Walter Hill is not crazy. He’s not eccentric. He turned 80 last January, and he’s Walter “you’d better believe it” Hill, and this is how he put it:
Month: November 2022
Starting To Blur In My Mind
If I could magically transform Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, Part One into a film that I would be genuinely interested in seeing as opposed to one that I’m vaguely or robotically inclined to see out of a sense of habit or historical duty, I would make it into a film about assassinating Vladimir Putin. But an extra-clever, light-fingered hit that’s so fleet and stealthy that no one even realizes it’s a hit.
Okay, his security guys might strongly suspect that Ethan and the team were behind it, but they can’t prove anything. The ice-picking of Putin pulled off with the same efficiency that Paul Newman and Robert Redford and the gang used to fleece Robert Shaw in The Sting. I would love to see that movie.
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One opens on 7.14.23. Dead Reckoning Part Two pops on 6.28.24.
Never Trust Anyone
…who claims to have been “violently ill.” Even if you’ve become stricken with some awful stomach virus that results in uncontrollable vomiting, say, I don’t trust that term. It sounds too rehearsed or cooked up. Like something you might say after a facetime phone chat with your publicist.
The sickest I’ve ever been happened in Marrakech in the summer of ’76. It came after eating a dish of Couscous at a rooftop restaurant. I awoke around 1 ayem, weak and whimpering. I spent the next twelve hours “making love to the toilet,” as my girlfriend of the time put it.
But there was nothing “violent” about it. It was more about laying down and surrendering to the void. Around 3 or 4 am I said to myself, “Okay, this might be it…I might die. But at least when I depart this awful nausea will stop, and I can merge with the infinite in peace.”
Posted from Santa Barbara on 1.18.20:
Telugu Epic for Simpletons
RRR is flamboyant garbage. Ludicrous, primitive Telugu crap. Cruel British paleskin colonists are ridiculous. Moronic liberation mythology. Over-done, over-baked, horribly acted and three hours long. Pic has its heart in the right place, and believes in ridiculous extremes and heroic absurdities…it spits on reality & naturalism, celebrates cartoon-level tropes…if only I were four or five years old! Alas, I’m a bit older. Alas, I have certain minimal standards.
Okay, the musical dance sequence at the British party (Brits vs. Browns) is approvable. Reminded me of that classic tribe-vs.-tribe dance sequence from Michael Kidd’s Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.
Ram Charan is cool in a fierce, hardcore way. But N.T. Rama Rao Jr. is impossible, not to mention heavy-set.
Friendo: “Of course the Brits are ridiculous. And so is the imagery and use of music. It’s an absurdist comedy.”
HE to friendo: If you say so.
Durling’s Virtuoso Rundown
HE approves of Roger Durling‘s Virtuoso choices for the 2023 Santa Barbara Film Festival (2.8 thru 2.18).
Elvis‘s Austin Butler! Banshee’s of Inisherin‘s Kerry Condon! Armageddon Time‘s Jeremy Strong! Tar‘s Nina Hoss! Till‘s Danielle Deadwyler!
Durling has also invited The Inspection‘s Jeremy Pope to share the limelight.
During has also tapped Stephanie Hsu and Ke Huy Quan from Everything Everywhere All at Once. I can’t fathom how Durling, a true Renaissance man, could possibly love Everything Everywhere as much as he seems to. I’m figuring it’s a token salute to the film’s popularity among Zellennials plus the Asian-American DEI factor. I refuse to believe that Roger actually likes and admires this punishing, wafer-thin film about the multiverse…no!
The Virtuoso evening will be moderated, as usual, by TCM host and Entertainment Weekly awards correspondent Dave Karger. It’ll happen on Wednesday, 2.15.23.
HE has been faithfully attending and reporting on the SBIFF since…oh, ’04 or thereabouts. Will I be able to attend three months hence? I’d love to but we’ll see.
Hashish Pipe + “Swamp Fire”
Saturday night, sometime after 1 am, decades ago. We’d been passing the hash pipe around, and Swamp Fire, a 1946 Buster Crabbe-meets-Johnny Wiesmuller film, was on the box. About as bad as a C-grade programmer gets, but we were goofing on it.
Right around the one-hour mark, or eight minutes before it ended, the swamp fire finally happened. Flames filled the screen. And somebody at the station broadcasting the film (WOR or WNEW or WPIX) decided to have some fun. The words SWAMP FIRE began flashing on the screen, as if to say “it’s finally happening…the swamp fire has begun!” We couldn’t stop laughing, and soon concluded that the graveyard-shift station guy flashing the title was either bored to tears or was getting ripped with a friend…one or the other.
The screenwriter of Swamp Fire was Daniel Mainwaring, author of “Build My Gallows High” (novel) and the film adaptation, Out of the Past. It’s been claimed that the writer who wrote the most flavorful Out of the Past dialogue was the uncredited Frank Fenton.
HBO Max Tobacco Suppression Continues
It’s not a rumor — some tiddly-wink at HBO Max has removed Warren Beatty‘s cigar from the McCabe and Mrs. Miller promotional art on the HBO Max menu. Ditto Paul Newman‘s cigar from HBO Max’s promotional art for The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean.
I’m presuming that someone figured that it’s wrong to promote smoking of any kind so the cigar was zotzed. HE is calling this an advertising form of woke “presentism.” What’s next? Digitally erasing Robert Mitchum‘s cigarettes in Out of the Past?
“Water Connects All Things”
Thought #1: Since Avatar opened in late ’09 or 13 years ago, I’ve regarded it as a very filling, four-course meal — a complete, nourishing and fulfilling grand slam in all respects. And so I’ve never understood the need or the hunger, even, for any Avatar sequels. Other than the fact that they would make money, of course, but shouldn’t films of any kind (sequels or stand-alones) be willed into existence for reasons other than the mere earning of shekels?
Thought #2: I’m not all that enthused, frankly, about a film in which significant portions take place under waiter, given my own personal inability to breathe in that environment. I’m not a fish and I don’t have gills and the Navi aren’t wearing air tanks or mouthpieces so…
Thought #3: My understanding is that the Navi are, like humans, oxygen-breathing beings with lungs. So how do they manage to stay underwater for long periods of time with relative ease, as if they’re naturally aquatic? Director-writer James Cameron has an answer, of course, but right I’m scratching my head.
Movie-Culture Ruination Took Eight Years
In a 3.21.14 piece called “Don’t Forget What’s Happening,” I wrote that “fanboy flicks are a profitable malignancy. They are well on the way to kicking real, adult-level movies out of mainstream cinemas and into VOD, streaming and other home viewing options altogether.”
That’s exactly what happened over the next eight years. Except now the plague has two heads — fanboy shit plus streaming content that numbs the soul.
“Super-amped fanboy flicks are the latest manifestation of the corporate influences which Pauline Kael lamented in 1980. They are flagships of a trend that are coming closer and closer to suffocating a mainstream movie culture that used to at least occasionally be about mirroring or capturing who we were (our values, needs, hopes) and how we lived. Every now and then theatres were the equivalent of community churches (i.e, places for inner communion and contemplation), but fanboy flicks are turning them into the spiritual equivalent of roller rinks and amusement parks.
“Fanboy flicks are a metaphor for the overall devolution of art and culture, not just in this country but all across Europe and Asia. They are injections of corporate heroin and Hollywood is the dealer. They are not pathways into our common histories and values and deep-down places. They are things we shoot into our minds and souls, but they are obviously inorganic. They’re not herbal tea or pot or peyote. They aren’t even Valium or Xanax. They’re Demerol.”
When “Lincoln” Fell
I felt a bit surprised this morning when I watched this Lincoln clip. Surprised because I don’t remember it….blank. Honestly? I don’t remember a single line or stand-out moment from Daniel Day Lewis‘s Oscar-winning performance. I know that DDL won, of course, and that his Lincoln voice sounded like Matthew Modine on his deathbed. But not much else. Okay, I remember a scene or two with Tommy Lee Jones.
I also recall being somewhat disappointed that Lincoln doesn’t include a single establishing shot of the 1863 White House or U.S. Capitol building.
Plus: President Lincoln was the first to take a hot bath with piped-in water, and I was hoping that Spielberg would briefly acknowledge that…nope. Or show us that toilets were made of wood back then — porcelain toilets weren’t made until the 1880s.
I’m basically saying that Steven Spielberg‘s Lincoln, which opened at the New York Film Festival 10 years and 25 days ago, has all but vaporized in our collective mind. Nobody talks about it or re-watches it or anything.
“Remember The Lincoln,” posted on 2.1.13: Every last Oscar hotshot predicting a Lincoln Best Picture win at the Oscars — Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone, Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson, L.A. Times contributor Mark Olsen, Toronto Star‘s Pete Howell and MCN’s David Poland — will fold and turn tail after Argo‘s Ben Affleck wins the top Directors Guild award tomorrow night. This is an official HE prediction,.
Spielberg blew it with the Clinton endorsement at the Golden Globes. He overplayed his hand and exposed his hunger. That was what tore it.
“What Were The Lincoln people Thinking?‘, posted on 2.3.13: “The DGA Best Director award going last night to Argo‘s Ben Affleck makes it a 99% certainty that Steven Spielberg‘s Lincoln won’t win the Best Picture Oscar.
“Now that we know the score, I’d like to openly ask all the Gurus of Gold and Gold Derby prognosticators who stuck with Lincoln all through December and especially January a simple question: why? What tea leaves told you that there was enough serious passion out there to push this well written, ploddingly paced, passionately performed grandfather clock of a movie into the winner’s circle?
“We now know that the passion was never there, not really. And yet for weeks Team Lincoln told us over and over again “it’s the likeliest winner, what other film has the stature?, it has to happen, it’s Spielberg’s best in years, it’s too good a film, it’s about a legendary U.S. President, it’s made well over $100 million” and so on.
“Even after those Argo wins at the BFCA, Golden Globes and the PGA and especially after Bill Clinton‘s Lincoln plug at the Golden Globes suggested to some of us that the hand had been overplayed, a lot of people still held fast. Why? What vibrations from what insect antennae told you to stick? I’m honestly curious.
“Yes, I had Lincoln down as my own Best Picture prediction for a while but I did so with resignation and depression. From the beginning I saw Lincoln as a lazy default choice. It was just sitting there like a lump of mashed potatoes. I couldn’t wait to dump it after sensing a change in the wind.
“My pet theory: The downfall of Zero Dark Thirty sealed Lincoln‘s fate. If ZD30 hadn’t been torpedoed by the Stalinists and had held on the strength it had in early December with all the critics awards, it would have taken a lot of support away from Argo, which after all is a more congenial and entertaining version of the same basic story (i.e., a brilliant CIA maverick bucks the bureaucratic tide in order to push through a secret, risky-seeming CIA operation in the Middle East that involves hoodwinking Islamic militants and which ends in delicious success). The Argo and ZD30 votes might have split the faction that is now voting entirely for Argo, and Lincoln might have inched ahead and become the favorite…maybe.”
“Lincoln Fades In The Mind,” posted on 7.6.19.
Against My Better Judgment
I’m going to watch RRR tonight, and I feel as if I’m about to have a tooth extracted without anasthesia. I don’t know for a fact that I’m going to hate it (how could I?), but I strongly suspect that I will. I’ve watched a few low-rent Indian schlock films in Indian restaurants; maybe if I watched it while eating…