Tom Hiddleston seems to offer a near-perfect physical reincarnation of the late Hank Williams in Marc Abraham‘s I Saw the Light (Sony Pictures Classics, 11.27). He’ll most likely be impressive in other respects. Directed, written and produced by Abraham and based on “Hank Williams: The Biography” by Colin Escott, George Merritt and Bill MacEwen. The question is when & where will I Saw The Light start to be seen…Telluride, Toronto or you-tell-me?

Tom Hiddleston as Hank Williams in Marc Abraham’s I Saw The Light (SPC, 11.27)

Hank Williams sometime in the late ’40s.

Only two small things gave me pause in this trailer for Jay Roach‘s Trumbo (Bleecker Street, 11.6) — Dean O’Gorman‘s portrayal of Kirk Douglas [explained in previous item] and John Goodman‘s Frank King (the real-life producer of Gun Crazy, The Brave One, Gorgo) violently swinging a golf club in defense of Mr. Trumbo’s honor. Otherwise it looks and sounds terrific — smart, stirring, well-written. You can feel it. I’ve been offering presumptions that Bryan Cranston will be a likely Best Actor contender for his performance as the legendary screenwriter-director; this offers concrete evidence that such a scenario may come to pass. Diane Lane, Elle Fanning, Louis, C.K. and Helen Mirren as Hedda Hopper, etc.

I nearly had a heart attack as I watched and listened to Dean O’Gorman portray Kirk Douglas in the new trailer for Jay Roach‘s Trumbo. Why use an actor who conveys a certain movie-starrish machismo but who mainly looks like an older Ryan Gosling? Douglas wore his thick blondish-reddish hair swept back and didn’t starting parting it until the early to mid 60s, and Douglas hired Trumbo to write Spartacus in late ’58 or early ’59. Why didn’t they give O’Gorman a more distinct hole in his chin? And why didn’t they hire an actor who could do a decent impression of Douglas’s voice and then dub O’Gorman, like Tim Burton did when Vincent D’Onofrio portrayed Orson Welles in Ed Wood? I’m sorry but O’Gorman’s Douglas impression just doesn’t cut it — it takes you right out of the film.

(l.) Dean O’Gorman as Kirk Douglas in Trumbo; (r.) Kirk Douglas in the early to mid 60s.

 HE to Roach, producer Michael London: Please fix this. It’s not a tragedy in and of itself but why hurt the move with something that clearly doesn’t work? Dub O’Gorman with someone who sounds like Douglas — can’t be that hard. Trumbo also features Michael Stuhlbarg as Edward G. Robinson and David James Elliott as John Wayne, and I’ll tell you right now I’m scared shitless of what may be in store.

In a just-released Franklin Pierce-Boston Herald poll of likely Democratic voters, Bernie Sanders is leading Hillary Clinton 44% to 37% with Vice President Joe Biden running third at 9%. In other words 53% of the respondents chose somebody other than Clinton. And yet a majority expects Clinton to win the Democratic nomination. Big deal — who would say otherwise at this stage? Pretty much everyone is depressingly resigned to the Clinton inevitability but nobody likes her much…nobody. Clinton stands for the right semi-progressive things but is inspiring no great love except from women in love with the metaphor of a female president. Will I vote for her? Yes, but with a sagging heart and no special enthusiasm.

The new teaser for Quentin Tarantino‘s The Hateful Eight (Weinstein Co., 12.25) tries to suggest that a fair-sized portion happens outdoors. Maybe the first 10 or 15 minutes but this is mostly a sittin’ around and talkin’ shit indoors movie. After attending the 4.19.14 read-through in downtown L.A., I called it “a fairly minor and almost dismissable thing — a colorful but mediocre Tarantino gabfest that mostly happens on a single interior set (i.e., Minnie’s Haberdashery, located in the Wyoming town of Red Rock during a fierce blizzard), and which unfolds in the vein of The Petrified Forest.” But oh, that Ultra Panavision 70 photography! For the record the aspect ratio of this teaser is 2.74 to 1 whereas classic Ultra Panavision 70 is 2.76 to 1…but no biggie. Good thing that Minnie’s is the size of the first-class lounge on HMS Titanic. Gives the actors room to spread out, swagger around.

In an 8.11 N.Y. Times piece about F. Gary Gray‘s Straight Outta Compton (Universal, 8.14) and more particularly about a screening of the Universal film last night, Michael Cieply observes that “those who have already seen the film have been quick to make a connection with the recent unrest in cities including Baltimore and, again this week, Ferguson, Mo.” On 7.31 I posted the following: “Apart from it being a tight, satisfying, straight-ahead telling of the N.W.A. saga (roots, breakout, success, conflict and falling apart, concluding with the death of Easy E.), it’s quite an indictment of police racism and brutality. And what a time for this to arrive in the wake of a string of video-captured police shootings and unwarranted arrests, the most recent being the shooting of Samuel Dubose. ‘Fuck Tha Police’ and then some. Expect highly charged reactions.”

Rod Lurie was asking for Best All-Time Top Ten Albums on Facebook two or three days ago. I didn’t post in time so I thought I’d tap out a few. These are the first albums that came to mind and in this order, but ten is ridiculous — gotta make it 25. Obviously I stopped discovering or even listening to new stuff eons ago, but just as obviously (or at least arguably) music was much, much better between the late ’60s and mid ’90s. So here we go, starting with stuff that came to mind without any research or second guessing, the standard being albums I’m most likely to listen to on a long car trip (if I’m not in a random song mode).

1. Excitable Boy — Warren Zevon; 2. Aftermath — Rolling Stones; 3. So — Peter Gabriel; 4. Nevermind — Nirvana; 5. Rubber Soul — Beatles; 6. Smile — Beach Boys; 7. The Nightfly — Donald Fagen; 8. Hejira — Joni Mitchell; 9. Heroes — David Bowie; 10. Disraeli Gears — Cream; 11. Velvet Underground & Nico — Velvet Underground; 12. Revolver — Beatles; 12. Synchronicity — The Police; 13. Colour By Numbers — Culture Club; 14. Full Moon Fever — Tom Petty; 15. Nirvana Unplugged MTV in New York; 16. The Town and the City — Los Lobos; 17. The Band — The Band; 18. Sticky Fingers — Rolling Stones; 19. Brothers in Arms — Dire Straits; 20. My Aim Is True — Elvis Costello; 21. Truth — Jeff Beck Group; 22. Permanent — Joy Division; 23. Learning to Crawl — Pretenders; 24. Trouble in Paradise — Randy Newman; 25. Emotional Rescue — Rolling Stones.

New trailer accompanied by Cannes Film Festival review, posted on 5.18: To me Joachim Trier‘s Louder Than Bombs, an ennui-laden, Euro-style Ordinary People stuffed with the usual suburban, middle-class downer intrigues and featuring one of the most reprehensible teenagers in the history of motion pictures, felt contrived and gently infuriating. Too many aspects felt wrong and miscalculated or even hateful, and once the tally reached critical levels I began to sink into my usual exasperation (faint moaning, leaning forward, checking my watch).

“Uh-oh, this isn’t working,” I began saying to myself at around the ten-minute mark. Later on I was saying, “Wow, this really isn’t working.” Later on I was muttering worse things.

Bombs is about a father and two sons grappling with the death of their wife/mother, and the dysfunctional behavior that emerges in her absence. Dad, a Long Island-based high-school teacher, is played by aging, overly sensitive, watery-eyed Gabriel Byrne. Son #1, a mild-mannered college prof and mystifyingly irresponsible young dad, is played by Jesse Eisenberg, wearing a bizarre straight-hair wig instead of his usual curlies. And son #2, the above-mentioned demon from Hades, is played by Devin Druid.

Isabelle Huppert plays the dead wife/mom — a renowned, N.Y. Times-endorsed war photographer who died some months ago in a local highway accident.

Don’t ask me how or why but earlier this summer I started going steady with Coke Zero. I knew it wasn’t good for me but I figured an occasional small-sized bottle would be okay. Plus I liked the flavor and took faint comfort in the fact that at least it didn’t have sugar. But two or three weeks ago I started to feel a kind of weird chemical sensation in my bloodstream, and I realized that I wasn’t sleeping all that well because of this. My body sensed that it was something in the Coke Zero. Maybe the potassium benzoate, which is used to protect the flavor of the beverage. Or the acesulfame potassium. In any event I suddenly said to myself “what the hell are you doing?” and threw all the Coke Zero out. Here’s a piece by health writer Ted Elliott that looks a little too forgivingly at the ingredients.

I flipped out this morning when I read Marshall Fine’s pan of Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig‘s Mistress America (Fox Searchlight, 8.14). Me: “How could you do this to such a neurotically and luminously alive film? With such a precise and unique voice? With such a timeless theme — i.e., ‘writers are always selling somebody out’? The first reinvention of 21st screwball comedy that holds together & which isn’t an homage to ’30s screwball (like Peter Bogdanovich‘s She’s Funny That Way) and you take a dump on it? Are you proud of yourself?” Fine: “The truth about Greta Gerwig and the emperor’s new clothes (i.e., lack of acting ability) will eventually get out.” Me: “Dead wrong. She’s a manic neurotic 21st Century Carole Lombard.” Fine: “Let’s agree to disagree. Don’t take it so personally.” Me: “You wouldn’t if you were her? Gerwig is doing something exciting here. She’s breaking new ground on top of being a funnier, flakier, taller and less chubby Lena Dunham. In fact she’s not chubby at all.”

For years the saga of the much-written-about effort to assemble a completed version of Orson Welles‘ never-finished The Other Side of The Wind has been missing a key element — i.e., a bad guy. Whenever a collaborative project stalls, it’s usually because somebody in the loop is being unreasonably demanding or flaky about something. Like Larry Silverstein, the obstinate greedhead who held up the reconstruction of the World Trade Center. The mark in this instance is Oja Kodar, Welles’ lover and comrade-in-arms for the last 24 years of his life and a current, Croatia-residing holder of rights to TOSOTW. Wellesians have long been reluctant to speak ill of Kodar given her tender history with Welles, but now a key chronicler has said “fuck it, let’s call her out.”

A piece posted yesterday (8.10) by Wellesnet.com‘s Ray Kelly claims in concise, chapter-and-verse form that Kodar is the Larry Silverstein of the Other Side of the Wind realm.

Oka Kodar

“And now we face the sad realization that Oja may be stalling the completion of The Other Side of the Wind,” Kelly writes early on.

“In Joseph McBride‘s What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?: A Portrait of an Independent Career, Wellesians first learned of the troubled efforts to finish TOSOTW and how Oja and Peter Bogdanovich sacked McBride, a key player in brokering a $3 million deal with Showtime to finish TOSOTW in 1999. The pact soon fell apart.

“In Josh Karp‘s Orson Welles’s Last Movie, numerous individuals (investors, attorneys, executives and others) who have been involved with the project during the last 15 years all told a variation on the same tale in which Oja derailed attempts to complete the film by (a) reneging on agreements, (b) pitting investors against each other, (c) secretly shopping for better deals and (d) shifting her allegiances at critical junctures.

“Oja’s actions prompted an attorney for the Boushehri family, a co-owner of the film, to write in a 2007 memo: ‘We have been waiting for many years for her to agree to a deal…my own personal feeling is that she is incapable of making a deal with anyone..our client has never been the problem. Kodar has been.'”

The word since last May is that the burn-through performance in Paolo Sorrentino‘s Youth is given by costar Jane Fonda. Not to take anything away from star Michael Caine, who believably inhabits the life of an 80something conductor as he chills and contemplates while staying at a Switzerland spa, but Fonda owns this movie. It’s just a single short scene between her character, an actress, and Harvey Keitel, a successful director who wants her to play a role in his latest film, but Fonda — trust me, I know what goes — is an all-but-guaranteed contender for Best Supporting Actress.