Two days hence Watcher (IFC Midnight), which I’ve been hyping since last January, finally opens. It’s an expert, quietly creepy, Polanski-level thriller, and well worth the price.

Set in present-day Bucharest and costarring Maika Monroe (It Follows), Karl Glusman and Burn Gorman, Chloe Okuno and Zack Ford‘s film is unquestionably scary and unnerving.

In my view it stops short of elevated horror — it’s more of a low-key, Roman Polanski-level thriller in the vein of Repulsion and The Tenant. First-rate chills and anxieties ensue. And not the “midnight movie” kind either.

Scream-level morons may respond in their usual way, but Watcher is as good as it gets with this kind of palette and approach.

4:30 pm Paris time, 10:30 am New York time. We’ve been airborne since 1:30 pm with nearly five hours to go. I chose Air Canada to save $$… big mistake.

All the sublime Parisian soothings of the last four days were erased this morning in one fell swoop. Everything has been hell. 5:30 am wake-up, idiotic Uber driver, wallet explosion on Roissy bus to CDG, interminable air terminal lines, etc.

Air Canada made me get a $35 Covid test, and we’re all wearing fucking masks on the flight. News flash: The pandemic is more or less over, guys, and fuck Monkey Pox. I hate hate HATE this crap so much.

Slight consolation: I’m wearing a very cool-looking Cannes Film Festival mask.

I needed something to take my mind off of this morning’s awful Air Canada / Charles DeGaulle gauntlet (150 minutes of Chinese water torture waiting), so I re-read last night’s thread about the unfortunate casting of Moses Ingram in the Obi Wan Kenobi Disney+ series.

It’s one of HE’s most fascinating threads in recent months, and I want to congratulate VicLaz6 for revealing to the world what a pack of salivating racist dogs many of the commenters are.

Seriously, most of the adverse comments alluded to impressions that Ingram’s Baltimore patois didn’t seem to belong in the Star Wars realm — the style and manner of her performance doesn’t fit, and therefore hurts the show’s credibility. (Along with the allegedly poor calibre of her acting plus the lousy writing.)

But the basic thrust, many said, was that the fault was less Ingram’s and more the casting directors.

I haven’t read most or even a fair percentage of the negative responses overall — only the HE sliver — and for all I know a good portion have been flat-out racist in nature. But something tells me the reactions are probably more mixed, and that Ewan McGregor’s fairly sweeping denunciation of all the naysayers as racist was unfair.

Regional Friendo: “Just saw Top Gun: Maverick…holy shit, that last act! Someone’s seen and plagiarized [a film released in 1977]!

HE: “Yup.”

Regional Friendo: “Wow…the hard-to-hit target, the steep mountain run [equals vulnerable target in ’77 film], even down to [Maverick costar repeating exactly what costar of ’77 film did during a big climactic action moment]. Five fucking Maverick writers to come up with that?”

HE: “As I’ve written, I would have respected it more if they’d followed the ending of The Bridges at Toko Ri (’54).”

Regional Friendo: “No way that was gonna happen. Too much money to make back.”

HE: “It would have hit home if they’d both died.”

Regional Friendo: “It’s not that kinda film. The audience would’ve revolted.”

HE: “‘Not that kinda film’? You sound like Jerry Bruckheimer.”

Regional Friendo; “I’m just telling you like it is
It’s exactly a JB film…it’s an audience film, not for Oscars. No studio would have green-lighted a film in which Cruise AND Teller die in the end.
It is what it is.”

The racist reactions to Moses Ingram’s casting as an Empire villian in Disney+’s Obi Wan Kenobi series are ugly and unfortunate. On the other hand one of the side complaints may be more about a lack of a certain class bearing.

All films set in the past or in fantasy realms have adhered to certain ways of speaking for the good and bad guys. Generally speaking villains allied with or backed by powerful forces tend to sound more disciplined and mannered in a high-class way than their underdog victims.

In Stanley Kubrick‘s Spartacus (’60), for example, the slaves were played by proletariat types with American accents while the Romans were played by British actors or distinguished college-dean types.

Likewise, in the Star Wars realm the classic approach has been (at least back in the old days) that the Empire baddies have sounded like officious, cultured British elites, or at least like people who went to expensive prep schools.

I’m going, of course, by the example set 45 years ago by Peter Cushing‘s Grand Moff Tarkin in the original Star Wars (’77).

Billy Dee Williams‘s Lando Calrissian sounded like a smooth American hustler, of course, in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. But it wouldn’t have worked as well if Williams had been cast as an Empire villain.

I don’t care who plays who in Disney+’s Obi Wan Kenobi series, but I can half-understand why some might say that a female Empire villain shouldn’t sound like a tough Baltimore girl. She should sound like a RADA instructor or a senior official with British Airways or a Whitehall bureaucrat of some kind.

I just think it’s fair to mention the pattern established by Cushing and others in the old days. Otherwise I couldn’t care less and I’m certainly not going to argue about it.

THR, 5.31:

My all-time favorite pre-geezer Eastwood vehicle is Don Siegel‘s Escape From Alcatraz (’79). My favorite unregenerate-geezer Clint is Gran Torino (’08). Today he hit 92.

“Beauty is a short-lived tyranny” is one of the truest statements about beauty ever spoken or written. It was mentioned the other day by Joe Rogan while discussing Amber Heard, but it’s an observation that goes back to Socrates.

It means one thing and one thing only: When you’re young and considered beautiful (or, in dude terms, unusually good-looking), you have a great deal of temporary power. It only lasts for 10 or 15 years, 20 at the outside. Once your peak beauty factor fades you naturally have to rely on what you have inside or what you’ve learned in terms of skills and wisdom and whatnot. But when everyone loves your face and physique, you have the power of a modest tyrant.

Most guys are fairly honest about this. I was relatively fetching in my 20s and 30s, and I knew that my looks were a help as far as landing job interviews and meeting women, etc. I was too insecure and miserable in my early to mid 20s to take advantage of this, but in my late 20s and 30s I had a batting average of at least .400, which is pretty good considering that in the ’70s and ’80s (perhaps the greatest nookie era in American history) nobody was batting .1000 or even .750.

Ask most women to define beauty and nine times out of ten they’ll say something along the lines of this Audrey Hepburn quote: “The beauty of a woman is not in a facial mode but the true beauty in a woman is reflected in her soul. It is the caring that she lovingly gives the passion that she shows. The beauty of a woman grows with the passing years.”

To that I say fine, but as Stanley Kowalski once said, “I never met a dame yet who didn’t know she was good looking or not without being told.”

An observation from 2011: “In the age of Botox and plastic surgery, beauty can be a much longer-lived tyranny than Socrates first believed.

“To men, the tyranny of beauty is all the things they do to entice it, capture it, and keep it, only to find that, like a flower, it only lasts so long.

“To women, the tyranny of beauty is the effort and time (and, often, no small amount of pain) required to be considered beautiful for as long as they can, by staving off the inevitable effects of aging.”

The official credit for the Crimson Tide screenplay was owned by Michael Schiffer (story by Schiffer and Richard P. Henrick). But the flavor, pizazz and cultural oomph came from three pinch-hitters — Robert Towne (the stateroom Von Clauzewitz scene), Quentin Tarantino (the references to Scotty and Star Trek warp speed and Kirby being the dominant artist of the Silver Surfer comic books) and Steven Zallian.

These three are the only ones I know about…there may have been others. But they primarily served as sauciers rather than heavy-lifting screenwriters.

“Don & Jerry: Go The Gay Way,” posted on 4.14.14: “In April of ’95 I did a hotel-room interview with producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer during the Crimson Tide junket.

“A few months earlier I’d laughed hard at Quentin Tarantino‘s ‘go the way way’ riff in Sleep With Me (’94), in which he discussed a struggling-with-homosexuality undercurrent in Top Gun. So I proposed to Don and Jerry that they should reach out to gay moviegoers by re-marketing all their films as secret gay movies that were fraught with homosexual themes and iconography (i.e., the phallic-shaped submarines in Tide).

“Bruckheimer froze with a grin on his face but Simpson smirked and kicked it around.

“When I asked them to sign my Crimson Tide script at the end of our chat, Simpson suggested that the gay subcurrent thing was more in my head than in their films.”

Yesterday I walked west-to-east through various northern Parisian neighborhoods…African, Islamic, Indian. The spicy, curried food aromas were wonderful. I walked past Gare du Nord and Gare de l’Est, and gradually wound up at the Canal St. Martin and then over to Place de la Republique.