HE to Journo Pally who’d recommended Thomas Anders Jensen’s Riders of Justice: “You were completely correct in advising me to watch this film, which I realized early on was a truly original stand-out. Two days ago I insisted that violence wasn’t funny or certainly couldn’t be sold as such, and I was wrong. The dry, low-key, half-crazy comic tone is really something. It’s not quite crazy enough, if you ask me, and there’s NO WAY this ragtag group of statisticians and revenge-seekers wouldn’t be BESIEGED BY DOZENS OF COPS after the final front-yard Wild Bunch-like shoot-out, and it’s so bizarre that the brilliant Brillo-head guy didn’t make the slightest attempt to try and seriously impersonate a therapist when speaking with Mads Mikkelsen’s daughter, and I was disappointed that the guilt of the bad guys regarding the death of Mikkelsen’s wife was seemingly watered-down or made less clear as we went along, and yet…I wasn’t expecting anything as original feeling as this…the deadpan humor really works. It’s quite the discovery.”
Month: May 2021
Fauci Flips on Lab Leak
Dr. Anthony Fauci has done a sudden about–face in terms of his once-dismissive opinion about COVID-19 having possibly originated as an accidental Wuhan “lab leak”. He’s admitted that he’s now less than convinced that the virus began as a natural (if catastrophic) biological occurrence. This breaks the dam. Lab leakers now have the upper hand.
Couch Twaddling
Bob Dylan‘s 80th birthday is today (5.24), although some posted celebrative essays yesterday. I couldn’t think of anything to say except “okay, congrats, good genes, hangin’ in there, keep at it.” Which didn’t seem worth saying. Then I saw (or was reminded of) this Drew Friedman illustration. And then I time-tripped back to March 2020…
There are two…make it three…okay, four things wrong with this 1938 LIFE magazine cover capture of Errol Flynn. The hand-under-the-chin pose looks fake, anxious. Flynn’s expression isn’t relaxed and confident — he could be waiting for a traffic light to change. The watch is too small and dandified and lacking the requisite machismo factor for a swashbuckler. And one other thing, almost incomprehensible when you think about it…
Snapped sometime in mid to late September 1958. The date is indicated by the presence of Sidney Poitier and the likelihood that he, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon (the latter two were shooting a period comedy on the Goldwyn Studios lot) were almost certainly reading a glowing, just-published review of The Defiant Ones, which opened on 9.24.58.
This Is What Happens…
…when you star in one really good film, and then you refuse to even try to star in another one as good for the rest of your life. This. Is. What. Happens.
Diesel costarred in Rob Cohen‘s better-than-decent The Fast and the Furious (’01) and yes, he had a good supporting roles in Boiler Room and Saving Private Ryan. But Find Me Guilty was the peak, and that was 15 years ago.
Forget The Sad Stuff
HE is not grief-struck about anything. I’m just saying that the bottom visual is, from my perspective, a fairly accurate depiction of what reality feels like on a moment-to-moment basis. Not any specific dominant color…nothing too precise or cleanly compartmentalized but a fluid, scattered jumble of impressions and decisions, nine or ten colors at once, several balls in the air.
Of The Von Trier Films I’ve Seen…
I’m still persuaded that (a) Breaking The Waves has the greatest ending (and is among the greatest endings of any film, ever), (b) Dancer in the Dark is the most lyrical, rhapsodic and emotionally devastating (not to mention one of the finest musicals ever made), (c) Dogville is the most severe and socially condemning, (d) Melancholia is the least memorable, (e) the two Nymphomaniac films are the most didactic and the least startling, (f) Manderlay is underwhelming and (g) Antichrist and The House That Jack Built are tied for being the most despairing or dispiriting. I’m ashamed to admit that I’ve never seen Europa, The Boss Of It All, The Idiots and The Five Obstructions.
Original Sin
The other day Paul Schrader posted that photo of his 20-year-old self from the spring of ’67. Given the current mindset of the community of friends and collaborators that he runs with, Schrader felt obliged to disparage the rural-white-kid look that he had at the time.
Facebook: “This is [what] white living in Michigan can make you and there was nobody to say, ‘Man, you’re white'”
As in “man, you’re hopeless…that look on your face, that smug Columbia T-shirt….you need to get out in the world and rumble it up and suffer some hard knocks and see what’s what.” Which all young people need to do.
The under-implication wasn’t just that the Schrader of ’67 needed to learn and grow and mature — the implication was that his Michigan whitebread background was an expression of inherent blindness and perhaps worse. He was a flawed human being because of his skin shade, his family heritage.
Which, of course, is the current view everywhere — white folk are inherently rotten apples unless proved or re-educated otherwise. And so I just posted the following (which no Hollywood liberal-progressive would dare share in a workplace):
Lunatic Mask-Holocaust Analogy
Speaking as a bruised victim of attempted Twitter jackal Stalinist wokester cancellation, I should be the last person in the world to advocate for anyone’s cancellation for some political-cultural offense.
I would nonetheless be delighted to see Marjorie Taylor Greene get cancelled, censured, bitchslapped, tarred and feathered, etc. For the sheer emotional pleasure of it. Partly because of that rancid face-palm analogy between enforced mask-wearing and Jews being forced to wear yellow-star badges by Nazis, but also because I loathe the twangy downmarket sound of her voice.
Yes, I know she’s playing a game called “wind up the libtards.” If she was a cockroach, I’d squash her flat.
All Dorked Up
Pete Davidson during last night’s “Weekend Update”: “[Masks weren’t a refuge] because everyone can still recognize me from my eyes. When you see someone who looks like he just woke up and hasn’t slept in days, it’s me.”
With these words Davidson, whom I’ve regard as a great, nakedly honest, world-class actor-writer-comedian since catching his performance in The King of Staten Island, acknowledged that he’s not Cary Grant, and that he radiates a basic mood medication-meets-Staten Island strangeness. And so he was encouraged (told) to grow out or otherwise “normalize” his hair for Judd Apatow’s film.
But since King opened, Davidson has been rockin’ a tennis ball, despite the universally accepted maxim that guys with extreme facial features need to modify this with a little hair flow…a little follicle smoothitude.
Davidson seemed to be saying last night that he’ll soon be leaving Saturday Night Live. Presumably so he’ll be free to play supporting oddballs in DC and Marvel films. What he needs to do is star in another King of Staten Island-type feature, but without the stoner friends or the Staten Island backdrop. He needs to play the witty, sexy, unbalanced guy of the 2020s…to play “Pete Davidson” in a long series of real-deal, here-and-now, cultural-state-of-things comedies, romantic and otherwise. He needs to be a new strain of the Woody Allen thing.
PD: “AIDS is just like SNL. It’s still here, except no one has gotten excited about it since the ’90s.”
“Funny” Violence Is A No-Go
“Give Anders Thomas Jensen‘s Riders of Justice a try,” a friend suggested. “The new Mads Mikkelsen film. Very wacky, very funny, very violent. Even sentimental. Tonal shifts extremely well handled. Great cast of offbeat characters.”
“Wacky, funny and violent,” I replied. “Check.”
“You’ve seen it?” he asked.
“No,” I answered. “Just not a huge fan of wacky, violent and funny. Because that means it’s probably an arch attitude thing or an ironic genre commentary of some kind.
“Oh, yeah, one other thing — violence can’t be funny. In actual life violence is the most anti-humorous, anti-mirthful element on planet earth. It kills everything in sight, anything that isn’t malicious.
“The violence in George Miller’s The Road Warrior had a droll, cynical, acrobatic-circus-act quality. Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road retained that attitude. But generally I hate films that try to deliver mordant humor out of psycho killings, shootings, slicings, beatings and whatnot.
“The idea of a director ironically standing outside a film and trying to goad an audience into smirking or chuckling at violent blood-letting has always struck me as a cheap device, and since the early ‘90s every two-bit Quentin Tarantino wannabe director, it seems, has given it a go. Violence on it own terms, okay. But not the chuckling kind.”
Leapin’ Lizards!
The film is called Stu, and these are easily the most horrifying photos I’ve seen all day. Mark Wahlberg + tennisball buzz cut + at least 30 if not 35 pounds. (Real + fat suit.) Directed and written by Rosalind Ross, starring Wahlberg, Mel Gibson and Teresa Ruiz, produced by Wahlberg and Jordan Fass, and exec produced by Colleen Camp and Miky Lee.
