I was never an electric toy train fanatic as a kid, but I remember being gifted with a five-piece set with tracks, a transformer and whatnot. I can’t recall if the maker was Lionel or Marx, but I do remember how heavy the engine car was (it really did weigh a fair amount) and that it generated a nice howling sound as it moved around the room and also emitted a simulation of steam. The electric current in the tracks was such that you could hear a faint throbbing or humming. If a strand or two of Christmas tree tinsel happened to fall on the tracks and the engine ran over it you’d hear a slight snapping sound and notice an odor of burnt whatever. I think I was seven or eight when the set arrived one Christmas. I think the purchaser (father, grandfather) was into trains for his own enjoyment, and that I hitched a ride.

I saw Robert Altman‘s Buffalo Bill and The Indians when it opened in June ’76. It’s a flat, pedantic film about the legacy of evil whiteys (personified by Paul Newman‘s Buffalo Bill) vs. that of noble Native Americans (Frank Kaquitts‘ Sitting Bull). It instructs the audience about who the good and bad guys were (and probably still are), and sorta kinda bores your pants off in the process.

But wait — it compounds. Imagine being in charge of the mastering of the recently released Indicator Bluray (12.14) of Buffalo Bill and The Indians, and deciding to capture what is being called “the original ‘antique’ color timing” — color that, judging by DVD Beaver captures, is overwhelmingly brownish and quite dark. Except it didn’t look this way in theatres. Believe me, I would have noticed.

Geraldine Chaplin, Burt Lancaster, Kevin McCarthy, Joel Grey, Harvey Keitel, John Considine, Will Sampson, Shelley Duvall, Bert Remsen, Denver Pyle, etc.

A more pleasantly colored Bluray version was released by Kino in 2014.

Again, Bluray captures belong to DVD Beaver.

From Fast Company‘s Michael Grothaus: “Operation Warp Speed is sputtering. Under the Trump administration’s vaccination roll-out, the goal was to have 20 million Americans receive their first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine by the end of December — a critical step in not only inoculating the most vulnerable, but also eventually achieving herd immunity in the country

“It is estimated that between 80% and 90% of Americans would need to be vaccinated to reach herd immunity.

“But instead of 20 million doses being administered this month, the U.S. has only administered 2.1 million doses so far — barely a tenth of the original goal, reports Axios. That means that if the U.S. is to meet its 20 million goal, it would need to vaccinate more than five million people a day between now and the end of Thursday — an unlikely occurence.”

Until this morning I’d never realized that John Ford‘s The Informer played at the Radio City Music Hall. An odd venue for such a film. The Informer is a arthouse film for adults, but I guess back then there was no such term. (To the best of my recollection “smarthouse” wasn’t a term until five or ten years ago.) The RKO Radio Pictures ad department tried to make The Informer seem like a relationship thing between a brawny, alarmed fellow who’s been under a sunlamp and a foxy blonde (Heather Angel or Margot Grahame?) with a lit cigarette.

This wire-service story appeared in the N.Y. Times on 5.11.35. Chilling. I naturally began thinking about authoritarian repression tactics in other times and cultures. I’m not offering any exact analogies or pointing specific fingers, but from what corner of our present-day culture are we hearing “not allowed, you can’t say that, shut it down, fire this person, lights out”? Be honest — who’s saying that kind of stuff these days? Am I allowed to ask this question?

As a longtime chronicler of those wraparound DeMille/Mayfair billboards, this is fairly unique. For Robert Siodmak and Mark Hellinger‘s The Killers didn’t play the Mayfair but the legendary Winter Garden theatre. United Artists briefly turned the decades-old venue into a movie palace between ’45 and ’46.

The Killers opened in August 1946

Jules Dassin’s Night and the City opened on 6.9.50.

James Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein opened on 5.11.35.

A few days ago I ordered a poor man’s Red River belt buckle. It arrived this afternoon. It’s made of a solid, heavy metal. Decent craftsmanship as far as a knockoff goes. I just need to figure some way of griming it up, making it look more beat-up and weathered. Plus it has my initials (and John Wayne’s) on the lower left corner. 7:40 pm: It’s too cheap looking, too gold-dipped…I should’ve ordered the pewter.

knockoff “Red River” belt buckle

Paul Greengrass‘s News of the World is a 19th Century horseback relationship drama between a widowed Civil War veteran (Tom Hanks and a young German girl (Helena Zengel) who was taken from her parents and raised by Kiowas. Hanks’ Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd, who earns survival money by reading newspaper stories to small communities, struggles to deliver the girl (whose German name is Johanna) to a bumpkin aunt and uncle in southern Texas, seemingly in the vicinity of San Antonio. Difficulties abound, ornery varmints threaten, two or three rainstorms descend, physical disasters (including a blinding dust storm) keep a comin’.

Please answer (a) yes, (b) no or (c) disagree with an explanation:

1. Paul Greengrass‘s News of the World is basically a good film — sturdy, reliable, authentic, true-hearted.

2. The adjectives or phrases that come to mind are “assured,” “atmospherically authentic”, “properly attuned to the 19th Century pace of life”, “True Grit-ish” and “somewhat predictable but not in a hugely problematic way.”

3. It’s a steady-groove, life-can-be-brutal, long-hard-journey thing. The performances, the screenplay (by Greengrass and Luke Davies), the cinematography and the trustworthy realism hold you.

4. Hanks’ Kidd character reminded you of Edmond O Brien’s Freeide Sykes in The Wild Bunch — yes, no, kind of, not really.

5. Hanks plays his usual patient, soft-spoken man of decency. Kidd is probably his best role and performance since…Cast Away?

6. News of the World is an entirely decent and respectable film. You can see where it’s heading from 100 miles away, but it’s the journey that counts.

Last night HE’s own Bob Strauss described Promising Young Woman as “soooo good! The kind of thing that wriggles out in all kinds of unexpected directions, upending both genre expectations and the woke doctrine so many on this site are afraid of, yet never betraying its fundamental righteousness in the process. Complex, crazy, often funny as hell and as startling as it gets.”

I’m an admirer also, but “funny”?

Posted this morning: “Promising Young Woman has a striking edgy quality and is loaded with a certain kind of acrid, on-target attitude, but Mr. Strauss has unfortunately joined the p.c. throng that insists on calling it ‘funny.’

“Different folks & strokes, but as God is my witness and may He, She or It strike me dead with Vito Corleone’s bolt of lightning, there is NOTHING that even flirts with ‘funny’ in this film. Funny can be laugh-inducing or titter-worthy or it can be an internal reaction (i.e., LQTM), but Promising Young Woman radiates an absolute and unequivocal absence of the mental, spiritual and emotional ingredients that constitute ‘funny’ or ‘dryly amusing’ or ‘guffaw-worthy’ or however you want to define it.

“Because PYW is, at heart, driven or informed by a brusque, occasionally quite chilly, unmistakably damning, hanging-judge quality.

“’Funny’ can be a line or a mood or an attitude that feels like the first hour of a mescaline trip. It delivers a certain something-or-other potion that flips a certain switch and makes you go ‘hah-hah’ or ‘tee-hee.’ If you’ve ever known any professional comedy writers you know they rarely laugh, but at the same time they’ll sometimes say ‘that’s funny’ or ‘that’s smart, clever stuff but it isn’t funny.’ PYW, trust me, is no comedy writer’s idea of “funny.” Because it has no interest in the afore-mentioned switch, much less in flipping it.”

This morning I read about about 25% of a long New Yorker piece about the coronavirus tragedy, written by Lawrence Wright and titled “The Plague Year.” It basically explains how Donald Trump, his executive branch goons and his moronic bumblefuck followers brought hell to this country by prolonging the pandemic and turning it into a much more deadly scourge than it needed to be.

The same story was covered by an excellent PBS Frontline doc called “The Virus: What Went Wrong?” Alex Gibney‘s Totally Under Control (which I reviewed on 10.12.20) also passed along the tale.

A few days ago film critic Thelma Adams posted a long list of destinations. She said to put YES next to any place you’ve been. The average is 8, she said. Thelma has visited 56. I’ve visited 98 or 99, and I will never, ever visit Dubai. And honestly? At this stage in my life I’m not putting a lot of faith in the idea of visiting Alaska.

Here’s my incomplete rundown, which omits a few cities, towns and regions:

Abu Dhabi
Acapulco
Amsterdam — YES
Alaska
Angola
Antigua
Arcos de la Frontera, Spain — YES
Arizona — YES
Aruba
Athens, Greece
Atlanta — YES
Austria – YES
Australia
Azores
The Bahamas
Bali
Barbados
Barcelona — YES
Bahrain
Belgium — YES
Belize — YES
Bermuda
Berlin — YES
Bern, Switzerland — YES
Borneo
Boston — YES (lived there!)
Bordeaux, France — YES

I couldn’t find the running-time breakdowns of Lawrence of Arabia, so I asked Jedi restoration guru Robert Harris, who oversaw the original (1989) Lawrence of Arabia restoration with David Lean.

Part one runs 135 minutes, he says, and part two runs 82 minutes.