Four or five days ago a Russian-subtitled trailer appeared for Jim Jarmusch‘s dryly perverse Only Lovers Left Alive (Sony Classics, sometime in 2014?), but so far no English-language version has popped up. I realize it won’t open in this country until sometime next year, but obviously a good trailer has been cut together and everyone’s digging it so why not issue a subtitle-free version? Where’s the harm? This is a very droll, no-laugh-funny vampire movie about middle-aged goth hipster musician types — a nocturnal lifestyle movie that Lou Reed would have loved. (Maybe Jarmusch showed it to him before he died?) After seeing it in Cannes I called it “a perfect William S. Burroughsian nocturnal hipster mood trip…I sank into it like heroin.”

The night before last I watched Susan Bellows‘ JFK, a four-hour American Experience documentary that will premiere on Monday, 11.11 and Tuesday, 11.12. How does it differ from the numerous other docs about John F. Kennedy? It’s a bit more candid about some of the dicey personal stuff. Kennedy’s carelessness (and in some instances recklessness) as a youth, the constant lying about Addison’s disease, his many marital infidelities (but none of the sordid details). There’s more of a warts-and-all sense of a man and less of that familiar tribute tone that always creeps in when a beloved figure is examined. Otherwise it reshuffles and deals the same deck of cards. How could it not? As others have, Bellows reports that Kennedy found his footing with the Cuban Missile Crisis and that he was looking at an almost certain re-election in ’64. Death saved him, of course, from having to either extricate U.S. forces from Vietnam (which he would have had a tough time doing altogether) or increase their strength and go down the same road that eventually engulfed Lyndon Johnson. What got me about this doc more than anything else? Those drums again.

I’m actually a little more interested in the Nova “Cold Case” show (airing on 11.13) that will re-examine all the forensic evidence in the JFK assassination by the light of current technology.

This is a catchy poster for John Wells and Tracy Lett‘s August: Osage County (Weinstein Co., 12.25). In the play it happens at the end of Act Two. In the film it’s somewhere around the halfway mark. Meryl Streep’s insults and rudeness get worse and worse until Julia Roberts loses it and leaps like a cat and the chairs go tumbling and the plates and silverware crash on the floor.

I wouldn’t listen again to Arcade Fire‘s “Afterlife” with a knife jammed in my ribs…not if I was driving through the desert and bored out of my skull…but stand-up cheers for the (curiously dark-haired) Greta Gerwig dancing and hopping around and baring her soul and keeping this video together for three minutes plus, “all on her own” so to speak. And it was shot live three nights ago! Phenomenal choreography, brilliant camerawork, inspired sets and lighting cues. The spell is broken when Arcade Fire band members make their entrance, but it’s still a very special piece. Hats off to director Spike Jonze.

Since catching Stephen Frears and Steve Coogan‘s Philomena (Weinstein Co., 11.27) at the Toronto Film Festival I’ve been expressing how appalled I felt by a bizarre offer of forgiveness that the film ends with — a pass given to an obviously reprehensible old-crone nun who has brought considerable anguish into the lives of an elderly Irish mother and her late son. Why can’t I accept forgiveness in this instance? A Cardinal rule of drama is that the main characters (and particularly the main evil-doer) have to meet with some form of justice at the end, and yet Philomena Lee, the real-life mother played by Judi Dench, can’t shake off a feeling of loyalty to the Catholic Church plus she doesn’t want to live with anger. And so evil skates because old ladies need their serenity.

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The question, of course, is will Nikki Finke be able to launch Nikkifinke.com early next year, as she has stated she’d like to do, or will her contract with Penske Media firmly and irrevocably stand in the way of that until the terms end in 2016?

Nobody remembers William Friedkin‘s Deal Of The Century (’83). It’s pretty much a forgotten film that wasn’t all that great in the first place, but this scene is classic. It works better if you know that Gregory Hines is playing a former arms dealer who has accepted Christ in his heart. It’s not just satisfying when people who chosen a gentler calling and a higher path succumb to base impulses — it’s actually kind of wonderful.

The way I see it Dallas Buyers Club‘s Jared Leto is the guy to beat for Best Supporting Actor. Deadline‘s Pete Hammond called it right after the Toronto Film Festival debut screening of Jean-Marc Vallee‘s film — in pop-through terms Leto’s Rayon, a compassionate if self-destructive draq queen who helps Matthew McConaughey‘s Ron Woodruff distribute non-FDA-approved drugs for fighting HIV, is a strong echo of Chris Sarandon‘s Leon in Dog Day Afternoon (’75) — a performance that was nominated for Best Supporting Actor.

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It’s a putdown, of course, if someone describes your film as History Channel-like. It means cut-rate history programmers made by second-tier contributors. Which slightly undercuts enthusiasm, no offense, for the History Channel’s just-announced plans to remake Roots, the famed ’70s TV miniseries based on Alex Haley’s book and produced by from David L. Wolper. Are you going to sit there and tell me the idea to do this didn’t come out of 12 Years A Slave, or more particularly a belief that at the end of the day the Academy will succumb to pressure to give Steve McQueen‘s film the Best Picture Oscar?

I recently wrote Oliver Stone about my mid-November Vietnam visit, and asked about “any particular places that had/has some particular meaning for you? Places where something happened that you’ll never forget?” He got back and suggested the Cu Chi tunnels near Saigon, the Michelin rubber plantation, Quang Tri near Hue, An Khe in the Central Highlands and Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) itself. “These were my locals,” he said. “You might also visit Da Lat, a fabulous old French resort on the lakes of the Central Highlands.”

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There are two trailer-revealed aspects of Lars von Trier‘s Nymphomaniac that have me worried thus far. One, the use of the term “the whoring bed” by Uma Thurman‘s character. And two, the possibility of having to watch (or more precisely avert my eyes from) Shia Labeouf‘s junk. Sex is all in your head and hands and olfactory glands. And in your soul. I don’t even want to glance at my own package, thanks. I happened to do that by chance when I was with a girlfriend in a lighted room with a ceiling mirror. Good God.