Two days ago Hitfix TV guy Daniel Fienberg actually wrote that “for many viewers, Ben Mendelsohn will probably be the surprise breakout star of Netflix’s Bloodline.” Really. Feinberg meant it. I was appalled. Mendelsohn’s Danny character, the oldest and surliest son of Robert and Sally Rayburn (Sam Shepard, Sissy Spacek), is a really bad package — a malignant, sandal-wearing, cigarette-smoking scumbag. Danny’s death was blessedly promised in a flash-forward excerpt in episode #1, but here I am on episode #4 and the fucker is still hanging around. God, I hate the way Mendelsohn is always sucking on cigarettes! And his toes sticking out all the time. Just finished episode #5 (or was it #6?): Okay, I feel a little sorry for him but let’s not get carried away.

Sweaty, nicotine-stained Ben Mendelsohn in Bloodline

Today Variety‘s “staff” ran a wrap-up piece about “13 break-out movies” that played at 2015 South by Southwest. Three days ago a similar N.Y. Times piece, written by Mekado Murphy, highlighted the “South by” films that were “the talk of the festival.” There were some overlaps but well over 20 films are included in the two articles, and yet neither mentions Ondi Timoner‘s BRAND: A Second Coming, a nearly two-hour doc about the transformation of Russell Brand from hyper libertine to social revolutionary.

This despite Timoner’s film having (a) opened SXSW to the usual hoopla, (b) won thoughtful praise from nearly every critic who reviewed it and (c) reportedly played to more than the usual rousing receptions at three separate showings. Several strong films played at “South by” and everyone, of course, has their special favorites, but how did these articles manage to completely ignore one of the festival’s most invigorating crowd-pleasers? Not to mention one of the most politically pointed films of that Austin gathering, and one that will likely cause a stir when it opens commercially later this year.

I don’t follow the career paths of each and every noteworthy online film critic, and I’m certainly not in the habit of monitoring press releases from the New Jersey U.S. Attorney’s office. But something mind-blowing was announced and reported last Tuesday about a film writer I slightly “know” — i.e., Gabe Toro. His posts and reviews evaporated last August and some (LexG among them) have wondered what happened. He was arrested, is what happened. On 8.19.14. Last Tuesday’s press release plus two news accounts state that Toro, a 31-year-old resident of the Bronx, has pled guilty to online enticement of a minor to engage in criminal sexual conduct, and that he’ll face at least ten years in the slam when he’s sentenced on 6.25, and that he’ll have to register as a sex offender when he gets out.

Everyone has been “ooh-ing and “aah”-ing the new trailer for Chris McQuarrie‘s Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation (Paramount, 7.31). I’m not immune to the excitement but there’s a slight blemish on the franchise. I’m referring to the fact that right now the Tom Cruise brand is undergoing yet another denigration due to Alex Gibney‘s Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief. Relatively few have seen Gibney’s doc (it pops on HBO on 3.29) but I have, and I’m telling you once again, as I wrote in my Sundance review, that Cruise comes off as a “coddled loon” and an enabler of a decidedly venal organization.

In this light (and I really don’t see how anyone can argue that this “light” doesn’t exist) it’s hard to relax with Cruise in this M:I5 context as the brave and daring Ethan. It’s a stone fact that Cruise is a seriously tainted guy off-screen — a possibly oblivious benefactor who’s supported and promoted a gang of vicious hombres who behave like a kind of evil “syndicate” while Cruise looks the other way. Watch Gibney’s film and tell me you don’t care at all, that the disparity between Cruise’s on-screen superhero and the unsavory real-life propagandist he’s more or less become in actuality doesn’t bother you in the least.

“The first thing I’d say [is that] online we’ve got to embrace nuance over outrage. We’ve got to get past an outrage culture of reading things simply and making really broad conclusions about them, and instead ask questions and try to listen to each other better. Generally, we just aren’t doing a great job of listening to each other online. I don’t think in the end it’s very helpful for the overall quality of discourse.” — YA superstar John Green (Paper Towns, The Fault In Our Stars) talking to Refinery 29’s Sabrina Rojas Weiss about YA headliner Andrew Smith getting beaten up on Twitter for stating that his novels aren’t that invested in female characters because he “was raised in a family with four boys, and I absolutely did not know anything about girls at all.”

Good Kill (IFC Films, 4.10.15) “is about drone warfare and this righteous drama’s take on it. The military jargon is bogus and insulting. There is, of course, no such thing as a ‘good kill’, and Andrew Niccol’s drama will remind you of that repeatedly. Good Kill runs through the rituals of military slaughter. It dehumanizes the combatant and underlines the inhuman nature of collateral damage and strikes based on pattern behavior. It’s often slow and occasionally simplistic, but at least someone’s talking about the issue.” — Excerpted from Henry Barnes‘ Guardian review, filed on 9.12.14 from the Toronto Film festival.

Ken Loach‘s Jimmy’s Hall “is a no-frills, true-life drama about Irish rabble-rouser Jimmy Gralton upon returning to his native home after more than 20 years spent in the U.S., and about his conflicts with conservative forces who feared the possible igniting of a leftist movement, and Gralton’s subsequent deportation back to the U.S. It’s a Loach thing through and through — mid-tempo, working-class, earnest, low-key, authentic, political. I mean no disrespect when I say it’s a bit of a shrugger. There are vague echoes, of course, of today’s 1% vs. 99% equation, and a refrain of the old rule about dissidents always dealing with struggle and adversity. The painterly textures and atmosphere are what moved me the most. I miss the visual splendors of rural, old-time Ireland (the small-village architecture, the browns and greens, the candle-glow lighting) that Loach has often captured in his films, and which are exquisitely presented here. He shot it on that dying technological format known as celluloid.” — filed from Cannes on 5.22.14.

Yesterday Pierre Morel and Sean Penn‘s The Gunman opened on 2816 screens and tallied a first-day gross of $1,769,000, which averages out to $628 per theatre. A problematic but reasonably diverting film, The Gunman performed only slightly better yesterday than Matthew Vaughn‘s reprehensible Kingsman: The Secret Service, which opened five weeks ago and has earned about $111 million thus far. To me the Morel-Penn is far more tolerable than the Vaughn, but American audiences don’t agree. You can’t expect fairness or justice at the box-office, but The Gunman didn’t deserve to die such an ignominious death.

It’s a significant deal to some, I hope, that a Criterion Bluray of Carol Reed‘s Odd Man Out is streeting on 4.14. Not so much for me as I purchased the British Network Region 2 Bluray (which has some of the same extras as the Criterion) two and a half years ago, or in August of 2012.  Odd Man Out is regarded as a serious classic by boomer and GenX film mavens (or at least the more devoted of these), but I wonder if there are any under-35s who even know or care. I need to keep reminding myself that under-35s regard ’80s films as old, ’60s and ’70s films as wheelchair material and almost anything made before that as too musty by half.

What I’m about to pass along happened 10 or 12 days ago. Only now can it be told. Bullshit — I just couldn’t be bothered to write about it until today, and even now I don’t feel all that motivated. But it happened. I was on the Yamaha and nudging my way out of an alley, about to cross northbound traffic on Robertson Blvd. and enter the southbound lanes. I vroomed across the northbound lanes and puttered my way toward the light on Burton Way, “splitting lanes” between two rows of idling engines. I then decided to veer into the far right lane just ahead of a large white SUV, but as I began to turn the SUV honked and blocked me by lurching forward. Slight brake screech. Okay, I said to myself. Some guy wants to play Dodge City.

The SUV driver, a smallish dude in a white tank top who looked a lot (but not exactly) like Kevin Hart, began to scold and sneer like his life, pride, financial future and family history depended on it…”fuck you think you’re fuckin’ doin’, motherfuckah?” I glanced and turned away. But even if I’d been the hair-trigger type a sixth sense was telling me to back off. If I’d said a single word or raised a single eyebrow, this guy might have leapt out of his car and gone all Ving Rhames or Suge Knight on me. Maybe. I definitely felt the readiness. My attempting to nudge in front of him was a major territorial challenge.

The one and only time I saw Steven Spielberg‘s 1941 was inside a small Manhattan screening room about a month before it opened, or sometime in mid-November of ’79. When it began with a parody of the opening Jaws beach scene with a pretty blonde taking a nude swim in the sea, complete with John Williams‘ Jaws theme music, I wanted to say out loud, “Holy crap, Spielberg is paying tribute to himself!?…he’s starting this film with an homage to his own Hollywood success to get a laugh!? My God!” Stanley Kubrick gave it to Spielberg straight when the latter visited the Elstree set of The Shining. “I saw your last movie, 1941,” Kubrick said. “It was great. It wasn’t funny but it was expertly made. You should have sold it as a drama.” I liked one scene — i.e., when Robert Stack‘s General Stillwell is chuckling happily and then choking up during a Hollywood Boulevard screening of Walt Disney‘s Dumbo.

A special extended version of 1941 running 146 minutes — 28 minutes longer than the original 118-minute cut — will screen at the American Cinematheque on Sunday afternoon at 5 pm, and I must say there’s a perverse part of me that wants to attend and endure this calamity all over again, just so I can say (a) “I saw the nearly two-and-a-half hour version!” and (b) “Let no one say I’m not willing to reconsider an opinion.”

Until a couple of days ago I’d never quite thought of 1971 as one of the truly legendary years in American cinema, or at least not along the lines of 1939 or ’62 or ’99. But on 3.18 a longish piece by a guy whose name might be Cole Brax (a vague echo of Cole Trickle, Tom Cruise‘s character in Days of Thunder) suggested this very thing. He didn’t make a complete-enough case for ’71’s lasting glory, but he definitely began the conversation. Key quote: “What I do know is that in 1971 many of the greatest filmmakers who ever lived released some of their best work. At the time, most of my favorite directors in film history were still active or just getting started. I don’t know what was in the water or the air that year (probably drugs), but the films that came out of that annum created a ripple effect that is felt to this very day.”

As noted Brax only lists a portion of the finest so here’s a more complete rundown, and listed in order of my personal preference:

Top 27 1971 Films: (1) The French Connection; (2) The Last Picture Show; (3) A Clockwork Orange (4) The Hospital, (5) McCabe & Mrs. Miller, (6) Sunday Bloody Sunday, (7) Get Carter, (8) Straw Dogs, (9) Murmur of the Heart, (10) Dirty Harry, (11) Klute, (12) Walkabout, (13) Two English Girls, (14) Death in Venice, (15) Two-Lane Blacktop, (16) Taking Off, (17) Carnal Knowledge, (18) Harold and Maude, (19) Roman Polanski’s Macbeth, (20) The Emigrants, (21) The Devils, (22) Play Misty for Me, (23) The Panic in Needle Park, (24) THX 1138, (25) Duel, (26) Little Murders, (27) Le Mans.