I haven’t looked at webcams for a good ten years or so. That’s because in the early aughts they didn’t deliver fluid video of scenic spots in Rome or Times Square but jerky low-rez images composed of a series of stills…and of course no sound. Now that’s changed. Earthcam.com currently delivers clean high-def video of tourist hotspots all over the world, and with good sound. I noticed this earlier upon reading a Chris Willman piece about the Abbey Road crosswalk and album cover shot. It’s dark over there now (4:10 pm Pacific) but check out the Abbey Road webcam during London daylight hours — you can watch people snapping photos of their friends walking the crosswalk all day long. This is what I had hoped webcams would do from the get-go. Now it’s finally happening. Very cool.

We all know that the characters played by big movie stars in action thrillers and TV series always have an abbreviated manly sound. All screenwriters understand this. You don’t give the brawny hero a name like David Poland or Ron Fairly or Jeffrey Wells or Lytton Strachey. Those names convey mild-mannered equivocation, learned liberalness, moderation. No, the studly, stand-alone action hero has to be called Frank Bullitt or Josh Randall or Walker or Bronk or Jack Reacher or Lew Harper or Shane or Ethan Hunt or Ram Bowen.

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The pretentiousness of that snail-paced, left-to-right tracking shot is intolerable. I don’t know what Visitors (due to premiere at the Toronto Film Festival) is about but we’re all familiar with the films of Godfrey Reggio so I can guess. This may be the most unappealing trailer I’ve ever watched in my life. I can’t wait to trash this film. I love black-and-white photography but I’m convinced I’m going to hate it. I’m not going to sit still for another one of these movies in which third-world types stare at the camera and try to guilt-trip me for living in an industrialized nation. Or for not caring enough about the victims of Katrina, which happened eight years ago. If Visitors is represented in any way, shape or form by this trailer (which I naturally suspect), I will stab it in the chest with a butter knife.

An Oscar play for Judi Dench in which she gets to play spirited, spunky, scrappy. A battle of wits and personality between Dench’s character and the author-journalist played by Steve Coogan (the latter having produced and co-written the script with Jeff Pope). A mother-son “heart” movie from Stephen Frears (The Queen), but with the son, an AIDS-afflicted gay Republican named Michael Hess, missing in the trailer (except in flashbacks, as a small child). Nor is Hess listed as a character on the film’s Wiki page. Is the adult Hess some kind of ghostly phantom in the narrative?

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Somehow Lee Daniels’ The Butler (a.k.a., “The Bee”) half works. To my great surprise. This decades-spanning biopic of White House butler Eugene Allen (called “Cecil Gaines” in the film) is nothing close to subtle or shaded or “sophisticated”, God forbid, but with the memory of Daniels’ The Paperboy relatively fresh I sat down expecting to be appalled or obliquely amused. But somehow it creates its own vibe and settles into a kind of earnest conviction, telling a condensed 20th Century African-American saga — era to era, administration to administration, bite-sized — in a tolerable and even affecting way. It’s not deft or clever, God knows, but it has a heart.

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Karen Black has left the earth at age 74. I was told last spring that she was in trouble with cancer. Sincere condolences to her family, friends and all who knew her as a creative colleague. Black was especially gifted at playing eccentric or spirited. Her best role, I feel, was as Jack Nicholson‘s ditzy-cracker girlfriend in Five Easy Pieces. Her hot streak ran from 1969 to 1976, or rather from Dennis Hopper‘s Easy Rider, in which she played a New Orleans prostitute who does acid with Hopper and Peter Fonda‘s characters, to Alfred Hitchcock‘s Family Plot. Her second-best role during this period was the wacko peroxide femme fatale in Day of the Locust. Her other distinctive performances during this streak were in Drive, He Said, Born to Win, Cisco Pike, Portnoy’s Complaint, The Outfit, The Great Gatsby and Nashville. Black kept on working until ’09 or thereabouts. Now is not the time to lament her long allegiance to Scientology.

In the September issue of Esquire, Woody Allen coughs up some “What I’ve Learned” material. I love these articles. I buy Esquire because of them. I wrote one myself a year or two ago. Here are my fave excerpts from the Allen piece:

“What people who don’t write don’t understand is that they think you make up the line consciously…but you don’t. It proceeds from your unconscious. So it’s the same surprise to you when it emerges as it is to the audience when the comic says it. I don’t think of the joke and then say it. I say it and then realize what I’ve said. And I laugh at it, because I’m hearing it for the first time myself.

“My mother taught me a value — rigid discipline. My father didn’t earn enough, and my mother took care of the money and the family, and she had no time for lightness. She always saw the glass a third full. She taught me to work and not to waste time.

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Watch this clip of John Wayne accepting Gary Cooper‘s Best Actor Oscar for High Noon at the March 1953 Oscar awards. Wayne delivers a comic riff about being angry that his people didn’t work harder at getting him the role of Marshall Will Kane. This is outrageous bullshit. High Noon was partly a metaphor for what screenwriter Carl Foreman had suffered (and was at the time still suffering) during Hollywood’s blacklisting of certain lefty screenwriters and how so many of his Hollywood “friends” had thrown up their hands or turned tail. Wayne was a staunch anti-Communist and more or less a supporter of the blacklist so the idea of him playing Kane is absurd. Not to mention the fact that he openly derided High Noon when it came out and later got together with Howard Hawks and made Rio Bravo as a retort to High Noon‘s dark view of human nature.

Last night I attended my second viewing of Destin Daniel Cretton‘s Short Term 12 (Cinedigm, 8.23), which I saw for the first time in Manhattan a couple of weeks ago. It’s basically about a small team of 20something counselors (principally Brie Larson, John Gallagher, Jr. and Rami Malek) at a kind of halfway facility, doing what they can to massage or otherwise chill down a group of errant kids who’ve suffered through parental-abuse issues or scrapes with the law. Hailed at last March’s South by Southwest and the winner of an Audience Award at last June’s L.A. Film Festival, it’s a real-deal, character-driven indie that delivers a plain, no-frills current that never quite feels “acted.”

Short Term 12 star Brie Larson prior to last night’s screening at Vine Street Academy theatre.

(l. to r.) Mysterious moderator, Larson, Gallagher, Dever, Malek, Stanfield and director-writer Dustin Daniel Cretton.

Costar Kaitlyn Dever.

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If George Clooney had decided to use, say, a Glenn Miller or an Andrews Sisters tune for this Monuments Men trailer, he would be indicating a certain classic approach to his telling of this, a real-life World War II saga. But no — he’s gone with “Kiss The Sky” by Shawn Lee’s Ping Pong Orchestra. That plus the dry, low-key humor should tell you a lot. During last May’s Monuments Men set visit I told Clooney that I detected a jaunty tone in the script. Clooney smiled and said, “Yeah, but we’ve taken some of the jaunt out of it since.” Like I said in the piece, “Clooney likes to aim his films at places where people live, and in this context he’s looking to make a film that does the old ‘play to the smarties but also to the popcorn crowd’ routine.”

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Jacob Kornbluth‘s Inequality For All (Radius/TWC, 9.27) , a profile of economist and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, is “clear, precise, needle-sharp…a brilliant, highly engaging, knowledge-expanding doc about a vital political topic that I really admired, was thoroughly engaged by and, to my surprise, was even emotionally moved by.” — from a couple of 2013 Sundance Film Festival posts.

The trailer for Spike Jonze‘s Her popped yesterday, and today it was announced that Her will close the N.Y. Film Festival. This has all been orchestrated. It’s all part of a grand plan. Bypass the Telluride Venice Toronto roundelay and then parachute into the NYFF. “You didn’t see us coming but we’re suddenly very much in the award-season conversation…snap!” Also today a Brian Brooks q & a with Spike, to wit: “There are so many different aspects to [Her]. Obviously technology has become such a big presence in our lives and, I definitely know, in my life. I think of how much of my daily interaction is with and through technology…and it’s an emotional experience too. It’s about love and our need to connect and our [method] of connecting. But, at its heart, it is a relationship movie.”