Early last evening I attended a London hotel gathering for Jeff Nichols‘ Loving (Focus Features, 11.4), and right off the top had an easy chat with costars Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga. I’ve been snippy about some of Edgerton’s work in the past (though not his performances in Animal Kingdom or his 2009 BAM performance as Stanley Kowalski in Streetcar), but after five minutes of party chatter that whole attitude melted away. If you like somebody, you can’t help it. I’m still no fan of The Gift (which Edgerton directed and costarred in) but he’s definitely off the HE shit list. That phase is over.

I couldn’t get a decent shot of Joel and Ruth, but I was at least able to manipulate this one, taken without flash, into looking semi-decent with the help of PicMonkey (i.e., Adobe Photoshop for dumbshits like myself).

After seeing Loving in Cannes last May I immediately predicted some Best Actress heat for Negga’s quiet, sad-soulful performance, and I wasn’t wrong. Right now she’s neck and neck with La La Land‘s Emma Stone, Jackie‘s Natalie Portman, 20th Century Women‘s Annette Bening, Elle‘s Isabelle Huppert and Viola Davis‘s not-yet-seen performance in Fences.

Negga was wearing some killer Rodarte slacks with safety pins up and down the left-leg seam. I told her that last weekend Kristen Stewart was wearing a Rodarte suit with the same safety-pin signature at the Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk premiere.

Ruth Negga’s Rodarte safety-pin slacks, worn to last night’s Loving party.

One of the most frightening wake-ups of my life happened during a cross-country road trip. Three of us in a large Oldsmobile of some kind. We were on a two-lane blacktop somewhere in western Oklahoma, and I’d been sleeping scrunched-up in the back seat. Maybe 6 or 7 am. Somewhere in the recesses of my dawning consciousness I heard the angry chant of 15 gorillas — “Ooo-kachaka! Ooga-ooga-ooo-kachaka! Ooga-ooga-ooo-kachaka!” — getting louder and louder. I was muttering to myself “fuck is that?” and then suddenly a switch was thrown and I felt terrified. Gorillas! I sat up and realized a second later where I was and what I was hearing — Blue Swede’s “Hooked On A Feeling.” I’ve never forgotten that moment, and I never will.

It felt odd — curious — that in the space of 24 hours Alice in Wonderland author Lewis Carroll (aka Charles Dodgson) was injected into my head twice — first on HBO, and then again at the Grove.

Last Sunday night a passage from Alice was heard in episode #3 of Westworld. Jeffrey Wright asked Evan Rachel Wood to read an observation of Alice’s, one that not only hinted at a certain awakening but echoed what Wood’s “host” character, Dolores Abernathy, is starting to experience.

Author Charles Dodgson, whose pen name was Lewis Carroll.

And then Carroll reappeared the following night (Monday) when I paid to see Gavin O’Connor‘s The Accountant. Cynthia Addai-Robinson‘s Treasury Dept. analyst is exploring Ben Affleck‘s autism/Asperger’s affliction online, and she spends a half-minute looking into Carroll’s alleged experience with a similar condition.

It was enough to make me want to see The Secret Side of Lewis Carroll, a BBC2 documentary that aired last year and which asserted that while Carroll may have fit the profile of a gentle, well-behaved pedophile, he didn’t actually descend into that pit.

The one and only William Tell overture trailer for Stanley Kubrick‘s A Clockwork Orange (’71), which popped in the late summer or early fall of that year, was a landmark achievement in movie advertising. Nobody had ever seen anyone like it before. Hugh Atkin‘s Trumpwork Orange, which popped today, is a completely decent tribute piece. Kubrick’s trailer is after the jump.

Watch this scene from Ingmar Bergman‘s Persona and try to imagine Natalie Portman delivering Bibi Andersson‘s monologue with, say, Jennifer Lawrence reclining and listening a la Liv Ullman. Doesn’t work, does it? That’s because this kind of frank eroticism has all but disappeared from mainstream cinema. This landmark Bergman film didn’t open in the U.S. until March 1967, but the “promotional premiere” (whatever that was) happened in Stockholm exactly 50 years ago today. You can’t beat that black-and-white Sven Nykvist cinematography. It may be that my all-time favorite Bergman flick is The Silence (’63).

How long have I been explaining that any would-be tentpole flick that includes a looking-down shot of the hero swan-diving off a tall building is automatically and irrevocably shit? And if you add shots of guys flying from building to building a la Crouching Tiger and/or jumping off a two-story building onto the street below the movie has dug itself into an even deeper hole. Justin Kurzel, director of Assassin’s Creed (20th Century Fox, 12.21), went there anyway. Because…you tell me. Because he’s an animal? Add Michael Fassbender to the mix and you’re talking serious toxicity. Sidenote: Poor Jeremy Irons has been doing paycheck work since the mid ’90s. His first shameless-prostitute gig was playing the creepy villain in Die Hard With A Vengeance (’95). His great big-screen run lasted about 12 years — The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Moonlighting, Betrayal, Swann in Love, Dead Ringers, Reversal of Fortune, Kafka, Damage, M. Butterfly, The House of the Spirits. In ’84 I saw Irons opposite Glenn Close in the first Broadway version of The Real Thing. He was the absolute king of the world back then.

I’m totally down with the forthcoming Mad Max: Fury Road monochrome version (Warner Home Video, 12.6) but I’d also buy a black-and-white Bluray version of The Road Warrior (’82) in a New York minute. Nor would I mind attending a screening of the black-and-white Fury Road in a decent-sized theatre, just to get the full impact. Update: It’s playing at Cinefamily on Tuesday, November 1st. I take it Warner Home Video will be releasing a black-and-white only version plus a Bluray with both the color and b & w versions together…right? Or am I confusing the Australian version with the domestic?

Last night Michael Moore announced a Tuesday, 10.18 debut of a secret Donald Trump documentary, Michael Moore in Trumpland, at Manhattan’s IFC Center. The torrent that has spewed out of Trump (particularly since he shifted into full-meltdown mode following the Access Hollywood pussy tape and all the sexual-assault accusations) doesn’t need a Moore spin, but I’d love to share in the revelry all the same. Remember that Moore was voicing serious concern about a Trump victory as recently as…what, last July? Variety is describing it as “a film version of [Moore’s] one-man show, which he has been performing in Ohio.” Presumably a Los Angeles screening is being arranged as we speak. I’d love to see it between now and Thursday night as I leave for Savannah on Friday morning.

The Guardian reported yesterday that the Swedish Academy has heard nothing but silence from Bob Dylan about whether or not he’ll be in Stockholm on 12.10.16 to accept his Nobel prize in literature. “I am not at all worried,” Academy secretary Sara Danius is quoted saying. “I think he will show up.” What Dylan is saying with his silence: “I do what I do and that’s enough. I don’t believe in awards or taking bows at high falutin’ ceremonies. Is this some kind of rare honor, a tribute of a lifetime? Yeah, okay, but at the end of the day expressing fuck-all indifference is more important to me than graciousness or good manners. I’ll probably show up but maybe I won’t. I don’t owe shit to anyone or anything. I’ve been a weird-prick motherfucker before and I might be again.” Leonard Cohen agrees after a fashion: “To me, [the Nobel] is like pinning a medal on Mount Everest for being the highest mountain.”

Next Monday’s Academy screening + reception for Mel Gibson‘s Hacksaw Ridge (Lionsgate/Summit, 11.4) will be a kind of socially-ratifying ritual affirming the general presumption that Gibson is out of the doghouse. I’ll be at the Savannah Film Festival that night, so I’ve been given a chance to catch the World War II saga a bit earlier. Much obliged.

Lobby standee inside West Hollywood’s Grove plex, snapped last night (Monday, 10.17).

My only opportunity to see Gavin O’Connor‘s The Accountant pre-opening was last Wednesday’s Manhattan all-media screening. I blew that off in order to have dinner with Jett in a Bed-Stuy Mexican restaurant. So I saw it last night at the Grove. But within an hour I was ready to leave. Give me credit for sticking it out until the 90-minute mark.

I was moderately intrigued by the autistic assassin idea, but the film is only interested in using that concept to sell a same-old-malarkey action franchise about another lethal, emotionally remote action hero who eliminates bad guys like he’s channel-surfing or, you know, doing what comes naturally. Because he’s a brawny, stealthy, quietly charismatic killing machine of few words…zzzzzz.

Ben Affleck‘s Christian Wolff may be an emotionally remote math wiz, but he’s still Bruce Wayne mixed with John Wick plus (as noted by Atlantic critic Chris Orr) Christian Bale’s Michael Burry character in The Big Short. Who received martial arts training as a child from a robe-wearing, bald-headed Asian instructor…Jesus! That’s when I decided to leave early. If an action film attempting to launch a franchise (and that’s really the basic game here, an origin story that might launch three or four Christian Wolff flicks) can’t create a backstory without resorting to fucking martial-arts training at a formative age, I for one won’t participate.

On top of which I really couldn’t figure out some of the plot teasings, and I really didn’t want to make the effort. I paid money to see this thing and now I have to screw my brain down and work to figure it out? Fuck that. On top of which I can never understand much of what Anna Kendrick is saying with her thin little pipsqueak vocal fry. (Everything she says is a variation on the old Minnie Mouse helium voice…beep-beepity-beep-beep.) On top of which I felt like an idiot for having paid to see this, sitting there in the front row with my fucking small popcorn and large bottle of Dasani water.

Plus The Accountant has no sense of moral order or clarity or balance. Does anyone in this film breathe ordinary oxygen? Every character except Kendrick’s is fairly full of it, side-stepping, double-dealing, lying, misrepresenting, living by some expedient ethical code, a killer or an enabler of same. Or greedy. On top of which I don’t believe that a Treasury Department employee with a soiled past (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) would have been hired in the first place without her background being discovered. Don’t even start with that shit.