Critical reactions to Joel Souza‘s Rust (Falling Forward, 5.2) indicate it’s not much more than a decent mezzo-mezzo western.

But the trailer alone tells me that Halyna Hutchins‘ cinematography is of a fairly high order — arthousey, Days of Heaven-ish, beautifully lighted. The portions of Rust that were shot after Halyna’s tragic death were handled by dp Bianca Cline.

For decades I’ve harbored fond memories of The President’s Analyst (’67), a half-annoying, half-hippieish, half-psychedelic social satire that starred the smooth James Coburn and a comfortably laid-back Godfrey Cambridge.

So when I gave Analyst a re-watch the other night, I was surprised to discover that much of it (roughly 60%) isn’t especially good…unfunny, broadly played, overly brittle, vaguely irritating, shallow in a Man From U.N.C.L.E.-ish or Our Man Flint-y way. I was soon looking at my watch and figuring “okay, not as good as I remembered.”

But then it does a switch-up and becomes a whole different film…it goes all hippie-dippie-ish and rock-and-rolly and free love-celebrating, and is generally invested in a kind of “spread the joy and transcendence of LSD” attitude. And then it dives into a surreal but amusing plotline about the malevolence of TPC (The Phone Company) and the robots behind this malignant entity. It ends with Coburn and Cambridge shooting it out with TPC droids….hilarious!

Rarely has a mezzo-mezzo mainstream film (green-lighted by Paramount’s Robert Evans) completely uncorked itself and gone all loopy-doopey like The President’s Analyst did. I ended up up chuckling and mostly loving it. The last 40%, I mean.

The big switch happens right around the one-hour mark. It starts when Coburn’s Dr. Sidney Schaefer, running from would-be assassins of an international cast, ducks into the legendary Cafe Wha? on McDougal Street and hooks up with a rock band led by “Eve of Destruction“‘s Barry McGuire (89 and still with us!). Schaefer quickly becomes a splendor-in-the-grass lover of the attractive, hippie-chicky Snow White (Jill Banner).

From the moment that McGuire and Banner slip into the narrative and invite Coburn to join them on their magic travels, The President’s Analyst becomes a mid ’60s “turn on, tune in and drop out” mood piece…a capturing of what a lot of people were feeling and delving into and experimenting with in ’66 and ’67.

In this sense Analyst is almost as much of a mid ’60s cultural capturing as John Boorman‘s Catch Us If You Can (’65) and Michelangelo Antonioni‘s Blow-Up (’66).

And yet that first hour…whoa. And the one-sheet slogans were hideous.

Poor, pixie-sized Banner was Marlon Brando‘s off-and-on girlfriend from roughly ’68 until her car-crash death in 1982, when she was only 35. She got slammed by a truck on the Ventura Freeway.

The career of Ted Flicker, director-writer of The President’s Analyst, went flat after someone slipped the Analyst script to J. Edgar Hoover‘s FBI, thereby tipping them off to the fact that Analyst would sharply satirize the bureau as well as the CIA. This led to Flicker and Evans being surveilled and harassed. The industry quickly got scared and dropped Flicker like a bad habit for a while. He later co-created Barney Miller. David Ewing‘s Ted Flicker: A Life in Three Acts screened in 2007 at the Santa Fe Film Festival. Flicker passed in 2014 at age 84.

Speaking as a mild-mannered, fair-minded, shoulder-shrugging film devotee, my feelings about this frightening TikTok video by “letsgofrightseeing” are roughly the same as the feelings held by many by elderly Cambodians about the terrorist regime of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.

I’m serious — this woman is rhetorically, behaviorally and substantially no different than Pol Pot.

There are very few things that are lower on the cultural cinematic scale than hardcore horror fans (movies, fiction). Not elevated horror but the grindhouse / slaughterhouse mulchy kind. I’m not saying fans of this ghoulash are the equivalent of swamp slime, but they’re in that general ballpark. They’re here and “alive” in a general sense, but their souls are corroded. They’re like zombies in a way.

1992 was my very first year at the Cannes Film Festival (I was there for Entertainment Weekly and Barbara O’Dair), and that was the year, of course, of Reservoir Dogs, which I saw there, of course, and fell insantly in love with,.

It pained me that I couldn’t get into the press conference (it might have had something to do with people with regular pink passes being told to wait until all the pink-with-yellow-pastille badge and lordly white-badge journos had been let in first). But I did manage to attend a Reservoir Dogs meet-and-greet soiree at the Majestic, which was cool.

Posted on 7.7.21:

For mostly sentimental reasons, I can’t stop telling myself that the 1992 Cannes Film Festival (5.7 to 5.18) was my absolute personal best. Because it was my first time there and therefore it felt fresh and exotic and intimidating as fuck. I had to think on my feet and figure it out as I went along, and despite being told that I would never figure out all the angles, somehow I did. ‘

It also felt great to be there on behalf of Entertainment Weekly and do pretty well in that capacity. Plus it was the first and only Cannes that I brought a tuxedo to. I’d been told it was an absolute social necessity.

Here are some of the reasons why I’ve always thought ’92 was the shit.

The first time you visit any major city or participate in any big-time event things always seem special and extra-dimensional…bracing, fascinating, open your eyes…everything you see, taste, smell and hear is stamped onto your brain matter…aromas, sights, protocols, expectations, surprises.

Nearly every night I enjoyed some late-night drinking and fraternizing at Le Petit Carlton, a popular street bar. (Or was it Le Petit Majestic?) If you can do the job and get moderately tipsy and schmoozy every night, so much the better. (Or so I thought at the time.) A year earlier I read a quote from P.J. O’Rourke — “Life would be unbearable without alcohol”. I remember chuckling and saying to myself, “Yeah, that’s how I feel also.” Jack Daniels and ginger ale mood-elevators were fun! Loved it!

But not altogether. Four years later I stopped drinking hard stuff; 20 years later (3.20.12) I embraced total sobriety.

Last weekend a special VistaVision presentation of John Sturges and Hal Wallis‘s Gunfight at the OK Corral (’57) happened at the Chinese by way of the TCM Film Festival.

Kino Lorber’s reportedly excellent 4K Bluray version has been available since late February, but there was still an expectation that the TCM screening would deliver a visual “bump”.

Why? Because the venerable man in the booth, Boston Light and Sound’s Chapin Cutler, was showing an extremely rare horizontal 8-perf VistaVision print. The vast majority of 1957 audiences saw Sturges’ film in 35mm.

Did the VistaVision Gunfight deliver, in fact, a bump over the Kino 4K? Maybe…who knows? No one who attended has offered a comparison, but I would be surprised if the VistaVision presentation offered anything double- or triple-wowser or even significantly “better” (sharper, grander, more impactful) than what the Kino 4K delivers on my 65-inch Sony 4K. (So far I’ve only seen an HD streaming version.)

And yet it was projected on that big Chinese screen under optimum conditions (Cutler is the best projectionist on the planet earth right now), and the film-nerd gang was all there. I’m sorry I wasn’t able to attend. I’m sure everyone enjoyed this approvable-if-less-than-classic western.

I’ve been trying to find images from Mad magazine’s “OK Gunfight at the Corral.” I distinctly recall a Purple Rose of Cairo image of Kirk Douglas‘s boozy Doc Holliday, and a caption that read “Doc, drunk as a skunk, shoots an usher in the movie theatre balcony” or words to that effect.

I despise low-thread-count T-shirts as a rule, but I’ve got to buy one of those shamrock green VistaVision fuckers.

Posted a couple of days ago by losangelestheatres.blogsot.com:

Rahm Emanuel fully and completely understands what’s wrong with today’s Democrats, and why they’re likely to remain a minority party until they wake up and shake that shit off.

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Early this afternoon I referred to Marvel’s latest (opening on Friday, 5.2) as Thunderballs. I guess I was thinking of Sean Connery‘s Thunderball plus Mel Brooks‘ Spaceballs. In all sincerity, Thunderballs is a better title — catchier, more amusing — than Thunderbolts….really.

As I understand it, many people have developed an idea about Blake Lively, famous for trying to murder the career of Justin Baldoni, being a toxic bitch whom no one wants to know, much less work with. Right? Paul Feig‘s Another Simple Favor is dodging theatrical, opening May 1st (this weekend) on Amazon Prime.

A likely 2025 Venice Film Festival entry, Benny Safdie‘s The Smashing Machine won’t open for another six and one-third months — 10.5.25.

Dwayne Johnson has been a movie star for roughly 15 years, and with that status has been able to pick and choose his projects. With the slight exception of Pain and Gain (’13), Johnson has starred in almost nothing but glossy escapist popcorn junk. Now, for an odd reason that only Johnson understands, he’s begun making movies that aspire to quality. Safdie’s flick is first out of the gate, and then comes Martin Scorsese‘s Hawaiian crime boss drama, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Emily Blunt costarring.

Johnson’s black-hair wig (James Mason in Julius Caesar) looks funny. There’s something simian about it.

Imagine you’re working on a N.Y Times report about the causes of last January’s collision between an Army helicopter and a commuter jet in the vicinity of Reagan National Airport, and you’ve concluded that five factors were to blame.

One of these factors (duhhh) is the inescapable fact that the pilot of the downed helicopter, Cpt. Rebecca Lobach, flat-out caused the collision by not only flying 100 feet too high but ignoring an urgent, last-minute plea from evaluating co-pilot Andrew Eaves for her to turn left to avoid colliding with the jet.

The other four factors (including the air traffic controller having failed to scream “LEFT, for fuck’s sake!….bank fucking left now!”) certainly contributed to the accident, but how do you decide that Lobach ignoring the altitude and not turning left at that crucial moment…how in the world do you figure that’s not the principal cause?

But as Loach was apparently gay and because her family went to some trouble to scrub her social media history in order to shelter her personal life from public scrutiny, you’ve decided it would be safer and less problematic to mention Lobach’s error last, in fifth place. This wouldn’t bury her responsibility for the tragedy but it would certainly minimize it. That way the Times could never be accused of regarding Lobach askew.

…much less say it?

It is absolutely accepted doctrine the whole world over that The Empire Strikes Back (’80…45 years old next month!) is far and away the best Star Wars film ever made…the best that ever will be made.

Partly because it plays like a fly-by-night episodic…no real “beginning” (it just drops onto the ice planet of Hoth and kickstarts itself) and certainly without a satisfying “ending”…it leaves you hanging with the young, immature, pint-sized hero in a robe, pajamas and slippers while recovering from a recent hand amputation plus the dominant macho-muscular hero encased in carbon freeze…it just slams on the brakes.

The best thing Empire has to say at the end is “well, at least the heroes aren’t dead!”

And partly because it delivers the best third-act plot twist in the history of genre cinema….

But mostly (and I’ve said this four or five times) because it’s the only escapist, teen-friendly space action fantasy that behaves like a film noir…the only Star Wars film in which the good guys are constantly losing at every turn…running for cover, barely escaping, the bad guys in hot pursuit and pretty much maintaining an upper hand start to finish.

Name another action classic in which the heroes constantly get their asses kicked, and don’t even manage a small win at the end.

[Originally posted on 12.9.21] There’s a famous bit in The Empire Strikes Back (’80) when the Millennium Falcon won’t turn over and so Han Solo twice slams a console with his fist and wham…it’s working again.

There’s a scene in The Bridge on the River Kwai (’57) when William Holden angrily kicks a non-functioning two-way radio, and suddenly it’s working again.

There’s a scene in The Hot Rock (’72) in which a police precinct captain (William Redfield) is told by a subordinate that a phone isn’t working, and he asks “well, did you jiggle it? Did you…you know, fiddle around with it?”

There’s a scene in The Longest Day (’62) where Capt. Colin Maud (Kenneth More) walks up to a stalled vehicle during the D-Day invasion and says, “My old grandmother used to say, ‘Anything mechanical, give it a good bash.'” He hits the vehicle and it starts right up.

And don’t forget that moment in Armageddon (’98) when Peter Stormare said “this is how we fix things in Russia!” and then whacked an engine with a wrench.

In 2010 my last and final Windows laptop (I had more or less become a Mac person two years earlier) stopped working in some fashion — it was acting all gummy and sluggish — and so I decided to bitch-slap it a couple of times. Instead of suddenly springing to life, the laptop more or less died. Violence, I realized with a start, was not the answer. Times and technology had changed.

I resolved at that moment to never try and William Holden or Harrison Ford or Peter Stormare or Kenneth More or William Redfield my way out of a technical problem again.