Amanda’s Mild Takes: Ls for the Week (and it’s only Tuesday)

 

It’s time for the Ls of the Week, and it’s only Tuesday. Amanda’s Mild Takes does the honors. Just remember, Everything is Going According the Plan!™

https://open.substack.com/.../first-ls-video-without-a...

"The Third Man" in 35mm at The Film Forum

 

The Third Man puts the “N” in noir, to the point that the shadows of post-war Vienna at night should get a co-starring credit. The ginned-up love between Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) and Anna Schmidt (Alida Valli) isn’t altogether convincing, serving mostly as a diversion from the real theme: friendship, and what it takes to end it. 

Having said that, it is an odd kind of friendship. When British officer Calloway (Trevor Howard) asks Martins about his “best friend” Harry Lime (Orson Welles) when they are having a drink after meeting at Lime’s “funeral” in the film's opening 15 minutes, he can only come up with a few things he remembers about Lime. He hasn’t seen him in 10 years and only a few other times since they were at school together. It seems a shaky basis to say “no one knew him better than I did” and call Lime “the best friend I ever had,” yet Martins decides to clear Lime’s name after Calloway calls him “the worst racketeer who ever made a dirty living in this city” and so we have a movie.

It’s news to no one that The Third Man is a classic, and deservedly so. The plot is involving, as a mystery should be; the acting is uniformly first rate; the cinematography is extraordinary, and the climax is iconic. The 35mm print “photochemically printed from original film elements” that played at Film Forum in New York is beautiful, with no scratches anywhere, and a gorgeous palette of grays and deep, deep blacks. If a couple of reel changes could have been smoothed out they’re only momentarily distracting. It’s well worth your time to give the film a second, or third, viewing.

 

"In the Hand of Dante" is a lukewarm mess

In the Hand of Dante might be a hot mess if it weren’t so pretentious. There’s nothing wrong with a heist movie—it’s a perfectly respectable genre. Why attach a biopic of Italian poet Dante Alighieri that stops the action dead in its tracks every 10 minutes and adds at least one hour to the 2½ hour running time? Because the object of the heist is the manuscript of Dante’s Divine Comedy, which doesn’t exist, even in the Vatican Library? Surely Julian Schnabel doesn’t have to prove that he’s an intellectual heavyweight. And if the source novel by Nick Tosches follows that structure, then Schnabel should have gotten rid of it. 

But he didn’t, and the film suffers for it. Also worth mentioning is the steady string of murders that begins in the first 10 minutes and continues relentlessly until the next-to-last scene. There are at least 10 and most are gratuitous. Again, faithfulness to the novel doesn’t win points. It slows the movie down. Not content with having half the characters and a dog get shot, Schnabel threw in a leisurely torture scene, which after all the shootings was a change of pace. Not to worry, there are one or two more to conclude the plot.

Schnabel assembled a notable cast, led by Oscar Isaac as Nick/Dante. He also snagged a cameo from Al Pacino and a supporting actor appearance by Martin Scorsese in an Old Testament beard and wig, spouting metaphysical nonsense. John Malkovich is the heist’s ringleader and Jason Momoa is the man with a claim to the manuscript.

Seen at the 2026 Tribeca Festival. Rated ½⭐️ for Martin Scorsese’s beard.

Call for comments on the Arch

URGENT – Public Comments Needed by June 15 about the Triumphal Arch in Washington, D.C. 

With little fanfare, a critical federal level review was initiated on Friday, June 5 for the 250-foot-tall Triumphal Arch that would be built between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery; and, remarkably, the public comment period closes on Monday, June 15. So, please submit comments right away—at the end of this article is a hot link to where comments should be submitted.

The review under Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act is designed to identify how the project could cause negative impacts (or as the feds call it, adverse effects) and how to “avoid, minimize, and mitigate” those negative impacts. The Cultural Landscape Foundation’s (TCLF) recent article Why is the National Park Service Helping the Administration Evade the Law? reveals how the National Park Service (NPS) is twisting, contorting, and manipulating the Section 106 process to fast-track projects such as painting the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall.

Now, NPS has hit the gas pedal on the reviews for the Triumphal Arch by compressing the public comment timeframe to a mere ten days. All of the documents concerning the proposed Arch can be found here.

In addition, as noted in TCLF’s article, organizations and individuals that are subject area experts and normally participants in the review process are currently being excluded; this includes TCLF, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, D.C. Preservation League, and others. According to the draft Programmatic Agreement (essentially a final contract): The [Arch’s construction] will be consistent with … the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards and Guidelines for the Treatment of Cultural Landscapes …” and other regulations.  Since TCLF’s Founding President & CEO, Charles A. Birnbaum, authored the Guidelines for the Treatment of Cultural Landscapes during his fifteen-year tenure (1992-2007) at NPS, it seems odd that TCLF’s request to be a “consulting party” to the review process has not been approved.

In recent comments submitted to the National Capital Planning Commission, an agency reviewing the Arch project, TCLF stated: “The proposed arch interrupts and severs key visual and spatial relationships that are integral to the Monumental Core’s design intent and its inherent symbolism.”

According to the National Park Service the present Memorial Bridge was “Symbolically … designed to show the strength of a united nation by joining a memorial on the north side of the Potomac River (the Lincoln Memorial) with one on the south (Arlington House, the Robert E. Lee Memorial). The architect [of Memorial Bridge] envisioned an elaborate sculptural program … including seated figures of the first four American presidents on the D.C. side and reclining statues of oceans and river gods on Columbia Island. The bridge itself was to have forty allegorical statues.” That entire sculptural program was eliminated by the U.S. Commission of Fine Art, another regulatory agency, as some statuary and pylons were seen as too tall in relation to the memorial.

The Lincoln Memorial is a hinge point (on a bent axis) visually connecting the Washington Monument and the Reflecting Pool to the east, and Arlington House. The Historic American Engineering Record report of 1988 about Arlington Memorial Bridge by historian Elizabeth Nolin noted: “As the final link in the chain of monuments which start at the Capitol building, the Arlington Memorial Bridge connects the Mall in Washington, D.C. with Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. Designed to connect, both physically and symbolically, the North and the South, this bridge, as designed in the Neoclassical style, complements the other monumental buildings in Washington such as the White House, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Jefferson Memorial.”

The Triumphal Arch would radically alter the visual and spatial relationships of a landscape listed in the National Register of Historic Places and insert a huge barrier between Arlington House and Arlington National Cemetery and the Lincoln Memorial.

The deadline for submitting comments is Monday, June 15—do not wait. Send in your comments now.

To submit comments, NPS requires using this online form. 

 

Wednesday afternoon’s movie at the 2026 Tribeca Festival was The Leader, written and directed by Michael J. Gallagher. Due to the sensitive nature of the subject, I won’t include the poster.

The Leader is a harrowing account of the Heaven’s Gate cult, focused on its leaders, Bonnie Lu Nettles a/k/a Do (Vera Farmiga) and Marshall Hepplewhite a/k/a Ti (Tim Blake Nelson). Of the 38 followers who died at Hepplewhite’s behest in 1997, three are featured: Warren (Jim Parsons), Michelle (Grace Caroline Currey), and David (Simon Rex), all of whom stray from the cult’s teachings and suffer as a result.

Not much is said about the other cult members and why they stayed with Ti and Do to the end—Warren did not. Apparently suicide was a dealbreaker for him alone. The need for certainty is as good an explanation as any, then and now. As for the leaders, it seemed to be equal parts believing what they preached, as absurd as it was, and simple grift. Someone has to pay the rent, even when heaven is your destination and ascension is imminent.

No cars exploded in flames, to Gallagher’s credit. What you do get is buckets of fake blood (don’t ask and whatever you do, don’t look) and a completely gratuitous closeup of an operation. The audience reacted to both with disbelief and thoroughly appropriate disgust.

(one star subtracted for the blood and the footage of the operation)

There are bound to be a few stumbles on the Road to AI Utopia

From the humans at magica.ai.
 

The sound you hear

The sound you hear is the future arriving from every direction. Think of it as "Everything Everywhere All At Once" in real life. Humans at magica.ai report the news, you decide how freaked out to be.

 

Amanda Nelson's Congress update for June 1st, 2026

We’re back with this week’s whiteboard! Congress was on recess last week (you’re shocked, I know you’re shocked) but we have lots to catch up on, including:

• NDAA funding for 2027, which includes a section tying our military supply chain, research, and AI development to Israel’s

• The status of the “Protect” kids/don’t say trans bill

• Catching up on the status of the ballroom funding and the DOJ slush fund of $1.776 billion

 The first two are the things to call your reps about!

https://open.substack.com/pub/amandasmildtakes/p/congress-wants-to-tie-our-military?r=1opwqh&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

AI On The March

From humans @ magica.com

AI will replace your job as soon as it learns to spell and other news from the front

In the AI universe, no one can figure out what The Plan™ is, let alone what it's going to be.

 

 

 

Source: AI Snacks newsletter from magica.com.