When and if Russian troops run into Sean Penn and his camera crew on some rubble-strewn Ukraine battleground, they should leave them alone. No shoving, no rifle butts, no bullets — please give the order to this effect. You’re friendly with Oliver Stone, of course, so you probably know Oliver made a ‘90s film with Sean (U–Turn) and that they’re good people, etc. Be cool, respect the fifth estate, don’t let the troops get carried away.

In a day-old interview with Clay and Buck (2.22.22), The Beast complimented Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin. He called the invasion (which has just escalated into bombing) a “smart move” and “genius…Putin declares a big portion of the Ukraine — of Ukraine — Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that’s wonderful. He used the word ‘independent’ and ‘we’re going to go out and we’re going to go in and we’re going to help keep peace.’ You’ve got to say that’s pretty savvy.”

Joseph McBride‘s “The Whole Durn Human Comedy” (Anthem, 3.1) is half-nutrition and half-dessert — a warm, wise, non-linear take on the careers of the great Joel and Ethan Coen.

But around the halfway mark it hit me that McBride and Anthem may have published the first Coen brothers eulogy on dead tree materials. For all the signals seem to say (or at least indicate) that these guys just aren’t feeling it, certainly on Ethan’s part. This is a book that says the Coens have a great history that may have wound to a close, and that their brand is no longer a going concern. We all hope otherwise, of course, but who knows?

The last effort from Joel and Ethan was The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, an anthology film for Netflix. But my view is that it didn’t count because it wasn’t really a single-narrative “Coen Bros. film” that opened in theatres. Within that realm, Joel and Ethan have actually been M.I.A. since Hail, Caesar!, which came out in 2016 and was a bit of a disappointment. It was fine (Josh Brolin was excellent) but it also felt incomplete.

If you ask me the last real Coen brothers film was Inside Llewyn Davis, which was nine fucking years ago.

McBride and I did a phoner a couple of weeks ago. I tried to grill McBride about this apparent state of affairs, but the only substantive comment he shared about Joel and Ethan possibly going their separate ways…well, read below.

If you know your Coens, you knew they’ve always conveyed for a contempt for American culture, and one way or another they’ve always delivered a scolding and a critique…which was true of Billy Wilder also, I think. But a lot of people “really hated” A Serious Man‘s mockery of Jewish community anti-semitism…God’s in a bad mood…doesn’t give a shit.

The last effort from Joel and Ethan Coen was The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, an anthology film for Netflix. But that wasn’t really a single-narrative “Coen Bros. film” that opened in theatres. Within that realm, Joel and Ethan have been M.I.A. since Hail, Caesar!, which came out three years ago. Except that was a bit of a disappointment. It was fine (Josh Brolin was excellent) but at the same time a bit strained and somehow incomplete.

I “liked” but didn’t love True Grit (’10) all that much. It was basically about Jeff Burly Bridges going “shnawwhhhhr-rawwwhhrr-rawwrrluurrllllh.” It certainly wasn’t an elegant, blue-ribbon, balls-to-the-wall, ars gratia artis Coen pic — it was a well-written, slow-moving western with serious authenticity, noteworthy camerawork, tip-top production design and, okay, a few noteworthy scenes.

So let’s just call the last 11 or 12 years a difficult, in-and-out, up-and-down saga for the boys, but at the same time acknowledge that the Coens have enjoyed two golden periods of shining creativity and productivity.

Forgive my never-ending Invaders From Mars enthusiasm, but I just happened to re-read a paywalled post from last July and thought I’d re-post.

I’ll bet that among connoisseurs of classic film scores, a fair-sized portion of the current membership has never heard of Raoul Kraushaar. Even during his peak period Kraushaar was regarded as a journeyman. If you scan his Hollywood scores from the 1940s and ’50s, you’ll notice that he composed almost exclusively for low-budget westerns with an occasional comedy or fright flick — In Old Monterey, Shed No Tears, Timber Fury, Stagecoach Driver, Bride of the Gorilla, Kansas Territory, The Flaming Urge, Mohawk, etc.

And yet Kraushaar’s score for William Cameron Menzies‘ Invaders From Mars (’53) is easily one of the spookiest and most haunting of that era, and indeed one of the most distinctive regardless of genre or budget or any other qualifier. Anyone who’s seen Invaders knows what I’m talking about. That eerie choir (mostly female sopranos) puts the chill in…the stuff of childhood nightmares and creep-outs.

How odd that Kraushaar — steadily employed in genre pictures, a respected composer as far as it went, born in Paris in ’08, died in Florida 93 years later — how odd that a fellow whom no one had ever pegged as equal in talent to Franz Waxman or Max Steiner or Bernard Herrmann — how odd that Kraushaar, no doubt hired by Menzies out of a certain respect but mostly, I’m guessing, because his quote was low enough to be accommodated by the meager Invaders From Mars budget…how odd that Kraushaar managed to crank out one of the greatest (or certainly among the most fascinating) scores for a scary popcorn movie ever written…and under rushed conditions, no doubt.

Byron Haskin and George Pal‘s The War of the Worlds, another 1953 space invader flick, was made for $2 million and used a much higher grade of talent all around. George Barnes‘ cinematography, for one example, was clearly a classier, more high-grade effort (more sharply focused, more richly colored) than John Seitz‘s unexceptional and rather “soft” capturings for Invaders From Mars.

It could also be argued that Kraushaar’s strangely unsettling score is more emotionally affecting than Leith Stevens‘ War of the Worlds score. There’s nothing miscalculated or insufficient about Stevens’ music — it’s fine as far as it goes — but it’s not in the same spiritual league as the Krasuhaar. Just saying.

The best passage from Kraushaar’s Invaders music begins just after the 3:00 mark:

We’re always adapting — all of us, but especially Type-A creative types. Maturing, cranking up, calming down, adjusting, shape-shifting — always in response to a changing world. It follows that no 40 year-old director is exactly the same in terms of craft, choices and sensibility as he/she was at age 30.

I think Francis Coppola (whom I had the pleasure of doing a two-hour phone interview with 41 years ago) was one guy when he made The Godfather, The Conversation and The Godfather, Part II. He was a slightly different guy when he made Apocalypse Now, and a faintly altered version of the Apocalypse Now guy when he made One From The Heart. He was a whole different dude when he made Jack — that’s for damn sure. And a much different guy when he made Tetro and Twixt.

Coppola has said he’s planing to invest over $100 million of his own dough in Megalopolis, which he’s called “a love story that’s also a philosophical investigation of the nature of man.”

It is my prediction that however good or bad it turns out to be, Megalopolis won’t connect with Joe Popcorn. Some will see it (I certainly will) but most won’t, and it’ll just end up as a streaming selection. That said, Coppola is living righteously for an artist who’s nearly 83 — still striving, still dreaming. Here’s hoping he makes Megalopolis and that it satisfies those who are willing to take the journey.

The late Jerry Lewis has been cancelled for gross sexual misbehavior that happened between 57 and 60 years ago.

In a 2.23 Vanity Fair report that includes a nine-minute video essay by documentarians Amy Ziering and Kirby Dick (Allen v. Farrow), actors Hope Holiday and Karen Kramer (formerly Karen Sharpe) recall Lewis having made crude overtures during the making of The Ladies Man (61) and The Disorderly Orderly (’64), respectively.

Lewis didn’t assault Holiday and Kramer but certainly made things unpleasant, they’re saying. Plus he punished them socially and whatnot for having refused his advances.

For decades we’d all understood that Lewis was a very tough interview and that he had a dark streak, and now we’ve been told that he acted like a dog with lower-tier actresses whom he thought he could manipulate, etc. Old-time Hollywood hotshots were taught by their culture that they could get away with crass sexual behavior, and for decades nobody said boo. But since the 2017 Harvey Weinstein revelations Hollywood culture has been encouraging victims to come forward and point fingers at the bad guys. The Lewis saga is what it is — obviously distasteful but not especially surprising, given the rules of the game in the bad old days.

If I’d been in Holiday or Kramer’s offended shoes, perturbed if not seething for decades about Lewis’s on-set behavior during the Kennedy and LBJ administrations, I probably would have gone public while he was still with us. I would have demanded a response and at least had the satisfaction of having done so while he was still walking around. Lewis passed on 8.20.17.

The last time I seriously contemplated the idea of Russian tanks invading a neighboring country and imposing autocratic rule was on 1.25.11, or a little more than 11 years ago. On that day the 2010 Oscar nominations were announced, the most ominous among them being the 12 nominations gathered by Tom Hooper‘s The King’s Speech — an all-but-certain indicator that this British period drama, a favorite among the old Academy farts, would win the Best Picture Oscar.

I was thinking, you see, about Vaclavske Namesti (Wenceslas Square) in August 1968. The image in my head was of Entertainment Weekly‘s Dave Karger and other supporters of The King’s Speech, standing atop Soviet tanks as they rumbled into Prague (“Wait, wait…what happened?”).

In one fell swoop the hopes of all Social Network supporters were dashed. Many were shocked; some were tear-struck.

The Social Network‘s eight nominations (including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor) vs. 12 nominations for The King’s Speech — forget it, game over, the bad guys had won. Because Academy and guild schmoes didn’t relate to the Fincher film but felt an emotional rapport with late 1930s England and Colin Firth‘s performance as King George.

David Fincher‘s brilliant, razor-sharp drama — a story about ruthless conflict in the building of Mark Zuckerberg‘s Facebook empire — had enjoyed a kind of “Prague spring” reception since debuting at the 2010 New York Film Festival. It was seriously admired by critics and the cool kidz. and by anyone who was invested in the emerging cyber world and where things were going — but the Oscar nominations strongly suggested it was going to lose the Big Prize. And that, to me, was shattering.

The day before the announcement Nate Silver, the FiveThirtyEight creator who had been way in front of most political statisticians during the 2008 presidential election, analyzed the Best Picture Oscar race for Melena Ryzik‘s Carpetbagger column, and his view was that The Social Network would most likely prevail.

The other 2010 “good guy” movie that David O. Russell‘s The Fighter, which received seven Oscar noms and wound up winning two — Best Supporting Actor (Christian Bale) and Best Supporting Actress (Melissa Leo).

Although based on the original 1963 Walter Tevis novel, Showtime’s The Man Who Fell To Earth series feels more like John Carpenter‘s Starman than a revisiting of Nicolas Roeg’s same titled 1976 film. The newbie is too emotional — I can sense that much. I’m intrigued by the idea of Bill Nighy playing the original David Bowie character, Thomas Jerome Newton, but where can they go with this? I don’t trust this. I can feel trouble.

Imagine that 1973’s The Sting, which earned the 2022 equivalent of over a billion dollars and won seven Academy Awards (including Best Picture), had never been made, and that David Ward‘s genius-level screenplay has been crafted by some young present-day hotshot.

Would it be produced by one of the studios, or by Netflix or Amazon or some other deep-pocket streamer?

A 2022 version of The Sting might get made, sure, but what are the odds that Ward’s original screenplay — a perfect Swiss watch, flawless of its kind, an Oscar-awarded jewel — would be filmed without significant changes?

My gut tells me that the rough-and-tumble social realism would be jettisoned. And that the casting would be subject to the usual presentism standards, meaning that one of the two male leads, Paul Newman‘s Henry Gondorff and Robert Redford‘s Johnny Hooker in the original film, would probably have to be played by an actor of color.

Yes, even though it’s set in 1934 Chicago, when racism was as common as dirt and factory soot and Robert Shaw‘s Doyle Lonnegan, a tough, old-school Irish mobster, would’ve never trusted a non-white hustler with any amount of his betting money. As Luther Coleman (Robert Earl Jones) confesses to Hooker in Act One of the film, “Ain’t no rich boy gonna trust a hungry [racial epithet] enough to be conned.”

Am I wrong? Would any producer or distributor have the stones to produce The Sting as is, or would they be obliged to make certain changes so as not to be frowned upon by progressives? It’s a fair question, surely.