Early Thursday evening I caught Guy Ritchie‘s Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guuerre. Soon after I got into a tennis-match volley with a friend who likes it more than me. I’ve cut out some of our back-and-forth but here’s the gist:

Nearly 40 years ago (in ’85) Robert Towne did an uncredited rewrite of 8 Million Ways to Die (’86), which was director Hal Ashby‘s last film. According to Ashby biographer Christopher Beach, Towne wrote a scene in which Jeff Bridges‘ Matt Scudder shoots a suspect who’s just hit a policeman with an unlikely weapon — a rocking chair. Ashby changed the weapon from a rocking chair to a baseball bat. Towne was furious at Ashby for doing so, and they were never entirely cordial after that.

Bottom line: Either you’re the kind of filmmaker who understands that rocking chairs are far more interesting, or you’re not. Either you get that people are sick of baseball bats, or you don’t.

Ritchie’s Operation Fortune is basically a breezy formula wank…efficent but sick in the soul…an agreeable-attitude, wealth-porn, travel-porn action flick that’s amusing here and there, and is smartly written in a shallow, same-old-crap sort of way. But for all the dry snark and low-key humor it’s basically wall-to-wall baseball bats.

I enjoyed the opening Point Blank tribute, the clop-clop of footsteps with Cary Elwes. I also liked the Burt Bacharach “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head” thievery scene.

Otherwise it felt to me like formulaic Ritchie cynicism, and too slick by half with too many toys and too much wealth and travel porn. Yes, it’s dryly amusing here and there, but to what end? It’s not really doing or saying anything. It’s just about slick action moves and shots muffled by silencers and dry, deadpan dialogue.

Taciturn, good-natured Jason Statham drills 45 or 50 guys, and there’s really nothing going on, nothing underneath…the same old globe-hopping shite.

I didn’t hate Ruse de Guerre but it has no fresh ideas, no real convictions above and beyond a rote Bondian attitude, and certainly nothing approaching what anyone would call nutritious dialogue.

It has an agreeable sense of “fun”, yes. Hugh Grant, the billionaire bad guy, has his cheeky blase attitude. Aubrey Plaza has her cynical, eye-rolling schtick down pat. And yes, there’s a certain tonal confidence…a certain light-hearted mood. But Ritchie just cranks this shit out, y’know?

Why can’t he make an action film with a droll or anarchic political attitude like The President’s Analyst?

Good action movies shouldn’t adhere too slavishly to formula. They should exude a little beyond -the-perimeter attitude. They should try for a little something extra. Something subversive or in some way unconventional.

I appreciated the brusque dispatch…the efficiency, dryness of tone and aloof comic attitude. It wasn’t bad in some respects. But what was it really?

Again, I loved the Point Blank clop-clop tribute and the affectionate nod to Bacharach and Butch Cassidy and other throwaway touches, and I almost enjoyed the fact that Ritchie kept saying to the viewer “this is nothing times infinity…I can crank this shit out in my sleep because I’m a slick hack with a sense of fatalistic humor about myself and you guys don’t care anyway, am I right?

“Your willingness to watch this shit, dear viewers, while shrugging your shoulders…because there is no God, no chance of any feelings of love or honest anger or honest anything…no possibility of surprise or anything at all but rank fuck-all cynicism…I’m nothing and you’re nothing, but at least this movie is carried aloft by wealth porn and travel porn, and for the millionth time this is a movie that regards death as a video-game proposition!”

The relentless goons and their ugly faces and the endless bullets and shell casings and the astronomical body count and the way the movie offers glimpses of the Roman ruins near Antalya but not so much as a second’s worth of reflection about them and…did I mention the wealth and travel porn? Oh, right, I just did. But that cherry red 1965 Mustang hardtop and all those black SUVs and the neck-deep cynicism…aagghhh!

Ritchie’s cynicism is truly, deeply suffocating and draining.

A few days before the 6.25.82 debut of Ridley Scott‘s Blade Runner, Harrison Ford, 39, sat for an interview with the 35 year-old David Letterman on the relatively young Late Night with David Letterman, which had premiered on 2.1.82.

The infinite registerings of discomfort, uncertainty, suspicion and mild anxiety on Ford’s face are riveting, and cumulatively speaking almost represent a more interesting performance than anything he’d ever done on-screen up to that point. He’s really squirming and not afraid to show it, but at the same time he’s trying to be calm and low-key.

I’ve been very thorough over the last several years in explaining why Michael Fassbender‘s career began to slump around ’16 or thereabouts, and why he seemed to be on a four-year hiatus between ’18 and ’21, although he’s been coming out of that. He’s actually on the verge of a career re-boot with (a) Taiki Waititi’s endlessly delayed Next Goal Wins possibly emerging later this year along with (b) Fassbender’s lead performance as a conscience-stricken hitman in David Fincher‘s The Killer (Netflix, 11.10).

By all means read Alexander Larman’s two-day-old Telegraph piece, “Whatever Happened to Michael Fassbender?” and give his various hypotheses full weight.

The Steve McQueen-like race-car obsession thing is interesting, but I suspect he got into that because the acting career was slowing down.

There are at least two reasons why Fassbender’s career started to go cold around six years ago, give or take.

One, he enjoyed a hot six-year streak between ’08 and ’13, but movie lovers began to go cold on the guy around ’16 or ’17, as evidenced by (a) a 6.1.16 HE piece called “Turning Against Fassbender“, (b) the total flopping of The Snowman and Assassins Creed, and (c) the #MeToo allegations that popped through five years ago.

Here’s how I put it nearly seven years ago:

Another key reason why Fassbender ran out of steam is that audiences have never made superstars out of ginger-haired guys. Insane as it may sound, ginger- or copper-haired buys have almost never made it to the penthouse level. There’s something about them that Americans just can’t quite settle in with or bow down to…not really. Fassbender, Lucas Hedges, Paul Bettany, Jesse Plemons, David Caruso, Ed Sheeran, Damian Lewis, Rupert Grint, Alan Tudyk, Brendan Gleeson, Danny Bonaduce, Eric Stoltz, Carrot Top Thompson, David Lewis, Domhnall Gleeson, Rupert Grint, Simon Pegg, Toby Stephens, the great Philip Seymour Hoffman, Chuck Norris, Jason Flemyng, Seth Green, David Wenham…none of them ever made it into the elite winner’s circle, not really. Because people glommed onto that hair and those freckles and went “okay, fine, good actor but nope.”

Only two copper-haired actors in the entire history of Hollywood have become serious superstars — James Cagney and Robert Redford. Except Cagney doesn’t really count because he enjoyed his big-star heyday in the mostly monochrome ’30s and ’40s, and Redford doesn’t count because he became a blonde sometime in the early to mid ’60s and stayed that way until his downshift period began in the late ’80s and early ’90s.

…and thereby celebrate an unmistakably mediocre, wildly over-written and frenetically visualized film about the Marvel martial-arts heebee-jeebies. But that’s okay because voting for the Daniels will affirm and celebrate the growing visibility and influence of Asian identity in modern cinema. Because in terms of woke Oscars, that’s what really matters at the end of the day…identity over quality. (Ask Jen Yamato.) Plus, at the same time, a vote for the Daniels acknowledges and in fact salutes the growing power of fickle-woke, anti-classical, “anything to piss off the 45-plus crowd” critics like David Ehrlich!

“Now, John the blacksmith, he torturing a thief / Says to the hero, the Commander-in-chief / ‘Tell me, great hero, but please make it brief / Is there a hole for me to get sick in?'”

"I think the most special thing about getting these nominations and getting to be nominated together is we're breaking out these records for the Asian community."

"Everything Everywhere All at Once" star Stephanie Hsu on the film's #Oscars nominations. pic.twitter.com/RDk0DTA6Rt

— Good Morning America (@GMA) March 3, 2023

In a 2.28 Vulture piece titled “The Cult of Daniels,” Daniel Kwan, the co-director of Everything Everywhere All At Once, recalls a conversation with his mother, June Kwan, who owns an East Village Asian food restaurant called Spicy Moon.

“My mom was very proud but confused by the [Oscar] nominations,” says Daniel K. “She was like, ‘I know people like the film, but can you explain why people love it?‘”

Bilge Ebiri, the article’s author, also speaks to June directly:

It was reported two days ago that Chris Rock will finally open fire about Will Smith and the Oscar slap in Chris Rock: Selective Outrage, a Netflix livestream broadcast that will “air” on Saturday, 3.4. The show, which will also feature Amy Schumer, Jerry Seinfeld and Leslie Jones, will be performed at Baltimore’s Hippodrome Theatre.

An “insider:” to Page Six: “People need to [stay with Rock’s set until] the last joke…they will not be disappointed.”

Nearly 14 months after debuting at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival, Jamie Dack‘s Palm Trees and Power Lines, a fearless film about teenaged sexual vulnerability if I ever saw one, is finally opening commercially.

I saw it on my computer 13 and 1/2 months ago, and raved…well, not actually. My initial review conveyed serious shock at how dark and sinister this film is. A “holy shit” rave.

I plan on seeing it sometime late tomorrow at the Village East Angelika. The reason it look so long to sell is that very few are going to want to sit through this stunning and ghastly film, albeit composed in a masterful fashion.

The Palm Trees review (1.24.22) by Variety’s Owen Gleiberman conveys a pretty good taste. I expect it to do less-than-zero business.”

“Hawk Swoops Down, Carries Away Prey,” also posted on 1.24: “Three days ago I stated that Jamie Dack‘s Palm Trees and Power Lines, a Sundance Film Festival Dramatic Competition entry, is among the festival’s three best films.

“I actually didn’t convey my true, deep-down feelings, which is that in the realm of stories about young girls dealing with predatory relationships and the sexual issues that always come with that, Dack’s film is one of the most shocking and upsetting that I’ve ever seen — period.

“I’ve already reported that it’s about a hugely creepy relationship between a fatherless 17 year-old (Lily McInerney) and a 34 year-old opportunist and latent scumbag (Jonathan Tucker), and that what happens would make any decent person gag. Without divulging specifics I should add that the film contains what I regard as the most odious and grotesque sex scene in motion picture history. And the ending is completely shattering.

“A friend doesn’t believe the ending, which again I can’t be specific about. But I can at least state that each and every dude in this film is either a dog or a beast. We’re talking implications of sexual cruelty, brutality and animality in every scene featuring a male of any age.

“I recently described the plot to a female friend with a 20something daughter, and she said, ‘This is basically how younger Millennials and GenZ see all white cis men…they think they are all rapists and assaulters.”

“I’m not disputing that many if not most younger males (late teens to mid 30s) are animals in terms of their sexual behavior. This view or judgement is certainly out there, so it wouldn’t be the craziest thing in the world for Dack to share this opinion.

“The shocking part of Palm Trees and Power Lines is the degree to which McInerney’s character is seemingly off-balance and emotionally starved for paternal attention and affection. Because right away you’re wondering how and why McInerney would go out with Tucker in the first place (there are all kinds of red flags). By the end of the film you’re left with an even more perplexing question. I thought McInerney might be safe at the end, and then she does something that made me go “oh my God!”

“You can argue that what she does is not entirely believable, but for me the dramatized horror outweighs the credibility.

“Friendo to HE: “I could totally buy that [McInerney] is damaged and would get seduced by this guy’s tricks…all of it. But as the movie portrays it, what she goes through in that motel room is so horrific, and in both that scene and the aftermath she is so filled with fear, that I just thought: The fact that she’s got daddy issues is going to transcend that?

“Her mother” — a good performance by Gretchen Mol — “seemed nice enough, not perfect but loving. Why would she be so alienated from that home situation?”

Elementary school drag shows for toddlers is basically about soft-clay positive imprinting — acclimating little kids to the idea that gay or trans culture is cool and that homophobia is unacceptable, etc. But the school-board officials approving this stuff are obviously sexualizing grade-school atmospheres, and this is alarming if not horrifying to not just red-state parents but sensible blues.

Where is the upside in agitating parents over their kids being exposed to flagrantly sexual behavior?

Be honest: If you were running a school board in some rural or suburban community, would any of this stuff give you pause? Or would you just say “fine!” and wave it all through?

This is beyond crazy. I thought it was a bunch of Dame Ednas. Instead: this. When will gay organizations say no to this? Why the lockstep defense of the indefensible? The damage these extremists and crazies are doing to gay rights is incalculable. https://t.co/hp7BCwIHhZ

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) March 2, 2023

The real Eddie Ginley has been an HE voice for some time and has posted 3900 comments. The fake Eddie_Ginley, a shit-talker and an all-around bad fellow, has an underscore between his two names and has posted 40 comments. Deep-sixing is obviously required.