Twitter (i.e., Michael McKean) asks: What 5 movies are you confident you’ve seen at least 10 times?

HE sez: Paths of Glory, Dr. Strangelove, The Hospital, Mean Streets, Heat, North by Northwest, Psycho, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Notorious, Network, Out of the Past, The Guns of Navarone, Some Like It Hot, High Noon, Red River, Only Angels Have Wings, The Thing From Another World, Barry Lyndon, 2001: A Space Odyssey, 12 Angry Men, Double Indemnity, King Kong, Lawrence of Arabia, The Departed, Gunga Din.

Alfred Hitchcock films are about…where should I start? Anxiety, murder, threats, suspense, unsettling intrigues, unfairness, innocent characters caught in a tight spot, paranoia, creepy undercurrents, more suspense, knives, scarves, pistols, etc. But that’s not what the creator of this T-shirt has in mind. For what he/she is longing for is a sense of conservative order and a feeling of being safe from chaos. Hitchcock films are always about immaculate control — about Alfred’s ability to create and in fact dictate a world that always behaves according to his own cautiously conceived rules and refinements, not to mention his dry sense of humor. As Hitchcock once said, ““Some films are slices of life…mine are slices of cake.”

O’Casey on Blowup mystery — posted on 8.1.07

According to Blowup costar Ronan O’Casey, who explained the full, partially-unfilmed plot of Michelangelo Antonioni‘s 1996 classic to Roger Ebert seven years ago, the inattention paid to the murder plot — on Antonioni’s part as well as that of David Hemming‘s photographer character — was a kind of accident. Antonioni was forced to go all mysterious and inconclusive, he says, because producer Carlo Ponti shut the film down before all the scenes were shot.

Ronan O’Casey’s only Blowup closeup

“The intended story was as follows: the young lover, armed with a pistol, was to precede Vanessa [Redgrave] and me to Maryon Park in London, conceal himself in the bushes and await our arrival,” O’Casey explains. “I pick up Vanessa in a nice new dark green Jaguar and we drive through London — giving Antonioni a chance to film that swinging, trendy, sixties city of the Beatles, Mary Quant, the Rolling Stones, and Carnaby Street. We stop and I buy Vanessa a man’s watch, which she wears throughout the rest of the film.

“We then saunter into the park, stopping now and then to kiss (lucky me). In the center of the park, Vanessa gives me a passionate embrace and prolonged kiss, and glances at the spot where her new lover is hiding. He shoots me (unlucky me), and the two leave the park intending to drive away. Their plans goes awry when he notices Hemmings with his camera and fears that Hemmings has photos of her. As it turns out, he has.

“None of this was ever shot. There were other scenes, such as those between Sarah Miles and Jeremy Glover [i.e, Vanessa’s character’s boyfriend who was also the trigger man in Maryon Park] that also went unrealized. Some of the scenes that were shot pertaining to the murder plot ended up in the film, but are completely puzzling to the audience. For example, in the film there is a scene with Vanessa and Hemmings at a cafe.” Wrong! The scene hes’ describing is between Hemmings and his bearded book editor.] A young man approaches, notices that she is with Hemmings, and runs away. That’s Glover. This makes for an odd, mysterious moment because the audience is completely ignorant of his identity.”
Ponti did Antonioni a favor, of course. If the all of this murder-plot, watch-buying stuff had been filmed and integrated into the film, Blowup would have been a much lesser work. That moment when Glover approaches the cafe and then walks away is perfect — absolutely perfect.

…putting 60% to 70% of Hollywood Elsewhere behind a Patreon paywall, that is, you’re greatly mistaken.

I would like nothing better than for Hollywood Elsewhere to just cruise along like it has for the last…God, it’ll be 17 years on 8.4.21. (And nearly 23 years if you count the October ’98 launch of my Mr. Showbiz column, which was lamentably titled HOLLYWOOD CONFIDENTIAL.) I really wish I could’ve kept going as a free site until 8.4.23 — 20 years, nice and tidy.

Alas, the monsters began arriving on Maple Street back in early ’18, and before I knew it “the terror” had begun to infiltrate everywhere.

HE began making modest amounts of dough almost immediately after launching in August ’04, and the income began to grow a bit more by ’07 or ’08. For about seven years (’10 to ’16, let’s say) HE award-season ads were pulling down decent six-figure revenues, and from this I was able to savor a modest lifestyle that included travel, buying the rumblehog, Italian lace-ups, Prague touch-ups and so on. Hardly a life of luxury, but, as Randy Newman might’ve put it, “it was all right.”

Then came the politically correct lizards and crocodiles and Komodo dragons, and before I knew it ad revenue had begun to shrink. Because “they” didn’t like me (or were afraid of seeming vaguely supportive) and so little by little revenue began to dwindle. Or as Lady Bird Johnson used to say, to “dwinnel.”

The ’20 and ’21 Oscar season (COVID) was the worst in HE history. There’s no sense kidding myself from where I sit right now. I have to either launch a paywall and do the best I can (or the best we can, I mean…myself and HE ad guy Sean Jacobs) with the ’21 and into ’22 Oscar season, or find some freelance writing gigs or, God forbid, send out resumes and find a (choke) “job.”

Over the last two or three years some truly wonderful Millennials and Zoomers in the publicity and marketing end of things (initially at film festivals and then within distributor offices) decided that I’d become a kind of pariah. Except I’m not. I’m the same columnist I’ve always been — the same mentality, the same passion, the same edge. What’s changed is that the culture has tipped into a kind of rigid woke mindset — say the right things and repeat the party dogma or you’ll be cancelled.

I am a humanist, a sane person, a father, a husband, a good writer, and a left-center moderate. And I haven’t written anything, said anything or done anything to warrant pariah status. I haven’t changed — the culture has. Things have gone CRAZY in some ways. All I’ve said and written has been the same old plain-spoken stuff. I have a voice, a way of writing, etc.

Do we ALL have to sound like Anne Thompson and Eric Kohn in order to survive these days? Isn’t there room for just one of us — i.e., myself — to have a blunter, franker opinion?

The shunning of certain ex-Commie screenwriters happened between the early to late ‘50s, but that era finally ended. “Scoundrel Time”, somebody called it. The woke totalitarian era will come to an end also. Sooner or later, all pages are turned, all chapters end and all things pass.

I. Have. Done. Nothing. To. Warrant. This. Kind. Of. Treatment. Even that recent thing that got me kicked out of Critics Choice…that wasn’t me! I wrote nothing. A friend did and I posted it for 45 minutes. And then I took it down. It was nothing. It was bullshit. And yet Jen Yamato and Chris Bumbray‘s fanged teeth were soaked in saliva.

Thank God for the sanity and friendship emanating from the good people I’ve been lucky to regard as friends for the last two or three decades, and press credential-wise from the Telluride and Cannes camps. From my persepective these are the last sane people on planet earth.

Wokesterism is a social-political plague — the new iteration of Maximilian Robespierre, the New McCarthyism, the New Victorians and surely a form of Bolshevik Totalitarian Orwellian insanity. Wokesters are suppressors and punishers — they’re against any concept of freedom that you or I or any semi-liberal person might recognize. I can’t wait for the zeitgeist to gradually swing in the other direction and for these reprehensible jackals to be on the run and/hiding in tall grass. And again, my core beliefs are liberal moderate and I come from a place of adventure and satori and clarity of the soul.

Wokesterism is fundamentally guided by love and compassion and humanitarian goals and a respect for all modes of ethnicity and sexuality and what-have-you, agreed. But in the name of righteous cleansing these people have become the totalitarian brain police that William S. Burroughs was so properly terrified of…they’re against freedom of speech…they’re about punitive measures and suppression and ruining good people’s lives…in a phrase they’re the new Khmer Rouge…FUCKING FANATICS.

Critic friend several weeks ago….

“The weird thing to me in all of this is the number of people — i.e., more than half of Jeff’s readers — who do not get it because they simply cannot see what is going on. They are such lockstep, go-along-with-the-crowd personalities that they think Jeff is talking about some fantasy in his head, rather than a genuine universe of real ideas that can no longer be expressed in the public square of mainstream media.

“Every time one of them says ‘Give it a rest, Jeff!’ I think: Here is someone who is truly, definingly clueless. The house is on fire, and they just think it’s a warm day.”

Nobody loves great, earth-shaking cinema more than myself.

Four days ago Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone posted an essay titled “The State of the Race — It’s Time to Talk About Art vs. Propaganda.” Consider the last four paragraphs:

“Art cannot survive this moment if we don’t fight for it. We must fight as film critics, as journalists, as fans and, yes, as Oscar bloggers.

“Granted, I know most won’t risk it. So they pander, day in and day out on Twitter, saying exactly what they have to say and staying silent about what they know to be true but are too afraid to say. None of them will speak up — not the major writers on any website devoted to the Oscars. There are only three of us who will — Jeff Wells, David Poland and myself. We’ve been mostly sidelined by Film Twitter for being too outspoken and never apologizing – which is good and bad. Hey, you haven’t lived until you’ve had a gang of wild-eyed GenZers chasing you around and calling you a ‘white supremacist.’

“Could you ever have imagined that people would be afraid just to say what they really thought about something? That journalists and critics and filmmakers would be afraid? Granted, social media, like the printing press and the radio have wreaked havoc upon our species. Those advancements in communication played a part in creating modern chaos — revolutions, the Holocaust — but they also led to the greatest books ever written and FDR’s fireside chats and the Mercury players.

“Best Action Flicks of the 21st Century” was posted on 5.9.17. What if anything has changed in the action realm in the four years since?

To most people “action film” means violent, whoop-ass shit with lots of leaping around, automatic rifle fire, squealing tires and non-stop adrenalin. But when it comes to deciding on the best action films, most viewers aren’t that demanding. They love their jizz-whiz and don’t care about the shadings and subtleties. But I am demanding, you see. To really love an action film I have to believe that (a) what I’m watching bears at least some relation to human behavior as most of us have come to know it and is therefore delivering a semi-believable, well-motivated thing, and (b) what I’m watching could actually happen in the real-deal world of physics (i.e., no idiotic swan dives off 50-story office buildings).

I don’t care, by the way, if the action content in a film takes up the first 10 minutes or the last half-hour or the whole damn running time. All I care about is whether or not I believe what I’m seeing, or…you know, whether I’m distracted or dazzled enough so that I don’t pay attention to logic or realism factors. Whatever works. As long as action defines character and vice versa.

If I’m enjoying an action flick it’s because I fucking believe it, and I never believe anything that doesn’t respect some grown-up concept of reality. Fantasy flicks can blow me for the most part. I want an action movie that will plant its feet, look me in the eye and tell the fucking truth.

Very few 21st Century action films live up to HE’s rules and standards, or even give a damn about doing so. The Fast and Furious franchise is notorious for spitting in the face of reality. Almost all superhero comic-book movies revel in the fact that their realm allows them to ignore logic and believability. Once in a great while and in a very blue moon, a first-rate action flick will come along that defies HE rules but gets away with it. One of these was Ang Lee‘s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (’00), but that’s a very rare occurence. On the other hand Crouching Tiger led to the stars of Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle flying around on wires, and that was an awful thing to behold.

Here are Hollywood Elsewhere’s choices for the 11 craftiest, best-made, most believable action films of the 21st Century, and in this order:

Initially posted on 8.26.07: Paul Greengrass‘s The Bourne Supremacy became notorious in certain circles for the exhausting, hyper-cutting, whip-pan technique that came to be known as “Paul Greengrass shaky-cam“, and which was later explored in a groundbreaking essay titled “Chaos Cinema.” I never felt sick from this technique, but others (I don’t know how many but at least a few) did.

I experienced my first shaky-cam vomit-splatter incident during an early-ish screening of The Bourne Supremacy on 7.12.04.

Sometime during the third act of an Ultimatum showing at the Writers Guild theatre, an older woman sitting on the left side spewed on the floor. It was kind of alphabet soup mixed with pumpkin puree and chopped Spanish peanuts. A few people got up and moved away. A guy who was sitting nearby told me later it smelled pretty awful in that section of the room.

The next day I mentioned the episode to a Universal publicist in an e-mail, not as something that was necessarily caused by Paul Greengrass shaky–cam but as something funny that had merely “happened.” I really hadn’t put two and two together. I was simply chuckling the way a fifth-grader might chortle with his friends if the really smart girl with the freckles and the pigtails had vomited in arithmetic class.

But the Universal publicist wasn’t in fifth grade — she was coming from the office of Roy Cohn during the Army-McCarthy hearings. Her voice shrill and agitated, and she read me the riot act in order to dissuade me from mentioning the incident in the column. I felt so overwhelmed with bludgeonings and bad vibes that I caved (wimp that I am deep down) and said, “Okay, all right…good God.”

Chaos Cinema Part 1 from matze on Vimeo.