I’ve spent most of the morning listening to Camille Paglia YouTube videos — an interview she did seven weeks ago with Reason.com’s Nick Gillespie, a lecture she gave during the 2012 Chicago Humanities Festival and a 1996 interview she did with Politically Correct‘s Bill Maher. I’ve been a rapt admirer of her contrarian puncturing…her radical, libertarian, anti-leftist-Stalinoid views since the early ’90s. I don’t agree with everything she says, but she’s one of the few truly unshackled, bold-as-brass cultural critics, and I love her obviously valuable, fully considered opinions mixed with her shoot-from-the-hip, motor-mouth way of speaking. She’s always a turn-on. A mind like a bullwhip.

Yesterday’s post about an apparent decision by Paramount Pictures to open Martin Scorsese‘s Silence in 2016 (and possibly to debut it in Cannes next May) makes sense all around, and is hardly surpising. Wikipedia and the IMDB have been calling this a 2016 release all along. The only person who’s projected a late-2015 Silence release has been David Poland, to my knowledge. There were natural expectations that it would receive some kind of late-breaking award-season release, being a Scorsese film and all. But not if you look at the particulars.

Silence would be coming out at year’s end only if it was seen as some kind of natural award-season wowser (as The Wolf of Wall Street clearly was to anyone with half a brain), and I’m presuming this is not what the Paramount gang is detecting. Scorsese and his editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, may be close to finishing it for all I know, but I don’t believe that’s a key factor. The key factor is that Silence will almost certain be a “critic’s movie“, hence the possible Cannes scenario. Because everything I’ve read about Silence tells me that it’s dark and pained and weighed down with suffering. It may be beautifully made and contain a spiritual current that redeems or balances out the religious persecution stuff, but it doesn’t seem to be any kind of galvanizing, accessible film that will reach out and really touch people where they live.

All along I’ve been presuming that Martin Scorsese‘s Silence might open in late 2015 but that a 2016 release was just as (if not slightly more) likely. In a 6.28 Best Picture spitball piece MCN’s David Poland flatly declared that we should Scorsese’s film to be given “a December berth and a November premiere.” Well, a couple of days ago I was told that Silence definitely won’t open this year and that it may debut in Cannes next May.

So what are the reactions to Southpaw? There’s no ignoring that 57% Rotten Tomatoes grade. Does Jake Gyllenhaal get a pass at least? Here’s my 7.22 review. From Richard Brody’s 7.24 New Yorker review: “The boxing drama Southpaw has the chilling feel of a movie made to fit the requirements of a dictatorship — not a political one but, rather, a bureaucratic one. The creations of the director, Antoine Fuqua, and the screenwriter, Kurt Sutter, seem to have been freeze-dried, cut into card-sized tiles, and laid out sequentially — sustaining only the shallowest definition of character, connected only by the thinnest string of motive, and hermetically isolated from the practicalities among which the action ostensibly takes place.” Update: Okay, no interest.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, a boxy version of Stanley Kubrick‘s Lolita was issued on Criterion CAV laser disc. By this I mean a version that was partly presented in a 1.37:1 aspect ratio with occasional 1.66 croppings from time to time. Dr. Strangelove was also presented this way (1.37/1.66) on an early Columbia-TriStar Home Video DVD, back before the 1.85 fascists muscled their way in and started cleavering everything. Yes, I’m happy that the current Lolita Bluray is cropped at 1.66, but boy, would I love to get hold of a high-def version of that 1992 Criterion laser disc. You think Kubrick (whose birthday is being celebrated today) didn’t sign off on the boxy Lolita? Of course he did.

I’ve just read Robin Write‘s two-part q & a with Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone (part 1 posted Friday, part 2 on Saturday), and I’m sorry but (a) it feels too abbreviated and (b) the questions aren’t punchy or probing enough. I know Sasha and the whole novelistic lay of the land here — the difficulties, detours, political intrigues, personalities, backstories and bickerings. And Write just skims the surface. Generalities, gentle vibes and a mutual admiration pact are good to start with, but then you’ve gotta get down.

I was at a stop-sign intersection the other day in Beverly Hills with the drivers of two or three cars looking at each other and wondering who would go first. The DMV handbook says to defer to the guy on your right, but that never seems to work as the guy on the right is usually deferring to some timid, deferential impulse and is unwilling to make the first move. Or he’s texting or not paying attention. The best strategy is to wait two or three seconds and then go for it. People usually roll with the idea of a guy on a motorcycle going first, and I tend to take advantage of that. So I crossed and was rolling along down the next block and then I saw a guy halfway into the next intersection and was ready to turn left. So I approached with an assumption that he would go first and I would wait before continuing on. But when I got closer he didn’t have the balls to go for it so I went instead, and so the guy honked. The honk meant “hey, show some manners! I was about to turn left in the intersection and you just pulled in front of me like you own the road.” I understood what he was saying. I didn’t mind that he honked. It’s okay. On the other hand I presume that he understood then and understands now that if a driver lacks decisiveness he/she is going to have to wait for decisive, take-charge drivers to go first. It’s not a big deal. Sometimes I’m the timid guy and when somebody else goes first, I accept it.

Six days ago Vanity Fair‘s Joanna Robinson posted a comprehensive projection piece about an alleged Eyes Wide Shut-level orgy scene in episode six of True Detective, which airs tonight on HBO. The orgy will happen at some secluded, manor-like lodge in Geurneville, California, a small town on the Russian River that I’ve personally visited a few times. Nice town, nice country vibe.

Guerneville, you should know, is a couple of miles from Monte Rio, which of course is where the fabled Bohemian Grove is located. (Here’s a map of the area.) A private 700-square-acre retreat for powerful white guys, Bohemian Grove is known for having hosted all kinds of pagan bonfire celebrations with guys wearing animal heads and loin cloths and pissing in the bushes. The Wiki page quotes Bill Clinton as describing the Bohemian Club as a place “where all those rich Republicans go up and stand naked against redwood trees, right?” On the Watergate tapes Richard Nixon is heard saying that he’s visited “from time to time…but it is the most faggy goddamn thing you could ever imagine.”

At this stage in the investigation of the Sandra Bland tragedy it really would require an exceptional degree of determination to believe that she might have been killed by Sheriff’s deputies in Waller County Jail on July 13th, or three days after allegedly kicking state trooper Brian Encinia after he pulled her over for a penny-ante traffic violation in Prairie View, Texas. The concept of a 28 year-old woman hanging herself over being temporarily incarcerated sounds extremely bizarre, but all the evidence points to suicide. It makes no “sense” apart from Bland having allegedly been distraught over her bail amount and having told authorities that she attempted suicide earlier, but there’s just no way to trust any other interpretation.

Another mass shooting will happen sooner or later, and then another one after that and so on. Accepting the possiblility of being murdered in a workplace or a movie theatre or a school by an unstable nutter is part of the price we pay for American citizenship. A mild, fair-minded background check amendment for commercial gun sales was killed by the U.S. Senate in April 2013 in a 54-46 vote, and among the Republican Senators from “gun states” who voted it down were Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, Ted Cruz of Texas, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Orrin Hatch of Utah, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Marco Rubio of Florida. Will this country be as gun crazy when the Millenials are running things 20 years from now?

What’s with the narration, or more particularly the narrator’s weirdly dated speaking style? It’s meant to be processed as a form of mock-ironic commentary (right?), but that suggests that Queen of Earth is some kind of dry comedy and not, as the copy states, “a psychological character study about an emotionally fragile woman (Elizabeth Moss) on the verge of a mental breakdown during her stay at a lakeside retreat with her seemingly unsympathetic best friend (Katherine Waterston).” IFC Films will open pic on 8.26.

Jason Segel has stood up and officially thrown his hat into the Oscar ring. His 9.26 interview with the N.Y. Times Oscar-season “bagger” Cara Buckley about his attention-getting performance as the late David Foster Wallace in James Ponsoldt‘s The End of the Tour (A24, 7.31) pretty much constitutes an official announcement. The theme of Segel’s campaign will be one that any working actor can relate to — the occasional need to gather one’s courage in order to stretch and break the mold and defy typecasting.

The End of The Tour‘s Jason Segel.

Segel “had grown weary of rote rom-com roles and was ravenous for change,” Buckley writes. Portraying a much-worshipped writer “was such a U-turn from Mr. Segel’s regular fare [that it] made the part only more tantalizing. ‘I knew I was going to try it, immediately,’ Mr. Segel said in an interview in the lounge of Manhattan’s Bowery Hotel. ‘When you start repeating yourself, it gets boring for everybody.'”

But if Segel and his handlers are smart, they’ll focus on the Best Supporting Actor race rather than Best Actor. The Best Actor situation is already half-locked down at this stage, and there’s just no way in hell that Segel will be able to elbow aside Black Mass‘s Johnny Depp, The Revenant‘s Leonardo DiCaprio, Trumbo‘s Bryan Cranston, Steve Jobs‘ Michael Fassbender, The Danish Girl‘s Eddie Redmayne (that’s five already!) and Snowden‘s (or The Walk‘s) Joseph Gordon Levitt (six!). Not to mention Love & Mercy‘s fully deserving Paul Dano and John Cusack, who’ve been looking at an uphill climb since last June.