Day: August 2, 2023

Better Quality “Romper Stomper” Gang Fight Scene

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27 months ago I posted a six-and-a-half-minute version of the legendary gang fight sequence from Geoffrey Wright‘s Romper Stomper (’92), one of the most indelible, pared-to-the-bone, punch-kick-and-wallop flicks about hate groups ever made.

It starts with six or seven skinheads (led by an astonishingly young and slender Russell Crowe) beating up on three or four Vietnamese guys in a family-owned pub. But word gets out immediately, and a large mob of furious Vietnamese youths arrive and beat the living crap out of the skinheads. Hate in and hate out. Bad guys pay. Glorious!

Hashtags are well and good but, as Woody Allen said about Nazis in that MOMA-party scene in Manhattan, baseball bats really bring the point home.

I’ve just found a longer (15 minutes), much better looking version of the same sequence. It was posted 10 months ago by “Dunerat.”

Those who’ve never seen Romper Stomper are urged to do so.

Posted on 6.4.21:

One of the reasons Geoffrey Wright‘s Romper Stomper (’92) works as well as it does — an anti-racist, anti-skinhead film that isn’t afraid to dive right into the gang mind and pretend-revel in the fevered currents — is John Clifford White‘s score.

The main theme seems to simultaneously channel skinhead rage and, at the same time, deftly satirize it. I don’t know what kind of brass instruments White used on these tracks — tuba? trombone? — but the sound and mood are perfect. Just a clever instrumentation of a melodic hook and obviously less than complex, but once you’ve heard the theme you’ll never forget it.

Polanski’s “Palace” Seems Like “Triangle of Sadness” Rehash

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No subtitles on the new Italian-language trailer for Roman Polanski‘s The Palace, but the satirical thrust is obvious.

As was the case with the guests aboard a super-yacht in Ruben Ostlund‘s Triangle of Sadness, the super-wealthy guests staying at a deluxe Gstaad hotel on New Year’s Eve in 1999 are arrogant, self-obsessed, super-rich fools, and some have been disfigured by extreme plastic surgery.

The Palace opens in Italy on 9.28. I for one would love an opportunity to see it in NYC prior to the Venice Film Festival.

“Napoleon” Is “Phantom Thread”-ish, A Bit “Weird’

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However Ridley Scott‘s Napoleon turns out, an early consensus began emerging months ago that Joaquin Phoenix‘s titular performance is highly eccentric. Ditto Vanessa Kirby‘s as Josephine.

In an recent interview with Empire‘s Ben Travis, it’s mentioned that during an argument scene Phoenix’s Napoleon slaps Josephine — an unscripted improv, the actors have told Empire magazine.

“We were using the real words from their divorce in the church,” Kirby says. “When that happens, you can faithfully go through an archival re-enactment of it and read out the lines and then go home. But we always wanted to surprise each other.”

Phoenix: Kirby said “whatever you feel, you can do…you can slap me, you can grab me, you can pull me, you can kiss me, whatever it is.”

Kirby: “It’s the greatest thing when you have a creative partner and you say, ‘Right, everything’s safe. I’m with you. And we’re gonna go to the dark places together.’”

Consider a research screening reaction posted on 1.23.23 by World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy:

“In the first half hour Phoenix’s performance is mostly subdued and he speaks in either exposition or military orders, so we don’t have a great sense of the character either. After the Egypt part though the movie really takes off and becomes fantastic, I would say Scott’s best historical movie.

“Weirdly the movie I was reminded of most was Phantom Thread, because Napoleon and Josephine have this perverse but also funny and sad and abusive relationship. Kirby is great.

“The battle scenes are all huge in scope and unique and probably the best of Scott’s career.

“I wouldn’t say Phoenix’s Napoleon is whiny, but he’s an egomaniac and Phoenix does a great job of portraying that. The humor hit for me and it felt like it did for the rest of the audience, with the scene where Napoleon stages a coup being one the funnier scenes I’ve seen in a movie in a while.

“Overall it’s much weirder than I would’ve expected from Scott or the subject.”

No Remake Allowed

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Joel Schumacher and Ebbe Roe Smith‘s Falling Down opened on 2.26.93 — 30 years and six months ago. No one would dare remake it today, but if someone did it would certainly be portrayed by the wokester congregation (all those who praised Women Talking and hated Empire of Llght) as a rightwing movie in the vein of Sound of Freedom.

Which means that apart from what the few truly independent-minded reviewers out there might say, no mainstream critics (i.e., the go-along-to-get-along types who represent the vast majority) wouldn’t be allowed to write anything praise-worthy. On top of which Clayton Davis would strongly disapprove.

Even if Son of Falling Down turned out to be good or half-decent or at least popcorn-worthy, it would nonetheless have trouble finding a distributor because the focus is too Joe Rogan or Daily Wire-ish…doesn’t follow the woke party lne. But if it found a distributor and managed to open theatrically, it would most likely become a word-of-mouth flick among MAGA types.

From Roger Ebert’s 2.26.93 review: “Some will even find it racist because the targets of the film’s hero are African American, Latino, and Korean…with a few Whites thrown in for balance. Both of these approaches represent a facile reading of the film, which is actually about a great sadness, which turns into madness, and which can afflict anyone who is told, after many years of hard work, that he is unnecessary and irrelevant.

“What is fascinating about the Michael Douglas character, as written and played, is the core of sadness in his soul. Yes, by the time we meet him, he has gone over the edge. But there is no exhilaration in his rampage, no release. He seems weary and confused, and in his actions he unconsciously follows scripts that he may have learned from the movies, or on the news, where other frustrated misfits vent their rage on innocent bystanders.”

I posted a shorter version of an HE Falling Down piece on 6.20.19.

Another crazy white guy movie that couldn’t be remade…forget it.

Saving Newspapers for Headline Value

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Earlier today I paused in front of these newspapers, which were displayed upon a cardboard newsstand inside a CVS. “Hmm,” I wondered, “should I save these for posterity?” Then I figured “naahh.” Then I thought “no, maybe I should.”

The last N.Y. Times dead-tree edition I saved was when Obama was elected — 11.5.08. I also have JFK’s assassination (replica), Marilyn Monroe’s death (replica), JFK’s Cuban Missile Crisis blockade, Nixon resigns, Reagan shot, Gorbachev toppled by coup, Yeltsin takes power.

Hedren on Downslope

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I was so disengaged during my one and only viewing of Charlie Chaplin’s A Countess From Hong Kong (‘67) that I can’t remember Tippi Hedren’s cameo performance as “Martha” — her first post-Hitchcock gig.

She had a more substantial role in The Harrad Experiment (‘73) as a married sex instructor, although her cool and somewhat icy manner in The Birds and especially Marnie made that kind of character a difficult sell. Her Harrad husband was played by James Whitmore…go figure.

Speaking of icy I was surprised to come upon this Coppertone ad the other day. I honestly didn’t think the mid ‘60s Hedren, who began as a model, was capable of wearing a two-piece bathing suit, much less posing in one for a magazine ad. The frigid-chilly Marnie persona had really sunk in by that time.

I’m trying to think of another actress during that era who conveyed such anxiety or acute discomfort with any sort of erotic presence or expression. She was like a brittle nun of some kind, tense and guarded and buttoned up.

Burned Into Brain

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Not that I use the term “influencers” with any regularity, but the pink fringe lampshade dude (or woman) below will henceforth be the image that comes to mind whenever the subject arises. A Barbie worshipper, obviously, but also a quintessential image of an alpha–current, favor–currying gladhander and movie–invite whore.

As for Manuela Lazic’s 8.1 Guardian piece about an increasing publicist tendency to invite social-media influencers to screenings more while diminishing as much as politically possible the access of serious, seasoned critics when it comes to expensive studio product…well, that’s been the deal for roughly five or six years, right? (Launched in 2016, TikTok exploded in ‘18.)

And when you eliminate the obsequious, finger-to-the-wind go-alongers (the reigning critic fraternity since feature-length films were born in 1915) and the legions of big-city critics who decided around the advent of #Oscarssowhite and #MeToo (‘16 to ‘18) and certainly after the George Floyd riots of May ‘20 that becoming political–crusade wokesters was the safest approach going forward, the ranks of truly engaged, worth-reading, alive-on-the-planet-earth film critics & columnists have been dramatically thinned, to put it mildly.

In shorter terms, whore critics have been the leaders of the pack for over a century, and then a whole new breed of politically progressive virtue signallers came along about five or six years ago. Add this community to social-media influencers and the game is 98% rigged. Clear-light critics and columnists (numbering very few in this country, maybe 25 or 30** including contrarians like myself) are the last carriers of the integrity torch, and most people reading this sentence (including the HE pissheads) will snort derisively at such a notion.

Lazic excerpt:

** a random few off the top of my head — Owen Gleiberman, Sasha Stone, Jordan Ruimy, Jeff Sneider, Todd McCarthy, Armond White, Peter Bradshaw, Boston Herald’s Jim Verniere, Mark Kermode, Mark Harris, Maitland McDonaugh, Janet Maslin, Paul Schrader, Ella Taylor, Peter Howell…who else?