Earlier this afternoon I got into an email argument with a guy who’s heavily into predicting award-season favorites. Yes, this again. He hasn’t seen The Birth of a Nation or Manchester by the Sea, but he was saying that my views about these two films (both of which I saw at last January’s Sundance Film Festival) are overly passionate and biased in terms of foreseeing how they’ll be received when they open in the fall.

Me: People are going to think what they think, but there’s really nothing lower in the universe than people who turn away from obviously well written, superbly acted, reality-reflecting, fully-rooted films by muttering that they’re not feel-goody enough.

Awards guy: Not being able to see that a group can’t, won’t or doesn’t appreciate a film that you admire is exactly what I’m talking about. You have an inability to check your own bias. Plus you don’t respond well when people disagree with you and so instead of trying to convince them to your side, you get aggressive and insulting.

Me: It’s not “an inability to check my own bias.” It’s an absolute refusal to show respect for the opinions of people who want a certain kind of drug when they go to a film. Good stuff is good stuff, and I know the properties. I always have. It’s not an opinion — I know the difference between pyrite (fool’s gold) and the real material. And I couldn’t care less about predicting what the middle-of-the-road crowd is going to like or not like.

Awards guy: Oscar predicting is always a combination of zeitgeist, politics and good reviews vs. good press. Since the last two years of #OscarsSoWhite have generated some really bad press for the Academy there’s a strong chance that we’ll see an anomaly of black-centered films nominated next year. That would affect something like Manchester by the Sea vs. The Birth of a Nation.

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I ducked a few slings and arrows the other day when I declared I would never again sit through an animated feature made by corporate formula peddlers. I said that films like Finding Dory were basically “corporate-branded heroin for the family audience.” One guy called me an asshat for dismissing quality-level animation. But it’s not the craft I’m addressing but the underlying corporate sedative that runs through the veins of (most) animated features. I explained my feelings a little better about three months ago, to wit:

“On a certain level I believe that family-friendly corporate animation is almost demonic in that it has a subversive agenda. It delivers family narcotic highs when your kids are young, but it acts as a kind of childhood sedative that leads to placated thinking and zombie lifestyles. Corporate animation is mainly about injecting and reenforcing blandly positive, middle-class consumerist attitudes and values. Watch corporate animation as a kid, live your tweener and teenaged life in malls, sign a college loan that will keep you in a kind of jail for half your life, and eternally invest and submit to American McMansionism — an Orwellian system if there ever was one.

“Childhood was a huge gulag existence when I was a kid, and Disney mythology was a key aspect of that. Comforting but phony emotion dreams do you no good as a 7 year-old — you’ll just have to unlearn them when you get older. And my parents played right along. Everything they did and said to shelter me from things they felt I was too young for constituted a huge minus in the end. It took me years to unlearn the lessons and impressions they passed along in the name of parental compassion.

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“That’s what dads do…they pass the best of themselves to their kids.” — Steve Gleason, the ALS-afflicted former football player, speaking in Clay Tweel‘s Gleason.

Actually, not quite. Good or well-meaning fathers try to pass along the best of themselves to their children, of course, but dads mainly influence their kids by example (hugs, gifts, scoldings and advice don’t count nearly as much as what the kid notices about your day-to-day behavior and particularly your responses to this or that challenge) and through their genes. The origin of Gleason’s condition, for example, may have come from his parents as roughly 5% to 10% of ALS cases are genetically inherited.

You can be completely loved with the wind at your back as you begin to make your way in life, and you can still get swatted like a fly. God routinely hands out random, tough-shit fates to the nicest people. Life is a crap shoot. The best people sometimes buy it by accident (poor Anton Yelchin) and other good ones live long, mostly happy lives, and some not-so-good ones live happily and high on the hog until well into old age. It’s a garden out there but also a slaughterhouse, depending on the breaks.

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On 3.22 Variety‘s Dave McNary reported that Ben Affleck‘s Live By Night, a 1930s crime drama based on a Dennis Lahane novel, would open on 10.20.17, or roughly two years after it began shooting in Georgia. Sasha Stone and I visited the set, remember, during the Savannah Film Festival.

A little more than a month later (i.e., on 4.26) the film was research screened at the Pasadena Arclight. (Obviously the Warner Bros. person who told McNary about the October 2017 release date gave him a bum steer.) Live By Night was research-screened again on Tuesday, 5.24 at the AMC Burbank 16. A couple of days ago it was learned that the new release date is 1.13.17.

Which means, of course, that Live By Night will get an awards-qualifying run sometime in December. But it’s a period genre film, and you know how Lahane adaptations tend to go (i.e., respectable craft, strong genre materials, contained in their own realm).

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Character-wise how does HBO’s 10-episode Westworld series compare to Michael Crichton‘s 1973 original? Ben Barnes and Jimmy Simpson have the James Brolin and Richard Benjamin roles (i.e., randy veteran, hesitant newbie) but they’re not as central this time around. Ed Harris is playing Yul Brynner. James Marsden is apparently a replicant gunslinger. Evan Rachel Wood is playing Dolores Abernathy, a female variation of Rutger Hauer‘s Roy in Blade Runner, a replicant who’s unhappy about having recently discovered she’s not human. It appears as if Anthony Hopkins is playing a combination of Richard Attenborough‘s character in Jurassic Park and Dr. Henry Frankenstein. Jeffrey Wright is playing Hopkins’ top administrator.

A 6.19 N.Y. Times story reports that the most appealing vp candidate to potentially run with Hillary Clinton — Elizabeth Warren — is “unlikely,” presumably because male hinterland voters would recoil at the idea of a granny ticket. Amy Chozick and Thomas Kaplan‘s story also mentions New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker and HUD Secretary Juan Castro, whom I would be okay with. But other candidates — Colorado Senator Michael Bennet, Secretary of Labor Thomas E. Perez, California Representative Xavier Becerra and Virginia Senators Tim Kaine and Mark Warner — sound dreary as fuck. My money’s on Booker — balls, a skilled orator, the requisite fire in the blood.

It’s only mid-June and I know very little for sure, but 2016 is seeming more and more like a relatively weak year for Best Picture contenders. The more I hear, the more I talk things over, the more I sniff the room, the less intrigued I feel. Gut feelings, insect vibrations, hairs on the back of my neck. A guy who’s seen some of the fall films told me the other day, “I hope things get better.”

I’m sounding like a broken record, I realize, but there appear to be six or seven hotties at best — Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea (I’ve seen it — a sad near-masterpiece), Martin Scorsese‘s Silence (maybe, maybe not — allegedly a difficult sit in terms of gruesome subject matter but who knows?), Ang Lee‘s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (maybe — a modern-day Catch-22), Nate Parker‘s The Birth of a Nation (probably but troubles await), Denzel Washington‘s Fences (based on a respected play but much of it is set indoors in a single home — probably more of a Viola Davis-for-Best Actress opportunity than anything else), and Jeff Nichols‘ Loving (a good film but more of a ground-rule double than a triple or a homer — Ruth Negga vs. Viola Davis for Best Actress trophy?) and Clint Eastwood‘s Sully (maybe, seems thin).

I’m sensing different kinds of weakness (uncertainties, vulnerabilities, head-scratchings) from all of these except for Manchester by the Sea, Fences, Silence and Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, and even these four might run into problems down the road.

I should just shut up and wait for the fall festivals, but I have a special long-throw ability to detect little tingly vibes from certain films, and so far I’m not sensing the possible presence of serious electricity or extra-ness in the wings except for Manchester, which I know has serious heft.

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Tarzan can’t part his hair with a comb. It’s not right. I haven’t seen David Yates‘ The Legend of Tarzan (Warner Bros., 7.1), but Edgar Rice Burroughs‘ Tarzan was born to a British Lord, right? I know he was referred to in Hugh Hudson‘s Greystoke (’84) as John Clayton. So I get why he’d part his hair if he’s back in England. But not in the jungle, for God’s sake. From a guy who’s seen it: “Tarzan’s hair is parted because the movie starts with him already domesticated and living in London with Jane when he returns to Africa for a diplomatic mission, and this turns into a jungle adventure. The movie is atrocious, by the way.”

I didn’t see Alice Winocour‘s Disorder (a.k.a. Maryland) at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, but it sounds a bit like Mick Jackson‘s The Bodyguard. One thing that Kevin Costner dealt with when that 1992 film came out was that he shouldn’t have worn a Steve McQueen crewcut. Same thing there — Matthias Schoenaerts looks like hell with tennis-ball hair.

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Anton Yelchin is dead at 27 from a bizarre miscalculation, a freak accident. The poor guy was found early this morning, pinned between his car and a brick mailbox on a downslope driveway at his Studio City home. The car was reportedly in neutral and still running when he was found. 

“It appears he had exited his car and was behind it when the vehicle rolled down a steep driveway,” the LAPD said in a statement.

I’m very sorry. Condolences to family, friends, colleagues, fans. Appalling news.

Yelchin was a gifted actor, but his boyish looks, thin frame and refined demeanor led to his playing a certain type of guy over and over — i.e., the bright, sensitive, somewhat tortured puppy dog. That was his brand, his handle. When you wanted that thing, you went to Yelchin.

In my mind Yelchin delivered five standout performances — Zack Mazursky in Nick Cassevetes‘ Alpha Dog (’06), Pavel Chekhov in J.J. Abrams‘ Star Trek (’09), Jacob Helm in Drake Doremus‘ Like Crazy (’11), Ian in Only Lovers Left Alive (’13) and Brian Bloom in Victor Levin‘s 5 to 7 (’14).

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I’ve seen Episodes #1 and #5 of Ezra Edelman‘s obviously first-rate O.J.: Made in America. So far it feels like one of the most brilliantly crafted murder-mysteries ever made (doc, narrative, whatever) and one of the most penetrating explorations of our late 20th century racial dichotomy, ever. And a psychodrama about a self-destructive Othello complex second to none.  8:45 pm update:  I’ve seen it all; watched episode #5 a second time. What a sprawling epic tragedy…wow.

The man was guiltier than sin itself, the blood evidence alone proving it dozens of times over, and at the end of the day the jury said “nope, the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman are not what really concern us — what matters is the importance of pushing back against decades of racist brutality by the L.A. police department by symbolically freeing a brother, even if that brother was a super-egotist who never really self-identified as ‘a black guy’ and was in fact ‘a Brentwood white guy’ through and through.”

This morning I decided to marathon through episodes #2, #3 and #4. I’m watching #2 now, and more particularly the section covering the ’92 L.A. riots. I was there. Actually, I wasn’t — I was mostly huddling in my West Hollywood home — but I remember the faint but distinct aroma of burnt wood and rubber, and how empty the nearby streets were after a dusk-to-dawn curfew order, which was in effect for at least one night. (More?) On one of the curfew nights I met with Entertainment Weekly‘s then-editor Barbara O’Dair on a hotel patio near Sunset Blvd.

A few days later I was filing a story from Cannes about a highly-charged conversation I’d had with director Spike Lee. I had shown Lee a quote from Mickey Rourke that basically laid the blame for the L.A. riots on Lee and John Singleton for having incited the conversation, or something along those lines. Lee flipped out — here are his remarks.

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From a 6.15 McSweeney’s essay by Samuel Priest: “I hate the new Ghostbusters movie because my number one issue when judging a film is and has always been Hollywood finance reform. And frankly, I’m tired of all big blockbuster movies. The movie system is corrupt and I think we need to put our foot down, right now specifically in 2016, to put a stop to this new Ghostbusters movie as a signal that we’re done with all big hollywood blockbusters. And if you don’t agree with me, well, maybe you need to stop buying movie tickets with your vagina.

“Of course we’re ready for a comedy-action movie with female leads. And of course, we’re overdue. But I think we need to wait for the RIGHT new Ghostbusters movie, not just ANY Ghostbusters movie. The women in the new Ghostbusters movie have a lot of good comedy experience — yes, of course. But over the last 20 years I can find a few examples of them not being funny, especially when you take those moments out of context.”