I may have been overly harsh yesterday in my dismissal of the 40-year-old Clash of the Titans. I’m walking it back a bit because the Harry Hamlin vs. Medusa sequence is half-tolerable. There’s no believing it, of course, but it’s spooky all the same. Otherwise the entire film is a tedious, old-hat, stop-motion joke.

In The Heights has stumbled and crashed at the box-office — not modestly but decisively.

Yesterday morning Forbes‘ Scott Mendelson lamented an estimate of “a frankly mediocre $5 million Friday” and “an over/under $15 million weekend launch.” Then Variety reported that Heights had earned even less — $4.9 million on Friday with an expected weekend tally of “just under $13 million.” Now Variety‘s Rebecca Rubin is reporting an $11 million weekend haul.

Variety‘s Rebecca Rubin: “The disappointing commercial reception for In the Heights is puzzling because critics embraced the joyous film, showering it with some of the best reviews of the pandemic era.”
HE interjection: Nobody cares what elitist critics think — they live on their own woke planet.

Rubin: “Moreover, Warner Bros. put substantial marketing heft behind the picture, and director Jon M. Chu and Lin-Manuel Miranda devoted a great deal of energy into promoting the movie, which compensated for the fact that its cast was comprised of mostly unknown stars and emerging actors.

“The film’s hybrid release on HBO Max likely affected its box office business. [And yet] recent Warner Bros. releases like Godzilla vs. Kong, Mortal Kombat and The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It still pulled in solid receipts despite being offered simultaneously on streaming.”

Make no mistake — In The Heights is a very well made, ace-level, stylistically assured neighborhood musical with an emotionally affecting current. It made me feel trapped, okay, but I resisted and toughed it out. The apparent message is that unsophisticated proles will only pay for theatrical if the film in question is scary, if it has wowser visual effects or if it’s aimed at kids and families. Teens on a Saturday night or children on Saturday and Sunday afternoons.

Friendo: “The original overestimates of how well In the Heights would do are, of course, the whole problem. (‘Projecting $20 million or higher!”) And that was definitely a case of seeing the movie through woke-colored glasses. ‘Look, it’s a Latinx musical! Every brown person in America will go! The same legions of cool brown people who are going to vote for Kamala Harris for president! What a wonderful progressive world!’

“Uh, no, you fucking idiots.”

As much as I admire who Kamala Harris is and the values she’s stood by (and for), I suddenly realized this morning that she won’t win the ’24 election if Biden doesn’t run (will he run for a second term?) and if she beats out all competitors. Don’t ask me how I know — I just do. It’s an instinctual thing — an insight I don’t welcome but can’t ignore.

Her theoretical Republican opponent (God help the country if Trump actually runs again) would tar and feather, slice and dice…it would be awful. Plus she doesn’t have a commanding or musical speaking voice — she has little if any Obama in her. And she’s quite short — 5’2″.

I would will vote for her in a New York minute — I’d love to see a smart, tough woman in the Oval Office. But my vote means nothing in this context.

Now that In The Heights has opened and failed to make box-office history and now that between half and two-thirds of the moviegoing public has written it off or at least decided to defy Eric Kohn and watch it on HBO Max…now that it’s regarded as a ruptured duck and people have left it behind, does anyone who saw it yesterday or today agree with the following?

One, that it’s a first-rate, well-made, go-for-the-gusto, real-deal musical, shot and performed and edited to the professional utmost but two, it’s also a film that strangely makes you feel a bit trapped and suffocated…a film that you’d like to escape from but you can’t because you shouldn’t because you paid to see it and you might as well tough it out. Does anyone feel that way?

I’m serious about the quality of John Chu‘s film — Heights is an absolutely first-rate production in every department.

#InTheHeights fans, don’t let that bad box office buzz bring you down. The film’s financial story is FAR from over, and no matter what, nothing can diminish its impact or the immense joy it has brought to *so* many audiences around the world. Keep your head up 💃🏼 pic.twitter.com/ewXt8v4Q57

— Zach Gilbert (@zachbgilbert) June 12, 2021

I know it’s about basically a revenge story, or about planning payback. Freddy Gale (Jack Nicholson) is distraught over his daughter’s death in a five-year-old car accident. When he finds out that the guy who ran his daughter down (David Morse) is about to be released from prison, he decides “I’m gonna make this guy suffer, or maybe even die…I’ll play it by ear.”

It opened 25 and 1/2 years ago, and I swear to God I don’t remember a single scene, a single line of dialogue, a single shot, the ending…none of it. Is it me or the film?

“…is that what you say doesn’t have to make sense, or jibe with the facts, or ever be challenged lest the challenge itself be conflated with racism. Seeing clearly is necessary for actually fixing problems, and clearlyt racism is simply no longer everywhere. It’s not in my home, and it probably isn’t in yours. We date human events as A.D. and B.C. but he need a third marker for Millennials and GenZ…B.Y., or Before You.” [Starting at 4:58 mark]

Forbes‘ Scott Mendelson is calling In The Heights “the first real heartbreaker of the summer.”

And that statement was based upon estimates of “a frankly mediocre $5 million Friday” and “an over/under $15 million weekend launch.” Except Variety is now reporting that Heights earned a piddly $4.9 million on Friday with an expected weekend tally of “just under $13 million“…I’m sorry but there’s a word for this, and the word is “bust.”

Compare this to woke media hypesters projecting at least $20 million and, per Mendelson, “even a $25-$35 million launch on par with Crazy Rich Asians.”

Mendelson’s dagger in the chest: “Film Twitter convinced themselves that In the Heights was The Force Awakens, but general audiences viewed it as Terminator: Dark Fate.

“In the Heights sold itself as a celebration of Hispanic-American culture but had little else to offer (no stars, no high concept, no IP, etc.) to those who those who didn’t view such a noble sentiment as automatically ‘worth seeing in theaters.'”

Are you reading this, Eric Kohn and Anne Thompson?

Did the ticket-buying public consider my 6.8 review and a certain sentence in particular and decide to blow it off or at least wait and see? The sentence in question read, “No question about it — In The Heights is one of the best films I’ve ever felt vaguely suffocated by.”

Mendelson: “Barring incredible legs (which is still possible), the $55 million In the Heights could be another example of audiences acting in opposition to online media narratives.” Otherwise known as the “whatever Eric Kohn is urging us to do, we’re doing the opposite” syndrome.

Mendelson: “We say we want Widows, but audiences show up for Venom, Halloween and The Grinch. Film Twitter championed Birds of Prey, but audiences showed up for Joker. Film Twitter decried Peter Farrelly’s Green Book and Bryan Singer’s Bohemian Rhapsody, while both films from ‘problematic’ directors, won multiple Oscars and grossed $322 million (the biggest-grossing Best Picture winner in a decade) and $905 million (the biggest-grossing straight drama ever) respectively.

“Meanwhile, during that 2019 Oscar season, Kevin Hart and Bryan Cranston’s ‘problematic’ The Upside earned $108 million domestic from a $20 million debut. Conversely, alt-right trolls didn’t stop Captain Marvel from topping $1.128 billion, a lesson that came too late for Disney’s Star Wars trilogy.

In the matter of the stunning, inexplicable suicide of Anthony Bourdain, it has long been my belief…okay, my strong suspicion that Bourdain was tragically triggered by the behavior of his turbulent girlfriend, Asia Argento.

I’m sorry but there was just too much sensual and philosophical and person-to-person pleasure in Bourdain’s life…he was seemingly all but smothered by the stuff, perhaps not by the reality but certainly the appearance of one orgasmic Zen delight after another…not to mention the charge of travelling from one place to another on a near-constant basis.

Of all the people who’ve ever offed themselves, Bourdain has to be the least likely of all time. And hanging himself just doesn’t make sense without some kind of emotional trigger, without some kind of brief drop into despair…some kind of cause-and-effect.

It is my belief that in the parallel realm of the last scene in Vertigo, Asia Argento was Scotty Ferguson and Anthony Bourdain was Judy Barton.

How do I mean that? I mean that Asia unwittingly (or carelessly) pushed Anthony over the cliff as surely as that shadowed nun in Vertigo scared Judy Barton into fearfully leaping out of that San Juan Batista bell tower.

Did Scotty kill Judy? No, he did not. She leapt out of her own sense of panic, clearly of her own accord — but Scotty was damn sure part of the reason why her life ended so suddenly and tragically.

And you’d better believe that without Asia Argento in his life, Anthony Bourdain might well be with us today.

To what extent does Roadrunner, Morgan Neville‘s just-premiered doc about Bourdain’s life, get into the whole Asia Argento mishegoss, or at least fiddle around with the possibility that Argento’s influence served as a fatal trigger in Bourdain’s psyche?

According to early Roadrunner reviews as well as a heads-up from a friendo, Neville “barely” goes there. Which sounds to me like he glances at the Argento factor without getting into it. He takes a snapshot or two and then moves on.

Here are some notes and thoughts I assembled this morning…partly from past HE posts, partly not:

So Roadrunner doesn’t get into the whole Asia Argento flagrant-infidelity-in-Rome thing? Various reports stated that she was fucking Hugo Clement, a younger journalist, just before Bourdain hung himself. It seemed to many of us that this may have tipped the secretly depressed Bourdain into nihilist despair and self-destruction. Maybe.

And the film more or less ignores the whole paying-off-Jimmy-Bennett thing?

And therefore the film barely ponders the distinct possibility that Bourdain’s suicide was significantly influenced by Argento’s messy (i.e., human) appetites and messy (i.e., human) life?

All along I’ve been naturally assuming that when the former Bruce Jenner transitioned into being Caitlyn Jenner, that she had simply grown her hair out to a traditional female length. Right?

I’m sorry but when Jimmy Kimmel used the term “Caitlyn Jenner wig” I was thrown. I realize that what Kimmel said could be construed as transphobic but…

At 5:25 Kimmel mentions Caitlyn’s Thursday visit on The View, during which the California gubernatorial candidate refused to admit that ex-president Donald Trump had lost the 2020 election. Trump did “some good things,” Jenner claimed, adding that she wants to be a “disrupter” in the state capitol like Trump was.

Good fucking God Almighty.

Kimmel’s reply: “Are we sure that isn’t Donald Trump in a Caitlyn Jenner wig?” Also: “She’s just trying to get attention. Caitlyn Jenner has a better chance of being the next Batman than she does governor of California. She knows little to nothing about anything, really.”

This is a couple of days old, but John Whorter and Megyn Kelly are standing behind English teacher Dana Stangel-Plowe after quitting her job at Dwight Englewood School in Englewood, New Jersey because of a strict enforcement of critical race theory.

Stangel-Plowe is claiming critical race theory lessons make white students feel like ‘oppressors’ In a resignation letter published by the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism, sh claimed that “the school’s ideology requires students to see themselves not as individuals, but as representatives of a group, forcing them to adopt the status of privilege or victimhood.

“As a result, students arrive in my classroom accepting this theory as fact: People born with less melanin in their skin are oppressors, and people born with more melanin in their skin are oppressed.”

What a colossal, shattering embarassment for Jeffrey Toobin. Author, columnist, New Yorker contributor, CNN’s top legal analyst since ’02. And of course, a notorious monkey spanker. 28 years as a distinguished, top-tier journalist, trashed in a matter of seconds.

It would appear, however, that Toobin has begun his public rehab process with CNN’s approval. Being interviewed by CNN’s Alisyn Camerota on “CNN Newsroom” is the first salvo.

Toobin has obviously been punished, and will continue to suffer for months if not years to come. Am I allowed to say that not every crime deserves the death penalty? I am? Okay, good — not every crime deserves the death penalty.

It’s humiliating enough for a woman to be conducting Toobin’s first interview after he was caught masturbating on a work zoom, but to make her, *not him*, detail the ordeal for an audience is disgraceful. pic.twitter.com/DhdaYJtuIa

— Natalie Johnson (@nataliejohnsonn) June 11, 2021

It would appear that Antoine Fuqua‘s Infinite (6.10) stinks. Certainly to go by David Rooney‘s Hollywood Reporter review.

Opening line: “It’s an intriguing idea in theory to hitch the reincarnation beliefs of Eastern religions to a futuristic scenario of gifted souls with perfect recall of their past lives, split into good and evil factions at war over humanity’s survival”…okay, stop right there.

Any scenario that insists on clear-cut delineations between good and evil is horseshit from the get-go. For the most part there are few absolute moral black or white extremes in any realm — except for the pure rancid evil of Donald Trump and the fact-denying wackazoids who would trash American Democracy for an authoritarian whitebread dictatorship defined by decades-old cultural values. Almost everything on the face of the planet is defined by varying shades of gray.

Rooney: “But Infinite is a soulless grind. Juiced up with a succession of CG-enhanced accelerated chases and fight action interspersed with numbing bursts of high-concept geek speak, Antoine Fuqua’s sci-fi thriller isn’t helped by a lead performance from Mark Wahlberg at his most inexpressive.

“His character is basically a charisma void with a permanently furrowed brow suggesting brain strain. It’s no surprise Paramount shunted this thrice-delayed theatrical release to its streaming platform.”