Month: August 2023

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?

Fashion Felony

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Since seeing Oppenheimer I’ve been feeling very supportive of Josh Hartnett, who gives a mature and highly convincing performance as nuclear physicist Ernest Lawrence. It’s a major career bump for a guy I’ve admired and have followed for over 20 years — The Virgin Suicides, Black Hawk Down, Pearl Harbor, Hollywood Homicide and Mozart and the Whale in the early days.

And then I saw this appalling sweater-and-shirt combo — one of the most seriously frightful mine eyes have ever beheld. The sweater alone! How can a reputable actor wear stuff like this? Obviously a small matter but still.

Trump Filet

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I’m still perusing Jack Smith’s new Trump indictment, but right now (i.e., as far as I’ve read) it seems to boil down to three conspiracies: (a) an attempt to defraud the United States, (b) an attempt to obstruct an official government proceeding and (c) a third to deprive people of civil rights provided by federal law or the Constitution.

Basically it’s a fork shoved into his flabby bloated gut for trying to overthrow the 2020 election.

Does this mean Smith (I’m slow with legal jargon so please bear with me) is charging Trump with having blatantly incited the Jan. 6th assault upon the Capitol building for the purposes of obstructing the electoral vote count? Or with having aided and abetted the assault by waiting 187 minutes to attempt to call upon his followers to cease and desist. Apparently so but I’m still sifting through the particulars.

Slogging Along in Queens

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…at 15 mph on a Manhattan-bound 7 train. Grateful for the transportation and the a.c., of course, but otherwise a miserable environment to endure. I’ve ridden mass transit systems all over the world, and New York’s subway service is the absolute pits. Oldies, fatties and those burdened with heavy luggage forced to climb stairs half the time…it really sucks.

Now That I’ve Returned

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I’m “glad”, in a sense, for having visited the friendly but dull and desolate urban wasteland that is Detroit.

I spoke to a cabdriver who’s lived in Detroit for 65 years. “When was Detroit’s peak era?” I asked. “The late ‘50s,” he replied.

The Flixbus journey from Detroit to London, Ontario was visually pleasant — flat cornfield farmland with occasional silos and vast blue skies. It reminded me of southern Texas and the long agricultural and steer-grazing stretch between Buenos Aires and Mar del Plata, Argentina.

The flat, modest, sprawling village of Grand Bend, Ontario is fine as far as it goes. A well-tended place, friendly people, a nice library, most of the usual amenities.

Alas, many of the weekend tourists roaming around near the crowded Lake Huron shoreline were chubby or porcine and wearing, of course, the usual low-rent garb. I felt truly sorry for their full-of-beans, bright-eyed toddlers, knowing they’re almost certainly doomed to look and behave the same as they come into adulthood.

We are living through a period of a general lack of refinement, slovenliness and cultural decline, and all you can do is slowly shake your head like Jose Ferrer’s Turkish Bey in Lawrence of Arabia and mutter “I am surrounded by cattle.”

There are certainly no persons resembling Peter O’Toole, Claude Rains, Omar Sharif, Anthony Quinn, Jack Hawkins or Anthony Quayle on the tree-lined streets of Grand Bend — I can tell you that for certain.

Okay, I’m partially taking that back. There was one exceptionally attractive and interesting person I ran into in Grand Bend — a young, slender and rather tall Vietnamese woman named Liz, a waitress at a disappointing Japanese restaurant and a resident of nearby Goderich. She wouldn’t have been cast in Lawrence but she was certainly genteel and well-spoken. David Lean would have given her a large tip.

Did the 20th Century realm that I knew as a New Jersey suburban kid and a young lad in Connecticut, Boston and NYC…maybe it never precisely existed as I recall it although I’m 100% certain that people were a lot thinner back then. Either way that era is gone for good now.