Ari Issler and Ben Snyder‘s 11:55, which debuts tonight at the L.A. Film Festival, is a straight, steady, well-performed, modern-day “reimagining”** of Fred Zinneman‘s High Noon with an entirely decent script, and as such it’s not half bad. And it has an ending that differs from the 1952 film in a good way — a finale that says something about escaping the cycles of violence that I found compelling, well-grounded and true to itself.

The downside (and I wouldn’t call it a huge one) is that a solemn, well-crafted homage to a classic film can only register in the final analysis as a solemn, well-crafted homage to a classic film.

The ending of 11.55, as noted, adheres to its own ethos and milieu, but the rest of it (okay, 80% of it) is an almost scene-for-scene revisiting of a film that arose out of the terror and cowardice of Hollywood’s red-scare era. 11:55 draws from its own social undercurrents, but it basically feels like an exercise. This isn’t to say I had a problem with it. I didn’t. I was moderately pleased by it, and never angered or even irritated. You just can’t go overly nuts about a film of this sort.

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I’ve said before that Chris Nolan has to go back to making smart, subversive, smallish movies but I guess that won’t happen. He has an empire to maintain and so he has to shoot big, bigger, BIGGER-ER movies from now until the end of the string. That said, I felt an instant surge of excitement when I saw this photo of a helicopter-mounted IMAX camera being used for a shot in Nolan’s Dunkirk, which Warner Bros. will open on 7.21.17. At the same time the below video of a recently performed Fast 8 stunt in Cleveland fills me with revulsion. There’s no doubt in my mind that this movie will (a) blow chunks on the HE scale, (b) be adored by Trump voters and (c) make hundreds of millions worldwide.

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There’s something about these tracks (which I didn’t arrange, and which includes the bitter, craggy voice of Robert Ryan in Billy Budd) in this particular order that simultaneously lifts me up and settles me down and seems…I don’t know, seems to open the long-throw cosmic door on some level: This, this and that.

Friend: “That poll you’ve quoted with Bernie is up by 1% is only for all registered voters. Among likely voters (the only truthful way to gauge) he is down by 10 points, far more of a gap than in any other poll (most have him down by 2).” Me: “I prefer to live in my denial balloon until Tuesday evening.” Friend: “It won’t even get to California. She will be declared presumptive nominee when polls close in NJ.”

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A 6.3 digital presentation of Woody Allen and Vittorio Storaro‘s Cafe Society at Cine Gear Expo has been described in mouth-watering terms by The Hollywood Reporter‘s Carolyn Giardina.

“Storaro actually arrived hours earlier in the day to make sure the projection was just as he intended,” she writes. “The gorgeous imagery was, uniquely, screened from a 12-bit uncompressed 4K DPX file (rather than a commonly used Digital Cinema Package), playing off a Clipster postproduction system and displayed with a Sony 4K projector — meaning that the Cine Gear presentation of the movie had more resolution and color tonality than today’s most commonly used digital cinema projectors.

“Lensed with Sony’s F65 digital cinematography camera (and lighter F55 for Steadicam work), Café Society was both Storaro and Allen’s first feature-length motion picture shot with a digital camera.

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Suicide Squad is the next major film in which ne’er-do-wells are unambiguously presented as the heroes. They’re “bad” but you’re on their team, you identify with them, you want to them to succeed, you’ll feel bad if they don’t. The best of the genre, top of my head, in this order: The Wild Bunch, Bonnie and Clyde, Heat, One-Eyed Jacks, The Professionals, The Dirty Dozen, The Outfit, Tom Horn, etc. I’m not talking about intriguing, charismatic bad guys (Tom Cruise‘s “Vincent” in Collateral, Denzel Washington‘s dirty detective in Training Day) or half-flawed good guys but outside-the-law characters presented as the most compelling moral characters in the realm of the film.

There’s a scene in Judd Apatow‘s This Is 40 when Leslie Mann gives Paul Rudd shit because he cops to having popped a Viagra before a romantic moment in the shower. Mann’s lament: “Am I not hot enough to raise your staff without medicinal augmentation?”  I forget what Judd’s reply was, but you can’t change over-40 biology. It’s not a lack of desire or start-up stiffitude but Mr. Johnson’s occasional tendency to become Mr. Moody. I’m there, I’m not there, I’m committed, I’ve changed my mind, etc. Yes, I got into this a few weeks ago but I’ve always been a Cialis guy. 24 to 36 hours vs. six to eight. I like them even when there’s nothing going on. “It makes me feel like I’m gonna live forever.” — Warren Beatty to Goldie Hawn in the second-to-last scene in Shampoo.

Story #1: I wasn’t there but a friend ran into Muhammad Ali at a New Jersey Turnpike gas-and-food stop in the winter of ’68. This of course was during Ali’s exile years (i.e., after the boxing commissars had taken away his heavyweight championship title after he’d refused to serve in the military due to religious objections over fighting in the Vietnam War). He was travelling in a large tour bus, and a fair amount of ice and sludge had apparently accumulated on the sides, and Ali had borrowed a water hose from the gas-station guy and was hosing it down and scraping the ice off with one of those long-handled scrapers. It was freezing and windy, but my friend had to shake his hand — “Hey, champ!” Ali stopped hosing, smiled, offered his hand and a kind word. Nothing special but “a moment.”

Story #2: In the fall of ’96 I was moderating a Woodland Hills AMC film class called “Hot-Shot Movies”, and one of my picks was Leon Gast‘s When We Were Kings, the brilliant doc about the 1974 Ali vs Forman “Rumble in the Jungle” championship bout which won the Oscar the following year for Best Feature-Length Documentary. I was introducing the film when a middle-aged, red-haired woman raised her hand and said, “Why have you chosen this film? Why do we have to sit here and watch it?” Translation: “I bought a ticket to your film series for doses of classy escapism, but not to see a film about that black Muslim blowhard who disgraced himself by refusing to fight in Vietnam.” I chose it, I said, because the film is full of spirit and love and celebration, and because it ends in glorious triumph. And because it may be the best sports-related doc I’ve ever seen.

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“Every kid I knew in high school had a Scarface poster….people like bad guys.”

The Great Paris Flood of 2016 is bad for tourism but quite the spectacle. And yet it’s nothing compared to the flood of 1910 when the Seine rose 28 and 1/2 feet (8.62 meters) above its normal level. The Seine levels are currently dropping. They had been at 6 meters (just shy of 20 feet) above normal. No tour boats, lots of bankside gawking, tons of mud and debris in certain areas. But the Louvre and the Musee d’Orsay have not been flooded, and life will go on.

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“American’s real religion is capitalism, and like every religion it needs a devil. And that devil has always been socialism. Republicans always say that if you let in a little socialism it’ll spread out of control, but actually it’s the opposite. It’s capitalism that we’ve let spread out of control. It’s eaten our democracy. It’s eating our middle class. It’s eaten our health care system, our prison system, our news media. It’s even eaten our food system so thoroughly that a lot of our food should no longer be eaten.” — Bill Maher “New Rules” schpiel during last night’s (6.3) Real Time, which HBO Now never offers until a day or two has passed.”

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