Speaking as a healthy double-vaxxed person, I intend to keep masking indoors for a while yet. I’m not sure when I’ll feel uninhibited about going maskless, but now feels too early. June, I’m thinking. Maybe July. I know for sure I’ll be…well, mostly maskless at Cinemacon (8.23 thru 8.26) and at the Telluride Film Festival (9.2 through 9.6). Does the fact that the fully vaxxed Bill Maher contracted Covid give me pause? Yes, but not that much.

From a Presidential election standpoint, all my life I’ve wanted another guy of this calibre to come along.

Forget the womanizing — I’m talking about intelligence filtered by mature moderation, the cool calculation, the relaxed urban vibe, the not-too-old factor, the measured phrasing, good head of hair, etc. But no one ever measured up. Because of a million factors that fed into our history over the last 57 and 1/2 years, and because you can’t go home again.

But JFK was a superstar, he had the right profile and the right vibe, and we all like guys like this. (Most of us.) As delusional and sentimental as this sounds, I would be delighted if a JFK-like politician (a liberal moderate** who doesn’t feel comfortable with wokesters) was to somehow pop through and run in ’24. A drunkard’s dream, of course.

All to say that I’m genuinely worried about Biden’s re-election chances. Not because of his FDR-like ambitions or philosophy or maturity as a leader, but because a year and a half from now he’ll be 80, and by election day he’ll be pushing 82. Aside from concerns about wokester fanatics I’m as much of a Biden fan as anyone. I don’t know what will happen, but we’re in uncharted territory…that’s for sure. And a sizable percentage of the population (40% or a bit less) doesn’t give a damn about the Democratic fundamentals.

** I realize that by today’s standards JFK was more of a moderate Republican than a Democrat.

If Miklos Rosza‘s “Parade of the Charioteers” one of the most stirring fascist anthems ever composed? I’m not saying it is, but I suspect that rightwing bad guys the world over (Donald Trump, Dick Cheney, Benjamin Netanyahu, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Vladimir Putin, et. al.) adore this kind of composition and performance. I certainly can’t imagine an audience of wokesters and Critical Race Theory believers responding to this eight-year-old show (Andre Rieu’s Johann Strauss Orchestra in Amsterdam) with anything other than muted horror.

I’m sorry but Rosza was a genius composer, and I can’t help feeling stirred by this. And I’m saying this as a mild-mannered, left-center moderate. Does admitting this make me a bad person regardless? In the eyes of some it probably does.

In the comment thread for “Five Things” (5.14), which was all about the superhack career of Richard Donner, someone mentioned The Omen (’76) and I jumped in with the following:

“The Omen is a good creepy film of its type. The best thing about it is Jerry Goldsmith‘s score. I would have drowned Damian after realizing what he is, but that’s me. I realize, of course, that unless Gregory Peck and Lee Remick remain in a denial cocoon for years on end there’s no movie.”

Because of that posting I re-watched this 1976 film last night, and almost immediately I was scolding myself for calling it “a good creepy film of its type.” It’s not — it’s actually a very stupid film that was made in a lazy, half-assed manner with mostly awful dialogue, and was burdened by idiotic plotting.

The Omen‘s success was based upon a general audience belief in mythical religious bullshit, and it launched itself upon the lore of The Exorcist (’73), which was and is a much better film. So please accept my apology for saying what I said. I don’t know what I was thinking.

With the exception of three good scenes — the nanny hangs herself during Damian’s birthday party, the dogs in the graveyard scene with Peck and David Warner, and Warner gets his head sliced off by a flying pane of glass — The Omen is a painfully mediocre effort.

Almost every scene summons the same reaction: “Why isn’t this better…why didn’t they rewrite the dialogue?…God, this wasn’t finessed at all.”

I came to really hate the tiny, beady eyes of that young actor who played Damian — Harvey Spencer Stephens (who’s now 51 years old).

The middle-aged, warlock-eyed priest who gets impaled by a falling javelin of some sort — why did he just stand there like a screaming idiot as he watched the rod plunge toward him?

Why didn’t Peck and Remick simply fire that awful demonic nanny (Billie Whitelaw)?

Why didn’t Peck just buy a pistol and shoot that demonic Rotweiler right between the eyes, and in fact shoot all the other Rotweilers in the graveyard?

As I mentioned Friday, The Omen depends upon Peck and Remick refusing to consider the obvious during most of the running time. Refusing to reach for an umbrella, wear a raincoat or take shelter during a thunderstorm…that kind of idiocy.

During his career heyday (’45 to ’64) Peck mostly played one smart, restrained, rational-minded character after another. (His roles in Spellbound, Duel in the Sun and Moby Dick were the exceptions.) The Omen was the first time Peck was called upon to play a stuffed-shirt moron — a denialist of the first order. Okay, he starts to wake up during the final half-hour, but it’s truly painful to watch an actor known for dignity and rectitude and sensible behavior undermine the idea of intelligent assessment at every turn.

For some odd reason the footage of Rome made me almost weep with nostalgia for that city — I haven’t been there since ’17.

I could watch The Exorcist once a year for the rest of my life, but I’ll never watch another Omen film again…ever. I was truly angry at myself for wasting 111 minutes of my life.

Eternal Style Godz to sandaled, bearded, ginger-haired schmuck with tennisball haircut, wearing one of the most appalling cream-colored suits in the history of tailored apparel (those rolled-up slacks! no belt!): “If we could assume physical form and descend to planet earth, we would hunt you down and….okay, we wouldn’t attack you personally because you’re just a model for hire, but we would find the Bruno Magli designers and marketing reps responsible for this and give them a good thrashing.”

Does anyone remember a 1963 Twilight Zone episode called “The Bard”, in which John Williams played a renimated William Shakespeare in a modern setting? There’s a rehearsal scene in which a pretentious and egoistic Marlon Brando wannabe (Burt Reynolds) so enrages Shakespeare that a beat-down results. This is what I was thinking of…that kind of “you repulsive little shit” reaction.

This road-race scene from Adam Rifkin‘s Dog Years (aka The Last Movie Star) is a keeper.

How many world-class, stick-to-your-ribs lines did Burt Reynolds deliver over the course of his career? All I can think of is “Fifty, my ass” and “the system’s gonna fail” from Deliverance. But young Burt’s “uh-huh” in this scene is riveting — a perfect distillation of of “yeah, I know life doesn’t last forever but I couldn’t care less at this point…hah!”

Old Burt: The hell’s the matter with you? We coulda been killed. You think you’re gonna live forever?
Young Burt (smug, cocksure): Uh-huh.

The CG in this scene isn’t what it could be, I realize. I wish Rifkin could have somehow made old Burt look fresher and less degraded.

In an interview with Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn, Robert De Niro spoke about his recently injured leg. “I tore my quad** somehow,” he said. “It’s just a simple stepping over something and I just went down. The pain was excruciating and now I have to get it fixed.

“But it happens, especially when you get older. You have to be prepared for unexpected things. But it’s manageable.”

De Niro said the injury wouldn’t affect his performance as bad-guy cattleman William Hale in Martin Scorsese‘s Killers of the Flower Moon, which is currently rolling. “[Hale is] pretty much a sedentary character in a way,” he said. “I don’t move around a lot, thank God. So we’ll manage. I just have to get the procedure done and keep it straight in a certain position and let it heal.”

And so the point of this riff: Please name the most vividly etched sedentary characters in the history of cinema, starting with Jabba the Hutt and moving on down. How about Orson Welles‘ Cardinal Woolsey in A Man For All Seasons (’66)? Or the supreme Martian commander in Invaders From Mars (green head, face of a Mexican woman, communicates with lizard-like pincers or tentacles)? Maybe the iron-lung guy in The Big Lebowski? Or William Hickey‘s Don Corrado in Prizzi’s Honor.

Only full sedentary characters qualify. Sidney Greenstreet sits like an iron Buddha statue 95% of the time in The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca, but now and then he gets up and walks into or out of a room — that’s a disqualifier.

** Quadriceps femoris

I watched Those Who Wish Me Dead (HBO Max) right after The Woman in the Window, and yeah, it’s pulpy and familiar and swamped with landscape and forest fire CG that looks like CG all the way.

And yes, Angelina Jolie is still too beautiful and well-tended to convince anyone she could be a Montana smokejumper. (She’ll have to bear this cross for the rest of her life.). Not a shred of believability = absence of collateral realism = disengagement. Angie-wise, I mean.

On the other hand this is a better-than-decent Taylor Sheridan flick — not as socially reflective as Hell and High Water or the two Sicario films, but skillfully crafted — well written, tightly composed (no dead spots), decently acted. Am I sick to death of writing lines like “it moves right along”? Yes, I am but it does.

Did I say “no fucking way” four or five times? Yes, especially when it came to Angle falling from a watch tower rope, slamming into terra firma and more or less shrugging it off. Ditto a certain vulnerable pair escaping fire by jumping into a river, and whether or not a certain structure might burn or not, and a certain character’s miraculous ability to dodge bullets fired by a pro.

But overall I wasn’t complaining much. I never bailed. It held me.

I was afraid, you see, that it would be all about Angie’s Hannah Faber saving Conner (Finn Little), the teenaged son of a murdered “forensic accountant”, from a pair of assassins (Aidan Gillen, Nicholas Hoult) looking to erase evidence that will create all kinds of grief for their cool, calm and collected employer, played by Tyler Perry.

Angie protects the kid in the usual resourceful ways, but the story is also about her ex-boyfriend (Jon Bernthal) and his wife (Medina Senghore) and the natural-sounding dialogue (I loved damn near every line that Gillen was charged with) and the extremely welcome use of a deer rifle and a pick axe. All hail Senghore and what her character manages to do.

Perry is great, by the way — not many lines but he nails them all. The best he’s been since Gone Girl.

Gillen and Hoult are supposed to be brothers, by the way, but they don’t resemble each other at all. Plus Gillen is over 20 years older than Hoult, and looks it. They’re not even of similar size. Why not get actors who look like they might be related? And if that’s impossible, don’t call them brothers.

I’ve said many times that you can’t rehash the cliche about a character having a nightmare and then waking with a start — bolting upright, eyes wide open, damp-faced. Been done way too often. Well, damned if Angie doesn’t awake from a forest fire nightmare in the exact same way. How could Sheridan do this? He knows it’s forbidden.

Warning: Spoiler material in paragraph #5.

During the first 45 to 50 minutes of The Woman in the Window (Netflix, now streaming) I was saying to myself “hey, this isn’t all that bad…it’s smart, absorbing, carefully composed, shot and cut in fine style and generally kinda nifty.”

Right from the get-go you can feel the presence of Joe Wright, the clever British director who also delivered the audacious Anna Karenina, along with the propulsion of what seems at first like a well-jiggered script, mostly written by Tracy Letts and later tweaked by Tony Gilroy.

There’s also a delicate but highly charged lead performance by Amy Adams, and a dishy one-scene cameo by Julianne Moore. Plus the Hitchcockian references (Rear Window, Spellbound) and hallucinatory flickerings. It’s really quite the package. Until it changes into something else.

I was troubled, I admit, by a weird early scene in which Adams, a wine-sipping, pill-popping, 40something agoraphobic therapist named Anna who lives in a three-story townhouse, is visited by a troubled teenager, Ethan (Fred Heichinger).

Ethan is the son of a bickering, tempestuous couple, Alistair and Jane Russell (Gary Oldman, Julianne Moore), who’ve just moved in across the street, and Anna watches them rant and rave right through their undraped windows. Once Ethan, bearing a small gift from his mom, introduces himself and starts talking jibber-jabbering with Anna, you’re asking himself “is this kid some kind of psycho nutjob? Why’s he so fucking hyper? There’s something Norman Batesy about this guy.”

You’re also asking yourself why Moore is (seemingly) playing a character named Jane Russell. Is there another across-the-street neighbor named Gary Cooper and one around the block named Bob Mitchum? Letts plays Anna’s therapist…what’s his name, Cary Grant?

Spoilers: Anyway I sat up in my seat and began to imagine that the critically panned Woman in the Window might have been misjudged and was actually kinda trippy, as it is during the first 45 or 50.

But then it falls through a trap door when everyone gangs up on Anna/Adams and she folds and confesses to being a delusional fantasist. Another way of putting it is that The Woman in the Window suddenly jumps off a cliff. It goes NUTS. And the climactic third-act scene when a steely-eyed Ethan returns with a knife is CRAY-CRAY.

The problem, in short, is not how Joe Wright directed it — it’s the crazily shifting script. I know Gilroy’s work fairly well, and I know he’s fairly incapable of writing cray-cray so I guess he was stuck between a rock and a hard place and had no choice. It must have been rough on the poor guy.

One, presuming that Bob Wilson and his wife Julia (William Shatner, Christine White) are flying coach, it’s amazing how much breathing and leg room average folks had on flights in the early ’60s. Two, the windows have sliding plaid curtains…luxury! Three, a stewardess asks the distressed Shatner if he needs a blanket — it’s been years since I’ve seen blankets in coach (even those shitty synthetic ones). Four, before today I never realized that the gremlin was played by Nick Cravat, who was Burt Lancaster‘s lifelong friend and acrobat partner. And five, Richard Donner directed mostly big-budget features but “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” was a more effective ride than almost everything he did for the big screen (except for Lethal Weapon, his peak effort).

It was announced earlier today that Robert Eggers‘ The Northman (Focus Features) will open on 4.8.22. There goes the concept of duelling Shakespeare-related dramas (which I mentioned a couple of weeks ago) opening during award season.**

The Focus folks are understandably terrified of anyone associating The Northman with Hamlet. I would certainly be if I was in their shoes.

As I mentioned on 1.13.21, the basic bones of the script (cowritten by Eggers and Sjon) are based upon the Scandinavian legend of Amleth, which inspired Shakespeare‘s legendary tragedy.

Focus synopsis: “The Northman is an epic revenge thriller, that explores how far a Viking prince will go to seek justice for his murdered father.”