…at Westport’s AMC Royale, and so far (5 pm) 31 seats have been sold. What does this tell you? It tells me that this James Mangold film will only do decent business this weekend…okay, better than decent, perhaps even brisk. But nothing to write home about.

Variety‘s Rebecca Rubin is reporting that Universal has yet to announce a Japan release date for Chris Nolan‘s Oppenheimer, which opens everywhere else on 7.21.

Oppenheimer is the saga of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), the father of the atom bomb and quoter of Vishnu’s statement in the Bhagavad Gita — “I am become death, destroyer of worlds.”

I don’t know if Japanese distributors are åntsy about screening Oppenheimer or not, but it’s obviously understandable if they are. 200,000 Japanese civilians died after A-bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 8.6.45 and 8.9.45, respectively. If I was a Japanese citizen and my great-grandfather had been incinerated in one of those blasts, I would have issues.

And yet, oddly, Oppenheimer reportedly doesn’t dramatize these attacks upon Japan. It’s only fair to ask why. The essence of Oppenheimer’s personal tragedy and the A-bomb terror itself, after all, manifested less in the 7.16.45 Trinity explosion than in the murder of 200,000 Japanese civilians the following month. The story is the story.

Yesterday the Supreme Court ruled to eliminate affirmative action — i.e., racial preferences in college admissions. In other words, no more college or university acceptances based on “this kid’s grades aren’t what they could or should be but he/she has experienced everyday racism and a culturally disadvantaged life in other respects so let’s cut him/her a break, and in so doing try to redress social wrongs.”

Affirmative action, in short, was about addressing the inescapable fact that life is unfair. From the vantage point of the early to mid ’60s, life had always been deeply unfair for persons of color.

The term was first heard via “Executive Order No. 10925“, signed by JFK on 3.6.61 — over 62 years ago. On 9.24.65, LBJ issued Executive Order 11246, which required government employers to “hire without regard to race, religion and national origin” and “take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, color, religion, sex or national origin.”

As a lad I was subjected to a standardized educational meritocracy, which I personally found brutal and exclusionary because the system back then wasn’t geared to recognize and accept, much less encourage, intelligent rule-breakers and clear-light-seekers like myself.

If you wanted to get into a top university you had to play along, ace your SATs and manage an excellent grade-point average…period. Alas, like Oliver Stone, Jim Morrison and others from a certain spiritual congeregation, I was more into the poetry of experience and upheaval and transformational rock music and pyschedelic Bhagavad Gita fulfillment than studying and brown-nosing my way into a sanctified community of Ivy League shitheads who play golf on weekends.

Affirmative action dismantled much of that for certain under-privileged youths, but now it’s back to struggling and scrambling and trying to out-point or out-maneuver those brilliant Asians and those smart white kids with rich parents. The unfairness of life has once again reared its head.

If I was a diehard progressive on a university admissions board, I would probably be telling myself “fuck those conservative Supremes…I’m going to finagle and pull strings and administratively pretzel-twist in order to approve disadvantaged kids of color anyway.” I can’t imagine that admissions criteria geared to favor non-whites and non-Asians whenever and wherever possible is going to just screech to a halt like that.

Posted this morning around 8 am: “To a modest degree Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One has a varied cast (the half-Korean Pom Klementieff and the cappuccino Greg Tarzan Davis are the ethnic standouts) but it’s not annoyingly diverse in a Barbie-ish, check-all-the-right-boxes way.

“It was seemingly produced within an alternate reality membrane, welcomely and even gloriously immune to the woke convulsions of the last six years…no conspicuous LGBTQ or trans characters, no Jabbas. Strange as it may sound and as confounding as it jay seem to some, MI:7 isn’t particularly focused on matters of race, gender and sexuality…good heavens!

Contentious Friendo: “One reason that superhero movies dig in harder on diversity and whatever other shit bothers you is because they’re (ostensibly) aspirational, as teenagers have all kinds of identity issues and sensitivities and whatnot.

“Honestly [Hollywood’s woke fetish is] not THAT different from what comics, especially Marvel Comics, did in the ‘60s, introducing Black Panther and the native American character Wyatt Wingfoot.And they were pretty ahead of the curve in gay ‘representation”’ in the ‘80s. It didn’t hurt that X-Men writer Chris Claremont was a bondage enthusiast whose off-hours lifestyle closely resembled what you see in Friedkin’s Cruising.” [HE insertion: “Oooohh, a bondage enthiusiast!”] And then DC got in on the fun with very earnest Social Issue plots, like Green Lantern/Green Arrow fighting the scourge of drug addiction.

“With the basics of the franchise now almost thirty years established, the Mission: Impossible franchise isn’t teen-oriented. Ethan Hunt’s a sexually abstemious James Bond and that’s enough to earn him a pass through woke world, or maybe Chris McQuarrie and Tom Cruise are hell-bent on making sure what they do isn’t ‘relevant’ to the larger world, and jusy serveing up a lot of suspenseful escapism.

“I know you’re consumed by the topic but there is honestly nothing more boring to me than thinking about it. Hollywood ‘ideology’ has always been provisional and ultimately insincere in any event.”

As a huge fan of Tran Anh Hung’s The Pot au Feu, which I praised a few weeks ago during the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, I was heartbroken to learn that it’s been acquired by IFC Films and Sapan Studios.

The Pot au Feu (aka The Passion of Doudin Bouffant) could become a major adult-market hit (it’s the greatest foodie flick of the 21st Century) and perhaps a major contender for Best International Feature Oscar, depending on whether or not France officially submits it.

Forgive my prejudiced viewpoint, but I’ve long believed that an IFC Films distribution deal is almost tantamount to a kiss of death. It’s certainly a guarantee that a first-rate, ecstatically reviewed European film will not be vigorously publicized and hooplah-ed. What IFC Films seems to do, in fact, is acquire exciting, critically hailed titles only to bury them.

History tells us that whenever a terrific Cannes movie is acquired by IFC Films, it is (a) never promoted for Oscar consideration (too costly for a cash-strapped distributor) and is (b) always released to low or non-existent buzz several months after the initial Cannes or Venice Film Festival breakout.

They certainly buried Kent Jones‘ Diane (’18) or at least the Best Actress prospects for Mary Kay Place, who won Best Actress trophies from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Actress. They buried the hell out of Olivier Assayas‘ Personal Shopper, which exploded in Cannes in 2016 only to limp its way to an anemic box-office opening in March 2017. God’s Country, an IFC Films acquisition, whiffed when it opened on 9.12.22. IFC had a nice little charmer in Stephen Frears‘ The Lost King (HE-reviewed on 3.24.23), and it barely made a ripple.

People see what they want to see, of course, but it always seems as if excellent movies under-perform when IFC Films is at the helm.

Will IFC Films (which currently has a 100% Rotten Tomatoes rating) at least offer to screen The Pot au Feu in Telluride and Toronto? This movie is a hit waiting to happen, at least among over-40 types.