Jonathan Glazer‘s The Zone of Interest has been shorn of explicitness while humming with implication. That’s the basic idea, and either this approach knocks you flat or it doesn’t. It’s a “brilliant” film as far as its austere design allows it to go, but the only thing that really got me was the opening overture — intense “oh, shit” music played over a black background before light invades and the film begins.

Among many others I recently participated in Scott Feinberg’s “The 100 Greatest Film Books of All Time” survey, the results of which popped in The Hollywood Reporter today (10.12).

What’s the next great topic for a Hollywood expose or tell-all? Six years ago I suggested a book called “Super-Vomit: How Hollywood Infantiles (i.e., Devotees of Comic Books and Video Games) Degraded Theatrical and All But Ruined The Greatest Modern Art Form“?

Here’s another idea — a recent-history book one about how censorious, ultra-sensitive wokesters all but suffocated the film business during the woke terror era (2016 to present)?

Here are the books I put on my top-25 Feinberg list:

(1) Sam Wasson’s “The Big Goodbye” (making of Chinatown book)

(2) Stephen Bach‘s “Final Cut: Dreams and Disasters in the Making of Heaven’s Gate”

(4) Mark Harris‘s “Pictures at a Revolution”

(5) John Gregory Dunne‘s “The Studio”

(6) Leo Braudy‘s “The World in a Frame”

(7) Thomas Schatz‘s “The Genius of the System”

(8) David McClintick‘s “Indecent Exposure”

(9) Otto Freidrich‘s “City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940s“,

(10) Julie Salamon‘s “The Devil’s Candy,”

(11) Jack Brodsky and Nathan Weiss‘s “The Cleopatra Papers”

(12) David Thomson‘s “Suspects“ + “The Whole Equation

(13) William Goldman‘s “Which Lie Did I Tell?”

(14) Peter Biskind‘s “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls” and “Down and Dirty Pictures.”

(15) Charles Fleming‘s “High Concept: Don Simpson and the Hollywood Culture of Excess,”

(16) William Goldman‘s “Adventures in the Screen Trade”,

(17) the audio version of Robert Evans‘ “The Kid Stays in the Picture”,

(18) James B. Stewart‘s “Disney War“

(19) Peter Biskind‘s “Seeing is Believing”

(20) Thomas Doherty‘s “Hollywood’s Censor” (the book about Joe Breen)

(21) Jake Ebert and Terry Illiot‘s “My Indecision Is Final”

(22) Nancy Griffin and Kim Masters‘ “Hit and Run: How Jon Peters and Peter Guber Took Sony for a Ride in Hollywood“,

(23) Bruce Wagner‘s “Force Majeure“,

(24) David Thomson‘s “Warren Beatty and Desert Eyes: A Life and a Story“

(25) Nathaniel West‘s “The Day of the Locust”

Please go to 2:25 in the below video report from England’s Channel 4 — “Inside the Gaza siege – an eyewitness report.”

The conventional time to memorialize poor Chris Reeve would be 12 months hence — the 20th anniversary of his death. The Superman star and quadriplegic crusader passed almost exactly 19 years ago — 10.10.04. Three days later I wrote a piece called “Guarded Guy.” Hollywood Elsewhere was only two months old at the time. Here’s an excerpt:

I had an experience with Reeve in 1980, when I was a pup journalist living in New York. It began with an interview piece I wrote about him for a New Jersey weekly called The Aquarian, the main subject being Somewhere in Time, which I had a thing for at the time, or more particularly the beautifully shot finale. (I wrote about this in ’17 — reposted below.)

Reeve and I met for the interview at a restaurant on upper Columbus Avenue. I had done my homework and prepared a lot of deep-focus questions, and I think he enjoyed our talk. Sonia Moskowitz, a gifted photographer whom I was seeing at the time, sat in for the interview and then took some photos of Reeve (plus one of him and me) outside the restaurant. Then we went back inside to sort out the bill.

I was a bit green back then, but I’d done a few celebrity interviews and knew that the basic rule was that the studio always picked up the tab. I assumed this would be the case but there was no Universal publicist at the restaurant to cover the check, and I didn’t know what to do because my Aquarian editor had never talked to me about expenses, and I didn’t have the cash to cover it on my own.

I thought Reeve (wealthy actor, right?) might step up to the plate and get his money back from Universal. It was that or somebody would have to leave a personal check or wash dishes. Talk about embarrassing. When I told Reeve I was a bit light I could see he was irritated. We kind of hemmed and hawed about it on the sidewalk, I offered everything I had (about $15 bucks), and he finally dug out his wallet and said, “Well, all right” and paid the balance.

When I wrote my piece I threw in a couple of graphs at the end about this bill-paying snafu. I thought it was both amusing and humanizing on some level that a successful big-name actor who’d played Superman was capable of getting flustered about paying a check, just like anyone else.

A week or two later, just as the Aquarian piece came out, I went with a couple of friends to see Reeve in The Fifth of July. We visited his dressing room to say hello after the show, and as an ice-breaker I asked if he’d seen the article. Bad question. Reeve hadn’t liked my closer and said so. He was scowling at me. I felt like I was suddenly in the Twilight Zone. I thought I’d written about the restaurant-tab thing with humor and affection. I’d figured this plus the fact that the overall piece was highly flattering would have charmed him.

To soothe things over I wrote him a note the next day saying I was sorry he had that reaction, that I really thought the humor I got out of our check-paying episode made it a warmer, fuller piece, and that I hoped he wouldn’t hold a grudge.

A few weeks later I ran into Reeve at an invitational party at a Studio 54-like roller skating joint in Chelsea. As soon as he spotted me he came right over, smiling, and said, “Hey, Jeff. Got your note…everything’s cool…don’t worry about it.” We shook hands, he smiled again and said “peace,” and that was that.

What this told me about Reeve is that he was gracious, obviously, and able to handle embarassments and whatnot. It also told me that deep down he was into dignity and protocol and doing things a certain way. I think that attitude bled into his acting on a certain level, and that’s why he wasn’t quite Marlon Brando.

George Clooney speaking in Boys in the Boat featurette: “These guys at the University of Washington are taking on the seniors, and then taking on the fraternity [something], and then taking on the Nazis.”

Clooney is using the usual shorthand, of course, but does he really mean that the young athletes who belonged to Germany’s 1936 Olympic rowing team were devout “seig heil” guys? Yes, Adolf Hitler saw the Berlin ’36 Olympics as a a potential proof of Aryan supremacy (Jesse Owens screwed that pooch), but how many German citizens were ardent supporters of the Nazi party that year, and how many were playing along to get along? A third or less?

How many blue-state liberals today pretend to be wokester sympathizers but are just keeping their heads down in order to stay out of trouble?

Let’s imagine, God forbid, that The Beast might win the ’24 election. He would therefore be president during the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles. Would it then be fair or accurate to describe the U.S. Olympic team as “the MAGAS”?

I saw Killers of the Flower Moon in Cannes last May, and gave it a B grade. Okay, a B-plus. Since then I’ve written about it from 49 different angles. And I absolutely intend to see it on an IMAX screen when it opens on 10.20. It’s a very well-made film, and it certainly warrants two viewings.

That said, it’s a woke flatliner. I can sense this in the air. In a perfect world Joe and Jane would swamp it like Barbenheimer, but my insect antennae signals are telling me perhaps not.

From “At the New York Film Festival, Delicate Movies and Ones That Go Vroom,” a 9.29.23 N.Y. Times piece by Manohla Dargis:

“One of the festival’s bigger headscratchers is that the latest from Martin Scorsese — a producer on Maestro — isn’t at the event. That would be Killers of the Flower Moon, which had its premiere in May at Cannes and will open theatrically Oct. 20.

“’We loved the film and invited it immediately after seeing it in Cannes,’ Dennis Lim, the artistic director of the New York Film Festival, told me. Days before the festival announced its main slate in August, however, Apple, which is releasing the movie, said that it would not be participating.

“As Lim noted, Flower Moon wasn’t in any of the other major fall festivals, which help usher films into the new season and onto the long road to the Oscars. (Apple could not be reached for comment.) Whatever the reason, its absence is a shame, especially because this is the event that 50 years ago presented a little film titled Mean Streets.”

There’s a trilogy of intensely charismatic, cameo-level, award-worthy performances — intense burn-throughs that rang the proverbial bell in 20 or 16 or even five minutes and 40 seconds. And they all happened during the second half of the 20th Century.

The longest of these was the least heralded — Jackie Gleason‘s Minnesota Fats in The Hustler (’61). His performance occupied only 20 minutes of screen time, but Gleason was nominated for Best Supporting Actor (along with costar George C. Scott).

In The Silence of the Lambs (’90) Anthony Hopkins‘ Hannibal Lecter had only 16 minutes of screen time, but it was sufficient to snag a Best Actor Oscar.

The shortest was Beatrice Straight‘s barn burner of a cameo in Network, technically just under six minutes but actually closer to four and three-quarters — that’s how long that marital argument scene she had with William Holden lasted. It won her a Best Supporting Actress Oscar, of course.

What 21st Century quickies qualify? Have there been any? I’m asking.

Wait, one more: Christopher Plummer‘s Mike Wallace in The Insider (’99), which — I’m just guessing — isn’t much longer than 25 minutes. Okay, possibly 30.