“I’ve been kinda down, as you know. Last two or three years, maybe longer. But I gotta tell ya it feels great to be doin’ better, at least as far as tonight is concerned. And I’ll tell ya one thing — even if you’re down you still gotta put on the brave face and bring the old kezazz. ”

I’m Thinking of Ending Things (Netflix, 9.2) is one of the most interesting creep-outs I’ve come across in quite some time. Please try to see it this coming weekend as I’d love to hear some reactions.

As I mentioned in my 8.27 review, I made a decision to more or less blow off the “what’s really going on here?” aspect and process it through the filter of my own push-pull feelings about my parents and my upbringing, and those little flashes of high-school trauma and heartache that have never really gone away.

The film basically conveys a feeling of being awash in a flood of suppressed memories that won’t quit lapping against your pilings. You might be unsure what to make of it. You might hate it or find it fascinating or somewhere in between, but it’s certainly not a trifle. I think that “psychological horror film” is an overly reductive way to describe it.

You’ve probably read that Rodgers & Hammerstein‘s Oklahoma! figures prominently in the film’s second half. Near the end a song called “Lonely Room“, sung by the Jud Fry character in the original 1943 production but cut from the 1955 film version, is performed in a surreal high-school production of the play. I had never heard it before seeing Kaufman’s film a few days ago. “Lonely Room” was restored for the 1980 and 1998 Broadway and London stage revivals of “Oklahoma!“.

The original Broadway production opened on 3.31.43 at the St. James Theatre.

Everyone knows “Morning Joe” Scarborough — thoughtful, vaguely left-leaning or at least “independent”, former Republican Congressman, hates Trump. And almost everyone has come to believe that we’ve reached the “Jesus, enough already” stage of the BLM protests in Portland, and that Rick Wilson‘s “woke shitheads” are generally doing more harm than good as far as the Biden-Harris campaign is concerned, etc. Just STFU until election day, and after that feel free to return to the streets and make the same noise.

So this morning Joe tweeted that the Portland chaos has to stop and that local authorities have to show a little authoritarian muscle, and what happened? He was told to “delete your account”, to stop kowtowing to the Trump narrative and to screw his head on correctly.

Is anyone else amused by the possibility that Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Soggy Bottom**, a ’70s-era ensemble drama, might be at least partly about the making of Barbra Streisand, Jon Peters and Frank Pierson‘s A Star Us Born? On-set snaps of Bradley Cooper closely resemble the way Peters looked back in the day, and it’s been written that costar Alana Haim “may” be playing a Streisand-like figure.

If true, this would fall under the heading of perverse casting, given Cooper’s recent Kris Tapley-endorsed Star Is Born remake. Twitter is certainly buying into the possibility.

Oh, and by the way The Film Stage‘s Jordan Raup reported today that Benny Safdie is playing longtime L.A. City Council member Joel Wachs in PTA’s film.

If — I say “if” — Cooper is indeed portraying young Peters in this Los Angeles-based film, I’d like to think that the inspiration came from three sources. One, JASH’s “Very Animated People” riff on Peters, which posted on YouTube on 8.28.17. Two, Frank Pierson’s “My Battles With Jon and Barbra,” a blow-by-blow account of the making of the ’76 version of A Star Is Born, written in a state of seething anger and resentment. And three, Karina Longworth‘s take on the Star Is Born debacle, “You Must Remember This,” episode #21, posted on 11.4.14.

[VIDEO] Bradley Cooper on the set of Paul Thomas Anderson's latest project (working title: #SoggyBottom) via @accessonline #AccessHollywood pic.twitter.com/258377pvuU

— Nelson Carvajal (@nelsoncarvajal) August 26, 2020

“In African cultures we often refer to loved ones that have passed on as ancestors. Sometimes you are genetically related. Sometimes you are not. I had the privilege of directing scenes of Chad’s character, T’Challa, communicating with the ancestors of Wakanda. We were in Atlanta, in an abandoned warehouse, with bluescreens, and massive movie lights, but Chad’s performance made it feel real. I think it was because from the time that I met him, the ancestors spoke through him. It’s no secret to me now how he was able to skillfully portray some of our most notable ones. I had no doubt that he would live on and continue to bless us with more.

“But it is with a heavy heart and a sense of deep gratitude to have ever been in his presence, that I have to reckon with the fact that Chad is an ancestor now. And I know that he will watch over us, until we meet again.” — from Black Panther director Ryan Coogler’s eulogy for Chadwick Boseman, posted this morning in The Hollywood Reporter.

Tell me this isn’t real. Tell me hinterland battleground voters aren’t this psychotic. (Or that these numbers represent a Republican Convention bump.) Tell me the legend of BLM lunatics hasn’t spread this far. Michael Moore is trying to shake liberals out of complacency, of course, but tell me it’s not much more than that.

“But aside from the 42 percent or so who consistently approve of Trump no matter what he or those around him do, most other Americans will see for themselves whether COVID-19 has evaporated or their economic security has improved this fall. Those are realities that Trump, for all his subterfuge, cannot alter.

“But racial animus is a less tangible and more enduring factor in America’s political fortunes, and it has been a toxic wild card in every modern election.” — from Frank Rich‘s 8.28 Intellligencer column, “Trump Thinks Racism Is His Best Chance.”

I suffered for three and a half hours earlier today. Stress, fatigue, confusion, anger. All in an attempt to mount a towel bar on our bathroom wall. The guy who put this video together (“TheRenderQ“) says it’s a relatively simple process, and would take a half-hour or so. Not if you have a 30 year-old power drill that only runs in reverse, and not if your bathroom ceiling is so old and lumpy that the floor-to-ceiling measurements aren’t equal, and not if the package contains a micro-Allen wrench that doesn’t really fit the fastening screw, etc.

I hate assembling things because stuff always goes wrong, there are always misleading directions (even when you find guidance on YouTube) and there are always unexpected hassles. I almost did it correctly in the end, but not quite. It left me feeling hugely depressed.

I’ve always been pretty good at woodwork (when we owned a home in Venice I built an octagonal jacuzzi cover and a wooden front gate) and I have a nice old toolbox, etc. But I hate instruction pamphlets.

HE review of Get On Up, posted on 7.30.14:

A statement that no Democrat would dare give voice to…

“If this election is a referendum of Donald Trump, Donald Trump will lose and Joe Biden will win. If this a referendum on woke shitheads yelling at people in public, then it’s going to be a much harder race.”” — Lincoln Project co-founder Rick Wilson during last night’s Real Time with Bill Maher.

Brian Wilson is, was, always will be an artist. His peak genius period was ’64 to ’68, give or take. But during the same period the others were, shall we say, on the shallow side. Insufficiently developed in more ways than you can shake a stick at. Don’t forget that the Beach Boys played South Africa during the height of apartheid, and were put on a UN blacklist (along with Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles and Cher) for having done so. They’ve been a Republican band for a long time, saluted by John McCain, Ronald Reagan and the like. They even considered playing at Donald Trump’s 2016 inauguration.

In last night’s “Four Ain’t Enough” thread, “Bob Hightower” trotted out the old “anyone who prefers High Noon to Rio Bravo doesn’t really like Westerns” line.

I tapped out a pretty good Rio Bravo vs. High Noon piece 13 years ago, but here’s another go, written this morning and mostly freshly phrased.

I like Rio Bravo enough to own the Bluray and re-watch it every two or three years, but it’s mostly a laid-back, hang-out, easy-does-it thang by way of the lore of Hollywood westerns.

On top of being an anti-High Noon argument piece, of course — a refutation of the Carl Foreman idea that when push comes to shove, fair-weather friends (or 95% of those who behave as if they like and care about you, especially at parties) aren’t worth a damn, and when things get tough you’ve only yourself to rely upon. Which is precisely how I feel about life anyway.

The best westerns aren’t just about genre conventions and cliches, but about the human condition…right?

From the ’07 piece: “You know from the get-go that High Noon is going to say something hard and fundamental about who and what we are. It’s not going to just poke along some dusty trail and go yippie-ki-yay and twirl a six-gun. It’s going to look you in the eye and say what’s what, and not just about the political and moral climate in some small western town that Gary Cooper‘s Will Kane is the sheriff of.”

Rio Bravo is not really invested in the “uh-oh, the bad guys are coming to break Joe Burdette out of jail and kill us in the bargain” situation or even in the characters except for Dean Martin’s broken-down alky. Sweat, nerves, tremors of seal-loathing — 100% believable.

The best scene, of course, is that dialogue-free beginning in the saloon, although it never made a lick of sense that Martin would bash Wayne on the head with a wooden club simply because Wayne has given him a look of well-deserved disgust when Martin is about to reach into a spittoon to retrieve a silver dollar, which is course is par for the course for the town drunk.

It also makes no sense that Joe Burdette (Claude Akins) would casually shoot Bing Russell in the stomach at close range, as there’s been no real provocation. It’s almost on the level of “aaah, I’m bored, here’s a bullet.”

On top of which Ricky Nelson’s high-register, pipsqueak speaking voice is too late ‘50s, too eighth-grade, too malt shop, too “Be-Bop Baby”…it lassos Howard Hawks’ studiously self-conscious, movie-ish western and sends you right back to Ozzie and Harriet-ville every time he opens his mouth.

And that sing-along jailhouse scene (“My Rifle, My Pony, and Me”, which uses the same Dimitri Tiomkin melody that was heard over and over in Red River but with new lyrics) is a real curiosity. It was thrown in to placate Nelson’s and Martin’s fans, but it stopped the movie cold, of course, especially when Walter Brennan‘s “Stumpy” joins in on “Get Along Home, Cindy Cindy”.

You know what would’ve been cool? If Hawks had cut away to Joe Burdette in his jail cell, smiling and quietly humming along.

Also from ’07: “Does Rio Bravo have a sequence that equals the gripping metronomic ticking-clock montage near the end of High Noon? Is the dialogue in Rio Bravo up to the better passages in Zinneman’s film? No. (There’s nothing close to the scene between Cooper and Lon Chaney, Jr., or the brief one between Cooper and Katy Jurado.) Is there a moment in Rio Bravo that comes close to Cooper throwing his tin star into the dust at the end? Is there a “yes!” payoff moment in Rio Bravo as good as the one in High Noon when Grace Kelly, playing a Quaker who abhors violence, drills one of the bad guys in the back?”

And don’t forget my “Tarantino’s Once Is Kin To Rio Bravo” piece from last July.