Month: April 2019

A bit short of 20 years ago I attended an all-media screening of The Phantom Menace at the now-vanished National in Westwood. I emerged a bit stunned, struggling for words. Eventually my head clarified and my thoughts took shape. I looked up at the night sky and vowed to expel Jake Lloyd from my movie-watching realm for the rest of my days.

At the very least The Phantom Menace launched the beginnings of an industry-wide realization — a process that took many, many years to reach fruition and maturity — that George Lucas was creatively over and had in fact become a kind of malevolent force. Whatever genuine inspiration he had inside him during the making of Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back had escaped, leaving him more or less hollow and adrift and adept only at marketing and manufacturing and screwing up Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

Who saw Topher Grace’s 85-Minute Prequel Re-Edit? I never did.

Two big reveals will happen tomorrow morning — the initial roster of 2019 Cannes Film Festival selections (probably without the Tarantino) plus the (heavily?) redacted Barr version of the Mueller Report. There will actually be two versions of the redacted special counsel report, with one being released to the public and one that will eventually go to a limited number of members of Congress with fewer redactions. Cannes first, and then Mueller.

I feel a little funny about posting a Tucker Carlson excerpt (4.16), but no one else has spoken frankly about how the MSM has all but abandoned Beto O’Rourke over the last three weeks and moved over to Pete Buttigieg, the new squeeze.

Carlson: “How it must feel to be Beto right now? You’re running really hard for President, giving speech after speech every day, riding your skateboard for the camera. And then one day you wake up and discover that your one true love, the American news media, has called it off…they’ve left you for a younger, hotter candidate…went out for a pack of cigarettes and just never came home.”

HE take: Carlson isn’t wrong, but after everyone gets used to BUDDHA-judge and O’Rourke learns to refine his hand movements and sharpens his stump speech and especially after the debates begin in the fall, things will settle down and even out.

The pauses in this scene — the moments when De Niro just stares at Keitel with an expression that’s somewhere between morally appalled and oddly perplexed — are what make it interesting. Sometimes vague detections of what’s inside of a character are more gripping than watching that character let it all out. This plus the spiky flattop, checked shirt, white T-shirt, jeans and spit-shined brown leather boots.

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If and when the 2020 Presidential race is between Donald Trump and Pete Buttigieg, homophobic jibes and smears will be liberally used. We know this — we know who and what Trump is. Two days ago on TMZ, Mayor Pete said he’s accustomed to being picked on, and that he’ll deal with it head-on before deftly changing the subject.

HE suggestion: BUDDHA-judge needs to grow his hair out a little bit — 1/2 inch, say. Right now it’s a little too crew-cutty, a little too Alfred El Neuman-y.

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Last night I re-watched my Bluray of Jerzy Skolimowski‘s Moonlighting (’82) — a finely chiselled, dead brilliant drama about four Polish guys (led by Jeremy Irons‘ “Nowak”) renovating their boss’s London flat during the time of the Solidarity crackdown in Poland. Very matter of fact, very specific and situational but at the same time a political allegory that sticks the landing. As perfectly made as this kind of thing can be.

In a four-year-old riff I repeated the old saw about the world being divided into two camps — those who hear Moonlighting and think of Bruce Willis and Cybil Shepherd, and those who think of Skolimowski and Irons and Jenny Seagrove and that ending with those shopping carts crashing and sliding downhill.

There were 31 comments from the HE community; 27 were about how cool the TV show was. I rest my case.

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Now I get it. In Showtime’s The Loudest Voice, Russell Crowe‘s performance as Fox News creator Roger Ailes is going to kill. It’s going to suck all the Ailes oxygen out of the room. Which is why the producers of Fair and Balanced (Lionsgate, 12.20) need to put their version of this sordid big-media tale in front of critics in Cannes and splash things up a bit. Otherwise they might feel like yesterday’s news or some kind of :what about us?” afterthought when F&B pops in theatres eight months from now. Lionsgate’s Ailes is played by John Lithgow.

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All along I’ve been thinking that sooner or later, Democratic primary voters will realize that Joe Biden is not the guy to go mano e mano with Donald Trump in 2020 (too yesteryear, too gaffe-y, peaked in the ’90s and early aughts, pushing 80) and that Bernie Sanders (also pushing 80) had his big groundswell heyday in ’15 and ’16 and that it’s time for everyone to support an eyes-forward, here-and-now candidate like Mayor Pete, Beto O’Rourke or Kamala Harris.

Now, suddenly, I’m scared of what Bernie might do — of the trouble he might create. He’s got a lot of money, his supporters have been known to behave like lunatics, and he might really fuck things up.

From today’s N.Y. Times assessment by Jonathan Martin: “Some in the party still harbor anger over the 2016 race, when [Sanders] ran against Hilary Clinton, and his continuing resistance to becoming a Democrat. But his critics are chiefly motivated by a fear that nominating an avowed socialist would all but ensure Mr. Trump a second term.

HE interjection: Don’t Democrats remember how Sanders was rejected by black voters in the South in ’16?

Martin:”‘There’s a growing realization that Sanders could end up winning this thing, or certainly that he stays in so long that he damages the actual winner,’ said David Brock, the liberal organizer, who said he has had discussions with other operatives about an anti-Sanders campaign and believes it should commence ‘sooner rather than later.’

“The good news for Mr. Sanders’s foes is that his polling is down significantly in early-nominating states from 2016, he is viewed more negatively among Democrats than many of his top rivals, and he has already publicly vowed to support the party’s nominee if he falls short.”

This scene from Nicholas Meyer‘s Time After Time (’79), which I haven’t seen since it opened, is about a hotel-room conversation between the visionary writer and idealist H.G. Wells (Malcolm McDowell) and John Leslie Stevenson aka Jack The Ripper (David Warner). Both have time-travelled to late ’70s San Francisco. One is a fish out of water, another belongs.

The scene is basically about editorializing — Meyer briefly stopping the narrative to remark upon the moral decline that permeates contemporary society.

Start this clip from the 1:35 mark:

Stevenson to Wells: “We don’t belong here? On the contrary, I belong here completely and utterly. I’m home. It’s you who doesn’t belong here. You, with your absurd notions of a perfect and harmonious society. Drivel. The world has caught up and surpassed me. Ninety years ago, I was a freak. Today, I’m an amateur.

“You go back. The future isn’t what you thought. It’s what I am. Do you know that you can purchase a rifle or a revolver? It’s legal.”

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