Where are all the descendants of Maximilien Robespierre who were looking to discipline Hollywood Elsewhere last January for not being a big enough fan of The Birth of a Nation when everyone at Sundance was going “whoo-whoo Nate Parker!” Now that Nate and The Birth of a Nation are between a rock and a hard place, all those Robespierres are pretending that last January never happened. Because the only thing they care about is the bon ami of the crowd and not bucking the tide.

HE, meanwhile, has held firm. I still say that as underwhelming as The Birth of a Nation may seem to this or that viewer, it deserves respect as a tribute to Nat Turner and the importance of that 1831 rebellion. Parker also deserves kudos for having struggled hard and long to get it made, and having delivered a reasonably decent film. Some readers are sick of hearing me repeat myself, I know, but I wanted to say this one more time before Birth opens on Friday 10.7. I know the film is on the ropes. I’m aware that the expected box-office tally isn’t going to break records (i.e., in the vicinity of $9 or $10 million in roughly 2000 theatres).

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I don’t where this idea came from, but Sonny Corleone (James Caan) went down in a hail of machine-gun bullets sometime during the warmer months of 1947 or ’48, when Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) was hiding out in Sicily. Michael returned to the U.S. in ’50. The murder of the heads of the five families (along with that of the turncoat Carlo) happened on the day of the baptism of Carlo and Connie’s daughter in 1951. Check with any Corleone family timeline — this, this, this or this — and they all say ’47 or ’48. For some reason this Sonny Corleone Wiki page claims 10.3.51, but it’s wrong.

Paolo Sorrentino‘s The Young Pope (HBO, February 2017) stars Jude Law as a fictional Pope who is called Pius XIII, but was born Lenny Belardo. That’s not the name of willful priest who rises in the ranks, but the name of a good buddy of John Travolta‘s Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever or Danny Aiello‘s top pizza chef in Do The Right Thing. Even the crudest Italian family, domestic or Italian, would name their infant son Leonardo, no? Pope will pop in less than three weeks (10.21) on Sky Atlantic in Italyy and Germany, and then six days later in Great Britain. The ten-episode series costars Diane Keaton, James Cromwell, Silvio Orlando, Scott Shepherd, Cécile de France and Ludivine Sagnier.

Tate Taylor‘s The Girl on the Train (Universal 10.7) is no Gone Girl, that’s for sure. And Taylor, as if you didn’t know, is no David Fincher. The movie is trash — a female Joe Eszterhas meets Peyton Place meats Fatal Attraction meets Anna Karenina. And the ending! This won’t stop fans of the 2015 novel from seeing it, of course. I talked to a couple of guys after the screening, guys who should’ve known better, and they were going “hmmm, not awful, moderately okay, will sell a lotta tickets,” etc.

Paula Hawkins‘ popular if tawdry airport fiction novel, set in a middle-class London suburb, has been made into an American companion piece, set in upscale suburbia along the Hudson. It’s contrived garbage masquerading as some kind of suffering woman’s parable about…what, escaping the chains of marital servitude and pushing back against suffocating male figures in so many women’s lives? Something like that.

Rachel Watson (Emily Blunt), a bleary-eyed, pasty-faced alcoholic who’s divorced her husband Tom (Justin Theroux) for infidelity, trains into Manhattan each day even though her drinking has left her unemployed. Almost every time the train passes by the home of Scott and Megan Hipwell (Luke Evans, Haley Bennett), who lived nearby when Rachel was married, something openly sexual is going on. Which Rachel can’t help but stare at. The train obliges her voyeurism by moving extra slow while passing by the Hipwell abode.

Then Megan goes missing, and then Rachel starts obsessively probing into their history as well as the current life of Tom and his new wife, Anna (Rebecca Ferguson), and their infant child. This situation deeply unsettles Rachel because her alcoholism, we learn, was an outgrowth of her inability to get pregnant while married to Tom. In any event Rachel’s obsessive, unbalanced behavior manages to persuade a local detective (Allison Janney) that she might be the guilty party and yaddah yaddah.

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Last night’s Westworld debut was a bowl of satisfaction. Richer, spookier, more complex than the 1973 Michael Crichton film. The Groundhog Day repetition element is brilliant, and then Evan Rachel Wood finally swats the fly…perfect. It was just one episode (and yes, I’ve heard the quality doesn’t sustain) but right away it felt like a 2016 BMW compared to Crichton’s ’73 Chevy Nova. A better thing texturally, thematically, technically, acting-wise.

Crichton told the tale from the vantage point of visiting tourists (James Brolin, Richard Benjamin) — HBO co-creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy have smartly reversed this scheme. Those poor androids are weeping inside, anguished and confused and yet starting to quietly contemplate the murder of their creator (Anthony Hopkins). Hopkins’ death, trust me, is going to be quite gruesome.

I had an idea before watching last night that Ed Harris would be playing Yul Brynner…nope. It’s also interesting that the droids have been programmed to interact with each other on their own time with no visitors in sight.

And what’s with the milk obsession? Vats of thick, milk-like gloop in the laboratory, milk pouring out of androids through bullet holes, milk being chugged from bottles.

There are few famous people whom I think less of and in fact loathe more intensely than Kim Kardashian, the ultimate empty vessel whose fame and fortune are metaphors for social doom and decay. For the sake of common decency as well as her children’s well-being I’m glad she wasn’t hurt by those Parisian thugs who took her jewelry and cell phones and tied her up in the bathroom, but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to briefly muttering “good, serves her right” when I first heard the news. She lives in this completely puerile, grotesquely affluent, Marie Antoinette-like bubble, and then wham — reality intrudes in the form of a robbery. Pardon me for shedding no tears.

Incidentally: Kanye West stopped a Queens concert that he was performing when he heard the news. He stiffs his audience so he can (a) call Kim in Paris, (b) ask if she’s okay, (c) tell her he loves her, and (d) make sure she’s double-protected by private security? What else can he do from 3600 miles away? The phone calls would have taken 10 or 15 minutes. A pro would have finished. The show must go on.

The just-released Film Detective Bluray of Fielder Cook‘s Patterns (’56) has been mastered at 1.66, which is fine by HE standards. I saw it for the first time last August via Amazon Prime streaming (here’s my mini-review), and I’m sure Film Detective will understand my preference for watching it at 1.33, which is how Amazon Prime presents it. Cook directed the live TV version a year before the film came out, remember, and had therefore already composed with a boxy visual scheme. Again — I’m not saying the 1.66 a.r. isn’t acceptable. I’m just a boxy obsessive. In the realm of mid 50s black-and-white films, 1.66 is certainly preferable to Paramount Home Video’s Bluray cleavering of Billy Wilder‘s Sabrina at 1.78:1. I happen to own an Amazon streaming version at 1.33, and it’s quite beautiful.

1.66:1

1.33:1

1.33:1

1.66:1

When actors get into strident on-screen arguments and start jawing their opponents with a challenge of some kind, they always add a “huh?” to the end of each statement. Such as “what will you do if you knock on her door and her husband answers…huh?” or “what kind of brilliant move will this be if your friends wind up hating you…huh?” I’m mentioning this because people in real life never say “huh?” — only actors. It’s something they all pick up in acting school or whatever. I can only say that I’ve never argued with anyone in my life who has ever used a “huh?” at the end of any sentence. Tell me I’m wrong.

I haven’t seen Paul Schrader‘s American Gigolo since it opened in February 1980. I may have actually caught it at a Manhattan press screening a few weeks before, come to think. Soon after I sat down with Schrader for a Films in Review interview piece (Vol. XXXI, issue 5, pages 284 — 276, “Paul Schrader: American Gigolo and Other Matters”). It was the beginning of a slicker, less gritty era mixed with the currents of darkness and depravity that you get with any Schrader film.

Richard Gere was young and beautiful then, of course, and the world of Manhattan was a smooth and seductive realm that was at the forefront of change. I recall thinking as I was writing the Schrader piece in my West 4th Street studio that the ’70s were being jettisoned and that “the 80s!” was a whole ‘nother state of mind. Glammy, greedier.  Reaganism was waiting in the wings. 

I was working hard and feeling anxious about money 24/7.  I regarded myself as a so-so writer, at best.  I would do cocaine and/or quaaludes whenever fortune smiled, and every so often I’d succumb to momentary feelings of shallow ecstasy. I used to dream about wearing great-looking Italian suits and shoes just like Gere does in this clip, except I couldn’t afford them. And yet somehow my impoverished circumstances didn’t interfere with my batting average, which was around .400.

A few months before seeing Gigolo I had donned a pair of black Raybans at a New York Film Festival opening-night party, and Andrew Sarris, standing nearby, cracked that I looked “like a Roman pimp in a Fellini film” — a moment of brief comfort.  No big-gun critic had ever spoken to me with even a hint of affection or bon ami before.

I haven’t seen Gigolo in 36 years, and I’m thinking I’d like to catch it again at the Aero this evening, but watching a 35mm print concerns me. How pink will it be? A DCP of Schrader’s Hardcore (’79) will follow. Schrader will drop by for a brief q & a at some point during the evening.

I have so completely given up on Tim Burton that I didn’t even flirt with the idea of seeing Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (20th Century Fox, 9.30). I figured it would just be another design-driven film aimed at the family trade, which is what many are calling it. With the exception of Mars Attacks!, I was with Burton all the way from Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure to Sweeney Todd. For me Ed Wood was the creative peak with Beetlejuice right behind it. But I lost patience when Burton began focusing mostly on CG-driven films that seemed to be more about production design than characters or hip attitudes — Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Alice In Wonderland, Dark Shadows, Frankenweenie. Yes, Big Eyes repped a swing back to adult-level material but it didn’t get me.

Posted on 9.25 by Vanity Fair‘s Richard Lawson: “I don’t want to oversell Miss Peregrine as some sort of ruminative mood piece about the human experience. It’s not. It’s a kid’s film, co-starring Samuel L. Jackson as an eyeball-eating mad scientist. But it’s the rare kid’s film that has a sense of risk and stakes and tension to it, that admirably dares to be violent and unsettling and sad.

“Those qualities have long been Burton’s bailiwick — but here, he finally synthesizes them together in a way that’s coherent and thoughtful. Miss Peregrine is a testament to finding the perfect material to match a director’s tastes, rather than trying for some hideous compromise, like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or Alice in Wonderland. As Tim Burton’s best film in almost a decade, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children has an exciting air of rejuvenation about it. It’s confident and judicious with its peculiarities, while letting its heart and intellect—not Johnny Depp in a bad wig—be its stars.”

It’s 9:41 am and I’ve nothing to say here. West Coast twitter coverage of last night’s SNL Trump-Clinton debate spoof surged around 10 or 10:30 pm, and was all but spent when I awoke this morning at 7 am. Okay, Kate McKinnon‘s cough, cane + somersault introduction was special. She was the life of the party. Alec Baldwin nailed Trump’s voice, posture and hand gestures (SNL even got the makeup right with the reverse-raccoon white circles around his eyes) but Trump’s relentless self-parody on the campaign trail (his Hillary imitation last night in Manheim, Pennsylvania is an instant addition to his reel) makes a comedic spoof, no matter how sly or skillful, a moot point.

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Let’s be charitable or at least forgiving and call Woody Allen‘s Crisis in Six Scenes, a new six-part, 140-odd-minute Amazon miniseries, a dud that causes no pain. Tolerably substandard, it’s basically The Man Who Came To Dinner set in the politically incendiary climate of the late ’60s with Miley Cyrus as a kind of Sheridan Whiteside. I binged through the whole thing last night, and didn’t feel the least bit angry at the general lackadaisical atmosphere. A little bit bored, perhaps, but I got through it. I felt placated. And then I finally made it to the payoff, which happens during the final two episodes.

I don’t regard Allen’s failure to consistently churn out films along the lines of Match Point or Midnight in Paris to be a prosecutable offense. He’s pushing 81 and is naturally going to show signs of slowing down. Over the last half-century Allen’s films have almost always been satisfactory (original stabs at personal excavation, ambitious concepts, pointed urban humor, etc.) and have sometimes achieved greatness, but now the best that can be hoped for is that he might just luck into an extraordinary idea or hook of some kind and deliver another gem.  Please, just one more.

Yes, eventually the biological odds are going to  overwhelm and it’ll be time to hang it up. At the same time I admire his no-retirement, bop-til-you-drop attitude.

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