Late yesterday morning respected author and movie journalist Peter Biskind posted the following on Facebook about Michael Cimino‘s The Deer Hunter (’78), obviously in response to Cimino’s death last weekend: “I hate to speak ill of the dead and all that, but the obits for Cimino, particularly Mark Olsen’s in the L.A. Times, are shockingly oblivious to the context of The Deer Hunter. Talk about historical Alzheimer’s!

“Of the notorious Russian roulette scenes, all Olsen can manage is that they became ‘instantly iconic, symbolic of the maddening pressures that set upon men at war.’ What? In fact, although it has a great cast and is undeniably a powerful picture, the politics are execrable, and were widely denounced at the time for turning the war inside out.

“The tiger cages in which our boys were held captive were a South Vietnamese invention, not a North Vietnamese. Nor were Vietcong guerrillas likely to grenade their own people, as the film portrays them doing. My Lai was a U.S. atrocity, not an NLF atrocity. The protests of the journalists who covered the war were the loudest, and all agreed that the North did not force U.S. prisoners to play Russian roulette, which was a device left over from an early script.

“All in all, Cimino was caught in numerous lies, ranging from his claim to have been a medic attached to the Green Berets, to his attempt to steal script credit from Deric Washburn.”

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I’ve been saying from the get-go that the quality of Peter Berg‘s Patriots Day — and the 12.21 platform release is a sign that Berg, star-producer Mark Wahlberg and the producers want it to be received as an exceptional, quality-level thing — will depend in part on how the perpetrators of the 2013 Boston marathon bombing are depicted.

(l to r.) Patriots Day star-producer Mark Wahlberg, director Peter Berg, Boston Police Commissioner Bill Evans (being portrayed in the film by James Colby) and “good samaritan” Carlos Arredondo, a guy who helped save lives in the immediate aftermath of the 2013 bombing.

To go by descriptions, Patriots Day sounds like a rah-rah procedural about how the fanatical Tsaranaev brothers were captured through the efforts of a few heroic Bostonians — among them an everyman police sergeant (Mark Wahlberg), Boston police commissioner Ed Davis (John Goodman) and Watertown cop Jeffrey Publiese (J.K. Simmons). But any hack director can make a “hooray for our side!” action drama.

The key to distinction with fact-based action films is realism, exactitude and complexity. Particularly regarding the villains. The best thrillers never reduce baddie-waddies to stick figures. They always dig in.

Paul Greengrass‘s United 93 (’06) showed us the intimate behaviors and occasional POV of the Al Qeada bad guys — it even depicted their religious rituals on the morning of 9/11. Fred Zinneman‘s The Day of the Jackal (’73) fully acquainted us, in a neutral way, with Edward Fox‘s would-be assassin of Charles DeGaulle. Costa Gavras‘s Z showed us the backroom plotting and mentality of the rightwing thugs and military authoritarians behind the killing of Yves Montand‘s liberal politician character.

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This morning a poster for Peter Berg‘s Patriots Day, a procedural thriller about the Boston marathon bombing of 4.15.13 and the hunt for the perpetrators, was released. It basically suggests an American flag in tatters. The red, white and blue strands, however, are made of shoe laces, which in my mind alludes to running shoes. The previously announced release dates — an Oscar-bait 12.21 opening in New York, Los Angeles and Boston followed by a wide release on 1.13.17 — were included in the release.

Oscar Poker returned today with a bang. Well, more like a whimper. Call it a half-bang, half-whimper, and half Waiting for Godot. Sasha Stone and I touched on…I forget what we touched on. Mostly we spitballed. Here’s the mp3.

Daniel Ragussis‘s Imperium (Lionsgate Premiere, 8.19) is about a short guy (Daniel Radcliffe) infiltrating a group of radical right-wing racist nutters. Written and directed by Ragussis from a story by Michael German, and almost certainly influenced on some level by Costa-Gavras‘s Betrayed (’88), in which FBI agent Debra Winger not only infiltrates a secret white racist organization but has an affair with the leader, played by Tom Berenger. Betrayed wasn’t very good, in part because Joe Eszterhas felt obliged to insert the fucking element. Imperium, which costars Toni Collette, Tracy Letts and Sam Trammell, will have a limited theatrical opening concurrent with VOD.

I’ve long believed that Albert Brooks‘ two finest films are Lost in America and Defending Your Life, but I happened to watch Modern Romance the other night on Netflix (where all the Brooks films are playing for the time being). It was almost a revelation. I’d forgotten how subversively (i.e., sometimes uncomfortably) funny it is. It brought me back to those emotional moments in my own life when “the ‘ludes kicked in.” (Oh, for the days when I used to score at the old Edlich Pharmacy on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.) Kathryn Harrold married The Last Word‘s Lawrence O’Donnell in ’94; they divorced in ’13 or thereabouts. Harrold runs an L.A.-based counselling service.

I had intended to catch a screening last week of Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates (20th Century Fox, 7.8), but something interfered. What was that thing? What kept me from going? It may have had something to do with my wanting to avoid this film like the plague. That aversion was always there but I had told myself to ignore it. “Man up and watch the film,” I told myself. “Face the music, do the job, grapple with the zeitgeist.” But I ducked it anyway, and I’m not sorry in the least. And I’d as soon go to Dublin as to hell.

I’d have a different attitude if the movie was called Mike and Dave Get Captured By ISIS. I would’ve attended that film with bells on. But of course that was never in the cards.

“Yes, it’s a piece of product shaped by four decades’ worth of arrested-adolescent farce, going back to the granddaddy of bad-behavior comedy, National Lampoon’s Animal House,” writes Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman. “[And] the women, who used to be victims of this stuff (or on the sidelines), are now at the rowdy, disheveled, foul-mouthed center of it all, and that just multiplies the highly agreeable possibilities for naughty nasty lunacy.

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I was reading Wesley Morris‘s 7.1 N.Y. Times piece about the overlapping realms of Blake Lively and Kate Hudson and how this affected his response to The Shallows. About halfway through it hit me that even though The Shallows has only taken in $36.7 million after 11 days in release, Lively has come up in the world since it opened. She’s become a kind of juggernaut, a major blonde, someone you talk about, a thing. This dumb-ass shark flick is the best thing that’s ever happened to her career. So I thought about this, and re-read my Shallows review and then stumbled upon something that Ben Affleck said about her in 2012. Just to keep things in perspective.

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It’s natural to go a little dippy in the early stages of a love affair. You might occasionally say and do things that will seem a bit silly or ill-considered later on. But you still have to draw a line. Especially if you’re looking to play a famous secret agent superstud. Somehow the name “James Bond” and a #famewhore hash tag don’t jibe. Call me old-fashioned but when 007 falls in love, he shows restraint. He might have been crazy over Honor Blackman‘s lesbian pilot in Goldfinger (i.e., the hottie who decided to become hetero or at least bi after fucking him), but he would’ve never, ever worn a T-shirt that says “I Heart Pussy Galore.” And in 1962 Sean Connery, trust me, would have never worn a T-shirt on a beach that said “I Heart Diane Cilento.” I’m sorry but this kills it for Tom Hiddleston — no 007 role for him, not after this.

If I was at the beach with a new girlfriend and she put on a T-shirt that said “I Love JW,” I would smile and say “wow, so cool…I love you too” but inwardly I would be asking myself “what the fuck?”

Let’s take Trump at his bullshit word and accept that the campaign guy who assembled the anti-Hillary ad with the six-pointed star really was thinking of the lawman star worn by High Noon‘s Will Kane or Sheriff Gene Wilder in Blazing Saddles. Even if you give him that, how dumb did his staff have to be to not realize that the Star of David is also six-pointed, and that using this image would result in accusations of anti-Semitism? Three answers: (a) the staffer[s] behind the tweet didn’t consider this, which is breathtaking, (b) they didn’t care about the anti-Semitic shade they were throwing upon themselves or (c) they definitely knew what they were putting out and presumed that Trump supporters would understand what they were saying, which is that big-city Jews are corrupt and out for themselves and not on the side of real Americans. Any way you slice it the Trumpsters handled this like idiots.

F.B.I. director James Comey put the Hillary Clinton email thing to bed this morning by stating the bureau is not recommending charges against the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee for her handling of classified information as Secretary of State, and that “no reasonable prosecutor” would bring a case against her.

And yet — here comes the wrist slap I spoke of a few days ago — Comey said that Hillary and her staff were “extremely careless” in using a private server, etc. Read: blase, cavalier, indifferent, a tad clueless, a touch arrogant. Read: “The rules don’t apply to me as much as they do with others because I’m Secretary of State….I can skirt this. We can, I mean…right, Huma?”

So that’s it — “extremely careless” but no indictment. Trump will try to make something of this but what can he say? It’s just a verbal admonishment. Hillary has slinked out of a potentially damaging episode that was caused by her obsessive guardedness and aversion to transparency. Sooner or later she or Bill or someone close will once again step into the cowpie. The Clintons are always up to something.

I’m feeling so much nostalgia for Obama now — dry, careful, concise, drama-less. The Clinton years are going to be such a mess, such a headache.