I cheered along with everyone else when Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger landed that US Airways jet on the Hudson on the opening day of the 2009 Sundance Film Festival and saved all those passengers from horrible death. I’ll therefore be cranked when I catch Clint Eastwood‘s Sully (Warner Bros., 9.9.16) four months hence. But are you gonna tell me Sully’s feat was even close to what Denzel Washington‘s William “Whip” Whitaker managed to do when things went wrong in Flight? Okay, so he’d had a few that day but he saved 96 out of 102 passengers. What a scene! And that co-pilot (Brian Geraghty)? A pathetic candy-ass.

Jonathan Jakubowicz‘s Hands of Stone (Weinstein Co., 8.26), a boxing + relationship period drama about the legendary Roberto Duran (Edgar Ramirez) and manager-coach Ray Arcel (Robert De Niro), will have a special non-competitive Cannes screening on Monday, 5.16. Pic costars Ellen Barkin, Rubén Blades, Ana de Armas and John Turturro. In prepared statements DeNiro and producer Harvey Weinstein indicated that the film, which completed shooting in March 2014, is more in the realm of Rocky than Raging Bull. Weinstein described it as “fun”; De Niro as a “good time.” Boilerplate: “The film is about the common history of Duran and Arcel, and about Duran’s successes of the ring in the ’70s and ’80s, including legendary fights against Sugar Ray Leonard.” Jakubowicz (Secuesto Express) directed and wrote.

(l. to r.) Ramirez, De Niro, Blades.

If I’m fully absorbing Larry Gross‘s riff, the best thing a director can be is (a) very bright, (b) profoundly talented and (c) possessed of a devotional attitude in terms of learning from the work of great directors. Some directors are instinctually gifted without being all that brainy or well-read but who’ve studied the greats (i.e., Steven Spielberg). Others are quite smart but with only modest talent (Woody Allen in Gross’s view). Or are modestly gifted but have learned everything they could from the best (Clint Eastwood in Gross’s view). And some are so in the grip of crackling intelligence that they seem to create more by design or scheme or deliberation than instinct. Which reputable directors appear (or have appeared) to possess all three attributes? Stanley Kubrick, for one. I know there’s a framed quote on a wall in Guillermo del Toro‘s Bleak House that references Albert Einstein, to wit: “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”

This is what Mel Gibson, Jason Statham or Bruce Willis do — try to save their daughters from kidnapping bad guys. Only this time it’s Nickola Shreli, an Albanian actor under the guidance of director-actor Malik Bader (Street Thief). Plus it feels like Nicholas Winding Refn‘s Pusher. Probably not a grade-A thing to judge from the third-tier festivals it’s played at, but at least it’s not the same old shite. I’d much rather see this than, say, The Nice Guys. Costarring Stivi Paskoski, Danijela Stajnfeld, Herion Mustafaraj.

The reason for Will Ferrell‘s recent decision to bail on playing a dementia-afflicted Ronald Reagan in an adaptation of Mike Rosolio’s Reagan basically boiled down to Twitter pushback and more particularly some outraged views posted by Reagan family members and allies.

I’m not saying that Ferrell’s performance as the nation’s 40th president or the film itself would have necessarily been legendary or world-class or even good, but it might have been. Having read the script, I posted an opinion on 4.27 (two days before the Ferrell turnabout) that “if and when it gets made with a decent director in charge, Reagan could turn out to be Ferrell’s most substantive film ever.”

Imagine if the news had somehow gotten around Twitter-style in 1940 that a 25 year-old upstart had persuaded the RKO honchos to greenlight a film that would contain negative, unflattering views of the life of William Randolph Hearst. The Hearst empire (which sought to have the film suppressed or better yet burned after it was completed) would have instantly tried to get RKO to pull the plug, and it’s at least possible that RKO, not having yet committed major funds to the project, might have caved. But somehow this didn’t happen, probably for reasons having to do with character and cojones.

Imagine also if 22 years later U.S. Air Force reps and the family of Gen. Curtis LeMay had gotten wind of Stanley Kubrick‘s intention to savagely lampoon LeMay in a Columbia film about nuclear war, and their combined efforts, assisted by sympathetic newspaper columnists, managed to persuade Columbia to pull out. It could have conceivably happened.

You don’t play baseball games in miserable, March-like weather. It was bad enough walking around in yesterday morning’s chilly, rainy atmosphere — the idea of huddling damp and shivering in a baseball park for three hours was unthinkable. But that didn’t stop Sunday’s Mets-Giants game from happening as scheduled. The decision to play under conditions that would have given pause to the Green Bay Packers was reprehensible — a corporate-level “fuck the fans” move. Hundreds showed up but notice the empty seats in the photo below. Jett, Cait and myself were among the no-shows. It would have better if the $230-something I paid for relatively decent seats near the third-base line had been given to a homeless person or donated to the Sanders campaign. I took a train to Connecticut and enjoyed a nice, kick-back day with no filing. It’ll be another decade or two before I even think about buying New York-area baseball tickets again, certainly in the spring.

Toward the end of a 5.1 New York piece that assesses the foreboding cultural-political impact of Donald Trump‘s presidential campaign, Andrew Sullivan writes the following: “More to the point, those Republicans desperately trying to use the long-standing rules of their own nominating process to thwart this monster deserve our passionate support, not our disdain.” The word “monster” isn’t a rash or cruel characterization of Trump — as Robert Kagan‘s 2.25 Washington Post op-ed piece explained in compelling if chilling terms, it’s an accurate one. Nor, obviously, is “demagogue” an unfair or inappropriate term. But Trump voters continue to eat, drink and think on another planet. It’s not that they’re oblivious to the game that Trump is playing or the spears he’s been throwing around, but they’re apparently still persuaded that his bully-boy, bull-in-a-china-shop attitudes are overlookable because at least he’ll shake things up and cut through the bullshit. The views of pundits like Sullivan and Kagan and pretty much the entire Washington D.C. cultural-political complex continue to fall on deaf ears. Because the Trump tune is largely about racial pushback, and in the view of white rurals it takes a monster to fight a monster, the latter being (in their minds) a sea-change in the cultural makeup of this country and the shifting power dynamics that have resulted. Trump is about race, stupid.

I’ve been reading about the Metrograph, a recently opened two-screen cinema at 7 Ludlow Street, and so this evening I dropped by. Nice two-story place. Brick exterior, spare design, darkish lighting. An upscale, refined salon for cineastes and cool cats. Beautiful wooden seats in theatre #1. (I didn’t visit theatre #2.) A restaurant and book shop upstairs. Exotic flavored popcorn (i.e., turmeric and cayenne pepper). They have the temerity to charge $4.00 for a roll of Reed’s cinnamon mints.

No marquee, austere, subdued but warmish.

I went to a 9:15 pm screening of Luchino Visconti‘s The Damned (’69), the classic ’30s-era melodrama about Naziism, steel mills, power and perversity. I haven’t seen it since the ’70s, but I have to say it underwhelmed. Makes its points about Germany’s Krupp family, leaves a strong impression but the shock value has worn off, and so you pay closer attention to the particulars.  I was surprised by how plain and even tedious the cinematography (by Pasquale De Santis and Armando Nannuzzi) seems at times — way too many zoom-ins and zoom-outs.

They showed an English-language version, which felt strange and even awful at times.

Helmut Berger is still a pervy hoot; Dirk Bogarde, Ingrid Thulin, Helmut Griem, etc. I didn’t hate it but it certainly hasn’t gained.

A 4.30 Politico piece by Annie Karni pours water on the idea of a Clinton-Warren ticket. She claims that while Hillary is intrigued by the idea of an all-female ticket, sources are saying she won’t ask Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who should have carried the progressive banner against Hillary instead of Bernie Sanders, to be her vice-president. One problem: Hillary is not and never will be the political lightning rod that Sanders is and which Warren is regarded as. The thunder of the last 12 months has been entirely about anti-Wall Street and anti-political-establishment feelings, and the only real excitement among voters, obviously, has been generated by the Sanders and Donald Trump candidacies. Hillary is a smart, crafty candidate who will almost certainly beat Trump, but she hasn’t harnessed the wildfire sentiments out there, certainly among the under-35s. If she wants to excite the Sanders progressives and do something that fence-sitters will actually feel cranked about, she should seriously think about partnering with Warren.

In a 4.25 N.Y. Times interview with Jodie Foster, Frank Bruni observes that Money Monster, her fourth directed film following Little Man Tate, Home For The Holidays and The Beaver, “is by far the most ambitious — a New York City thriller with SWAT teams, explosives, George Clooney and Julia Roberts.”

The other day I wrote that “if I was lord and dictator of The Nice Guys, I wouldn’t allow face-punching.” And if I was lord and dictator of Money Monster, I would definitely prohibit SWAT teams and explosives.

I realize that it’s about a hostage situation, and that Jack O’Connell‘s Kyle Budwell, a frenzied guy who’s lost everything, is holding a gun on Clooney’s Lee Gates, and that the rote thing would be for the SWAT guys to aim their weapons and pick him off if possible. But how sick are you of SWAT teams? How sick to death are you of movie explosions? I know this sounds silly, but what if Foster and the Money Monster writers were to respond to this dicey situation in a somewhat different way? Not just tactically but dramatically, I mean.

What if a TV station security guy or a detective from a nearby precinct were to say to everyone, “Look, can we break precedent for once and not send in the SWAT team? Yes, we’ve got a loose cannon threatening a guy but let’s tone it down. Let’s use our heads and figure this guy out and play it one soft step at a time.” I would melt in my seat if Money Monster did that. “Thank you, Jodie!,” I would shout from my tenth-row-seat.

Robert Towne went a little bit in this direction when he did an uncredited rewrite of 8 Million Ways to Die (’86), which was director Hal Ashby‘s last film. According to Ashby biographer Christopher Beach, Towne wrote a scene in which Jeff Bridges‘ Matt Scudder shoots a suspect who’s just hit a policeman with an unlikely weapon — a rocking chair. Ashby changed the weapon from a rocking chair to a baseball bat. Towne was furious at Ashby for doing so, and they were never entirely cordial after that.

Bottom line: Either you’re the kind of filmmaker who understands that rocking chairs are far more interesting, or you’re not. Either you get that people are sick of baseball bats, or you don’t.