No one will dispute that during his heyday as a powerful Hollywood and Broadway producer, Scott Rudin was often…okay, commonly believed to be an abusive employer. It all came to a boil in April 2021, which is when a Tatiana Siegel THR piece and a subsequent sensitive-wokester clamor led to Rudin withdrawing from the showbiz arena after acknowledging and apologizing for his behavior.

Now it’s four years later, and Rudin, according to a 3.28 N.Y. Times article by Michael Paulson, is looking to do a Louis C.K. and finesse a lowkey return.

Back in the days of peak woke terror (roughly ’18 to early ’24), those guilty of indisputably bad behavior were slapped with one of two kinds of punishments — (a) hangings and beheadings (Polanski, Allen, Weinstein…”go get yourself buried”) or (b) public whippings followed by a finite period of banishment.

When the Rudin thing exploded four years ago, the anger was so intense that I thought he might be the latest member of the Polanski club. Now not so much…sooner or later all things dry up.

I say this having been yelled at by Scott two or three times myself, but you know what? I shook that shit off. Did I like getting slapped around? No, but I didn’t whine or cry or mew like as kitten either. Like Lee Marvin‘s “Walker” might have concluded, I figured there’s always heat in the Hollywood kitchen, and occasionally getting yelled it is just part of the game.

Once upon a time the shouting, volatile, highly-demanding producer or swaggering “boss from hell” was a lamentable part of showbiz lore…Burt Lancaster‘s J.J. Hunsecker in Sweet Smell of Success, Alan King‘s Max Herschel in Sidney Lumet‘s Just Tell Me What You Want, the real-life Joel Silver and Harvey Weinstein, Saul Rubinek‘s Lee Donowitz in True Romance (based on Silver for the most part), Kevin Spacey‘s Buddy Ackerman in Swimming With Sharks, Tom Cruise‘s Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder, etc.

None of these characters were pleasant to be around on a 24/7 basis, but, as in real life, they had a dominating brand and tradition that you had to finesse one way or the other.

And then along came the sensitive, safe-space-seeking Millennials, and that Buddy Ackerman shit began to get old right quick.

The private exchange of affection and fluids is no one’s business except for the actual exchangers, and it certainly has no bearing upon the ability of a candidate for high office to serve effectively.

Outside of your #MeToo alarmists and two-faced hypocrite Republicans, who gives a damn if former New York State governor and current candidate for NYC mayor Andrew Cuomo and top assistant Melissa DeRosa had something going on two or three years ago? Or now even? So what?

Nobody knew about JFK’s compulsive womanizing in the early ’60s, and we all understand, of course, that aside from his rreportedly callous attitude about exploiting impressionable young women who worked at the White House, none of this even slightly mattered in terms of his Presidential duties and obligations. And if Pete Buttigieg runs for President in ’28, nobody should say a a single word…’nuff said.

Leave it there.

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.

…for allowing me to step up and rent this Venice Film Festival crib….all paid for and locked down…myself + Jordan Ruimy…just south of Campo Santa Margherita, and close to a vaporetto stop…Monday, 8.25 through Sunday, 9.7.

A new Deliotte survey has re-conveyed the familiar and depressing news that Zoomers and Millennials have all but abandoned the temple of cinema worship…they just don’t have the same faith in (and hunger for) movies that their elders do.

“HE to All Rapier-Tongued 17 Year-Olds,” posted on 3.17.23:

A quote attributed to Ben Affleck in Rebecca Keegan’s 3.16 THR interview mentions his 17 year-old daughter, Violet:

“I like the fact that she has this silver rapier tongue. [Then again] she lives her life largely in opposition to the work her parents have spent their lives dedicated to, where she’ll say things like, ‘I’m not sure film is really…do you think it’s a genuine art form?”

HE to Violet: “Movies have always been, at best, a haphazard art form, which is to say one that occasionally detours into art or at least an attempt at same. A half-assed, popcorn-driven, now-and-then art form. Or at least during awards season until Everything Everywhere All At Once, the equivalent of a cinematic hydrogen bomb or mass cyanide capsule, came along.

“But on the audience side of the equation, the occasional communal appreciation of movies and least a semblance of a belief that movies can at least potentially deliver some kind of artful reflection of what it’s like to live and struggle on this planet…that communal tradition is pretty much over, and it’s been killed by your generation (GenZ) along with the Millennials.

“People have been communally watching proscenium-arch plays since the Greek and Roman eras, and feature films since 1915 or thereabouts — call it 110 years. And then you guys arrived and settled in and pretty much killed the whole togetherness aspect. Not altogether but, you know, mostly.

“Now it’s mainly about streaming content in your living rooms or on your Macbooks and iPads, but not really ‘watching’ because you’re constantly texting and multi-tasking and checking out TikTok videos whenever your attention wanders.

“So to answer your question, film used to satisfy the measurement of being an occasional art form until you guys dropped in. Commercial movie theatres used to be regarded in some quarters as churches…no longer! Now they’ve pretty much become gladiator arenas. People used to sit there for 115 minutes or longer and actually pay attention for the most part…no longer for the most part!

“Nowadays the only way to savor really good films in a theatrical environment with people who ‘get’ it and love the worshipful aspect is to attend an upscale film festival (Cannes, Telluride, Venice, Toronto, Berlin, Sundance). Have you ever attended one of these? Maybe you should think about doing this. Can’t hurt.”

(Obviously the same laments, scoldings and heartbreaks apply also to Gen Alpha, born between 2010 and 2025.)

Unless a major hair-and-beard coloring job is in the offing, we may as well accept the fact that Matt Damon‘s Odysseus is going to look a bit moondoggy-ish in Chris Nolan‘s The Odyssey (Universal, 7.17.26). But give Damon credit, at least, for having gotten himself into shape. Look at those arms! Those flat abs!