The reason I’ve always worshipped the Pepsi Cola boardroom sequence in Mommie Dearest (’81) is because in the space of two minutes it totally turns you around by making you root for Faye Dunaway‘s Joan Crawford. The scene arrives at the two-thirds mark, and up until that point Crawford has been portrayed as a fanatical perfectionist, disciplinarian and Kabuki-faced horror mom. And then she stands up to those Pepsi Coca sharks and it’s suddenly “go for it, Joan…we love you!”

Please name other gnarly or sociopathic or outright villainous characters who have suddenly become admirable or even heroic in the space of a single scene.

I don’t know from the histrionic ego shenanigans that have engulfed the Hollywood Critics Association over the last few days. THR‘s Scott Feinberg describes the contretemps between founder Scott Menzel and ex-president Scott Mantz (not to mention the ten members who’ve recently quit) as “a cross between a Christopher Guest comedy and All About Eve, featuring Hollywood strivers, showmanship and, in the views of some, possible swindling.”

I couldn’t care less how this shakes out, but HE has never felt much allegiance for a critics org that has long believed in applying DEI criteria to end-of-the-year film awards.

Why do I think this? Because films should win awards because they’re superbly crafted, emotionally moving and/or qualify as great art in ways that transcend regimented wokethink.

As Feinberg recounts, the HCA was co-launched in mid-2016 by We Live Entertainment web journalist Scott ‘Movie Man’ Menzel and then-Access Hollywood on-air correspondent Scott “Movie” Mantz. The idea was to create a critics group that, unlike most others, would be gender balanced and racially diverse.

What got my attention was a passage in Feinberg’s piece that passes along Mantz’s recollection about how George Tillman Jr.‘s The Hate U Give (’18) was chosen as the HCA’s Best Picture winner.

Mantz’s recollection of Menzel’s explanation: ‘Ashley [Menzel’s wife, who is now listed on the HCA’s website as its co-founder] and I were going through the final votes, and it was looking like Roma was going to win. I didn’t want us to be just like everybody else. So Ashley and I, when we saw which way the votes were going, voted for The Hate U Give.

“This movie speaks more to what our organization is about,” Menzel emphasizes, “so that’s why I thought that it would be good if we showed that this movie won.”

Mantz’s reply to Menzel: “Yeah, but if the members are voting and you are looking at the votes and you’re voting another way to give your preference, you are manipulating the vote. That’s voter fraud [which] ethically I have a very big problem with.”

Mantz tells Feinberg adds “that he didn’t and doesn’t believe that The Hate U Give actually came anywhere near that close to topping the voting.”

Menzel denies making any such admission to Mantz, though he does confirm that he and his wife voted for The Hate U Give. He also rationalizes that “we have a lot of people of color within our organization who really liked the movie.”

I found The Hate You Give somewhere between decent and tolerable. Humanistic, compassionate, tragic. But I wasn’t sufficiently intrigued to watch it all the way through, mainly because I could tell what it was up to (beware of demonic, hair-trigger white cops) from a mile away. I’m obviously okay with a film saying that, but if that’s all it it has to say I’m left with shrugs and whatevs.

Critic Mark Dujsiuk, 10.19.18: “There’s a clear difference between complex and heavy-handed, but it’s one of those things you have to see to know. Unfortunately, The Hate U Give falls into the latter category.”

Film Forward’s Kent Turner: “[It’s] about the slogans.”

“And I think what Kubrick did with his movies, he would take properties and literature and just say ‘I don’t care about this book…I’m gonna deconstruct it and make a movie based on this [deconstruction]’…he had this very specific idea about cinema.”

Just another wiggy, anti-MSM, “let’s go, Brandon” nutter on the road. With one significant omission on the rear window. Or should I say one significant newbie? (Snapped this morning on Route 7 at 9:15 am.)

…is one false move, one tiny screw-up, one small miscalculation, one slight misjudgment, one fumbled ball, one banana peel on a linoleum floor…and the bats of hell will be all over the place.

Possibly a super-defining, career-changing performance from Daniel Radcliffe? You tell me.

A 1930s Phillip Marlowe noir in the traditional vein of Dick Richards’ Farewell My Lovely (‘75) with none other than Liam Neeson in the title role? It won’t rock theatrical (strictly aimed at GenX and boomer types), but I adore the gesture of it all…the old-time vibe.

Last night I finally watched Claire Denis‘s Both Sides of the Blade (Avec amour et acharnement).

Written by Denis and Christine Angot, it’s basically about a marriage between a long-of-tooth Parisian couple — Juliette Binoche‘s “Sara” and Vincent Lindon‘s “Jean” — coming apart at the seams because of wifey’s decision to start fucking an ex-boyfriend (Gregoire Colin‘s “Francois”).

It’s Jean’s fault, in a way, for going into an athletic-talent-spotting business with Francois. Jean knows Francois and Sara’s romantic history, but as an ex-con he’s looking to build his life up again with a sport-related enterprise.

Anyway, Jean smells the Sara-Francois vibe before long, Sara lies to Jean with absolute conviction, and eventually it all blows the hell up.

The weird part is that Francois is significantly younger (Colin was born in ’75) than Sara, who looks late 50ish (as Binoche is). And Jean is in his early ’60s (as Lindon is). If you ask me Binoche and Lindon are only a few years away from being too old for this shit.

Plus we realize toward the end that Francois is selfish and a bit coarse (during his first assignation with Sara he suddenly wants anal without lube or foreplay). This tells us that Sara is foolish — a bad judge of character — on top of being a lying infidel.

There’s also a pointless, credibility-straining subplot about Jean having an alienated black son named Marcus (Issa Perica), which I completely ignored. One, the Marcus subplot was obviously inserted to satisfy the woke thing. And two, Jean and Marcus don’t resemble each other in the slightest. Complete bullshit.

Both Sides of the Blade isn’t half bad, but all it leaves you with is “dudes, don’t marry a conniving liar.”

Is there a reason why the Wikipedia and IMDB pages for Greg Mottola‘s Confess, Fletch (Paramount, 9.16) refuse to mention that the film was at least partly shot in Rome? That’s the only aspect that has me going.

I was watching the trailer and going “uhm-hmm, yeah, okay” when all of a sudden there was Jon Hamm sitting at an outdoor cafe in either Piazza Navona or Campo de Fiori. Bingo!

The youngest guy in the principal cast (Roy Wood, Jr.) is 44 years old — that tells you something. Hamm’s GenX costars include Marcia Gay Harden, Kyle MacLachlan, Roy Wood, Jr. and John Slattery.

Originally posted on 12.14.20 (five weeks after Biden’s election, three weeks before attack on U.S. Capitol): I never knew any Vinnie Barbarino or Tony Manero “borough” types in the mid ’70s, but I’d known a few Italian-American guys during my painful upbringing in Westfield, New Jersey. They proudly called themselves “guineas”, wore pegged pants and pointy black leather lace-ups, radiated pugnacious vibes and seemed to live in their own angry little world.

And I knew that the bridge-and-tunnel chumps who came into Manhattan on weekends in the late ’70s, the ones who were too thick to realize that their chances of getting into Studio 54 were completely nil…those razor-cut slash polyester goons who radiated sartorial cluelessness in so many ways, and thereby indicating a certain myopic mindset…I knew these guys.

And so I believed Nik Cohn‘s “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night,” the 6.7.76 New York cover story that soon became the basis for Robert Stigwood and John Badham‘s Saturday Night Fever, which became a huge hit and cultural earth-shaker after opening on 12.14.77.

I loved the 2001 Odyssey dance sequences as much as the next guy, but I wasn’t a fan of the film itself, largely because I found John Travolta‘s Tony Manero an impossible asshole — chilly, closed off.

Yes, I know — that was who and what he was, being based on the “Vincent” character Cohn had written about and so on. But where was it written that I had to like Manero’s company?

I bought a ticket to see Badham’s film at Westport’s Post Cinema just before Christmas of ’77. I wanted to have an interesting and perhaps an eye-opening time, but almost immediately I was saying to myself “I have to hang out with this asshole?” On top of which FUCK DISCO…that was one of my foundational beliefs at the time.

What a shock, therefore, to discover 20 years later that Cohn had basically “piped” the New York cover story. He’d done a little research in Bay Ridge and poked around and talked to a few locals, but had more or less made it up.

And yet Cohn’s article felt genuine. I totally recognized (or felt that I recognized) his observations about a certain strata of young, under-educated Italian-American guys in their late teens and early 20s and their dead-end jobs and whatnot…it seemed to convey certain basic impressions of borough guys of that era. I bought it and so did Hollywood, Stigwood, Badham, Travolta and, down the road, tens of millions of fans of the film.

It just went to show that fiction could masquerade as honest reportage and vice versa. I re-read Cohn’s piece last night after watching the Bee Gees doc, and I had a good time with it. Even knowing about Cohn having admitted the truth in ’96, I bought it all the same. Good writing is good writing.

I’ve just discovered Mo, a week-old Netflix comedy series about a pot-bellied, never-say-die Palestinian refugee without a passport or citizenship papers (standup comic Mohammed Amer) and trying to get traction in the Houston area.

Loosely based on Amer’s rough-and-tumble experience in this country, the series is co-written by Amer and Ramy Youssef (Hulu’s Ramy). It’s a fast-paced, character-rich, highly regarded show with fleet dialogue and a humanistic streak.

Who turned me on to Mo? Veteran hotshot comedian Bill Dawes, a supremely impudent, Irish-American, Bill Burr-like actor-comedian who costars in Mo (starting in episode #5).

Onstage Dawes constantly pokes the woke Stalinist bear. A brash, witty, good-looking, unapologetic, unabashedly heterosexual, tired-of-all-this-shit funny guy…one of the comics who don’t share the Hannah Gadsby aesthetic, or who certainly occupy the opposite end of the spectrum with agreeable servings of spunk, verve and fearlessness.

Dawes to HE Netflix readers: Push the LOVE THIS button so we’ll get renewed for season #2.

Note: I’m personally too stupid to figure how to find much less push this fucking button, but I’m sure most HE readers will be able to ace it.