Month: August 2026

A Guy Who Isn’t Sure About Aspect Ratios

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…just saw Ridley Scott‘s The Dog Stars (20th Century, 8.28), which looks to me like the seventy-ninth dystopian wasteland flick we’ve been fed over the last decade or so, but at least there isn’t a gay-bear subplot featuring Nick Offerman in a bath towel.

The guy liked it, he says, because it’s not some sweeping, gargantuan, super-scaled Scott flick (it only cost $110 million…chicken feed!) and therefore felt to him like Ridley in some kind of lean, hardcore, stripped-down mode.

You want real bare-bones Ridley? Try The Counselor (’13), which only cost $25 million.

Set in rural Colorado but shot entirely in rural Italy, The Dog Stars is “basically Omega Man” with Denver vacant and gutted and overgrown and basically in ruins with most of the population dead from some kind of Covid plague.

The Dog Stars is basically a four-hander — Jacob Elordi, Josh Brolin, Margaret Qualley and Guy Pearce — plus the usual assortment of scalawags, fringe zombies, feral scavengers and blah blah. Probably Elordi’s best performance ever, he says. (JE plays a Van Morrison-loving pilot and dog owner.) Qualley plays a kind of pallid love interest, he says, but minus any hunka-chunka (although they might sexually get together down the road, he says). Brolin plays a gruff Trumpian survivalist; Pearce plays Qualley’s dad.

Is there any story tension? Not really, he said, other than Elordi somehow getting wind of a humane, harmonious community in Colorado Springs or someplace like that.

It’s filmed in IMAX, the guy says. “Tall boxy IMAX?” I asked. “I don’t know…I don’t care about that stuff,” he said. “All I know is that it filled the screen.” Except the trailer tells us that The Dog Stars is presented in 2.39:1 (standard Scope) so it doesn’t fill the fucking screen. How can you trust a guy who doesn’t know (or care to know) the difference between 1.43:1 and 1.85:1 and 2.39:1?

HE nonethless appreciates this guy having shared his impressions.

Which Misunderstood or Shat-Upon Films From the Past

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…are due for an official, institutional rehab?

In his admiring 8.23 review of David Kittredge‘s Boorman and the Devil, Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman calls this about-to-open documentary as the latest example of “Movie Disaster Rehabilitation Culture, which is now an industry among hipster cinephiles.”

And so “the arid and didactic Heaven’s Gate has been elevated to the status of masterpiece. Eyes Wide Shut, which should have been about pedophilia (not aging swingers in masks), is now top–drawer Kubrick. And Exorcist II: The Heretic is described in Kittrdge’s doc as a wacked but misunderstood grand folly.

“I passionately disagree with all three of those reassessments,” Gleiberman writes, “and I think they’re all rooted in a certain impulse toward viewing movies in a postmodern way — as endlessly malleable texts rather than as stories that require an emotional logic and coherence that none of those films have. Wait long enough and even the worst movie, if it possesses the proper shoot-the-works ambition, can be ‘reframed.’”

HE hereby nominates Simon West and Jerry Bruckheimer‘s Con Air as one of the most deserving contenders for this hallowed status. It was the first Bruckheimer action flick to fully embrace a surreal, meta-ironic, half-comedic approach to the JB formuila. In this sense Con Air was a true genre groundbreaker, and yet, incredibly, it’s currently saddled with a 59% Rotten Tomatoes rating as well as a 52% rating on Metacritic. WTF?

Kathryn Bigelow‘s Zero Dark Thirty (2012). ZDT doesn’t need an agggregate critical rating upgrade (the RT and Metacritic ratings are in the low to mid 90s). It does, however, need a full and unqualified apology from the woke scumbags who did everything they could to take it down over allegedly endorsing torture….ridiculous!

At some point down the road Josh Safdie‘s Marty Supreme will need a fresh reassessment minus the Timothee Chalamet-needs-to-be-punished narrative that so many award-season handicappers succumbed to. We don’t need to rehash the whole thing except to say that at the end of the day Marty Supreme — a great manic-high, pogo-stick, hoppity-hop farce — was sorta kinda given the bum’s rush. In a sane, non-woke world it would’ve taken the Best Picture Oscar instead of PTA’s One Battle After Another.

No, I don’t think Damien Chazelle’s Babylon deserves a rehab treatment. Stylistic audacity isn’t enough. It didn’t work then and it doesn’t work now. Leave it there.

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Harry Lauder

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There’s a longstanding theatrical superstition that if you merely say “Macbeth” inside a theatre (or perhaps anywhere) you might be cursed by bad luck or some form of tragedy. AI states that the substitute term, for safety’s sake, is “the Scottish play.” Maybe in some circles but hipsters always refer to the Shakespearean tragedy as “Harry Lauder.”

I got this straight from the horse’s mouth of Peter O’Toole, mind. It was during a December ‘80 GQ interview in his Hampstead Heath home. O’Toole had recently suffered through ghastly reviews of an Old Vic production of Macbeth (which I attended) so he was certainly an authority.

“Somebody Spoke And I Went Into A Dream”

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Vancouver Sun, John Mackie, 9.4.21: “Robert Mitchum always had a reputation as a bit of a bad boy. It was cemented on Sept. 1, 1948, when he was arrested in a midnight police raid on a 20-year-old starlet’s home in Los Angeles.

“The police narcotics detail said they had been watching Mitchum for eight months and Lila Leeds for a shorter period, and encountered no resistance in making the arrest,” said a story in the Los Angeles Times. “Lights were burning in the living room of the house at 8443 Ridpath Drive when the raiding party arrived. The house, a well-appointed home with a built-in bar, is ideally suited to be a ‘reefer resort,’ Inspector William Craig said. It is perched on a hillside with no near neighbours, and well-screened by shrubbery.”

The arrest made headlines around the globe. The Vancouver Sun’s headline was “Robert Mitchum Caught With Dope,” although the art was a photo of the beautiful Leeds, who the story described as “a blonde bit player.”

According to the story by the British United Press, Mitchum admitted smoking pot to the cops.

“I’ve been smoking marijuana for years,” he said. “I knew I would get caught sooner or later. I’m ruined.”

Mitchum, Leeds, “blonde dancer” Vickie Evans and real estate agent Robin Ford “were booked on suspicion of violating the State Narcotic Law, a felony.” They were released after posting $1,000 bail each.

The 31-year-old Mitchum was separated from his wife at the time of the arrest, but she came back to Los Angeles with their two kids to stand by his side. Leeds was engaged to Lana Turner’s ex, Stephen Crane, but he fled to Europe to avoid the scandal.

On Sept. 2, L.A. police psychiatrist J. Paul de River opined that marijuana use “was the latest style in Hollywood.”

“It’s prevalent among artists for two reasons,” he said. “It peps them up when they’re working under a strain, and it acts as a powerful romantic stimulant.

“Now it’s a well-known fact Hollywood people are jaded. They’ve tried everything. The only way they can get any stimulation is to indulge in ‘reefers.’ It’s the only way they have left to get any thrill out of romance.”

“I don’t quite savvy all this sudden bleeding over the plight of Robert Mitchum, a droopy-eyed young movie actor who seems to have been caught by the cops on a reefer binge with a couple of blondes,” Ruark wrote in The Sun on Sept. 14.

“For one thing, it’s not an unusual offense in Hollywood. Dragging the weed ranks roughly in the film colony with taking Benzedrine as a substitute for sleep and sobriety.”

On Sept. 28, Mitchum’s lawyer, the famed Jerry Giesler, tried to get the indictment dropped because its language was “indefinite, uncertain and unintelligible.” The judge was amused, but denied his request, and the case went to trial in January 1949.

On Jan. 11, Mitchum was found guilty of criminal conspiracy to possess marijuana, and on Feb. 9 was sentenced to one year in the county jail, although the judge placed him “on probation for two years on condition that he spend 60 days in jail.” Leeds received the same sentence.

Mitchum was sent to a prison farm near Castaic in the northeast part of Los Angeles County, where he made cement blocks. The L.A. Times took a photo of him milking a cow.

He kept his sense of humour is the big house, telling reporters his fellow prisoners had voted him “Mr. Cement Block of 1949.” He was released after 50 days for good behaviour, and his studio, RKO, put him right back to work.

His popularity was undiminished, which Ruark had predicted when he quoted an RKO poll on why he was popular with young female “bobby soxxers.”

Ruark: “The poll, capsuled, revealed they liked the young man because ‘He has the most immoral face we ever saw,’ and, ‘He suggests sex in an evil way.’”

Zero Mostel-Gene Wilder Flick That Hardly Anyone Remembers, Much Less Saw Back In The Day

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An American Repertory Theatre revival of Eugène Ionesco‘s Rhinoceros, a darkly absurdist 1959 play about inner ugliness and encroaching slob conformity (1930s National Socialism, Trumpism), began playing in Cambridge about a week ago. It will continue until Sunday, September 27th.

John Turturro (Berenger, the flawed but rebellious main protagonist), Paul Giamatti (Jean, the main antagonist) and Tatiana Maslany (Daisy, Berenger’s wife) top the Cambridge cast.

The first B’way production opened in 1961 at the Longacre theatre with Eli Wallach as Berenger, the great Zero Mostel in the Giamatti role (his performance snagged a Tony for Best Leading Actor) and Anne Jackson as Daisy.

13 years later Gene Wilder (Berenger), Mostel and Karen Black (Daisy) costarred in a low-budget film version that was released on 1.21.74. It was directed by Tom O’Horgan, produced by Ely Landau and distributed by American Film Theatre.

I was ashamed to admit to myself this morning that I’ve never seen a single clip from this and had almost totally forgotten about it.

Pic opened only a couple of weeks before Blazing Saddles (2.7.74) and roughly nine months before Young Frankenstein (12.15.74) — the two most seminal and popular comedies Wilder ever starred in. Quite the banner year.

Has anyone seen the ’74 Rhinoceros? And if so, reactions?

“Are You A Member, Sir?”

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HE to Ralph Meeker: “That genteel, bespectacled, British-accented clerk is in his late 60s or maybe older, and you’re slapping him around?”

Meeker to HE: “Yeah, and if he’s not careful there’s more where that came from!”

The Hollywood Athletic Club is still in the same location — 6525 W. Sunset Blvd.

“After A While You Learn Something”

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Is this really Robert Mitchum talking, or an AI Mitchum bot of some kind? He conveys some great observations, but it doesn’t sound like him. It does and it doesn’t. It sounds like he’s reading from a script.

Film-quality-wise, Mitchum peaked in the ’40s and ’70s, but a bit less so in the ’50s, ’60s and ’80s. Herewith are his 17 best films — the very best in boldface:

1940s (4): Till the End of Time (1946), Pursued (1947), Crossfire (1947), Out of the Past (1947)

1950s (6): His Kind of Woman (1951), The Racket (1951), Macao (1952), The Night of the Hunter (1955), Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957), Thunder Road (1958)

1960s (3): The Sundowners (1960), Cape Fear (1962), The Longest Day (1962)

1970s (3): Ryan’s Daughter (’70), The Friends of Eddie Coyle (’73), The Yakuza (’74)

1980s (1): That Championship Season (’82)

Huge “Manchurian” Mistake on Frankenheimer’s Part

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A respectful HE salute to L’il Abner and The Manchurian Candidate costar Leslie Parrish, who passed late last year at age 90.

Parrish would have been 91 if she’d lived past her most recent birthday (3.18.26), which is neither here nor there although she did pass roughly eight or nine months ago.

I’ve been wanting to say the following about The Manchurian Candidate for decades:

Midway into John Frankenheimer‘s 1962 classic Jocelyn Jordan (Parrish) slips into a “fascist rally” costume party thrown by Senator John Iselin (James Gregory).

But when she appears before the brainwashed Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey) in a private room, Jocelyn is wearing a Queen of Diamonds outfit — a huge “whoa!” because Dr. Yen Lo (Khigh Dhiegh) has implanted this image into Raymond’s brain as a compliance trigger. Except Jocelyn is not part of any long-gestating commie plot to assassinate a presidential candidate and install Iselin in the White House — she’s quite ignorant of the plot and simply loves Raymond, etc.

So why in the hell is Jocelyn wearing that costume? Did John’s evil wife Eleanor (Angela Lansbury) urge her to wear it? Okay, but why would Lansbury do that? And why would Jocelyn comply? She surely understand how much Raymond hates her.

This was a huge error on Frankenheimer’s part. For the film falls completely apart when she appears in that get-up, and it doesn’t recover for several minutes.

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Appalled By Video Clip of Walking-and-Talking Robot

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…losing balance and collapsing on a sidewalk. Not by the device’s temporary failure (mistakes instruct designers and manufacturers what’s wrong and how to fix it), but by the sound of someone giggling at the moment of impact…an onlooker laughing at the poor thing. Would they also laugh when a five-year-old crashes to the pavement on a bicycle? What kind of low-life chuckles at this stuff? I’ll tell you what kind. An ignorant fraidy cat who feels threatened by advanced tech.