Variety‘s Owen Glieberman has written that the finest performance by Chadwick Boseman, currently starring in Da 5 Bloods, is his James Brown channelling in Tate Taylor‘s Get On Up (8.1.14). While I completely agree, I don’t have many vivid memories of that Universal release. The Apollo Theatre dressing-room standoff between Brown and Viola Davis‘s “bad mom” is all that really stands out.

I do, however, have a profound and lasting affection for Alex Gibney and Mick Jagger‘s Mr. Dynamite, the Brown documentary that premiered on HBO roughly three months later (10.27.14). Get On Up was a respectable, hard-pushin’ Hollywood biopic, but the Gibney doc was the real thang. The raunchy, grinding, rhythmic current had it all over the Taylor biopic, which, by the way, Jagger also co-produced.

“Woody Allen Gave Me The Same Look,” posted from Vietnam on 11.18.13: “This guy didn’t like it when I started snapping pictures. First he gave me one of those ‘are you about to steal a little piece of my soul?’ expressions that I’ve seen every time I’ve taken a random quickie of this or that unprepared human. Then he came over and stuck his arm through the bars and swatted me across the forehead.

“He wasn’t trying to hurt me. He didn’t try to scratch or cut my skin with his nails. It was just a mild ‘fuck you and your camera’ swat. He made his point. I ignored him completely but I understood what he was saying.”

Mr. F. comment: “A century from now, the historical record shall cite this post when describing the very first case of Vietnamese Simian Flu, a pandemic virus that crossed over to humans and killed millions by the year 2050. Jeffrey Wells will go down in history as ‘Patient Zero.'”

Yesterday morning Spike Lee gave Woody Allen a brotherly hug. Lee was asked by WOR 710’s Len Berman and Michael Riedel about Allen’s cancelling by #MeToo wokesters. Spike basically said “Woody is cool and my friend and a fellow Knicks fan”, but without addressing the baseless charges against Allen by the Farrow gang.

Lee: “I’d just like to say Woody Allen’s a great, great filmmaker, and this cancel thing is not just Woody. And I think that when we look back on it, [we’re] gonna see that, short of killing somebody, I don’t know if you can just erase somebody like they never existed. Woody’s a friend of mine…I know he’s going through it right now.”

I don’t know what “this cancel thing is not just Woody” means, but otherwise Lee basically said that Woody is too talented and too important a filmmaker to be guilty of child molestation, and that he shouldn’t be cancelled unless he’s been proven guilty of murder. That’s not the right way to put it.

Lee should have said that Woody is completely innocent, and that the nonsensical position of Woody haters is based on nothing but a blind belief that Dylan Farrow‘s account of what may or may not have happened on 8.4.92 is truthful. Lee could have also mentioned there’s nothing in terms of evidence or professional opinion (not to mention the account posted by Moses Farrow) that backs up Dylan’s account.

Update (6.13, 2.14 pm Pacific): Spike has apologized for the clumsy wording in his WOR statement, and for a second time has declined to mention the facts in the Woody case:

The Woody comment begins at 3:31 in the conversation.

I’ve twice tried to watch Anatole Litvak‘s Sorry, Wrong Number, a classic 1948 noir starring Barbara Stanwyck, Burt Lancaster, Wendell Corey, Ed Begley, etc. But both times the anxious, borderline-hysterical tone has pushed me away.

Stanwyck’s agitated performance as a spoiled heiress, “good” as it is, is especially difficult to weather. And Lancaster is always sweating and wild-eyed and pleading.

What a jagged-edge world in which to live…what a needling hellscape. Never a gentle word or peaceful interlude, never a moment in which Stanwyck or Lancaster or anyone takes a breather or offers a witty line or laughs at a joke or savors a nice piece of music.

Am I losing my appetite for film noir? I don’t think so. I’ll love Double Indemnity, The Big Sleep, The Killers, Gun Crazy, Ace in the Hole, This Gun For Hire, D.O.A., Laura and Out of the Past until the day I die. Partly because all of these films offer little slices of wit and humor and even joie de vivre from time to time. I’m just not a Sorry, Wrong Number type of guy, and that’s fine.

On “taking responsibility”…

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Joe Carnahan (@carnojoe) on Jun 12, 2020 at 4:51pm PDT

What pandemic? Toss the masks. Have a brewski.

Friday night (6/12), St. Mark’s Place pic.twitter.com/hujW2ZFFrY

— evgrieve (@evgrieve) June 13, 2020

Imagine all the exhausting work that went into installing the suicide lever, and particularly the reasoning for having it in the first place.

“Let’s see…there’s always a chance I’ll be feeling a little down-in-the-dumps one of these days, and that I may want to kill myself,” Henry Frankenstein (or was it Doctor Pretorius?) might have reasoned. “But instead of swallowing a painless black capsule, wouldn’t it be far preferable to tumble to my death while being crushed by heavy stones?”

Christopher Nolan‘s Tenet ain’t openin’ on July 17th no more. The super-expensive, time-shifting Warner Bros, release, which exhibitors are counting on to re-start theatrical with a bang, will now open on 7.31.20, or two weeks later. It was also announced today that Wonder Woman 1984, which had been slated to open on 8.2, has been bumped back two months to 10.2.20. Obviously the feeling is that Joe and Jane Popcorn may not be as ready to return to theatres as presumed.

Please take note of the completely predictable, bow-wow, tail-wagging-the-dog thinking that went into Robbie Collin’s 6.12 Telegraph essay, “Let’s Not Kid Ourselves — Tropic Thunder‘s blackface joke is no better than Bo’ Selecta.”

I hereby propose the immediate lifetime cancelling of Robert Downey, Jr. and Ben Stiller for this heinous spoonful of cinematic cyanide satire, and of course the immediate removal of Tropic Thunder itself from all streaming services. Not. Kidding. Goofing around.

“Try To Imagine Tropic Thunder Being Released Now,” posted on 11.9.18:

Ben Stiller‘s Tropic Thunder was released just over a decade ago. You know what would happen if Stiller had never made the original but had somehow made the exact same film and released it today, right? You know what would happen. At the very least Robert Downey, Jr. would be executed and sushi’ed on Twitter.”

There’s quite a striking difference in the RT reactions to Judd Apatow‘s The King of Staten Island — critics are less enthused (69%) than the mostly tickled-and-satisfied Joe Popcorn crowd (90%). A similar critical disparity is happening with Spike Lee‘s Da 5 Bloods — 91% thumbs-up from critics compared to a 78% Joe Popcorn rating.

Reddit reactions to Da 5 Bloods are all over the map — it’s either a home run or a bunt.

IMDB ratings, meanwhile, are a tad underwhelming for both films — 6.6% for Da 5 Bloods, 6.5% for KOSI.

HE reminder: “The King of Staten Island made me smile and guffaw and even laugh out loud several times (highly unusual for an LQTM-er). And I believed every word of it…every line, emotion, situation, character. It’s peddling sardonic humor that doesn’t feel schticky, although I guess it is. The tone is low-key raw, kinda nervy, certainly unpretentious and 90% bullshit-free.

“Okay, it softens up during the final passage, but I welcomed this with open arms. Because a film about wall-to-wall, start-to-finish nihilism would be too much. And the length (136 minutes) doesn’t feel longish but completely necessary and natural.”

Yes, I’m aware that the “Blac Rabbit” version is a year old, but it only took off yesterday on Twitter. Sidenote: I’ve said this before but the alternate version of “Eight Days A Week” (with the opening and closing “ooooh”) is much more transportive than the official version.

These guys knocking “Eight Days a Week” out of the fucking park on an NYC subway platform is fantastic … pic.twitter.com/XRnyDNIuN2

— Super 70s Sports (@Super70sSports) June 10, 2020