The great Diana Rigg has passed from cancer at age 82. She lived a radiantly full life and enjoyed a long, vibrant career (her first professional gig happened in 1957 at age 19, performing in the RADA production of Bertolt Brecht‘s The Caucasian Chalk Circle), and I felt a genuinely poignant pang when I learned of her death this morning.

I understand that I’m obliged to celebrate (a) her Emma Peel role in The Avengers, (b) her wife-of-James-Bond turn in In Her Majesty’s Secret Service (’69) and (c) her ongoing performance as Olenna Tyrell in Game of Thrones. But for me Rigg’s sincere but sardonic performance as Barbara Drummond in Arthur Hiller and Paddy Chayefsky‘s The Hospital (’71) was her absolute finest moment.

The fact that Rigg was a pack-a-day smoker for 53 years straight (1956 until 2009) probably had something to do with her passing, but then again that was her choice. Quality over quantity, she probably felt. How anyone could believe that inhaling foul cigarette smoke for decades on end constitutes quality is beyond me.

I’m sorry but my interest in Woody Allen‘s Rifkin’s Festival has just…well, kind of plummeted.

Due respect but casting Wallace Shawn as a dismayed romantic protagonist (a cuckold) is not what anyone would call audience-friendly. Shawn has always been a brilliant wit and an amusingly thinky performer, but he’s 77 years old, for heaven’s sake. By any semi-realistic biological standard he’s “out of the game.”

And in the film he’s married to an attractive looker (played by Gina Gershon, whose real age is discoverable but who appears to be somewhere in her late 40s). It would be one thing if, say, Allen had cast the 75-year-old Steve Martin in the role. But not a bald Bilbo Baggins.

Yes, Shawn’s character would naturally feel wounded and disoriented by Gershon’s temporary infidelity, but it’s all but impossible to relate to Shawn in this context. My first reaction was “this is almost like John Huston casting Lionel Barrymore in the Humphrey Bogart role in Key Largo.”

41 years ago Allen used Shawn’s appearance as a sexual joke. In a fleeting Manhattan cameo, Shawn played Jeremiah, a sexually dynamic ex-boyfriend of Diane Keaton‘s “Mary” character. Allen: “Well, you certainly fooled me. This is not what I expected.” Keaton: “What did you expect?” Allen: “Well, you said that he was a great ladies’ man and that he opened you up sexually, and then this little homunculus…” Keaton: “He’s quite devastating.”

But now we’re supposed to take Shawn seriously as a husband with a saucy wife and certain amorous capabilities?

Republican Louisiana Senator John Kennedy sounds like a Woody Harrelson-level actor trying to emphasize the down-home, Tobacco Road, Okie from Muskogee accent in order to repel viewers. Kennedy’s pretzel-contortion responses to CNN’s Pamela Brown about Trump’s Covid-19 comments to Bob Woodward are surreal. When he tries to call Woodward’s “Rage” a “gotcha book”, she reminds him that Trump’s recorded comments are the subject at hand and not the book as a whole. What term applies when lying serpent scumbag is insufficient?

For clarification’s sake: Yesterday I mentioned the term “choppers” and a reader asked “don’t you mean chompers”? No, I replied. When Lauren Bacall and the boys sing “And Her Tears Flowed Like Wine” in The Big Sleep, she croons “he socked her in the choppers” around the 34-second mark. And if that’s not good enough, here are the original Joe Greene lyrics.

A tale of a risky affair between a high-school teacher (Lindsay Burdge) and a teenaged student (Will Brittain), Hannah Fidell‘s A Teacher was a buzzy title at Sundance ’13. (Here’s my review.) The following year HBO announced a plan to turn the film into a limited series with Fidell again directing. Now it’s an FX project with Kate Mara in the Burdge role, and Nick Robinson as her 16-year-old lover. (Okay, maybe 17.)

May I ask something? When it comes to affairs between scampy teachers and male students (in real life as well as dramas), why do things always have to end in shame and prosecution? Why can’t they fall in love like French president Emmanuel Macron and Brigitte Macron did when he was a 15 year-old student and she was a 39-year-old teacher? Or what about a story about an inappropriate relationship that just comes to a gradual, no-big-deal end without the cops and the school principal getting involved?

My mother warned me once or twice about predatory women when I turned…oh, 15 or 16. I used to pray I’d get hit on. If I’d been lucky enough to connect with one of my attractive teachers when I was that age…well, my God! I would have dropped to my knees and given thanks to God the Father Almighty.

Florian Zeller‘s The Father (Sony Classics, 12./18) is “the best film about the wages of aging since Amour eight years ago,” according to critic Todd McCarthy.

Pic “takes a bracingly insightful, subtle and nuanced look at encroaching dementia and the toll it takes on those in close proximity to the afflicted.

“Fronted by a stupendous performance from Anthony Hopkins as a proud Englishman in denial of his condition, this penetrating work marks an outstanding directorial debut by Zeller [and] looks to be a significant title for Sony Classics domestically later in the year.”

Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman: “Which scenario is real, and which one has [Hopkins’ character] hallucinated? We can’t quite tell, but in each case what we’re seeing feels real, and that’s the film’s ingenious gambit.

“In The Father, Zeller plants us inside a convincing homespun reality only to reveal that it was a mirage; before our eyes, the solidity turns to quicksand. Or was the reality before it the mirage? The film gives us small sharp clues to get our bearings, and each time we do it pulls the rug out again, seducing us into thinking that this time we’re on firm ground.”

This isn’t a color-filtered video — it’s San Francisco an hour or two ago, straight from the shoulder. From ABC7news: “Why is the sky orange in the Bay Area? There is smoke in the air from the Bear Fire near Chico, but the marine layer is protecting us, so the sky is red, yellow or orange even where air quality is good. On Tuesday, we had the wind to blame for those smoky skies — and lack of a smoky smell. The smoke was coming in from the August Complex Fire near Mendocino National Forest, but high winds were keeping the smoke at a high altitude, instead of settling near the surface.”

People really don’t know what to do right now. Everyone on the Embarcadero is stopping to record the sky and chit chatting in a way I haven’t seen since pre-pandemic @sfchronicle pic.twitter.com/ueKQ4g7WTD

— Jessica Christian (@jachristian) September 9, 2020

Transcripts and audio clips of chats between Donald Trump and Bob Woodward in Woodward’s “Rage” (Simon & Schuster, 9.15), reported in a 9.9.20 Washington Post story by Robert Costa and Philip Rucker:

Excerpt #1: “On 2.7.20, Trump called Woodward and revealed that he thought the Covid-19 situation was far more dire than what he had been saying publicly. ‘You just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed. And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flu. This is deadly stuff.'”

Excerpt #2: On 3.19.20, Trump told Woodward that “I wanted to always play [the virus] down…I still like playing it down because I don’t want to create a panic.”

What he meant, of course, is that he didn’t want to panic the stock market and the business community. So rather than deal with it as a leader from a straight, take-charge, here’s-what-needs-to-be-done perspective, Trump tried to bullshit his way through the situation.

In a CNN interview earlier today, Woodward’s former Washington Post colleague Carl Bernstein called this a case of “homicidal negligence.”

Q: “Did you mislead the public?”

President Trump: “Well, I think if you said in order to reduce panic, perhaps that’s so. The fact is, I’m a cheerleader for this country. I love our country and I don’t want people to be frightened. I don’t want to create panic.” pic.twitter.com/NNbnkPz346

— CSPAN (@cspan) September 9, 2020

Like every teenager who ever walked the earth outside of the usual suck-ups, brown-nosers and goody-goodies, I saw myself in almost every sneering, anti-authoritarian character who came along. I began to grow past that in my early 20s, but I’ve always felt a certain kinship with outlaws, contrarians, rebels, malcontents.

And yet, paradoxically, the first movie character that I felt I truly understood was Gary Cooper‘s small-town marshall in High Noon, which I first saw on my parents’ TV. Because he embodied a kernel of an idea that had begun to chill my soul at an early age — that life is a solo journey**, and that when push comes to shove fair-weather friends aren’t worth a damn, and that you can’t count on anyone but yourself. Of course, I didn’t fully understand this until I hit my 30s.

What's the first film where you felt like you saw yourself on screen? pic.twitter.com/BQq2B1dpGf

— Film4 (@Film4) September 4, 2020

** Ida Sessions (over the phone): Are you alone, Mr. Gittes?” Jake Gittes: “Aren’t we all?”

In the wake of yesterday’s AMPAS announcement about new representation and inclusion standards for Best Picture Oscar seekers, I’m reposting a portion of a 2016 chat between The Daily Beast‘s Jen Yamato and director-writer Ethan Coen about #WhyIsHailCaesarSoWhite? Yes, again.

Pally: “The idea of Trump being re-elected is horrific, but it’s not as if I’m living in denial of that possibility, or of why it might happen. And as much as I dislike the New Woke Times, there has been plenty of analysis in there — or, at least, some — that acknowledges the possibility that Trump could win. I think the media recognizes that this is a genuine race, and that it’s going to be close.

“The mainstream media won’t say that the wokeness factor hurts Democrats. And yet, ironically, everyone who’s not a woke ditto-head knows this is true. Woke fascists like Mark Harris represent about three or four percent of the people. They speak for next to no one. Unfortunately, those woke fascists have infiltrated the media. But the people understand. I don’t think the people are in a bubble. Only the woke fascists are.”

Pessimist: “The other point of view [is that there are] people who think Trump is the better option. But you can’t find that [opinion] anywhere unless you listen to those people who are [regarded as] verboten. If 60% of people are afraid to say what they think online then we have no fucking idea what they think. If they’re afraid to say what they think online it’s likely about the left since there is not a very high price to pay online for not supporting Trump. 60% of this country are white people. Most of the swing states are white people. Trump’s voters are enthusiastic. So what I’m doing is looking at their side of things. Because I can no longer trust our side to tell me the truth about anything. We say what we want to be true.”

Pally: “With respect, I simply don’t agree with you. And the reason I don’t agree with you is that seeing Trump as the better option is a mental illness. It’s not rational. It’s cult thinking. There is no ‘reasonable’ defense of it.

“I don’t say that as a wokester. I’m a middle-of-the-road centrist-liberal, always have been. I’m willing to listen to ‘the other side’ and always have been. But two-fifths of the country is living in a cult of personality. That’s seriously what it is. I don’t think there’s a more empathetic explanation for it.”

Pessimist: “A lot of people see him as the better option simply because he [stands for] stopping the left. And if we do not understand this basic concept we are ignoring a major element in the race.”

HE to Perssimist: “I don’t know what kind of data you need to see in order to ease up on your doomsaying. Seriously — you seem determined to deny or refute all polls that strongly suggest Biden enjoys a fairly solid and steady lead. You nonetheless seem locked into a doom & gloom scenario because of the BLM rioters & wokester shitheads effect. It’s a very disturbing situation, agreed, but no one outside the idiotic Trump base is buying Trump’s claim that Biden is taking his marching orders from the radical Left.”

As I mentioned yesterday, the Dune trailer (which I saw last Friday in a Flagstaff multiplex) is somewhat impressive. Timothee Chalamet seems to be doing his own Paul Atreides. I recognize that the arc of Paul’s story in Frank Herbert‘s Dune trilogy is about more than fulfilling a head-spinning destiny and achieving heroism, but involves a gradual descent into a Messianic psychology. But that’s the second part, no?

The basic message of the Dune trailer is “here we go again with a story of a young lad imbued with a certain specialness, and discovering super-powers and carrying the old Joseph Campbell torch on a difficult path to greatness…leading a rebellion, defeating evil, ultimate triumph. Oh, and spices.”

In short it’s more or less the same old same old, and I’m astonished how the fanboys continue to cheer this musty, time-worn fable.

That aside, Greig Fraser’s subdued palette seems agreeable. And Chalamet’s costars appear to hold up their end — Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Josh Brolin, Stellan Skarsgård, Dave Bautista, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Zendaya Coleman, David Dastmalchian, Chang Chen, Sharon Duncan-Brewster, Charlotte Rampling, Jason Momoa and Javier Bardem.

Due respect, but I can’t wait to suffer through this thing. Seriously.