Month: March 2024

I’ve never had a great longing to experience India. Overpopulated, too much poverty, boring topography, guys shitting on the street, etc. But ever since catching Wes Anderson‘s The Darjeeling Limited (’07) I’ve wanted to travel across India on a nice, not-too-swanky, middle-class sleeper train…bunk beds in a cabin, superb Indian food in the dining car, hours of meditation time while staring at the countryside.

My only long-ass, third-world train ride happened 11 years ago in Vietnam, and I don’t mind saying it felt like dreary hell.

[Posted in mid-November 2013] Yesterday was a long one. A road journey from Hoi An to Quang Ngai and the My Lai Massacre Museum, and then a slow, rickety train ride from Quang Ngai to Nha Trang. We left Hoi An at 7:30 am and arrived in Nha Trang at 11 pm last night.

I wanted to visit the My Lai massacre museum near Quang Ngai so we drove down early yesterday morning — a two-hour trek with all the rain and the traffic and road construction. I was told it would take another 11 or 12 hours to drive to Nha Trang so we bought train tickets from Quang Ngai to Nha Trang, which would take about eight hours, I was told. It took ten.

Our down-at-the-heels, less-than-fully-hygienic train left at 1 pm and chugged along at a moderate pace for 400 kilometers, stopping for 10 or 12 minutes at each station. It was hellish, in a sense, but I didn’t want to be encased in a luxurious tourist cocoon. I wanted to feel and smell and taste the real Vietnam like an average local. Well, I got that.

A Gone With The Wind quartet (Olivia De Havilland, David O. Selznick, Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier) during the 12th Academy Awards ceremony, held on the evening of Thursday, 2.29.40 (why a Thursday?) at the Ambassador Hotel’s Cocoanut Grove.

This can’t be the only decent color photo, but right now all I can find are unexceptional, run-of-the-mill black-and-white shots.

Passed along seven years ago by HE commenter “Stewart Klein“:

Posted on 11.27.14: Producer and former Paramount Pictures president Frank Yablans, who presided over that studio during its early-to-middle”70s golden period (The Godfather, Serpico, Paper Moon, Chinatown, The Godfather, Part II, Murder on the Orient Express) and then served as vice-chairman and COO of MGM/United Artists under Kirk Kerkorian, died earlier today at age 79.

Unlike his slightly older, still-living brother Irwin, a producer of second-tier “product” who was Billy Carter to Frank’s Jimmy Carter, the younger Yablans believed in class and quality. Alas, like almost every other producer, his record was hit-and-miss.

Frank produced Silver Streak (good comedy), The Other Side of Midnight (glitzy garbage), The Fury (second-tier DePalma), The Star Chamber (Peter Hyams crap) and Congo (crap).

Yablans also produced and co-penned screenplays for North Dallas Forty (a very good football film) and Mommie Dearest (classic, hilarious, over-the-top kitsch).

“My Neighbor Frank Yablans,” posted by Medium‘s Loren Kantor on 12.26.23.

Posted on 1.16.17 — slightly more than seven years ago:

HE commenter Bobby Peru has attempted a takedown of Frank Perry‘s Mommie Dearest, calling it a “florid embrassment” that uses “cheap, tacky artifice to generate cartoonish shocks” and “unintentional comedy.”

That’s been the prevailing rant against this film for decades, and it’s just as wrong today as it was 35 years ago. I explained what it actually is as concisely as I knew how.

“Mommie Dearest is maudlin soap-opera realism,” I replied, “overbaked but winkingly so, everyone in on the joke and yet taking it ‘seriously,’ and at the same time a melodrama that’s occasionally intensified and heightened to the level of Kabuki theatre.

“The comedy is not ‘unintentional,’ but at the same time it’s not really a ‘comedy’ — it’s a kind of hyper-realism with a campy edge.”

“If director Frank Perry had modulated Dunaway’s performance, some of the great lines — ‘No wire hangers EVER!,’ ‘Don’t fuck with me, fellas!’ — wouldn’t have worked so well. Those lines are the stuff of Hollywood legend, right up there with Bette Davis saying “what a dump!” and Vivien Leigh saying “I’ll never by hungry again.”

Peru: “This post is quite amusing for a number of reasons, but I concur Dunaway is a legend for her finite run of the above mentioned films, which will go down in film history. However, to call Mommie Dearest ‘that great Frank Perry film’ is, at the least, oxymoronic, and at most a wild, almost unbelievable overstatement, especially coming from a ‘film Catholic’ like you, Jeff; the Movie Godz do not approve. Even Dunaway knows what a POS that florid embarrassment is; after years of rudely dismissing any journalist who would dare to even breathe the title, she finally discussed recently and blamed Perry for ruining her career by not working to ‘direct’ her performance, thereby leaving it unmodulated and Dunaway herself twisting in the wind (as if great, Oscar-winning actors can’t self-direct at least to a modicum).

“The movie is camp junk for a reason — because it is cheap, tacky artifice with one agenda, which is to generate cartoonish shocks. This has not stopped me and millions from enjoying it as such, but ‘great’ it most certainly is not unless you are referring to unintentional comedy.

“As for Dunaway herself, the Crawford turn bolstered by decades of diva behavior (my friend is her neighbor and has told many a story) well past her glory years has also contributed to why her career went to the toilet; too many grandiose notions about herself and a history of making lives difficult onset. I’ve heard first-hand stories of her dismissing acting students while auditing classes (‘They’re staring at me’) to parading up and down the aisle of a coach flight — get this — reading a script aloud. She is a major nut, great as she was.”

…and delivered with the same care and exactitude.

One of the most horrifying Orwellian wokethink images mine eyes have ever beheld…I’m serious, I was there and I fucking snapped this photo…a N.Y. Times video ad inside the Washington, D.C metro, which first appeared in February ’22. Only two years ago, and one reason why Biden has reason to fear the wrath of the electorate.

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From The New York Times…even Maureen Dowd wants him to quit.

Welcome to episode #2 of “The Misfits” as HE’s Jeffrey Wells welcomes this weekend’s hotshot guests — Wilson Morales, editor and founder of Blackfiklmandtv, and comedy writer, former Fox News movie guy and “Talking Movies” cohost Bill McCuddy.

Topics include (a) the last and final Oscar predictions (we’re all very glad the season will be over after next Sunday night, 3.10), (b) reactions to Dune: Part Two, and (c) speculations about five or six March releases. Again, the link.

Click through to HE’s Substack page to watch, and please be good people by becoming paid subscribers next week and down the road.

From “Myth of Good Driving While Half-Stinko,” posted on 2.18.22:

As we all know, Robert Zemeckis‘s Flight is about the disease of alcoholism. I responded well to this 11.2.12 release, in part, because I had become a sober person roughly nine months earlier — on 3.20.12. And yet the film contains a certain drunk-driving paradox. Because Denzel Washington‘s “Cpt. Whip Whitaker” saves his commercial plane from crashing by flying upside down. We’re led to understand that if Whip had been 100% sober he might not have rolled the plane over and saved the day.

But even if this isn’t what the film says, I’m thinking that this principle applies to some extent to car driving.

If you’re driving your Lexus drunk your reaction time is slower than if you’re cold sober, and if you’re really stinko you’re definitely a menace to all humanity. But drunk or semi-drunk driving isn’t all bad, and sometimes it works. Or at least it did for me.

I know, I know — did I just say that? In today’s world DUI is a felony punishable by huge fines and jail time in some cases, and rightly so. But in the ’70s tens of thousands of people drove from place to place every night with a buzz-on and in some cases plain shitfaced, and some awful things resulted, I’m sure. But quite often, probably the vast majority of times, drunks just drove home and parked their cars and watched a little TV and went to sleep on the couch. And then woke up at 3 am, undressed and flopped in their bedroom.

May God forgive me but in my early drinking days when I lived in Wilton and Westport, Connecticut, I drove late at night with several beers and/or Jack Daniels on the rocks in my system, and I just cruised on through, and I mean weekend after weekend after weekend after weekend. No accidents, no fender benders, nothing. Others plowed their cars into ponds and trees and guard-rails, but not me.

There were times, in fact, when I drove down those winding country roads at high speeds and I would focus like a motherfucker, and I was convinced at times that I was driving like Paul Newman at Lime Rock.

I started to tell myself, in fact, that I drove better when half-bombed because I was less intimidated by the possibility of something going wrong. I drove without fear, without hesitation. I took those hairpin turns like a champ.

Present tense: In short, if you’re as good a driver as I was and you’re not flat-out wasted, driving with booze in your system isn’t such a bad thing. Or at least it doesn’t need to be. Would I drive drunk now? Of course not. I stopped drinking 8 and 2/3 years and I’m not an asshole. I’m just saying that I got away with it for years, and…well, I’ve said it.

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I had a few chats with Dennis Wilson back in the mid ’70s, and one of those times we briefly discussed Monte Hellman‘s Two Lane Blacktop (’71). And I can tell you that Wilson wasn’t a fan. I can’t recite an exact Wilson quote as it happened too long ago, but his basic opinion was that Hellman had missed the potential…that he didn’t really understand what the film was about or didn’t appreciate the glory of high-octane engines….something like that. Wilson felt he understood the fast-car aesthetic better than Hellman, and that he understood more fully what it should have been about.

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