Month: March 2022

With great respect and profound sadness Hollywood Elsewhere is acknowledging the death of producer Alan Ladd, Jr, an old-school guy & son of Shane who believed in taking the occasional risk, standing by certain filmmakers and supporting the advancement of women in the ranks.

Ladd was 20th Century Fox’s production chief between ’76 and ’79, and distinguished himself as the guy who stood behind Star Wars and Alien. In ’79 he launched The Ladd Company, which yielded Chariots of Fire (’81), Outland (1981), the truncated & narrated version of Blade Runner (’82), Night Shift (1982), The Right Stuff (1983) and Police Academy (’84). He also produced Gone Baby Gone (2007).

Ladd joined MGM/UA in ’85 (Giancarlo Parretti!), and thereby cranked out A Fish Called Wanda (1988), Moonstruck (1987) and Thelma & Louise (1991). Ladd re-started the Ladd Company with Paramount Pictures in ’93, and thereafter produced The Brady Bunch Movie and Braveheart.

Last night’s image of everyone in the House chamber listening to President Biden‘s State of the Union address without masks was very gratifying. It was almost surreal. I have to drive out to the Valley now and in so doing will visit two or three stores, and for the first time since last June I won’t be wearing a mask. Let’s see what happens. Yesterday masks were being worn everywhere I went.w by

‘This is ridiculous’: @GovRonDeSantis scolds students for wearing face masks during his @USouthFlorida visit https://t.co/v9XLjueCYi pic.twitter.com/TFeC6t6wL9

— WFLA NEWS (@WFLA) March 2, 2022

In one corner we have Oliver Stone, who gave Vladimir Putin a friendly interview four or five years ago, suggesting that we’re overly consumed by anti-Putin hysteria while “omitting key facts when inconvenient, and that we’re failing to “understand the full spectrum of what’s happening.” Which boils down, Stone feels, to Putin’s territorial anti-NATO paranoia being justified or at least understandable.

And in the opposite corner we have former chess champion and anti-Putin, pro-democracy activist Garry Kasparov, telling Megyn Kelly that this is Putin’s last stand. Not to mention Michael Moore posting yesterday terms of surrender that Putin might want to consider.

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Every now and then we have to remind ourselves how far everything has fallen. Indeed, collapsed. How no one is even attempting this kind of thing in mainstream cinema — how completely shut down things are now. (Obviously not in cable/streaming but theatrically.) This scene was written and shot 42 or 43 years ago, but listen to it…feel it. Nobody’s even trying to deliver this kind of middle-class angsty stuff now, in large part because dramas about wealthy suffering white people are verboten.

Yes, yes…I agree that Raging Bull should have won the 1980 Best Picture Oscar, but if Robert Redford’s 1980 drama had never happened 42 years ago and was made and released sometime in 2021, are you telling me it wouldn’t be the far-and-away favorite to win Best Picture? Because it totally kicks CODA‘s ass. Don’t even mention CODA in the same sentence.

Originally posted on 5.10.19: The late Alvin Sargent was one of Hollywood’s finest and classiest 20th Century screenwriters, especially in the realm of adult relationship dramas. On the same level as Bo Goldman, William Goldman, Ben Hecht, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, David Rayfiel, Paul Schrader, Robert Towne, etc. Ordinary People was the peak, but the runners-up were The Sterile Cuckoo (’69), Paper Moon (’73), Julia (’77), Straight Time (’78, w/ Jeffrey Boam), Dominick and Eugene (’88), Hero (’92 w/ Laura Ziskin and David Webb Peoples) and Unfaithful (w/ William Broyles Jr. — ’02).

Toward the end of his career Sargent wrote or co-wrote three or four Spider Man scripts. Alas, his kind of movie had fallen out of favor and paychecks were there for the taking.

This YouTube short was posted around ten days ago. (It was shot somewhere in the San Diego region.) If this isn’t a defining portrait of pathetic self-absorption in 2022 America, nothing is. This video should be converted to 4K and played on bus-stop video screens and in fact played on super-sized screens in all the major tourist areas worldwide — Times Square, Piccadilly, Sacre Coeur region of Paris, Shibuya in Tokyo, etc.

Hang this video in the Museum of Modern Art. Hell, hang it in the Louvre.

Last night I posted a YouTube video of recent carnage in Kharkiv, Ukraine. It showed a large building being shelled — shocking, of course, but nothing grotesque, no dead bodies or pools of innocent blood. Almost right away the YouTube censors stepped in: “The following content has been identified by the YouTube community as inappropriate or offensive to some audiences.”

Good brave people are going through hell as they fight for their lives and their future, and “some audiences” might be offended by images of same?

Two days ago I read an article in the UK edition of Marie Claire (written by Health, Sustainability & Relationships Editor Ally Head) that offered tips for coping with the images of the Ukrainian horror. Translation: Here’s how you, sitting on your comfy couch or under a hair dryer in your beauty salon, can cope with their experience of death and destruction.

HE to YouTube monitors: Here’s a video of a captured Russian soldier weeping about having killed innocent Ukrainians. Will your extra-sensitive Millennial snowflakes find this offensive also? Contemplating the murder of innocent people is kind of upsetting, no?

If YouTube was somehow a thing back in late 1941, this “protect the delicate sensibilities of certain viewers” policy would prevent posts of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Or footage of the Atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Or images of Nazi concentration camps. Or footage of 9/11.

I listened yesterday to Marc Maron’s WTF interview with Sam Elliott, which has blown up due to Elliott’s trashing of The Power of the Dog. Twitter, of course, is depicting moustachioed Sam as a homophobe.

Yes, Elliott is a rugged traditionalist type and perhaps not as embracing of non-straight sexuality as he could be, but I don’t believe he’s homophobic in any kind of problematic sense. Ask anyone — Sam is a decent, considerate fellow who just happens to deal straight cards.