Day: April 29, 2023

“Margaret” Is All But Finished Theatrically

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Most critics couldn’t control themselves when it came to over-praising Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret. Yesterday they were panting and shrieking and hyperventilating, and guess what? Joe and Jane Popcorn pulled a “meh” and mostly stayed away in droves. Playing on 3,343 screens, Margaret managed a lousy $673 per screen for a projected weekend gross of around $6 million.

Bottom line: Moviegoers didn’t want to pay to see an ABC After-School Special set in 1970. HE called it a generally decent little film, but it couldn’t cut the box-office mustard. Out of time, out of mind.

Deadline’s Anthony D’Alessandro:

Dated Dialogue We’d All Like To See Removed

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Steven Spielberg recently apologized for digitally altering E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial by replacing handguns with walkie-talkies, and everyone seemed to agree — it’s better to leave awkward 20th Century scenes alone and not try to cater to 21st Century sensibilities.

Hollywood Elsewhere agrees in the matter of E.T. but not in other cases. I’m referring to unwelcome dialogue in Goldfinger (’64), One Two Three (’61) and Rear Window (’54).

There’s a post-coital scene in Guy Hamilton‘s Goldfinger when Sean Connery explains to Jill Eaton about the proper temperature for drinking champagne. “My dear girl, there are some things that just aren’t done,” Connery says, “such as drinking Dom Perignon ’53 above the temperature of 38 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s as bad as listening to the Beatles without earmuffs.”

It’s amazing that the Beatles/earmuffs line made it into the script, which was written by Richard Maibaum and Paul Dehn. It makes James Bond sound like a stuffed shirt who doesn’t get it, and it’s almost astonishing to consider the fact that no one on the Goldfinger shoot said “wait, do we want 007 sounding like some crabby old guy who hates British rock music?”

The scene really does stop the film cold for a few seconds, and I wouldn’t have a problem if someone wanted to change Connery’s line to something less clueless.

There’s a moment in Billy Wilder‘s One Two Three when three MPs (led by Red Buttons) enter the Coca Cola bottling plant and explain to James Cagney that they’re looking for “some dame who has ‘Yankee Go Home’ tattooed on her chest.” (:50 to 1:07 — below)

There’s a great bit when Cagney does his neck-shrug thing and Buttons goes right into a Cagney imitation — “Oh, okay, buster!” But a few minutes later Buttons open up a locker and glances at a polka dot dress with two balloons with “Yankee go home” lettering. Buttons freaks out, slams the locker door and claims he saw a “naked” woman inside the locker except “one of [her breasts] was green, and the other was yellow….take me away!”

This isn’t just an atrocious joke that kills the mood of the film for 20 or 30 seconds — it may be the worst joke line that Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond ever wrote. For years I’ve been telling myself that the whole locker room scene needs to be cut out. I would have no argument with this…none whatsoever.

The third offender is a scene in Alfred Hitchcock‘s Rear Window. During one of Wendell Corey‘s visits to James Stewart‘s Greenwich Village apartment, the discussion turns to whether or not Raymond Burr‘s landlord may have been told about the departure of of Burr’s wife.

Corey hears Grace Kelly preparing food in the kitchen and notices that an open overnight bag with a folded negligee. Corey gives Stewart a teasing look and asks “do you tell your landlord everything?”

This is Hitchcock’s way of suggesting to 1954 audiences that it’s vaguely immoral for single apartment dwellers have sex with each other. That may not have sounded like a ridiculous notion to Ma and Pa Bumblefuck back in ’54, but most audiences were surely okay with sex outside the bonds of wedlock, and certainly between sophisticated New Yorkers like Stewart and Kelly.

In any event I always wince when Corey says that stupid line, and I wouldn’t have the slightest difficulty with the line being eliminated for good.

Musk, Maher, “Woke Mind Virus”

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HE haters can take shots at Elon Musk and repeat their woke-denying bullshit, but please tell me how it’s a good, approvable thing for a typical high-school student to be asked what he/she knows about George Washington, and the first thing out of his/her mouth is “he was a slave owner.” That’s the woke mind virus in a nutshell.

Don’t Count Him Out

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Did those cruel paparazzi shots that surfaced a couple of weeks ago inspire Jack to return to his courtside seat?

If I were Jack I wouldn’t stop there. I would concurrently (a) drop 30 or 40 pounds on a Zen diet, (b) get a Hollywood Elsewhere micro-hair-plug Prague special, and (c) color my my hair so it’s dark gray, not borderline white. But that’s me.

Those perfectly tinted eyeglasses — half amber, half sunset red — are magnificent.

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