Jeffrey Wells

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After 25 years on the job, senior NPR editor Uri Berliner has resigned due to being “disparaged” by newly installed NPR honcho Katherine Maher, whose commitment to over-the-waterfall woke derangement syndrome is already the stuff of legend.

A 4.16 Daily Mail article tells me that as far as Sydney Sweeney is concerned, producer Carol Baum (Dead Ringers, Father of the Bride, The Good Girl) and Hollywood Elsewhere park their cars in the same garage.

It’s nice to be agreed with by persons of taste and accomplishment, but when Baum asked her USC students to explain Sweeney’s appeal not one of them had the courage to say “formidable rack”?

Warner Bros. and Martin Scorsese’s The Film Foundation have produced a 4K digital restoration of John Ford’s The Searchers, and in the process created a new 70mm print.

The latter will be screened five days hence — Sunday, 4.21, 3:15 pm — at Hollywood’s Egyptian, as a closing-day presentation from the TCM Classic Film Festival. Alexander Payne will offer a few thoughts.

No screenings for NYC film cognoscenti? Nothing planned for MoMA or FSLC’s Walter Reade? Or at the Film Forum or at Pleasantville’s Jacob Burns? Odd.

There’s just one problem. The Searchers is rife with problematic depictions of Native Americans. Wokesters certainly won’t approve. Don’t even speculate what Lily Gladstone might say.

…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.