Sasha Stone and I recorded the latest Oscar Poker on Sunday, 11.26, around 1:30 pm. Here’s a link.

Incidentally: Hollywood Elsewhere continues to take exception to the strange absence of Black Flies, which Open Road has obviously yanked from its previously-slated late November release date.

An assaultive, high-velocity, rough and tumble capturing of the lives of Emergency Medical Technicians in Brooklyn, Black Flies may not be a great, earth-changing film but it’s certainly a respectable one while being a close relation of Martin Scorsese‘s Bringing Out The Dead (’99). We discussed this situation towards the end of the podcast.

Again, the link to the latest.

Another recent re-watch was Oliver Stone‘s Savages. I panned it 11 years ago, but for some reason it didn’t go down all that badly two nights ago. It didn’t greatly bother me, and I really enjoyed Benicio del Toro‘s cartel enforcer, “Lado” Arroyo.

Posted on 7.6.12: Savages is about a couple of youngish, very flush Laguna Beach pot dealers (Taylor Kitsch‘s “Chon”, Aaron Taylor-Johnson‘s “Ben”) somehow failing to grasp the obvious when a Baja crime cartel tells them they want to distribute their potent product and split revenues 80-20. Which basically means “game over” and “time to move to Indonesia” because the Mexicans are fiends who will chew them up and spit them out one way or the other.

John Travolta‘s character, a corrupt DEA guy, explains that the cartel, run by Salma Hayek‘s “Elena” and enforced by Benicio’s “Lado”, is basically Walmart and that “they want a Ben and Chon section on aisle three.”

The guys intend to make a run for it while pretending to play along, but Elena smells duplicity and orders their girlfriend Ophelia, a.k.a. “O” (Lively), kidnapped. And once that happens it’s war — theft, hijackings, frame-ups, burnings, counter-kidnappings, etc.

I made a point of reading Don Winslow‘s “Savages” before catching the film, and was fairly taken with it. I love Winslow’s tight sentences and smack-dab phrasings, and the way it reads like a screenplay. So despite the beating Savages has taken on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, I was hoping for at least a modicum of satisfaction. Some of the book had to rub off.

To me, that didn’t happen. At all. I felt assaulted and trapped and underwhelmed all through Savages. Almost nothing but pique. The first thing I said to a friend as I left the theatre was “why did they even make this thing? Who could possibly like this or recommend it with any enthusiasm?”

I was “directing the movie” as I read Winslow’s book, of course, and in my version the action was fast and brutal, like in real life, but I didn’t wallow in it. And the actors didn’t “act” — they read their lines flat, fast and straight. They just about threw them away, which is what you more or less have to do when you’re dealing with “I think we’ve struck gold” and “I had orgasms — he had wargasms.”

Stone does the opposite, for the most part. He whips up the visual energy every which way, glossing and flashing it up like there’s no tomorrow. And flaunting the spilt blood, gougings, torturings. All you want is for the killing and the sadism to ease up a bit, for Stone to go the “less is more” route. A touch of suggestion, imagination…not a chance. And the three leads — Taylor Kitsch, Aaron Johnson, Blake Lively — drop their on-the-nose lines like spoonfuls of mashed potatoes on the kitchen floor, “acting” with their eyes and smiling too much and pretty much murdering the potential coolness at every turn.

Narration is almost always a bad idea, but especially so with an action film. Lively is the narrator here, and her opening line — “Just because I’m telling this story doesn’t mean I’m alive at the end of it…it’s that kind of story” — is, no offense, terrible. I bought Joe Gillis narrating his own Sunset Boulevard saga from the morgue, but Lively saying she may or may not be dead at the end…forget it.

Posted six and a half years ago — 6.17.17:

“There were brawls. I had guys die. You know, the show would end and someone’s still sitting there and then you realize they’re never getting up. I had a projectionist die one time in the booth. I heard the crowd booing, and then the movie’s off the screen. This is when there were carbon arc projectors, so a lot of times these projectionists would just fall asleep or they’d be screwing somebody up there and they’d forget to change the carbon arc.

“So I go up there…and the guy’s dead on the floor. I called the cops, and then I thought — this is how sick you’d get after being in New York for a few years in those days. I thought, ‘This is my big chance to actually shame a New York audience.’ So I went into this theater and I looked at them, and I said, ‘I’m very sorry for the inconvenience [but] the projectionist has passed away. We have someone going up there now, and your film will be on shortly.’ And they booed me!” — Savages author Don Winslow recalling a Times Square movie-theatre gig in the ’80s, reported by Bilge Ebiri in the Village Voice.

True story #2 (i.e., my own): I worked as a Brooklyn theatre manager sometime in ’79 or early ’80. I honestly forget the name of the theatre, but it was a midsize house that played mainstream films. I remember telling the guy who’d hired me that I’d been a licensed projectionist in Connecticut and that I’d worked at the Carnegie Hall and Bleecker Street Cinemas under Sid Geffen, which was true.

So I got the gig, but I became bored with the job very quickly. On top of which I was never all that reliable about keeping track of ticket sales and whatnot. I wasn’t skimming — I just wasn’t an efficient mathematical type. And then I decided to play Warren Zevon‘s Excitable Boy over the theatrical sound system before the show began. And I didn’t play it quietly — I had the sound levels up to at least 7 or 8. I was eventually canned, of course. The story of my life from the time I was 17 to the launch of Hollywood Elsewhere in August ’04 was “and then I got fired.”

True story #3: I once led a small rebellion inside the old Regency Theatre (1987 Broadway, New York, NY 10023). It happened in the late ’70s. It was during a weekend showing of North by Northwest. Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint were on the train from New York to Chicago, and then the projectionist skipped a reel and suddenly Grant was in the cornfield dodging bullets from the biplane. Or something like that.

I was up in a flash and running upstairs to the booth. I knocked sharply on the door…’Yo, hello?’ (rap, rap, rap). Two more guys came up to join me, and then a third and a fourth. No response from inside so another guy stepped up and knocked on the door with me. The projectionist came out, saw the angry crowd and freaked. He was like The French Connection‘s Marcel Bozzuffi when he was cornered by that MTA official on the speeding subway car…’Get back!…get back!’ We told “Marcel” about his error (he obviously hadn’t been watching the screen). He eventually calmed down and fixed the problem.

In a just-released SEC report, Disney has acknowledged that the woke political and social agendas contained in its creative product have cost the company dearly and drained the value of shareholder stock.

It all boils down to a lack of “consumer acceptance,” or more particularly general consumer perceptions “of our efforts to achieve certain…social goals, often differ widely and present risks to our reputation and brands.”

The Hill‘s Jonathan Turley: “Disney has reportedly lost a billion dollars just on four of its recent ‘woke’ movie flops, productions denounced by critics as pushing political agendas or storylines.

“Yet until now, the company has continued to roll out underperforming movies as revenue has dropped. What’s more, Disney stars persist in bad-mouthing its fabled storylines and undermining its new productions. The company admits that it has suffered a continued slide in ‘impressions’ (that is, viewership) by 14 percent.

Hurley excerpt #2: “You can bring movies to the public, but you cannot make them sell. Once an unassailable and uniting brand, Disney brand is now negatively associated with activism by a significant number of consumers. The company is now even reporting a decline in licensing revenue from products associated with Star Wars, Frozen, Toy Story and Mickey and Friends — iconic and once-unassailable corporate images.

Hurley excerpt #3: “The question is how long Disney (or its shareholders) can tolerate falling revenues tied to its ‘misalignment with the public.’ A massive corporation, Disney can lose billions before facing any truly dire decisions. Yet even Disney’s CEO, Bob Iger, now appears to be seeking to ‘quiet things down’ after years of culture wars.”

With the overwhelmingly negative reaction to his lead performance in Napoleon, Joaquin Phoenix is hopelessly stuck between a rock and a hard place — people are sick of watching him play weird and sullen wackos but they also won’t accept any attempt he might make to play normal. His doleful nut persona can no longer be used without spurring mass derision on the part of Joe and Jane Popcorn.

“Joaquin Phoenix’s One-Man Cult of Depressive Method-Acting Vanity,” posted by Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman:

“Joacquin Pheonix’s character in I’m Still Here is an actor who replaces performance with the actorly exhibitionism of mental illness. And that, in a way, has become the story of Joaquin Phoenix as an actor.

“Whether he’s taking on the role of one more morose everyman dweeb, a Batman villain, or Napoleon, he plays severely damaged people, but what he’s really doing is projecting the dramatic image of himself as an actor reaching into the lower depths.

“On occasion, he transcends the self-focused gloom and brings off something miraculous. I thought he was genuinely great in Joker, in part because the director, Todd Phillips, knew how to build and sculpt Phoenix’s performance; let’s hope that he helps Phoenix bring off a comparable feat opposite Lady Gaga in Joker: Folie à Deux.

“But as films like Napoleon and Beau Is Afraid reveal all too clearly, Joaquin Phoenix has become an actor who needs to be rescued from his worst impulses. Too often, he sinks into his own torpor, steamrolling his movies with the depressive wacked song of himself.”

Three days ago I began tearing through Glenn Frankel‘s “High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic,” an essential, smoothly readable history (published in February 2017) of the legendary Carl Foreman.

The book focuses on Hollywood’s traumatic, ethically fraught Red Scare era of the late ’40s and ’50s, and particularly the trials and tribulations of this once-blacklisted producer and author of High Noon‘s allegorical screenplay as well as several other classic, hard-hitting films (Champion, Home of the Brave, Young Man with a Horn, The Men, A Hatful of Rain, The Bridge on the River Kwai, The Guns of Navarone, The Victors).

I thought I knew the High Noon saga top to bottom, but Frankel’s well-researched book taught me quite a few things.

I finished it last night, and immediately wanted to re-watch Lionel Chetwynd‘s Darkness at High Noon: The Carl Foreman Documents (’02), a two-hour PBS documentary that dug into more or less the same Foreman saga.

I hadn’t seen Chetwynd’s film since an invitational Academy screening 21 years ago, but I keenly recall the excitement and controversy.

The controversy stemmed from Chetwynd’s doc having delivered a persuasive, highly damning portrait of High Noon producer Stanley Kramer, who went on to direct a string of urgent and respected social-political dramas including The Defiant Ones, On The Beach, Inherit the Wind and Judgment at Nuremberg.

Chetwynd’s film (assembled from Foreman’s corner) accused Kramer of cowardice and personal betrayal, and there wasn’t much of an argument to be made as Chetwynd had done his homework and then some.

I recall praising Darkness at High Noon in my then four-year-old column, which was then berthed at reel.com. The film is narrated by Richard Crenna with Foreman’s first-hand account read by Richard McGonagle.

My initial search this morning yielded a YouTube version that was posted a year ago by Carl’s daughter, Dr. Amanda Foreman. Alas, it looks like hell due to having been horizontally taffy-pulled. Chetwynd’s original version was composed in 1.37.

I’m figuring that a version that represents the original aspect ratio has to be accessible. (A MUBI version has disappeared.) I’ve just reached out to Chetwynd, etc.

From Todd McCarthy’s 4.10.02 Variety review of Chetwynd’s film: “Pic pivots on the charge that Kramer essentially robbed Foreman of his rightful credit as producer of High Noon after the latter had left the U.S. for England to escape the snare of the blacklist (his writing credit was protected by the Writers Guild).

“After firmly establishing Foreman’s right to that credit on what was bannered ‘A Stanley Kramer Production’ and demolishing the long-standing rumor that the film’s much-noted cutaways to clocks to reassert its real-time structure were not in the script but added in post-production, Chetwynd backtracks to relate his protagonist’s biography, from Chicago upbringing and apprenticeship in Frank Capra‘s WWII filmmaking unit to rising late ’40s screenwriting rep on Home of the Brave, Champion and The Men.

“That outspoken Hollywood conservative Chetwynd should be taking up the cause of former Communist Party member Foreman may raise an eyebrow or two. But the doc assumes a vigorously pro-Foreman position not only in opposition to HUAC but especially against [Kramer’s] alleged weak-spined duplicities.

“Kramer’s family is now disputing the film’s characterization of him, and while his side of the story goes unrepresented here, the sort of thorough documentation Chetwynd offers on Foreman’s behalf will be hard to refute.”

I had gotten to know Chetwynd in ’94 and early ’95 while writing a long Los Angeles magazine article titled “Right Face“. It focused on various Hollywood actors and screenwriters who had experienced varying degrees of suspicion and discrimination due to being conservatives in an overwhelmingly liberal town.

…but not always.

There are days when I feel like Dennis Hopper‘s Tom Ripley in The American Friend — “I seem to know less and less about who I am, or who anybody else is.”

But that’s just the proverbial doubt dog tugging at my overcoat. Mostly I feel fine.

Thanksgiving dinner at Jett and Cait’s was warm and cool and soothing, and familiar in the best ways imaginable.