Passed along late this afternoon. Any thoughts, additional info, disputes, Doubting Thomases, etc.?

Telluride Premieres (10):

Babygirl (Nicole Kidman, A24)
Conclave
Angelina Jolie‘s Maria
Jason Reitman‘s SNL 1975
Nickel Boys
The Piano Lesson
The End
Better Man
Don’t Let the Dogs Go Out Tonight
Piece by Piece

CANNES/VENICE carry-overs (6):

All We Imagine As Light
Anora
A Different Man
Emilia Perez
Misericordia
The Seed of the Sacred Fig Harvest

…to listen to off-the-cuff remarks by the leading Democratic presidential candidate and not have to listen to that mumbling, bent-over, coughing, croaky-voiced rickety old goat who, as Bill Maher said last weekend, appears to be “one gentle breeze away from death.”

I’ve never liked Kamala Harris‘s voice — that thin, nasally, reedy, sharp-toned, half-squeaky quality — but it’s so wonderful to know that she’s capable of crafting and expressing complete sentences, and that Droolin’ Joe is finally out of the game and that I’ll never be obliged to listen to him again.

I realize Kamala is basically a selling-point figurehead who will presumably energize lefties and independents of all shapes and sizes, and that if she’s elected on 11.5.24 the West Wing advisers and staffers will be the ones handling the actual nuts-and-bolts. But…

Strange as this may sound, I’ve been feeling semi-enthused about the identity factor. I actually kinda like the DEI boost — first woman president, first African + Jamaican-descended president, first partly Asian president.

Plus I’m starting to think she may win after all. Americans like new stuff, new faces and voices, etc. Plus she’s under 60!

I’m not surprised that Joker: Folie a Deux (Warner Bros., 10.4) won’t be playing Telluride, but I’m still saddened by its absence. Because I know it’s extra-good….I can feel it.

Venice Film Festival topper Alberto Barbera:

I’m sorry but while sitting in my third-row seat at the Museum of Moving Image last Saturday evening, I would have been a much happier camper watching John Ford‘s The Horse Soldiers instead of The Searchers.

The former, released in 1959, has never been accused of being a great film — two years ago I called it steady, sturdy mid-range Ford — but it’s very watchable and oddly comforting, and it has no racism or bizarre atmospheric concepts (a family living alone in a water-less, soil-free Monument Valley) or anything that prompts strong disbelief.

That scene in which John Wayne‘s Union troops are hiding in a forest alongside a sizable-sized river as they listen to some Confederate troops sing a marching song, and doing so with the vocal expertise of the Mitch Miller singers and in harmony yet…gets me very time.

HE commenter “brenkiklco”: “Brilliant in patches but quite slight. The action is perfunctory. The charge at Newton Station is rather lamely staged. And there’s scarcely any climax at all. Ford reportedly just wanted to wrap the thing up after a stuntman died on the set. The romance is unconvincing. Most of the performances have that Fordian quality of slight, theatrical exaggeration. A hint of Victorian barnstorming that you either go with or you don’t. But Wayne and Holden make good frenemies, and there are several enjoyable scenes.

Posted on 6.4.22: I’ve had it up to here with the standard narrative about The Horse Soldiers being one of John Ford‘s lesser efforts. I know this sounds like heresy, but it may be my favorite post-1945 Ford film. I know that She Wore A Yellow Ribbon and The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance are widely regarded as more substantial and therefore “better”, but I don’t like watching them as much as The Horse Soldiers, and anyone who doesn’t like that can shove it.

A Civil War drama based on Grierson’s Raid of 1863, The Horse Soldiers is steady, solid, midrange Ford — well-produced and well-acted with good character arcs and flavorful Southern atmosphere. Plus it gets extra bonus points for being set in the South (green trees, green grass, plantations, swamps, bridges, rivers) and not in godforsaken Monument Valley.

Handsomely shot by William H. Clothier in a 1.66 aspect ratio, its very easy to watch — every time I pop it in I feel comfortable and relaxed. Partly because it has a minimum of Ford-bullshit distractions. My only real problem is a scene in which rebel troops are heard signing a marching tune exactly like the Mitch Miller singers. I also don’t like a scene in which a furious John Wayne throws down eight or nine shots of whiskey in a row — enough to make an elephant pass out.

There’s a scene in which a boys’ military academy is asked to attack Wayne’s Union regiment — a scene in which a mother drags her 10-year-old son, Johnny, out of a line of marching troops, only to lose him when Johny climbs out of his second-floor bedroom window to rejoin his fellows. It reminds me of that moment when Claudette Colbert collapses in a grassy field as she watches Henry Fonda marching off to fight the French in Drums Along The Mohawk.

I also love that moment in Newton Station in which Wayne senses something wrong when costar William Holden, playing an antagonistic doctor-surgeon, tells him that perhaps a too easily captured Confederate colonel (Carleton Young), an old buddy, isn’t the submissive, easily captured type — “He’s West Point, tough as nails…the man I knew could lose both arms and still try to kick you to death.”

Kino Lorber’s new 4K version of this 1959 film (which lost money, by the way, partly due to exorbitant salaries and producer participation deals) streets on 6.14.22

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“The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.” — Thomas Wolfe, “God’s Lonely Man.”

“I am alone…I’m not lonely.” — Robert Niro‘s Neil McAuley in Heat (’95).

Taxi Driver is one more in a long list of 20th Century movies that could never be made today. The woke commissars would never allow a 13 year-old actress to play a street prostitute. Not a chance in hell.

In Paul Schrader‘s original Taxi Driver screenplay, the pimp (eventually played by Harvey Keitel) was black and in the final reel shoot-out, Travis killed only black people.

“In the original script, it was just a racist slaughter,” Schrader recalls. “There was genuine concern. [The producers] came to me and said, ‘We’ve really got to change this. There could be a riot.’ It would have been socially and morally irresponsible if we had incited that kind of violence.” — from a 7.6.06 Guardian interview piece.

“Bickle Died in Shootout…Again,” posted almost exactly three years ago:

Strangely, curiously, there are still those who don’t understand (or refuse to accept) that Tony Soprano was whacked while sitting in that family restaurant booth in the final episode of The Sopranos. I’ve come to understand that these very same people have also fought against the obvious interpretation of the aftermath of that tenement shootout scene in Taxi Driver (’75).

For the 17th or 18th time, here’s the damn explanation (and there’s really no arguing this):

At the end of the Taxi Driver shootout sequence and just after the bleeding and mortally wounded Travis Bickle, sitting on that blood-spattered couch, pretends to shoot himself in the head as he goes “bawshhhh!…bawshhhh!”, director Martin Scorsese switches to an overhead crane shot of Bickle on the couch and the two cops standing at the doorway with guns drawn. Looking downward, the camera slowly tracks along the ceiling, over the cops and down the hallway and into the street.

Most would say this is just a cool overhead tracking shot and let it go at that. But it’s just as legitimat to call it the path of Bickle’s spirit as he leaves his body and prepares to merge with the infinite finality…remember Jeannot Szwarc‘s similar spirit-rising-out-of-the-body shot at the end of Somewhere in Time? Same basic idea.

What half-reasonable person could ever buy the denouement of Taxi Driver? Everything in this sequence screams “this is bullshit!” In what world would Bickle, suspected by at least one Secret Service Treasury guy as a potential assassin (“Henry Krinkle”) who nearly killed Sen. Charles Palatine…in what world would Bickle be portrayed as a hero by the media for shooting a corrupt cop and two pimps in an East Side tenement building? The idea is insane.

And this shooting in some way helps the parents of Jodie Foster‘s Iris to find her and bring her back home to Indiana? (Iris will never be restored as a normal Indiana teenager…she’s been ruined and corrupted forever.)

And then Cybil Shepard gives Travis a come-hither look in the rear-view mirror when he gives her a ride in his cab?

It’s all Travis’s death fantasy…the stuff he imagines would happen in a perfect world as he sits on that tenement couch, bleeding profusely and eyeballing the cops and slowly drifting off the mortal coil, etc. The very last shot in Taxi Driver is of a seemingly startled Travis looking into his cab’s rearview mirror, and then whoosh…he’s gone. No reflection. Because Travis isn’t actually there.

Are there really people out there who think that the denoument is somehow real? Yes, there are.

“I am McLovin’s fat dad, and no, I have no problem with wearing a black baseball cap and black shorts. Okay, I helped raise him so I guess I’m partly responsible. Yeah, I bought the weapon that he used to try to kill Trump with and left it lying around so I’m also responsible for that, I suppose. I knew he was a lonely strange kid and that he had been bullied and whatnot….yeah, I knew that. So a lot of what happened is my fault…I admit it, all right?

“No, I’ve never seen Superbad but I’m going to watch it soon.” — Matthew Crooks, father of deceased Trump shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks.

HE to Friendo: I have more motivation to despise the wokester totalitarian thought-police left than most. I’ve flirted with primitive fantasies I’d rather not speak of. Sometimes I feel as if I’m Travis Bickle talking to Peter Boyle in that scene outside the Belmore Cafeteria….”I don’t know…I’ve got some really bad thoughts.” Nobody despises these monsters like I do.

Friendo reply: “It’s probably too late to put the woke genie back in the bottle as an entire generation has been brainwashed by the gender-studies-and-identity-politics fascist-college-professor mafia, and the mainstream media has been infiltrated by this insanity as if eaten by termites. I grieve for all of this (and have for several years now), and I really do get it.

“But eventually backlashes are going to set in (did you see Bill Burr‘s opening monologue on SNL? — I was shocked that they allowed it). And once the fervor goes out of the whole idea of a ‘resistance’ (a term so despicable and narcissistic that it makes me almost physically ill), I think some of the wind may go out of the woke sails.

“Things go out of fashion, and then come back in. And vice versa. And wokeness, as destructive as it is, is nothing if not fashion. It has no more moral reality than buying a handbag to prove you’re cool.

“Basically, wokeness is white supremacy for hipsters. I assume that at some point people with IQs over 100 are going to start figuring that out.”