Director Mike Hodges has passed at age 90. He actually died three days ago (Saturday, 12.17.)

Hodges’ career peaked 51 years ago with the release of Get Carter (’71), made when Hodges was 39 or thereabouts and which many consider his greatest film. Many are also serious fans of Hodges’ Croupier (’98). He also directed Pulp (not that good), Flash Gordon (mildly diverting) and I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead (’03 — a kind of Get Carter remake).

Posted on 7.31.22: Michael Caine‘s Jack Carter is an icy, ruthless bastard in Mike Hodges‘ Get Carter (’71). A real brute and a shit of a human being, and yet curiously emotional in a deeply buried sense. Which is to say a psychopath who cares about “family”, or at least about a certain offspring.

Carter is emotionally enraged, to put it mildly, over the death of his brother and the sexual molestation of his brother’s (or more likely Carter’s) daughter, Doreen (Petra Markham) and yet brusquely efficient when it comes to dispatching certain citizens of Newcastle. Five, to be exact, and none of them assassins or muscle types (like Carter) but basically go-alongers.

What stands out in Get Carter isn’t so much that Caine murders three shady fellows — Ian Hendry‘s “Eric Paice” (whose eyes are like “pissholes in the snow”, Carter observes), Glynn Edwards‘ “Albert Swift” and Bryan Mosley‘s “Cliff Brumby” — but also a pair of youngish, attractive women — Geraldine Moffat‘s “Glenda” and Dorothy White‘s “Margaret”.

These two aren’t killed in the heat of rage or passion exactly, but because of their laissez-faire complicity in nudging Doreen into performing in low-rent sex films. They are disposed of without any feeling, but certainly decisively and with absolute precision. (Okay, Glenda isn’t deliberately killed but she certainly wouldn’t have died if she hadn’t associated with Carter, and her ghastly manner of death — drowning in the trunk of a submerged car — rouses not the slightest emotion on his part.)

What other big-screen bastard has killed two prime-of-life women for what boils down to a moralistic motive — for going along with the corruption of a child? I can think of only one other murderer of this generally cold-blooded sort — Richard Widmark‘s “Tommy Udo” in Kiss of Death (’47), although his victim was an elderly, wheelchair-bound woman (Mildred Dunnock).

Seriously, what other bad guy has iced an attractive younger woman or two without blinking an eye? Caine’s Carter isn’t alone, but the others aren’t coming to me.

I’ve finally decided upon the proper sequential order of HE’s top 30 films of 2022. Almost every title has a link to my original review. (Okay, one or two links don’t connect to a “review” as much as a riff that contains opinions.) But this is the final order, and if you insist on only considering a Top Ten list…

Okay, I didn’t really like The Northman, but I respected it. Excerpt: “Excessive isn’t the word — startling, repetitious, numbing, eye-filling, confounding and yet all of a single harmonious compositional piece. Obviously the work of a serious artist. Handsome, exquisitely composed and about as bereft of humanity as a film in this vein could possibly be.”

1. Empire of Light
2. Close
3. Happening
4. Vengeance
5. She Said
6. Emily The Criminal
7. Christian Mungiu‘s R.M.N.
8. Top Gun: Maverick
9. Avatar: The Way of Water
10. Tar (despite the many irritations)

11. Bardo
12. The Banshees of Inisherin (minus the finger stubs)
13. Thirteen Lives
14. Armageddon Time
15. The Menu
16. God’s Country
17. All Quiet on the Western Front
18. Palm Trees and Power Lines
19. Triangle of Sadness
20. Holy Spider

21. The Batman
22. The Northman
23. Living (decent)
24. Argentina 1985
25. Apollo 10 and 1/2
26. Navalny
27. Las Vegas portion of Elvis
28. Watcher
29. Bros.
30. The Fabelmans

In the midst of moving from Los Angeles to Connecticut last July, I forgot to renew my DBA (“doing business as”) certification. I’ve just been told by my principal bank that I have to re-file and re-validate the DBA thing. That means slogging it out yourself and paying a $150 fee to one of those agencies who do it for you. If you know anything about slogging it out on your lonesome you know you have to spend hours online to figure out the process, which usually culminates in physically travelling to some godforsaken Kafka-esque government office and waiting in line…soul-suffocating misery for everyone involved, including the clerks.

Or was it closer to 20 months? When did mask mandates start to lift in a significant way? I can’t even remember.

On 3.1.22 the N.Y. Times reported that mask mandates were being lifted in “several” states, but didn’t masking more or less stop sometime in the fall of ’21? Can’t recall if it was early, mid or late fall.

I know that when I saw Spider-Man: No Way Home at the Grove on 12.16.21 no one was wearing a mask, and that‘s what I first got Covid (i.e., Omicron). But I didn’t care. Because I was so sick of living a mummified pandemic lifestyle that even being sick felt like a liberation.

For roughly 18 months (3.20.20 to the final third of ’21) we were all part of a Vast Army of Suffocated Shut-Ins.

Tatiana and I got the hell out of Dodge twice to escape the awfulness of it all — to the Grand Canyon and Monument Valley area in August of ’20 and then an escape to Belize (lost iPhone, pit-bull attack, dead bats) in June of ’21.

As we speak I’ve been vaxxed four times and have had two four-day bouts with Covid (the last one two or three weeks ago), and I don’t care if I get it again because it’ll just be another flu-like experience and so what?

I died a thousand times during the pandemic, and I’d rather physically die than go through that again.

For several decades I lived as a free soul more or less, acquiring experience, taking my lumps and loving certain moments, and then life stopped sometime around 3.20.20. It was exotic at first, and then it was hellish. Pandemic gov’t assistance was a lifesaver, of course, but that didn’t change the fact that life just slowed to a crawl.

Mainly because Average Joes are reporting that they’re suffering vague headaches and otherwise (as I noted in my initial reaction) feeling exhausted from the weight and length and gut-slammy nature of Avatar 2. Which is partly attributable to its 192-minute length, and partly due to the heavily-saturated visual spectacle.

It’s too familiar, too cliched, too long and, the underwater stuff aside, not as much of an eye-popper as the original Avatar because it’s basically a flamboyant rehash and because so much has happened big-spectacle-wise over the last 13 years.

Avatar 2 is visually masterful and dazzling from start to finish, yes, but, as the Critical Drinker notes, “visual spectacle is nothing new in movies today, and the more you see it in this film, the less impact it ends up having,..it’s like being fed the world’s largest chocolate cake morning, noon and night for an entire year…eventually you get kinda sick of it.”

Plus pic “suffers from a bloated and self-indulgent screenplay that drags on for at least an hour longer than it needs to…the middle family section is 90 minutes of sheer fucking inertia.”

Boiled down, the too-much-chocolate-cake aspect, I think, is what seems to be giving people headaches. (And which may have killed that poor guy in India.) Chocolate cake overload. Avatar 2 may or may not reach the worldwide $2 billion gross that director-writer-producer James Cameron has said it needs to earn to be considered a success, but like I said a day or two ago, three Avatars on Pandora will be more than enough. Please.

The only thing that could prolong the interest factor would be if a huge Navi army travels to our planet to confront the powers-that-be and…I don’t know, demand that they leave Pandora alone. Perhaps a wild-ass battle of some kind, or perhaps some kind of a Davy Crockett goes to Congress denouement…I don’t know. Okay, confronting humans on their own turf isn’t such a good idea. The Navi can’t breathe our air, for one thing.

Three is enough, over and out.