I made it clear on Twitter today, and I’m making it clear again here: I’m a respectful admirer of Selma as far as it goes and I certainly appreciate the things it does right, and I’m not engaged in any kind of campaign…please. I was told the other day that it has a certain heat, that it gives people something to vote for, that it could even win, etc. So I took a close look at how some of the Gurus of Gold guys are rating it…that’s all. Selma is fine. James Rocchi loves it. It has a good heart. Let that shit go.

Everyone understands that Universal has an embargo on all Unbroken reviews until 11.30 (or is it 12.1?), but I’m nonetheless surprised that last night’s premiere in Sydney, which was pretty much open to anyone willing to buy an expensive ticket, hasn’t yielded a single renegade review, a descriptive tweet or two, a comment-thread critique…nothing. Let’s presume for the sake of presuming that Unbroken will be assessed two weeks hence as good but not great, quite intense and occasionally violent, and that audiences will love it a bit more than critics, who will probably be somewhat mixed. Which will matter not as far as the Academy is concerned. The Brangelina cocktail is about as potent right now as it’s ever been, and the Academy really wants them attending the 2015 Oscar ceremony because they want that electric feeling on the carpet and in the seats, and so one way or the other, I’m guessing, it’ll be nominated for Best Picture. No win but all the flush gala trimmings leading up to a loss. That’s probably a fait accompli.

“Starting with Magnolia my initial exposure to Paul Thomas Anderson’s films have felt like stretching exercises or mindfucks of one kind or another — never easy, always a climb or a tangle, always in front of the line and beckoning to the folks in the rear…c’mon, guys…don’t hang back. And then with the second or third viewing they seem more engaging, less gnarly…of course! But you always have to come to them — they never come to you. And that’s cool. I just wish I could have been a little more engaged as I watched Inherent Vice. I never felt like I was ‘in the car.’ I constantly felt like I was running alongside or eating the exhaust.” — from a 10.5.14 piece called “Morning After Respect.”

I’ve been wanting to re-experience Bennett Miller‘s Foxcatcher for the sake of compassion if nothing else. Give it another go, a fair shake, etc. I wasn’t the biggest fan out of Cannes but I’ve been telling myself it might kick up or play better the second time. But I missed all the invitationals amd I haven’t gotten myself down to a nearby theatre since it opened last weekend. But now I’m 100% committed to seeing it again with bells on and no excuses. Mainly because National Review critic Armond White has written a brutal pan of Miller’s film because he doesn’t like the film’s political metaphor, which is basically about the perversity of the patriotic one-percenters as represented by Steve Carell‘s John DuPont.

If White is this pissed off about Foxcatcher, I must have missed something when I first saw it in Cannes. One way or another I need to see it again and bend over backwards and give it whatever love I can find, if for no other reason than to stand against Harmin’ Armond and bond with a fellow liberal.

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Mike Binder and Kevin Costner‘s Black and White (Relativity, 12.3), which I’ve been a huge fan of all along, has run smack into the bland ambitions of Paramount Pictures, Seth Rogen, Kevin Hart and director Nicholas Stoller, and has been forced to change its title to Black or White, which really doesn’t fit the film. But Paramount has snagged the rights to Black and White (as well as Black & White, which would have served as a half-decent alternative title for the Binder-Costner) and that’s that.

Stoller’s period comedy, based on a script by Rodney Rothman, will costar Rogen and Hart as the first-ever duo of separate-race cops working together in an LAPD squad car in the late 1940s. If it gets made, that is. The film hasn’t been given a formal go-ahead but Stoller sounded confident when he talked about it with Collider‘s Steve Weintraub earlier this year.

The irony is that during the Collider interview Stoller didn’t sound all that thrilled about Black and White, and in fact seemed more enthusiastic about calling it Jazz Cops, which actually is a better title. Stoller explained to Weintraub that Rogen and Hart’s characters have to “infiltrate the jazz scene to bust jazz musicians for weed.”

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Joan Tarshis initially told me about her Bill Cosby encounters 14 or 15 years ago, but she didn’t want to go public. But seven years ago Hollywood Interrupted‘s Mark Ebner posted a fairly damning, well-sourced piece about Cosby’s booty bandit compulsions for everyone to reflect upon…and the story just laid there. Ebner wrote at the time that People magazine “recently buried a rare investigative piece (12.18.07) featuring shocking interviews with three women claiming that Cosby ‘earned their trust, then sexually assaulted them,’ but — because the story was hidden in all the fluff that drives celebrity magazine sales — Cosby-as-serial sexual abuser is still essentially a non-story.” Obviously no longer.

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HE crashed this morning due to a huge traffic surge from the Joan Tarshis/Bill Cosby story that I posted yesterday afternoon. The tech guys at Liquid Web didn’t spot the problem, but it was obvious to me. I had to increase my memory and storage capacity to the tune of an extra $75 monthly. The Wrap, Variety, Hollywood Reporter, N.Y. Daily News…they all jumped on it. I’ve always thought that HE had plenty of memory, more than enough. Maybe I do now. It took a while for the Liquid Web guys to physically install the extra capacity. Apologies for my lack of foresight.

Let’s imagine that Disney and Working Title execs get together soon and decide they need to erase Jack Black‘s “Cosby sweater” line in High Fidelity as far as all future DVDs, Blurays and digital downloads are concerned. To remove the taint. Which means they’d have to hire Black to re-dub the line. But with what? How can Black describe the sweater humorously without alluding to the un-person? Strictly hypothetical. A stupid idea, of course, but you know how corporations get when icky stuff surfaces and “threatens the brand.”

Bennett Miller‘s Foxcatcher opened limited this weekend. Responses from HE readers are hereby sought. Here’s a re-post of my Foxcatcher review out of Cannes: “Speaking as a devoted admirer of Bennett Miller‘s Capote and Moneyball, it gives me no pleasure to admit that I feel less enthusiastic about Foxcatcher.

“There’s no doubt that Foxcatcher is strong and precise and clean, especially as crime dramas tend to go. And I respect the fact that it contains undercurrents that stay with you, and I certainly respect and admire what Miller has done in his usual deft and subtle way. But the obviously intelligent Foxcatcher is a relentlessly bleak trip that, accomplished as it is, isn’t especially likable or enjoyable. Okay, I ‘liked’ it or…you know, I didn’t ‘dislike’ it because it’s so well-made and refined, etc. But it’s basically a grim study of a dark tale about victims and affluent malevolence and corrupting wealth, and about fate surrounding the characters like tentacles and sucking them down the drain.

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I’m sorry I missed Liv Ullmann‘s Miss Julie at the Toronto Film Festival, but I’m even more sorry that I can’t watch the trailers for this mixed-response film without wondering what’s up with poor Samantha Morton. She’s only 37, and over the last four or five years her head, neck and body have seriously ballooned. An unkind remark, you may say, but do you think Average Joe audiences are going to ignore this fact? Her appearance has significantly changed. Certainly since she was in Anton Corbijn‘s Control. Colin Farrell plays Jean, the fiance of Morton’s Christine, in this adaption of August Strindberg’s 1888 play. You look at Morton and then Jessica Chastain, and you can’t help but partially sympathize. Miss Julie may (I say “may”) open in the U.S. sometime in December.

Sexual assault accusations have been raining down on Bill Cosby over the last week or two, above and beyond a 2006 out-of-court payoff to alleged victim Andrea Constand. 13 women have reportedly accused the comedian of intimate transgressions of one kind or another. Last Thursday the Washington Post published a piece by alleged Cosby victim Barbara Bowman. In response to which Cosby cancelled an appearance on Late Night with David Letterman and refused to discuss the issue with NPR’s Scott Simon in an audio interview posted on 11.15.

I’m recapping the basics because an old friend, former actress, music industry publicist and journalist Joan Tarshis, has decided to share her own, heretofore private story about her unfortunate encounter with Cosby back in 1969. She had opportunities to spill to the tabloids a few years back but she didn’t want to go that route. The flood of recent Cosby coverage has changed her mind. She got in touch this morning and sent me the following:

“I was 19 years old in autumn of 1969. I had flown to Los Angeles from New York to work on a monologue with Godfrey Cambridge. Two women I was staying with were friends of Bill Cosby, and they took me to have lunch with him in his cottage at Universal Studios, where he was shooting The Bill Cosby Show. He was always generous with his food and drinks, though he never drank alcohol. But he always topped my Bloody Mary’s with beer, which he called a ‘redeye.’

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Two days ago I riffed about the relative lack of calming shade and big towering trees in the Los Angeles area. Another thing we’re short of is rain, of course, and particularly torrential downpours, which I love standing in the middle of as long as I’m under an umbrella or shelter of some kind. I experienced an awesome cloudburst last year at this time (on 11.19.13) in Vietnam, in a forested area outside of Hue. The sound alone was fantastic. How many of these have I sampled since moving to Los Angeles in ’83? Damn few. I remember another really good one in Paris about 11 years ago. Rivers were raging in the gutters of narrow cobblestoned streets.

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