Rick Rubin to Paul McCartney: “When could you look back and realize [that] what we did back then was really special?”

If I was interviewing McCartney I would never ask a question as moronic and simple-dick as that…ever. Creative people never look back and say “wow, I was really rumbling with high-test gas when I did this or that”…never! You never stand back and give yourself a review…ever. If you’re somehow possessed of something special and exceptional and God-sent, you just go with it. You go with it and hope that it takes you someplace worthy and nutritious. And that’s it. Nothing more or less than that.

I think we’ve all understood for the last 10 to 15 years and certainly since the pandemic hit that the lore and religiosity of film…the faith and investment and occasional wonder of movies as it used to exist in the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s and even the early aughts is over…a few welcome exceptions aside, the beating heart of movies as it used to be is in permanent cardiac arrest…double kaput and triple fucking finito.

But just to be sure that we all understand this without the slightest trace of ambiguity, former Paramount and 20th Century Fox honcho Barry Diller has repeated the death mantra in so many words:

“The movie business is over,” Diller said in an exclusive interview with NPR’s David Goura during the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference. “The movie business as before is finished and will never come back.”

Diller’s remarks sounds better if you add the “f” word so here they are again, augmented: “The movie business that we used to know is fucking over. It’s fucking finished and will never fucking come back.”

“There used to be a whole run-up,” Diller said, remembering how much time, energy and money studios invested in distribution and publicity campaigns. The goal, he said, was to generate sustained excitement and enthusiasm for new movies. “That’s finished,” he said. “I used to be in the movie business where you made something really because you cared about it,” he said, noting that popular reception mattered more than anything else.

Best Diller quote: “These streaming services have been making something that they call ‘movies.’ They ain’t movies. They are some weird algorithmic process that has created things that last 100 minutes or so.” The definition of “movie,” he said, “is in such transition that it doesn’t mean anything right now.”

The Stillwater praise out of Cannes is fairly strong but I’m a bit leery. Something feels wrong or the wrong people are cheering it on. Can’t put my finger on it, but for the time being I’m just gonna wait. Update: The more reviews I read, the more promising Stillwater sounds.

Indiewire‘s David Ehrlich: “A strained but strangely affecting turducken of a movie that bakes a dad-on-a-mission thriller together with a heartwarming fish-out-of-water story and then a brutal crime drama before glazing the whole thing with a marvelously goateed Matt Damon, Tom McCarthy’s Stillwater is the kind of original Hollywood production that would make you say “they don’t make them like that anymore” if only they had ever made them quite this way in the first place…equal parts Taken, Paddington and Prisoners, one after the other.”

Ultrasound images of unborn babies developing in their mothers’ warm amniotic fluid were fairly primitive in the late ‘80s. Things are much more advanced today. I would use the word “startling.” As would Rene Magritte if he was among us.

Richard Donner‘s Radio Flyer was mostly dismissed when it opened 29 and 2/3 years ago (2.21.92). People of taste were appalled. And yet this dreadful little film, which lost a ton of money (made for $35M, earned a lousy $4.75 million) has a current RT audience score of 73% — three out of four Joe Popcorn types approve!

I’m presuming that no one in the HE commentariat will defend Radio Flyer, but maybe I’m wrong. Obviously something about it appealed to people during the final year of the George H.W. Bush administration, but what exactly? The initial word was that it was a Spielberg thing, but of course it wasn’t.

HE question: What kind of diseased, depraved mother (i.e., Lorraine Bracco‘s Mary) marries an abusive animal (Adam Baldwin‘s unseen “King”) and turns a blind eye to abuse of her own sons?

From Owen Gleiberman‘s EW review (dated 2.28.92): “It’s 1969, and Bobby (Joseph Mazzello) and Mike (Elijah Wood), two brothers with matching doleful expressions, have just traveled cross-country with their newly divorced mom (Lorraine Bracco). The three arrive in a beautiful, wide-open section of Northern California, where their cozy suburban street is nestled within a beckoning expanse of sun-dappled hills.

“As the boys roam their pastoral surroundings, each new encounter takes on the aura of a storybook adventure. They open the door to the toolshed, and a ‘monster’ pokes forth its bald, reptilian head; actually, it’s just the harmless old turtle who lives there. There are bullies to frighten them (and to frighten off with their trusty German shepherd). And there are wishful reveries inspired by their red Radio Flyer wagon — dreams of rolling off that big hill near the airport and flying, really flying, the way a boy named Fisher did years ago, when (according to legend) he powered his bicycle right up into the air.

“The music gushes, the late-afternoon sunlight glints, and one half expects to look up and see E.T. himself grinning from the nearest bush. Yet even as Radio Flyer seems a tribute to the magic of childhood, an undertow of darkness develops. The boys’ mother has quickly remarried; her husband (Adam Baldwin), a sadistic, beer-swilling roughneck, directs his rage toward quiet, defenseless little Bobby. We learn that he’s been beating the child, giving him huge brown welts all over his back. Bobby, though, is reluctant to tell his mother, and he makes Mike swear to keep his secret.

“For the entire movie, the stepfather’s face remains hidden in shadow. He appears, instead, as a malevolent specter: a hand reaching into the fridge for yet another six-pack, a voice barking out caustic threats. Radio Flyer wants to show us how a man this vicious could seem, in Bobby’s eyes, a kind of abstraction, less a human being than a monstrous force. At the same time, the movie suggests that children escape intolerable situations by withdrawing into a cocoon of streamlined fantasy.

“Donner keeps his camera at a serene distance, so that we seem to be eavesdropping on the two boys. Elijah Wood, in particular, holds the screen — he has a beautifully inquisitive face, with eyes like liquid marbles. Despite flashes of sensitivity, though, the movie is so rigid and programmatic about contrasting its light and dark sides — the horror and the dream-retreat — that it seems fundamentally schizoid.