HE’s BFF and gracious condo-host Jody never saw The Exorcist when everyone else was catching it theatrically in late ’73 and ’74. Nor did she catch it on cable, DVD or Bluray over succeeding decades.
Last night I persuaded her to finally watch it, 48 or 49 years after the fact. My pitch wasn’t that it’s a classic elevated horror film (although it is), but before the Puzuzu stuff begins it’s a superbly made ’70s relationship film — beautifully shot, cut, acted, written. A probing, realistic, eerie-around-the-edges classic about the complicated lives and parallel fates of three residents of D.C.’s Georgetown district — a famous actress, her daughter and a Jesuit priest-psychologist. So we watched it and had a great time.
It was reported a few days ago that original Exorcist star Ellen Burstyn, 89, has completed her work on David Gordon Green‘s currently shooting Exorcist trilogy. I feel nothing but…well, partly contempt for this Blumhouse/Morgan Creek/Universal franchise, and partly just sad that a franchise born of a single, superbly made 1973 film is still a dog chasing its own tail.
The delighted reactions of Collider‘s Perri Nemiroff and Variety‘s Jazz Tangcay aside, Jurassic World Dominion (Universal, 6.10) is allegedly dogshit. I won’t catch it until Thursday afternoon, but what am I gonna say?
What a lotta shit this year has been so far. World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy is conducting a mid-year ’22 poll, but telling respondents to keep their lists of faves to five, unranked.
Here are my seven: 1. Watcher (BEST), 2. Dog (NOT BAD, ANTI-WOKE), 3. Top Gun: Maverick (HIGHLY EFFICIENT POWER PUNCH), 4. Apollo 10 1⁄2: A Space Age Childhood (WARM, AGREEABLE), 5. The Northman (A SLOG THAT I RESPECTED, and what about that Nicole Kidman?), 6. The Batman (HIGHLY RESPECTED, ALL OF A PIECE), 7. Crimes of the Future (DIDN’T ENJOY IT BUT IT’S “GOOD”).
Note: I deliberately haven’t seen Everything Everywhere All at Once — I refuse to pay to see it in a theatre. I have a streaming version, however, and will watch it soon. A little voice is telling me that EEAAO is going to top the list.
Stephen Frears and Christopher Hampton‘s Billy Wilder & Me, set to film next spring, will be film-maven catnip. The story will have to be sad, given the gradual downturn of Wilder’s career when he hit his late 60s. It’ll be one thing for serious Wilder devotionals, and another for casual viewers who might know him from Some Like It Hot or The Apartment.
Set in 1977, pic will star Christoph Waltz as the masterly Austrian-born director, the ultimate cynical romantic or vice versa, as he directs his commercially ill-fated Fedora. Hampton’s script is based on Jonathan Coe‘s “Mr. Wilder and Me.”
Wilder’s legendary directing career peaked from the mid ’40s to early ’60s, but went south after Kiss Me Stupid (’64). He rebounded with The Fortune Cookie and held his ground with The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes and Avanti!, but the glory days were over. His last three films — The Front Page, Fedora and Buddy Buddy — finished him off.
Official synopsis: “In the summer of 1977, an innocent young woman begins working for Billy Wilder and his screenwriter Izzy Diamond on a Greek island during the filming of Fedora. When she follows Wilder to Germany to continue the shoot, she finds herself joining him on a journey of memory into the heart of his family history.”
Fedora Wiki page excerpt: “Allied Artists dropped its deal to distribute Fedora after it was screened at a Myasthenia Gravis Foundation benefit in New York City and the audience response was unenthusiastic. The film was picked up by Lorimar Productions, which planned to sell the screening rights to CBS as a television movie.
“Before the network could agree to the offer, United Artists stepped in. After cutting 12 minutes of the film based on studio recommendations, Wilder previewed it in Santa Barbara. Halfway through the audience began derisively laughing at all the wrong places. Dejected by the response and despondent from all the problems he had encountered up to this point, the director refused to make any more edits.”
Sex is between your legs and gender is between your ears…fine. But why do so many in the trans community get so fucking angry when you question the notion that gender isn’t quite as fluid and indistinct and comme ci comme ca as they assert?
I don’t know anyone who wants to give the trans community a hard time. I certainly never have or wanted to. My basic attitude is whatevs, no problem, live your lives, etc. Everyone feels this way.
But with last November’s arrival of Sutton, my granddaughter, I’ve been feeling triggered by progressive activists in the educational system wanting to force-feed gender ideology to young children. I feel kids should be left alone until…I don’t know exactly, but probably when they approach puberty. And don’t even talk about asking little kids which gender they identify with, or God forbid acting upon their answers with this or that medicinal (Lupron) or surgical measure.
The main impetus behind the hardcore progressive wokester cabal is not just about showing compassion and acceptance for historically marginalized or put-upon communities (African Americans, women, LGBTQ, transgender), but also about bending over backwards to make things right by abruptly and radically reversing biological embeds. One way of achieving this is by threatening sensible centrists and left-moderates with toxic social-media accusations and even career destruction.
Either you’re with us or you’re a racist or a sexist or a homophobe or an anti-trans bigot. Either you’re with us or you’re crabgrass, and you need to be yanked out of the soil. I can’t wait until these fine folks are on the run and searching for tall grass.
It is my solemn, fully considered belief that wokesters are a pernicious ideological movement. It is my solemn, fully considered belief that many on the progressive left have literally gone insane. Thank God the social-political pendulum is starting to swing away from the crazies, and I think many of them realize this. I’ve gradually come to feel over the last three or four years that progressive wokesters deserve serious pushback, and lemme tell ya it feels very good to be part of a growing community that is doing the pushing.
Last night I watched Matt Walsh‘s What Is A Woman?, a 94-minute documentary (available only through a Daily Wire subscription). Mainstream media types have slagged it as anti-trans, but it’s just a simple, rudimentary, building-block exploration of the basics.
All Walsh does, really, is to politely ask trans activists and various professional-class specialists (college profs, psychologists, surgeons) what a woman is, and to apply the measure of basic biological fact against their political theory.
None of them give Walsh a straight answer, and two or three raise their backs and threaten to terminate their interview when Walsh tries to insert the concepts of basic logic and fundamental biological reality.
These are people, it is quite clear, who are living in their own bubble, and when Walsh tries to discuss the roots of trans ideology they all go cold and stiff and defensive. Calm and measured at first, they all gradually smell where Walsh is coming from, and seem unable to handle his basic, mild-mannered, sensible-sounding inquiries, almost certainly because to do so would open them up to political difficulties from trans activists. They know who butters their bread.
Has Walsh assembled his documentary in the manner of peak-strength Michael Moore, by presenting a somewhat slanted view of things? You could argue this, yeah, but if I didn’t see the harm when Moore did it so how can I complain about it now?
The thing that stuck in my mind is the hostility. Angry, arch-backed responses always expose weak viewpoints and purist radical temperaments.
David Cronenberg‘s Crimes of the Future opened three days ago (6.3). I’m presuming that the reviews scared a lot of would-be viewers off — not the negative judgments, of which there are very few, but the descriptions of the surgical slicings and glurpy body parts, not to mention “ear man.” But some HE followers are bolder and more inquisitive, or so I tell myself. Please share if you went there.
Just to get things started, here are some excerpts from my 5.24 Cannes review:
1. As far as it goes, Crimes is a respectable, dialogue-driven, high-concept chamber piece. Baroque, perverse, concentrated.
2. Where does it stand on my Cronenberg preference list? Somewhere in the middle, just above Dead Ringers and Naked Lunch. My all-time favorite Cronenberg film is still The Dead Zone, followed by A History of Violence, Crash, The Fly and Scanners.
3. Crimes of the Future is basically a play . There’s never any doubt that you’re watching a thoughtful, rigorously sculpted effort by a grade-A auteur. It’s not elevated horror but a kind of perversely erotic body-probe mood piece.
4. Remove the physical-effects stuff — bizarre surgical slicings, erotic body penetration, superfluous internal organ removal — and the seaside, small-hamlet, sound-stage setting (it was shot in Athens), and you’re left with a presentation that could have been staged at Manhattan’s Cherry Lane theatre or…whatever, on Philco Playhouse back in the early to mid ’50s.
In an interview with Death of a President author William Manchester, Mrs. Kennedy recalled that her husband wanted her to make a stylistic statement during their Dallas visit. “There are going to be all these rich Republican women at [a lunch they were scheduled to attend], wearing mink coats and diamond bracelets,” JFK told her. “[So] be simple — show those cheap Texas broads what good taste really is.”
In a subsequent dispute with publishers of Manchester’s book, Mrs. Kennedy managed to dilute “cheap Texas broads” into “rich Texas broads” and then “those Texans.”
I’m mentioning the original quote because (a) it makes JFK seem more human and less iconic and (b) because I relate to withering aesthetic judgments. It reminded me that Kennedy was capable of remarking how gauche or clueless some people dressed. It suggests that had he survived into his 90s and found himself at my rooftop restaurant in Hue — I realize this sounds like a stretch but it isn’t really — he too would have been appalled at the sight of old-man feet inside rubber and leather sandals. Not to mention the shorts and the golf shirts. Maybe.
Glenn Kenny: “One hears a lot of dumb, gratuitous and outright asshole-ish ‘JFK, c’est moi’ statements over the course of a lifetime, but this one really has a certain je ne sais quoi.”
6.6.22 explanation: I posted this four days before the 50th anniversary of JFK’s murder, when historical perspective essays were flooding the internets. I was recoiling from the sight of sandaled old-man feet at this Hue hotel, and so my free-associating mind wondered “how would a 96 year-old JFK had reacted to such a sight?” I’m confident that he would’ve felt that even in Vietnam, ugly, unpedicured man toes should always be concealed.
“Guy gets on the MTA in LA…dies. Think anybody’ll notice?”
Tom Cruise‘s “hello, I’m looking for my wife” scene in Jerry Maguire still ranks first, but Vincent’s final line in Collateral [4:15 to 4:40] is first runner-up. In a way it’s almost more moving than the Maguire scene because you’re not expecting cynical, hard-case Vincent to emotionally reveal himself.
Late last week I was asked to tap out a response to Jeff Sneider‘s “Is Tom Cruise the Biggest Movie Star in the World?“, a 6.3 Los Angeles magazine piece. I was in the middle of my stuck-in-Toronto nightmare but I said “sure.” And then I forgot about it. Here’s what I would have written if Air Canada hadn’t made my life so briefly miserable:
“Tom Cruise is the Last Big Movie Star, of course. But there’s still something mechanized and energizer–bunny about the guy. We all know this.
“A real movie star doesn’t just sell tickets — he/she also reflects some rooted, grounded aspect of the culture on some level, or stands for the kind of person we are (or at least aspire to be) deep down. Everyone knew (or at least believed they knew) who the big stars were in the old days — Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, Robert Redford, Al Pacino, Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, Meryl Streep, Clark Gable, William Holden, Humphrey Bogart, Katharine Hepburn, Marlon Brando.
“But nobody really knows who Tom Cruise is, not really. Back in the couch-jumping days there was a suspicion that he might have gone around the bend, that he’d become a Scientology fanatic. That notion has since drifted away.
“And yet he’s been selling the hell out of that guy he’s been playing all along, and he certainly deserves credit for keepingthatactgoing and that engine running for nearly 40 years. And for the most part his movies have long stood for quality.
“Cruise has been a major brand and a highly influential audience motivator since Risky Business (’83) and right now he’s obviously riding high off the response to Top Gun: Maverick (currently $291 million domestic and Cruise’s highest-ever grosser).
“So good for him and more power, but he’s always seemed a little too guarded for my tastes. For what it’s worth I’d like to see him play more guys in the vein of Vincent, that gray-haired assassin in Collateral, and that cocaine cartel pilot in American Made.”
I’m planning to finally watch Matt Walsh‘s What Is A Woman? doc, which has been streaming since June 1st. I happen to feel more in synch with Walsh’s views about gender ideology and slightly less in favor of gender positivism, which has been flirting with gender wacko-ism. I wouldn’t characterize my views as dismissive or transphobic — I’m more of a trans-questioning type of guy.
I’m completely down with Bill Maher’s “Along For The Pride” rant that he delivered two weeks ago. I think that Charles Durning‘s farm dad in Tootsie (“Bulls are bulls and roosters don’t try to lay eggs”) was a sensible-sounding guy. I think that the transgender swimmer Lia Thomas competing against natural-born women is tremendously unfair. And I don’t see what’s so awful about Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Act (aka “Don’t Say Gay”), which prohibits classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity from kindergarten to third grade….what’s wrong with postponing this shit until kids get a little older?
The rhetorical thrust of Walsh’s doc is obviously topical and seemingly sensible, and yet most the critics are ignoringit. That seems unfair and even punitive. I’m still succumbing to jetlag naps (I won’t be out of the woods for another two or three days), but I’ll give it a shot this afternoon.
HE correspondent “Eddie Ginley” recently saw Bong Joon-ho‘s Barking Dogs Never Bite (’00), and was struck by the “guy living in a hidden basement area without anyone noticing” subplot that was re-used in Parasite (’19). Ginley says he “can’t believe no one has ever mentioned this.”
