Clark Gable drank and smoked himself to death. Three packs a day, according to some accounts. Plus cigars and pipes. Reportedly a binge drinker. His age (59) had relatively little to do with anything. He bought it.

Anthony Lane’s New Yorker review of Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog explains why Campion may win the Best Director Oscar (for crafting an intense backwater realm and going whole-hog on the perversity), but why it has almost no chance as a Best Picture contender. Nobody will want to celebrate how this grim and odorous parlor drama makes them feel — they just won’t.

And not with a loaded gun pointed at my head either. I would really, truly, honestly rather jump into a pit of hungry, soaking alligators than watch this film. Okay, that’s not true — I would choose watching over being torn to shreds by reptiles. And I would rather see it than get shot in the head. That aside…

You can’t leave your morality in the parking lot when you visit the megaplex. It’s a crucial part of who and what we are, of course, and surely a determining factor in how we react to amoral or immoral characters on the screen.

Obviously some bad guys can be charming or at least fascinating. I could post a long list of bad-guy protagonists who qualify — Kirk Douglas‘s Midge Kelly (Champion), Douglas’s Jonathan Shields (The Bad and the Beautiful), Anthony Quinn‘s Zampano (La Strada), Marlon Brando‘s Sir William Walker (Burn!), Rip Torn‘s Maury Dann (Payday), James Gandolfini‘s Tony Soprano, etc.

But every now and then you run into a scuzzy lead protagonist who crosses the moral-ethical line, leaving you no choice but to say “oh, give me a break!” or “all right, that’s it…I need a shower!” Such a character is Simon Rex‘s aging porn star (“Mikey Saber”) in Sean Baker‘s Red Rocket.

Roughly six weeks ago I wrote that Red Rocket teeters on the line between mostly legitimate film festival-smarthouse cinema and relentlessly depraved and disgusting sociopath-porn.

“It’s ‘good’ in the sense that Baker isn’t afraid to show his lead character diving into gross and reprehensible behavior; ditto most of the supporting players. We’re talking bottom-of-the-barrel Texas trash here.

Nor does Baker feel obliged to deliver some form of moral redemption for Mikey, which I respect.

Yes, Baker occasionally delivers slick chops and whatnot, and yes, Mikey has a sizable horse schlong (even when flaccid), but the scuzz factor in this film is REALLY rank. Yes, I realize that Baker isn’t out to soothe or feel-good me. I respect his integrity but the way Red Rocket makes you feel is not good in any way, shape or form.

The crowd I saw it with in Telluride left the theatre without comment. In short, they seriously hated it. Any human being who’s seen Red Rocket would understand that reaction and tread very lightly in recommending Baker’s film, if at all.

Unless you’re elite hipster critic Bob Strauss, that is, in which case you go “wheeee…one of the year’s best! Unless, of course, you can’t tolerate the lead character but if you’re really hip like me, you’ll get past that!”

HE to Strauss: Is this your new Get Out, Bob? Seriously, do you honestly think that people tell their friends and coworkers to see films about characters they may not be able to morally tolerate? You wrote “if you can tolerate the awful person he plays”….WHAT? Rex’s character is raw sewage. What kind of reprehensible scumbag would be cool with the company of this animal?

The “naked Mikey wearing a huge red donut” poster is much more audience-friendly than any stand-out aspect of the film, although I should offer side props to Susanna Son, who makes an impression as “Strawberry,” Mikey’s gullible, up-for-anything girlfriend.

Now that the dust has settled and the Edgar Wright fanboys have finished jerking off to this candified, nonsensical, horribly written film, the truth can be acknowledged by sensible film mavens.

Critic friendo on Martin Scorsese and Jonah Hill’s Jerry Garcia project: “Personally, I’d rather have seen them cast someone like Sam Rockwell. The speaking voice is the key and Jerry Garcia ‘s voice had this uniquely nasal California twang.

“The film starts with Garcia going into a coma in ‘86 and then the film unfolds as a trippy, dreamy coma flashback. Ends with him coming out of the coma and playing his first triumphant show, over which the headlines of his subsequent death roll.

“And you are correct: Live Dead is the ne plus ultra of live Dead releases. At this point, I could probably whistle the entire album, I’ve listened to it so many times.”

Note to Jett: “When you came out on 6.4.88 we were both amazed and fascinated and instantly mesmerized. In love but at the same time blown away. My heart was melting but that’s me. Two or three days later, after we’d returned home, Maggie said ‘I really love this little boy.’ And as the days and weeks progressed we just kept sinking into those feelings of love and adoration more and more. It’s like a feeling of a pleasure drug flooding your system.”

9:30 pm: A for vision, A for speaking comic truth, A for Leonardo DiCaprio’s explosive acting in two temper-tantrum scenes and….uhm, somewhere between a B-minus and a C-plus for execution.

Very ballsy and bold Strangelove-like satire that feels like an extended, gargantuan, improv-y, effects-laden SNL super-skit about massive self-delusion & self-destruction, and yet oddly inert in certain portions. But not entirely.

Because at the same time it’s really out there and righteously wackazoid, and it works now and then.

A crazy-ass Covid and climate-change comic allegory, for sure. It says the right things, totally eviscerates the right and especially the dumbfuck denialists.

It hits the mark a few times, and as broad apocalyptic satires go, you certainly can’t say it doesn’t swing for the fences. Leo really nails it in two screaming scenes (as noted), and it ends with a kind of hand-holding family whimper scene that I responded to.

I can’t in all good conscience say it’s “Casey at the Bat” because it’s really, REALLY saying the right & necessary things, and I loved it for that. But it felt strangely off in a way that I found head-scratchy. But (yes, I’m repeating myself) I loved what it was saying. Call it a ground-rule double with issues.

That said…

In a recent “Awards Chatter” podcast with The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg, Dakota Johnson (The Lost Daughter) mentioned a well-known complaint about legendary director Alfred Hitchcock.

Johnson stated that her grandmother, Tippi Hedren, now 91, was hit on by Hitchcock during the making of The Birds (’63) and especially Marnie (’64), and paid a price because she didn’t acquiesce. “Hitchcock ruined her career because she didn’t want to sleep with him,” said Johnson, “and he terrorized her, [and] was never held accountable.”

Okay, no argument but Hedren’s acting talent had, I believe, some effect on her Hollywood fortunes.

Hedren is reasonably effective in The Birds but less so in Marnie. One of the reasons that film is so hard to get through is that she’s too clenched and brittle. That’s who the character is, of course, but you can sense that “clenched” and “brittle” is all that Hedren has. (Grace Kelly, whom Hitchcock had sought for the role, would have somehow made Marnie into a fuller, more sympathetic figure, or so I suspect.) Hitchcock told Francois Truffaut that Hedren “didn’t have the volcano,” and I think that’s a fair statement.

I’m not disputing that Hitchcock made things difficult for Hedren after she turned him down sexually, but I don’t think her career would have developed either way. Hedren had a limited amount of talent. She had the chops of a good-enough supporting player or TV performer, but overall she was far from Ingrid Bergman.