Month: January 2023

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Please absorb the basics of (a) the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, (b) Stanley Kramer‘s Inherit the Wind (’60), and (c) the small-town Christian zealots who condemn the sensible, scientific-minded Bertram Cates (Dick York), his defense counsel Henry Drummond (Spencer Tracy) and especially Baltimore Herald journalist E.K. Hornbeck (Gene Kelly).

In damn near every scene, the holy-rolling Bible-thumpers are positively throbbing with the spirit, completely convinced of their God-given righteousness, and unwavering in their conviction that Cates, Drummond and Hornbeck deserve to suffer the pains of hell and then some.

Now remove yourself from this small Tennessee town (i.e., Hillsboro) of nearly a century ago, and ask yourself if these Old Testament wackazoids remind you of any particular group or social movement today. Think about it. Take your time.

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From HE commenter “joshsleeps” (opsted last night): BREAKING: TRANSCRIPT OF JASON WEINBERG‘S SECRET MOTIVATIONAL SPEECH LEAKED [wee below]:

“Alright, you fucksticks. Kate, Edward, Charlize, Jennifer, Amy, Susan…if you ever want another nomination you’d better get your asses in line and start tweeting about Andrea right effing now.

“Oh, what’s that? I don’t give a shit if you haven’t seen the movie. As far as you’re concerned this is the greatest female performance of all time. I’m talking all day, e’ryday — I wanna see tweets and grams.

“Jamie Lee! Put. That. Coffee. DOWN. Oh, you think I’m fucking with you? I assure you, I am not fucking with you. Who do you think bought your nod this year? I’ll take it back faster than you can say ‘It’s an honor just to be nominated.’

“Katie, honey, you want Avatar 5? You better sign up to host a screening right fucking now.

“Gwynnie, you wanna keep that sweet sweet Goop cash and avoid an IRS audit, you’ll ‘gram that Andrea deserves all the awards — even the ones that haven’t been invented yet! Yes, I’m dead fucking serious.

“Howard! Don’t think your washed-up ass is exempt from any of this. Next time I’m in gridlock on the 405 and trapped with your shit radio show, I’d better hear nothing but Andrea’s name comin’ out your mouth.

“Are we clear, dipshits? It’s fuck or walk, post or host. Guy doesn’t come to a special screening ‘less he wants to vote. You can’t close him, you can’t close shit, you are shit, hit the bricks, pal! Cuz you are finished.

“I have no sympathy for you. Close this nomination, the world is yours. But I don’t hear Andrea’s name come Tuesday morning, you’ll all be shining my shoes. And you know what you’ll be saying? Buncha losers sitting around a bar, ‘Oh, I used to be an actor, tough racket.’

“You’ve been warned. Now go out and make this happen. For Andrea. For me. For you. Or else.”

Team Riseborough (i.e., Andrea and homies) has been more or less given a pass by the Academy. Okay, Academy CEO Bill Kramer has mildly snorted but declared there will be no punitive measures.

HE friendo: “Thank God. Now she wins. Maybe.

“What Andrea really needs right now is Danielle Deadwyler going classy by telling Clayton Davis to siddown and shut up while proclaiming that Riseborough ‘shouldn’t suffer because of over-zealous friends…hell, she’s got my vote.’

“Sadly, the safest choice at this stage of the game is Michelle Yeoh. Sadly, the great Cate Blanchett has probably lost the Best Actress Oscar, and certainly her momentum.

“And that’s fine with me. I hated that film but this is is a year when older voters will turn off Everything Everywhere 20 minutes in and STILL vote for Yeoh. They can separate the two.

“Okay, ‘hated’ is a little too strong. I admired that it tried to do something unique. I applaud that in fact. I think it’s just The Emperor’s New Movie. Older voters who don’t want to be seen as dust think it’s hip.”

More Friendo: “I definitely wouldn’t have seen To Leslie without all of this happening. I’m positive I’m in the majority on that.

“What kind of stuns me is that Alison Janney and especially Marc Maron didn’t do more to push their own legitimately worthy little movie. Especially Maron whose WTF podcast has a huge following. Apologies to him if he did that but I missed it if so.

“Ironically speaking, I wouldn’t be surprised if Riseborough herself is drinking heavily these days. I would be.”

I’m sorry but that’s a likely no-go on M. Night Shyamalan‘s A Knock At The Cabin (Universal, 2.3).

Bullshit premise: “A family is abruptly held hostage by strangers while vacationing in a woodsy cabin…’one of you must die in order to avert the apocalypse'”…bullshit. Then again this situation is one of the few instances that would seem to justify owning a Glock.

I would be delighted if M. Night could somehow re-ignite or rediscover what he had going 20 years ago (The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs), but you can’t go home again. Filmmaker-auteurs only have so much psychic essence. Once the well runs dry, there’s no refilling it as a rule.

Dave Bautusta: “[My character] is this giant child. Which is actually his role in the film…a child” Not sure if Mr. Tankbod Ripplehead is being literal; if so this feels like a reveal.

I was just as surprised by the Andrea Riseborough thing as anyone else, but to paraphrase Stephen Stills, “There’s something happening here.” Paul Schrader, Marc Maron, Rod Lurie…something has snapped.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences is just trying to placate the Riseborough conversation — we all understand that, no worries — but there’s an early groundswell thing happening regardless. Right here, right now.

What we’re all witnessing or at least sensing is the very early beginnings of the end of woke tyranny.

I am the groundhog — Hollywood Elsewhere is the groundhog.

Obviously the Riseborough thing (which is partially driven by the “hey, what happened to Danielle Deadwyler?” thing) and the climate of fear within film festivals are separate concerns. But they’re also linked in a certain oblique way.

When Eric Kohn, of all people, is noting that goose-stepping woke groupthink is inhibiting artistic freedom, you know something’s up.

Go ahead and chortle if you want, but I think we’re witnessing the nascent beginnings of a Spartacus moment. It’s some kind of boiling-water, bursting-tea-kettle thing — a combination of a lot of triggers (and not all them contributing to an articulate whole) but it’s some kind of emotional socio-political catharsis that boils down to “we’re tired of this Big Brother-esque, guilt-tripping, Great Cultural Revolution, Twitter tyranny shit and we’re not gonna take it any more…fuck you!”

Remember Kirk Douglas, John Ireland, Harold J. Stone and the others yelling “aahhggh!!” as they attacked the Roman guards inside Peter Ustinov’s gladiator school in Capua?

IndieWire’s Eric Kohn, one of the original woke commissars who once challenged me about the validity of the word “woke” — he suggested it was arguably an imaginary construct used by righties — Kohn actually posted the following paragraph on 1.29.23, and this definitely means something…it means that all the cowards who raise their damp fingers to the wind before saying anything…the cowards are now asking themselves if woke fascism might need to be walked back a bit.

Journalist to Jounalist: “Can you imagine how a movie like Neil LaBute’s In the Company of Men, which premiered at Sundance in 1997, would be received today?” Such a film (a blistering critique of misogyny) wouldn’t be shown today, of course. And that’s what’s the matter.

“Ladies, it’s okay with me.”

This is a thing, right? Remember that TikTok woman posting about how whites needed to stay away from the opening weekend’s commercial showings of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever so black audiences can watch that film “in peace”?

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“…comes bob-bob-bobbin’ along…along!”

Whenever I’ve thought of Cindy Williams, I’ve thought of The Conversation. Her character, Ann, and Frederic Forrest‘s Mark, her lover or husband or whatever, strolling around San Francisco’s Union Square, bugged and haunted and up to something pretty bad. I’ll always think of her in this context…her finest moment.

Honest confession: I’ve never seen a single episode of Laverne and Shirley.

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Speaking as a onetime friend and promotional colleague of Robert Englund, the livewire, ready-for-anything actor who played Freddie Krueger in the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, I’ve always slightly regretted how Englund wasn’t more fully appreciated for his witty, snap-crackle, quasi-Rennaissance Man personality.

Just as the Frankenstein monster image always seemed to diminish or at least darken the classy gentleman aspect of Boris Karloff, there’s always been a lot more to Englund than that red-and-green sweater and those long razor fingers.

Which isn’t to say that Hollywood Dreams and Nightmares: The Robert Englund Story, a forthcoming doc about Englund, won’t be worth a watch. Pic will have a brief theatrical run in late spring before the streaming launch on June 6th.

“Brief Shining Moment of Freddiemania,” posted on 1.17.15:

“I’m recalling my efforts as a freelance public relations guy for New Line Cinema in ’85 and ’86, and particularly my promotion of Jack Sholder‘s A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge, and even more particularly the semi-phenomenon know as ‘Freddiemania,’ which originated with spottings of movie fans dressed as Freddy Krueger a la Rocky Horror for midnight showings of Wes Craven‘s A Nightmare on Elm Street (’84).

“There weren’t that many Freddy freaks to be found, to be perfectly honest, but it was an interesting and amusing enough story to persuade Entertainment Tonight and the N.Y. Times and other big outlets to run pieces on it and to speak with Sholder (who later directed The Hidden, one of the finest New Line films ever made) as well as Freddy himself, Robert Englund, with whom I became friendly and hung out with a bit. (Producer Mike DeLuca was a 20 year-old New Line assistant at the time.) One of my big Freddy promotional stunts was persuading Englund to march in New York’s Village Halloween Parade on 10.31.85 from Houston Street up to 14th or 23rd or something like that.

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The below image was captured yesterday morning (dawn) during a balloon ride over the Serengeti National Park in northern Tanzania. You can disagree and that’s fine, but it immediately struck me as being in the same aesthetic realm as Freddie Young‘s work on Lawrence of Arabia (’62).

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We all understand that first-class Blurays of 1950s big-studio features that were captured on large-format celluloid (VistaVision, Cameras 65, Technirama, Super Panavision, etc.) are glorious eye candy.

Last night I was in heaven as I savored the just-right compositions in Joshua Logan‘s Sayonara (’57), which was shot by Ellsworth Fredricks in Technirama (35mm film run horizontally at 8-perf, or the same as VistaVision). 1080p resolution is great but 4K UHD is better, etc. My God, the fine threads in those Air Force uniforms, Marlon Brando‘s gistening brown hair, the naturally luminous Kyoto exteriors, etc.

But where are those other 4K large-format titles? Why are we still waiting for a 4K UHD Bluray of John Ford‘s The Searchers, which was one of the first Blurays on the market (released on 10.31.06) but which desperately needs to be remastered and 4K’ed and generally brought uo to to speed. Ditto Ben-Hur, shot in Camera 65 and expensively and immaculately transferred to Bluray 11 years ago, but no 4K upgrade on the horizon. Ditto North by Northwest, also shot in VistaVision but not even a promise of a 4K version.

Nobody’s in a hurry, dragging our feet, we’ll get there when we get there, etc.

You can therefore understand my initial excitement when I discovered a claim on Home Theatre Forum, posted on 9.25.22 by a Danish film buff named Kevin Oppegaard (aka “titch” on HTF), that he’d seen “a beautiful, absolutely flawless 4K DCP…if Warner Bros. ever decides to release this on 4K UHD, there will be much rejoicing.”

And yet Oppegard, I’ve been told, is apparently full of shit. A guy who’s reliably in the know informs that Warner Home Entertainment’s DCP of The Searchers is only 2K, and represents the work done 16 years ago.

Somewhere in the Copenhagen area, Kevin Oppegard has just put on a pair of dark sunglassas and a lumpy fishing hat, and is shuffling off into the crowd.

Also not to be trusted is a website claim by Seattle’s Grand Illusion theatre, stating that a “new 4K restoration” was screened a year ago (2.3.22). The same insider informs that WHE’s DCP of North by Northwest is 4K, but if the Grand Illusion presentation really was a true 4K finish (as the web page implies), it would not be of sufficient quality for a 4K UHD release.

The Searchers and North by Northwest are candidates, of course, for eventual 4K UHD release, but there’s nothing to spill at the present time.

I’m not saying that the argument put forward by the “get Andrea Riseborough and her supporters” crowd (Variety‘s Clayton Davis, Puck’s Matthew Belloni, Till director Chinonye Chukwu) ever had any real traction, but for a day or so the anti-Riseborough contingent made some noise and seemed to generate an “uh-oh” atmosphere.

But I think it’s fair to say now that their side in this debate (i.e., the wokester position) is weakening as we speak and they’re basically adopting a rope-a-dope stance. Reasonable, fair-minded human beings are standing against them and their vague allusions to some kind of conniving, elitist, white-person, anti-equity cabal…that’s all going away, I’m afraid. I can feel it.

Director Rod Lurie put it nicely earlier today on Facebook: