This is an earnest, reasonably well-directed film with a clumsily structured script. It jumps around between different periods of J. Edgar Hoover’s life so often that it never manages to create any momentum in the story it’s trying to tell, the portrait it’s trying to paint.

Leonardo DiCaprio’s performance as J. Edgar Hoover has its moments, but he seems to be hamstrung by the thick accent he adopts, which for some reason is thicker than the real Hoover’s accent.

Hoover’s very bizarre personal life is presented with compassion, without glossing over anything. It’s hard to understand why anyone wanted to make this film, except to garner Academy Award attention, but it basically lacks the juice to compel any kind of attention at all.

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[SPOILER ALERT — don’t read further if you haven’t yet watched True Detective but plan to.]

So it ended up being lurid pulp fiction after all, not a supernatural thriller.  The title should have tipped us off about this.  Yet the whole thing was a kind of wild fever dream, always teetering on the brink of the plausible — it made you feel unsteady, filled you with dread.  Doing this without supernatural elements was a fine achievement and a very satisfying one.

It kept you guessing to the end.  When Rust pointed his finger in the direction of the kidnapped sheriff next to the boat and gunshots exploded out of nowhere at the places Rust was pointing, I thought for a second that Rust had been revealed to possess magical powers.  But, no — there was a hidden sniper firing those shots, a device perfectly suitable to lurid pulp fiction.

When Rust and then Marty entered the grotesquely decorated maze of Carcosa, the suspense became nearly unbearable — because they should not have been doing this by any rational calculation.  They should have gone in together, or waited for back-up.  But they had to navigate that maze, whatever the cost — it was a symbol of the maze of the case itself, which they had become obsessed with, willing to risk everything to solve.

Not the least of the risks they ran was madness.  Trying to enter the mind of a severely deranged psychotic killer left them on the margin of sanity themselves.  But they needed to enter the madman’s story to chart the maze he’d created and destroy it.

The references to The King In Yellow became clear at last.  The King In Yellow was a series of stories about a play that induced madness or despair in people who watched or read it. In other words, a series of stories about a story. That’s its significance to True Detective — not the supernatural element in the original book. Errol William Childress was telling stories about himself through his grisly deeds, which induced Rust and Marty to search for the story that inspired Childress’s story, and its significance. Only by unraveling that story could they change it. In the process, both risked losing their minds.

In the coda after the chase in the maze, a coda that is the true climax to the series, Marty reminds Rust about his youth in Alaska when he’d stare up at the night sky and make up stories.  There’s a suggestion that telling stories is the only reasonable response to the forbidding mystery of the cosmos, and that the foundation of all stories is seen in the night sky — darkness versus light.

In the coda, we find that Rust, the bitter nihilist, has found faith — in something beyond death.  The supernatural intrudes at last, in the last place we’d ever expect it — Rust’s petrified heart.  But it doesn’t appear out of nowhere — Rust’s obsession with solving the case was always based in faith, an idea that stopping a few of the world’s horrors does mean something, does bring a spark of light to the darkness of existence.

Marty points out that the dark holds more territory in the night sky than the light, but Rust won’t let that be the final word.  “Once there was only dark,” he says.  “If you ask me, the light’s winning.”

That’s his story now, but every step he and Marty took in the course of the series was a part of telling that story, necessary to the creation of that story.

Matt Barry’s latest movie — short, sweet, dark . . .

I thought this was an exceptionally dumb movie.

Christopher Nolan is really the grand duke of mediocrity.

Nolan knows how to make hit movies but he doesn’t know how to direct a movie.  This is only possible in an age when people think of factory-fabricated Twinkies as “cake”.

The great cinematographer Gordon Willis (above) didn’t like zooms in general and especially not in period films. He and Coppola agreed early on they they wouldn’t use zooms for The Godfather.

There is, however, one obvious zoom in the movie, in an establishing shot of the Woltz mansion just before the bedroom scene with the horse’s head.  It turns out that Willis didn’t shoot it.  Coppola and another cinematographer went out and stole several establishing shots of the mansion at dawn because Coppola felt he needed them and there was no money left in the budget to get them done officially.

The zoom in question pushes in on Woltz’s bedroom window, and you can see why Coppola used it, given that he didn’t have a crane or tracking equipment to get the same effect.

I hate zooms myself, in any kind of film, agreeing with Jean-Luc Godard that zooms should only be used to annoy and alienate the audience, and that zoom in The Godfather has always stuck in my craw, even knowing how and why it was created.

Ironically, it turns out that there is another zoom in the movie, one I never processed as a zoom until I read about it.  It’s the famous three-minute opening shot of Bonasera telling his troubles to Don Corleone.  It starts close on Bonasera’s face and opens up slowly to show Bonasera in a wider shot over the Don’s shoulder.

This was done with a mechanized computer-controlled zoom lens set to proceed so slowly that you never really resister the optical distortion inherent in a zoom.  It works fine and doesn’t take you out of the period visual style crafted so meticulously by Willis, but part of me wishes I didn’t know it was a zoom.

For me, the high point of the Academy Award ceremonies tonight was this selfie, organized in an apparently improvisatory, or mostly improvisatory moment while the telecast was in progress by host Ellen DeGeneres.

The Academy Award ceremonies are basically just a big selfie that the film industry takes of itself.  They’re usually pretty dumb but always successful, because people enjoy celebrity selfies.  It’s the self-importance and the fake jollity of the ceremonies that make them nauseating.  But in the picture above, the various stars reveal themselves as the narcissistic kids they are at bottom — “Look at me!” they’re all saying, with a cheerfulness that’s actually endearing.

The picture even got bombed by the brother of best supporting actress winner Lupita Nyongo’o — he’s the guy on the right-hand side of the picture, obscuring our view of Cate Blanchett — authenticating the spontaneity of the moment.

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