Month: December 2022

Against my better judgment I offered to take Jody to an IMAX 3D showing of Avatar: The Way of Water. This evening, I mean. Not at HE’s preferred venue (Loews Lincoln Square, which has a full-sized IMAX screen) but at a cheeseball Cinemark gladiator plex in Milford (fake IMAX, crawling with families).

I suspected that Cinemark would subject viewers to the same 20 to 25 minutes of trailers that AMC does, but I wasn’t sure. So I asked an overweight Millennial ticket-taker (bad complexion, awful tennis-ball haircut) how long the “interminable trailer crap” would run for, and the little wuss became upset at the c-word and walked away. He went over to the manager (male, 40ish, balding) and asked him to deal with me because he felt unsafe speaking to a customer who hates watching trailers and uses mildly vulgar terminology.

I didn’t like the OMTT because I hate overly sensitive Millennials as a rule. All he had to do was spit out the trailer running time — i.e., 25 minutes. Alas, behaving like a man was beyond his ability. We exchanged dirty looks.

After I’d been informed by the manager that the trailer bombardment would indeed run 25 minutes, I walked toward the popcorn counter. Mr. Sensitive Weight Problem came over, pointing and shouting “don’t you ever talk that way to me again! I’ll have you thrown out!”

What? I didn’t vocally reply but I went into a brief theatrical simulation of being scared. “Okay, that’s it…throw him out!”, the fat ticket-taker barked at a security guard.

The guard was older, calmer. “You got a ticket?” I showed him my dinky toilet-paper pass for IMAX theatre #8. “Okay,” he said. “The theatre’s right over there.” But I don’t want to be in the theatre right now, I replied, as I hate watching bombastic trailers. “Okay, but just step away to the side until the fat ticket-taker calms down,” he said.

All right, the guard didn’t actually say “until the fat ticket-taker calms down” but that’s what he meant. I nodded and strolled away.

The bottom line is that Millennials don’t always act like professionals. Their sensitive feelings are what matter the most. Which is why I’m not a fan.

Originally posted on 9.28.16: The only thing wrong with this Warren Beatty-Diane Keaton lovers quarrel scene in Reds is that it doesn’t last long enough. I wish I could have captured this in a way that does more justice to Vittorio Storaro‘s cinematography. It’s just my iPhone 6 Plus shooting an Amazon stream with shitty black levels. But I love the acrimonious energy.

I had a couple of spats like this with a girlfriend just a few months before Reds opened in the fall of ’81. Her name, honest to God, was Louise. She had the most beautiful half-Asian eyes.

Friendo: “You should check out Athena, an amazing action thriller on Netflix, set in the projects on the edge of Paris. Co written and produced by Ladj Ly (Les Miserables was among the 2020 Oscar Nominees for Best Foreign film) and directed by Romain Gavras, the son of Costa Gavras.”

She likes strong, dominant men and you’re too smooth and mushy to qualify. She’s sexier and better looking than you — it would be one thing if you were gym-toned with big broad shoulders to match her large breasts, but you’re not. Plus she’s much more powerful than you (economically, fame-wise) and she’ll soon be punishing you for these shortcomings — trust me. Plus she’ll eventually humiliate you when a more suitable lover comes along. And you’ll never really recover from this. You’ve fucked yourself. If only you’d stayed with Debbie Reynolds…

It’s completely silly to dismiss years ending in 3 as, historically speaking or artistic accomplishment-wise, somehow underwhelming or vaguely forgettable.

But I’ll say it anyway. I’ve always felt a certain dismay about or distance from such annums.

3 is an odd number — I’ve always preferred the evens. I didn’t like being 3 or 13 —the first tolerable year in this stream was when I turned 23, and even that was mildly sucky.

What happened in 1903, 1913 and 1923? Not that much. The only good things about 1933 were the inauguration of FDR and the opening of King Kong. ‘43 was a WWII in-between year. Several films that opened in ‘53 were pretty good (War of the Worlds, Stalag 17, Julius Caesar, Roman Holiday, The Big Heat) but history-wise it was fairly drab. JFK was murdered in ‘63. 1973 was a great Watergate year, but movie-wise it couldn’t hold a candle to ‘71. One of the few good things about ‘83, movie-wise, was the release of Betrayal. ‘93 was a passable movie year (The Firm, Schindler’s List, True Romance, Philadelphia) but let’s not get too cranked up. ‘03 was the farcical invasion of Iraq. I loved many 2013 movies (The Wolf of Wall Street in particular) and my life was going pretty well so ‘13 gets a pass, but I’m not feeling all that great about ‘23.

Born in 1929, legendary TV journalist and probing celebrity interviewer Barbara Walters (aka “Baba Wawa”) has passed at age 93. She bagged so many big-deal, on-camera interviews during her half-century-plus career (many U.S. Presidents, Fidel Castro, Barack Obama, Katharine Hepburn, Monica Lewinsky, Warren Beatty, Vaclav Havel, Boris Yeltsin) that there’s no room to list them all. Not to mention the satirical stamp of Gilda Radner. Not to mention Walters launching of The View in ‘97. Respect for a major influencer & feminist pathfinder.

To me, a young fellow who looks “well fed” radiates…it’s hard to put into words but for me it’s a vaguely uncomfortable vibe. A feeling of teetering on the edge. The definition of well-fed is hard to pin down, and I don’t want to sound dismissive. It refers to the physical look of someone who’s not fat or plump or chubby, but who seems to enjoy eating. Someone who’s just a tiny bit heavier than he/she ought to be.

My silent reaction when I see a well-fed 20something is that they’re…I don’t know exactly. A tad indecisive? Not louche or indulgent enough to be fat, but lacking the discipline to be seriously lean and taut. There’s nothing “wrong” with looking well-fed, but at the same time there’s something not quite right about it. Well-fed means a bit stocky but a few bowls of ice cream short of being bulky.

These thoughts were going through my head as I watched Truman Hanks in A Man Called Otto. Truman is Tom Hanks‘ youngest son and is playing a much younger version of Hanks’ curmudgeonly Otto in flashback. The problem is that Mr. Hanks is super-slim these days and a 20something son is supposed to be slightly slimmer than his 60ish dad so something feels off.

It also doesn’t quite work when the hefty son is taller than his father. Plus Truman seems a little too nice. If you have a cranky attitude when you’re older, you’re going to have a few shards of that attitude when you’re younger as well. I didn’t buy it.

I’m not trying to be brusque or unkind — just candid. I honestly don’t care for the appearance of well-fed types. I remember looking in the mirror when I was 28 and going into shock when I realized that I had “the look.” It freaked me out. I changed my diet and drinking habits right away.

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One of my favorite HE rants, originally posted on 8.1.14 and titled “Please Stop Being Overly Impressed By Smiles, Kindness and Consideration…Please“:

During August or September of 2013 Jon Stewart‘s Rosewater shot footage in Jordan, and in preparation for this costumer Phaedra Dadaleh, a well-established professional in that region, was hired. On 9.11.13 Dadaleh told a Rosewater promotional site that she was “nervous” meeting Stewart, but her concerns quickly evaporated. “He’s just the most amazing, friendly, down-to-earth kind of guy,” she said. “He just got up, gave me a big hug and immediately made me feel at ease.”

That’s cool, Phaedra, and good for you, Jon. But people on movie sets have been saying the exact same thing about major above-the-line types for at least a century if not longer, and they never get tired of saying it. Time marches on and they just won’t stop wetting their pants when name-brand people are as kind and gracious and friendly to them as regular Joes are to each other in the outside world. It’s always “I was afraid this famous hotshot might be brusque or snide or otherwise a dick or a bitch, but he/she was totally the opposite…and he/she made me feel so good.”

Rosewater director-writer Jon Stewart, costumer Phaedra Dahdelah during 2013 filming in Jordan.

I know the feeling, and I’m not saying that many above-the-liners — Jon Stewart among them, I’m sure — aren’t really nice to begin with. But one of the main reasons that bigtime showbiz types have made it to the top is that they’re really good — practiced — at putting on that warm, kind and affectionate face when the situation calls for it.

And one atmosphere in which you’re almost guaranteed to receive warmth and love and hugs is one in which people are always alpha-vibing each other to death from the early morning into the wee hours until it’s coming out of their ears — i.e., a fucking movie set.

People loving and kissing and hugging each other like mad. Hugs, backrubs, bon ami…and every fucking joke and one-liner is either hilarious or very funny or at least somewhat funny. A lot of people do the monkey submission thing by slapping their thighs and bending over and staggering backwards when they laugh at other people’s jokes on movie sets. I’ve been visiting sets all my life, and sometimes I wind up smiling so much that my facial muscles are aching after four or five hours.

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I’ve only just discovered a YouTube clip of the A&P musical dance sequence that closes Noah Baumbach‘s White Noise. It’s the only portion of the film that really and truly works.

I’ve written about this twice over the preceding two and a half months, but it can’t hurt to re-post. It’s titled “White Noise Finale That Could’ve Been.”

Posted on 10.1.22: “The common consensus is that whatever you may think of Noah Baumbach’s White Noise, a dryly farcical ‘80s period drama set in an Ohio college town, the final sequence — an ambitiously choreographed dance sequence featuring shoppers at an A & P supermarket — is the highlight.

“The sequence affirms the film’s basic theme about nearly everyone turning to all kinds of distractions (including food) to avoid contemplating their own mortality.

“Though brilliantly staged, the dance number is undercut by Baumbach’s decision to use it as a closing credits backdrop. Here’s how I put it to a friend:

“The LCD Soundsystem ‘New Body Rhumba’ finale could have been great if Baumbach hadn’t decided to overlay it with closing credits. I almost shouted out loud ‘Oh no!! He’s blowing it!!’

“I’m saying this because once the credits begin we instantly disengage as we tell ourselves okay, the movie’s over so the aisle–dancing is just a colorful bit, a spirit-picker-upper…whatever.’

“If Baumbach hadn’t given us permission to disengage, the dancing could have been wild and mind-blowing in a surreal Luis Bunuel-meets-Pedro Almodovar way. It could have been a mad slash across a wet-paint canvas…a Gene Kelly consumer-orgy crescendo.

“And then it could have segued into a closing credit crawl. Alas…”

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HE commenter Eddie Ginley said it best: “With the notable exception of Green Book, recent winners have been those that (a) haven’t been nit-picked to death and (b) that Oscar voters can live with.”

That’s HE’s basic idea with EEAAO — to chisel and bite and nitpick it to death.