Because I’m the damn horse. The instant I read this I whispered “good God!” to myself. I was this exact same horse when I was 19, 28, 37 and at one or two other junctures. Amazing.

A couple of days ago Santa Barbara Film Festival director Roger Durling did a sit-down with Roadrunner director Morgan Neville. Here’s the whole interview, and below is a clip of the portion in which Neville addresses — calmly, openly, intelligently — the “deepfake” thing.

Three and a half months ago I reviewed a Kino Lorber Bluray of Marty Feldman’s In God We Tru$t (’80), an anti-religion, anti-corporate satire in which Richard Pryor played God. (Or more precisely “G.O.D.”).

An In God We Trust Richard Pryor-with-white-Godbeard T-shirt was subsequently created by Elara.world, a normcore merch line from an outfit run by the crazy Safdies (Josh and Benny) and Sebastian Bear-McClard (i,.e., Emily Ratajkowski’s significant husband).

A few days ago Timothee Chalamet, costar of Wes Anderson‘s The French Dispatch, wore the whitebeard-Pryor T-shirt during a Cannes Film Festival photo op. And here I am mentioning it. It’s all come full circle.

Posted on 3.21.21: “I just can’t fathom why a rich actor would choose to wear a schlubby normcore T-shirt. He could wear the coolest Calvin Klein or John Varvatos three-button T-shirt…some kind of cooler-than-shit creation with a little style, something he bought in Milan or London or at a tag sale in Marin County.

“What’s the point of a rich guy looking like some average dude from Worcester or Scotch Plains or Clearwater? To what end? To prove to himself that he’s average common too, just like him and the same as you?”

16 days ago a major Time magazine piece, written by Eliana Dockterman, celebrated the coming of Black Widow (Disney, 7.9), and particularly the rugged, progressive, toughed-up de-sexualizing of Scarlett Johansson‘s Natasha Romanoff. And that the movie did. What sector of your ticket-buying audience was revved by this strategy, apart from educated urban progressive women?

There was also the fact that for many of us, Black Widow sucked eggs. Marvel hardcores may have been been into it, but who else? Okay, the Rotten Tomatoes critics score is at 81% (way too kind) and the audience score is at a mystifying 92%. How can this be? Black Widow stinks — I know it does, I saw it at a theatre, I was miserable, etc.

And now, 10 days after opening and at the end of its second weekend, Black Widow has totally plunged at the box-office — down 67% from last weekend.

The first weekend alone told the tale. On Friday, 7.9, Black Widow brought in $39,510,446. On Saturday, 7.10 earnings were down 41% to $23,305,929. On Sunday, 7.11, the tally was $17,549,937 — down another 25%.

Deadline‘s Anthony D’Alessandro called this weekend’s fall-off “the second steepest ever for a Disney-distributed MCU title…if you want to know what the negative impact is by having a Marvel movie available in homes and in theaters at the same time, here it is.”

Then again the worldwide box-office so far is $264,012,671 — both domestic and international earning $132 million and change. So Black Widow isn’t a wipeout, or (to be fair) even close to one. But that domestic second-weekend plunge can’t be called encouraging.

Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman has addressed the pearl-clutching outrage over Morgan Neville‘s decision to “digitally deepfake” Anthony Bourdain‘s voice in three aural passages in Roadrunner, the just-released doc about the late foodie and CNN travelogue adventurer.

As I pointed out in a 7.15 post titled “Bourdain Deepfake Isn’t A Problem,” Neville’s alleged offense involved the audible creation of sentences (i.e., three) not actually spoken by Bourdain but written by him. Neville created an A.I. replication of Bourdain’s voice, assembled from vowel and consonant splices and fragments of legit Bourdain recordings. And so we hear Bourdain “reading” the passages even though he didn’t actually do that.

Gleiberman believes that Neville should have copped to the fakery somewhere in the film (probably in the closing credits), but otherwise isn’t that rattled. His basic point is that “when it comes to swapping in fake reality, documentaries have been sliding down a slippery slope for years,” especially in the area of reenactments.

“A reenactment and a voice fake actually do different versions of the same thing,” he points out. “Both cement a reality in your mind — the image of something or the sound of something — that didn’t happen, at least not in the way it’s presented.”

Gleiberman also notes that the deepfake Bourdain voice “probably gets closer to reality than most reenactments do,” and that documentaries in which an actor will read a subject’s words, sometimes simulating their tone of voice, “isn’t much of a leap from what Roadrunner does.”

Shorter Gleiberman: “Not much of a hoo-hah here, fellas!”

Best passage: “The manipulation of Bourdain’s voice in Roadrunner seems to open a Pandora’s Box. What happens when unethical filmmakers employ such techniques? But let’s not pretend that we’ve been purists about it. Documentaries have been inching away from unalloyed reality for a long time. And it’s we in the audience who enable it. We’re the ones who like our reality sweetened, heightened, finessed until it looks just like a movie.”

…all the careless young asshats in their teens and 20s. Thanks, guys…you took us back to the hell of 2020…reverse course! Pop the champagne!

I’ve been intending to point this out for decades, but for some reason I never did. There’s a visual element in a scene from Billy Wilder‘s The Spirit of St. Louis that makes no sense at all. I’m talking about the 90-foot-tall eucalyptus trees at the very end of the Roosevelt Field runaway — the ones that Charles Lindbergh (James Stewart) barely clears once the plane finally lifts off.

The first “hold on”, of course, is “why would any airfield allow huge trees to grow at the very end of a runway?” The second thing, of course, is that there are no eucalyptus trees in Long Island, or in any region that has cold temperatures.

We’re talking, in short, about two suspension-of-disbelief whoppers at the same scene. Wilder or his second-unit director presumably shot the takeoff scene somewhere in Southern California.

This pales alongside the biggest suspension of disbelief whopper of all time, which happened in the original King Kong. 24 words: “If the Skull Island natives built that huge wall to keep Kong out, why’d they make gates big enough for him to get through?”

This observation was first delivered by the late film scholar and archivst Ron Haver on the 1985 Criterion Collection King Kong laser disc, which contained one of the first-ever audio-track commentaries ever put on the market.”

[4:40 mark] “This film, today, is a satisfactory…uh, triumphant film for me, but it’s a smaller audience because documentaries don’t get worldwide attention. We’re selling it very nicely here, in Europe, and we’ll see where it goes. But America will remain a tough market.” — Oliver Stone, director of JFK Revisited: Through The Looking Glass, speaking to France 24 on 7.13.21.

I know that all the biggies said “no” to Stone and Through The Looking Glass over the last several months, but it really doesn’t figure that some distributor or streaming outfit somewhere wouldn’t want to offer this doc to the U.S. market. Amazon, Hulu, Netflix, HBO Max, History Channel, National Geographic…it doesn’t add up that none would have the slightest interest in putting it out there. Stone and his producers must be asking too much.

Psy-ops (or psychological operations) “are operations to convey selected information and indicators to audiences to influence their emotions, motives, and objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of governments, organizations, groups, and individuals.”

HE commenter Iceblink (about an hour ago): “I’m really starting to miss the days when Jeff had access to and had actually had seen at least some of these films. Now we’re rewarded with lame Friendo hot takes and the ruminations of one of my least favorite film critics out there. And you want people to pay for this?”

HE to Iceblink: “I didn’t go to Cannes this year…big deal. A lot of people didn’t. It didn’t feel right, money was tight, etc. I see everything I can in a timely fashion, and I’ll be attending Telluride, the coolest festival of them all, in less than six weeks. If you don’t like the column these days, fine. Go where ya wanna go.

“I have a better idea. Let’s reverse our respective roles. Why don’t you try entertaining me? Turn me around, open my mind, excite my blood….c’mon, man. I need some top-grade Iceblink reportage or poetry in my life. Or, you know, maybe you could write one or two things that would knock me out sometime later today. If so, great. But try doing it two days in a row. Try doing it five days in a row. Try doing it every fucking day including weekends. Try doing it 365 days a year.

“And if you can’t manage to dazzle me today or at the end of the week or the end of the month or by the end of the year…I’m not saying it’s not in you because maybe it is…but if you can’t manage it, would you consider doing one thing? Or trying to do one thing? Would you consider putting your phone on a camera mount, aiming it in your direction, turning on the video and…well, use your imagination.”