On 10.4 I riffed about Kathryn Bigelow‘s Last Days, an animated short doc about elephant poaching, which had previously been given a special screening during the New York Film Festival. I asked why isn’t Bigelow’s film hadn’t been made available right away by the Wild Aid guys…nothing. Now, two months later, they’ve finally released it. An elephant is killed every 15 minutes. Wild elephants may be all but extinct in 11 years. “Blame China,” you might say, but one of the biggest markets for ivory is right in New York City. Here’s the home page, so to speak.

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I’m a little ashamed to admit this, but until last night I had never seen Joseph H. Lewis and Dalton Trumbo‘s Gun Crazy (’50). I was flipping through films on my new Roku player and came upon a high-def version on Warner Classics. I’d been told for decades that Gun Crazy was an essential noir that everyone loves, but I wasn’t expecting to be blown away. I was half-asleep when I started watching at 11:30 pm but I woke right up. It’s genius-level — a major groundbreaker, pulp art. Those long takes shot from the rear of John Dall and Peggy Cummins‘ moving car (particularly that legendary three-minute-long bank robbery sequence), the urgent sense of immediacy, that semi-improvised-sounding dialogue, those urgent close-ups, conflicted emotions, the sexuality, the fog-shrouded ending in the swamp…all of it. I hereby apologize to Lewis, Trumbo, Dall, Cummins and the whole team for missing this classic for so long.

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“This is Noah Baumbach’s snappiest and most commercially appealing film yet. Not as darkly hilarious as Greenberg or as visually ravishing and mood-trippy as Frances Ha, but it’ll be well reviewed and catch on with most under-50 urban sophistos. It’s a nimble, fast-moving, culturally attuned relationship dramedy about a generational chasm (late 20somethings vs. 40somethings) or more precisely the vague sense of anxiety that somewhat older guys have about younger guys in their field or realm — a fear of being out-hustled or out-cultured and possibly even left behind if they’re not careful.” — from my Toronto Film Festival review of While We’re Young.

Pretty much all James Bond villains over the last 52 years have been perverse European elitists with the usual compulsions and gourmet savorings. Joseph Wiseman‘s Dr. No was “Chinese,” of course, and Yaphet Kotto‘s Dr. Kanaga/Mr. Big in Live and Let Die was Caribbean-born, but they were cut from the same cultivated cloth. So now we have Christoph Waltz, Hollywood’s definitive, all-purpose, highly mannered 21st Century villain, playing yet another classic Bond baddie — the Ernst Stavro Blofeld-like Oberhauser — in the just-announced Spectre. Again. When the real malignant baddies of 2014 are the Islamic nutters. Plus 1% jackals looking to exploit the misery of others caught up in shrinking or stagnant economies, corporations involved in same, fossil-fuel burners, etc.

Spectre cast (l. to r.) Naomi Harris, Lea Seydoux, Daniel Craig, Monica Bellucci and Christoph Waltz.

The Bond films have never been about realism but they’ve always inserted political and cultural ingredients so that the 007 realm will bear at least some resemblance to the real world. Going with a standard, super-slinky, European-born baddie is lunacy in this day and age.

On top of which I’m sick to death of Waltz playing another unctuous villain who delights in his sinister silkiness. Something in me just snapped when he picked up his second Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Quentin Tarantino‘s Django Unchained, after winning the same trophy for more or less the same kind of character (loquacious, “ironic” attitude, self-amused) in Inglorious Basterds. My personal mantra became “enough of the meddlesome Waltz.” I watched Big Eyes last night at the Aero, and Waltz’s “ooooh, tee-hee…look at how icky I can be!” routine pretty much smothered whatever enjoyment I might have otherwise gotten from this moderately okay, half-decent film.

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“Yes, but he was aggressive and belligerent and nearly the size of Richard Kiel, and he had just shoplifted a liquor store, ignored a police officer’s order to walk on the sidewalk rather than the middle of the street, slugged the officer, tried to wrestle the officer’s gun away and managed to convince the officer (however excitable and unprofessional the officer’s final response might have been) that he might get clobbered into unconsciousness so if you poke a hornet’s nest…sorry, man, but the kid pretty much bought it.” Note: Here’s the entire Tom Tomorrow strip, posted on 12.3. The last two panels aren’t that funny.

I didn’t attend this Deadline-sponsored q & a between Dominic Patten and Humbling star Al Pacino, but I attend a similar session last night at the Sherman Oaks Arclight between Pacino and Deadline‘s Pete Hammond. And it was almost all fun. I loved the stories Pacino told about being cast in The Godfather (he originally wanted to play Sonny) and how Paramount executives wanted to fire him because he was playing Michael in what they felt was an overly submerged and muffled way, but then he saved himself when he performed the Italian restaurant assassination scene. “They just wanted to me shoot somebody,” Pacino recalled. Here, again, is my own recent discussion with Pacino.

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The pigs, of course, are the Walmart executives who fund this systematic torture, primarily because of the life-long confinement of squealers in gestation crates. Eff this vile industry. Forget about the taste of dead pigs altogether. Who eats pork anyway? I do but very guiltily. On rare occasions I’ll eat a couple of sausage links with a plate of scrambled eggs, and every now and then at a diner I’ll order blast-furnace, volcanic-ash bacon. And I feel like an idiot every time. Okay, I’m giving it up. Never again. Joaquin Phoenix was kind of bad in Inherent Vice but standing up for pigs is the right thing. Seriously.

Nobody wants to listen or acknowledge, but Kevin Costner gives the finest, most layered and deep-downiest performance of the autumnal phase of his career in Mike Binder‘s Black or White (Relativity, 12.3). Why haven’t I been pushing his performance more or putting him on my lists? Because almost nobody is with me and I’m not brave or defiant enough to stand up alone. Which means that to some degree I’m a coward. But I’m telling the serious truth here about the quality of Costner’s performance. Watch the film and tell me I’m wrong.

It finally hit me last weekend why Costner isn’t getting any award-season traction to speak of.

Black or White wears its emotions a little too plainly at times, but Costner has mainly been jettisoned because (I know this sounds simplistic but trust me) the film has been thrown under the bus by the politically correct left. This is because Binder’s script doesn’t slavishly follow the “sensitive” liberal line about the black-white chasm and the stereotypes that cling to that, and so kneejerk lefties and their industry brethren have deep-sixed the film and Costner with it.

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Cue the politically correct, New York-centric ultra-liberals who’ve suggested I was a racist for saying Mike Brown was a sociopathic thug and that the wisest thing to do when being questioned or admonished by a cop is to mildly submit. The former basketball star clearly needs to rethink things as he’s obviously become a self-hating lackey of racist ruling circles.

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With, as one of the big studio wheels in Sullivan’s Travels said, “A little sex in it.”

What’s the strategy behind House of Cards marketers looking to summon recollections of Richard Kelly‘s Donnie Darko (’01)? Is there any other way to read this?