Go to the bathroom, look in the mirror, and ask yourself, “Who am I? What am I? Am I a person of passion and conviction — a heartfelt Movie Catholic whose life has meaning because of the industry I love and work for — or am I just a go-alonger whose primary longing in life is to swim with the other fishies and thereby feel safe and secure?”

“Starting in about 2005, the number of democracies around the world began to fall, as it had in the 1930s. Authoritarians rose to power: Vladimir Putin in Russia, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Jarosław Kaczyński in Poland, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and Donald J. Trump in the United States.

“American democracy in the 21st century is withering.

“The Democracy Index rates a hundred and sixty-seven countries, every year, on a scale that ranges from ‘full democracy’ to ‘authoritarian regime.’ In 2006, the U.S. was a ‘full democracy,’ the seventeenth most democratic nation in the world. In 2016, the index for the first time rated the United States a ‘flawed democracy,’ and since then American democracy has gotten only more flawed.

“True, the United States still doesn’t have a Rome or a Berlin to march on. That hasn’t saved the nation from misinformation, tribalization, domestic terrorism, human-rights abuses, political intolerance, social-media mob rule, white nationalism, a criminal President, the nobbling of Congress, a corrupt Presidential Administration, assaults on the press, crippling polarization, the undermining of elections, and an epistemological chaos that is the only air that totalitarianism can breathe.”

— excerpted from a New Yorker piece titled “The Last Time Democracy Almost Died — Learning from the upheaval of the 1930s,” written by Jill Lepore and posted on 1.27.20.

“Because you love movies,” the latest Once Upon A Time in Hollywood ad says. This is a positive coded message. It means that serious fans of Quentin Tarantino‘s ninth film are relaxed and sophisticated enough to see past aspirational, vaguely academic notions about “cinema” and the learned attitudes they connote — they’re down with confident, engaging, cool-as-shit flicks.

In part because they know (and this is a sophisticated idea that’s been brewing since the Cahiers du Cinema days of future director Jean-Luc Godard) that some of the greatest and most satisfying big-screen experiences, not to mention those that have delivered great and lasting art, were made with the initial idea of being audience-friendly entertainments.

In short, a film doesn’t have to be artistically “serious” or pretentious to be worthy of critical admiration, and perhaps even win a Best Picture Oscar.

As I mentioned earlier this month, Once Upon A Time in Hollywood winning the big prize would be a unique historical achievement. It would be the first time in Hollywood history that an amiable, relatively plot-free, character-driven, laid-back attitude flick wins the big prize.

To put it more simply and given the fact that Tarantino’s film is a celebration of the B-movie realm of 1969 Hollywood, it would be the first “drive-in movie” to win this honor. A more on-point description would be “hangout movie“. In the vein, say, of Tarantino’s Jackie Brown (’98), which, until OUATIH came along, is arguably his finest and most engaging film of the last 20 years.

Perhaps the most precise analogy of all is Howard Hawks‘ Rio Bravo (’59), which Tarantino has described as “the ultimate hangout movie” and which he’s been enthusing about for decades.

You could actually call Once Upon A Time in Hollywood a kind of Rio Bravo tribute. The parallels aren’t abundant, but they’re evident.

Rio Bravo‘s two main characters are John Wayne‘s “John T. Chance”, a gruff, mince-no-words Texas sheriff, and Dean Martin‘s “Dude”, the town drunk who used to be good with a gun. In Tarantino’s film Brad Pitt‘s Cliff Booth is a vaguely Wayne-like stunt man, driver and gopher — laid-back, steady, confident — and Leonardo DiCaprio‘s Rick Dalton is certainly a “Dude”-like actor — formerly a big TV western star with a top-rated series (Bounty Law), now beset with career worries and an alcohol problem.

The Rio Bravo villains are the ranching Burdette brothers (Nathan and Joe) and their gang; the baddies in Tarantino’s film, of course, are the Manson family and particularly Tex Watson, Susan Atkins (aka “Sadie”), Linda Kasabian (“Flower Child”) and Patricia Krenwinkel (“Katie”).

Rio Bravo concludes with the drilling of the Burdettte gang by John T. and Dude (aided by Walter Brennan‘s “Stumpy” and Ricky Nelson‘s “Colorado”), while OUATIH ends with the walloping, face-mashing, pitbull-chewing and flame-throwing incineration of the Manson ogres by Cliff and Rick.

And both films are mainly about…well, talking shit and sizing up the situation and to some extent dealing with kindly Mexican fellows (Pedro Gonzalez-Gonzalez‘s “Carlos” in Rio Bravo + the car attendants at Musso & Frank whom Cliff tells Rick not to cry in front of) and wondering what’ll happen down the road. Basically marking time with sweat and anxiety mixed with occasional fraternal chillin’ and the mopping of brows. Plus Dude and Rick fretting over their respective alcohol issues.

Posted on 12.20.19: Running to escape death can look or seem ignoble, and a father’s natural urge to shield his kids from harm is surely as noble as it gets.

Alas, most of us (except for glory-of-the-human-species fellows like Bobby Peru) are genetically inclined to avoid being killed. “Run for your life” is a very strong instinct, and being faced with imminent death tends to bring out the primal. Most of us would hightail it when a mountain of snow is approaching, and I don’t think there’s much to debate here.

Any guy who says “in this horrible situation I would hug my wife and kids in the last few seconds we have before being smothered to death”…anyone who insists they would not try to escape suffocation is almost certainly lying.

Question for Julia Louis Dreyfuss’s character and for that matter her two kids: A huge terrifying avalanche is getting closer and closer and you just sit there? You have legs and leg muscles at your disposal, no? A massive wall of death is about to terminate your future and your reaction is “oh, look at that…nothing to do except watch and wait and hope for the best”?

Posted on 8.7.13: If Gregory Peck had been clairvoyant and under the influence of a truth drug on the night he won the Best Actor Oscar for To Kill A Mockingbird in March 1963, he might have said, “Well, this is it…the peak moment. I’ve been lucky enough to play starring roles for the finest producers, directors and writers in the business for the last 18 years…Spellbound, Duel In The Sun, Gentleman’s Agreement, The Paradine Case, Twelve O’Clock High, Roman Holiday, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, Moby Dick, The Bravados, The Big Country, Pork Chop Hill, On The Beach, The Guns of Navarone, Cape Fear…and it’s been wonderful. I’m saying this because for the next 40 years it’s going to be all downhill.

“Oh, I’ll make a few interesting films over the next couple of decades but my charmed career period is over and I know it. Some actors only get lucky for five or ten years. I nearly had 20. And for that I’m very grateful to the industry and especially to the public. From the bottom of my heart, thank you.”

This is a cruel topic to bring up, but who right now is in this position? Who out there is Gregory Peck in March 1963? In a good place and working all the time and maybe even peaking and financially flush, but the charmed, blue-chip glory days are basically over with nothing but gradually dwindling returns to look forward to.

Supplemental anecdote: During his acceptance speech after winning the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for Witness, Earl W. Wallace (who co-wrote the Harrison Ford cop drama with Pamela Wallace and William Kelley) said “I have an uneasy feeling my career just peaked.” It happened 34 years ago, during the 58th Academy Awards telecast in ’86. Wallace says it at 4:55 [after the jump].

I obviously know nothing, but I’m sensing extra-ness in Peter Debruge‘s Sundance review of Edson Ota‘s Nine Days, filed at 12:25 am today:

“At the risk of overselling Edson Oda’s ultra-original, meaning-of-life directorial debut, there’s a big difference between Nine Days and pretty much every other film ever made. You see, most movies are about characters, real or imagined, and the stuff that happens to them, whereas Nine Days is about character itself — as in, the moral dimension that constitutes who a person is, how he or she treats others, and the choices that define us as humans.

“But Oda doesn’t stop there. In a film of dizzying conceptual ambition — Jean Paul Sartre‘s No Exit meets Michael Gondry and Charlie Kaufman‘s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind — the Brazilian-born, U.S.-based writer-director wants to make audiences appreciate the little things, like the feeling of sand between your toes or the way your hand surfs the air when extended from the window of a moving car.

“To that end, Oda concocts an elaborate new metaphor for thinking about how souls are selected for the responsibility of life. And while no film can possibly be an antidote to suicide, this one poignantly reminds how lucky we are to be here: a planet full of lottery winners.”

I for one hate the feeling of sand between my toes. Dry sand, damp sand, beach tar…I hate that whole experience. When I’m near the shore I like to walk around in white laceless sneakers without so much as a single grain of sand getting involved, and preferably on paved pathways or boardwalks or pavement. Hey, I’m a city guy.

Jordan Ruimy disputes: “Nine Days is unwatchable. Maybe the worst movie I have seen at [Sundance ’20]. Pretentious drivel.”

This is far more interesting than looking at those overly wide, hard-to-zoom-in-on class of ’20 photos that popped yesterday. HE to readers: If you were Quentin Tarantino, would you wear a brown-and-yellow bowling shirt to an event like this?

“Wolficorn“, a private Los Angeles-based pilot, “took the flight radar data from Flight Radar 24 and entered it into Google Earth Studio in order to get a better idea of the flight path in the hopes it could provide a little more insight into [the Kobe Bryant tragedy].”

I was naturally intrigued to watch a decent visual simulation of the San Fernando Valley typography that Ara Zoboyan, the pilot of Bryant’s Sikorsky S-76B, was eyeballing as he steered the chopper and its eight passengers to their fate. Wolficorn stops the footage a few seconds before the simulated impact.

Comment #1 (Doug. W.): Inadvertently flying into IMC followed by loss of control due to spatial disorientation and loss of situational awareness…#1 killer for pilots. Very sad.”

Comment #2 (Neal B.): “[Zoboyan] tried to thread the needle between rising terrain and a descending fog/cloud base, and lost.”

Comment #3 (David Stewart) “[So] if that was the route then it was suicide on a cloudy day with only 2.5 km of visibility. Why didn’t they just turn back? This really sucks.”

Comment #4 (wjatube): “No mystery what happened here. This tragedy was completely avoidable. Most helicopter services were grounded that morning due to the low cloud ceiling (even the police). Get-there-itis has killed once again. All for the sake of getting from John Wayne to Thousand Oaks just 90 minutes faster.”

CNN contributor Majahat Ali: “This is the pathetic insecurity of the spineless amoebas of men such as Mike Pompeo and the others in the Trump administration. This is a recurring theme with Pompeo. He really doesn’t like it when female reporters actually ask him questions, and are intelligent and do follow-ups. This time around he throws around f-bombs and brings out a map without countries. Whom should we believe…Mary Louise Kelly, a veteran journalist, or Mike Pompeo, who this month alone has lied to the American public about imminent threats. This man from Harvard has completely redefined ‘imminent’ in a way that is completely different from ‘imminent.'”

Republican strategist and author Rick Wilson (“Running Against the Devil: A Plot to Save America from Trump–and Democrats from Themselves“): “Mike Pompeo has become one of the high priests of Trumpism, and the core of Trumpism is a war on the media. Performative media hatred that they bring in on the daily.

“Pompeo knows, deep in his heart, that Donald Trump couldn’t find Ukraine on a map if he had a ‘U’ and a picture of an actual, physical crane. He knows this is an administration defined by ignorance of the world. That’s partly him playing to their base, playing to their audience…the credulous rube who thinks ‘you’re the smart one, Mr. President, and the others are all elitists.’

“Pompeo is defining the office [of Secretary of State] down to the lowest possible level. This is [about] Trumpism corrupting everyone and everything that surrounds him. This is a graduate of both West Point and Harvard who knows much better than this. But this is the performative douchiness that [Trump acolytes] do to please Donald Trump. Pompeo knows these performances are going to be played and that Trump is going to see them and like them. That’s who he’s performing for — an audience of one. Pompeo knows that Mary Louise Kelly is a pro and not some DNC plant, but he wants to please Trump. This is a food chain inside Trump world. Whoever sucks up the most is the guy who gets the most rewards.”

Last night World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy shared some fleeting observations about the five Sundance keepers that have emerged over the last few days. Every Sundance festival delivers four, five or six head-turners, and usually during the first weekend (Friday, Saturday, Sunday). It would appear (emphasis on the “a” word) that the only possible Joe Popcorn hit is Max Barbakow‘s Palm Springs, a time-loop romcom a la Groundhog Day with Andy Samberg, Cristin Milioti and J. K. Simmons.

Four days left in the fest (although Tuesday is the last dependable day as things always start to run out of gas on Wednesday) and the hotties are (a) Florian Zeller‘s The Father (a film that puts YOU in the mind of an Alzheimer’s sufferer), (b) Janicza Bravo‘s Zola (a love-hate thang, crazy manic Floridian hijinks, idiot characters), (c) Palm Springs, (d) Lee Isaac Chung‘s Minari (hardscrabble Korean family survival tale, set in rural Arkansas) and (e) Bryan Fogel‘s The Dissident (exacting doc about the Saudi murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and a scathing portrait of the Trumpies who looked the other way).

12:30 pm update: A critic friend insists that Emerald Fennell‘s Promising Young Woman (Carey Mulligan revenge flick) belongs with the above. “It takes a little while to settle into a groove but eventually becomes dynamite. How can you ignore a 20-for-20 favorable rating on RT? It’s the one film here that I continue to think about.” HE response: “It sounded unappealing but if you say so, fine. One can never trust Sundance reviews as a whole as the general tendency is to be kind if not celebrative.”

The wipeouts include Dee Rees‘ The Last Thing He Wanted (“disaster”) and Benh Zeitlin‘s Wendy (“Total disappointment…Zeitlin hasn’t grown up as a filmmaker”). Iffies and in-betweeners include Alan Ball‘s Uncle Frank (middle-aged NYC gay guy awkwardly comes out to bumblefuck family) and Sean Durkin‘s The Nest (slow-burn thriller, cultural isolation).

Screening today: Liz Garbus‘s Lost Girls (missing daughter, Long Island serial killer).

Again, the mp3.

Olivia Colman, Anthony Hopkins in Florian Zeller’s The Father.

Imagine the instant death sentences that would be handed down if a distributor today was dumb enough to promote a film with a poster this leering, this brazen, this 4-3-2-hike. Alas, such images and attitudes were par for the course in the ’70s. (You had to be there.) Will the Khmer Rouge try to kill me for posting this image in an ironic historical sense? You can’t be too careful these days.

Dan Jenkins‘ “Semi-Tough” (published in ’70) was a raunchy account of the world of big-time pro football. Arrogant American behaviors, racial attitudes, Madison Avenue tie-ins, etc.

For some reason Michael Ritchie’s 1977 adaptation, which costarred Burt Reynolds, Kris Kristofferson and Jill Clayburgh, was turned into a satire of Werner Erhard‘s Erhard Seminars Training (EST), which became B.E.A.T. in the film.

The poster, in short, lied its ass off, conveying literally nothing about what the film was actually about.

I saw it once in the summer of ’77 at the Westport Fine Arts. Didn’t mind it, chuckled once or twice, haven’t seen it since. Formerly viewable via Amazon Prime, but no longer. It just popped on Bluray.

A fatigued (possibly dispirited) Clark Gable during the filming of The Misfits. I read somewhere that Gable didn’t lead the healthiest lifestyle. A couple of packs of cigarettes per day, lots and lots of booze. Sooner or later that kind of living catches up with you. It caught up with Gable at age 59, on 11.16.60 — eight days after the election of JFK.

Burt Lancaster’s second Native American role, following Jim Thorpe, All-American. I’ve never seen this Robert Aldrich-directed film. I’ve always heard it wasn’t much. “Not only synthetic but, believe it or not, incredibly slow and dull.” — N.Y. Times review, 7.10.54.

The subhead of David Frum‘s “Bernie Can’t Win,” posted today in The Atlantic, speaks volumes: “But unless other Democrats take a page from his book — stressing the practical over the theoretical, the universal over the particular — they won’t prevail either.”

First four paragraphs: “’Left but not woke’ is the Bernie Sanders brand. If anybody failed to recognize it before, nobody can miss it now.

“Last week, the mega-podcaster Joe Rogan endorsed Sanders. The Sanders campaign tweeted a video of the Rogan endorsement from Sanders’s own account. That tweet then triggered an avalanche of disapproval from other voices in the Democratic coalition.

“Rogan is not an ally to the cultural causes that have come to predominate on the contemporary left. He even mocks many of those causes, while also dancing around conspiratorial thinking of the left and right fringes: 9/11 denialism, Obama birtherism, and speculation about dark deeds concerning Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation.

“As The Atlantic reported in a memorable appreciation of Rogan back in August, Rogan is a voice for men:

“Guys who get barbed-wire tattoos and fill their fridge with Monster energy drinks and preordered their tickets to see Hobbs & Shaw…Like lots of other white men in America, [Rogan] is grappling with a growing sense that the term ‘white man’ has become an epithet. And like lots of other men in America, [and] not just the white ones, he’s reckoning out loud with a fear that the word ‘masculinity’ has become, by definition, toxic.”

HE reaction: Rogan has “a growing sense that the term ‘white man’ has become an epithet”? Growing?

HE question: What presidential contender besides Bernie is a non-wokester who’s into stressing the practical and universal? Pete Buttigieg, bitches.