During a 6.29 visit to “Howie Mandel Does Stuff“, Bill Maher said he’s booked to appear on Tucker Carlson‘s Fox show sometime soon. “We’re negotiating”, Maher said. He reports that Carlson staffers initially wanted the conversation “to just be about stuff we agree on, and I said [forehead smack] no.”

Due respect but Hollywood Elsewhere will take it as a personal affront — a slur, an insult — if Alejandro G. Inarritu‘s Bardo doesn’t play Telluride ’22.

Many of us have been banking on this Spanish-language Mexican dramedy to play Venice and Telluride for several months now, and I really don’t want to hear about any possible plans to premiere the Netflix release later in the year…seriously, man…c’mon, please don’t.

Too many alleged hotties from big-gun directors are already slated for late ’22 openings — Damien Chazelle‘s Babylon, David O. Russell‘s Amsterdam, Martin Scorsese‘s Killers of the Flower Moon, Sam Mendes‘ Empire of Light, David Fincher‘s The Killer and Steven Spielberg‘s The Fablemans. Adding Bardo to this list would be excessive.

Come Labor Day columnists and film mavens like myself need to see good, nutritious, X-factor films — theatrical experiences that excite, disturb and challenge — to keep our spirits up and make our semi-miserable lives feel whole and perhaps even vibrant. This is why Inarritu ducking out of Telluride simply won’t do. We’re talking feelings of bitterness, depression and most of all abandonment.

Official Bardo synopsis: “A nostalgic comedy set against an epic personal journey. It chronicles the story of a renowned Mexican journalist and documentary filmmaker, who returns home and works through an existential crisis as he grapples with his identity, familial relationships, the folly of his memories as well as the past of his country. He seeks answers in his past to reconcile who he is in the present.”

Daniel Giménez Cacho plays the journalist-filmmaker (basically a stand-in for Inarritu himself); Griselda Siciliani costars.

Bardo finished principal photography, remember, last September — 10 effing months ago. It was announced last April that Netflix had acquired the for theatrical and streaming. Shot by Darius Khondji in 65mm, the film’s actual title is Bardo (or False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths).

Words with the potential to strike fear into the hearts of Telluride regulars: “Bardo is a cinematic experience that has inspired us to create a release strategy designed for the film to penetrate culture in the biggest and widest way. We will give film lovers everywhere the opportunity to experience the film through a global theatrical release and the film’s worldwide release on Netflix.” — Netflix honcho Scott Stuber.

Between allegedly positive responses at a recent East Coast test screening (as reported by Jordan Ruimy) and the likelihood of debuting at Telluride ’22, She Said (Universal, 11.18), a Spotlight-resembling investigative journalism drama about the Harvey Weinstein sexual predator offenses, is looking like a Best Picture Oscar contender…right?

Or is it perhaps a bit less of a #MeToo-ish All The President Men and more of a Bombshell, Part II?

Not to mention possible Best Actress noms for costars Zoe Kazan (playing N.Y. Times reporter Jodi Kantor) and Carey Mulligan (as Times reporter Megan Twohey)….who knows? But it has the right aura, the right timeliness.

That said, Andre Braugher‘s performance as N.Y. Times exec editor Dean Baquet is, I suspect, unlikely to inspire the kind of reverence that greeted Jason Robards‘ performance as Ben Bradlee in Akan Pakula‘s All The President’s Men. For Baquet’s support of Kantor and Twohey’s reporting on Weinstein has since been overshadowed by his unleashing the forces of purist woke terror (1619 and BLM absolutism, Nikole Hannah-Jones, the absurd firing of Donald McNeil Jr.) in the Times newsroom and greenlighting the kind of harsh woke-scolding environment that led to Bari Weiss‘s resignation.

Apart from becoming a Scientology fanatic, it’s fair to say that the last 40-odd years of Tom Cruise‘s life and career have panned out hugely, exceptionally and phenomenally.

It’s just that the idea of Joel Goodson being five years away from the classic retirement age of 65 makes me feel that the locomotive pace of life is moving…well, a bit faster than I’d prefer. I know, I know…60 is the new 50 but still.

For me, Cruise turning 60 is roughly at par with McCartney turning 80. Anyone who was around when Risky Business opened knows what I’m talking about, and I don’t want to hear from any scolds.

HE’s 15 Richest, Best Crafted, Most Compellingly Performed Tom Cruise Films (in this order and excluding all of his high-powered, robo-bunny formula action franchise films): Jerry Maguire, Collateral, Risky Business, The Firm, Born on the Fourth of July, Rain Man, Jack Reacher, American Made, The Color of Money, Tropic Thunder, A Few Good Men, Edge of Tomorrow, Losin’ It, Interview with the Vampire, Magnolia.

HE’s 14 Least Favorite Cruise Films (excluding all of his high-powered, robo-bunny formula action franchise films): Cocktail, Far and Away, Legend, Days of Thunder, Eyes Wide Shut (very well made, compulsive watchable but finally a curiously chilly experience), Minority Report (irritating Kaminsky bleachy-gray color scheme), Vanilla Sky, The Last Samurai, War of the Worlds (good film with atrocious ending), The Mummy, Knight and Day, Valkyrie, Lions for Lambs, The Outsiders.

I can’t remember how I feel about Rock of Ages.

…since the late ’70s. Definitely catchy — you could even say throttling — in a flashy, one-hit-wonder way. The opening guitar-and-bongos prelude (the first 51 seconds) is the best part. I saw Dirk Hamilton and the band play a set at the Bitter End sometime around ’79 or ’80, and it was clear he was dealing with a serious case of stage fright. He quit music for two or three years but then came back to it, and is still plugging along.

Best wishes to the just-married Lindsay Lohan and Bader Shammas. The couple has been living in Shammas’ home city of Dubai, where he works as an assistant vp at Credit Suisse, for a couple of years.

I’ve never been to Dubai, but I’ve always understood it to be a kind of flamboyant wealth-porn city…high-rises, high temps, beaches, super-malls and devoid of anything that I would value culturally. Paris, Barcelona, London, Rome, Munich, Prague, Bern, Zurich…anywhere but effing Dubai, please.

Plus we all understand that Middle Eastern men and particularly those raised in the UAE are not exactly known for honoring 21st Century feminist values. They’re generally known, in fact, for being somewhat medieval-minded….be honest.

If you’re a fan of Sidney Lumet‘s Prince of the City (and what Lumet admirer isn’t?) and you haven’t seen Find Me Guilty (’06), which many have ignored or dismissed as a commercial failure, you need to buckle down and rent it.

I know that Find Me Guilty never seems to come up much in discussions of Lumet’s career, and yet it’s absolutely one of Lumet’s finest and is certainly one of the greatest films ever made by a director who’s over 80. (Lumet’s Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead, released in ’07, also belongs on that list.)

I haven’t re-watched Guilty since it opened 16 years ago, but I’ll be revisiting tonight.

Guilty is a marvel of old-fashioned (i.e., ’80s-style) craftsmanship — Lumet’s superb direction, T.J. Mancini and Robert McCrea’s’s finely structured screenplay and skillfully pared-down dialogue, and Vin Diesel’s inescapably charming, sincerely felt performance that briefly put him back on the road map. It was the last first-rate performance he ever gave.

In my book Find Me Guilty was Lumet’s best film since Q & A (1990), and before that Prince of the City (1981). It’s a tight, no-nonsense court drama that’s not about legal maneuvers or discovering evidence or doing right by the system and justice being served, but mob family values.

It’s not without its amusements and gag lines from time to time, but Guilty is a fairly serious, rooted-in-reality court procedural about wise-guy morality, or the urban mythology about same..

There’s more time spent in a courtoom in this thing than in Lumet’s The Verdict, and for good reason: Find Me Guilty is about the longest-lasting federal criminal prosecution in history. From March ’87 to August ’88, 20 members of the New Jersey-based Lucchese crime family, each represented by his own lawyer, were brought to trial in Newark, New Jersey, on some 76 charges (dope smuggling, gambling, squeezing small businesses…the usual mob stuff).

The mob family values can be summed up by the words “don’t rat,” “don’t roll” and “family is everything.”

I’m talking about the values of a group of bad guys (i.e., men who live outside the law and occasionally enforce their ethical standards by whacking each other) who ostensibly care for and someitmes “take care of” each other, and about one particular bad guy — Diesel’s Jackie DiNorscio — who stood up for certain things over the course of this trial…loyalty, friendship, togetherness…even if the reality of Italian crime ethics, going by everything I’ve heard, is that everyone rats out everyone else sooner or later and a lot of these guys are just full-out sociopaths, or are viewed this way by the majority. And yet Guilty isn’t an invented story.

What’s really striking is that Find Me Guilty delivers pretty much the precise opposite moral message of Prince of the City, which is about the emotional torment that a corrupt cop puts himself through when he decides to tell the absolute truth and rat out his equally corrupt cop friends, and ends up despised and lonely and broken.

Guilty is about a wise guy who refuses to rat out his wise-guy friends, even when most of them shun him and treat him like a leper because of his court behavior, but who nonetheless holds to his own moral ethical course.

Has there ever been a major-league filmmaker besides Lumet who has made two films about the same culture — the New York-area criminal underworld — with both (a) based on a completely true story about courts and prosecutors and defendants, (b) both grappling with almost the exact same moral-ethical issue, and yet (c) coming to almost the exact opposite conclusions about ratting out your friends?