Month: June 2021

Amazon Wokester Suffocation

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Speaking as a daily columnist who’s tried the patience of HE readers like Zoey Rose (“I’m just tired of the constant pieces about woke culture and [how] the Khmer Rouge is out to get him and all his white friendos,” etc.), I’m genuinely worried about mentioning Amazon’s Inclusive Storytelling guidelines, a just-revealed blueprint or master plan for suffocating verve, creativity and crackling energy in the name of inclusion and sensitivity and smoothing everything out as much as possible.

HE to Zoey Rose: Is there any way I can report and comment about this horrifying state of affairs without pissing you off? Or will any mention of regimented corporate wokeness alienate your affections? I’d really like to touch on this, but the thought of trying your patience fills me with hesitation.

I’ll just cut to the chase and say that I’m completely in synch with Sasha Stone’s take, to wit: “It’s one thing to encourage inclusive hirings behind the camera, but once they start getting into storytelling and the formation of characters, content, and theme to promote a specific ideology then we are no longer looking at art. We are looking at full-blown wokester propaganda.” Put another way, it’s well-intended Big Brother-ism. Or, if you will, progressive virtue-signalling.

You think the Academy’s Representation and Inclusion Standards for Oscar Eligibility (announced on 9.8.20) were strict and suffocating and antiseptic? Amazon’s are much worse.

Stone: “Most audiences today, old and young, can spot a ‘woke’ message coming from a mile away. The more a film lectures them the less likely they are to want to watch it. Here are a few quotes from Amazon’s Inclusion Playbook and Inclusion Policy — now imagine being the people hired to monitor the films to make sure they meet all of these criteria. Better yet, imagine movies like The Exorcist, Blue Velvet, Chinatown, Do the Right Thing, Bull Durham, Casablanca or The Player being made under these rules:

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Which Directors Are Ascending / Descending?

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On last Friday’s Real Time with Bill Maher, Quentin Tarantino explained one of his reasons for thinking about retiring. (According to this scenario he’ll make one more film and then hang it up.) He said he’d looked into the arcs of a couple of dozen major directors, and that generally the best years of a director’s career are over after the first 20 to 25 years…if he/she lasts that long.

Example: Billy Wilder began directing with Double Indemnity in ’44. His peak period began 14 years later with Some Like It Hot, The Apartment and One, Two, Three. And then it was all downhill (20 years worth of almosts, not quites and flat-out misses) until Buddy Buddy (’81) finished him off.

It follows that many if not most of today’s better known brand names are on their way down. A select few will almost certainly never wither or lose their way (Martin Scorsese, Wes Anderson, Joel Coen, Alejandro G. Inarritu, Robert Eggers) but…I don’t know what I’m talking about. I just started this piece and I’m already exhausted.

15 months ago Complex.com posted “The Best Directors Right Now,” a reasonably comprehensive tally of helmers who seemed most likely to be shaping cinema (or what remains of it) over the next decade or so. I could settle into this for three or four hours and deliver my own assessments, but it would be easier to leave it up to the HE community.

I’ll go this far — I’ll assign one of four categories (ETERNALS, HOLDING FAST, ASCENDING and DESCENDING) to various directors, and then the readership can bat it around. I’m not even sure if I have time to cover the whole crowd. Maybe I’lll do it in installments.

Paul Thomas Anderson / DESCENDING. Reason: Hated Inherent Vice, felt mostly irritated by Phantom Thread, generally disliked The Master. There Will Be Blood, the last great one, was 13 and 1/2 years ago. Is Soggy Bottom a placeholder title? It sounds random and nebulous.

Joel and Ethan Coen / ETERNALS. Reason: Joel and Ethan may have temporarily parted ways over Joel’s decision to make a boomer-aged Macbeth, but knowing them as I (feel I) do it’s my conviction that they’re incapable of crafting anything less than hardcore film art, even when they’re making a throwaway like Hail, Ceasar!.

Park Chan-wook / REGRETTABLY HOLDING. Reason: The Handmaiden, Thirst, Oldboy…elite critics will never stop dropping to their knees over this guy. Then again he’s been at it for nearly 30 years, which means, by Tarantino’s assessment, he has nowhere to go but down.

Ryan Coogler / ASCENDING. Reason: Black Panther, Fruitvale Station, Creed…the sky’s the limit.

Alfonso Cuaron / HOLDING FAST. Roma, Gravity, Y Tu Mamá También….what’s next?

Alejandro G. Inarritu / HOLDING FAST. Reason: Presently shooting Limbo in Mexico/. A solid 20 years of audacious output beginning with Amores perros and on to 21 Grams, Babel, Biutiful, Birdman and The Revenant.

You know what? I’m really sorry I started this article because it’s wearing me down and crushing my soul. I feel like I’m digging ditches. I hate that I even began this damn thing. I’ll start again tomorrow morning and consider the situations of Guillermo del Toro, Claire Denis, Greta Gerwig, Barry Jenkins, Rian Johnson, Bong Joon-ho, Yorgos Lanthimos, Spike Lee, Christopher Nolan, Josh and Benny Safdie (i.e., “the crazy Safdies”), Steven Soderbergh, Quentin Tarantino, Denis Villeneuve, Jia Zhangke, Diao Yinan, Wes Anderson, David Fincher, Tim Burton, Clint Eastwood, Edgar Wright, Peter Jackson, Woody Allen, Quentin Tarantino, James Cameron, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, etc.

Multiples

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Twitter (i.e., Michael McKean) asks: What 5 movies are you confident you’ve seen at least 10 times?

HE sez: Paths of Glory, Dr. Strangelove, The Hospital, Mean Streets, Heat, North by Northwest, Psycho, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Notorious, Network, Out of the Past, The Guns of Navarone, Some Like It Hot, High Noon, Red River, Only Angels Have Wings, The Thing From Another World, Barry Lyndon, 2001: A Space Odyssey, 12 Angry Men, Double Indemnity, King Kong, Lawrence of Arabia, The Departed, Gunga Din.

What This Is

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Alfred Hitchcock films are about…where should I start? Anxiety, murder, threats, suspense, unsettling intrigues, unfairness, innocent characters caught in a tight spot, paranoia, creepy undercurrents, more suspense, knives, scarves, pistols, etc. But that’s not what the creator of this T-shirt has in mind. For what he/she is longing for is a sense of conservative order and a feeling of being safe from chaos. Hitchcock films are always about immaculate control — about Alfred’s ability to create and in fact dictate a world that always behaves according to his own cautiously conceived rules and refinements, not to mention his dry sense of humor. As Hitchcock once said, ““Some films are slices of life…mine are slices of cake.”

Plot That Was Never Shot

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O’Casey on Blowup mystery — posted on 8.1.07

According to Blowup costar Ronan O’Casey, who explained the full, partially-unfilmed plot of Michelangelo Antonioni‘s 1996 classic to Roger Ebert seven years ago, the inattention paid to the murder plot — on Antonioni’s part as well as that of David Hemming‘s photographer character — was a kind of accident. Antonioni was forced to go all mysterious and inconclusive, he says, because producer Carlo Ponti shut the film down before all the scenes were shot.


Ronan O’Casey’s only Blowup closeup

“The intended story was as follows: the young lover, armed with a pistol, was to precede Vanessa [Redgrave] and me to Maryon Park in London, conceal himself in the bushes and await our arrival,” O’Casey explains. “I pick up Vanessa in a nice new dark green Jaguar and we drive through London — giving Antonioni a chance to film that swinging, trendy, sixties city of the Beatles, Mary Quant, the Rolling Stones, and Carnaby Street. We stop and I buy Vanessa a man’s watch, which she wears throughout the rest of the film.

“We then saunter into the park, stopping now and then to kiss (lucky me). In the center of the park, Vanessa gives me a passionate embrace and prolonged kiss, and glances at the spot where her new lover is hiding. He shoots me (unlucky me), and the two leave the park intending to drive away. Their plans goes awry when he notices Hemmings with his camera and fears that Hemmings has photos of her. As it turns out, he has.

“None of this was ever shot. There were other scenes, such as those between Sarah Miles and Jeremy Glover [i.e, Vanessa’s character’s boyfriend who was also the trigger man in Maryon Park] that also went unrealized. Some of the scenes that were shot pertaining to the murder plot ended up in the film, but are completely puzzling to the audience. For example, in the film there is a scene with Vanessa and Hemmings at a cafe.” Wrong! The scene hes’ describing is between Hemmings and his bearded book editor.] A young man approaches, notices that she is with Hemmings, and runs away. That’s Glover. This makes for an odd, mysterious moment because the audience is completely ignorant of his identity.”
Ponti did Antonioni a favor, of course. If the all of this murder-plot, watch-buying stuff had been filmed and integrated into the film, Blowup would have been a much lesser work. That moment when Glover approaches the cafe and then walks away is perfect — absolutely perfect.

If You Think I’m Enjoying This…

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…putting 60% to 70% of Hollywood Elsewhere behind a Patreon paywall, that is, you’re greatly mistaken.

I would like nothing better than for Hollywood Elsewhere to just cruise along like it has for the last…God, it’ll be 17 years on 8.4.21. (And nearly 23 years if you count the October ’98 launch of my Mr. Showbiz column, which was lamentably titled HOLLYWOOD CONFIDENTIAL.) I really wish I could’ve kept going as a free site until 8.4.23 — 20 years, nice and tidy.

Alas, the monsters began arriving on Maple Street back in early ’18, and before I knew it “the terror” had begun to infiltrate everywhere.

HE began making modest amounts of dough almost immediately after launching in August ’04, and the income began to grow a bit more by ’07 or ’08. For about seven years (’10 to ’16, let’s say) HE award-season ads were pulling down decent six-figure revenues, and from this I was able to savor a modest lifestyle that included travel, buying the rumblehog, Italian lace-ups, Prague touch-ups and so on. Hardly a life of luxury, but, as Randy Newman might’ve put it, “it was all right.”

Then came the politically correct lizards and crocodiles and Komodo dragons, and before I knew it ad revenue had begun to shrink. Because “they” didn’t like me (or were afraid of seeming vaguely supportive) and so little by little revenue began to dwindle. Or as Lady Bird Johnson used to say, to “dwinnel.”

The ’20 and ’21 Oscar season (COVID) was the worst in HE history. There’s no sense kidding myself from where I sit right now. I have to either launch a paywall and do the best I can (or the best we can, I mean…myself and HE ad guy Sean Jacobs) with the ’21 and into ’22 Oscar season, or find some freelance writing gigs or, God forbid, send out resumes and find a (choke) “job.”

Over the last two or three years some truly wonderful Millennials and Zoomers in the publicity and marketing end of things (initially at film festivals and then within distributor offices) decided that I’d become a kind of pariah. Except I’m not. I’m the same columnist I’ve always been — the same mentality, the same passion, the same edge. What’s changed is that the culture has tipped into a kind of rigid woke mindset — say the right things and repeat the party dogma or you’ll be cancelled.

I am a humanist, a sane person, a father, a husband, a good writer, and a left-center moderate. And I haven’t written anything, said anything or done anything to warrant pariah status. I haven’t changed — the culture has. Things have gone CRAZY in some ways. All I’ve said and written has been the same old plain-spoken stuff. I have a voice, a way of writing, etc.

Do we ALL have to sound like Anne Thompson and Eric Kohn in order to survive these days? Isn’t there room for just one of us — i.e., myself — to have a blunter, franker opinion?

The shunning of certain ex-Commie screenwriters happened between the early to late ‘50s, but that era finally ended. “Scoundrel Time”, somebody called it. The woke totalitarian era will come to an end also. Sooner or later, all pages are turned, all chapters end and all things pass.

I. Have. Done. Nothing. To. Warrant. This. Kind. Of. Treatment. Even that recent thing that got me kicked out of Critics Choice…that wasn’t me! I wrote nothing. A friend did and I posted it for 45 minutes. And then I took it down. It was nothing. It was bullshit. And yet Jen Yamato and Chris Bumbray‘s fanged teeth were soaked in saliva.

Thank God for the sanity and friendship emanating from the good people I’ve been lucky to regard as friends for the last two or three decades, and press credential-wise from the Telluride and Cannes camps. From my persepective these are the last sane people on planet earth.

Wokesterism is a social-political plague — the new iteration of Maximilian Robespierre, the New McCarthyism, the New Victorians and surely a form of Bolshevik Totalitarian Orwellian insanity. Wokesters are suppressors and punishers — they’re against any concept of freedom that you or I or any semi-liberal person might recognize. I can’t wait for the zeitgeist to gradually swing in the other direction and for these reprehensible jackals to be on the run and/hiding in tall grass. And again, my core beliefs are liberal moderate and I come from a place of adventure and satori and clarity of the soul.

Wokesterism is fundamentally guided by love and compassion and humanitarian goals and a respect for all modes of ethnicity and sexuality and what-have-you, agreed. But in the name of righteous cleansing these people have become the totalitarian brain police that William S. Burroughs was so properly terrified of…they’re against freedom of speech…they’re about punitive measures and suppression and ruining good people’s lives…in a phrase they’re the new Khmer Rouge…FUCKING FANATICS.

Critic friend several weeks ago….

“The weird thing to me in all of this is the number of people — i.e., more than half of Jeff’s readers — who do not get it because they simply cannot see what is going on. They are such lockstep, go-along-with-the-crowd personalities that they think Jeff is talking about some fantasy in his head, rather than a genuine universe of real ideas that can no longer be expressed in the public square of mainstream media.

“Every time one of them says ‘Give it a rest, Jeff!’ I think: Here is someone who is truly, definingly clueless. The house is on fire, and they just think it’s a warm day.”

Nobody loves great, earth-shaking cinema more than myself.

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“Ideology” Is Everything, Everywhere

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God bless Quentin Tarantino for lamenting the state of Hollywood today in which “ideology” — wokester totalitarianism + Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style conformity — has damn near become Hollywood’s end-all and be-all.

“There has become a thing that’s gone on, especially in this last year, where ideology is more important than art,” QT told Bill Maher the night before last**. “Ideology trumps art. Ideology trumps individual effort. Ideology trumps good. Ideology trumps entertaining.”

Maher said “yup” and simplified the basics — “It’s either virtue-signalling or special-effects superhero event flicks.”

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Very Small Fraternity

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Four days ago Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone posted an essay titled “The State of the Race — It’s Time to Talk About Art vs. Propaganda.” Consider the last four paragraphs:

“Art cannot survive this moment if we don’t fight for it. We must fight as film critics, as journalists, as fans and, yes, as Oscar bloggers.

“Granted, I know most won’t risk it. So they pander, day in and day out on Twitter, saying exactly what they have to say and staying silent about what they know to be true but are too afraid to say. None of them will speak up — not the major writers on any website devoted to the Oscars. There are only three of us who will — Jeff Wells, David Poland and myself. We’ve been mostly sidelined by Film Twitter for being too outspoken and never apologizing – which is good and bad. Hey, you haven’t lived until you’ve had a gang of wild-eyed GenZers chasing you around and calling you a ‘white supremacist.’

“Could you ever have imagined that people would be afraid just to say what they really thought about something? That journalists and critics and filmmakers would be afraid? Granted, social media, like the printing press and the radio have wreaked havoc upon our species. Those advancements in communication played a part in creating modern chaos — revolutions, the Holocaust — but they also led to the greatest books ever written and FDR’s fireside chats and the Mercury players.

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Harlem Joy In Summer of ’69

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Friendo to HE: So have you watched Questlove‘s Summer of Soul (Searchlight, 7.2) yet?

HE to Friendo: This evening, I guess. Otherwise soon. Performances by major late ‘60s soul acts in Marcus Garvey Park, until the heading of the Harlem Cultural Festival. Cool — everyone loves a top-notch concert film. But what’s so wowser about it? Why all the heat and the awards during last January’s Sundance? Other than the fact that chummy indie guy David Dinerstein is one of the producers?

Friendo to HE: Mostly for the archival footage. The tagline is “this was the black Woodstock.” Same summer, same chapter in history. 300,000 people showed up in a span of six weekly free concerts, Sundays between 6.29 and 8.24.

HE to Friendo: Okay, but what’s the big deal? Other than the virtue signaling aspect?

Friendo to HE: Mostly it’s just about the great music and community aspect of the concerts, and how major media ignored this in favor of the Woodstock festival at Max Yasgur‘s farm. And how cans and cans of footage of the ’69 Harlem Cultural Festival was shot and then placed in a basement, where it sat for a half-century. And how we have a spiffed-up capturing of an historic music festival. Obviously it didn’t have the influence or impact of Woodstock. You can’t just rewrite history and say that these Harlem shows changed the course of history because…well, they didn’t. Nobody really knew about the ’69 Harlem Cultural Festival until recently.

HE to Friendo: Great music, community celebration, surging emotions…terrific. But the Woodstock analogy isn’t analogous.

Friendo to HE: It’s such a 2021 thing. Reframing history according to present-day terms, otherwise known as “presentism.”

The complete title, by the way, is Summer of Soul (…Or, When_ the Revolution Could Not Be Televised). Except hour-long specials of the concert were broadcast by WNEW Metromedia (Channel 5) on Saturday evenings throughout June, July and August — 10:30 to 11:30 pm.

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Everyone Gets “Blue” Now

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The opening paragraph in “50 Reasons to Love Joni Mitchell’s ‘Blue’,” a 50-years-later commemorative tribute piece in the 6.20 edition of the N.Y. Times, contains a strange backhand gesture. Written by Lindsay Zoladz, the passage reads as follows:

“Just before embarking on the pivotal intercontinental voyage that would inspire much of her peerless 1971 album “Blue”, Mitchell considered her grandmothers. One ‘was a frustrated poet and musician…she kicked the kitchen door off of the hinges on the farm,’ Mitchell recalled in a 2003 documentary. The other ‘wept for the last time in her life at 14 behind some barn because she wanted a piano and said, ‘Dry your eyes, you silly girl, you’ll never have a piano.’”

That unnamed 2003 documentary is titled Joni Mitchell: A Woman of Heart and Mind. It was directed by Susan Lacy (who also helmed Spielberg, Jane Fonda In Five Acts, Judy Garland: By Myself, Leonard Bernstein: Reaching for the Note, Rod Serling: Submitted for Your Approval and Very Ralph) and aired on PBS’ “American Masters” series.

Given Lacy’s sterling reputation and the commendable chops and perceptions in Joni Mitchell: A Woman of Heart and Mind, why would Zoladz or her Times editor refer to it as “a 2003 documentary” — a reference that indicates a lack of respect or even derision?

What’s Changed Over Last Four Years?

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“Best Action Flicks of the 21st Century” was posted on 5.9.17. What if anything has changed in the action realm in the four years since?

To most people “action film” means violent, whoop-ass shit with lots of leaping around, automatic rifle fire, squealing tires and non-stop adrenalin. But when it comes to deciding on the best action films, most viewers aren’t that demanding. They love their jizz-whiz and don’t care about the shadings and subtleties. But I am demanding, you see. To really love an action film I have to believe that (a) what I’m watching bears at least some relation to human behavior as most of us have come to know it and is therefore delivering a semi-believable, well-motivated thing, and (b) what I’m watching could actually happen in the real-deal world of physics (i.e., no idiotic swan dives off 50-story office buildings).

I don’t care, by the way, if the action content in a film takes up the first 10 minutes or the last half-hour or the whole damn running time. All I care about is whether or not I believe what I’m seeing, or…you know, whether I’m distracted or dazzled enough so that I don’t pay attention to logic or realism factors. Whatever works. As long as action defines character and vice versa.

If I’m enjoying an action flick it’s because I fucking believe it, and I never believe anything that doesn’t respect some grown-up concept of reality. Fantasy flicks can blow me for the most part. I want an action movie that will plant its feet, look me in the eye and tell the fucking truth.

Very few 21st Century action films live up to HE’s rules and standards, or even give a damn about doing so. The Fast and Furious franchise is notorious for spitting in the face of reality. Almost all superhero comic-book movies revel in the fact that their realm allows them to ignore logic and believability. Once in a great while and in a very blue moon, a first-rate action flick will come along that defies HE rules but gets away with it. One of these was Ang Lee‘s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (’00), but that’s a very rare occurence. On the other hand Crouching Tiger led to the stars of Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle flying around on wires, and that was an awful thing to behold.

Here are Hollywood Elsewhere’s choices for the 11 craftiest, best-made, most believable action films of the 21st Century, and in this order:

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