Month: December 2022

Remember “Bullet Train”?

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Nobody has been stupid enough, have they, to re-watch Bullet Train over the last three or four months?

From The Telegraph‘s “Worst Films of ’22”, penned by Robbie Colin:

Posted on 8.2.22: I’m sorry but I don’t do summer movies as a rule. Smartly strategized, semi-realistic action and thrills are great (especially if they adhere to the forbidden laws of basic physics, which were more or less banned from filmmaking circles 20 years ago), but later with “turn off your brain and submit to the crap”, which is what Bullet Train is about.

Don’t get me wrong — I adore expertly rendered escapism. Being goosed and transported out of my own miserable head and taken to someplace fresh or surprising or hilarious or super-exciting is what movies have occasionally done for decades, and are certainly still capable of doing, and I mean going all the way back to the absolute gymnastic brilliance of Buster Keaton and his dazzling command of action choreography.

Alas, Bullet Train is not a Hollywood Elsewhere type of action flick. Because director David Leitch, an ex-stuntman who allegedly co-helmed the original John Wick (’14) and then actually directed Atomic Blonde (’17) and Deadpool 2 (’18), hasn’t the slightest interest in delighting people like me, and he might even be the kind of guy who would spit on the sidewalk when Keaton’s name is mentioned.

Okay, he might be a Keaton fan but he certainly doesn’t get him.

I vaguely respect (sort of) the fact that Leitch is basically giving people like me the finger and loving it. I vaguely respect (in a perverse roundabout way) that Leitch is fiercely opposed to realistic action chops and focused on fusing martial arts, manga and dry humor in a kind of bullshit Guy Ritchie wacky cartoony vein.

For all I know Bullet Train, which is looking to excite those tens of millions of action fans who also despise the idea of realistic action (you know, the kind with roots in that tedious realm that exists right outside the theatre doors or when you take off your headphones and turn off your Playstation games), and if it winds up making money, great.

Because that’s who and what Leitch is — a man of impudence and conviction and hunger who’s out to make money. And Sony loves him for that. And Brad Pitt, who was allegedly paid $30 million to star in this thing, is almost certainly swooning with affection.

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When Midler Was In Flower

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I just want it known that I caught Bette Midler‘s “The Divine Miss M” show at the Berkeley Community Theatre (1930 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA 94704) on Saturday, 9.29.73.

Terry Anzur’s review appeared the following Tuesday (10.2.73) in The Stanford Daily.

My group included ex-girlfriend Sherry McCoy, her sister Donna and three or four pallies who shared a place on San Francisco’s Russian Hill. Tons of gay guys dressed in drag…quite the colorful community. And the crowd roared when Midler, carrying a pair of pink feather boas, ran out to ecstatic applause. Her opening number was “Friends.”

After the show we all went to the backstage door to watch Bette come out and sign autographs. Her hair was tied up in a bun (or she didn’t have the red wig on…whatever), and when she came out and waved ‘hi’ to the onlookers, Donna said “who’s that?” My eyes rolled into my forehead.

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HE’s Anti-“EEAAO” Campaign Is Working

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THR’s Scott Feinberg has abandoned Everything Everywhere All At Once as his #1 pick for the Best Picture Oscar winner, and has shifted Top Gun: Maverick into the top slot. Variety’s Clayton Davis also got behind Maverick a few days ago with EEAAO relegated to fourth place.

Thank fortune that Feinberg and Davis have faced reality and “seen the light”, so to speak.

Ke Huy Quan (i.e., “Short Round”) might win the Best Supporting Actor Oscar but EEAAO is all but finished as far as betting on the Big Prize is concerned.

And this is how it should be. Standards of cinematic decency are prevailing. Let everyone understand that HE is the epicenter of the worldwide EEAAO takedown campaign…a cause near and dear to the hearts of all serious cinema lovers.

Pele Eternal

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The great Pele has succumbed to cancer at age 82. Pele‘s reputation as Brazil’s (and indeed the world’s) GOAT soccer player soared during the late ’50s, ’60s and early to mid ’70s. Lacking a sports gene, I didn’t pay attention to Pele until he appeared as a costar in 1981’s Victory (aka Escape to Victory), at which point he was 41 and essentially retired. Victory was a full-of-shit World War II fantasy sports flick — one of John Huston‘s most unfortunate director-for-hire gigs.

“Some Like It Hot” Meets Presentism — Woke, Diverse, Nonbinary, etc.

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I’ve been told that Broadway’s diversified, woked-up stage musical of Some Like It Hot isn’t doing so well commercially. No stars to speak of is one reason. Overly woke-icized may be another.

The show ignores the basic scheme of the Billy Wilder’s 1959 classic, making more than half the characters black with the Jerry/Daphne character (played by Jack Lemmon in the Wilder film) embracing transgenderism and yaddah yaddah. And the show buries the film’s final line — “nobody’s perfect.” Of course it does!

Directed by Casey Nicholaw and featuring Christian Borle (Joe/Josephine), J. Harrison Ghee (Jerry/Daphne), Adrianna Hicks as Sugar (called Sugar “Kane” Kowalczyk when she was played by Marilyn Monroe) and Kevin Del Aguila as an Latino Osgood, Some Like It Hot opened just under three weeks ago — 12.11.22.

HE reader Des McGrath: “The Jack Lemmon character has been rewritten to discover that he is a trans woman over the course of the story.

“The immortal final line? Gone. Instead of Osgood Fielding responding ‘Nobody’s perfect’, he tells Daphne ‘You’re perfect just the way you are’ (or something like that).

“And the Marilyn Monroe character is no longer a dumb blonde but a strong black woman, who sings about how as a child growing up in a small town in Georgia she liked to go to the movies, but ‘could only use the balcony. Like the movies, life could be that black and white.’

“So now she wants to break the color barrier in Hollywood.”

HE to McGrath: “Like the film, the show is set in 1929. Sugar wants to break Hollywood’s color barrier in nineteen-twenty-fucking-nine? The new Some Like It Hot, in short, is another exercise in presentism — transposing the woke sensibilities of today to the jazz age.”

I Was Strangely Submissive

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…when I saw Glass Onion at the Paris theatre sometime around 11.12 or thereabouts. I wasn’t expecting much except, hopefully, a Last of Sheila remake, and when that didn’t happen I kind of just gave up and sat there and went “okay, whatever.” I felt mildly underwhelmed, but not all that pissed off.

I wasn’t irritated by the film as much as by a couple of women sitting two rows behind me. They were laughing…make that shrieking at everything, and loudly. After a while I couldn’t stand it. I turned around and glared at them for a full ten seconds. If I had the power of telepathic messaging I would have conveyed the following to these low-class boobs: “For God’s sake, this movie isn’t too bad if your expectations are sufficiently low, but it’s not that good and you guys are killing the modest enjoyment factor…can you please turn it down?”

Since Glass Onion started streaming on Netflix six days ago (12.23) there’s been a groundswell of negative social-media opinion from non-professional critics. Perhaps this is a fringe thing as the Rotten Tomatoes ticket buyers have given it an overwhelmingly positive response, and of course the mainstream whore critics loved it.

Awesome New Jersey Turnpike Music

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Plus this 1977 song sounds much better without the singing and the lyrics. The point is made by the guitars — nothing more needed.

On Wednesday afternoon (yesterday) I experienced a form of transcendence while listening to this instrumental track. I was moving north on the New Jersey Turnpike, and I suddenly felt more energized and attuned than usual…super-charged even. I felt like I was driving like Steve McQueen in Le Mans. Everything was perfect.

If An Ad Agency Was Stupid Enough…

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…to create this kind of spot today and if the underwear manufacturer and participating TV stations were stupid enough to run it, they’d all be sent packing…cancelled, shamed, run out of the business and condemned to work in fast food for the rest of their lives.

The advertiser was Underdaks, an Australian men’s underwear brand. Shot in 1994, it was temporarily banned from Australian TV after a later-dismissed complaint to the Advertising Standards Council made because of the tagline “He’s probably gay”. Alternate tagline: “Nice luggage”.

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To Be Soul-Kissed by Demi Moore…

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If the kid (actor Philip Tanzini) had been, say, 12 or 13 or even 14, I might not feel altogether comfortable watching Demi Moore (19 at the time) give him a hot-mama kiss. But 15 is cool. Plus he was a showbiz kid. Plus he looked like a nerd — that doesn’t mean he wasn’t ready to slam ham at the drop of a hat.

Plus it was 1981 — the dawn of the tits ‘n’ zits era of movies (Losin’ It, All The Right Moves, Risky Business). Everybody knew the score, and the era of woke prudery was several decades off. Tanzini is now 56 years old and probably melting down over the memory.

I was 15 once, and my hormonal surges were like bodily volcanoes…Krakatoa, East of Java. I would’ve dropped to my knees, gotten out a hymn book and praised God if a hotsy-totsy 19 year-old actress had kissed me like that.

I was taking sneaky Saturday trips into Manhattan when I was 15, remember, and occasionally getting goosed by 40ish, creepy-looking gay guys on 42nd Street, and I more or less shrugged that shit off.

One day when I was 15 my mother told me to watch out for older women who might try to take advantage of me, and my only thought was “please…please, God…arrange for an older foxy woman to try to bring thoroughly immoral, anti-Christian sexual rapture into my life!”

Needless to add, Hollywood Elsewhere stands with the 32.9% of Twitter responders who have no problem with this.

Red River D

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There’s something hugely joyful about reuniting with my mail-order John Wayne Red River brass belt buckle. The fact that I’m happy to once again have it in my possession means, of course, that I’m just as much of a racist swine as Wayne was during his lifespan, and has nothing to do with my loving the 1948 Howard Hawks western (which, as the buckle points out, was actually shot in ‘46).