There’s something to be said for Mervyn LeRoy‘s direction of Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (’44) — steady, workmanlike, no surprises but no potholes either. LeRoy always stayed within his safety zone, but he was a good, reliable “house” director. His best film was They Won’t Forget (’37), a Warner Bros. courtroom drama based on the real-life lynching of Leo Frank in 1915.

Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo was strictly a WWII morale-builder but a better-than-decent one, and a first-rate action film during the final third. You can totally lean on the solid, straightforward performances from Van Johnson (“I lost my ship!”), Robert Walker, Spencer Tracy, Phyllis Thaxter, Robert Mitchum.

I was especially taken by the extra-handsome, perfectly lighted cinematography by Robert Surtees (The Bad and the Beautiful, Ben Hur) and Harold Rosson (The Wizard of Oz, Singin’ In the Rain), and the fleet, finely timed editing by Frank Sullivan. Plus I’d never seen it in HD.

I began watching last night with the idea of being put to sleep. I fast-forwarded through the first half (training, relationships, flyboy camaraderie) but wound up watching the rest. This happens occasionally.

Don Was‘s I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times (LIVE, ’95) remains the best Brian Wilson documentary ever made. Brent Wilson and Jason Fine‘s Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road, which recently played the Tribeca Film Festival and which I saw last night, is okay for what it is but nowhere near as good.

It’s basically footage of Wilson and Fine, a Rolling Stone editor and longtime friend of the 78 year-old musical genius and Beach Boy maestro, driving around Los Angeles and visiting locations from Brian’s past. And what it boils down to is an intimate portrait of a good, gentle soul, but one who is clearly a bit twitchy and beset by unruly currents.

Honestly? Long Promised Road felt a bit exploitive. It made me feel awkward, uncomfortable. I felt sorry for Brian. He’s a good soul but I felt as if he was being subjected to a fair amount of discomfort in speaking to Fine. There was a medium close-up of Brian performing that reminded me that he reads his own lyrics off a teleprompter. It’s good that he gets out and performs, but there’s something creepy about the film. I felt badly for him.

Friendo: “I met Wilson in 1995, and he could barely carry on a conversation — and that’s true in the film as well. And obviously, he can’t sing anymore. But I don’t find any of that creepy. That’s just who Brian Wilson is, and my honest feeling is: It’s good that he survived, and has a life. He hasn’t written a memorable song in decades, but ‘Smile’ — the 2004 version — is one of my all-time favorite records. I think even now, he radiates the energy of a good soul.

HE to Friendo: “Yes, a good soul. A good heart. I’m glad he’s still plugging away. But the doc still felt a bit cruel. Fine is a decent guy but the very act of training a camera lens on poor Brian flirts with heartless exploitation — I was saying to myself, ‘Jesus, they should leave the poor guy alone.’ A gentle soul but quite twitchy. Kid gloves.”

World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy is polling critics on the five best films of 2021.

HE’s favorite film of the year thus far, hands down, is Thomas Anders Jensen’s Riders of Justice: A truly original stand-out with a deliciously skewed, deadpan sense of humor. On 5.21 I insisted that violence wasn’t funny or certainly couldn’t be sold as such, and I was dead wrong. Riders’ dry, low-key comic tone is really something. I wasn’t expecting anything as original feeling as this. It’s quite the discovery. I’m actually intending to watch it again this weekend.

My second favorite is Jasmila Zbanić‘s Quo Vadis, Aida?, which played at last year’s Venice and Toronto festivals before opening stateside on 3.15.21. It’s a blistering, horrifying, you-are-there account of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre — 8000 Bosnian men and boys murdered in cold blood by Serbian troops under the command of Ratko Mladic. For me it ranks alongside other Bosnian brutality-of-war dramas like In The Land of Blood and Honey, Welcome to Sarajevo and No Man’s Land. Not a suspense piece or a classic war drama but a mother’s perspective saga that asks “who if anyone will survive the coming massacre?” You can feel it coming from around the corner. Devastating.

Third is Simon Stone‘s The Dig (Netflix, 1.15.21). I called this tale of the famous Sutton Hoo dig of 1939, which uncovered a sixth-century Anglo Saxon burial site, generally pleasing as far as this kind of modest and unassuming British period drama goes. I loved Ralph Fiennes‘ performance as real-life archeological excavator Basil Brown — his gutty working-class accent is note perfect, but the performance is in his eyes…at various times determined, defiant, sad, compassionate. And Carey Mulligan‘s Edith Pretty…talk about a performance at once strong, heartbreaking (as in sadly resigned) and resilient. I admired it despite an idiotic subplot about a married Lily James wanting to schtup the daylights out of a young, good-looking fellow, Rory (Johnny Flynn), whom she meets on the dig.

HE’s #4 is Phillip Noyce‘s Above Suspicion. On 4.1 I called it a jug of classic, grade-A moonshine — a brilliant, tautly paced, perfectly written action thriller (i.e., rednecks, drug deals, criminals, lawmen, murder, car chases, bank robberies) that plays like an emotional tragedy, and is boosted by an ace-level performance from Emilia Clarke. Most people would define ‘redneck film’ as escapist trash in the Burt Reynolds mode, but there have been a small handful that have portrayed rural boondock types and their tough situations in ways that are top-tier and real-deal. My favorites in this realm are John Boorman‘s Deliverance, Billy Bob Thornton‘s Sling Blade, and Lamont Johnson‘s The Last American Hero. Noyce’s entry is the absolute, dollars-to-donuts equal of these, or at least a close relation with a similar straight-cards, no-bullshit attitude. And it revives the strategy of William Holden‘s narration of Sunset Boulevard.

My fifth favorite is, despite its financial failure, Jon Chu and Lin-Manuel Miranda‘s In The Heights. On 6.8 I called it “good, grade-A stuff — engaging, open-hearted, snappy, well-composed, catchy tunes, appealing performances, razor-sharp cutting. One character-driven vignette after another. Dreams, hopes, identity, hip-hop, neighborhood vibes, community, self-respect…all of it earnestly feel-good. There’s no fault in any of it except for the minor fact that I was quietly groaning. Okay, not “groaning” but half-in and half-out. Admiring but disengaged. There isn’t a single moment in which I didn’t appreciate the effort, the professionalism, the heart factor, Alice Brooks‘ vibrant cinematography…all of it is fine and commendable, and I must have checked the time code 10 or 12 times, minimum.”

Michael Cohen: “[Trump is] in trouble, Allen Weisselberg’s in trouble, Weisselberg’s kids, Matt Calamari, Rudy Giuliani, they’re all in trouble. Why? Because there’s documentary evidence that’s in their [prosecutors’] possession.”

“[And they] don’t really need Weisselberg or Calamari, [because] one of them will flip to save themselves. And once you get Calamari you don’t need Weisselberg, [and] when you get Weisselberg you don’t need Calamari. But the truth is, they don’t need either of them because they have the documents to prove exactly the illegalities done by Trump.”

Kimmel: “Have you ever seen Donald Trump cry?”
Cohen: “No, but I’ve seen him get out of the shower with his hair soaking wet”….yaaahhh!

Yesterday I noted how IndieWire‘s Zack Sharf was so terrified of using the term “Black western” that he wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole in his riff about a new trailer for The Harder They Fall. Instead he went with Netflix’s term — a “new school Western.”

The folks at Essence were less intimidated. Their headline for Brande Victorian’s 6.24 article reads as follows: “The First Trailer For The Star-Studded Black Western The Harder They Fall Is Here.” The term “Black Western” is also used in the lede paragraph. Holy shit!

Imagine being Jamie Lee Curtis‘ “Laurie Strode”, the Halloween scream queen from the Jimmy Carter era. Imagine having no interests, longings or intrigues in life other than one thing…recovering from the trauma of having been nearly murdered by psycho-killer Michael Myers in ’78, back in her late teens (actually 22 by JLC’s calendar), and then deciding, 40 years later in her early 60s, “this Michael Myers shit ends now!…I won’t stand for it any longer!…even if the guy who’s been playing him for the last 40-odd years, Nick Castle, is 73 years old!”

Except she will stand for it because Halloween Kills isn’t the end…the finale is slated to arrive in mid October ’22 when Halloween Ends opens in theatres. Except if you know anything about the slithering, salivating paycheck whores behind this franchise, Michael Meyers will never really die.

John Carpenter on the original Halloween: “True crass exploitation. I decided to make a film I would love to have seen as a kid, full of cheap tricks like a haunted house at a fair where you walk down the corridor and things jump out at you.”

That’s actually a dodge, John. The Halloween movies are about jump-boo, okay, but the undercurrent has always been about one thing and one thing only — killing sluts for having sex while saving the chaste virginal heroines (Curtis’s Strode) so they’ll live another day….because sluts need to scream and howl and die horribly. Same difference with the Friday the 13th franchise. I first wrote about the slut-killing meme in my Films in Review review of Halloween, 42 and 1/2 years ago. You’d think this would have subsided or evolved over the decades.

From a 10.22.18 Refinery29 piece by Elena Nicolaou: “The horror genre is saddled with blatant sexism, the focus of which is found in the trope of the Final Girl — and in her opposite. In classic slasher movies, the Final Girl emerges from an encounter with great evil, bloody but unbroken. Her other female friends are usually not so lucky, typically meeting their demise after having sex. As the ‘Sex By Death’ trope goes, if a woman has sex in a horror movie, she’s doomed to die.”