Day: April 26, 2024

And The HE Community Says…?

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I guess I’m so accustomed to movies being overlong or needlessly extended that I didn’t even mention the length of Challengers in my 4.16 review. Would I have preferred a 110-minute cut? Or, as Schrader suggests, 100? I only know I didn’t feel oppressed by the 131.

Misunderstood By More Than A Few

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Ten days ago I re-posted a generic HE viewpoint…my longstanding praise of Paul Brickman‘s Risky Business (’83)…basically a statement that this was far more than a teenaged horndog comedy but å social satire of the slyest, dryest and most on-target kind.

Risky Business was hugely enjoyable (“Who’s the U-boat commander?” is one of the funniest lines ever spoken by an actor whom no one had heard of back then and who still draws a blank) and yet the butt of the humor was obvious and consistent…the whole thing was aimed squarely at the unfolding early ’80s zeitgiest and louche wealthy-guy opportunism in particular…a congregation of social forces that indicated we were all starting to ease up and hang back and say “what the fuck?” more and more…swirling downwards into greed and effete whateverism.

Critic Emmanuel Levy, who’s been around forever, said precisely the same thing:

But I was astonished to discover last night that David Denby, one of my all-time favorite critics who was with New York magazine for many years before moving over to The New Yorker…I was astonished to read Denby’s 8.22.83 review and realize that he missed Risky Business almost entirely. Denby obviously saw it, but it went right around him or through him or over him. He allowed that Brickman has some talent but basically panned the film, calling it “corrupt” and “a clear failure.”

A clear failure? It’s one of the smartest, funniest, most perfectly realized, on-point social satire-slash-sex comedies ever made…it’s right up there with The Apartment and The Graduate…it simultaneously understands and chortles in a resigned, low-key way at upper-middle-class entitlement, and with the cynical knowingness of a Reagan-era Oscar Wilde.

Another of my favorite cinematic soothsayers back then, N.Y. Times critic Janet Maslin, also missed it…mind-blowing. Christian Science Monitor critic David Sterritt dismissed it also.

Roger Ebert, however, got it….good for him.

Criterion’s Risky Business 4K pops on 7.23.24.

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Windy

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Donald Trump has been wealthy beyond measure since at least the ’80s, and yet he can’t afford to fix his serious baldness problem? By simply taking the time to address it with the sevices of the right people?

If this miserable pig had gone to my Prague team 20 or 25 years ago these blowover moments would never happen because there wouldn’t be any scalp to cover up.

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Oldbermann Has Put It Mildly

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Yesterday six conservative members of the nine-member Supreme Court made it quite clear that they are whores for Donald Trump and fools for his plan to lay waste US democracy and bring fresh, ferocious, anti-democratic hell to this country if he wins in November…they will do whatever they can to shilly-shally their way out of the line of fire and submit to his agenda by any pretzel-contortioning that comes to mind.

Olbermann: “You, Samuel Allito, are personally backing America’s Hitler…as these six evil, corrupt, partisan, useless, anti-democracy gangsters on the Supreme Theocratic Court flailed around yesterday, looking for an excuse, any excuse, to bury the evidence against Trump and to fix the upcoming election…this destructive fascist court…you and I now know this.”

Sidestepping Sports

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“Challe” is not a word in any language, but it reminds me of chattle, which basically means movable goods. The second word could be some kind of shortened slang abbreviation or cryptic allusion to people who come from Niger, the landlocked West African country.