Movie Nation

Reading Twitter’s reaction to the Golden Globe nominations announced yesterday, a few takes stood out — things beyond the usual “What do those foreign-accented liquor distributors and diner-owners know about good film/TV?” criticism.

“I May Destroy You” was Twittered up as a singularly grievous omission from the TV nominations. “Racism” was the answer I saw fans and film folk involved in the show coming up with. That seems entirely within the realm of possibility.

But as cluttered as the TV/streaming scene is now, I’d almost cut them slack for that. Too many choices, a widely split voting bloc, it could slip through the cracks.

The best things I saw on TV last year included “Mrs. America,” “The Good Lord Bird,” and a couple of others I saw omitted or mostly-passed-over. And yet they went for Hulu’s gaudy, stumbling and drawn-out “The Great.” “Queen’s Gambit” was good, and certainly has the hype to warrant being nominated. Anya Taylor-Joy’s status as new Brit “IT girl” is secured.

“Ted Lasso?” Come now.

When you look at the head-scratching field for movies — best picture (drama and “musical or comedy” categories) — making the case that “racism” maybe did play a role in which members got around to watching and endorsing which films and shows gets even trickier.

A couple of acting nominations for “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” for Viola Davis and Chadwick Boseman, a Regina King “best director” nomination for “One Night in Miami…” a deserved Daniel Kaluuya nod for actor in “Judas and the Black Messiah,” an out-of-the-blue nomination for Andra Day in “The United States vs. Billie Holiday” all point to an electorate that at least got to all the pertinent African American films of last year.

Spike Lee’s “Da 5 Bloods,” pushed by critics’ groups and the American Film Institute, was left out and I thought deservedly so. It’s like the fifth best African American-directed feature of the year and a huge “Treasure of Sierra Madre” sized fall-off from the heights of “BlackKklansman.”

But I would have surely thought “Ma Rainey” would earn a best picture nod, and maybe one for “Judas and the Black Messiah.” George Wolfe’s directing expertise was a great boost to “Ma Rainey.” Ms. King’s directing debut (“Miami”) struck me as pedestrian in comparison.

Looking at the playing field, unsettled with the collapse of theatrical exhibition during the pandemic, the Hollywood Foreign Press was facing a daunting task, getting to hundreds of streaming film titles and hundreds more new series.

Netflix’s “Mank” got more than its share of attention — FAR more than it deserved, in my opinion.

But when you remember “Emma.,” got around to considering the formidable “Pieces of a Woman” (Vanessa Kirby got an actress nomination), gave “Nomadland” its due and singled out Carey Mulligan and her movie, “Promising Young Woman,” you’re skating on the creme de la creme. Defensible choices, selected by allegedly secret ballot, all up and down the line.

Lee’s movie and its cast were passed over. But Hulu’s “U.S. vs. Billie Holiday” seemed an awards season outlier, until now. The Globes giveth and taketh…

Also, while I would’ve leaned more heavily into “Ma Rainey” than “Mank,” the “snubs” seem a lot less egregious when you consider how scattered the hype and “momentum” of this year’s “awards season” contenders was going to be, with a global pandemic altering everything from release schedules and buzz, and muzzling the over-ballyhooed pre-Oscars awards buzz.

AFI’s list, the deservedly-lost in the shuffle NY critics and National Board of Review and Gotham hype, little of that seems to be having its usual impact. Maybe we’re headed towards a more surprising Oscar field and Oscar night than usual.

Sawyer Spielberg co-stars, with Malin Barr, in this mid-March horror tale from Dark Star. Yes, Sawyer is son of Steven and Kate Capshaw, an actor with not a lot of credits…yet.

A young couple seeks shelter with the WRONG farmer in this one.

It’s nigh on impossible to make a film that tells the story of the Civil Rights Movement through a white character’s eyes any more. We’re a very long way from the days of a “Mississippi Burning” treatment of this subject.

The very best you could hope for in telling this story through white “eyes on the prize” is dismissal, or well-earned accusations of “cultural appropriation” from the culture at large. Even if Spike Lee’s listed as a such a film’s producer.

That’s a barrier the folks who made “Son of the South” never cleared. This well-intentioned but often patronizing biography is about an Alabama white man who was one of the early organizers of the Students Non-violent Coordinating Committee, the young people who started the Freedom Riders project and were in the front ranks of the later Freedom Summer.

Bob Zellner was a real hero of the movement, the grandson of a top man in the Alabama Ku Klux Klan and son of a former Klansman turned liberal Methodist preacher who found his life’s work and passion in the idealism of people struggling for racial equality.

But in telling his story and the larger saga he was a part of, “Son of the South” goes for “cute” and keeps the most important figures in this grassroots effort to break the stranglehold white supremacy had on America on the periphery.

There’s good stuff here, and Zellner is worth remembering. But the movie’s virtues are lost in too many cringe-worthy moments.

In 1960 Montgomery, Zellner (Lucas Till, the new “MacGuyver”) first gains notice for upsetting the powers that be at local Huntingdon College by leading his class assigned to write about “the race problem” into sermons and rallies led by the Rev. Ralph Abernathy (Cedric the Entertainer, quite good) and Civil Rights icon Rosa Parks (Sharonne Lanier).

Early scenes featuring those two are the best things about “Sons of the South.” Writer-director Barry Alexander Brown, Spike Lee’s longtime editor, ensures that Abernathy has both a stoicism for the long road ahead and an open-minded compassion about what it will take to walk it. And Lanier’s Parks is a woman of agency, not the passive “She was just tired and didn’t want to give up her seat” reluctant heroine of myth. Parks, like John Lewis (Dexter Darden), was looking for some “good trouble” when she made a protest that launched the Montgomery Bus Boycott and changed America.

Seeing Lanier’s turn in this role reminds us that Rosa Parks should get her own biopic.

Zellner is depicted as a blend of curious and contrary. He takes an interest in the cause, even if he’s willing to leave it at just “an interest,” largely at the insistence of his “our-lives-are-all-planned-out” fiance (Lucy Hale). But the contrarian in him bristles at the threats from the college and the KKK.

And when his Birmingham bigot Grand Dragon Grandpa (Brian Dennehy) shows up, all the cross-burnings in the world aren’t changing the kid’s mind.

Parks warning him that “taking no side is taking a side” in this struggle is something Zellner takes to heart. Eventually. First he’s got to maintain his “get along to get along” stance with his racist peers, hear out Grandpa’s “call a spade a spade” lectures and see for himself the mob violence when the Freedom Riders, integrating interstate bus travel, arrive in Montgomery.

Brown makes this scene as savage and bloody as the real thing. And it’s a crying shame that this is where “Son of the South” starts to go seriously wrong. Till’s Zellner arrying a beautiful, injured Black college professor (Lex Scott Davis) to safety, even if it really happened, makes for cringe-worthy optics.

Building a romance out of that (even if true), this accomplished, five-language speaking Paris-educated Fisk University professor taken by the pretty, blondish Alabama undergrad? Come on.

Everything that follows, including Bob’s near murder by “traitor to your race” types, staggers under that (afterthought) romance and other cutesy touches. Bob, answering the phones for SNCC in Atlanta, learns about this culture he’s intent on helping through “Jet” and “Ebony,” and has to unlearn “Nigra” and learn to pronounce “Negro.” And he gets more direct threats from his own grandfather, all moments that make you wince as they unfold.

It’s not that the performances are incompetent. The script is alarmingly tone-deaf.

Producer Spike Lee couldn’t warn Brown away from the mines in this minefield of a movie about a “white savior” saving the huddled Black masses in the Deep South?

Even the real Zellner, depicted as recognizing his “white privilege” long before that term entered public use, must have seen how clumsily this plays.

And yet for all that, the entire enterprise might have come off had they played up the African American mentors who took the man on and not rendered them — to a one — bit players in an American saga they authored.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for strong racial slurs and violence throughout, and thematic elements

Cast: Lucas Till, Lex Scott Davis, Lucy Hale, Sharonne Lanier, Dexter Darden, Chaka Foreman, Brian Dennehy, Julia Ormond and Cedric the Entertainer.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Barry Alexander Brown, based on the memoir by Bob Zellner. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:45

The rift that started when Warner Brothers had to rethink distribution last year thanks to the pandemic seems terminal, to some. A “divorce” is in the works. Or is it?

Christopher Nolan can’t really blame “Tenet” bombing on Warners can he?

The studio, famous for much of its history for giving filmmakers a nearly free hand to create, from Kubrick to Nolan, got a thorough chewing-out from Nolan after “Tenet” came out and WB had to rethink things. He seems to have expected he’d be consulted before his home studio moved its release slate to HBO Max.

The theatrical release of “Tenet” seemed to make Warners’ point for it.

But Nolan wasn’t hearing it. I am mystified that he hasn’t cooled off since. All the talk now is where he’ll land.

Netflix gives filmmakers free rein and big budgets. Disney is a bigger player than ever thanks to Disney Plus.

But neither of those offers the prestige of Warners. Does he want his movies to be uh, Netflix “events?”

I, for one, cannot imagine the larger-than-life experience of his best films — “Dunkirk,” “Inception” — as TV-sized cinema.

This seems a shame.

The mayor walks the few blocks from his home to work, stopped several times along the way by constituents at the start of his day.

“What can I do for you?” he asks, pressing the flesh and reinforcing what Tip O’Neill always said — “All politics is local.”

Those who shout out from shops, car windows or stop him on the street just want to say “Hi,” and seem thrilled just to meet The Mayor.

At his spacious office with a view from a sleek new City Hall, “Mayor Musa” (Habib) sits through meetings about “our city’s brand” and what they should name the fancy new city-center fountain. A tour of a restored school is where he listens to gripes about doors that don’t quite fit, and promises to see to it. As he walks neighborhoods like Old Town, he micromanages the managers running renovation projects, lecturing them on property rights and picking spots he’d like to see a bench or two placed.

It doesn’t matter if he’s running late. He’s sure to be arm-twisted into staying in the neighborhood for a community luncheon.

But as we watch David Osit’s documentary “Mayor,” we see a public figure who is sweating the little things because the big things are all but off limits to him. This is Ramallah, a mostly-Christian city in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian West Bank, capital of the Palestinian Authority.

Mayor Musa is an international figure, locally popular and when we meet him, freshly-reelected. But as he has to remind a helpful German “fact finding” delegation that’s shown up to counsel unending patience to a city, a people and a region chafing under over 50 years of occupation, “I could be stripped, in front of everyone, by a 16 year-old Israeli soldier” just because the soldier demands it.

Habib, the embodiment of cool, friendly “dignity” is, like every citizen of his city, subject to the whims of an invading army that shows up at any provocation, surrounded on hills in every direction by fortified Jewish “settlements” aimed at making permanent Israel’s claim to the West Bank.

“Mayor” follows Mayor Musa through days of diplomacy, planning, and tidying up a busy city which can boast of alluring shopping districts, enterprising cafe and shop owners and a Popeye’s Chicken franchise, one of many Western businesses that have planted roots there.

He keeps his cool under the deluge of petty details — City Hall’s cable hasn’t been hooked up, no newspapers have been delivered, and his repeated pleas for “a radio, so I can hear the news,” are buck-passed and ignored.

And then “that clown Trump” declares Jerusalem the capital of Israel and that he’s moving the U.S. Embassy to that multi-religion/multi-state and iconic West Bank city. All hell breaks look.

Mayor Musa must try to keep the peace, or at least bear witness to massive shows of force from the Israeli Defense Forces. He and his various subordinates remind each other and foreign dignitaries that they have no control over their borders or even their own sewage treatment and trash disposal. Israel closes off such cities whenever the Netanyahu government feels the need to flex its muscles. Sewage backs up, trash piles up and unruly citizens set fires in protest.

The suit-and-tie imperturbable Habib zips from hot spot to hot spot, literally putting out fires and chewing on those who might have set them, listening to complaints of Israeli “settlers” burning olive groves and polluting drinking water, taking his case to countries where he’s invited to speak and showing a face of reasonable defiance to Israel and the world when the need arises.

Osit (“Building Babel,” “Thank You for Playing”) has an eye for the ironic in this portrait of a polished modern politician trapped in an untenable situation. The picayune things that Mayor Musa throws himself into earn eye rolls from the mayor itself.

“Naming a fountain” is fine. But how can we get a sewage treatment plant if it took 15 years to get Israeli permission to open a new cemetery?

That slick new city hall? The international community had to build it after a 2002 Israeli incursion demolished much of the city.

Osit’s film never bogs itself down with details, such as “Is there a tax base paying for these improvements, or are international handouts Ramallah’s bottom line?

Ramallah’s resemblance to Beirut in a cosmopolitan sense, “WeRamallah” branded as “the gateway to Palestine” (“Too political,” the Mayor warns.) can make the viewer fret over Musa Habib’s future, mayor of a Christian city trapped within a Muslim-majority “state” unified only in its opposition to Israeli apartheid. That’s “fragile” in the extreme.

David, “do the people of America know what happens here?” Habib asks the off-camera filmmaker at one point. Probably not.

As the post-“Jerusalem is Israel’s capital” fallout reaches its apex, we see Israeli soldiers chasing rock-throwing protestors to the city’s center, with the soldiers pausing to take selfies in front of the city’s spectacularly-lit Christmas tree. Mayor Musa can only join those videoing the troopers doing this and shake his head.

As he’s the sort of personable, passionate politician a lot of people can identity with, “Mayor” leaves us with the hope that his plans don’t come to nothing, and that with “that clown” out of Washington, maybe he’ll find a more sympathetic ear here. Maybe journalists will “discover” Ramallah in between Israeli raids and “the gateway to Palestine” can be showcased to its best advantage.

After all, Americans who see a city decorated with KFCs and Starbucks might find there’s more than one point of view about what is and should happen in this corner of the Middle East.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Mayor Musa Habib, Prince William, others

Credits: Directed by David Ostit. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:29

Every now and then, a series or movie breaks through on one of the non Netflix streamers and we remember, “Oh yeah, we have that choice, too.”

Last weekend it was a Justin Timber drama, “Palmer” that pointed the spotlight on Apple TV and drew a record number of eyeballs. A “Palm Springs” here, “Ted Lasso” or “Handmaid’s Tale” or Warner film premiering on Hulu or HBO or Amazon there doesn’t really dent the dominant streamer.

Disney + is making inroads, but is anybody else getting competitive without emptying their bank accounts?

Why didn’t Hulu or Amazon buy the new James Bond film before it goes stale on the shelf?

The Hollywood Reporter takes a look at the numbers and dollar signs involved in gaining parity.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/the-high-cost-of-chasing-netflix

“Get Out” was Daniel Kaluuya‘s breakout film, a satiric, suspenseful horror blockbuster that generated a lot more discussion of its intensity, gimmick and twists than of its good performances.

But taking on charismatic Black Panther recruiter, leader and born-politician Fred Hampton, the “Messiah” of “Judas and the Black Messiah” is a next level performance. The English-born Kaluuya scorches the screen with an undiluted blast of star power, a thrilling, moving portrayal of human dimensions in a larger-than-life scale.

He gives this account of Hampton’s life in the Black Panthers and that of the “Judas” FBI informant who betrayed him a magnetic presence at its center, an electrifying star turn that brings to vivid life a major figure in civil rights/civil disobedience history, something sorely-missed in the Malcolm X of “One Night in Miami.”

Director and co-writer Shaka King (TV’s “Shrill” and “People of Earth” episodes) seeks to turn this tale of civil rights martyrdom into a suspenseful story of out-of-control government paranoia and a cunning pawn who figures in FBI efforts to prevent J. Edgar Hoover’s late-life nightmare, that African America would produce “a
Black Messiah” who would unify the country behind an effort to redress racial, social, economic and judicial injustices visited upon his people.

That’s how Hoover (Martin Sheen, superbly sinister) put it in directing his subordinates, the (white) men in charge of watching Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X and — once they were gone — Fred Hampton, party chairman of the Black Panther Party of Chicago.

Young, a charismatic off-the-cuff speaker and canny strategist, Hampton ran the Panthers’ chapter in what he called “the most segregated city in America,” Chicago, preaching “Rebellion is our only solution” and “Political power flows from the barrel of a gun.”

Militant? You bet. But the fact that he was presiding over a supplemental education system and pre-school breakfast program for Chicago’s underprivileged, his bravery and ability to meet with street gangs like The Crowns, the Puerto Rican Young Lords and even KKK-like white underclass Young Patriots in creating the first “rainbow coalition” made him all the more dangerous to the always-paranoid Hoover.

So when a bold car thief named Bill O’Neal, who used a fedora, trenchcoat and fake FBI badge to con Black men out of their Cutlasses, tumbles into the legal system, Agent Roy Mitchell (Jesse Plemons) is tasked with “turning” him, with a little leverage.

Car theft is a decent stretch in prison, but impersonating a Federal officer? Uh oh.

That’s how O’Neal, played by the simmering LaKeith Stanfield of “Knives Out!” and “Sorry to Bother You,” is arm-twisted into joining the Panthers in the late ’60s, ordered to make himself useful to the Party and ingratiate himself to Hampton.

“The Panthers and the Klan are one and the same,” Agent Mitchell purrs. Maybe O’Neal buys it, but it’s not like he had a choice. “Find out what they need,” he’s ordered.

“A car,” is his answer, so the Bureau gives him a Buick Wildcat. But as Bill, who has a reputation on the streets and fear of that catching up with him, tells them after the first tests Panther security puts him through, “They ain’t no terrorists. They’re terrorizing ME.”

“Judas and the Black Messiah” follows the two on their separate but destined-to-collide trajectories, Hampton organizing, drawing crowds and falling for a fan (Dominique Fishback), O’Neal trying to avoid discovery, to get paid for his tips and information, maybe even hoping to steer the Party clear of trouble with the Feds and the racist-by-right Chicago PD.

King stages tense meetings set up by Hampton and assorted groups which he wanted to ally with, or at least keep clear of Panther political activities. Kaluuya makes Hampton human by letting him show little flashes of nerves that the 20-21 year-old hides under swagger and “million dollar words,” and by letting him look like a man of his time.

No, almost nobody hit the gym back then — cops, Panthers or car thieves.

Stanfield plays O’Neal as a nervous opportunist whose constant side-eyes let us see his terror of being found out. He’s shifty and, at first, willing to follow orders. But he starts to question directives even if his middle man (Plemons’ Mitchell) dares not act on any flash of conscience.

King paints even the more dubious Panthers in a heroic light, which makes the explosions of violence — harassing, threatening and murdering cops met with counter-intimidation and firefights — more jarring. It’s hard to believe this really went on, with compliant news organizations sticking with the official law enforcement “version” of every flashpoint, arrest and shootout.

Event of the past year lend even more credence to the film’s point of view, that rhetoric was hurled at above-the-law police and Feds until it was obvious that wasn’t slowing town the targeting, arrests and worse.

If there’s a fault to the direction and screenplay, it’s the film’s frittering away too many suspenseful “Will they figure O’Neal out?” and “Will he cross the Feds and aide the Party?” moments, “leaving money on the table” as poker players put it. This is a good film that thanks to the impressive cast, flirts with greatness.

But in a banner year for African American representation in front of and behind the camera, King looks like a filmmaker who will get more trips to the plate, more chances to touch’em all. Stanfield is already a rising star and in-demand talent.

And after his Messianic turn here, Kaluuya’s star is in the ascent and his phone — if there’s any justice in Hollywood — has to be ringing off the hook. He lets us see what his contemporaries saw in Hampton, and he makes us wonder just who he might have become.

MPAA Rating: R for violence and pervasive language 

Cast: Laeith Stanfield, Daniel Kaluuya, Jesse Plemons, Dominique Fishback and Martin Sheen.

Credits: Directed by Shaka King, script by Will Berson and Shaka King. A Warner Brothers/HBO Max release.

Running time: 2:05

Feb. 12 in theaters, March VOD. Man, Mickey Rourke just looks less and less of this world, right?

You can’t help but root for any romantic comedy that comes along to work, because so very few of them do.

“The Right One” has a few promising elements which make themselves obvious from the get-go. But the good ideas run out quickly and the cute scenes turn few and far between long before we’ve taken that first peek at our digital watch.

And that chemistry we get a whiff of between the stars remains just that, a whiff — as in a swing-and-a-miss.

Cleopatra Coleman of “The Argument” and TV’s “The Last Man on Earth” makes a perfectly bubbly leading lady, a romance novelist with writer’s block. Sarah needs to get inspired, get writing and get her next book in the stores because her agent Kelly (Iliza Shlesinger) says “You’re almost 30. It’s my last chance to sell you as ‘a prodigy.'”

“I’m 31!“

She needs to get over her last break-up, Simon, get out there and get her mojo back.

That’s how she starts running into this mysterious stranger played by Nick Thune of TV’s “Life in Pieces” and “Love Life.”

First, he’s a pretentious art critic at a gallery opening she and Kelly drop in on. Later he poses as a pretentious artist, with a minor wardrobe change and serious upping of his poseur game.

“I before ‘me,’ except after ‘you,’ THAT’s what this painting is about!”

Running into him busking as ‘Cowboy Cody’ in a city square (set in Seattle, filmed mostly in Vancouver), doesn’t get any answers in the face of her persistent questions. He cryptically suggests he’ll be at a performance space that night, and she winds up ditching her set-up date after catching his wigged, cross-dressing (he has a beard) impersonation of a singer-songwriter “gal” fresh off the bus from Tulsa.

Sarah is hooked. And as we’ve seen this guy at his day job, gonzo skateboarding free-spirit “G-Money” at his phone sales office, and volunteering as puppeteer Mr. G at a preschool, we’re at least intrigued.

Whoever this “G” is, he’s damned good at becoming whoever his costumer will bond with and buy from on the phone — a master of accents, tastes and multilingual, multicultural trivia. His many voices come in handy performing for kids, too.

He even dazzles his new boss (David Koechner) by bonding instantly over a supposed shared love of Blues Traveler and its harmonica-master lead singer, John Popper.

Sarah finds herself tagging along on this stranger’s evening odyssey, donning a neon-smiling plush kitty head for an all night rave as “DJ Meowna” to his DJ Catamice .

“Like DJ Deadmau5?”

“Where do you think he got the idea?”

But as caught up in all this as Sarah professes to be, she doesn’t know this dude. She wakes up in bed with a chameleon tour-guide to Pacific Northwest entertainment, “Matteo” the Argentine ballroom dancer/”Scarface” coke dealer or slam poet “Tim Demint.” And while in character, he never breaks character.

As this upsets her but doesn’t scare her off, any more than a stalker who warns her to “Stay AWAY from him,” Sarah starts probing his mystery, hunting for his secret sadness and taking notes for a possible book as she does.

Yeah, this is sure to work out.

There’s just a touch of antic energy to these early scenes that gives “The Right One” promise. Piling all the incidents and guises this “G” takes on into one night could have been giddy fun. Comedies like this work at a quick and breathless tempo, which would hurtle us and Sarah to the point of “swept away” with mere momentum.

Instead, reality TV producer turned writer-director Ken Mok stops everything cold by having G-for-Godfrey turn off the charm like a switch. This character isn’t remotely engaging or charismatic as himself, so hiding that aspect of him until late in the game is essential, revealing his sad “secret” later in the game a must.

What would Sarah, author of “romance novels for dumb millennials” want with him?

The sparks Thune sets off, in character, with Coleman and with Koechner (in just a couple of scenes) point to this obvious conclusion. The movie only comes to life when our guy is playing other characters.

What’s worse, the squishy relationshippy stuff is strictly a non-starter. Thune as G-Money clicks with Coleman and Thune as unfunny Adam Scott TNG does not.

I think he’s playing the character as accurately as he thinks is called for, but never broadly or energetic enough to make the movie work. When he’s not cute and charming he’s REALLY not cute and charming.

Bad call on somebody’s part. Coleman’s Sarah needed to be more down in the mouth to make her coming-out-of-her-shell journey pay off.

Add the fact that it’s the tamest R-rated romantic comedy in the history of motion pictures to its gloomy pauses and funereal pace and you haven’t got a rom-com on your hands, just a rom-corpse.

MPAA Rating: R for language and sexual references 

Cast: Cleopatra Coleman, Nick Thune, Iliza Shlesinger and David Koechner

Credits: Scripted and directed by Ken Mok. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:31

Just go to this link and check out the man’s filmography. Hal Holbrook had a very long, deep and interesting career. Like others we’ve spent this winter of 2021 mourning, he was active a very long time, made many memorable roles his own and became famous — late in life — for just being a grand voice of age in movies and on TV.

I interviewed him a few times over the years, the last time when he was up for an Oscar for “Into the Wild,” which wasn’t even close to his last performance, even if it was one of his twinkling finest.

“Lincoln” for Spielberg after playing “Lincoln” on TV, a Dirty Harry movie villain, “The Fog” and of course, “All the President’s Men.” “That Evening Sun,” “Capricorn One,” the list is endless. Or nearly endless.

He was the first guy ever to use “I’d tellya, but I might have to killya if I did” when I jokingly asked him about who the man later ID’d as FBI Agent Mark Felts was. Holbrook’s “Deep Throat” in “All the President’s Men” entered myth, a Harry Lime shadow, lit by a cigarette in a DC parking garage, saving democracy by verifying one Republican misdeed at a time for The Washingon Post.

That interview was back in the ’90s, when he stopped off on one of his many tours as “Mark Twain Tonight!” to speak to students at a conservatory I used to cover in Winston-Salem, NC.

He was just hilarious on the phone years later when I interviewed his wife Dixie Carter about her cabaret show, which she toured the country (Florida included) with. A “Designing Woman” with an authentic “Evening Shade” drawl, she gave Holbrook added Southern bonafides, as he told me while he called her to the phone and filled the time as we both waited for The Lady. Delightful.

Our last chat, for “Into the Wild,” was a phoner that took place as he waited for her to finish an appointment at a Houston hospital. Dixie was sick with the cancer that killed her shortly afterwards, but he put on a brave face.

A grand old man who will be remembered for a LOT of films, fondly remembered. Rest in Peace, Mr. Twain.

Here’s that 2010 interview, timed to the release of “That Evening Sun,” a phrase I can hear him drawling through still — “I hate to see that evenin’ sun go down.”

Hal Holbrook isn’t a Southerner. He was born in Ohio. But he has spent much of his life impersonating a famous Southerner — Mark Twain, on the stage. He has spent time in the South. Lots of it, from the 1940s onward.

“And I married into it,” he cracks. He has been married to singer and actress Dixie Carter since 1984.

The marriage was the most helpful of all when it came time to play Abner Meacham, the cantankerous Tennessee farmer and store owner who busts out of a retirement home determined to reclaim his farm from the new tenants in the indie film That Evening Sun , now showing in some cities. It wasn’t Twain that Holbrook channeled to play Abner. It was his late father-in-law.

“[Halbert] ‘Cart’ Carter was a short man brought up in a small town — Republican,” Holbrook says in storytelling cadences polished by decades of one-man shows. “I learned to avoid certain subjects, especially with a man who loved to talk about his prowess with a knife. And about the fights he’d won, and how he could punch somebody out. He was full of advice about that sort of thing.

” ‘Cart, why is it you had to fight so much when you were young?’

” ‘Hal,’ he says, ‘there weren’t any policemen around to settle things.’ This was in McLemoresville, Tennessee, where they lived. He says, ‘The closest police were in Milan, 12-15 miles away. If you got into something, you had to settle it yourself.’

“That was integral to my approach to Abner Meacham. Even at his age, he had to settle this dispute himself. He wasn’t going to go call on anybody.”

Because of that father-in-law connection, Holbrook took extra care to be very specific about the accent in That Evening Sun, which was shot in Tennessee. “My wife, Dixie [of TV’s Designing Women], went over every syllable with me!”

Reviews for the film have been glowing, with The New York Daily News noting that “a twitch of his jowl is all Holbrook needs to convey hard-earned experience.”

We were reminded of Holbrook’s folksy charms by the Oscar nomination he landed for Into the Wild a couple of years ago. But the upshot of that acclaim is “I’m working harder than I ever have in my life. I don’t understand what in hell is going on. I am going to be 85 in February. I had to give up sailing. Not just because I’m not strong enough to take a boat across the ocean. I don’t have time.

“I did two small films in September and November. And I’m still doing Twain, 20 or so times this year. I like to do him 30 times a year, but in this economy…”

With Holbrook, it always comes back to Twain, the writer/humorist/philosopher whom he studies constantly, updating his Mark Twain Tonight act with Twain’s timeless riffs on Americans and the American condition.

“There isn’t anybody that I know who put it down more clearly and more accurately, what we are as people, than Mark Twain. I cannot get over the miracle of what this man had to say about our lives, our civilization.

“Nobody tells the truth any more. That’s one of the chief reasons my show works. People are surprised at hearing the truth spoken. And because they’re surprised, they laugh. Because it’s funny.”

He recites a bit from the “Money is God” portion of the act, a section added to include Twain’s thoughts on recessions and “panics,” of which he lived through a few.

“‘A blight has fallen upon us. And the monarchy of the rich and the powerful are the authors.'”

Holbrook pauses and chuckles.

“That’s the double whammy. You watch the show and you think ‘This guy’s alive and he’s talking about this scoundrel or that one.’ Then five seconds later you remember, ‘Wait a minute. He died 100 years ago.’ “

His old friend and sometime collaborator, stage director Gerald Freedman, says that after doing the act and polishing his Twain for 50 years, “Now, when he is on stage it is hard to remember that he is acting Mark Twain.” Holbrook has become his character. Freedman marvels that well into his 80s Holbrook still totally commits to a part and seems “to be truly living in the moment.”

Holbrook has a biography coming out later this year, and he’s working on another volume of that, too. When you’re about to hit 85, you’ve been acting since the 1940s, and have covered as much theatrical, TV and cinematic ground as he has, one book wouldn’t cover everything.

There are more films, he hopes. And more shots at Twain. He’s about to hang up the phone to reread some more of Bernard DeVoto’s book, Mark Twain in Eruption. “Homework,” he says.

“Why quit? The man’s got as much to say to us as he ever did. And people still want to listen.”