From a producer friend: “WWII movies and difficult spiritual journeys are two currents during the current fall season. Whiplash and Foxcatcher don’t quite constitute a third as they number only two — obsessive-compulsive crazy coaches and their brilliant protege/prey.”

Kathryn Bigelow‘s big night happened a little less than five years ago. Doesn’t feel like it but that’s the math. All that love in the room…and then two and three-quarter years later Bigelow and her Hurt Locker collaborator Mark Boal delivered Zero Dark Thirty, a brilliant, even better film, in my humble view…and some of those who were cheering Bigelow for her Hurt Locker triumph turned right around and allied themselves with a cabal of p.c. lefties and helped to engineer or at the very least support the ugliest takedown in Oscar history. Find me someone in this town who isn’t a one-eyed jack and I’ll call bullshit. The only emotions you can really trust are resentment and envy — everything else is suspect.

I decided to download and install the recently-popped OSX Yosemite on my three computers (2011 Macbook Pro, 2013 Macbook Air, 2009 iMac) today. It takes a while but once it’s all installed it’s pretty sweet. For some reason Adobe Flash Player was erased by the Yosemite installation…pain in the ass. The only real problem is that Yosemite keeps asking you to install computer-to-phone Cloud capabilities that won’t function unless you have IOS 8 installed on your phone, which of course has been glitchy if not problematic for those who don’t have the iPhone 6. I’m not buying the damn thing until there’s an iPhone 6 Mophie juice pack, which won’t be ready until early 2015…nice! Apple is a racket. The point of new operating systems isn’t just to make things work more smoothly, but to goad you to buy new devices. I’ll probably have to buy a new Macbook Pro by the end of the year or soon after.

Deadline‘s Mike Fleming is reporting that Relativity will distribute Mike Binder and Kevin Costner‘s Black Or White, a racially-flavored child custody drama that I went apeshit for after catching it last July. (Here’s the review I posted as the Toronto Film Festival began.) I recognize that other critics weren’t as enthusiastic but I don’t care…fuck it. Fleming is saying the film will be released this year to qualify for awards action but I heard…well, that things aren’t finally decided. Relativity will release the film “through its newly formed multicultural division,” obviously an indication that they expect Black and White to hit bigger with non-whites than with whites…right? It’s a movie about both sides of the racial divide, guys. It’s mainly about parenting.

Variety‘s Tim Gray recently tried to kick up a little Oscar dust for David Ayer‘s Fury, which is expected to earn…oh, maybe $25 million this weekend. Below-the-line nominations, Gray means — Roman Vasyanov’s cinematography, production designer Andrew Menzies, editors Jay Cassidy and Dody Dorn (I could actually see a nomination for these two) and so on. I think we all know that Fury is just a good old-fashioned war flick with amped-up gore and a ridiculous nihilistic ending. It ain’t on the awards hunt, and that should be good enough for the parties concerned. If they gave an Oscar for Best Girly-Faced Wimp or Actor Most Deserving Of an Early Painful Death, Logan Lerman would be a strong contender but otherwise forget it. Incidentally: It’s 6:30 pm New York time so enough people have seen Fury and presumably have an opinion about the ending. Read the piece, think it over and, if so moved, add your name to the HE Honor Roll of Six Critics who found Ayer’s Wild Bunch finale loony.

“’I used to say no to almost everything, because I thought, I’ve got enough dough, I know what I want to do, and I know what I’m capable of,’ Michael Keaton says before switching to a baseball metaphor, something the Pennsylvania native and lifelong Pittsburgh Pirates fan has a habit of doing. “It’s really like saying, ‘I’m going to make you throw me my pitch. I’ll foul a bunch off, but ultimately I have faith that somebody’s going to throw me my pitch.’ By those terms — the Keaton version of ‘I am big, it’s the pictures that got small’ — Birdman may best be described as a fast-breaking curveball the actor manages to hit out of the park.” — from Scott Foundas‘s Variety interview with the Birdman star.

Fear is irrational. When people get scared, they don’t want explanations — they just want to feel safe. And when that happens, they always turn to the hard guys on the right. Which is why the less-than-aggressive response by Obama administration and more particularly the Center for Disease Control’s Tom Frieden to the recent Ebola scare ensures that the Republicans will win a U.S. Senate majority next month. President Obama wouldn’t have decided to appoint a new Ebola czar (Ron Klain has the job) if he wasn’t seriously concerned about Frieden looking like a weak sister over the last several days. If there was even a hair-breadth’s chance that the Republicans might not win, that hope is all but dead now. Frieden’s mild-mannered, bordering-on-milquetoasty responses to questions about his agency not being hard and decisive enough have surely created a sense of elation among Republicans. People who were teetering on the fence now have a reason to go with the hard guys. It’s over. The Right is going to fuck things up horribly between early 2015 and early 2017, and it’s basically due to the Ebola crisis but more particularly to Frieden.

It’s an old story from the ’90s (L.M. Kit Carson hooked me up with Guillermo del Toro around ’94 or ’95, or a little before the Mimic shoot) but a true one.

From a friend: “The actual loaned sum (i.e., Cameron to Del Toro) was around $250K, which used for the ransom negotiator’s salary (said sum was paid promptly after GDT’s father’s release). The ransom itself was painfully raised by GDT’s family over the long ordeal.

“The Cinema Blend and Uproxx articles are inaccurate in many ways, including the fact that the kidnapping happened many, many months after Mimic was released.”

From Rebecca Keegan‘s “The Futurist“: “But it was when his father was kidnapped in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1998 that del Toro realized just how much he could count on Jim the Guy. Miramax had recently released del Toro’s biggest budget movie, Mimic, a $30 million production, and in his hometown the director was now believed to be a Hollywood high roller. Criminals captured Federico del Toro and demanded a ransom from his son. Then they doubled it. Over the course of the seventy-two-day ordeal, Cameron called and e-mailed del Toro constantly, counseling his friend on hiring the right people to perform the ransom negotiations based on his own experience with personal security. He reviewed the references from the negotiators. It was Cameron who loaned del Toro the ransom negotiator’s salary, a sum big enough to alleviate the family’s financial burden. ‘Of all my friends, Jim was the Gibraltar stone, ‘ del Toro recalls. He would pay Cameron back immediately upon his father’s release…”

What…another Paul Schrader post-production hassle? Lionsgate/Grindstone has taken away his latest, Dying of the Light, presumably because they believe that Schrader’s version of the film will be less commercial than their cut. I’ll always think of myself as a Schrader loyalist but it’s always something with this guy…always some rumpus in post. “We lost the battle,” Schrader has written on his Facebook page. “Dying of the Light, a film I wrote and directed, was taken away from me, redited, scored and mixed without my imput. Yesterday Grindstone (a division of Lionsgate) released the poster and the trailer. They are available on line. Here we are, Nick Cage, Anton Yelchin, Nic Refn and myself, wearing our ‘non-disparagement’ T-shirts. The non-disparagement clause in an artist’s contract gives the owners of the film the right to sue the artist should the owner deem anything the artist has said about the film to be ‘derogatory.’ I have no comment on the film or others connected with the picture.”

We do none harm. We say none harm. We think none harm. And if this be not enough to keep the director’s cut of a film intact and available, then in good faith we long not to live.

I caught Chris Rock‘s Top Five towards the end of the Toronto Film Festival, and despite liking it for the most part and the film having generated a certain hoo-hah, I somehow managed to not file anything. Odd. Rock has made a good, smart-ass, to some extent Annie Hall-ish comedy about…well, presumably his own personal and professional travails to some extent but in a broader sense the whole tangled mess of it all (career, alcoholism, creative burnout, media glare, bad-news trophy wives, family). Good-natured but sharp and sometimes stinging, his third directorial outing comes the closest to generating the wily energy of Rock’s stand-up routines…it feels pulled from the raw and “real” as far as it goes. The only weak spot is an odd decision to portray a N.Y. Times writer (Rosario Dawson) as guilty of an ethical breach that would never be tolerated in actuality. A bothersome issue that I buried in a drawer somewhere. Top Five is Rock’s best film so far, a breakthrough of sorts, an 8.5.

This trailer is telling me that Angelina Jolie‘s film is on the nose, right down the middle…emphatic, color-desaturated and kinda square. Somebody said the other day that it’s supposed to be a little more Robert Bresson-ish than David Lean-like…okay, but not here. N.Y. Times reporter Michael Cieply may or may not have have seen Unbroken, but in a 10.14 piece about three World War II-era films (this one plus Fury and The Imitation Game) Cieply writes that Unbroken “is perhaps the closest of the three to a conventional Hollywood film in its focus on an empathetic protagonist.” On top of which the sadistic Japanese camp commandant is too good-looking. I don’t know if Zamperini’s religious conversion in 1949 under the influence of Billy Graham is in the film or not, but it would be interesting as hell to end with this. First and foremost because it happened, and secondly because it would be ballsy to go against the liberal laissez-faire Hollywood attitude by ending a big awards-bait movie with a Jesus conversion. Which of course would play commercially in the hinterland.