Deadline‘s Mike Fleming and Pert Bart discuss The Godfather and particularly Francis Coppola‘s soon-to-publish “Godfather Notebook” (Regan Arts, 12.20) which is selling for $50 bills or thereabouts.

Among the new Black List scripts, I’m mainly interested in reading Elyse Hollander‘s Blonde Ambition, which is about Madonna‘s personal struggles in New York City in the early ’80s and the burning hoops she had to jump through in order to record her first album, Madonna, which popped in July ’83 and included “Borderline”, “Burning Up” and “Lucky Star.”  I’d also like to read Dan Gilroy‘s Inner City, his Denzel movie (Michael Clayton meets The Verdict) about a Los Angeles attorney facing an ethical crisis. Can someone send me PDFs of these plus whatever other scripts they think are worth reading? Update: A good fellow has sent me the whole 2016 Black List library — thanks!

“The first Star Wars trilogy had a fresh, insurgent energy, and learning the names of all those planets and galactic adventurers has seemed, to generations of fans, like a new and special kind of fun. Now, though, it is starting to feel like drudgery, a schoolbook exercise in a course of study that has no useful application and that will never end.

“Masquerading as a heroic tale of rebellion, Rogue One‘s true spirit is Empire all the way down. Like the fighters on the planet Scarif, which is surrounded by an all-but-impenetrable atmospheric shield, you are trapped inside this world, subjected to its whims and laws. You can’t escape, because it is the supposed desire to escape that brought you here in the first place.

“Rogue One has no will to persuade the audience of anything other than the continued strength of the brand. It doesn’t so much preach to the choir as propagandize to the captives, telling us that we’re free spirits and partners on the journey. The only force at work here is the force of habit.” — from A.O. Scott‘s N.Y. Times review.

And yet 128 critics have had enough supportive things to say for Rogue One to have an 82% Rotten Tomatoes rating. And yet it’s only managed a 66% rating on Metacritic.

A little more than a half-century ago we had a rich-guy president, well-educated and eloquent on the stump, not without his shortcomings (i.e., girls, a strain of recklessness) but inspirational and focused and responsible as far as that went, plagued with a bad back and Addison’s disease but otherwise slender and attractive. By today’s standards he’d be a moderate Republican. Today we have a rich guy President-elect who’s a defiantly ignorant authoritarian and a sociopath in the tradition of Putin and Berlusconi — the only temperamentally unbalanced chief executive in U.S. history, determined to undermine civilized discourse and sensible government as most of us have known it for decades, and a fat ass on top of everything else — the most grotesquely proportioned U.S. president since William Howard Taft. And you know what? If JFK had been born in 1965 and run as the Democratic candidate instead of Hillary Clinton a sizable percentage of the red-state idiots would’ve voted for him instead of Trump, and we wouldn’t be facing a four-year nightmare. God help us.

Fresh from treatment in a Los Angeles psychiatric hospital, Kanye West spoke this morning with President-Elect Donald Trump, which naturally fueled speculation that West may perform at Trump’s inauguration next month. Trump and West posed for photos in the lobby afterwards. Trump said they talked about “life…we discussed life.” Trump said he and West are “friends, just friends. He’s a good man. Long time. Friends for a long time.” Deranged and delusional, both of them.

Speaking three or four days ago at the Dubai Film festival (and quoted in a 12.10 Wrap piece by Matt Pressberg), Samuel L. Jackson derided Oscar-bait movies as films that people don’t really want to see but have to put up with during award season. Well, they don’t have to put up with them but, to go by Jackson’s interpretation, they’d rather not even consider them as an option.

The blazingly shallow Samuel L. Jackson, snapped last weekend in Dubai.

What a Shallow Hal Jackson is. An empty Coke bottle looking to do paycheck movies for the rest of his life, and polluting the common spiritual pool a bit more with every self-regarding performance. 

If it weren’t for award season Hollywood would be all empty escape, bullshit fantasy, CG-driven slop, comic-book pulp, gross-out comedies, empty diversion — it would die and shrivel from a lack of soul.

Jackson is probably correct when he derides sensitive slogs like Collateral Beauty, at least to go by Owen Gleiberman’s Variety review. Nobody with a lick of sense is looking forward to that Warner Bros. release.

But Jackson is dead wrong and broadcasting from the Planet Uranus when he says that Manchester By The Sea is “not an inclusive film.”

There are two aspects of Garth Edwards and Tony Gilroy‘s Rogue One (Disney, 12.16) that I was really and truly impressed by, and I can’t mention either of them. Well, I could but it would be shitty of me. The first weekend crowd is entitled to be surprised as much as I was last night. As far as overall reactions are concerned, I’m going to summarize the basics and mix in some iPhone jottings that I tapped out last night at Mel’s Diner on the Strip, and then blend in comments from four seasoned know-it-alls who also caught it yesterday.

My basic reaction is “okay…if that’s how you want to play it, fine….I’m sure it’ll make a lot of dough. The question is ‘how much?'” My second reaction is “boy, I wonder what this thing was before Tony Gilroy came along and rewrote 40% of it and punched it all up.”

I came, I saw, I wilted and I sure as shit didn’t “care” that much. I wasn’t actually indifferent but I was saying to myself “I’m not into this” almost immediately. But I didn’t mind it, as such. Then I started to get into it toward the end, but emotional engagement definitely hadn’t happened. But Rogue One does play right into A New Hope — it all feeds in and craftily at that, and this I found satisfying.

Remember those secret Death Star plans that Princess Leia put into R2D2, plans that she wanted Obi Wan Kenobi to have, etc.? That’s what Rogue One is basically about — how the rebels got hold of those plans and figured out the basic structural weakness of the Death Star (i.e., “the weapon”). And don’t scream “spoiler” at me — this summary is right there on the Wiki page.

I was highly impressed, as noted, by at least two secret respects, but among the plus-elements I’m able to mention the huge extended battle scene (which seems to go on for at least 25 or 30 minutes and possibly a bit longer) is simultaneously dazzling and exhausting.

David Lynch‘s Blue Velvet — the movie that restored his reputation after the debacle of Dune — opened a little more than 30 years ago. True story: I did publicity for New Line Cinema in ’85 and ’86, and one of the films I focused on in particular was A Nightmare on Elm Street, Part 2. A colleague told me a story about calling Hope Lange, who had recently costarred in Nightmare 2 as well as Blue Velvet. He was calling about some print interviews he’d arranged for her to do, but as they began speaking he realized Lange was under the impression that he was working on Blue Velvet. When he explained otherwise, her gracious and inviting tone disappeared. “Oh, you’re calling about the other film,” Lange said.

From Paul Krugman‘s “The Tainted Election,’ posted on 12.12: “Did the combination of Russian and F.B.I. intervention swing the election? Yes. Mrs. Clinton lost three states — Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania — by less than a percentage point, and Florida by only slightly more.

“If she had won any three of those states, she would be president-elect. Is there any reasonable doubt that Putin/Comey made the difference?

“And it wouldn’t have been seen as a marginal victory, either. Even as it was, Mrs. Clinton received almost three million more votes than her opponent, giving her a popular margin close to that of George W. Bush in 2004.

“So this was a tainted election. It was not, as far as we can tell, stolen in the sense that votes were counted wrong, and the result won’t be overturned. But the result was nonetheless illegitimate in important ways; the victor was rejected by the public, and won the Electoral College only thanks to foreign intervention and grotesquely inappropriate, partisan behavior on the part of domestic law enforcement” — i.e., Comey.

A friend who saw Rogue One at the Pantages two nights ago calls it “the best Star Wars film I’ve ever seen.” I asked what his favorite Star Wars film is, and he answered The Empire Strikes Back. Me: “You’re saying it strikes the same kind of heavy chords?” Friend: “Well, it’s not as darkly themed or artily photographed but it’s really good…they had to start from scratch with brand-new characters.”

I could have gone into my song-and-dance about Empire being such a one-of-a-kind thing, but I didn’t want to be tedious. But I doubt that Rogue One is going to be all about losing, betrayals, self-doubt, hauntings and evil having its way, which is what consumes Irvin Kershner‘s 1980 film. (And which is precisely what’s happening in this country right now.) They’re no glory in Empire. The heroes get their asses kicked from beginning to end, and at the end they’re grateful not to be dead and ready for a nap. Like most of us these days.

An out-of-town critic who saw it this morning said the following: “I’m not much of a Star Wars fan, but this one struck me as easily one of the best in the series. It goes on too long — 133 minutes — with one of those endless battle sequences at its climax, but the story is pretty interesting, there is actually some moral complexity, and it appears the franchise has finally entered the 21st century in terms of casting. The heroes are a Mexican, an English woman, two Asians and a Pakistani/Muslim/Englishman. So the film’s racial and ethnic composition is kind of a ‘fuck you’ to Trump and the alt-right.”

I’m seeing Rogue One this evening at 7 pm on the Disney lot.

For the 17th time: The fact that I adore grimly serious fast-car movies means that I have no choice but to loathe the Fast and Furious franchise, and to condemn F. Gary Gray‘s The Fate of the Furious (Universal, 4.4.17) sight unseen. Because this franchise has steadfastly refused to invest in any semblance of road reality, and has thereby locked me out of the action time and again.

Because I really love that low-key Steve McQueen machismo thing. I worshipped the driving sequences in Nicholas Winding Refn‘s Drive. Those screeching, howling tires and clouds of smelly white smoke in their wake. The kind we can really believe in. Hey, guys? McQueen is looking down from heaven, and he thinks you’re all pathetic. Particularly Diesel and Johnson.

Last night I watched the last three episodes of HBO’s Divorce, which I’ve liked enough to stay with but not enough to write about. But here I am writing about the music played over the closing credits of episode #10 — the Little River Band‘s “Lonesome Loser.” This was never more than a second-tier song (the lyrics are kind of awful in a self-pitying way) but it got me nonetheless. Because the chorus has a nice hooky harmony thing, and because it’s been 30-plus years since I’ve had a listen. All to say there are some songs out there that you know aren’t very good but you listen to them anyway, especially when you’re driving. I have a place in my head for songs like this, and I’m sorry.