Month: May 2022

What does that tell you? I’ll tell you what it tells me. It tells me that Elvis is not a Lubitsch film. It also scares me somewhat. I’ll leave it at that.

“There are basically two kinds of people,” critic Harlan Jacobson observed in the mid ‘80s. “Those who think of Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd when they hear Moonlighting, and those who think of Jeremy Irons and Jerzy Skolimowski.”

Last night a Wilton friendo said, “Oh, I saw that. The other one.”

HE: “The Jeremy Irons? It opened 40 years ago.”

Friendo: “The one I saw was five or six years ago. A black kid…”

HE: “That was Moonlight. (beat) Whadja think of that?”

Friendo: “Ehh. Didn’t like the ending.”

Yesterday New York theatre guy Seth Rudetsky tweeted this photo of himself and 92-year-old Gene Hackman at some Santa Fe event.

Glad to see Hackman in good health (although my first reaction was that he looks like Gollum). but the first Hackman film that came into Rudetsky’s mind was The Poseidon Adventure? Seriously? Not Hoosiers, The French Connection, Crimson Tide, The Firm, The Conversation, Unforgiven, Get Shorty, Mississippi Burning, Lilith, French Connection 2, Under Fire, etc.?

A new still from Jordan Peele’s Nope (Universal, 7.22), and particularly (l. to. r.) of Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer and Brandon Perea.

Palmer, of course, has become world famous over the last three weeks (or since 4.20) as the woman whose adverse reaction to a physical prank by Being Mortal costar Bill Murray — i.e., his allegedly yanking her pigtail in a nyuk-nyuk, joking-around way — led to production on Aziz Ansari‘s film being suspended.

Nobody knows for a fact that Murray’s offense involved pigtail-pulling, but if it was about that (and I know nothing at all) there’s a whole thing about black girls being extremely sensitive about white people touching their hair.

This is two months old — from a 3.13.22 Bill Maher-Ben Shapiro podcast discussion. The main reason we’re afraid to talk about obesity is that a hefty percentage of obese people in this country…forget it. I’ll just get smacked. Forget I mentioned it.

Tweeted four days ago:

Absolutely incredible pic.twitter.com/ZprAxIRhyu

— Abner Pastoll (@abnerpastoll) May 6, 2022

Earlier today The Ankler‘s Jeff Sneider announced that one of the gloomiest and dreariest flicks in the history of cinema — Mark Romanek, Alex Garland and Kazuo Ishiguro‘s Never Let Me Go (’10) — is being relaunched as an FX series under the guidance of DNA Films & TV”s Andrew Macdonald and Allon Reich. What a perfectly dreadful idea. I’m in instant mourning.

August 2010 HE commentary: It’s not a very well-kept secret that Never Let Me Go deals with a grim-fate dynamic — an oppressive, locked-down situation in which “a long and happy life” isn’t in the cards for the main characters, who have been raised to be organ donors for the rich.

There’s a famous saying about how “the clarity of mind that comes to a man standing on the gallows is wonderful.” As in face facts, sharpen your mind, prioritize.

I’ve always been one, however, to take it a step further and not just prioritize and all that, but to first and foremost revel and rejoice in the immediacy of the symphony of life.

Death is something to be accepted, okay, but primarily fought and strategized against, frequently laughed at, lampooned and pooh-poohed, acknowledged but simultaneously “ignored” (in a manner of speaking), dismissed, despised and raged against (in Dylan Thomas‘s words) right to the end.

There is only life, only the continuance, only the fuel and the fire…only the next step, the next breath, the next meal, the next sip of water, the next hill to climb, the next perfect pair of courdoruy pants, the next adventure, the next hypnotizing woman, the next splash of salt spray in your face, the next staircase to run down two or three steps at a time, the next rental car and the next winding road to concentrate on and carefully negotiate, etc.

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A conversation about the Bond franchise…a franchise that will most likely continue but which technically no longer exists due to the fact that James Bond was killed at the end of No Time To Die. Here’s how I put it earlier today:

HE: “’They’ (franchise caretakers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson) killed James Bond in order to placate the wokester tyrannicals. HE HAD TO DIE for his decades of prowling, women-devouring chauvinism (which peaked during the Sean Connery-George Lazenby period and had actually started to wane with Roger Moore, who was too courtly and light-hearted to be a GENUINELY CALLOUS CHAUVINIST) and especially to signify that that kind of iconic power and dominance (brawny, martini-sipping white guy with a special license to kill anyone) had come to an end. THE STATEMENT HAD TO BE MADE.

Friendo: “I actually predict that Broccoli & Co. are going to bring Bond back as a defiant white man who is more sexual than Craig’s Bond was in the end. The series needs that, and I think they know it.”

HE: “But they killed the character — a British secret service agent who came into being in the early ’50s in the early Ian Fleming books, and who ruled as a superstar movie character for six decades (Dr. No to No Time To Die). How can they bring him back except in a prequel world?”

Friendo: “They can start the series over — in either a prequel world or a contemporary world — with a snap of their fingers. They can do whatever they want. I mean, the last Spider-Man movie featured all three of the actors who had played Spider-Man — a complete shattering of any sort of logical, cohesive, spherical Spider-realm. Who says this stuff has to perfectly parse? The Craig series was self-contained — a kind of five-film mythology. Why not just launch another series like that? Having said all that, I would LOVE it if they went early-‘60s period with it. That could be amazing, and they could bring the sex back.”

HE: “Yes, they can ‘do what they want’, but if they can REALLY do whatever the fuck they want, why did they kill him in the first place? What for? THEY ENDED THE MAN’S LIFE, and they’re gonna come right back in a couple of years with a new James Bond film like nothing happened in No Time To Die? If they’re going to do that, why did they kill ‘James Bond’? It makes no practical sense. It makes no sense at all. It was crazy.

“Unless (and this is my central point) they killed him as a symbolic sacrificial offering to the Secret Order of Woke Tyrannicals. A symbolic acknowledgment that, in the words of Kaye Corleone in The Godfather Part II, “all of this must end.”

“Broccoli didn’t need a signed demand letter from Woke Central, hand-delivered by courier — she knew that the time had come in the culture to kill this symbol of male dominance and omnipotence…that this decades-old symbol of brawny, ruling-class, white-guy power and close-to-unstoppable potency had to be stilled and snuffed out to make room for the new ruling order of women, wokester absolutists, Pete Meisel-type guys, POCs, LGBTQs and David Chappelle-hating trans activists.

“It’s not just that white guys need to share and surrender power and give up the old brutish ways of doing things — it’s also that white guys, to acknowledge their malignancy and to make up for their centuries of sinful plundering, need to sit in the back of the bus or, better yet, slit their own throats. This, finally, is what the killing of James Bond signified.”

Crimes of the Future director-writer David Cronenberg has been predicting Cannes Film Festival walkouts as a kind of taunt. He’s basically asking cineastes if they have the necessary sand. Are you men or milquetoasts? How deep is your ocean? How long is your toleration fuse?

Viewers who bolt out of a Crimes screening, in short, might be frail, anxious, overly self-protecting. The first requirement of a devotional cineaste is an absolute willingness to submit, of course, and if you can’t endure a little psychic disturbance by way of simulated body horror, what good are you?

Fuck all that. In the name of all the tepid souls and conventional comfort-seekers of the movie realm I am ready to whine and howl and kvetch over Crimes of the Future. Deep down I have always been a ponce, a nancy boy. I go to movies to feel more alive and self-aware and connected to the universe, and I’ve never gotten how depictions of body mutilation are in any way edifying or nutritious.

Sitting through scenes of body horror and mutilation over the years, “real” or imagined…Cronenberg’s Videodrome, The Brood, Crash, Dead Ringers and The Fly, not to mention Stuart Gordon’s Re–Animator and Alex Garland’s Never Let Me Go…yes, these scenes have enhanced or enriched or added dimension to my moviegoing life. At the very least I’m glad I’ve seen them.

But did I enjoy watching them during the actual moment of exposure? Nope — I winced through each wincing moment, and I haven’t re-watched any of these except Re–Animator, mainly because of the humor. The only Cronenberg film I’ve watched several times is The Dead Zone.

Cronenberg himself has claimed that his films are “funny,” but only in a dry, perverse, no-laugh-funny sense.

Will I be man enough to handle the grisly stuff in Crimes of the Future? I may be, but I know right now I’ll be groaning.

Donald Trump is a criminal sociopath — a self-deluding, tyrannically-inclined beast from 20,000 fathoms who tried to subvert our democracy, and would do so again in a New York minute. The man is flat–out evil, and it would be dead wrong of Elon Musk to let him back on Twitter.