Amy Zimmerman’s Daily Beast hit piece about Casey Affleck popped on 11.22 — five days ago. Thanksgiving weekend is a bad time to try and ignite discussion or gain traction. My first reaction was to leave it alone, and as of this morning I was still inclined to ignore it. But two journo pals have written me over the last two days, both asserting that “the takedown campaign has begun.” And yet so far, silence. But if others start hammering away on Monday and Tuesday, I guess there’ll be no stopping it and I’ll have to jump in whole hog. But I respectfully believe that it should stop here and now. Really. Let it go.

Affleck is described in the Zimmerman piece as having sexually harassed and intimidated to some extent I’m Not There producer Amanda White and dp Magdalena Gorka six or seven years ago. Affleck may have behaved unfortunately, but he didn’t do anything that would fall under the headings of “grotesque” or “ghastly” or “criminal.” While he may have acted in a boorish fashion, Affleck didn’t assault or hurt anyone, and while he was hit with a civil lawsuit (which he settled) he was never charged with anything. It was never on that level.

In an 11.4 N.Y. Times interview/profile of Affleck by Cara Buckley, Affleck was asked if he felt responsibility in the matter, and he replied that he did not. ‘It was settled to the satisfaction of all,’ he explained. ‘I was hurt and upset — I am sure all were — but I am over it. It was an unfortunate situation, mostly for the innocent bystanders of the families involved.'”

I believe in a separation of church (cinema) and state (personal lives of filmmakers, p.c. judgments about this or that incident of alleged bad behavior). I’ve heard stories about almost everyone in this town having acted in some kind of questionable or sleazy or abrasive manner at one time or another. It’s a slippery slope when you start saying “yeah, that’s a great film but the producer is an asshole or the lead actor betrayed his girlfriend or I got into a fender-bender with the screenwriter” or whatever.

I didn’t think that Roman Polanski‘s legal troubles in the mid ’70s should have anything to do with how good or award-worthy The Pianist was, but the online pitchforkers sure did. They tried to tar and feather Polanski that year (i.e, 2002) but he won the Best Director Oscar anyway.

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Last night I watched a high-def streaming version of Lonely Are The Brave, and was dazzled once again by Philip Lathrop‘s immaculate black-and-white photography, and especially the exquisite balance in his framings. Lathrop also shot The Americanization of Emily, The Cincinnati Kid and Point Blank.

Posted on 7.29.12: “All my life I’ve been telling people that Lonely Are The Brave (’62) is one of Kirk Douglas‘s finest films, and that his performance as Jack Burns, an obstinate old-school cowboy, was his most touching. I said this to Douglas when I interviewed him 30-odd years ago in Laredo, Texas [i.e., fall of ’82], and he agreed with me. But have you watched it lately?

“I respect Lonely Are The Brave for what it does right. I love the plainness and the simplicity of it. I love Walter Matthau‘s performance as the sheriff who gets what Douglas’s Jack Burns character (or the Burns metaphor) is basically about, and who sympathizes with him. I love the widescreen black-and-white photography. And early on there’s a very well-handled scene between Burns and an ex-girlfriend, played by Gena Rowlands.

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Somebody said yesterday that the enemies and victims of Fidel Castro’s dictatorship felt doubly infuriated by the fact that he lived to the ripe old age of 90. Some would have preferred, I’m supposing, a harsher fate. Like  the one that enveloped Romania’s Nicolae Ceausescu, the notorious Communist despot who was overthrown and machine-gunned to death (along with his despised wife, Elena) 27 years ago.

Ceausescu’s end happened on Christmas day, and began to be reported on 12.26. I was married then. We were all visiting Maggie’s family in Capitola, right near Santa Cruz. Dylan was a month old; Jett was a year and a half.

So after thinking about Castro yesterday I began to re-read summaries of the Romanian revolution, but I mainly focused on videos. [After the jump.] Footage of the execution of the Ceausescus actually missed most of what happened; the shooting began before the camera crew was ready. So I was surprised yesterday to come upon these two photos, which apparently are genuine. The clouds of plaster dust and the flying hat seem especially convincing. It looks like a clip from the final shoot-out in Sam Peckinpah‘s The Wild Bunch. An excellent job by whomever if the photos are fakes. They may have been on the web for ages but I never saw them until yesterday.

My first thought was that strictly from an aesthetic perspective these are the kind of brutal images that war photographers live for. Robert Capa would’ve given his eye teeth to catch something like this during the Spanish Civil War.

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I don’t know how long this has been on Google Maps or how long it’ll last, but I captured it 30 minutes ago (i.e., 9:25 pm Pacific). I don’t know how many people besides Mark Ebner were on to it. Sunday, 11.27 update: I read late last night that “Dump Tower” had been removed, but it still appears if you type in “Trump Tower, New York, NY.”

It’s lame of me to post this, especially given that it’s four days old, but the footage of Gary the cunnilingus dog, starting at 1:50, is worth it in itself. Never before revealed: Sometime in the fall of ’82 I was drinking with a bunch of actors at the old Cafe Central (75th and Columbus), i.e., the place where Bruce Willis used to bartend. Carrie Fisher was sitting a couple of chairs away from me. I waited for the conversation to downshift and then leaned over and said “hey” to her, told her my name, etc. She was in no way obliged to give me the time of day, but I thought I’d take a shot anyway. Bad idea. She gave me one of those looks that said “do you want trouble?” Alternate translation: “You’re saying hello for what reason again?” A voice told me I shouldn’t have, but I was batting around .400 back then and figured I probably wouldn’t hit a brick wall.

Silence musical composer Robbie Robertson to Toronto Star‘s Peter Howell on Martin Scorsese‘s latest (from 11.24 post): “It’s really unusual. It’s so different from anything he’s ever done. It’s different from anything around. The whole mood of this movie is different. It’s different visually, the visual tone of it. Some of (Scorsese’s) movies are bang, bang, boom, boom…this one is called Silence, and it’s a meditation — a painful one but beautiful.”

HE question: Painful in what sense? For the Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver‘s Jesuit priest characters, of course, but an underlying shudder hit me when I read that.

Which reminds me: The National Board of Review allegedly saw Silence a few days ago. It will screen for the NY Film Critics Circle on Wednesday, 11.30 — four days hence. On Tuesday, 11.29, Scorsese’s film will be shown to 400 Jesuits in Rome. Guild and Academy screenings will begin next weekend, the very first happening on 12.3. So why hasn’t Paramount sent out invites to big-city blogaroos like myself? If they were planning to screen it for guys like me sometime next week (i.e., between Monday, 11.28 and Friday, 12.2), they’d have said so by now.

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First came last Tuesday’s report by New York‘s Gabriel Sherman that Hillary Clinton was being urged by a group of prominent computer scientists and election lawyers to call for a recount in three swing states won by Donald Trump — Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — which, they strongly suspect, may have been manipulated or hacked.

Then yesterday’s (11.25) Washington Post piece by Eric Chenoweth, co-director of the Institute for Democracy in Eastern Europe, reminded that there is abundant evidence that Russian hackers elaborately interfered in U.S. election process over the past several months.

And now comes today’s news that Hillary Clinton’s campaign will support an election recount effort, launched by Green Party candidate Jill Stein, in the battleground state of Wisconsin. TheWrap reports that “as of Saturday morning, Stein’s campaign raised more than $5.7 million online,” and that “the Green Party’s plan is to also file recount efforts in the swing states of Michigan and Pennsylvania.” Which the Clinton campaign is also down with.

Are these recounts likely to change the winner of the Presidential election? No, but if hackers (Russian or otherwise) managed to wrongfully swing a significant number of votes to Trump in any of these three states, that information should be obviously be aired and howled about.

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Speaking at the recent Airb&b Open Conference in Los Angeles, Gwynneth Paltrow shared some thoughts that suggested she’s open to the idea of being in Donald Trump‘s corner, or at least that she’s potentially receptive to the social convulsions that Trump’s Presidency might bring about.

“It’s such an exciting time to be an American because we are at this amazing inflection point,” Paltrow said. “People are clearly tired of the status quo, and…it’s sort of like someone threw it all in the air and we’re going to see how it all lands. It’s very important for me, personally, now more than ever, to create a community and to remember the humanity of everybody and to create love and…understanding. The most amazing thing for me about this election is I felt…‘I don’t understand the opposition well enough at all.’ I’m not going to tell you what side I’m on, but my big takeaway was, ‘I really need to open my mind and understand better because I don’t.’”

At the very least Paltrow has joined that odious community, headed by Jimmy Fallon and Oprah Winfrey, that has sought to normalize Trump by suggesting that he’s not so bad. May she suffer for this.

This five-day-old Apple ad (“Frankie’s Holiday“) is perfect. Delicate, compassionate, handsome, performed just so, exquisite cinematography. The director is Park Pictures‘ Lance Accord, who directed “Misunderstood,” the awesome 2014 Apple ad. He also did the cinematography for Spike Jonze‘s Where The Wild Things Are and Adaptation and Sofia Coppola‘s Lost in Translation, Lost in Translation and Marie Antoinette. Frankenstein’s monster is played by Everybody Loves Raymond‘s Brad Garrett, who stands 6’8″. Fair question: Apart from “Frankie” playing a Perry Como tune on an iPhone, what does this ad have to do with Apple product? Answer: Nothing.

Fidel Castro was no sweetheart, granted, but we helped to motivate and create him. Don’t kid yourself. Read your Chomsky, your I.F. Stone. Hell, any fair-minded historian. Ask Pablo Larrain, Alejandro G. Inarritu, Guillermo del Toro, Roger Durling, Alfonso Cuaron…any Latin-born filmmaker or film connoisseur who knows whereof he speaks.

Before Castro the U.S. had long regarded Latin America as fertile territory to be exploited. The Monroe Doctrine basically stated that European powers were to leave Latin America alone so we could exploit it for our own interests. The building of the Panama Canal was a constructive trade enabler, but primarily one of many operations that was mostly about serving U.S. interests.

We allied ourselves with Central and South American military regimes all through the 20th Century — i.e., right-leaning frontmen for the oligarchs (i.e., the upper-crust elite), which have always been in league with U.S. interests and the coldly capitalist, market-driven finaglings of the International Monetary Fund. And the lower classes have always had to eat bean dip.

The CIA engineered a coup d’etat in Guatamela in 1954 against a Democratically elected leader, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, because he was too independent-minded, not enough of a U.S.-favoring toady. In 1973 we helped engineer a brutal coup against Salvador Allende in Chile for the same reason.

Remember that Havana boardroom scene in The Godfather, Part II in which Batista confers with Michael Corleone and the heads of other U.S. corporate interests (i.e., the “United” Telephone & Telegraph company, United Fruit)? Did you get a feeling from that scene that these were good guys following humanistic impulses?

For all his flaws Fidel Castro was the first strong Latin American leader to assert nativist independence and tell U.S. interests to back off. As Oliver Stone‘s South of the Border explained a few years ago, almost all of South America had elected similar nativist leaders in the 21st Century — the late Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, Bolivia’s Evo Morales, Brazil’s Lula da Silva, Argentina’s Cristina Kirchner (along with her husband and ex-President Nestor Kirchner), Paraguay’s Fernando Lug and Ecuador’s Rafael Correa — a sea change that was partly inspired by Castro.

We tried to oust and assassinate Castro in the ’60s, remember. We enabled him to be an alarmist and, for a time, to rally the Cuban people against us. We gave him the rationale, the fuel to run Cuba with a severe ideological hand — no question. If Castro was a tyrannical asshole, the U.S. provided the abusive influence that led to that mentality.

Who doesn’t admire Fidel Castro for leading a hard-won guerilla campaign against Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, the manifestly corrupt U.S.-backed general who ran that exploited country from 1952 to ’59?  Castro campaigned, fought and organized against Batista’s government from ’52 on. He did nearly two years in jail, from ’53 to ’55. He left Cuba for Mexico, and then returned with 81 comrades in December 1956. But their ranks were quickly thinned by gunfire and whatnot, and so the Castro revolution began in the hills of Cuba’s Sierra Maestra mountains with less than 20 guys. Their numbers grew. They fought like motherfuckers for just over two years. As admirers of The Godfather, Part II will tell you, the Batista government fled the country right around New Year’s Eve 1958 along with Michael Corleone, Fredo Corleone, Hyman Roth, Sen. Pat Geary…they all got the hell outta there.

Then came Castro’s visit to the States, the seizing of elite Cuban property, the Cuban firing squads, the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in April ’61`, the ’62 Cuban Missile Crisis, the exile of the Marielitos that led to the arrival of Antonio Montana in Miami and the resultant deaths of Frank Lopez and Detective Mel Bernstein. Not to mention the constant taunting and defiance of several U.S. Presidents, Kennedy in particular. The years flew by and Fidel hung on with the beard and the cigars, the tenacity and the belligerence. Even with President Obama’s recent relaxing of relations and for all the music and all the classic ’50s autos, Castro’s Cuba is still is an impoverished, down-at-the-heels place with all kinds of repressive measures against gays and political dissent. 

And now Fidel is dead at age 90. He was undoubtedly a shit as well as a taskmaster, visionary and tireless propagandist. Quite the legendary figure. You can’t say he didn’t swagger around or that he didn’t have a steel pair. Communists are made, not born. Castro was on the right side of history in the ’50s, but after taking power in Cuba…well, remember the dictator in Woody Allen‘s Bananas who said that the new language of San Marcos would now be Swedish and that everyone would have to change their underwear every half-hour? Castro obviously wasn’t that bad but he wasn’t exactly Simon Bolivar either.

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Posted in N.Y. Times on 11.22 — “Democrats’ Leadership Fight Pits West Wing Against Left Wing” by Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman: “Struggling to respond to Donald J. Trump’s victory, a group of shellshocked Democrats moved swiftly to endorse Representative Keith Ellison of Minnesota for chairman of the Democratic National Committee, hoping that he would be a fresh face for a party with a depleted bench.

“But after steadily adding endorsements from leading Democrats in his bid to take over the party, Mr. Ellison is encountering resistance from a formidable corner: the White House. (It’s not highly significant to note that Ellison is African-American, but it does add to the intrigue.)

“In a sign of the discord gripping the party, President Obama’s loyalists, uneasy with the progressive Mr. Ellison, have begun casting about for an alternative, according to multiple Democratic officials close to the president.

“The battle pits the titans of the Democratic Party against one another, with Mr. Obama’s camp at odds with figures like Chuck Schumer, the new Senate Democratic leader, and Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.”

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