Shia LaBeouf‘s “Creeper”: “I’m supposed to terrorize the herd…that’s my function.”

Okay, but as the cast appears to be largely Latino/Mexican is Shia playing a white guy? Or is Creeper a Mexican character? I’m asking because Shia seems to be speaking with an accent. Are white guys allowed to play brown these days?

Directed, written and produced by David Ayer, The Tax Collector (RLJE, 8.7) is described as an “American” crime thriller. It costars Bobby Soto, Cinthya Carmona, George Lopez.

In The Towering Inferno, Richard Chamberlain‘s sinister son-in-law character died for his sins. He was selfish and cowardly, and so he had to fall 138 stories to his death, screaming all the way down. But disaster films are also expected to serve some cruel sadism, and so a couple of innocents (played by Jennifer Jones and Susan Flannery) also slammed into the pavement. Satisfaction all around.

One of the reasons I disliked Jack Smight‘s Airport ’75 is that none of the passengers (some of whom were played by Gloria Swanson, Helen Reddy, Linda Blair, Sid Ceasar, Myrna Loy, Jerry Stiller, Normal Fell, Nancy Olson and Martha Scott) were killed. They just sat in their seats and grimaced and occasionally screamed.

Airport ’75 is basically about Dana Andrews’ small private plane crashing into the windshield of a commercial 747. Three professional guys die as a result — Andrews, co-pilot Roy Thinnes and attempted replacement pilot Ed Nelson. The latter, tethered to a cord, is lowered from a rescue plane in front of the wounded jet. Unfortunately his harness becomes caught in the jagged material surrounding the hole in the cockpit, and Nelson flies out. I wasn’t satisfied. I didn’t want Nelson to fall 20,000 feet to his death — I wanted Swanson, Reddy, Loy or Stiller to suffer that fate.

In his 1.19.74 N.Y. Times review, Vincent Canby said that Airport ’75 suffers from “a total lack of awareness of how comic it is when it’s attempting to be most serious.”

If I’d been in charge of the script and direction, I would have included MCU footage of the terrified Nelson as he falls to his doom above the snow-covered Wasatch Mountains. (Imagine Martin Balsam‘s close-up as he’s falling backwards down the stairs in Psycho — something in that realm.) Then I would have cut to a young couple enjoying some cross-country skiing near a large frozen lake. They would look up as they hear a strange hissing sound. Behind them we see a blurry, human-shaped missile slam into the ice and disappear. The couple turns. They take off their skis and walk out to the area of impact. They come upon a perfect body-shape hole (arms, legs, head) in the ice.

Too sadistic? Maybe, but be honest — this is the kind of Colisseum-style spectacle that ’70s disaster movies were selling, certainly by implication. I realize that the film was financially successful (cost $3 million, made $50 million worldwide) but it wasn’t bloodthirsty enough.

I’ve had a second look at Rod Lurie‘s The Outpost (Screen Media, 7.3). The version I saw last fall has been tweeked and refined and I wanted to savor the final final, so I watched it on the 65-incher, slouching on the couch.

HE verdict: This fact-based, highly adrenalized Afghanistan war pic not only holds but upticks. The 40-minute battle sequence (which starts around the 75-minute mark) is not only riveting but a work of serious beauty, if that’s the right term. It’s really spellbinding — there’s no looking away from it, and it’s hard to breathe while it lasts. It might even help you lose weight.

Lurie and Jake Tapper’s book aside, special commendation goes to cinematographer Lorenzo Senatore and editor Michael J. Duthie.

Crisp military salutes are hereby offered to the mostly all-male cast but especially to co-leads Scott Eastwood (his snarly, tough-as-nails staff sergeant performance is a breakthrough) and Caleb Landry Jones, who has finally stopped mumbling and planted his feet and told the truth like a man. HE to CLJ: You deserve a Best Supporting Actor nom, bruh, but don’t ever mumble again. I’m serious.

And don’t forget the sound design, especially the zing-zing bullets slamming into terra firma, humvee metal, helmets, bone, flesh.

Currently The Outpost has a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 90%. I don’t get the 75% Metacritic rating. There’s no reason for dissing the film, given what it honestly is and what it clearly accomplishes.

Unfortunately Gov. Gavin Newsom has closed all indoor California theatres for at least three weeks, so there goes the big-screen immersive effect that a film like this needs. The only large-screen experience this weekend is at the Vineland Drive-In, which is located in the industrial shithole known as the City of Industry.

A U.S. forces-vs.-Taliban war flick based on Tapper’s reporting, The Outpost is a rousing plunge into another tough battle that actually happened, and is another example of the kind of combat flick to which we’ve all become accustomed — one in which the U.S. forces get their asses kicked and barely survive.

Lone Survivor, Hamburger Hill, Black Hawk Down, The Hurt Locker, In The Valley of Elah, Platoon, We Were Soldiers, Pork Chop Hill — American forces go to war for questionable or dubious reasons and the troops engaged get shot and pounded all to hell. Those who barely survive are shattered, exhausted, gutted. War is bad karma.

Lurie isn’t trying for anything more than an expert reality-capturing. He’s done his best to replicate a military tragedy that happened 11 years ago, and in so doing is telling his audience, “Take it or leave it but this is it…this is the truth of what happened.”

Tapper’s same-titled book, published in 2013, is about the ordeal of U.S. troops defending Combat Outpost Keating. Located at the bottom of a steep canyon and absurdly vulnerable to shooters in the surrounding hills, the outpost was attacked by Taliban forces on 10.3.09.

Froµ Matt Taibbi’s 6.28 essay on Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility“:

“It’s been mind-boggling to watch White Fragility celebrated in recent weeks. When it surged past a Hunger Games book on bestseller lists, USA Today cheered, ‘American readers are more interested in combatting racism than in literary escapism.’ When DiAngelo appeared on The Tonight Show, Jimmy Fallon gushed, ‘I know…everyone wants to talk to you right now!’

“White Fragility has been pitched as an uncontroversial road-map for fighting racism, at a time when after the murder of George Floyd Americans are suddenly (and appropriately) interested in doing just that. Except this isn’t a straightforward book about examining one’s own prejudices. Have the people hyping this impressively crazy book actually read it?

“DiAngelo isn’t the first person to make a buck pushing tricked-up pseudo-intellectual horseshit as corporate wisdom, but she might be the first to do it selling Hitlerian race theory.

“White Fragility has a simple message: there is no such thing as a universal human experience, and we are defined not by our individual personalities or moral choices, but only by our racial category.

“If your category is ‘white,’ bad news: you have no identity apart from your participation in white supremacy (‘Anti-blackness is foundational to our very identities…whiteness has always been predicated on blackness’), which naturally means ‘a positive white identity is an impossible goal.’

“DiAngelo instructs us there is nothing to be done here, except ‘strive to be less white.’ To deny this theory, or to have the effrontery to sneak away from the tedium of DiAngelo’s lecturing – what she describes as ‘leaving the stress-inducing situation’ — is to affirm her conception of white supremacy. This intellectual equivalent of the ‘ordeal by water’ (if you float, you’re a witch) is orthodoxy across much of academia.

“DiAngelo’s writing style is pure pain. The lexicon favored by intersectional theorists of this type is built around the same principles as Orwell’s Newspeak: it banishes ambiguity, nuance, and feeling and structures itself around sterile word pairs, like racist and antiracist, platform and deplatform, center and silence, that reduce all thinking to a series of binary choices.”

A little less than five years ago I badly wanted to catch Lin Manuel Miranda‘s Hamilton on Broadway. It had opened at the Richard Rodgers theatre in August 2015, and for a good year or so I kept reminding myself to somehow catch it during one of my NYC visits. But I was also repelled by the absurdly high ticket prices, and I gradually convinced myself that it wasn’t worth the candle.

I then told myself that I’d catch a roadshow version or at the very least a video-captured version on cable or streaming. But neither scenario happened. The cable/streaming thing stalled because the producers felt this would cut into roadshow revenues.

And so gradually the Hamilton moment — the late-Obama-era, fresh-out-of-the-box excitement — began to wear off.

Now the Hamilton “movie” is finally about to stream on the Disney channel (starting on 7.3). Obviously a good thing for millions who never saw it. But honestly? As brilliant and universally applauded as the stage show was (and to go by reviews of the streaming version), it’s no longer a thing with special vitality.

Hamilton doesn’t seem to have opened five years ago (it actually began at the Public Theatre on 2.17.15) but more like a decade ago, given everything that’s happened since that first electric moment. And it’s always been my feeling that movies don’t just connect because they’re exceptional but because of the timing — because they’ve opened at just the right time and have struck when the iron is hot.

A Hamilton press screener has been sitting in my inbox for a couple of days, and I’m thinking of catching it tonight. Why didn’t I watch it immediately? Because it’s an old show now.

Last night I finally watched episode #2 of HBO’s Perry Mason series. It continued, of course, with that smokey, gunky, grimly desaturated, grimey thing. But I finally figured out what’s really bothering me about this show, and here it is:

Matthew Rhys, who plays the titular lawyer-investigator, is too long of tooth to be playing a World War I veteran in 1931.

Combat soldiers are generally 18, 19 or 20, so let’s bend over backwards and say Mason was 20 when he fought against the Germans in 1918. That would make him 33 in 1931. Except by any biological yardstick Rhys looks at least 12 or 14 years older than that. He’s currently 45, but with his creased Elmer’s Glue-All complexion and facial features starting to sag he might as well be 47 or even 48. (Remember how Cary Grant looked in Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House? He was 44 or thereabouts, but he looked 38 or 39 at the oldest.) And if Rhys looks 47 or 48 he might as well be 49 or 50.

It just doesn’t work to watch a guy who’s well into middle-age try to figure out if he wants to be a private-eye bottom-feeder or not. Professional identity crises are something you go through in your mid to late 20s or, at the very latest, your early 30s. I for one don’t want to watch a 45 year-old guy trying to figure out who and what he is. He should handled that shit 15 or 20 years ago. So there it is — my basic problem with Perry Mason.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has invited 819 actors and filmmakers to join up and pay their dues. The AMPAS membership tally now comes to now 9300. In keeping with recent patterns, the additions will further diversify the ranks. 45% of the fresh recruits are women and 36% are under-represented ethnic/racial minorities, for a total of 86%. The international (i.e., non-domestic) makeup of the new crew is 49% from 68 countries.

So are the remaining invitees who aren’t female or under-represented ethnic-racial minorities (what is that, 55% or less?) males or, God forbid, European-descended males with pale complexions?

As I understand the new-members situation, Scott Feinberg‘s Hollywood reporter headline — “Film Academy Invites 819 New Members, With 36 Percent People of Color” — isn’t quite right as the term “people of color” has been retired in favor of the above-mentioned URERM (i.e., under-represented ethnic/racial minorities).

For years the Academy has used the “person of color” term. Except that partly alluded, I’m told, to people of Spanish heritage and residence (i.e., citizens of Spain). In the eyes of the Academy, for example, Antonio Banderas was regarded (until today) as a person of color. Which is kind of odd as Spaniards are not “people of color” any more than Mick Jagger is. Anyone who’s seen a Pedro Almodovar film will tell you that while their hair is frequently dark (along with auburn, blonde and what-have-you), they all have fair, Wonder Bread-ish, Ozzie-and-Harriet complexions.

And so AMPAS is now going with the more egalitarian-sounding under-represented ethnic/racial minorities, which draws a sharper line. As long as they continue to keep white guy additions to a bare minimum, we’re good.

After yesterday’s coinage of “No Chairs Nolan“, his p.r. rep Kelly Bush issued the following statement: “For the record, the only things banned from [Christopher Nolan’s] sets are cell phones (not always successfully) and smoking (very successfully). The chairs Anne [Hathaway] was referring to are the directors chairs clustered around the video monitor, allocated on the basis of hierarchy not physical need. Chris chooses not to use his but has never banned chairs from the set. Cast and crew can sit wherever and whenever they need [to] and frequently do.”

From Jeffrey Toobin‘s “Why The Mueller Invetigation Failed,” posted a day or sp ago by The New Yorker: “The President has tweeted about Mueller more than three hundred times, and has repeatedly referred to the special counsel’s investigation as a ‘scam’ and a ‘hoax.’ Barr and Graham agree that the Mueller investigation was illegitimate in conception and excessive in execution—in Barr’s words, ‘a grave injustice’ that was ‘unprecedented in American history.’

“According to the Administration, Mueller and his team displayed an unseemly eagerness to uncover crimes that never existed. In fact, the opposite is true.

“Mueller had an abundance of legitimate targets to investigate, and his failures emerged from an excess of caution, not of zeal. Especially when it came to Trump, Mueller avoided confrontations that he should have welcomed. He never issued a grand-jury subpoena for the President’s testimony, and even though his office built a compelling case for Trump’s having committed obstruction of justice, Mueller came up with reasons not to say so in his report.

“In light of this, Trump shouldn’t be denouncing Mueller — he should be thanking him.”

No sadness in the passing of the great Carl Reiner at age 98 — only cheers, gratitude and celebration. I worshipped the fact that he was on Twitter and a lucid Trump hater right to the end. Reiner once told Larry King that he didn’t post his tweets from a smart phone but from a desktop — whatever works.

A couple of days ago I happened to re-watch Reiner’s All Of Me (’84) and decided it was both his and Steve Martin‘s finest flick ever. Not to mention Lily Tomlin and Richard Libertini‘s.

My second favorite Reiner film is (and has been for a long time) Where’s Poppa? (’70), followed by the interesting if somewhat preachy Oh God! (’77) and finally The Jerk (’79), which also starred Martin.

On The Dick Van Dyke Show, which Reiner created, produced, cowrote and costarred in as the Sid Caesar-like Alan Brady, he was the original tempestuous, egotistical, insecure tyrant. (On a sitcom, I mean.) And he was a great straight man to Mel Brooks in their “2000 Year Old Man” routines, and I loved his angry impatient guy schtick in It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (’63) and The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming (’66).

Reiner Wiki: “Of all the films I’ve directed, only Where’s Poppa? is universally acknowledged as a cult classic. A cult classic, as you may know, is a film that was seen by a small minority of the world’s filmgoers, who insist it is one of the greatest, most daring, and innovative moving pictures ever made. Whenever two or more cult members meet, they will quote dialogue from the classic and agree that ‘the film was ahead of its time.’ To be designated a genuine cult classic, it is of primary importance that the film fail to earn back the cost of making, marketing, and distributing it. Where’s Poppa? was made in 1969 for a little over $1 million. According to the last distribution statements I saw, it will not break even until it earns another $650,000.”

Reiner was a Jewish atheist, which he came to largely from the influence of the Third Reich. Quote #1: “I became an atheist after Hitler. I said, what is this? If there was a God, would he not be hearing 18 million people, 16 million Jews, or 20 million other people, saying, ‘Please God, don’t do this, make him stop?’ God was so busy doing what? Striping zebras or fixing the long necks of giraffes?” Quote #2: “I have a very different take on who God is. Man invented God because he needed him. God is us.”

Director-screenwriter Larry Karaszewski, Carl Reiner in front of the Aero on 9.20.14.

The acrobatics are applaudable, but who climbs up the side of a building in shiny leather street shoes? Especially while wearing glasses and a straw hat? Almost dying from falling five or six stories and slamming into the pavement at 100 mph is deeply unsettling and therefore not the least bit entertaining. This is basically a stretched-to-the-limits-of-crediblity suspense sequence, and over-rated at that. Sidenote: Harold Lloyd died in ’71, but I was invited to a party at his Green Acres estate (or at least what remained of it) sometime in ’83. I’ve never forgotten the magnificent 1920s interior design (Mediterranean / Italian Renaissance) and furnishings, particularly the Tiffany lamps.