Respect and condolences for the friends, fans and colleagues of Bill Nunn, who’s passed after only 62 years of life. I knew him best as “Radio Raheem” in Spike Lee‘s Do The Right Thing (’89), which was shot when the Pittsburgh-born Nunn was 34. Sidenote: Raheem’s ghetto blaster ignites a fierce battle (racist Italian pizza guys vs. African American Fort Greene natives) in this scene from Lee’s film. In the view of Raheem and friends, assaulting passersby with ear-splitting music was a celebration of their culture, but to most New Yorkers back then (and I’m speaking as an ex-resident) ghetto blasters were a scourge. They made life hell for thousands of Central Park visitors on weekends. A friend told me about a kid on a bike who was blasting sounds somewhere near an open pasture in southern Central Park, and suddenly the kid lost his balance and the blaster fell and shattered and was silent. A few people leapt to their feet and started cheering.

Posted four days ago (9.19) by Kirk Douglas (edited): “I am in my 100th year. When I was born in 1916 in Amsterdam, New York, Woodrow Wilson was our president. The longer I’ve lived, the less I’ve been surprised by the inevitability of change, and how I’ve rejoiced that so many of the changes I’ve seen have been good.

“Yet, I’ve also lived through the horrors of a Great Depression and two World Wars, the second of which was started by a man who promised that he would restore his country it to its former greatness.

“I was 16 when that man came to power in 1933. For almost a decade before his rise he was laughed at — not taken seriously. He was seen as a buffoon who couldn’t possibly deceive an educated, civilized population with his nationalistic, hateful rhetoric. The ‘experts’ dismissed him as a joke. They were wrong.

“A few weeks ago we heard words spoken in Arizona that my wife, Anne, who grew up in Germany, said chilled her to the bone. They could also have been spoken in 1933:

“’We also have to be honest about the fact that not everyone who seeks to join our country will be able to successfully assimilate. It is our right as a sovereign nation to choose immigrants that we think are the likeliest to thrive and flourish here…[including] new screening tests for all applicants that include an ideological certification to make sure that those we are admitting to our country share our values.’

“These are not the American values that we fought in World War II to protect.

On 10.25 Olive Signature will issue a 4K-scanned Bluray of John Ford‘s The Quiet Man. Olive put out a 2K Bluray in January 2103. The newbie will offer a denser, more finely rendered harvest of an original-negative restoration from the UCLA Film and Television Archive.

Ford biographer, SFSU professor and author Joe McBride, who recorded a commentary track on the forthcoming version, says “this is the best-looking home video release of The Quiet Man I’ve ever seen. Other editions didn’t capture the lush, delicate beauty of the Oscar-winning cinematography by Winton C. Hoch and Archie J. Stout — this one does.”

I bought the 2013 Bluray, watched it for 45 minutes and gave up. I simply don’t like this film because it overloads on the Irish blarney. Sentimentality never ages well, and that quality has always been the anvil tied to the ankle of Ford’s reputation. I’m sorry but Ford’s susceptibility to the Irishness of The Quiet Man (particularly his affection for drinkers and fondness for what David Thomson once called the “tedious eccentricity” in his supporting players) just wears you down. The John Wayne-Maureen O’Hara connection is the only thing that saves it.

The info is two days old, but after 48 years N.Y. Post critic Lou Lumenick is packing it in. I didn’t post anything yesterday because I couldn’t think of anything…well, affectionate to say about him. I’ve always respected Lumenick’s diligence and critical judgment (for the most part), but from my perspective he’s mostly been this scowly, morose dude I’ve run into at film festivals. I’ve been reasonably polite with Lou for years, and most of the time he’s acted as if he’s barely been able to contain his loathing. Life is short. I wish that Lou had found a way to be a nicer, gentler person, but he didn’t have the stones.

Lumenick gave me props when Hollywood Elsewhere’s Shane aspect-ratio battle ended in triumph, at least as far as the Bluray was concerned. (Woody Allen‘s sentiments tipped the scale in favor of the 1.37 crowd.) But it should be noted that all N.Y. Post links to Lumenick’s reports about the Shane a.r. brouhaha and particularly Warner Home Video’s capitulation have been wiped. That’s spite, pure and simple.

I should also note that the piece Lou wrote about Gone With The Wind‘s stock dropping due to racist content prompted one of the best critical rebuttals I’ve ever posted, so I’m glad that Lou trashed GWTW because it allowed me to deliver a more profound observation, which is that GWTW is not a film about the South or slavery or the Civil War as much as a parable about the deprivations of Great Depression.

Alex Lehmann and Mark Duplass‘s Blue Jay (The Orchard, 10.7), which I saw at the Toronto Film Festival, is an affecting relationship piece about a pair of former high-school lovers (Duplass, Sarah Paulson) re-igniting when they run into each other in their hometown. It explores the usual stuff — changes, regrets, old longings — with delicacy, and the black-and-white cinematography (Lehmann served as his own dp) is a nice touch. But the story is familiar. There might be a little of the old spark still going on and maybe one of the parties is hurt by how it all ended 12 years ago, but you can’t go home again. I think we all know that and so, decent as Blue Jay is on its own terms, I was less than fully intrigued.

You know what hasn’t been seen before? What would be a little different? If a guy and a girl who knew each other in high school but were never romantically linked meet near their old hometown, and the woman, we learn, is about to get married in a week or so. Great guy, big wedding, all the trimmings. And they talk all about their lives and go for drinks and dinner and maybe get into an adventure or two, and an attraction takes hold and they wind up going to his hotel room. The sex is gymnastic, gasping, religious. The next morning they realize they really like each other and that in another realm this might be the start of something awesome, but not this time. With more than a little sadness she shakes it off and kisses him goodbye in a parking lot and that’s that, and then he goes back to his okay but somewhat lonely life.

Two or three days ago I was on my bike and approaching an intersection without a stop sign or stoplight. There was a guy in an SUV on my left, easing out and looking to cross the intersection as I was approaching it. I was looking to drive straight through so who would go first? You know how these things work — you slow down, improvise, try and gauge what the other guy is going to do. The SUV guy was assessing me just like I was assessing him. I was cool with him crossing first but he kept sitting there, waiting for me to make a move so fuck it, I gunned it. But when I was ten feet away from the intersection, or almost right in front of him, the SUV guy suddenly tapped the gas and came right for me, forcing me to swerve to the right to avoid being hit. It wasn’t a heart-attack thing but a major dick move on his part. Again, it’s not like I was being pushy and saying to him “get out of my way, here I come.” I didn’t make a move until I was sure he’d decided to let me go first, and then he changed his mind and forced me to swerve to avoid being hit. Asshole!

That three-day-old report about Angelina Jolie having learned from a private investigator that Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard were having it off during the filming of Allied has been denied by Cotillard. On top of which it’s none of our damn business.

But I can at least mention how things work when an affair ignites between the stars of a film. Such things happen with more regularity than you might think, and between big names.

The general rule is a variation of “what happens in Las Vegas, stays in Las Vegas.” Nobody says anything when a power couple is up to something, and when the movie wraps so does everything else. Those are the rules that almost everyone understands and lives by.

Every now and then an on-set relationship will spill over into real life (Meg Ryan and Russell Crowe, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton) but for the most part, they tend not to.

in a just-posted Rolling Stone interview, Bruce Springsteen has called Donald Trump a “moron.” Yo, Bruce — you don’t wanna go out on a limb! Here’s a fuller quote: “The republic is under siege by a moron. Without overstating it, it’s a tragedy for our democracy.

“When you start talking about elections being rigged, you’re pushing people beyond democratic governance. And it’s a very, very dangerous thing to do. Once you let those genies out of the bottle, they don’t go back in so easy, if they go back in at all. The ideas he’s moving to the mainstream are all very dangerous ideas — white nationalism and the alt-right movement. The outrageous things that he’s done — not immediately disavowing David Duke? These are things that are obviously beyond the pale for any previous political candidate. [In another era] it would sink your candidacy immediately.”

Asked by interviewer Brian Hiatt if Springsteen is feeling “a lack of enthusiasm for Hillary,” the 67 year-old singer said, “No, I like Hillary. I think she would be a very, very good president.”

A couple of hours ago Gold Derby‘s Chris Beachum reported that Paramount has committed to a December release date for Martin Scorsese‘s Silence, a religious persecution period drama set in 17th Century Japan. “While [a specific release] date is not set in stone, we’ve had enough of a confirmation that it will indeed be released in December,” Beachum wrote. I immediately wrote Paramount for specifics — true or not, what date if true, how many theatres? If Beachum is correct, I’m guessing Silence will have a NY-and-LA opening in early to mid December, and that it’ll screen for critics either just before or just after Thanksgiving.

Disney marketing is throwing a debate-watching party on Monday night in West Hollywood. The idea is to remind attendees (i.e., mostly keyboard-tappers like myself) of the echoes between the social/political currents in Disney’s Zootopia, which is eyeballing an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Feature, and the first official face-off between Hillary Clinton vs. Donald Trump. There won’t be any filmmakers or executives attending, just some Disney p.r. guys. Just a nice place to hang while catching the debate. No interviews, no pressure.

I didn’t beat a path to see Mel Gibson and Jean-Francois Richet‘s Blood Father because it felt like too much of a rage-driven exploitation retread — a grizzled, tattooed dad with a criminal past protects an alienated, errant daughter from drug dealers. I figured it might be another Get The Gringo, which no one paid attention to. Yes, it managed an 88% Rotten Tomatoes rating when it opened on 8.12, but I still resisted. I figured at least some of the critics were giving Gibson a sympathy pass or paying tribute to the charismatic big-bucks hotshot he used to be.

Well, I was wrong. I finally watched Blood Father last night (it’s streaming on Amazon prior to the 10.11 Bluray debut), and damned if isn’t a highly efficient action-exploitation flick, like something Don Siegel might have made in his prime. It’s tight and well-layered, the writing is character-driven and flavorful and often amusing, the action is grounded and realistic (credit Richet, who directed those excellent, similarly grounded Mesrine flicks from ’08) and the performances deliver well above the usual for this kind of fare, especially in Gibson’s case.

It just works all around and never feels cheap or sloppy or self-mocking. It was clearly assembled by pros who were committed to making something smart and extra-punchy.

Some critic called it “a small gem…a good old-fashioned chase picture, thickened with pulp.” But that makes it sound like it’s mainly an adrenaline flick for the animals. Which it is to some extent, but Blood Father (which is based on a 2006 Peter Craig novel) is also a first-rate character study of a classic bad hombre (ex-con, rage monster, former alcoholic) trying to walk the straight and narrow as well as a mildly affecting father-daughter relationship thing.

Like lemmings, you and your pallies will pay to see Antoine Fuqua‘s The Magnificent Seven starting tonight. Despite the fact that you know it more or less blows, as indicated by the 63% and 54% ratings on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, respectively.

“When a lazy wank-off flick like The Magnificent Seven comes along and makes you feel drained and nauseous, people like Denzel Washington and feature writer Lewis Beale say ‘hey, relax…it’s just a movie!’ But there’s no relaxing when a film is flagrantly empty except in terms of the photography (Mauro Fiore‘s lensing is first-rate), and has nothing in the way of cleverness or fresh attitude up its sleeve.” — posted on 9.11.16.

“It is written in the Hollywood playbook that the personalities and speaking styles of action-film heroes have to be wry, cocky, self-amused. So completely confident about their badassery that nothing rattles them. No edge, no anxiety. Pretty much every threat is an opportunity for casual dispatch, gun-twirling and deadpan one-liners.” — “The Smug Brothers,” posted on 7.18.16.