amanda Lipitz‘s STEP, a rousing, affecting doc (recently acquired by Fox Searchlight) about getting out and over for a trio of inner-city Baltimore girls whose involvement in a Baltimore Leadership School for Young Women step dance team is fused with their attempts to gain admission to a good college, and Ted Bourne, Mary Robertson and Banks Tarver’s TRUMPED: Inside The Greatest Political Upset Of All Time. I’ve been working on reviews of both, but I’ll have to finish them (or try to) at Salt Lake City’s airport. My Park City Transportation shuttle arrives in 25 minutes.

Emmanuelle Riva, who at age 84 gave one of the cinema’s saddest and most searing performances about facing the end of one’s life in Michael Haneke‘s Amour (’12) and who also delivered, at age 32 or 33, one of the most enduringly erotic currents in film history in Alain Resnais‘ Hiroshima mon amour (’60), has passed on, a little more than three weeks shy of her 90th birthday. Respect, condolences — a truly great actress who almost beat out Jennifer Lawrence for the Best Actress Oscar.

In his Variety obit for the late John Hurt, Owen Gleiberman notes that Hurt’s extraordinary range always involved empathy for this characters, a prime example being “his mordant undertone of regret” as the professional killer in Stephen Frears’ The Hit (1984).

The character was called Braddock, and Hurt’s portrayal of this flinty fellow was a kind of game, in a sense. All through the film he did the standard taciturn and frosty thing, the proverbial ice-man, a void in his soul. And yet Braddock was almost entirely driven by emotion. The trick was to convey occasional spigots of the stuff beneath the tough-guy facade.

Braddock was cold, clipped, hard-boiled. Strictly a professional, always guarded, always with the shades. But Hurt’s task in The Hit was to secrete little flickers of feeling, little hints of alone-ness and black humor or existential fear, and — during the third act — to convey hints of buried camaraderie and even compassion for Terrence Stamp‘s Willie Parker.

The fact that Braddock had a thing for Laura del Sol‘s Maggie wasn’t so much conveyed by Peter Prince‘s script but by Hurt’s extraordinary finesse. You eventually get the idea that Del Sol might be the great love of Braddock’s life.

Bill Maher is obviously 100% dead-on, but the ugly fact is that in today’s Twitterverse, a realm of politically correct wild dogs looking to rip your flesh and consume your intestines over the slightest hint of an infraction…the ugly fact is that daily columnists like myself have to occasionally walk stuff back. Not with some whiny-ass “apology” but a straight, subdued admission along the lines of “okay, maybe I could’ve phrased that with a little more sensitivity.” You have to at least be open to an occasional admission of this or that shortcoming, first and foremost because I make little mistakes all the time. Nickle-and-dime missteps of phrasing, slight errors of judgment, etc. The trick is to catch them on my own or, depending on the situation, admit error when called out. If, that is, I’m actually in the wrong, and that’s a big “if” so watch it.

Key quote: “While you self-involved fools were policing the language at the Kids’ Choice Awards, a madman talked his way into the White House.”