Month: April 2022

I was sorry to read the Daily Beast‘s 4.8.22 story about Ezra Miller’s erratic and disturbing behavior. Not just because Miller’s career may be in serious jeopardy, but because of the following sentence:

I’m sorry but something snapped inside when I was confronted with plural pronouns (they/them) that described (or alluded to) both Warner Bros. executives and Miller within the same sentence.

The old pronoun system (the one I’ve adhered to for several decades on this planet) calls for they/them to be used in the case of a group of humans within any social context. The new pronoun system insists on they/them also being used for individuals who identify as they/them gender whatevers.

For me, the use of conflicting, contrary applications of they/them within a single sentence violates a fundamental standard of descriptive clarity — a violation of a system that speakers of the English language have relied upon for centuries, for God’s sake. Sorry, but I’m suddenly finding this intolerable. I feel as if electrodes are attached to my damp ankles. I can feel jagged friction sparks in my brain. And all due to a single Daily Beast sentence written by Kyndall Cunningham.

I know this sounds abrupt but all of a sudden the pronoun thing — a re-ordering of the English language due to political activism on the part of one-half of 1% of the population, and driven by an attempt to show respect and establish boundaries that will benefit the ambiguous gender-fluid community — strikes me as fundamentally INSANE, or at least in this context.

Say it loud and proud: We cannot and must not use they/them to refer to an individual and a group of people within a single sentence.

We’re living in a world in which…how to put this?… pronouns have broken out of their cages and are running wild. I am sitting inside a nighttime campsite perimeter, lit by a small fire, and the wild, unruly pronouns are like wolves howling in the woods and getting closer and closer to the campsite.

The wokester left has become a diseased cult, and I say this as a mild-mannered left-center moderate.

…in Silver Linings Playbook is perfectly captured by this hand-smothering, squashed-face sculpture. Truth be told, it’s what I feel like half the time. At times I’m the hand; other times I’m the face. I know it sounds fucked up, but what do you want me to do, lie?

Two tech crises in rapid succession have disrupted the HE force field.

The day before yesterday HE’s Sonos player went awry. You don’t want to know the particulars but it took two longish tech-support phone calls over the course of 24 hours to fix the damn thing. The first tech person was an idiot; the second was smart and enterprising.

Shortly after the Sonos issue was resolved the whole wifi system went belly up. After all kinds of Spectrum tech-support agony by way of trial-and-error, it became clear that the Spectrum-provided router (five or six years old) had suddenly refused to sync. These things happen — sometimes a device just gets tired and weary and stops working properly. You just have to man up turn the other cheek.

I was told that the fastest remedy would be to go down to the WeHo Spectrum office and switch-out the malfunctioning router for a newbie. I was given an appointment time (11 am) and an appointment code. When I got there I punched in the code on the welcome screen, and of course they had no record of my having any such appointment. (The Spectrum phone-tech guy had dropped the ball.)

At first the in-store Spectrum guy (Asian, glasses, chubby) said they couldn’t help me unless my name was “in the system.” But I was told I had an appointment at 11am, I said. In any event I’m here, I pleaded, and I have the broken router. There are only four or five customers waiting right now — can’t you just slip me in when there’s an opening? Chubby spectacles shrugged his shoulders, repeated the line about “the system” blah blah.

I went to a nearby Jamba Juice and asked Spectrum tech support for advice, and they said “oh, the chubby bespectacled guy can help you…just sign in as a guest.” Which I did. I was given a new router (more Star Trek-y than the old one). I brought it home, powered it up and plugged in two identical yellow ethernet cables into two receptacles, one marked “ethernet” and the other marked “internet.”

Of course nothing has changed — the wifi is still on the fritz.

I have, however, arranged for a Spectrum engineer to visit tomorrow morning (Friday, 4.8). He/she will presumably fix the whole situation.

Oh, and by the way: The L.A. Water and Power guys turned the water off for eight hours today. That helped.

Friday, 4.8 update (6:10 am): HE is further perplexed by the strange inability of my iPhone 12 Max Pro to load web pages solely on the strength of AT&T’s normal WeHo air. (My usual home-generated wifi signal will be flat until the Spectrum repair guy arrives later this morning.) We all understand that individual carrier connectivity is always a bit slower than home or business-generated wifi, but right now HE’s AT&T signal (three bars) is anemic — it’s like being in the middle of the Sonoran desert.

Festival guy to World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy about David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future: “If people thought Crash was divisive back in ’96, this is going to create way more chaos and controversy for sure. The last 20 minutes are a very tough sit. I expect walk-outs, faintings and real panic attacks (I almost had one myself!) at the Lumière theatre. No hyperbole, I promise.”

“Lea Seydoux’s role is way too bonkers and RADICAL to contend for a Cannes Best Actress award in my book, but I’d love to be proven wrong. I see no precedent in Cannes for a performance of that caliber or genre gaining momentum with a jury…I mean. Seydoux basically plays a (very oft-naked) Gina Pane-like artist of the near future.”

Synopsis: “Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) is a beloved performance artist who has embraced Accelerated Evolution Syndrome, sprouting new and unexpected organs in his body. Along with his partner Caprice (Lea Seydoux), Tenser has turned the removal of these organs into a spectacle for his loyal followers to marvel at in real-time theatre. But with both the government and a strange subculture taking note, Tenser is forced to consider what would be his most shocking performance of all.”

Pic costars Kristen Stewart, Scott Speedman, Welket Bungué and Don McKellar.

An undated article in Cinephiliabeyond.org, composed by Sven Mikulee, contains a rough, Stanley Kubrick-authored treatment for The Shining. It’s less than 70 pages long, and with a significantly different story than the one delivered by Kubrick’s 1980 film.

“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” is still there, but at the end of the day Wendy Torrance (Shelley Duvall) winds up killing Wacko Jacko (Jack Nicholson) with a big knife, gut-stabbing him.

And in a huge switch, Scatman Crowthers’ Dick Halloran, the Overlook Hotel’s chef, isn’t a kindly good guy trying to save Wendy and Danny from the malicious Jack. Instead he becomes some kind of demonic figure who’s in league with the ghost of Delbert Grady. Wendy kills Halloran also.

An HE “friendo” has seen Robert Eggers’ The Northman (Focus, 4.22) and is sharing mixed-favorable impressions as far as they go.

“Never discount a true filmmaker, even with studio interference,” he remarks. “It runs 140 minutes and I was never bored, and that means something these days. It feels, obviously, very familiar, as it’s based on the legend of Amleth, which inspired Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but it’s incredibly well–directed.

“What The Northman lacks is the artful ambiguity of Eggers’ first two films, The Witch and The Lighthouse. The influence of studio notes is apparent throughout.

“But it’s not that much of a slog, and despite a little too much CG with a climax happening at the mouth of an active volcano…two naked men fighting, not the best ending…Hollywood doesn’t really make epics of this kind any more.

“You can tell Eggers wanted a more elevated, visually-driven movie but the reshoots made it more ‘entertaining.’ Hopefully a director’s cut shows up someday, more of a pure Eggers version.

“The off-the-top influences are Hamlet, Gladiator and Games of Thrones.

“Alexander Skarsgard’s lead performance is stellar. Ethan Hawke, as Skarsgaard’s murdered king-father, is in the film for maybe 10 minutes. Nicole Kidman, Hawke’s wife-queen, has a few scenes (her screen time comes to roughly 20 minutes) that she just nails. Anya Taylor Joy cuts a vivid figure.”

How many heads are split open with axes? “I’d say about a dozen,” he responds. “The killings are extremely brutal. A fair amount of intestine spilling.”

There’s some kind of nod to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, he reports, and the skull of Yorick makes an appearance.

The Northman’s review embargo lifts on April 11th.

French-dubbed trailer:

Top to bottom: (a) Myself and Jett at my parents’ home in Southbury, Connecticut, 20 or 21 years ago; (b) My first film column, written weekly for the short-lived Fairfield County Morning News; (c) a passable-for-a-kid-but-don’t-give-up-your-day-job sketch of Peter O’Toole in Becket, and (d) snapped in Boston during the good old druggie days.

The first time I ever stood next to a dead guy was around 12:30 or 1 am on Westport Road, on my way back from a night of revelry at the Player’s Tavern. A kid of 18 or 19 had crashed his motorcycle and apparently broken his neck. I got there before the cops did. My first thought was to feel his pulse, but I wimped out at the last second. Plus I couldn’t call 911 as there were no cell phones. So I just stared. He might have been breathing his last but he sure didn’t look it with his eyes open and all. He looked like a deer that had been hit by a car.

In the decades since I haven’t come upon any young dead guys anywhere. Not in the cities, not in the desert…nowhere. My understanding is that apart from drunk-driving fatalities most young people who buy it outdoors do so in combat. So it feels a little arbitrary and arty to look at all these dead kids in Aaron Salazar‘s Still Life, an eight-minute short.

How come they’re all in their 20s? Where are the overweight middle-aged corpses? How about a dead grandma in a toppled-over wheelchair, killed by a latter-day Richard Widmark? And what killed all these kids? I’m presuming that Salazar is saying “death is always still and final and absolute.” Which it is, of course, but in the matter of teens and twentysomethings it’s fairly unusual unless you’re a Yakuza soldier or a hopeless alcoholic or druggie or involved in the Mexican drug trade or fighting the Russians in Ukraine.

Still Life from Grandma Honey Films on Vimeo.

Among several suggestions for reviving or restoring the Oscar brand, THR‘s Scott Feinberg is re-proposing the Best Achievement in Popular Film Oscar, which was announced and then killed in the late summer of 2018.

Feinberg suggestion #6: “The board of governors should henceforth be tasked with bestowing a special achievement Oscar each year — to be presented on the Oscars telecast — to a commercially successful film that also displays artistic merit and is a credit to the industry. This would be different from, and therefore would not ‘devalue,’ the competitive Oscar, and would certainly not preclude its recipient from competing for competitive awards. While this special Oscar would most logically go to the film’s director and its principal producer, the film’s stars should be encouraged to accept alongside him or her (which would certainly not hurt TV ratings, either).

“Recent films which could have been honored in this way include 2017’s Wonder Woman (director Patty Jenkins and producer Zack Snyder could have been accompanied by stars Gal Gadot and Chris Pine), the first modern female-led superhero film; 2019’s Avengers: Endgame (directors Anthony Russo and Joseph Russo and producer Kevin Feige could have been accompanied by the actors who played the Avengers), the culmination of a remarkable 11 years of the Marvel Cinematic Universe; and 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home (director Jon Watts and producer Feige could have been accompanied by the three actors who have played the title character), a milestone in a 20-year-old franchise which helped to sustain the film industry through the aftermath of 9/11 and COVID.

“Revive Popcorn Oscar Concept,” posted on 4.26.21: “There’s really no choice any more. The Best Achievement in Popular Film Oscar idea, killed in its infancy by the snooties, doesn’t need to be revived — it needs to be implemented. Really. Another Steven Soderbergh-styled Oscar telecast in ’22 and it’s over. Hell, the brand is on life-support now.

Once again: “On 9.10.18 Bloomberg’s Virginia Postrel posted a solution to the Best Picture Oscar problem. Her idea was simply that there are two film industries — one for ticket buyers who tend to prefer mass appeal or FX-driven popcorn flicks, and another for Academy members who prefer to honor movies that are actually good in some kind of profound, refined or zeitgeist-reflecting way.

“It’s been understood for years that the vast majority of moviegoers are agnostic regarding the faith of cinema. What faith, you ask? Good point. Postrel’s article isn’t even three years old, and the pandemic has made it seem like an idea from another era. But embracing the Popcorn Oscars (maybe even encompassing the top five categories) would at least represent an attempt to face reality.

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