When it comes to nude scenes, women don’t have to worry about whether they’re showing attractive equipment when the director shouts “action!” But guys do, of course. In Terry Southern‘s “Blue Movie” a coarse, Joseph E. Levine-like producer named Sid Krassman is persuaded by a Stanley Kubrick-like director named Boris to perform in a sex scene, and Krassman is very worried about not having enough “heft” before filming begins. We’re all familiar with “some show, others grow.” We all want to be horses but male biology has never been especially obliging in that regard.

I caught Stephen Karam‘s The Humans (A24, 11.24) early yesterday afternoon. It won’t open for another six or seven weeks, but it was reviewed out of Toronto so it’s fair to jump in.

This is a highly respectable, surprisingly “cinematic” adaptation of Karam’s 2016 play, which he’s filmed unconventionally by emphasizing distance and apartness and narrow hallways and deep shadows, with a particular emphasis on material rot inside the apartment walls and a general sense of architectural foreboding and claustrophobia.

All the performances are top-notch, especially Jane Houdyshell‘s. Her performance as the maritally betrayed, care-worn mother of two grown daughters (played by Beanie Feldstein and Amy Schumer) is almost Oscar-level. It needs an extra “acting” scene or two, but she’s very good.

As usual I had trouble understanding all of Feldstein’s dialogue, as she always seems to emphasize emotional tonality and a certain sing-song manner of speaking as opposed to adhering to the old-fashioned practice of (I know this is a bad word but I’m going to say it anyway) diction.

Oh, and I didn’t believe for a single millisecond that South Korean heartthrob Stephen Yeun would partner with Feldstein, a seriously overweight woman in her late 20s…a woman who is headed for serious health problems down the road if she doesn’t follow in her brother’s path and drop some serious pounds. Feldstein and Yeun just aren’t a match, not in the actual world that I’ve been living in for several decades, but along with “presentism” and color-blind casting it’s also become a “thing” to cast obese actors in this or that role and then require their fellow cast members to pretend that obesity is fine and normal and “who cares?”

Schumer is fine as the depressed older sister.

The warmest emotional moment comes when the murmuring, blank-faced, Alzheimer-afflicted June Squibb (as grandma) joins in and says grace. Twice. This plus the Thanksgiving “what we’re thankful for” moments at the table are the only emotional touchstones in the whole film.

Richard Jenkins, Houdyshell’s husband, confesses to having lost his job (and therefore — did I hear this wrong? — his pension and insurance) due to an apparently brief affair with a coworker. In short, after being with a company for X number of years, they decided to cut his head off and destroy his life because of a single workplace sexual episode. And then the two daughters, after hearing of this, have to lay their #MeToo-ish judgments on withered old dad, along with their natural resentment for his having hurt their mother’s feelings, etc.

May I say something? 74 year-old Jenkins is too old to have had an affair. The workout club manager he played in Burn After Reading, maybe, or the guy in The Visitor or the gay FBI agent in Flirting With Disaster but his Humans dad is way, way past it. Grey haired, paunchy, neck wattle…forget it. In movies as in life you’re allowed to have crazy extramarital affairs up until your early 60s (if you look good), but not beyond that.

Let’s be honest here — this is an “artfully” shot (oooh, look…80% of the time Karam keeps the camera a good 20 to 30 feet away from the actors!) but VERY morose film about some seriously depressed people whose lives are almost certainly on the way down with no hope of escape or redemption. It isn’t long before you feel stuck — imprisoned — in this apartment, and in Karam’s play. No tension, no gathering story strands….it’s just slow-paced conversational misery and confession and gloom.

The Humans is certainly not comedic. Yes, there’s an element of horror in the building itself — it’s a terrible, TERRIBLE place to have a Thanksgiving dinner in, much less reside in, what with the groanings and stompings and filthy windows and pus bubbles and canker sores on the walls. And it’s not just this family of seven that’s stuck in this horrible environment — we’re all stuck in it, and there’s no getting out.

If they could somehow convince Dave Chappelle to host the ’22 Oscar telecast, and I mean with the understanding that (a) he gets to say any damn thing he wants in the opening monologue, and (b) that there might be two or three subsequent monologues during the show, depending on what comes to mind…

If they were to do that I swear to God the show would be saved from that horrible Soderbergh after-stink that has been in the air since last April. With “I have my own way of seeing things” Chappelle hosting, most of that deranged woke shit would just fly out the window.

This morning HE commenter “LAislikenowhere” wrote the following: “Blacks. 13% or 14% of the population. But look for 85% representation in every award category (nominated or presenting). Because woke. Most people are right to be a bit WTF about this overcorrection. I swear this shit is fermenting more racism than existed three years ago.”

But you know what Chappelle has said about this? I don’t have the exact quote but it goes something like “400 years of black people being shit on…we’ve earned a little over-correction.” I swear that Chappelle in white sneakers and smoking a cigarette could restore the Oscar brand — all by his lonesome he could save it. They should sign him for five years straight.

So I can speak with authority when I riff on George Clooney‘s adaptation of J.R. Moehringer‘s The Tender Bar (Amazon, 12.17), which debuts at the BFI London Film Festival on Sunday, 10.10.

“Sean Baker’s Red Rocket (aka ‘Dog Erection’) 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, Simon Rex‘s “Mikey Saber”, dive into gross and reprehensible behavior but most of the supporting players besides. 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. It was not a pleasant sit, but that’s the point, I realize.

“The Galaxy crowd totally hated it — a quick shattering of applause and then silence and hasty exits.” — posted from the Telluride Film Festival on 9.4.21.

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.

If it’s all the same I’d like 91-year-old Gene Hackman** to put the car in reverse and roll back to the way he looked and sounded in 1995’s Crimson Tide or, better still, 1988’s Mississippi Burning. And just stay there. No aging, no withering, no whitening.

“Stoplight With Hackman,” posted on 1.28.21: Sometime in the summer or early fall of ’94 (can’t remember which) I visited the Culver Studios set of Crimson Tide. Producer Jerry Bruckheimer had invited me. I hung around in a low-key way for two or three hours. No chit-chats with “talent” or anyone except Jerry — basically an opportunity to see the nuclear submarine set, which was built to tilt and lean and shake around. I watched Tony Scott guide Gene Hackman through a confrontation scene over and over. I was maybe 100 feet away.

When you first arrive on a big movie set there’s nothing more exciting. And then you hang around for a while, doing nothing but watching and maybe shooting the shit with whomever and taking notes and sipping soft drinks and nibbling bagels, and you’re eventually bored stiff.

Eventually it was time to leave. I took a last look at the set, thanked Jerry, shook hands and briskly walked off the sound stage and back to my black 240SX Nissan. I eased out of the parking lot and drove north on Ince Blvd. I stopped at a red light at the corner of Ince and Culver Blvd.

I’ll be watching Dave Chappelle‘s latest Netflix special, The Closer, sometime tonight. Chappelle has already caught a fair amount of shit for what his detractors are calling unnecessarily harsh or dismissive or unwarranted or otherwise unfair jokes about gay and trans people. He even defends J.K. Rowling!

If anyone wants to start things off…

Friendo #1: “The fact that the Emmys went with woke stuff front and center — and the Tonys were even worse — is a bad harbinger for what the ’22 Oscars will be. Although this year’s movies are looking slightly more mainstream so that might help a little.”

Friendo #2: “The [SJW woke ethos] is death for these shows, not because people are put off by women or POC winning, but because if women or POC win for movies that exist primarily as woke signifiers (and therefore nobody but Academy voters and 1,200 media people cares about those films), the viewership will continue to plunge. They actually need to award films that a great many people see and like.”

HE: “Like No Time To Die? Seriously, like King Richard, I’m thinking. And perhaps, God help us all, Belfast.”

Friendo #1: “I think The Last Duel might be one. Probably West Side Story. Dune maybe. Probably not No Time to Die — I don’t think a Bond film can get there.”

HE: “Dune?”

Friendo #1: “The woke thing right now is suffocating everything. EVERYTHING.”

Friendo #2: “Once the grosses are in on Dune, it might not make it. I don’t think The Last Duel will make it either. West Side Story is probably a sure bet. I’d say it’s looking a damn sight better than last year.”

Friendo #1: “Fingers crossed. I do hope they don’t make it woke though. The virtue signaling is a bit much.”

Friendo #2: “I think that hit bottom last year [with the Soderbergh Union Station Oscars]. And everyone knows it even if they can’t say it. These people are fucked in the head (wokeism = a kind of dementia), but they’re survivors. They don’t want to see the Oscars swirl down the drain like Marion Crane‘s blood in Psycho.”

The previous teaser for Lin-Manuel Miranda and Steven Levenson‘s Tick, Tick…BOOM! (Netflix, 11.12), about the struggle of Rent creator Jonathan Larson to get up and over in the late ’80s, was a wee bit scary. But this trailer is encouraging. It’s certainly more engaging.

It seems to suggest, by the way, that Larson was something other than a cisgendered hetero**, as it highlights two or three heart-to-heart advice discussions between guys (Joshua Henry in particular).

In Damian Chazelle‘s Babylon (Paramount, 12.25.22), Brad Pitt plays a dapper, in-some-ways-John Gilbert-resembling movie star who, shall we say, runs into some difficulty during Hollywood’s transition from silents to sound in the late 1920s to early ’30s. Margot Robbie plays Clara Bow, according to the IMDB.

Pitt was captured yesterday during a break from filming at The Ebell of Los Angeles (743 So. Lucerne Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90005), which is often used for period filming. The Ebell includes a clubhouse building and the 1,270-seat Wilshire Ebell theatre.

“Fellini Satyricon meets Day of the Locust,” posted on 7.21.19: “I’ve partially read a May 2019 draft of Damien Chazelle‘s Babylon, his theatrical follow-up to First Man. Babylon is a late 1920s Hollywood tale about a huge sea-change in the nascent film industry (i.e., the advent of sound and the up-and-down fortunes that resulted) and about who got hurt and those who survived.

“A la Quentin Tarantino‘s Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, Babylon offers a blend of made-up characters and a few real-life Hollywood names of the time — Clara Bow, Anna May Wong. Paul Bern and an “obese” industry fellow who represents Fatty Arbuckle. (I’m presuming there are many others.) I’ve only read about 40% of it, and I’m certainly not going to describe except in the most general of terms. It runs 184 pages, and that ain’t hay.

“Most of Chazelle’s story (or the portion that I’ve read) is amusingly cynical and snappy, at other times mellow and humanist, and other times not so much. It takes place in the golden, gilded realms of Los Angeles during this convulsive, four or five-year period (roughly 1926 to 1931, maybe ’32) when movie dialogue tipped the scales and re-ordered the power structure. Everyone above the level of food catering had to re-assess, re-think, change their game.

“It starts out with a long, bravura sequence that will probably impress critics and audiences in the same way La-La Land‘s opening freeway dance number did. Except Babylon is darker, raunchier. The first 26 or 27 pages acquaint us with the main characters (one of whom may be played by Emma Stone) while diving into the most bacchanalian Hollywood party you’ve ever attended or read about. Cocaine, booze, exhibitionist sex, an elephant, the singing of a lesbian torch song, heroin, blowjobs, and a certain inanimate…forget it.

“Unless Chazelle embarks on a serious rewrite, the 27-minute opening of Babylon is going to seem like quite the envelope pusher. It’s basically Fellini Satyricon meets Day of the Locust meets the secret orgy sequence in Eyes Wide Shot meets the Copacabana entrance scene in Goodfellas. Plus Baz Luhrmann‘s The Great Gatsby meets The Bad and the Beautiful meets Singin’ in the Rain meets The Big Knife…that’ll do for openers.”