Month: August 2023

Danny Wu‘s American: An Odyssey to 1947, a documentary that’s mostly but not entirely about the experience of genius filmmaker Orson Welles during the mid 1940s, will be released by Gravitas Ventures on 9.12.23.

A Wellesnet announcement, dated 8.4.23, says that the doc “follows the rise and fall of Welles while interweaving stories of diverse individuals amidst the backdrop of the Great Depression, World War II and the dropping of the Atomic Bomb.”

Synopsis: “Director Orson Welles navigated his meteoric Hollywood rise beginning in the early ’40s. As WWII begins a Japanese American boy visits abroad, and an African American soldier enlists in the U.S. Army. As the story advances, each character follows their own ambitions in search of their American identity. The doc’s first half is about the romantic rise of a great American director, and the second half transitioning into the realities of race and life in the Jim Crow era.”

I haven’t seen the film, but the title feels like a stopper….ungrammatical, inelegant. How does an odyssey go “to” a given year without mentioning the year of origin or the beginning of the arc? But let’s not dismiss or mischaracterize. I’m looking forward to it. Really.

Earlier today, however, I was struck by a remark from critic and author Joe McBride, a renowned Hollywood historian and Welles biographer who probably knows more about the late filmmaker (who died in ’85) than anyone else.

McBride: “Welles did a couple of shameful radio shows right after the Hiroshima bombing on 8.6.45, praising the dropping of it. I wonder if this film will ignore them.”

Shameful?

I replied to McBride as follows:

“Joe — The lives of tens of thousands of U.S. servicemen who would have been ordered to invade Japan were spared because of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki A-bombings.

“What’s so shameful about Welles praising Truman’s decision to bomb Japan on 8.6.45 and 8.9.45?

“I am here and alive and breathing (ditto my sons Jett and Dylan and my granddaughter Sutton) because my Marine lieutenant dad, Jim Wells, wasn’t ordered to invade Japan. The odds of his surviving that assault were relatively low, or so he and his Marine comrades believed.

“Japanese leaders started the war, and despite their growing inability to prevail against U.S. forces during the final two years of the war, they refused to consider surrender when it was proposed in ‘45. They made their own fanatical bed.

“The A-bomb murders of roughly 200,000 Japanese citizens were beyond horrific, of course, but savage cruelty is in the basic DNA…the basic nature of war.

“So if Orson Welles praising the atomic bombings of Japan was shameful, as you’ve said, would it have been better for the U.S. to invade Japan and thereby invite a mass slaughter of U.S. troops? Is that what you’re saying?

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Here are HE’s finest films of the first eight months of ’23 — two thirds gone, four months to go.

I’ve given no consideration at all to box-office performance — the rankings are strictly about how successful and satisfying each film is according to its own game and rules, and how thematically fulfilled it feels when all is said and done.

A special demerit system applies in the case of otherwise commendable, first-rate films that delivered (a) manosphere pissnado or (b) caused my soul and knees to ache due to slow pacing and density of dialogue.

1. Tran Anh Hung’s The Pot au Feu
2. Guy Ritchie‘s The Covenant
3. Cruise & McQuarrie‘s Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning, Part One (2023)
4. Christian Mungiu‘s RMN
5. Eric Gravel‘s Full Time
6. Chris Nolan‘s Oppenheimer — first-rate film but I groaned at the one-hour mark, knowing there were two full hours to go…my soul cried out.
7. Greta Gerwig‘s Barbie [manosphere pissnado demerit]
8. Jonathan Glazer‘s The Zone of Interest
9. Martin Scorsese‘s Killers of the Flower Moon
10. Matt Johnson‘s Blackberry
11. Ari Aster‘s Beau Is Afraid
12. Ben Affleck‘s Air
13. Celine Song‘s Past Lives
14. Jean-Stephen Sauvaire’s Black Flies.
15. Steven Soderbergh‘s Magic Mike’s Last Dance
16. Nicole Holofcener‘s You Hurt My Feelings
16. Kelly Fremon Craig‘s Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret.

No offense but I still haven’t seen How To Blow Up A Pipeline.

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HE’s director-writer friendo believes that the WGA negotiators are “an ineffective wild bunch — great with threats, terrible with realistic negotiations.”

The three principal hardheads, he asserts, are Patric Verrone (whom he calls “the Iago figure”), David Goodman and “the melodramatic and very bellicose” Chris Keyser.

David Young stepping aside from negotiating last February meant that “the WGA had a different playbook in mind, a more militant and rigid one.”

“WGA leadership wanted a strike the last time their contract us up, but due to COVID couldn’t ask for a walkout,” he says. They’re now asking, he contends, “for unrealistic mandates for a business model that will be marginalized in the future, such as dictating a minimum number of writers hired for staffing. That’s akin to making a one-man show on Broadway illegal, forcing upon the production a supporting cast.

“Whatever deal the WGA winds up getting could have been achieved without a strike,” he states, adding that “the main leverage right now remains the actor walkout.”

“The strike fund is just whispers on the picket lines as many people haven’t qualified for aid, expressing anger at not getting help.

“David Young suddenly having a medical issue last February after leading every negotiation successfully for years…well, that says something as he was a blue-collar outsider with a tougher style than the mild-mannered scribes used in the past. He was a teamster type, a street fighter.

“Verrone led the strike the last time [2007], planning for it long before it was called. One opinion is that he was a little animation guy who wanted to have his roar heard by the studios that ignored him in the past.”

And that “thing” is that Maestro isn’t all that focused on Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein. Well, it is to a considerable extent, obviously, but Carey Mulligan’s Felicia has the spotlight. Duhh.

I’ve been presuming all along that the two strikes will slog on and on and ruin the red-carpet aspect of the early fall film festivals and half-destroy award season promotions until they finally end in October or November…best guess.

But then that Guardian story appeared last Saturday, and then last night a director-writer friendo said the following: “There’s been radio silence so that probably means the [Writers Guild] is going to take this deal in principle. [Bob] Iger turned conciliatory and got involved, allowing concessions. The WGA negotiating committee is particularly maladroit (i.e., given to bungling), but Carol [Lombardini] from the AMPTP is skilled and not the heavy here.”

Speaking as a total freak for color snaps of classic era Times Square marquees and billboard ads, I was initially thrilled to find this color shot of the DeMille’s gigantic, two–sided PSYCHO wall promo.

Alfred Hitchcock’s seminal slasher pic opened on June 16th, 1960. 63 years ago hit films would play for several weeks or even months on end, but let’s presume this nocturnal image was snapped sometime that summer when interest was peaking.

My spitballs are (a) definitely Mark Meadows, (b) probably Rudy Guiliani, (c) possibly John Eastman. Further speculation?

Oh, and by the way? If I were Fani Willis I wouldn’t entertain ambitions to run for public office down the road. She’s presumably an excellent attorney but to say she has an awkward speaking style is putting it mildly. She reminded me of Tiffany Haddish announcing the Oscar noms in 2018. You can feel her struggling as she reads the particulars.

If you want to cut to the chase in the matter of Michael Oher‘s Blind Side lawsuit against Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy (and their response to same), you may want to read Leigh Steinberg‘s 2.9.15 Forbes article, titled “5 Reasons Why 80% Of Retired NFL Players Go Broke.”

From yesterday’s boilerplate HE piece:

ESPN’s Michael Fletcher: “[Oher] alleges that Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy, who took Oher into their home as a high school student, never adopted him. Instead, less than three months after Oher turned 18 in 2004, the petition says, the couple tricked him into signing a document making them his conservators, which gave them legal authority to make business deals in his name.

“The petition further alleges that the Tuohys used their power as conservators to strike a deal that paid them and their two birth children millions of dollars in royalties from an Oscar-winning film that earned more than $300 million, while Oher got nothing for a story ‘that would not have existed without him.’”

In other words the Tuohys are shifty and slippery, baby, and Oher wants a cut of that money, honey.