To go by the below trailer, the just-released 4K Dirty Harry Bluray is infected with orange-teal disease…the same virus that has all but ruined several Criterion Blurays.
When’s the last time you’ve noticed that red paint on a city curb (absolutely no parking) had a red-orange hue? When’s the last time that the top of a fire hydrant was painted glaring teal-turquoise? Or a pickup truck, for that matter? Look at that big truck with the intense light-blue cab and a red-orange front bumper…this is bullshit.
Another trait of this malignant color scheme is pinkish flesh tones.
These icky colors and tints are all over the new Dirty Harry. I’ll take the old 1971 colors, thanks. Fire-engine red curbs, I mean.
Obviously orange-teal fascism is spreading like cancer. It really has to be stopped. Some eccentrics actually seem to prefer orange-teal. They’re zombies. They’re not human.
Surprise below! The orange-red curb from before has reverted back to a more reddish color…what gives?
Natural flesh tones on Clint’s face in this somewhat older image (from ’22 — below) are not all that prominent on the Dirty Harry 4K.
But the trailer alone tells me that Halyna Hutchins‘ cinematography is of a fairly high order — arthousey, Days of Heaven-ish, beautifully lighted. The portions of Rust that were shot after Halyna’s tragic death were handled by dp Bianca Cline.
For decades I’ve harbored fond memories of The President’s Analyst (’67), a half-annoying, half-hippieish, half-psychedelic social satire that starred the smooth James Coburn and a comfortably laid-back Godfrey Cambridge.
So when I gave Analyst a re-watch the other night, I was surprised to discover that much of it (roughly 60%) isn’t especially good…unfunny, broadly played, overly brittle, vaguely irritating, shallow in a Man From U.N.C.L.E.-ish or Our Man Flint-y way. I was soon looking at my watch and figuring “okay, not as good as I remembered.”
But then it does a switch-up and becomes a whole different film…it goes all hippie-dippie-ish and rock-and-rolly and free love-celebrating, and is generally invested in a kind of “spread the joy and transcendence of LSD” attitude. And then it dives into a surreal but amusing plotline about the malevolence of TPC (The Phone Company) and the robots behind this malignant entity. It ends with Coburn and Cambridge shooting it out with TPC droids….hilarious!
Rarely has a mezzo-mezzo mainstream film (green-lighted by Paramount’s Robert Evans) completely uncorked itself and gone all loopy-doopey like The President’s Analyst did. I ended up up chuckling and mostly loving it. The last 40%, I mean.
The big switch happens right around the one-hour mark. It starts when Coburn’s Dr. Sidney Schaefer, running from would-be assassins of an international cast, ducks into the legendary Cafe Wha? on McDougal Street and hooks up with a rock band led by “Eve of Destruction“‘s Barry McGuire (89 and still with us!). Schaefer quickly becomes a splendor-in-the-grass lover of the attractive, hippie-chicky Snow White (Jill Banner).
From the moment that McGuire and Banner slip into the narrative and invite Coburn to join them on their magic travels, The President’s Analyst becomes a mid ’60s “turn on, tune in and drop out” mood piece…a capturing of what a lot of people were feeling and delving into and experimenting with in ’66 and ’67.
In this sense Analyst is almost as much of a mid ’60s cultural capturing as John Boorman‘s Catch Us If You Can (’65) and Michelangelo Antonioni‘s Blow-Up (’66).
And yet that first hour…whoa. And the one-sheet slogans were hideous.
Poor, pixie-sized Banner was Marlon Brando‘s off-and-on girlfriend from roughly ’68 until her car-crash death in 1982, when she was only 35. She got slammed by a truck on the Ventura Freeway.
The career of Ted Flicker, director-writer of The President’s Analyst, went flat after someone slipped the Analyst script to J. Edgar Hoover‘s FBI, thereby tipping them off to the fact that Analyst would sharply satirize the bureau as well as the CIA. This led to Flicker and Evans being surveilled and harassed. The industry quickly got scared and dropped Flicker like a bad habit for a while. He later co-created Barney Miller. David Ewing‘s Ted Flicker: A Life in Three Acts screened in 2007 at the Santa Fe Film Festival. Flicker passed in 2014 at age 84.
Speaking as a mild-mannered, fair-minded, shoulder-shrugging film devotee, my feelings about this frightening TikTok video by “letsgofrightseeing” are roughly the same as the feelings held by many by elderly Cambodians about the terrorist regime of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.
I’m serious — this woman is rhetorically, behaviorally and substantially no different than Pol Pot.
There are very few things that are lower on the cultural cinematic scale than hardcore horror fans (movies, fiction). Not elevated horror but the grindhouse / slaughterhouse mulchy kind. I’m not saying fans of this ghoulash are the equivalent of swamp slime, but they’re in that general ballpark. They’re here and “alive” in a general sense, but their souls are corroded. They’re like zombies in a way.
