How do you handle a hungry man? You kill him with fat, grease and cholestoral. Remember that scene in The War of the Worlds when Gene Barry and Ann Robinson are preparing fried eggs inside an abandoned farmhouse, and Barry says with an air of comfort and satisfaction “we’re doing all right”? Once in a great while I’ll prepare an old-fashioned fried egg, bacon and home fries breakfast. Unhealthy but emotionally comforting — a breakfast serving that tens of millions of mothers (including my own) would prepare on weekends.

Obviously the word “THE” has been afforded great significance within the realm of Warner Bros./DC adaptations. In the tradition of Matt Reeves‘ THE Batman, we now have James Gunn‘s THE Suicide Squad (Warner Bros., 8.6.21), a five-years-later sequel to David Ayer‘s Suicide Squad. THE Suicide Squad is also known as Suicide Squad 2 but don’t let that throw you.

The Suicide Squad is the tenth film in the DC Extended Universe (DCEU). Written and directed by James Gunn (who, don’t forget, lost his Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3 job over a 2018 Twitter kerfuffle only to be re-hired later on), pic is a paycheck paradise for costars Margot Robbie, Idris Elba, John Cena, Joel Kinnaman, Jai Courtney, Peter Capaldi, Alice Braga, Pete Davidson, David Dastmalchian, Michael Rooker, Taika Waititi, Nathan Fillion, Storm Reid, Daniela Melchior, Steve Agee, Sean Gunn, Joaquín Cosío, Juan Diego Botto, Julio Ruiz, Flula Borg, Tinashe Kajese, Mayling Ng, Jennifer Holland and Viola Davis.

Two milliseconds after my initial glimpse of Pedro Pascal‘s “Maxwell Lord” character in the Wonder Woman 1984 trailer, I flashed on a 30something Donald Trump.

In a day-old Independent piece by Adam White, WW84 costume designer Lindy Hemming acknowledged that Lord was partly inspired by Orange Plague.

Excerpt #1: “That’s helpful to look at Donald Trump, isn’t it?” Hemming teased. “There is something about the period of Donald Trump and being a businessman, isn’t there, of being rather sleazy a little bit, and a bit goofy [in the] hair and a lot of talk. So that’s why he’s there. Yeah, so that’s it, really.”

Excerpt #2: “Director Patty Jenkins has suggested that Trump served as just one of a number of inspirations for the character. ‘He’s one of them,’ Jenkins told Screen Rant. ‘I mean honestly, the funny thing is he is [an influence], but I’m not trying to make…I don’t want to get political, it’s not about being political.’”

(l.) Pedro Pascal as “Maxwell Lord; (r.) Donald Trump in the mid ’80s.

 Sidenote: Who or what is the female hyena monster [after the jump]?

I’m still trying to figure how Chris Pine‘s “Steve Trevor” is alive and kicking around. He blew himself up inside a plane (“It has to be me”) in the original. No ambiguity — blown to bits.

Wonder Woman 1984 was originally slated for release on 12.13.19, before being advanced to 11.1.19. It was then delayed to 6.5.20. On 3.23.202 COVID concerns bumped it to 8.14.20. Then it was bumped again to 10.2.20.

In late May of ’82 I did an Us magazine group interview with E.T. costars Henry Thomas (who was 10), Drew Barrymore (all of seven years old) and Robert MacNaughton (then 15).

I remember being told by my Us editor, Stephen Schaefer, that a decision had been made by Universal publicists and magazine editors alike to concentrate on Henry and Drew and downplay poor Robert. “But he’s so good in the film!,” I replied, feeling a bit sorry for the guy. That may be true, I was told, but he’s too old and not cute enough — the story will be about Henry and Drew.

The piece was called “E.T.’s Tiny Heroes,” and it turned out to be a cover (my first). The issue date was 7.20.82.

Richard Attenborough‘s Gandhi won the 1982 Best Picture Oscar. Because it said something important and politically correct about social issues, human rights and whatnot. E.T. should have won for the simple, undisputed fact that it’s a much better film that Gandhi…much. Yes, some of it feels emotionally heavy-handed, but that’s sentiment for you. It doesn’t age well. Ask John Ford about that.

Henry Thomas will turn 50 on 9.9.21.

The voice of the FabTV interviewer of Charlie Kaufman, director and screenwriter** of I’m Thinking of Ending Things (Netflix, 9.4), is thin and reedy, and the speaking style is the usual 65% vocal fry + 35% sexy baby — par for the course for 20something women these days. (Just ask Lake Bell.) And she sounds as if she’s “reading” the questions, and that someone else may have written them. She could be a court stenographer reading back testimony.

Kaufman’s film opens two weeks from today.

** Kaufman adapted Iain Reed’s 2006 novel of the same name.

A friend forwarded an 8.16 Quillette piece called “The Challenge of Marxism.” The author, Yoram Hazony, seems to be saying that the SJW Robespierres, Khmer Rouge cadres and wokesters on Twitter + Bernie Bros (i.e., Robert “Kid Notorious” Evans) + BLM street protestors and “1619 Project” transformatives are the New Marxists.

And in their zeal to kill fair-minded, mild-mannered liberalism they represent a certain threat that will not play down the road, etc. Or words to that effect.

Excerpt: “[New Marxists] disorient their opponents by referring to their beliefs with a shifting vocabulary of terms, including ‘the Left’, ‘Progressivism’, ‘social justice,’ ‘anti-racism’, ‘Anti-Fascism’, ‘Black Lives Matter’, ‘Critical Race Theory’, ‘Identity Politics’, ‘Political Correctness’, ‘Wokeness’ and more. When liberals try to use these terms they often find themselves deplored for not using them correctly, and this itself becomes a weapon in the hands of those who wish to humiliate and ultimately destroy them.

“The best way to escape this trap is to recognize the movement presently seeking to overthrow liberalism for what it is: an updated version of Marxism. I do not say this to disparage anyone. I say this because it is true. And because recognizing this truth will help us understand what we are facing.”

Pally viewpoint: “He’s talking about the cult mentality of you’re-with-us-or-against-us…and also the former impulses of liberalism (social justice, compassion for the disadvantaged, etc.) hardening into rigid doctrinaire principles. That’s exactly what happened in academia, and it’s now spreading like a virus into the mainstream media.

“I think the essay is spot-on. Marxism is just what this is — not the strict economic definition of Marxism (i.e., class war) but the spiritual model of it. Everything ‘purified’, heretics tossed out, etc. The idea of ‘justice’ pushed to greater and greater extremes. And any view that holds out the idea of compromise must be vilified.

“Marxism, in a word, is leftist absolutism. It’s what happened in Cuba after Fidel Castro came to power; it’s the insanity wrought by Mao [during the Great Cultural Revolution]. And it’s certainly not what Joe Biden stands for.”

In Joshua Logan and William Inge‘s Picnic (’55), William Holden played a drifter named Hal Carter — former high school football star, failed Hollywood actor. Carter was supposed to be somewhere in his mid to late 20s, but Holden was 37 and looked it. By today’s standards he could easily be mistaken for a 45 year-old. Picnic was shot in Hutchinson, Kansas in the spring-summer of ’55. Holden was “reportedly nervous about his dancing for the ‘Moonglow’ scene. Logan took him to Kansas roadhouses where he practiced steps in front of jukeboxes with choreographer Miriam Nelson. Heavy thunderstorms with tornado warnings repeatedly interrupted shooting of the scene in Kansas, so it was completed on a backlot in Burbank, where Holden (according to some sources) was ‘dead drunk’ to calm his nerves.”

Hollywood Elsewhere is thinking about attending a community rally at the Bicentennial Station Post Office on Beverly Blvd. (between Curson and Stanley) on Sunday, 8.16 at 11am. Please stop by for a few minutes to support the USPS and postal employees and to show that we value this important civic institutions, etc. The demo will wind down around noon to avoid the worst of the heat.

It would appear that Chris Nolan‘s Tenet is widely admired — 88% and…wait a minute, only 71% on Metacritic? Okay, it’s mostly admired. Three out of ten in the negative column.

When it comes to assessing the pros and cons of any heavy-duty blockbuster from a major distributor, at least 90% if not 95% of critics will strive for some kind of generosity if not positivity, even if the critic in question wasn’t completely knocked out. Somewhere between 5% and 10% will speak more honestly. That’s simply the way it works. Now and then that percentage can extent to 15% or 20%

The most trustworthy reviews in the world are when you run into a friend in a parking lot who’s just seen it, and he/she gives you 75 or 100 words of straight dope. This is what I’ve always aimed for — parking-lot candor, no time for bullshit, etc. I’ve dropped the ball two or three times in that regard, but to err is human.

Robert Pattinson, John David Washington.

Indiewire‘s Mike Cahill: “Where did it all go wrong? Deep in the film’s tangled DNA, there are traces of an effervescent, boundless, city-hopping romp. Turn time back! Reopen cinemas! Save the world!

“But there’s zero levity in “Tenet”: Nolan simply reverses time in an effort to bring dead ideas back to life. And if he couldn’t have envisioned Saturday-night moviegoing being among them, it feels doubly sorrowful that a film striving to lure us all outdoors should visit this many locations and not once allow us to feel sunlight or fresh air on our faces.

“Visually and spiritually grey, Tenet is too terse to have any fun with its premise; it’s a caper for shut-ins, which may not preclude it becoming a runaway smash.”

From Catherine Shoard’s review in The Guardian:

“It’s no wonder Christopher Nolan thinks Tenet can save cinema. That’s a doddle compared to the challenge faced in his film, which, we’re frequently reminded, is a proper whopper. Prevent world war three? Bigger. Avoid armageddon? Worse. To spell it out would be a spoiler, but think 9/11 times a hundred, to quote Team America: World Police, a film Tenet faintly resembles.

“Lucky, really, because Tenet is not a movie it’s worth the nervous braving a trip to the big screen to see, no matter how safe it is. I’m not even sure that, in five years’ time, it’d be worth staying up to catch on telly. To say so is sad, perhaps heretical. But for audiences to abandon their living rooms in the long term, the first carrot had better not leave a bad taste.

“For all Tenet’s technical ambition, the plot is rote and the furnishings tired.

Let Him Go (Focus Features, 11.6) is obviously a neo-western genre piece, but it’s going to be good. The director-writer is the skilled and exacting Thomas Bezucha (The Family Stone, Big Eden) and…I don’t know but you can just tell.

Kevin Costner and Diane Lane are the good guys, and the demons are played by…well, at least Lesley Manville, Will Brittain and Jeffrey Donovan.

Boilerplate: Based on based on Larry Watson‘s same-titled 2014 novel, a semi-violent saga about a retired married couple (Costner, Lane) trying to see to the well-being of their grandson in the wake of their son’s untimely death.

They discover that their grandson is now under the care of a notorious crime family led by an icy matriarch (Manville) who smokes at the dinner table. Things eventually turn violent, etc.

J.C. Chandor, arguably the finest auteur-level director to have broken through over the last decade and the proud helmer of Margin Call (’11), All Is Lost (13), A Most Violent Year (’14) and last year’s Triple Frontier (about half of which I regard as almost on the level of Treasure of the Sierra Madre)…J.C. Chandor “is in talks” to direct Sony’s Kraven the Hunter, a fucking Spider-Man spinoff based on a nearly 60-year-old Marvel property.

I was crushed when I read Justin Kroll‘s Deadline story. This is almost like Francis Coppola, fresh off Apocalypse Now and One From The Heart, bumping aside Richard Donner to direct Superman II. It’s obviously tough out there and we all have bills to pay, but my God, how depressing.

When I need a little pick-me-up I watch YouTube clips of Margin Call…particularly that Jeremy Irons staff meeting scene. All Is Lost is one of the greatest sea-survival tales ever filmed, and a platform for one of Robert Redford‘s finest performances. I was planning on watching Triple Frontier again because parts of it are so damn good. I never liked Bradford Young‘s cinematography for A Most Violent Year, but the film itself is excellent. Yes, I realize it lost money but still.

The Right Stuff, a Disney Plus eight-hour miniseries produced by Leonardo DiCaprio‘s Appian Way, is based on Tom Wolfe’s best-selling book. Originally intended to be a National Geographic Channel presentation but then Disney+ stepped in, etc. It begins streaming on 10.9 with a two-hour opener, and continues with six one-hour episodes. It costars Patrick J. Adams, Jake McDorman, Colin O’Donoghue, Aaron Staton, James Lafferty, Micah Stock and Michael Trotter.

Given the less-than-stellar reputation of Philip Kaufman‘s The Right Stuff (’83), the Disney+ version has nowhere to go but up esteem-wise.

It’s been three and a half years since I re-posted my pan of the Kaufman film (“Overpraised Right Stuff“). Here it is again:

“The Right Stuff is a diverting film with some above-average passages, agreed, but too much of it feels like commoner soup. I expected some kind of semblance of the Tom Wolfe book, which was eloquent and savvy and well-researched and often funny, at least in a snickering sense.

“Almost every amusing element that landed in the Wolfe book fails to land in the film. Every scene in the Kaufman film feels broad and over-acted in order to appeal to the folks in the cheap seats. Urination jokes (i.e.. Alan Shepard letting go in his space suit), masturbation jokes, seasick-vomiting jokes, rubber-tube-up-the-ass jokes  — everything primitive is used. Very little in the way of low-key, the-way-it-really-was pilot stuff. Almost every scene feels performed by actors.

“Wolfe wrote about Glenn (Ed Harris) telling Alan Shepard (Scott Glenn) that he needs to stop catting around at the local cocktail lounges because it’ll be bad for the Mercury astronaut’s image if it gets out, and how Shepard told Glenn that girls are none of his damn business and to bugger off — great in the book, doesn’t work in the film.

“Wolfe wrote about Gus Grissom‘s ‘death dimes’ — two rolls of dimes that he took with him on his Mercury flight in order to pass them out to friends later on, but which made it difficult for him to tread water in the Atlantic after his capsule sank, because of their weight. (“And now this big junkheap of travel sentiment stuffed in his knee pocket was taking him under… dimes!…silver deadweight!”). Great in the book, ignored by Kaufman.