Jeffrey Wells

…that could been used for the forthcoming Criterion 4K Bluray, the Criterion guys chose the most rotely familiar (i.e., the dullest) and certainly the gayest.

I would have chosen a two-shot of Tom Cruise’s Joel Goodson and Joe Pantoliano’s Guido, the killer pimp. Or the car dealership guy saying “who’s the U-boat commander?” Or Cruise saying “what the fuck!” to Richard Masur’s moustachioed college-entrance guy.

I like the original theatrical cut — it’s perfect. You can have Paul Brickman’s director’s cut

“Paul Brickman‘s Risky Business reflected and in some ways defined the early ’80s zeitgeist (Reagan-era morality, go for the greenbacks, the receding of progressive ’70s culture).

“And it brought about an ungodly torrent of tits–and–zits comedies, so numerous and pernicious that they became a genre that forever tarnished the meaning of ‘mainstream Hollywood comedy.’ But Risky Business was a perfect brew.

“The Tom Cruise-Rebecca DeMornay sex scenes were legendary, the vibe of upper-middle-class entitlement was delivered with natural authority, Joe Pantoliano‘s Guido is arguably a more memorable character than his Ralph Cifaretto in The Sopranos, and the opening dream sequence is just as funny and on-target in its depiction of encroaching doom as Woody Allen‘s Bergmanesque train-car sequence at the beginning of Stardust Memories.

“I had an invite to a special Risky Business screening at the Beverly Hills Academy a week before the opening, but I blew it off because a girlfriend was visiting that night and things were hot and heavy at the time. I wound up catching it ten days later at a theatre in Westwood, and I remember saying to myself after it ended, ‘Wow, what I was thinking when I missed that screening?’

“I remember sitting at the long-ago-shuttered Joe Allen (Third Street across from Cedars Sinai) a month or two after Risky Business opened, and noticing Cruise and DeMornay sitting at a darkly lighted table together, apart from the crowd.

“HE’s all-time favorite sex scene is the one on the Chicago “L” between Cruise (by anyone’s measure an unlikely participant in this realm) and DeMornay. It’s perfect because like any transcendent sexual encounter it feels levitational — orchestrated, finely tuned, rhythmic, musical. It multiplies and compounds the sexual train metaphor that Alfred Hitchcock created in that last shot in North by Northwest, and it ends with that perfect (i.e., very subtle) electric train-track spark.”

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I can’t believe this is happening, but it is. Biden almost certainly isn’t going to be re–elected eight months hence, and I’m deeply sick of the denialists on this site saying “ohh, pooh-pooh to the polls…the election is several months off” and all that crap.

When The Beast is restored to power in November the HE denial brigade will have to either disappear or change their social media identities or move to Portugal or Vietnam. They’ll certainly have to wear sunglasses and fishing hats for the next 10 or 15 years. Because Trump’s victory will be largely their fault. Because they looked the other way or otherwise fiddled while Rome burned.

I’m not talking about the expected right vs. left dynamic…status-quo, social-justice liberals vs. fired-up MAGA wackos…half of the country is terrified of an authoritarian sociopath winning and the other half believes that purging wokester fanatics is more important than anything else…alas, weakened Democrat fervor will decide things. Centrist moderates staying home on election day out of a lack of enthusiasm for sending great-grandpa back to the Oval for another four years. People sitting on their hands.

2024 is not 2020…the terror of The Beast is right around the damn corner.

National Public Radio’s newly-installed honcho Katherine Maher, by any fair-minded standard a flared-nostril, POC-worshipping, white-male-hating woke storm trooper, has wasted no time in bull-whipping (and nearly terminating) NPR senior editor Uri Berliner for having written a sharply critical 4.9 Free Press article about how NPR went over the woke waterfall five or six years ago and thereby lost the trust of moderately liberal and centrist listeners.

Berliner surely understood that his Free Press article, however truthful and grounded, would be a bridge-burner and that the odds of keeping his NPR job wouldn’t be good.

Right now Berliner is only suspended but you know he’s going to be facing great difficulty in the weeks ahead.

The gist of Daniel Bessner’s Harper’s article is that rank-and-file, middle-level industry folk are getting bled and squeezed to death by the brutes at the top of the food chain…by the soul-less greedheads.

I could never decide where to scatter Tony’s remains. (He passed in the fall of ‘09.) I still have no good ideas. So he resides inside a small wicker storage thing in my bedroom. It’s not grotesque — he’s just there. Inside a dark-blue imitation velvet pouch with a drawstring.

I awoke at 4 am this morning and needed a bit more shut-eye, so I returned to slumberland around 8:30 am. A half-hour later I was awakened…”aaggh, the fuck?” Luna was napping next to me in bed, her ass less than 15 inches away. She’d more or less farted in my face.

Will dudes shrug at Wicked costars Ariana Grande and Cynthia “witchy greenskin” Erivo and thereby bring about a somewhat muted reception?

Filing from Cinemacon, Jeff Sneider isn’t predicting a shortfall — he’s just saying Wicked (Universal, 11.27) is no Barbie.

Sneider’s quote: “I struggle to see men showing up in droves for this movie.”

At least Sneider’s gender generalization was about XY and not double-X. For if he had posted a gut hunch about potential female responses to Jon Chu’s two-part musical fantasy, he might have been clubbed, stabbed, skinned and all but decapitated.

That’s what happened to me eight and a half years ago when I posted four bad words about Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s The Revenant — “Forget women seeing this.” Never generalize about any gender in any context!

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HE regretfully notes that Hillary Sharyn Marks Strauss, wife of veteran critic and HE comment-thread regular Bob Strauss, has passed on. Hillary and Bob were married for 35 years (i.e., hitched in ‘89). I knew and quite liked Hillary socially for a good portion of that union, and am very sorry she’s left us all too soon.

Eddie Dmytryk Says Robert Ryan Was Pressured Into Playing Racist Killer in “Crossfire” — “Nobody Wants To Play A Role Like That”

An actor of any non-Anglo ethnicity (an Egyptian, say) may be cast as an historical paleface character of English or European descent, but a white actor may never play a character of color under any narrative circumstance.

Just as there is a long list of films that I can watch over and over again, there are also those that I will never again submit to. Near the top of this list is Michael Cimino‘s The Deer Hunter.

I’m not talking about a film I don’t care for. I’m talking about a film that I wouldn’t watch again if someone shoved a snub-nosed .38 into my ribs, or offered me a sizable cash bribe. Would you sit through Star Wars: The Phantom Menace for $20 bills? Would you watch A.I. or Always again? The Cannonball Run II? Sylvester Stallone‘s Cobra?

I’ve stayed away from this simultaneously audacious and godawful film for the last 45 years, and I’m not about to break my streak.

Memories of my first and only viewing in a Manhattan screening room (late November ’78) are branded on my brain tissue. That idiotic Russian Roulette device. Those working-class townspeople singing a wedding song like practiced professionals in a Russian opera. The relentlessly cloying and obnoxious (i.e., overly performed) working-class camaraderie. Those absurdly majestic Northwestern mountain peaks that happen to be in rural Pennsylvania.

And especially Christopher Walken‘s idiotic Russian roulette death…no lead character in a serious film has ever died for a dumber reason than Walken did in The Deer Hunter.

Politically and culturally The Deer Hunter is one of the most full-of-shit films about the American proletariat ever made. The way it simultaneously used and ignored the Vietnam War was sickening.

Posted by Peter Biskind soon after Cimino’s 7.2.16 death: “The politics are execrable, and were widely denounced at the time for turning the war inside out. Clearly, filmmakers who make features ‘based on’ reality take liberties with their material, and the truth vs. art debate is one that will probably go on forever, encompassing films like Triumph of the Will, On the Waterfront, Birth of a Nation, etc., etc. But I think we can make some distinctions.

“First, ironically, although The Deer Hunter is certainly not a documentary, Cimino took great pains to replicate documentary footage his researchers had uncovered. Even the Russian roulette sequences were mean to evoke the famous still photograph of the Saigon police chief shooting a prisoner at point blank range with a pistol to his head.

“But more to the point, there are so many perversions of the truth in The Deer Hunter, all seemingly intended to make the same ideological point — i.e., the Vietcong were evil Orientals — while the Americans were no more than naive victims. There’s a lot more going on here than mere creative license.

“And finally, if I may be indulged, the film is centrally about male bonding and friendship among Americans, with the war as a backdrop and the Vietnamese reduced to stick figures with guns. In my opinion it’s really disgraceful!”

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