…with a man and a woman realizing that death is imminent and about to enfold them, and that they’re powerless to stop it? Not a solitary figure, mind, but a couple — romantically linked, father and daughter, anything along those lines.

Last night I was watching the end of Kurt Neumann‘s Rocketship X-M (’50), and that concludes with Lloyd Bridges and Osa Massen staring out of a porthole window as their rocketship plummets to a crash landing.

There’s Mimi Leder‘s Deep Impact ’98), in which TV anchor Tea Leoni and estranged father Maximillian Schell stand on a beach as a half-mile-high tidal wave approaches at 1000 mph.

The last few seconds of Arthur Penn‘s Bonnie and Clyde (’67), just before the posse start firing as Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway gaze at each other for the last time.

Stanley Kramer‘s On The Beach (’59), of course, with two emotionally entwined couples (Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner, Anthony Perkins and Donna Anderson) facing either slow radiation death or suicide.

Paul Greengrass‘s United 93 doesn’t count as none of the doomed passengers are portrayed as emotionally linked, or at least none with dialogue.

Which others?

“Whenever it’s a damp, drizzly November in my soul…whenever some pain-in-the-ass HE commenter (Renaissance, Vic Lizzy, Jeremy Fassler) posts something prickly or ugly…whenever I feel like stepping into the street and knocking people’s hats off, then it’s high time to pop an Oxy and stream a comfort flick…Charley Varrick, Fear Strikes Out or any black-and-white VistaVision title, 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, The Horse Soldiers….that line of country.”

Thanks again to Mark Frenden, HE’s go-to guy for any kind of visual tweak or manipulation….fast turnaround, never fails. I realize that I need to be weathered up to fit in…working on it.

Many of us believed that that Banshees of Inisherin costar Kerry Condon was an Oscar shoo-in for Best Supporting Actress. She was and is the heart and soul of Martin McDonagh‘s metaphorical dysfunction drama — no one disputes this. But then the Golden Globes gave their Best Supporting Actress prize to Wakanda Forever‘s Angela Bassett as (be honest) a make-up gesture for the HFPA’s racist history in terms of membership. And then last night the insufferably woke Critics Choice voters went for Bassett also.

So now Academy voters undoubtedly FEEL OBLIGED to award Bassett also. If they give their Best Supporting Actress Oscar to Condon instead Twitter may detect a very slight after-aroma of racism, so they have to give it Bassett…even though we all agree that her banal, quarter-of-an-inch-deep Wakanda performance doesn’t deliver a fraction of the soul and substance that Condon provided.

Bassett is 64 and has been plugging away since the early ’90s, so her supporters are calling it a career tribute award now. It’s a rigged game. Life is unfair. The actress who gave the best supporting performance probably won’t win.

Friendo: You’re not allowed to criticize the idea of Angela Bassett winning an Oscar for a histrionic performance in a stupid superhero flick. I was thinking about saying “it’s great Bassett is finally winning an award but too bad it’s in a superhero movie”, but then I realized I’d get attacked for it. You can’t attack religious symbols.

HE: As I said last night, Sunday night’s Critics Choice awards show felt like some kind of Twilight Zone experience. Voting the woke party line (sacralization of race, gender, sexuality plus focusing on emotional core issues over an instance of morbid self-destructive obesity) means NOTHING in this context. It’s Maoism.

Friendo: Wokeism is a cult, that’s for sure. Look at what Cate Blanchett said last night…”the patriarchal notion of competition for a top award” or whatever she said.

HE: I thought Cate was more of a circumspect type.

Friendo: I just mean that actresses like Blanchett at this point are stuck between a rock and a hard place. They feel obliged to suggest they don’t want to win if they’re already at the top and are white. They feel a bit guilty so they’re saying ‘let’s get rid of the awards…everybody should get a certificate of merit.’ They’re almost there now. Merit has gone out the window.

HE: Oh, I see. Cate feels obliged to project a certain blithe spirit…a vague sense of guilt about this, and so she’s saying “I don’t need to win”. She’s not hungry for it, clearly. It’s unseemly to project hunger or ambition. Maybe this means Michelle Yeoh will take the Oscar now.

Friendo: She felt guilty about the possibility of beating Michelle Yeoh at her moment of near-triumph, and so rather than beating a woman of color with a decades-long narrative she probably doesn’t want to win.

HE: That’s what she was saying — you’re right. From a racial or tribal perspective, white artists defeating artists of color is not a good look.

Friendo: Exactly.

HE: Under our current Maoism defeating a person of color flirts with a morally unsavory narrative.

Friendo: Be honest — does anyone honestly think Angela Bassett should win for that Wakanda performance role? Equity mindsets mean that artists of color can never really rise on their own merit. Awards have to be gifted to them by whites.

HE: It’s totally ridiculous that Bassett has beaten Kerry Condon twice so far…c’mon!

Friendo: No intelligent human could argue even half-heartedly that Bassett’s performance is superior to Condon’s.

Legendary Kansas City film owner and “uber collector” Wade Williams passed six or seven days ago at his home in Kansas City. Respect and condolences. The ginger-haired Williams owned theatrical rights to a trove of films from the ’30s, ’40s, ’50s and beyond, particularly science-fiction titles. He was quite the legend in Kansas City film buff circles, having also managed a repertory cinema or two. He was also, truth be told, a guy who infamously stood in the way of restoring Invaders From Mars, which his estate still holds the theatricL rights to, for many decades. (Ignite Films finally did an end run around Williams in order to beautifully restore Invaders.) Williams had long been regarded as a notorious “rights squatter” who thought and operated in the mule-headed tradition of Raymond Rohauer. On top of which he was a right-winger. But he cared deeply about the lore of pulp cinema, and so HE is thereby offering a final respectful salute.

On Sunday afternoon Jeffrey Wells (fresh from his special Invaders From Mars screening at the Bedford Playhouse) and Sasha Stone settled into another Phase One handicapping conversation (i.e., Oscar Poker). In and out, up and down, Andrea Riseborough, Critics Choice, etc. And then Sasha broke through with another vein of thought and Jeff said, “Wait, wait…that’s good…this is better than before.” And it all flowed from there.

The Critics Choice voters are total woke lemmings — they’ve gone over the cliff (i.e., are lacking in good taste) and are no longer predictive of the Oscars, and that’s final. And where did Brendan Fraser’s win come from? How did he muscle aside Colin Farrell and Austin Butler? HE applauds Cate Blanchett’s Best Actress win for Tar, of course.

Veteran producer friendo (i.e., burdened with a sense of taste): “It’s criminal that Everything Everywhere All At Once took Best Picture at the Critics Choice Awards. And RRR for Best Foreign? Get outta town.”

Sarah Polley’s Women Talking script (essentially a barn-dialogue primer about women standing up to white male sexual assault) winning the CC’s Best Adapted Screenplay trophy is curious, given the obviously superior investigative pedigree of Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s She Said screenplay.

The CC ceremony was some kind of award season glitch, a belch, an anomaly.. Voting the woke party line (sacralization of race, gender, sexuality plus focusing on emotional core issues over an instance of morbid self-destructive obesity) means NOTHING in this context.

Cate Blanchett’s Tar win aside, there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between Critics Choice voters lining up like stooges and voting a straight woke party ticket and, say, Democratic trade unions voting for Richard Daley’s Chicago Democratic machine ticket back in the ‘50s and ‘60s.

Wokeism is a cult and a scourge — its followers are indistinguishable from those obedient, red-book-waving Mao lapdogs during China’s “great cuitural revolution.”

I don’t know why I’ll always remember Captain Meathead, but somehow this late-night Park City encounter (1.17.14, or almost exactly nine years ago) has taken up residence. Probably because I loved the late Lynn Shelton’s Laggies (‘14) and…I don’t know. All seemed right with the world back in ‘14, and I was very happy for Shelton that night. Happy all around. I’m very sorry…well, for a great many things.

Posted a day ago: At the Oxford Union, Konstantin Kisin, a Russian-British satirist, podcaster, author and political commentator, recently made a case for “This House Believes Wokeness Has Gone Too Far”. The HE wokester brigade is hereby commanded to listen to this speech.

You Tube guys: (a) “Think of all the progress we’d make if our leaders felt this way, instead of pandering to woke idiots for votes and then just doing more of what is bad”, (b) “An absolutely phenomenal speech…I cannot stress enough how much it warms my heart to see people like Lisinb come out of relatively nowhere to carry the torch’; (c) “radiates with clarity!”, (d) “Can there please be more people like this guy, so civilization can hopefully be saved?”

Before this morning’s Bedford Playhouse screening of Invaders From Mars, I’ll be sharing a few words with the audience about the composer of the eerie musical score — the unsung Mort Glickman, an under-valued, under-the-radar guy if there ever was one.

In Laurent Bouzereau‘s two-hour Making of ‘Jaws’ doc, director Steven Spielberg says that John Williams‘ creepy leviathan score is responsible for half of the film’s effectiveness. Same deal with Invaders From Mars, which is chiefly distinguished by William Cameron Menzies‘ production design but would still amount to very little without Glickman’s input.

Glickman’s Martian choir music injects a profoundly creepy vibe…a sense of hovering otherworldliness…”a bleak acapella that conjures visions of a dying Martian landscape or the wailing of frightened minds in hell,” to quote from a 1986 Cinemascore article by William Rosar.

And poor Glickman, sub-contracted by Raoul Kraushar, didn’t even get screen credit — Kraushar claimed that honor. On top of which Glickman died of a heart attack two months before Invaders From Mars opened in April 1953. He passed on 2.27.53 at age 54.

Posted on 4.2.22: Yeah, I know…Mort who?

It’s been asserted for years by people seemingly in the know that the actual composer of the famously eerie Invaders From Mars score is not Raoul Kraushar, as I’ve stated a few times on HE, but longtime Republic Pictures composer Mort Glickman.

Reporting has it that Kraushar was a Hans Zimmer-like operator and compiler who would hire guys to ghost-write scores, which Kraushar would then take credit for.

I’ve been persuaded that the claims about Glickman may have merit. Okay, that they’re probably legit.

I am therefore apologizing if in fact (as it appears) I have passed along bad intel. Kraushar was apparently not the Invaders From Mars composer, and I apologize for previously failing to report that Glickman, a stocky, bespectacled guy who looked like a 1950s grocery-store clerk and could have played a behind-the-counter colleague of Ernest Borgnine‘s in Marty…Glickman was the maestro!

Three people have made the case — (1) David Schecter, co-producer of Monstrous Movie Music, a “series of re-recordings which feature a wealth of classic music from many of everyone’s favorite science fiction, horror and fantasy films”, (2) Janne Wass in a 2016 article for scifist.wordpress.com, and (3) William H. Rosar, author of a 1986 CinemaScore article titled “The Music for Invaders From Mars.”

I first saw Laurent Bouzereau‘s The Making of ‘Jaws’, an extra feature on the Jaws laserdisc, in ’95. 27 and 1/2 years ago. It’s since been included on the DVD, Bluray and 4K Bluray editions. It runs two hours and six minutes or something close to that. I was instantly gobsmacked by how honest and thorough and meticulous it was. Every significant chapter, every step of the journey. And a lot of it is funny. And everyone looks so young!

Almost everyone took part except for poor Robert Shaw, who passed in ’78, and the late Murray Hamilton, who departed in ’86. Spielberg, Zanuck and Brown, Sid Sheinberg, Richard Dreyfuss, Lorraine Gary, book author Peter Benchley, screenwriter Carl Gottlieb, Roy Scheider, dp Bill Butler, edtitor Verna Fields, John Williams, shark specialists Ron and Valerie Taylor, etc.

It’s absolutely the definitive account of how Steven Spielberg, Richard Zanuck and David Brown‘s 1975 thriller came to be. The doc is significantly better, it goes without saying, than Eric Hollander‘s The Shark Is Still Working (’12), which I caught a few years ago. Decent, approvable.

I re-watched Bouzereau’s doc last night, and it’s still transporting. I know the saga backwards and forwards and I loved every minute. The only thing it needs is someone acknowledging at the very end that the enormous success of Jaws yielded a mixed legacy. For Jaws and Star Wars basically brought about the end of the Hollywood’s greatest chapter (the late ’60s to late ’70s) by ushering in the era of the blockbuster. Nobody so much as mentions this in Bouzereau’s film….astonishing.