Day: April 7, 2023

I’m hearing that Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (6.30.23) is “another Top Gun: Maverick in that it’s a love letter to a bygone moviegoing experience.”

Director James Mangold, I’m told, is “very deft in mining the same turf as Rocky Balboa, depicting an aged actor and character taking a valedictory lap. Harrison Ford brings the goods, but it’s Phoebe Waller Bridge who truly ups the game, playing her part like a young Diana Rigg. Audiences will love her character and performance. The film will pack theaters.”

Fine, I said, but I don’t trust Mangold AT ALL. The trailer tells me they’re recycling old jokes and old bits. It looks like a slick franchise tribute and that’s all.

Reply: “Once again, Phoebe Waller Bridge is the key to the film. She gives it heart and soul and wit.

“Contrasting the proverbial disgruntled and grumpy older Ford against hippies in the 60s is what works. He’s an old man yelling at clouds and kids to get off his lawn, but he’s the only one that perceives the dangers of the assimilated enemies working for the American government at NASA.

“Mads Mikkelsen‘s villain is a former Nazi scientist like a Werner von Braun, now working for NASA. Basically a sardonic and philosophical Doctor Strangelove type. Mikkelsen uses a little Peter Lorre-styled menace laced with sinister humor.”

Letter to N.Y. Times from Barbara Barran of Brooklyn: “During President Biden’s State of the Union speech, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert repeatedly interrupted him, with Ms. Greene screaming, ‘Liar!’ Both women are still members of Congress.

“But let two Black representatives in Tennessee — Justin Jones of Nashville and Justin J. Pearson of Memphis — protest the lack of gun control legislation after children were massacred, and they are thrown out of office by the Republicans.

“What a travesty! What a terrible place this country has come to!”

I’ve always loved this “explaining The Searchers” scene from Martin Scorsese‘s Who’s That Knocking At My Door? (’68). Filmed in ’65, the 26-year-old Harvey Keitel is trying to make Zina Bethune, 20, with his knowledge of and passion for John Ford‘s The Searchers (5.16.56).

It’s really Scorsese talking, of course. You’re left with a presumption, in fact, that Scorsese probably attempted any number of seductions along these lines.

Over the decades many people have proclaimed their knowledge of and passion for The Searchers. The first significant “we need to take a fresh look” piece was written in ’79 by New York contributor Stuart Byron. His money phrase was calling it the “Super-Cult Movie of the New Hollywood,” and that certainly stirred the pot for a lot of folks.

On 8.9.11 the late Peter Bogdanovich sought to re-start the engine with an IndieWire piece in which he The Searchers “not only among the very best, but also among the final Western masterworks of the movies’ golden age.”

Largely for the sake of obstinacy I posted a counterpunch piece a couple of days later (“Hard-To-Love Searchers“) and I was mostly hated on for doing so. You’re worthless, stupid…kill yourself! Sure thing.

And then on 3.18.13 Scorsese himself posted a conflicted, yes-and-no Searchers love essay in The Hollywood Reporter.

That was ten years ago, and I think that as time moves on it’s going to be less and less dangerous or dicey to assess The Searchers in less-than-glowing or semi-religious terms. Scorsese’s wisest observation in the THR piece was that director John Ford personally related to John Wayne‘s Ethan Edwards, the gruff, scowling, racist-minded loner at the heart of this 1956 film. This is precisely why the present-tense viewers are considerably less enamored (if in fact they ever were enamored) of this rather thorny and at times cruel-hearted film.

Scorsese’s basic thought is that while The Searchers has some unfortunate or irritating aspects, it’s nonetheless a great film and has seemed deeper, more troubling and more layered the older he’s become. Which is well and good but you always have to take Scorsese’s praise with a grain of salt, I think. A lifelong Film Catholic, Scorsese has always been a gentle, generous, big-hearted critic. Show him almost any mediocre film by a semi-respected director and nine times out of ten he’ll look on the bright side and turn the other cheek. Has he ever written anything even the least bit mean or cutting or dismissive?

My basic view of The Searchers, as I wrote in ’07 or thereabouts, is that “for a great film it takes an awful lot of work to get through it. I don’t know how to enjoy The Searchers any more except by wearing aesthetic blinders — by ignoring all the stuff that drives me up the wall in order to savor the beautiful heartbreaking stuff (the opening and closing shot, Wayne’s look of fear when he senses danger for his brother’s family, his picking up Natalie Wood at the finale).

That said I can’t help but worship Winston C. Hoch‘s VistaVision photography for its own virtues. And speaking of the lush lensing, the last and only Searchers Bluray popped 16 and 1/3 years ago (12.8.06). It’s well past time to issue a remastered 4K version.

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Julius Avery‘s The Pope’s Exorcist is obviously garbage, but HE admires the final paragraph in Guy Lodge‘s Variety review.

“A sloshed Chet Huntley speaking to an equally hammered David Brinkley during New Year’s Eve coverage in 1966: “You know, David…sometimes I wish I was single. I’m fairly wealthy, I’m famous and there are all these women around. I’m telling you it’s a tragedy. And my wife and I…all right, I won’t go there. But God, would I love to sow a few wild oats before it’s too late! I mean, let’s face it, David…we’re both gonna be dead some day.” — from HE’s 1.1.17 coverage of Don Lemon’s inebriated New Year’s Eve coverage in New Orleans.

Variety‘s Brent Lang is reporting that Air has a two-day tally of “just under” $6 million, having earned $2.4 million yesterday (Thursday, 4.6) and $3.2 million on Wednesday, 4.4. To me that sounds more like “just over $5.5 million” than “just under $6 million.” but whatever.

Pic is expected to finish with $16 million as of Sunday night. It opened in 3500 theatres and has, so far, a per-screen average of $939 or something close to that.

Air cost $90 million to produce, but it sure doesn’t look it. It looks like a $45 million movie, if that. It’s 85% to 90% interiors (Nike Beaverton offices, Chris Messina‘s agent office, bar/restaurants, a 7/11 store, Matt Damon‘s home) plus some Beaverton exteriors, some roadways and a simulation of a Wilmington, North Carolina neighborhood plus the Jordan backyard.

Deadline‘s Anthony D’Alessandro: “For the type of feel-good, inspirational, star-driven dramedy this is, many in town are rooting for this movie to do well. For if Air can leg out, it provides hope to motion picture studios for the types of movies that can work post-pandemic.”

The likely truth is that the Super Mario Bros. morons are sensing or smelling a “dad movie,” and they’re obviously not breaking the doors down to see Air. Plus three out of five Air viewers so far have been male (“59%” male, according to D’Alessandro) which means a fair percentage of women are either being dragged to it or quietly deciding to wait for streaming.

Friendo: “I don’t think anyone will dare report that this is any kind of bomb. There’s too much at stake.” HE to friendo: “It’s not a bomb — it’s just performing modestly. It was never going to be a runaway hit. What matters — this is a huge factor — is that it delivers spiritual uplift.”

As one who’s occasionally accepted and enjoyed freebies from movie studios, it’s hard for me to feel outraged about the recent report that Supreme Court Judge Clarence Thomas and his rightwing nutbag wife Ginni acccepted lavish favors from GOP megadonor Harlan Crow over a couple of decades.

Is Thomas guilty of a punishable ethics violation? Almost certainly, but everyone “takes” to varying degrees. It’s the way of the world among the ambitious, the well-positioned and the hungry-for-more set.

If I could force Thonas to resign by clapping three times, I would clap three times. But they all do it.

I tend to avoid or at least suffer through prison movies as a rule. To varying degrees they’re all about yearning for freedom, of course, but they always feel more confining than liberating (i.e., why does the caged bird sing?) and because life itself, for me, has always been about the defiance of suppression, confinement and regimentation so I already knew that tune backward and forward.

I don’t need and in fact have been forbidding the idea of a movie reminding me about these basic terms, and I’ve felt this way since my early teens, which is when I started to understand the degree of dull underlying horror that permeated normal middle–class life. This is how it seemed, at least, in suburban New Jersey (Westfield) and exurban Connecticut (Wilton).

As much as I admire Morgan Freeman’s performance in The Shawshank Redemption, I’ve never been able to derive any real pleasure or payoff from that film. Ditto Papillon, Birdman of Alcatraz, Bronson, Hunger, The Green Mile, Starred Up, Each Dawn I Die, 20,000 Years at Sing Sing, et. al.

Don’t even mention Oz or Orange Is The New Black.

The only prison flicks I’ve enjoyed, unsurprisingly, are about breakouts. Don Siegel’s Escape From Alcatraz (‘79) is the champ. Stuart Rosenberg’s Cool Hand Luke (‘67) is more about the spirit of freedom than escape, but it still qualifies. Ben Stiller’s Escape at Dannemora** (‘18) is an excellent bust-out film. I love the comical breakout sequence in Peter Yates’ The Hot Rock (‘71).

There’s one exception to my rule — a prison flick that isn’t about escape and just says “fuck it — life on the block is what it is” while staking claim to being a serious meditation on morality and jailhouse ethics: Robert M. Young and Miguel Pinero’s Short Eyes (77).

A couple of months ago I visited a friend who lives near the village of Ossining, which is about 40 miles north of Manhattan and is the home of Sing Sing prison. Peter Falk grew up there, and during an interview he recalled that all the lights in the town would flicker and grow dim whenever a guy was getting fried in the chair.

** Escape at Dannemore is actually a limited series so that makes it a whole different bowl of rice!