Originally posted on 3.21.11, but now updated: One of the healthiest things you can say about anything that’s over and done with is “okay, that happened.” Unless, of course, you’re talking about a stretch in a World War II concentration camp or something equally ghastly. Otherwise you have to be accepting, past it. Especially when it comes to ex-girlfriends. We went there, it happened, nobody was right or wrong, that was then and we’re here now…let’s get a coffee and catch up.

All my life I’ve been friends with exes, or have at least been open to same. And they’ve been open to ease and friendship with me. Except one. 

She was (and most likely still is) a whipsmart blonde with a great ass, a toothy smile and a kind of young Katharine Hepburn vibe. She’d been raised in Brooklyn but always reminded me of a Fairfield County gal. She’s married now and living in Pasadena; her husband — a slightly stocky, gray-haired guy of some means — doesn’t resemble me or her first husband (a doobie-toking small-business owner who owned a Harley) at all. Whatever attributes or nice qualities he’s brought to the table, he’s clearly a swing away from the past.

I gave up trying to be in touch with her three or four years ago. She really wants to erase that part of her life — the first marriage (which began in the summer of ’96) and the affair with me that began in early ’98 and lasted two and two-thirds years. We last spoke in ’11 or ’12. The most significant thing that happened before that was her friending me on Facebook.

Our thing began at the ’98 Sundance Film Festival and finally ran out of gas in late ’00 when her husband found out. I took the hurt and the lumps. I was dropped six or seven times. It was easily the most painful and frustrating relationship of my life. Whether things were good or bad between us was entirely about her shifting moods. Her father had been a philanderer when she was fairly young and this had caused a lot of family pain, so she felt badly about following in his footsteps. But she kept coming back and oh, the splendor.

The bottom line, obviously, is that she’s not at ease with having been a beloved infidel in the waning days of the Clinton administration. Easing up and looking back by way of occasional contact or e-mails just isn’t a comfortable thing for her. 

I could write a Russian novel about what happened during our fractured romance.  I once flew to NYC just to hang with her for a couple of days without the nearby presence of her husband.  Toward the end we had a blissful rendezvous in Las Vegas.  But when all is said and done I’m basically a Woody Allen type of guy — the heart wants what it wants and all’s fair. Even if nothing hurts quite as badly as being the on-and-off boyfriend of a not-very-married woman.

But I’m past it. I’m not sorry it happened. And I’ve always liked her besides. She’s smarter than me. And a good judge of character, more practical, more planted, etc. But I’m deeper, stronger, a better writer.

This being a travel day (i.e., back to Los Angeles), Hollywood Elsewhere has been maintaining radio silence for the last few hours. The usual packing, cleaning and running around. Plus the Toronto weather today was warm and rainy, like Panama. My American Airlines flight is currently over eastern Colorado. The ETA is just before 10 pm Pacific. Sidenote: I didn’t want to mention this because I don’t like whining, but over the last six days I’ve been grappling with a bad case of Plantar fasciitis, or more specifically a really bad pain in my right heel. I’ve been hobbling around with a cane since last weekend. The plantar fascia is the ligament that supports the arch of your foot. If you strain or inflame it, you’re fucked. It’s not just over-40 types who suffer from PF but younger folks who are on their feet a lot, like athletes or soldiers. Sub-sidenote: People treat you gently when you’re carrying a cane. They get out of your way, let you go first, look at you with a measure of concern. Pretty girls have been eyeballing me more since I bought the cane — I guess they’re figuring I’m less of a threat than a guy with two good feet.

A friend accused me this morning of not being sufficiently supportive of Hillary Clinton in this, her hour of need as her campaign appears to be stalling if not collapsing. She’s Mondale, she’s Dukakis. I replied that I’m terrified at the prospect of Trump winning, but that Hillary is just too flawed a candidate and too blind as a strategist for me to go “Seig heil, Hillary is great, all hail Hillary!”

My friend then accused me of more or less being on Team Trump. “WHAT? You sound like you’re having a breakdown,” I replied. “Yes, I truly dislike Hillary Fainting Arrogant Goldman Sachs Establishment Eyebags but I WANT HER TO WIN. More to the point, I don’t want her to lose.” Friend: “If you don’t want her to lose then help her win. It’s not rocket science.”

She’s obviously the only rational, sensible choice, I answered, “but she’s such a terrible, terrible candidate. She’s sinking in the polls now and she’s just sitting there like a vegetable, recovering from her pneumonia.

“And she will NEVER, EVER BE FORGIVEN if she loses. Hillary alone will singlehandedly redefine the definition of pariah if Trump wins. She’ll be like O.J. Simpson — she’ll have to leave the country and live in southern Spain. Or just hide in her house in Chappaqua and never come out. When she visits Chelsea in Manhattan people will scowl and spit when her car drives by.”

Written yesterday afternoon to a critic friend after catching Walter Hill‘s critically lambasted (Re)Assignment, to wit: “I just saw it, and it’s nowhere near as problematic as I’d been led to expect. Pulpy and crude, yes, but fairly intelligent, a little slow but far from ludicrous, and generally not bad. It’s way, way better than either of the Sin City flicks. Michelle Rodriguez with a beard looks like Oscar Isaac in Inside Llewyn Davis. I suspect, however, that those ridiculous time & place title cards along with those animated freeze-frames were tacked on in post. It also seems as if those Tony Shalhoub-interviews-Sigourney Weaver exposition scenes might have been shot after principal photography. And what moron decided that (Re)Assignment was a better title than Tomboy? I’ve already mentioned that the plot bears a certain similarity to Pedro Almodovar‘s The Skin That I Live In. If Sam Fuller was still around he could’ve made something like this.

(l.) Frank Kitchen, the male version of Michelle Rodriguez in Walter Hill’s (Re)Assignment; (r.) Oscar Isaac in Joel and Ethan Coen’s Inside Llewyn Davis.

For whatever perverse motives, Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman and Indiewire‘s David Ehrlich last night praised The Edge of Seventeen (STX, 11.13). But they’re almost certainly being generous and obliging, in part (I suspect) because they don’t want to be seen as older cranky male critics shitting on a teen-angst dramedy, especially one from a female director-writer.

In the words of John F. Kennedy, I do not shrink from the occasional responsibility of shitting on a teen-angst dramedy — I welcome it. I was frowning and throwing my hands in the air and exhaling and checking my watch less than five minutes in. Okay, Edge became somewhat more tolerable during the last third, which is when neurotic characters in movies of this sort begin to fold and weep as they lay their emotional cards on the table. But God, that first hour. And the cliches! It poked and prodded and put me through long stretches of hell.

As noted, Edge isn’t all torture and yes, director-writer Kelly Fremon Craig is a cut above in some respects, but with James L. Brooks producing, I wanted a kind of angsty-teen-girl Bottle Rocket. Instead I got a misery flick. Mine, I mean, more than Hailee Stenfeld‘s because of prolonged exposure to the enraged, obnoxious, take-no-prisoners personality of her character, Nadine, whom Craig probably based upon aspects of herself.

The neurotic, obstinate and nearly friendless Nadine is suffering because (a) she’s an old soul and a secret genius (as was I during my high school years) and her classmates are too shallow to get her. Her father died some years back from a heart attack, and her frizzy-haired mom (Kyra Sedgwick) is ineffectual. On top of which Nadine’s resentment of older smooth-cat brother Darian (Everybody Wants Some‘s Blake Jenner) turns to seething hate when he falls in love with her lifelong best friend Krista (Haley Lu Richardson) and vice versa.

I’ve never liked Elizabeth Taylor‘s coarse, braying performance as Martha in Mike Nichols‘ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolff (’66). I always felt she was playing a charicature of a vulgar, bitter alcoholic rather than really letting that misery into her soul. But I’ve watched this film time and again, and the reason (apart from those amusing, inventive performances from Richard Burton and George Segal) is Edward Albee‘s scalding dialogue. Albee died today at age 88 — due respect and condolences, but I have another complaint. I always thought it was absurd to invite guests over at 12:30 or 1 am to start with. Not to mention drinking yourselves into oblivion while everyone’s flaws and foibles are exposed and picked away at, and refusing to end this torture until dawn. Albee got at the fact that back in the early ’60s people of modest accomplishment hated themselves a lot more than they were willing to admit — a significant disclosure at the time.

Antonio Campos‘ Christine (The Orchard, 10.14), which I saw at last January’s Sundance Film Festival, is a smartly assembled if decidedly glum character study of Christine Chubbuck (Rebecca Hall), a frustrated, chronically depressed TV news reporter who felt stymied by the then-emerging tendency among local news stations to deliver froth and diversion rather than serious news or in-depth human-interest stories. She was lonely, bitter and pissed off, and on 7.15.74 the poor woman shot herself during a live broadcast. She died 14 hours later.

Christine is a good film, but it’s about ironies compounded within a hall of mirrors. Irony #1 is that Chubbuck would be unknown today if she hadn’t shot herself (she was never going to be Judy Woodruff), and that the film wouldn’t have been made if not for her tragedy. Irony #2 is that Campos’s film wouldn’t be all that engrossing without the on-air-shooting. Take away that sadness and it’s just a story of a gloomy woman who desperately wanted to do a good job but who wasn’t brilliant, lucky or charming enough to make it in a brutally shallow racket that was just starting to understand that superficial giddiness and bubbly personalities were far more valued by viewers than in-depth reporting.

That said, Christine is a well-written, believable, reasonably engrossing thing. Hall captures the testy anger and increasing desperation that Chubbuck was apparently experiencing on a drip-by-drip basis. It’s the best performance of her career, but God, it’s a downer to hang with this woman. We know from the get-go she has nowhere to go but down, and the film, really, is about how she has to go through eight or nine dispiriting episodes before she accepts this fact herself, and we, the audience, are basically stuck with this process.

Christine is tapping into general feelings of anger and frustation that we’ve all tasted from time to time, but after 90 minutes the downswirl starts to engulf you. I found myself muttering to Hall, “Look, this isn’t going to work out…you’re too pissed off, you lack the necessary charm and you might even get canned by Tracy Letts if you don’t watch it…it’s time to do something else with your life. Become a teacher or a newspaper reporter or sail to Cuba or move to Mexico, but get off the pot and blow this popstand.”

Yesterday afternoon I caught Vikram Gandhi‘s Barry, a modest but sharply etched character study of young Barry Obama between ’81 and ’83, when he began and completed his junior and senior years at NYC’s Columbia University as a political science major, and more particularly when he began to grapple with his half-white, half-black identity.

Yes — another young Obama flick on top of Richard Tanne‘s commendable and charming Southside With You. Barry is obviously smallish but quite fluid and specific — carefully made, nicely layered, more observing of small details and generally a looser, craftier film than Southside, which (don’t get me wrong) I felt respect and affection for on its own terms.

Devon Terrell as 20 year-old Barry (i.e., pre-Barack) Obama in Vikram Gandi’s Barry.

Barack in ’81 or thereabouts.

Barry, in short, is basically a “who am I?” flick about social conflict, racism (both the benevolent and hostile kinds), hesitancy and uncertainty start to finish — a whole lotta frowning and meditating on Barry’s part.

It basically studies this athletic, mild-mannered young dude and gives him the time and the room to find his own way as he becomes friendly with a variety of black, brown and white characters on the Columbia campus and near his off-campus apartment on West 116th Street.

It ends on a note of self-acceptance, as you might expect, along with Obama’s decision to embrace his African-descended side by calling himself Barack, which happens at the end of the film, or sometime towards the end of his Columbia period.**

In his screen debut, Australian actor Devon Terrell plays Barry with enough of a physical resemblance to pass muster along with the right manner, voice and speaking style. It’s a confident, well-rooted performance. Qualifier: Terrell’s nose is a bit too Roman and his eyes indicate some kind of Hawaiian or Maori heritage — his features remind you a little bit of Dwayne Johnson‘s.

I’ll be seeing only two films on this, my last full day of the 2016 Toronto Film Festival. The first will be Walter Hill‘s pulpy (Re)Assignment (formerly Tomboy), which has not only been trashed by almost every critic except for THR‘s Todd McCarthy but appears to the reigning calamity flick of the festival. The second, beginning at 9:15, will be Kelly Fremon Craig‘s The Edge of Seventeen, a teen-angst dramedy produced by James L. Brooks and costarring Hailee Steinfeld and Woody Harrelson. (A friend assures me it works.)

Challenging as it may be, Hill’s film sounds like the more interesting of the two.

Using a plot that seems to resemble Pedro Almodovar‘s The Skin I Live In (’11), (Re)Assignment about a low-rent male assassin (Michelle Rodriguez) who is changed into a woman by a revenge-seeking surgeon (Sigourney Weaver) because Rodriguez has killed her brother. The controversy, of course, makes it feel like essential viewing. Most of the pans are calling it bad or inept or horribly misjudged, and of course the transgender Twitter harridans are screeching about it being politically incorrect, etc. I can’t wait.

The Guardian’s Benjamin Lee writes that (Re)Assignment has been “made with such staggering idiocy that it deserves to be studied by future generations for just how and why it ever got made.” Variety‘s Dennis Harvey says it “gracelessly mashes together hardboiled crime-melodrama cliches and an unintentionally funny ‘Oh no! I’m a chick now!’ gender-change narrative hook.”

And yet THR‘s McCarthy claims that while (Re)Assignment is “a disreputable slice of bloody sleaze, there’s also no question that Hill knows exactly what he’s doing here, wading waist-deep into Frank Miller Sin City territory and using genre tropes to explore some provocatively, even outrageously transgressive propositions.

The last three minutes of this Cenk Uygur election rant is brilliant in the sense that it cuts right to the heart of things. The first seven minutes focus on Hillary Clinton‘s recent downward poll trajectory (i.e., losing in Ohio and Florida) and the possibility of further weakening in other battleground states, but the last three minutes focus on the hubris of the Clinton campaign and more particularly the attitude of denial within her staff and among supporters in the media.

The money portion comes when Uygur speaks to or rather pleads rhetorically with HRC, to wit: “Remind me what you’re running for. ‘I’m With Her’ is not a thing…that’s not a thing that you run for. We all knew why Bernie Sanders was running…income inequality, which he’s been fighting for 40 years. And Trump is a madman, he’s running for his ego, we all know that…but Hillary Clinton, what are you running for? ‘Stronger Together’, whatever that means, but what are you running for? What does Hillary Clinton care about? I don’t know. Do you know? Does she know? Has she communicated this to the American people?

I forgot to mention in my 9.9 review of Tom Ford‘s Nocturnal Animals, in which I shared mostly negative reactions, that the final scene is rather good. It’s decisive and final, and yet leaves the final interpretation in the audience’s lap. Otherwise my verdict stays the same: “I’m fully aware that Animals is an ambitious, experimental thing (certainly from a structural standpoint) but I never felt fully drawn in. It keeps you at a distance. Half 21st Century elite ennui and half ‘fictional’ flashback, it scores in a fleeting, in-and-out fashion but mostly sinks into mud.”

Was this N.Y. Times survey of likely voters, which gives Hillary Clinton only a slight edge (46 to 44) over Donald Trump, conducted in the wake of Hillary’s fainting episode last weekend? If not the race could be even tighter. I’m guessing that the 100% accurate but ill-considered “basket of deplorables” quote is a factor in this. Millions despise her. Yes, Sasha Stone, she’ll almost certainly win, but it’ll most likely be a squeaker. Hillary needs to get down on her knees and thank God she’s not running against a semi-sane, sensible-sounding Republican lunatic. If that was the case she’d almost certainly lose. She plots, she deceives, she connives, she faints, etc.