I have this thing about conservative blondes. Or I used to, I should say. The other day I heard from a certain rightwing lady I dallied with 12 or 13 years ago. She had written to wish me happy birthday, but she also quoted the Bible while letting me know she was happy about Donald Trump‘s victory. Our discussion quickly became contentious. I’m sorry but I saw red.

Rightwing blonde: “The wicked are overthrown and are not, but the house of the righteous shall stand. A man shall be commended according to his wisdom, but he that is of a perverse heart shall be despised.” — Proverbs, 12:19.
HE: Bible verses make me sick, no offense.
Rightwing blonde: “The lip of truth shall be established forever; but a lying tongue is but for a moment. Deceit is in the heart of them that imagine evil, but to the counselors of peace is joy.” — Proverbs, 12:20.
HE: You’re quoting the Bible while celebrating Trump’s victory?
Rightwing blonde: Of course. You choose hate and it’s sad. We the country chose [our President], like it or not!
HE: Cancer, heart attack, dementia…all of these or just one or two? As always, best wishes.
Rightwing blonde: The Devil is under my feet. You are powerless over me. I love my enemies but hate the sin!
HE: I sincerely hope that you meet your maker one day. Hey, wait a minute…you will!

I’m about to catch the latest digital restoration of Citizen Kane (4K, nitrate negative) at the Egyptian. Donald Trump is a big fan of Orson Welles‘ 1941 classic, and two days ago a Buzzfeed piece by Allison Willmore pointed out the similarities between Trump and Charles Foster Kane: (1) They both carved out their own empires with the help of family money, Trump in real estate and Kane in newspapers; (2) They both divorced twice, though Trump, unlike Kane, would marry a third time; (3) They both own cavernous Florida estates with fanciful names, Trump’s Mar-a-Lago and Kane’s Xanadu; and (4) when both run for office, it’s on a platform that stresses personality and pugnaciousness over policy.

John Madden, Jonathan Perera and Jessica Chastain‘s Miss Sloane (Europacorp/Film Nation, 11.25) is a moderately decent governmental potboiler. But it feels more like a cable series pilot than a theatrical stand-alone. A couple of critic friends were creaming over it — my reaction was more circumspect. It’s very plotty, very Aaron Sorkin-esque, very Newsroomy. Except the setting is a progressive D.C. lobbying firm instead of a Manhattan cable news station.

I’m presuming that women will like Chastain’s steely, take-no-prisoners samurai personality and maybe some guys, but it’s basically a two-hour pilot for a Showtime series about a ruthless but effective superwoman lobbyist who cuts through the bullshit and always aces her enemies, even though she has no life, pays for sex and takes pills to sleep (or is it to stay awake with?). But every week she wins.

Somebody really should pitch this — seriously. Brittle, tough-as-nails super-lobbyist who advocates for the right things and pisses off the male establishment. Tough shit, guys, but this lady will leave welts on your ass.

It’s definitely not Michael Clayton (which one critic friend compared it to), and it’s a whole different package than what Spotlight served or had in mind, and Chastain, trust me, played a much cooler character in Zero Dark Thirty. She’s basically playing Jeff Daniels in The Newsroom but with a different set of hang-ups and much hotter gams and a totally killer wardrobe. The presence of costars Sam Waterston and Allison Pill also reminded me of The Newsroom.

I always regarded Leon Russell in somewhat the same light as Doctor John, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Gregg Allman — southern blues rockers with raspy, gravelly voices and a grizzled, studly rock-star flamboyance. Born in Oklahoma, Russell broke into the music business as a session man in 1958, and then suddenly became a headliner around 12 years later. A friend who was a big blues aficionado back then always thought Russell was an inauthentic, egoistic poseur…really? That always sounded harsh to me. Russell peaked in the early to mid ’70s (“A Song For You,” Mad Dogs & Englishmen tour , and probably most famously when he sang his “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and “Young Blood” medley at George Harrison‘s “The Concert for Bangladesh” (during which he and Harrison also sang harmony as Bob Dylan sang “Just Like A Woman”). Yes, he became an overweight Father Christmas figure with a huge, snow-white beard, but he kept on playing and playing. And now he’s gone — sorry. Condolences to friends and fans, due respect, etc.

If I had somehow appropriated Ethan Coen‘s witty, mordant humor and written his N.Y. Times “2016 Election Thank You Notes” piece myself, nearly the exact same article would have resulted. I would have, however, added four extra “thank you!”s to the eight Coen listed.

9. Low-information black voters who stopped Bernie Sanders’ momentum and more or less ensured Hillary Clinton’s victorious lead in the Democratic primary race. We can argue the reasons for Hillary’s dark electoral fate, but we now know for sure that losing was in the cards all along. Millions of us believe that Sanders, who caught on bigly because he spoke to the same working-class frustrations that Trump did, could have won in the end. (A Presidential race between two change candidates would have been tight, but I really think Bernie would have edged Trump out because of his obvious moral decency and intellectual superiority.) But his campaign died when southern African American voters shunned him at the polls. The reason was that they weren’t “all that familiar” with Sanders, and that they felt a natural kinship with Clinton because she’s associated with the liberal largesse of her husband’s administration. Nobody wanted to say that “aren’t all that familiar with” was code for (a) lazy, incurious, low-information attitudes and (b) a brilliant presumption that despite Sanders having gotten arrested for demonstrating for civil rights in the mid ’60s, a U.S. Senator from a mostly all-white state (i.e., Vermont) can’t be trusted to understand or respond to the concerns of black voters. Well done, fellas!

10. Jon Stewart for his refusal to launch his own Presidential campaign in the wake of his retirement from The Daily Show. Don’t kid yourself — the first serious Jewish presidential candidate would have beaten the pants off Trump. People don’t care if you’re a professional politician or not — they just want to vote for someone they like and trust and can relate to. Stewart is smart, passionate, personable, knows his stuff. If he’d had gone all-in, he could’ve done it. I’m not joking — he really could’ve saved us from a Trump presidency. But he decided to spend time with his kids instead. Final thought: Spending time with your kids at the breakfast table is well and good, but kids learn and grow by their parents’ example.

Hulu has all but deleted the little black girl’s allusion to female genitalia in last night’s SNL skit about kids discussing Donald Trump — i.e., “His name’s pussy.” What they kept in was “ussy.” (Not a typo — they cut out the “p” sound.) Here’s what the girl said in the actual skit. “[Trump] unleashed racism and xenophobia. We now must return to the dark ages of white presidents. Also my dad said that Donald Trump will stop and frisk my cat. We have a black cat. His name’s pussy.”

Every frame of Ben Affleck‘s Live By Night (Warner Bros., 12.25) looks immaculate and painterly and damn near perfect, which means that no matter how good the film turns out to be, Affleck owes a huge debt of gratitude to legendary cinematographer Robert Richardson (Shine a Light, Inglourious Basterds, Shutter Island, Django Unchained, World War Z, The Hateful Eight). Dying to see this, but I’ll be forced to miss Wednesday night’s big press screening due to my Key West excursion beginning early Wednesday morning. That’s okay — I’ll catch it the following week.

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I’ve been in a state of quiet, suppressed worry over Warren Beatty‘s Rules Don’t Apply (20th Century Fox, 11.23) for nearly four weeks. As noted I’ve been chatting enjoyably with Beatty for a quarter-century and I feel real affection for the guy (and I always will), but I can’t wiggle around the fact that while the movie is certainly its own bird and reps a strong vision, it’s mainly a spotty, in-and-out thing.

I recognize that several critics are fans and I’m happy for that, and I’ve heard it’s definitely popular among certain Academy types — cool. I hope Rules does well commercially and that Warren lands a Best Actor nomination for his trouble, although I think he and his strategists should have gone for a Best Supporting Actor nom instead. Just my opinion.

(l. to r.) Lilly Collins, Alden Ehrenreich and Warren Beatty on the red carpet at Thursday’s AFI Fest premiere of Rules Don’t Apply.

Beatty has been telling everyone that Rules Don’t Apply isn’t a Howard Hughes biopic, and that it’s primarily a love story between a pair of 20something Hughes employees — Marla Mabrey, a virginal would-be actress played by Lily Collins, and Frank Forbes, a driver-assistant played by Alden Ehrenreich — who want each other but feel constrained by the sexual puritanism of the ’50s. But the film is a Howard Hughes film, no question, and Beatty’s performance as the eccentric billionaire is by far the strongest element.

You come away thinking about Beatty’s performance — he’s got the charisma, conviction, weirdness, authority — but hardly at all about Collins or Ehrenreich’s, due to their characters feeling thin and under-written and muffled. And while the movie feels like it’s using the conventions of farce to keep things peppy and funny, at the same time it seems a little afraid of playing it straight and plain. 

But Rules is engaging here and there and at times even approaches a kind of brilliance by way of a klutzy, off-center mentality. Which is to say…I don’t know how to put it. I’m scratching my head as I write this.

Rules Don’t Apply isn’t so much a “dramedy” as an arch, dialed-down farce that feels inspired here and there and at other times like a movie that never really takes flight. It’s a mix of conflicted and conflicting impulses and cross purposes, and yet is all of a curious piece. I saw it for a second time two nights ago, and I’m afraid I felt the same as I did after the first viewing in mid-October, which was “hmmm….in and out, not bad here and there, Warren is good, maybe Academy members will like it, crazy movie, some good scenes,” etc.

It feels turgid and constricted in some ways, and yet has a silly, loose and fuck-all tone at other times. A bent, tightly-sprung attitude. 

It’s been edited like a sonuvabitch — cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut. Many scenes during the first 25% or one-third feel a bit choppy and abbreviated. Yes, that’s the way farces are usually paced. It reminded me at times of Ernst Lubitsch‘s Design for Living (that’s good) and at other times like Charlie Chaplin‘s The Countess From Hong Kong (don’t ask). And yes, I recognize that it’s personal to some degree in that Warren came from a somewhat repressed religious culture in the ’50s.

From a 2.10.15 N.Y. Times “Insider” piece: “On 11.21.22, The New York Times gave its readers their first glimpse of Adolf Hitler, in a profile that got a lot of things right — its description of his ability to work a crowd into a fever pitch, ready then and there to stage a coup, presaged his unsuccessful beer hall putsch less than a year later. But the article also got one crucial point very wrong — despite what ‘several reliable, well-informed sources’ told The Times, his anti-Semitism was every bit as genuine and violent as it sounded.”

Before The Flood director Fisher Stevens to Hollywood Elsewhere during yesterday’s phone interview: “You’re right — the election was the worst possible thing that could have happened for the environmental movement. But I don’t want to be on one of those people who says ‘fuck this’ and rolls over and gives up. I’m going to do my best to get to Trump and try to make him understand that everything he does politically or strategically can probably be changed, but everything he does to the environment cannot be changed. (Here’s the mp3.)

“His daughter Ivanka, whom I know and can get to…she seems a bit sensible…our kids were born the same day in the same hospital. I’m going to implore her to tell her father to oppose government corruption, to make a stand. Most of the climate deniers are on the payroll of lobbyists. I know it’s a long shot, but it’s the only think I can think of to keep myself from going into a big black hole. We have access to her, and we’re going to try to sit down with her and try to influence her before Mike Pence and Mitch McConnell and others….what worries me most is not Trump but the people he’s surrounding himself with.

“Leo is really depressed [about the election], but he’ll join me in this [strategy]. There’s a lot of passion. We’re not going to give up. We’re gonna keep fighting. If Ruth Bader Ginsburg can hold on for another four years…” Again, the mp3. Watch Before The Flood for $2.99.