I just saw M. Night Shyamalan’s Old. It delivers a hooky premise (wealthy tourists are unable to leave a cliffside cove in which the laws of time and biology are bizarrely suspended) but without much rhyme or consistency.

It’s interesting and trippy and semi-spooky — I was certainly never bored — but there are all kinds of loose ends and head-scratchy developments that don’t line up or unify. And yet despite the haphazard plotting it feels oddly intriguing.

In other words, the fact that the low-key horror elements don’t make sense or build into a cohesive whole strangely works in Old‘s favor. It feels like a first draft of an experimental creeper, written by someone new to the game who doesn’t care about following the usual rules. I was saying to myself “this is kinda sloppy but at least it’s different, and I’ve no idea where it’s going.”

And then during the final 15 minutes Old suddenly loses its nerve and turns logical — it tries to impose order by making sense of things (villains, conspiracy, arrival of law), and in so doing it betrays and destroys itself. A complete collapse.

As I left the theatre a guy booed. But without the imposition of logic and rationality during the finale, I’m betting that the booing guy would have been more accepting and perhaps even won over.

But of course rural bumblefucks don’t have common sense. Because they’re stupid bumblefucks who live in their own little vacuum-sealed Trumpian or Marjorie Taylor Greene echo chambers.

I’ve never felt that the term “re-shoots” is a fair one, as it suggests that a film in question hasn’t worked out in editing, and that it’s been re-thought, re-written and re-shot because what was shot before wasn’t good enough. That’s not what re-shoots typically means. Re-shoots mostly means that new material been shot. Perhaps a scene or two will be re-shot, and that’s rare. And so what if that happens? Every writer working on anything of any size or scope always rewrites, re-thinks, re-shuffles and re-shapes. Filmmakers also, and it’s all to the good.

Bill McCuddy to HE (written last week): “I love you. You know that. I’ve been a fan for 20 odd years, but the column seems to be more for you than us. If this is The Sopranos, I want to be Tony, not Dr. Melfi. I know what I’m about to suggest involves more work, but the stories that I pay to see have to be mouth-watering. So far I’m dry coughing.”

HE to Friendo: “‘Mouth watering’? What am I, a hamburger chef? A gelato guy with a push cart? A trained seal? I bleed every day onto the keyboard and you’re saying ‘mmmm, I want more flavor, more gusto, better jokes, more pepperoni on the pizza.’ Jesus!”

McCuddy to HE: “The stuff we want to pay for has to be sexier and stickier, in my opinion. Air Mail is kind of getting it right but even they are struggling. I want you to succeed. Will keep you posted.

“P.S. For the record I’m fascinated with the evolution of the space and your battle with the Stalinist wokesters so, while I may in the minority, I’m good there. (Why not make all of THAT POLITCAL-CULTURAL SHIT the subscriber stuff?) And no, I’m not pissed that I wasn’t one of the insiders you gave a free pass to.”

HE to McCuddy: “Fine. Whatever. Thanks for the notes.”

McCuddy to HE: “Really or just being nice? Okay, I’ll take it either way.”

HE to Friendo: “What do you think I am, a news bureau here? A cable station with three anchors, four news writers, three tech guys, five producers and a couple of van drivers on call? I’m not Saturday Night Live, for Chrissake. It’s just me and the movies and whatever streams or opens and whatever happens on a real-deal basis…whatever comes to mind or pours out. I know you’re right, and that I have to generate more flavor, tastier ice cream, a dynamic twice-weekly podcast, steaks with more sizzle and drugs with more potency…I have to be a chef, a high-end drug dealer, a dramatist, a magician, an Uber driver, a comedian on the level of Dave Chapelle, a juggler, circus acrobat…all of that and more, and it still won’t be enough.

“Everything that happens or erupts goes into the column…everything including my entire 40 year history in this racket, my strange inability to see Nicolas Cage‘s Pig, not going to Cannes but going to the forthcoming Telluride Film Festival, my loathing of the Sundance and Toronto agendas, lost keys, trips to Prague and Zurich and Mexico, the souls of cats and kittens and pit bulls, lost wallets in the dumpster, side-eyes from fans of atrocious hip-hop at West Hollywood gas stations, lost iPhones, recollections of this and that…anything I can pull out of my head…fuck!

“Do you know of another one-man-band + long-standing bigmouth who generates even a third as much content? I’m not blah-blahing here…every day I’m digging fucking ditches.

“I’ve been grinding this shit out 24/7/365 since ’06 — 15 years straight. If you count the HE launch in August ’04 I’ve been doing it for 17 years. And 23 years if you count the launch of Mr. Showbiz and the other columns, beginning in October ’98. Every drop of blood I could squeeze out along the way, I’ve squeezed out. Every damn day and twice on Sundays, and it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. And it’s not enough for Bill McCuddy.”

McCuddy to HE: “THAT’S NOT WHAT I’M SAYING. I’m saying to build a subscriber base you gotta reconfigure some of what you’re saying to make it more irresistible. It’s MARKETING, not changing. And what do mean ‘not enough for me”(?) I come at least three times a day!”

On 12.10.94 the Los Angeles Film Critics Association voted to give their Best Film Score trophy to Howard Shore‘s compositions for Tim Burton‘s Ed Wood. It may have been the first time that LAFCA has given such an award to an ironically composed score — one that was knowingly, wink-winkingly and brilliantly “bad”. Except that it wasn’t, of course. A better description might be that Shore was going for satirically banal.

Shore’s music was actually wonderful (and it still is), but you needed to listen to it with the right kind of ears. You had to understand that Shore had attempted to write music that might have been composed for an actual grade-Z Ed Wood film from the ’50s — cheesy-sounding but “in quotes.” Shore was more or less saying between the stanzas “do you get it?…the movie is kidding and so is the music.” There’s absolutely no question about Shore’s intent.

The LAFCA awards were handed out at the Bel Age Hotel on Saturday, 1.21.95, and longtime LAFCA member and L.A. Reader film critic Andy Klein presented the Shore award.

In his introductory remarks, or so the legend goes, Klein riffed on Shore’s music in a way that I’ve just attempted, calling it brilliantly insincere, satirically referenced, playfully composed, etc.

And yet to everyone’s surprise Shore was vaguely miffed at Klein’s remarks, or so I read afterwards. I don’t have a tape or a transcript of his acceptance speech, but I heard through the grapevine that Shore said something along the lines of “I don’t know what Andy Klein is on about but I didn’t write a score that was meant to be chuckled at.”

I asked Klein this morning if he could fill in the gaps. “The gist of what I said was that Shore managed to have it both ways — walking the line between being of the genre and being about the genre, as in campy,” Klein replied. “It was a compliment, suggesting he managed to do both. He took offense at the latter part, which struck me as weird.”

Question for HE commentariat: What other film scores could be fairly characterized as having been written ironically or with a general lack of sincerity? You could claim that almost any score for a comedy or a satirical genre spoof (like the score to The Spy Who Loved Me) might qualify as Ed Wood-like, but I don’t know. I’m not sure that anyone besides Shore has ever composed the same kind of score. You tell me.

I also believe that the opening Ed Wood credit sequence is absolute genius-level, and totally in keeping with the tone of the film.

I was going to say that Cleveland Steamers sounds cooler — that the idea of a baseball team steamin’ and chuggin along like a choo-choo train sounds more Cleveland-ish…a better fit for a rugged, working-class, rock-n-roll city like Cleveland. But then I looked up the local slang associations.

“We remember those moments, as we move forward with change / You see, it has always been Cleveland that’s the best part of our name.” — from ad copy read by Tom Hanks.

Together, we are all… pic.twitter.com/R5FnT4kv1I

— Cleveland Indians (@Indians) July 23, 2021

All day yesterday I was telling myself “tomorrow is Thursday., and a chance to catch evening viewings of Old and Val.” (Wokester publicists are being their usual delightful selves in terms of screening invites. Love you guys!) This morning I was genuinely shocked upon realizing that today is Friday, 7.23.

In mid July of 2019 Tatiana and I did five or six days in Prague, took a train trip to Munich and endured a briefly terrifying lost-wallet episode, and then took another train ride and had a couple of relaxing days in Zurich.

Munich nightmare: Soon after arriving in Munich I took an Uber to meet a journalist friend at a beer garden. The Uber driver was a 40ish Greek immigrant named Oscar. Friendly but maybe a wee bit slow on the pick-up. Anyway, I got out and Oscar took off. 10 seconds later I realized my wallet was missing.

Uber’s search engine didn’t give me Oscar’s phone, but it allowed me to write him and report the loss through their relay software. It also allowed me to write management and ask them to reach out to Oscar, etc. Agitated and scared, I sent three identical messages to Oscar and Uber management. Five minutes passed…nothing. Ten minutes. Then I got a message from Uber saying that they’d passed the news along to Oscar, blah blah. But no Oscar reply.

After 20 or 25 minutes I figured it was a lost cause, and so I called another Uber to take me back to the hotel. And of all the Uber drivers in Munich, Oscar answered and said he’d be there in three minutes. “Oscar!” I wrote back. “I left my wallet in your car less than half an hour ago!” Then he pulled up and I jumped in. “Do you have my wallet?” I asked. “No,” he said, and my heart sank. Then he said, “I gave it to the police.”

Tennessee Williams: “Sometimes there’s God…so quickly!”

So we drove to the precinct in question, and sure enough the wallet was there. And the cops were really friendly. I thanked them, and one said, “You should thank this guy,” referring to Oscar. “But of course!” I said. Happy ending! A $40 tip for Oscar, which he wouldn’t accept at first. But I insisted. I should’ve made it $50 or a $100, I know.

A couple of months ago I posted a short riff about M. Night Shymalan‘s Old (Universal, 7.23). I was basically repeating something that I’d initially wrote in mid March, which was that the Alan Ladd-sized Gael Garcia Bernal ((5’6″) is too short to be married to Vicky Krieps (5’9″) in a movie, at least without their size disparity being a distraction.

“But,” I added, “I’m sure Shyamalan has framed their two-shots carefully or had Bernal wear ‘lifts’ or stand on milk boxes or whatever it took.

And yet I’m told by a couple of critic pallies that Shyamalan makes no attempt to hide the height difference. Veteran critic #1: “[Shyamalan] pretty much shows that differential. You totally get a sense of what a shrimp Bernal is.” Veteran critic #2: “It’s obvious that Krieps is substantially taller [than Bernal]. I actually exaggerated the height difference in my review for a laugh.”

Rotten Tomatoes critics haven’t touched the tall-short dynamic for fear of being accused of sizeism by the Twitter wolves, which could get them fired. So don’t go looking for any mentions of this issue in any Old reviews. Only Hollywood Elsewhere is bold enough to step into this minefield.

I’ll be catching and reviewing Old tomorrow night. Right now it has a 59% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a 57% rating on Metacritic.

Strangely, curiously, there are still those who don’t understand (or refuse to accept) that Tony Soprano was whacked while sitting in that family restaurant booth in the final episode of The Sopranos. I’ve come to understand that these very same people have also fought against the obvious interpretation of the aftermath of that tenement shootout scene in Taxi Driver (’75).

For the 17th or 18th time, here’s the damn explanation (and there’s really no arguing this):

At the end of the Taxi Driver shootout sequence and just after the bleeding and mortally wounded Travis Bickle, sitting on that blood-spattered couch, pretends to shoot himself in the head as he goes “bawshhhh!…bawshhhh!”, director Martin Scorsese switches to an overhead crane shot of Bickle on the couch and the two cops standing at the doorway with guns drawn. Looking downward, the camera slowly tracks along the ceiling, over the cops and down the hallway and into the street.

Most would say this is just a cool overhead tracking shot and let it go at that. But it’s just as legitimat to call it the path of Bickle’s spirit as he leaves his body and prepares to merge with the infinite finality…remember Jeannot Szwarc‘s similar spirit-rising-out-of-the-body shot at the end of Somewhere in Time? Same basic idea.

What half-reasonable person could ever buy the denouement of Taxi Driver? Everything in this sequence screams “this is bullshit!” In what world would Bickle, suspected by at least one Secret Service Treasury guy as a potential assassin (“Henry Krinkle”) who nearly killed Sen. Charles Palatine…in what world would Bickle be portrayed as a hero by the media for shooting a corrupt cop and two pimps in an East Side tenement building? The idea is insane.

And this shooting in some way helps the parents of Jodie Foster‘s Iris to find her and bring her back home to Indiana? (Iris will never be restored as a normal Indiana teenager…she’s been ruined and corrupted forever.)

And then Cybil Shepard gives Travis a come-hither look in the rear-view mirror when he gives her a ride in his cab?

It’s all Travis’s death fantasy…the stuff he imagines would happen in a perfect world as he sits on that tenement couch, bleeding profusely and eyeballing the cops and slowly drifting off the mortal coil, etc. The very last shot in Taxi Driver is of a seemingly startled Travis looking into his cab’s rearview mirror, and then whoosh…he’s gone. No reflection. Because Travis isn’t actually there.

Are there really people out there who think that the denoument is somehow real? Yes, there are.

Last weekend French President Emanuel Macron told citizens who’ve refused to get vaccinated that their horseshit would no longer be tolerated — no access to restaurants, cafes, movie theaters, plane flights or long-distance trains without official proof of vaccination (or a recent negative test).

Imagine if President Biden had the sand and the stones to say the same thing to American bumblefucks — “get the vaccine or else, guys…we’ve had it with your stupidity and obstinacy and ignorance…you’re making things worse for everyone,” etc.

N.Y. Times, 7.19, reported by Aurelian Breeden: More than 100,000 people took to the streets across France over the weekend to protest President Emmanuel Macron’s tough new vaccination strategy…demonstrators in Paris and elsewhere vented against what some called Mr. Macron’s ‘dictatorship’ after he announced that a “health pass”would be required for many to attend or enter most public events and venues.

“At the same time, however, his policy seemed to have [brought about] the desired effect: Record numbers of people flocked to vaccination centers in advance of the new rules coming into effect next month.”

Incidentally: All Telluride Film Festival attendees have been requested to upload their vaccination cards by this Friday (7.23),

From Owen Gleiberman‘s review of M. Night Shyamalan‘s Old (Universal, 7.23):