In the view of a certain HE friendo who’s no fan of the suddenly departed Amazon and MGM Studios honcho Jennifer Salke….

“[Amazon owner] Jeff Bezos was perturbed by the protracted 007 fallout, as well as the cost of buying out Barbara Broccoli and Michael Wilson, but spending that additional billion on severance for the Bond producers as well as the costs of the Salke-approved Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power as well as Citadel ($300 million) finally took its toll on this trillionaire. 

“Bezos finally woke up to Salke’s wokeness (and should have questioned her early on the cost of acquiring Mindy Kaling’s Late Night).  Both Salke and her husband Bert are considered lavishly unqualified for positions they’ve held for too long, and encumbered by questionable taste.”

“When their evil enemy” — played by Sean Penn? — “resurfaces after 16 years, a group of ex-revolutionaries reunites to rescue somebody’s” — presumably Leonardo Di Caprio‘s — “daughter”. Whatever.

Thomas Pynchon‘s “Vineland” was set in 1984, of course. But Paul Thomas Anderson‘s film (Warner Bros., 9.26) is set…does it matter?

I’m not feeling this. I’m not sensing an interest on the part of the filmmakers to convey a basic push-pull situation that feels like the basis of a story.

Set in the northwest, One Battle After Another appears to set in the present tense (as indicated by the cars) but the pay phone…are there pay phones anywhere these days? Even in the boonies? The last time I was in rural Colorado…seven months ago…I didn’t see a single one.

The armed revolutionaries are lefties, of course, but what’s the plan or goal exactly? Whoever cut this trailer together doesn’t want us to know. It feels a bit scattered, chaotic. I know there have been screenings here and there, and I’ve read about a three-hour-plus length.

…roughly nine months after The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg reported that Boulder was a “strong candidate,” and seven months after I posted that Boulder was unconfirmed but all but locked.

Yesterday Facebook‘s Mark Harris posted a well-written essay about Arthur Penn‘s Night Moves (’75) — an essay included in the just-released Night Moves 4k Bluray as well as posted on Criterion.com.

This morning I wrote the following to Harris: “You naturally don’t want to ruin your valued relationship with Criterion so you’re not going to mention the appalling orange-teal color scheme (primarily an aesthetic call pushed by Criterion’s Lee Kline* starting in the late teens) on Criterion’s just-released Night Moves 4K Bluray….a scheme that vandalizes the original look of Arthur Penn’s Watergate-era noir.

“I’m not exaggerating. This is apparently a consensus view. The proof is in the pudding, as a recent HE article shows.

“And not only Night Moves but Midnight Cowboy, Bull Durham, Teorema, Sisters — Kline and Criterion have created a cottage industry built upon uglifying the original color schemes of these films…vandalizing them by going way dark and imposing orange-teal hues.

“Orange-teal is nothing less than an obscenity. Criterion’s version of Night Moves isn’t a “distraction” from the horror, as you put it — it is its own brand of home-video horror, and one guaranteed to last.

“I own the 2017 Night Moves Bluray and it’s totally fine.”

* Kline was cut loose from Criterion in late 2022. I don’t know who the new Lee Kline is, or if Criterion’s Night Moves Bluray was mastered three or four years ago when Kline was still running the shop.

HE to Kline in 2018:

Around 6:30 last evening I sat down with Magazine Dreams inside an AMC plex in Stamford. Within 15 minutes I was in a state of twitching animal convulsion.

“Why am I watching this shit?”, I asked myself. “Why am I here? Why in the world would I want to hang with a body-builder as deeply fucked up and rage-consumed as Jonathan Majors’ Killian Maddox, who is ten times more deranged than Travis Bickle?”

I was in that completely empty theatre because some deeply perverse and twisted voices in the HE commentariat insisted that I had to man up and watch this fucking thing…that I would have no street cred if I ducked it.

Well, this is a film that has been carefully calculated to alienate and offend. I’m not surprised to have heard that director-writer Elijah Bynum has been arrested, tried and sentenced to Movie Jail, an actual brick-and-mortar facility located near Bakersfield. Ten years of wearing stripes and breaking rocks in the prison quarry.

Just as it defied credibility that Cybill Shepherd‘s Betsy, a seemingly mature campaign staffer, would go out with the obviously immature and eccentric Travis Bickle in Martin Scorcese‘s Taxi Driver (’76), it makes no sense at all that Haley Bennett‘s Jessie would go on a dinner date with the obviously antsy, deeply insecure Killian. And what a disaster that turns out to be.

Bennett is very good at conveying profound discomfort during that scene.

When Killian does some body-flexing online, some commenters (dudes who immediately reminded me of the HE pisshounds) post demeaning insults…“Incel vibes!…why hasn’t he killed himself yet?” and so on.

Killian is completely untethered to any concept or imitation of emotional health. He’s a time bomb, a lunatic…run in the opposite direction. One way or another he’s going to wind up dead or in jail…something tragic or destructive.

“This film is torture to sit through,” I wrote while sitting in row seven. “I’m miserable.”

That said, Magazine Dreams has four excellent scenes — (a) one in which four white guys, allied with the owner of a paint store that Killian has destroyed, pull Killian out of his car and beat him up badly as one of them calls him an “ape”, (b) a second-act scene in which the principal attacker (the “ape” guy) enters a diner with his wife and two kids, and Killian saunters over and starts verbally intimidating the man and scaring the shit out of the wife and kids, (c) a scene in which he enters a hotel room with a prostitute and then wimps out, changes his mind, and (d) a third-act scene in which Killian, armed with a rifle, slips into the apartment of a guy who gave Killian low marks in a bodybuilding competition, and orders him to disrobe while threatening him with death,

Welcome to the world of a truly ridiculous rage monster. Steroid madness. Boiling blood, smeared blood.

“Body builder collapses on-stage”…who gives a shit?

On top of which Killian fucking eats too damn much. Decidedly gross.

I’ll at least give Bynum and Majors credit for having the balls to make a film that almost everyone who sees it is certain to dislike or more likely hate.