The MI:7 shortfall has already been kicked around, but what in blazes is happening in this world? Aced out by Sound of Freedom, okay, but by anemic Haunted Mansion?
Jeffrey Wells
That Unilluminated “R” Is A Metaphor
…for not just the diminished returns of Joseph L. Mankiewicz and Daryl F. Zanuck’s “monumental mouse” (Judith Crist’s term) but about the dwindling power of the old studio system itself.
The Hell You Say
This morning HE commenter Dean Treadway wrote something curious in the thread for “Annoying Beefalo on Baltic Beach.” He wrote “you must have been a terrible bully in school.”
Au contraire — it was often the other way around. During my horrible gulag youth I was occasionally victimized by bullies, both in fraternal and official realms. I was a provocateur, true, but the social punishment measures were brutal, even fiendish.
“Hardly a bully,” I replied. “I frequently felt alone and isolated and picked on. Mainly starting in my teens. Not always but often among rancid, herd-instinct groups in junior high and senior high (i.e., mainly in toxic New Jersey, hardly at all in Fairfield County).
“I consequently withdrew to some extent. I felt much more attached to movies and TV shows than to real life, which struck me as characterized by tiresome duty and drudgery and regulated boredom with very little in the way of discovery and adventure or, as Jim Morrison put it, “true sailing”.
And yet I had a perverse streak from an early age, rarely adhering to the straight and narrow. An instinctive oddball contrarian thing. Perhaps on some level an anarchist instinct, but more simply a healthy anti- authoritarian urge.
The first long word I learned to spell was anti–disestablishmentarianism.
Example: My Cub Scout group was hand painting fake-leather folders for personal diaries — we were simply supposed to try our hand at stylized caligraphy with the word “DIARY”’ front and center plus our names and birthdates at the bottom. I wrote the word “DAIRY” because I found it amusing.
I’m still pushing back against the bullies, except now they’re mainly from the ranks of Millennials and Zoomers.
Memory Enhancement
Prevagen comes highly recommended by none other than Sasha Stone. I’m starting the regimen today…a double dose for starters.
Jack Black Is Only 53
…but he looks like a blend of Gabby Hayes, Yosemite Sam, Klondike Clem and the ghost of Dr. John. (Borrowed from a Scott Alexander Facebook post.)
Saving Newspapers for Headline Value
Earlier today I paused in front of these newspapers, which were displayed upon a cardboard newsstand inside a CVS. “Hmm,” I wondered, “should I save these for posterity?” Then I figured “naahh.” Then I thought “no, maybe I should.”
The last N.Y. Times dead-tree edition I saved was when Obama was elected — 11.5.08. I also have JFK’s assassination (replica), Marilyn Monroe’s death (replica), JFK’s Cuban Missile Crisis blockade, Nixon resigns, Reagan shot, Gorbachev toppled by coup, Yeltsin takes power.
Hedren on Downslope
I was so disengaged during my one and only viewing of Charlie Chaplin’s A Countess From Hong Kong (‘67) that I can’t remember Tippi Hedren’s cameo performance as “Martha” — her first post-Hitchcock gig.
She had a more substantial role in The Harrad Experiment (‘73) as a married sex instructor, although her cool and somewhat icy manner in The Birds and especially Marnie made that kind of character a difficult sell. Her Harrad husband was played by James Whitmore…go figure.
Speaking of icy I was surprised to come upon this Coppertone ad the other day. I honestly didn’t think the mid ‘60s Hedren, who began as a model, was capable of wearing a two-piece bathing suit, much less posing in one for a magazine ad. The frigid-chilly Marnie persona had really sunk in by that time.
I’m trying to think of another actress during that era who conveyed such anxiety or acute discomfort with any sort of erotic presence or expression. She was like a brittle nun of some kind, tense and guarded and buttoned up.
Burned Into Brain
Not that I use the term “influencers” with any regularity, but the pink fringe lampshade dude (or woman) below will henceforth be the image that comes to mind whenever the subject arises. A Barbie worshipper, obviously, but also a quintessential image of an alpha–current, favor–currying gladhander and movie–invite whore.
As for Manuela Lazic’s 8.1 Guardian piece about an increasing publicist tendency to invite social-media influencers to screenings more while diminishing as much as politically possible the access of serious, seasoned critics when it comes to expensive studio product…well, that’s been the deal for roughly five or six years, right? (Launched in 2016, TikTok exploded in ‘18.)
And when you eliminate the obsequious, finger-to-the-wind go-alongers (the reigning critic fraternity since feature-length films were born in 1915) and the legions of big-city critics who decided around the advent of #Oscarssowhite and #MeToo (‘16 to ‘18) and certainly after the George Floyd riots of May ‘20 that becoming political–crusade wokesters was the safest approach going forward, the ranks of truly engaged, worth-reading, alive-on-the-planet-earth film critics & columnists have been dramatically thinned, to put it mildly.
In shorter terms, whore critics have been the leaders of the pack for over a century, and then a whole new breed of politically progressive virtue signallers came along about five or six years ago. Add this community to social-media influencers and the game is 98% rigged. Clear-light critics and columnists (numbering very few in this country, maybe 25 or 30** including contrarians like myself) are the last carriers of the integrity torch, and most people reading this sentence (including the HE pissheads) will snort derisively at such a notion.
** a random few off the top of my head — Owen Gleiberman, Sasha Stone, Jordan Ruimy, Jeff Sneider, Todd McCarthy, Armond White, Peter Bradshaw, Boston Herald’s Jim Verniere, Mark Kermode, Mark Harris, Maitland McDonaugh, Janet Maslin, Paul Schrader, Ella Taylor, Peter Howell…who else?