9:40pm: I tweeted a reply to Zoe Rose Bryant as follows: “Hey, Zoë, I’m a straight white dude, okay, but Jordan Ruimy’s parents are North African so he doesn’t quite qualify. Oscar death to EEAAO!”
Bryant, whose award-season sentiments are basically or mostly “everything is wonderful…every film, every performance…love it all!”…Bryant has bravelyblockedme so my tweet doesn’t exist on Twitter. So here it is.
What Zoe meant, in part, is that despite his ethnic heritage, Jordan sounds like a “white dude.” He has that “white dude” attitude. Meaning that he doesn’t seem to understand movies as fully as she does.
Posted 2 and 1/2 years ago, way back in July 2020….time flies when you’re absolutely loving your life. Back then there were assholes commenters (like the late “Seasonal Affleck Disorder“) who kept writing “what will it take to get Jeff to stop posting about this crap…everything’s fine…just write about loving movies!”
Gene Siskel: “You have to summon the courage to say what you honestly feel [about a film]. And that’s not easy. There’s a whole new world called political correctness going on, and that is death to a critic, to participate in that. Wanting be liked is another…forget even the world of political correctness. Wanting to be liked, wanting to go along with the group [is] death to a critic. [Forget all that and] take your best shot.”
Roger Ebert: “When you said the word ‘political correctness’ it made me think of college students working for the student papers or writing papers that are going to be read out loud in class…political correctness is the fascism of the ’90s. This feeling that you have to keep your ideas and your way of looking at things within very narrow boundaries or you’ll offend someone. Certainly one of the purposes of journalism is to challenge that kind of thinking. And one of the purposes of criticism is to break boundaries. But what politically correct students are training themselves to do today is to lie…to lie.”
HE to Siskel and Ebert in heaven: Those politically correct college students of the late ’90s are now in positions of power and running the show. You wouldn’t believe what’s happening today at the N.Y. Times, for example. And that p.c. culture has become extremely censorious and punitive. They’re meting out punishment to transgressors and contrarians, and the ultimate p.c. punishment is called “cancelling’ — they’ll murder you on a digital platform called Twitter and get you fired if you persist in saying the wrong thing…so in the film realm if you depart from the officially sanctified view of this or that topic according to, say, Guy Lodge or Jessica Kiang, you’ll get beaten up by the mob. You could even be forced to drive for Uber or work in fast food if you’re not careful.
And you know what else? Many of the smartest big-time critics are just going along with this. Because they’re mice…because they’re afraid of standing up. It’s not that different from the Commie witch hunts of early to mid ’50s. [Thanks to Jordan Ruimy for passing along clip.]
Ebert text from heaven, just received: “Let’s say, for example, that you’re not as much of a fan of the great Ennio Morricone as others. That might brand you as being less perceptive than you should be, but you are absolutely entitled to say that without dodging punches.”
The spooky closing montage is the crowning crescendo of William Cameron Menzies‘ Invaders From Mars (’53). Without this sequence the film would amount to much less, certainly in terms of present-day esteem. The combination of that eerie choral music (composed by Mort Glickman, orchestrated by Raoul Kraushar) along with those trippy reverse-motion shots still get under your skin.
A huge round of applause to editor Arthur Roberts, and an extra round for Glickman — the choral music delivers the spook and the soul.
The new Ignite Bluray arrived just a couple of days ago, and on one of these video essays Glickman is given credit for the music by Invaders restoration master Scott MacQueen. Joe Dante and John Landis also deliver excellent commentary in the same essay.
Apologies for the crappy video capture — I should have shot it last night.
I was sitting in seat E5 during yesterday afternoon’s Avatar 2 screening. The “show” started at 2:15 pm, but as we all know that meant the film itself wouldn’t start until at least 20 minutes of trailers had unspooled. As it happened the film didn’t begin until 2:40 pm. During the 25 minutes of trailers two seats to my left were empty, but I figured the purchasers would show up at the last minute. They didn’t, and after a while I started to say to myself “hey, this is pretty good…maybe I can move over and stretch my legs.”
At 3:07 pm the seat purchasers finally showed up. 27 minutes after the film had begun. The fact that both were overweight had nothing to do with anything, of course. Avatar 2 seats are expensive, and they had to have reserved them a good 10 days in advance. How undisciplined and chaotic does your life have to be to cause this much delay? This wasn’t just another movie –it was an opening-day showing of one of the biggest films of the year. Did they forget? One of them couldn’t get out of the bathroom? I gradually pushed these thoughts out of my head, but it took a while.
Avatar 2 runs 192 minutes — add on 25 minutes of trailer promos and you’re talking 217 minutes. That’s obviously part of the exhaustion factor — it’s grueling to be bombarded with loud, floor-vibrating, super-sized images for three hours and 37 minutes. Lawrence of Arabia runs ten minutes longer (227 minutes) but that film doesn’t rough you up like Avatar 2 — it’s visually vast and eye-filling, but huge portions are dialogue-driven.
Pre-Elon Musk Twitter may not have done the right journalistic thing by suppressing the sad, pathetic sagaof Hunter Biden during the ‘20 ejection, but I’m glad they did it regardless. Because the Hunter Biden scandal is nothing, as I explained early last September:
Before yesterday’s 2:15 pm Lincoln Square screening of Avatar2 they showed the trailer for James Gunn’s GuardiansoftheGalaxy, Vol. 3 (Disney, 5.5.23). My spirit sank — anotherMarvelattitudegoofballfan–servicecomedyinspace. The patience of Chris Pratt’s Peter Quill once again tried by Dave Bautista’s Drax the Destroyer…really bad for the soul, man. Pit of depression.
