The only thing wrong with this Warren Beatty-Diane Keaton lovers quarrel scene in Reds is that it doesn’t last long enough. I wish I could have captured this in a way that does more justice to Vittorio Storaro‘s cinematography. It’s just my iPhone 6 Plus shooting an Amazon stream with shitty black levels. But I love the acrimonious energy. I had a couple of spats like this with a girlfriend just a few months before Reds opened in the fall of ’81. Her name, honest to God, was Louise. She had the most beautiful half-Asian eyes.

Is Reddit the ugliest major site around? It looks like it hasn’t been redesigned since ’98, if that. Rules Don’t Apply director-producer-star Warren Beatty is doing a Reddit AMA (i.e., “ask me anything”) chat tomorrow at 11:30 am Pacific. Beatty’s motivation is to convey to under-35s that Rules, which is largely set in 1958 Los Angeles, is not some crusty period piece but something pulsing and pertinent to right now. (Or so I’m told.) But honestly? If there’s one guy in the universe whose basic nature is less open to “ask me anything…go ahead, fire away” than almost anyone else, it’s Mr. Beatty. Especially when strangers are involved. I’m saying this with affection. You can ask him whatever you want, and he’ll always give you some kind of chess-move answer…intelligent, serious but side-steppy, always polite, charming…but he’s not really given to wide-open candor. But don’t let me stop you.

I can listen to Boys in the Band Trump all day long and into the night…

It’s around 10 pm or a bit later, let’s say, and I’m looking to wind down. What I’ll often do is put on a comfort movie — a good film I know backwards and forwards that I love to just bathe in, just settle into like steamed mud…yessss. I’ll only half-watch it as I write tweets or research something or fiddle around on Facebook or whatever, but a comfort movie is my friend, my pal, my blankey.

A comfort movie obviously can’t be too challenging or antsy or jingle-jangly. It has to give me a nice “all is well with the world” feeling. Make me feel so good and so secure.

Nobody worships sparkling, needle-sharp black-and-white films more than myself so I tend to favor monochrome comfort more than color, but not entirely. Comfort movie visuals have to downshift me and treat me like some kind of cinematic masseuse. They need to make me feel like…I don’t know, like I’ve just dropped a quaalude. That dates me, doesn’t it? Okay, a Percocet.

Favorite comfort movies: John Schlesinger‘s Sunday Bloody Sunday, Kathryn Bigelow (i.e., “Biggy”) and Mark Boal‘s Zero Dark Thirty, Martin Ritt‘s The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, Stanley Kubrick‘s Paths of Glory, Irving Reis‘ The Bachelor and the Bobby Soxer, the VUDU streaming copy (i.e., not the overly inky Criterion Bluray) of Howard Hawks‘ Only Angels Have Wings and Mark Robson‘s The Bridges of Toko Ri, Don Siegel‘s Charley Varrick, Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, Martin Ritt‘s Hud and Alfred Hitchcock‘s Notorious, to name but a few.

“Since The Arizona Republic began publication in 1890, we have never endorsed a Democrat over a Republican for president. Never. This reflects a deep philosophical appreciation for conservative ideals and Republican principles. [But] this year is different. The 2016 Republican candidate is not conservative and he is not qualified. That’s why, for the first time in our history, The Arizona Republic will support a Democrat for president.” — from yesterday’s editorial endorsement statement, the likes of which will almost certainly never happen again in our lifetime.

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On 3.20.15 I posted a piece about what a rich and legendary year 1971 was. 28 first-rate films and 23 that were at least fairly good — a significant tally. But I forgot to mention Peter Fonda‘s The Hired Hand, which was widely admired from the get-go. But I’ve never seen it so I bypassed it. That situation will soon be corrected with Arrow’s release of a Hired Hand Bluray on 11.21.

I don’t like the trailer [after the jump] but I trust the reviews by N.Y. Times critic Roger Greenspun and The New Yorker‘s Penelope Gilliatt:

Greenspun: “I don’t know just what I expected of [this] Peter Fonda western, but certainly not a film so sensitively appreciative of what might be possible in a western. A certain amount of what might not be possible also gets in, for The Hired Hand is a rather ambitious simple movie, with a fairly elaborate technique and levels of meaning rising to the mystical, which seems so much a part of the very contemporary old west.

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There are so many appalling, mind-boggling negatives that Donald Trump has wrapped around himself, but suddenly there’s this belief that the 1996 Alicia Machado Miss Universe thing, which Hillary raised during the debate and which Trump inexplicably doubled-down on yesterday, is going to penetrate and damage him badly with women who are STILL on the fence about the guy.

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Something I posted on Facebook last evening right before the debate: “God protect us from rural dumbshits who don’t give a damn about anything but their diminishing earning power and general rage at the present. And their primal fear of suddenly being a minority in terms of political power.  They are the animals of our time.”

I haven’t time to review Terrence Malick‘s Voyage of Time: The IMAX Experience, which I saw this morning at IMAX headquarters in Playa Vista, but I can at least say two things: (1) It’s certainly an enveloping eyeful — I felt immersed and half-stoned and floating within the thing, and I loved the fact that it’s only 40-odd minutes; and (2) the aspect ratio information on the IMDB — 1.43:1 mixed with 1.90:1 — is wrong. The version I saw this morning on a super-sized screen was for the most part somewhere between a perfect box and 1.33 (closer to the latter). There was a brief portion (starting around the ten-minute mark and lasting less than five minutes) that was shown at 1.43:1. The boxiness is magnificent. I was sitting in the third row, and the monster screen is so tall and full that I had to look up and down to contemplate the upper and lower portions — there’s no taking it all in from a fixed viewpoint. Definitely worth catching if you can see it at a real IMAX theatre. Off to Miss Sloane…

Bruce Beresford‘s Mr. Church, a low-key Eddie Murphy relationship drama, had its big premiere during last April’s Tribeca Film Festival. It kind of went away during the summer, but then it turned up at Pete Hammond’s KCET screening series on 9.13 before opening on 9.16. On 10.21, or three weeks from this Friday, Mr. Church be on Digital HD and On Demand and then on Bluray/DVD on 10.25. Which seems like a reasonable way to go. I’m only mentioning this because I somehow never saw it. Partly because I didn’t care that much (that 16% Rotten Tomatoes score) and partly because I never received a screening invite. Could that have been because of my nearly decade-old “stop Eddie Murphy” campaign regarding his performance in Dreamgirls? Just asking. I don’t have a problem with Murphy. That was then, this is now.

Hollywood Elsewhere needs to drive all the way the fuck down to IMAX headquarters in Playa Vista (roughly a 40-minute drive) for a 9 am screening of Terrence Malick‘s Voyage of Time. Followed by quickie interviews with a couple of Malick producers. Then it’s back to Beverly Hills for a 1 pm screening of John Madden‘s Miss Sloane (EuropaCorp, 12.9), which I’ve been told is quite good.

Denzel Washington‘s Fences, an adaptation of August Wilson‘s play, will be going mano e mano against 20th Century Women, a family film of a different caste, when they both open on Christmas day. All this time I’ve been hearing about Viola Davis‘s performance, but the trailer is all Denzel. Costarring Jovan Apedo, Stephen Henderson, Mykelti Williamson, Russell Hornsby and Saniyya Sidney.

I never had the impression that my father liked me a great deal either. He loved his advertising job, I was told, but he was sullen around the house. When I was really young he seemed mostly irked or bored by my presence when he wasn’t barking orders or telling me to mow the lawn or sending me to my room for some infraction. When I got into my teens and started mouthing off he became testy and at times hostile. He often took refuge in reading, TV shows and alcohol.

But he provided the shelter, clothing and food, and he always paid the bills. And then we became friendly when he went into AA.