Dylan and I caught a FSLC screening of Anora around 3 pm (he’d never had the pleasure) and then we took the B train down to Grand Street station, which is three or four blocks from Kiki’s, a smallish, crowded, very lively Greek restaurant with two separate bars. Luscious cuisine, cool staff, darkly lighted, not murderously expensive.

Earlier this evening HE spoke to the remarkable Eddie Ginley, film maven, HE correspondent and longtime resident of Melbourne, Australia. The primary topic was Brady Corbet‘s The Brutalist.

Ginley is a fan but on a limited basis — “Impressed by certain aspects, but other aspects are frustrating,” he said. We kicked it all around, and dipped every so often into other topics.

Random thoughts and jabs: (a) The Brutalist announces itself as a major film by way of the 215-minute length, an overture, the use or VistaVision and a grand thematic indictment (European ingenuity and creativity vs. American arrogance, dominance and short-tempered impatience; (b) Why did I feel so much empathy for Brody in The Pianist and none for him here?; (c) What’s up with the heroin habit?; (d) unfair as it sounds, I’ve never liked Brady Corbet — I’ve disliked his vibe since Funny Games and Lars von Trier‘s Melancholia — hated him in Simon Killer; (e) Many if not most critics feel that Corbet managing to shoot an “epic”-sized film for only $9.6 million warrants special respect, or so it seems from this corner.

The discussion lasted roughly an hour. I’ve broken it down into two parts.

If any other HE big-mouths want to engage in one-on-one discussions on any topic, I’ll be happy to pick up the phone and post an audio file. 30 to 45 minutes, something like that

Part 1:

Part 2:

During his four years in office (1.20.77 to 1.20.81), Jimmy Carter was more of a gentle country preacher than an effective U.S. President. He spoke softly, wore cardigan sweaters, urged Americans to try and use less energy and be better people. Ethically and morally he was easily the 20th Century’s finest and noblest Oval office occupant — a real Christian and a peace-seeker who talked the talk and tried to walk the walk.

Alas, most Americans don’t really want a good and gentle man running the show — they want a Gary Cooper-in-High Noon or an Alan Ladd-in-Shane type of guy….a mature, steadfast fellow who wears a pair of iron revolvers but also believes in justice and restraint…but also a man who doesn’t back away from a fight.

Carter was too gentle, too thoughtful, too much the peanut farmer, not “street” or slick enough.
When his Iranian hostages rescue mission failed, his presidency was kaput.

If you want to analogize recent presidents with the main characters in Deliverance, Carter was Ronny Cox‘s Drew Ballinger — easily the most morally driven, the most concerned about decency and fairness. Barack Obama was Jon Voight‘s Ed Gentry — an intelligent, fair-minded man who stepped up and did the necessary thing when the situation required it. In his dreams Trump thinks he’s Burt Reynolds‘ Lewis Medlock but he’s really Ned Beatty‘s squealing Bobby Trippe.

I don’t know who Joe Biden or Bill Clinton were….maybe James Dickey‘s Sheriff Bullard.

A moment of respectful silence for dear Mr. Carter, a good man whose presidency, I’m sorry to say, mainly served as a cautionary tale.

Before posting the below I thought long and hard about the most beautiful monochrome films ever shot, but I’m sure a few deserving titles were overlooked. Not necessarily the most expressive or artful but the most visually delicious on a frame-by-frame basis. Please tell me what to add….thanks.

Godzilla vs. Kong (Warner Bros., 3.21.21) is a movie made by deranged adolescent lunatics with too much money to spend. Okay, I didn’t mean that. Adam Wingard and the Kong vs. Godzilla producers aren’t lunatics. They’re evil winged monkeys from hell, pretending to be human.

This movie actually made me feel like one of those monkeys, except I was more the old-fashioned kind with wires on my back and serving Margaret Hamilton‘s Wicked Witch of the West. I started to hop around the living room, cackling and snickering and clapping my hands as I pretended to fly.

Kong to Godzilla at the finale: “Yo…truce?”

Kong too easily flies around like a winged bat or a big helium-stuffed panda bear or a giant mosquito dressed in an ape suit. The fucker weighs hundreds and hundreds of pounds and he yet floats and leaps and falls dozens of stories and it’s all cool. This movie doesn’t respect physics!

But the screenwriters — Eric Pearson and Max Borenstein with “story” assistance from Terry Rossio, Michael Dougherty and Zach Shields — had to be on hallucinogens when they cooked up some of the more wackazoid imaginings. I respect LSD too much to suggest that you, the potential viewer, should see Godzilla vs. Kong on acid, but you could theoretically do that.

And if you were a batshit insane person to begin with, you might get more out of it that way. If you have no soul to begin with and you wouldn’t know satori or enlightenment if they bit you in the ass, why not?

This is the nuttiest, craziest, most imaginative monster destruction-derby movie I’ve ever seen in my wasted, ruined life. And, at a projected budget of $160 to $200 million, probably one of the most wasteful. But if the lower figure is true, Wingard has spent slightly less money that Rian Johnson will spend on the first Knives Out sequel, so at least there’s that.

Does it bother anyone that King Kong has a visible navel? They probably should’ve given him a large schlongola….c’mon, why not?

This movie, by the way, has three overweight characters — Brian Tyree Henry‘s “Bernie Hayes”, Julian Dennison‘s “Josh Valentine” and Fatzilla himself. Kong is actually in pretty good shape all around. Washboard abs. I think it was really cruel, however, to “contain” Kong inside a huge artificial Kong Dome on Skull Island. Leave the poor guy alone…God. Not to mention the cost.

I need to watch Ingmar Bergman‘s Wild Strawberries. Or George Cukor‘s Sylvia Scarlett. Something sane and semi-sedate. Nope, changed my mind. I’ve decided to watch John Carpenter‘s Assault on Precinct 13.

Friendo text (6:32 am Pacific): “I can’t believe you liked that corporate funded, juvenile scripted POS.”

HE reply: “‘Liked it’? It made me scream and howl. It injected feral madness into my veins. The fine fellows who made this film are evil. It’s an insane hallucinogen carpet ride. Corporate derangement syndrome. Sickness incarnate. And yet…dopey!”

Charles Shyer, whom I was friendly with during the aughts and early teens and whom I quite liked after we got to know each other following his divorce from longtime creative partner Nancy Meyers, has left the earth. He was 83.

Shyer’s salad days as a director-writer of mainstream feel-good relationship movies lasted for 20 years — Private Benjamin (’80 — directed by Howard Zeiff but co-written by Charles and Nancy), Irreconcilable Differences (’84), Baby Boom (1987), Father of the Bride (1991), Father of the Bride Part II (1995), The Parent Trap (which Nancy directed — Charles co-wrote and produced). Then came The Affair of the Necklace (’01) and Alfie (’04).

Nancy not only flourished but surpassed Charles after the turn of the century.

Friendo: “This one really hurts. Great guy…really funny and insightful.”

HE: “I considered Charles a fairly close acquaintance back in the aughts and up until 2014 or ‘15, and I liked him a lot….he had soul and grit and saw through the bullshit, and he really went for it. He didn’t lie. Very sad about this.

“The key Shyer moment for me was discovering moldy strawberries in his office after dropping by for a chat about The Affair of the Necklace. That told me he was a regular dude like myself. I really liked him after that.”

HE riff on dudes with the ability to have green baskets of moldy strawberries sitting in their work space:

Since opening three days ago Babygirl has been faring rather poorly with Joe and Jane Popcorn, but it’s not the fault of director-writer Halina Riijn, who’s made a brilliant, riveting film about compulsive sexual behavior.

The fault, dear Brutus, lies with A24’s marketing team, which has insisted on selling the Nicole Kidman-Harris Dickinson film as an “erotic thriller.” Erotic it certainly is, but no one in their right mind would call it a thriller.

Friendo: “Don’t you think marketing this film as an ‘80s & ‘90s-style ‘erotic thriller’ a la Body Heat, Basic Instinct and Sea of Love may have been a SERIOUS miscalculation?”

HE: “Yes. Applying the ‘thriller’ label is completely ridiculous.”

Friendo: “This is how the producers or the releasing company were promoting the film: As a goddamn ‘erotic thriller.’ Which it most certainly is not. And those of us (like me) who believed the hype, were expecting — and YEARNING FOR — that kind of experience. Instead we got a bait & switch.”

…until the late spring of ’65, which is when the Great Transcendence happened.

To this day I’ve never felt great affection, much less enthusiasm, for Bob Dylan‘s “All I Really Want To Do“. Simply because of Dylan’s underwhelming performance of the tune. Even now I despise the Woody Guthrie way he sings the chorus…”all I really want to dooo-hooooo!”…like some yee-haw hillbilly.

But I adore The_Byrds’_version, which was released on 6.14.65, or only five days after Dylan recorded his version on 6.9.64, or seven weeks before his version was even purchasable on Another Side of Bob Dylan (8.8.64).

Cher’s version, which isn’t as good as the Byrds cover but is still more tolerable than Dylan’s, was released sometime in late May of ’65, or before Dylan recorded his own.

Cashbox-wise, Cher’s version outsold the Byrds. The listening public had no taste then and they still don’t.

“All I Really Want To Do” is basically a breaking-up-with-Suzie Rotolo song. “I’m just not into you sexually like I was before but I don’t want to hurt you either or, you know, cause you any grief” roughly translates into “I’m boning someone else now but let’s not go crazy about this…I’ll always care for you but maybe you should think about ‘seeing’ someone else yourself.”

Dylan’s mid ’60s recordings didn’t really sound all that wonderful…they lacked ripeness, fullness, polish and pizazz, technical edge…until Bringing It All Back Home, which came out in April ’65. From that point on he was truly the performing master of his own domain.

….that have ever come out of Ethan Hawke’s mouth. Particularly the passage between 1:50 and 2:48, but the whole thing really. Posted four years ago.

Posting a live, film-sourced GIF of the DeMille theatre’s electrified PSYCHO billboard (Seventh Avenue and 47th) in June 1960 is an HE milestone — never before have I seen this GIF, much less tried to share it. 63 and 1/2 years ago. A very big deal.

The I Don’t Care Girl (’53) was a biopic about Eva Tanguay, a vaudeville superstar who peaked from around 1900 to the early 1920s. 21-year-old Mitzi Gaynor wasn’t a good fit for a film with that title, as it suggested a woman with a provocational, sexually liberated, Isadora Duncan-like attitude.

As I noted in my 10.21.24 Gaynor obit, “Thespian skills aside, most popular actresses of the ‘40s and ‘50s activated or at least hinted at some form of inner heat…some kind of bedroom intrigue or fantasy. Whatever it was that Rita Hayworth or Lana Turner or Maureen O’Hara or Lizabeth Scott or Anna Magnani or Jean Simmons or Gloria Grahame or pre-Cleopatra Elizabeth Taylor or even Deborah Kerr had that indicated a vigorous or perhaps even a hungry-python approach to sex, Gaynor had almost none of.”

Ollie Brenner hates the hoi polloi like I do, plus he hates Nosferatu (“terrible fucking movie”). My kind of cinema bro. 100% approval.

Ollie on the scent of Dayton cinemagoers at a certain Regal cinema: “There’s a certain smell that encapsulates them. A certain aroma, if you will, that follows them around. Kind if like,…I don’t know. Like musky, but also lilke a rusty coin kind of smell, Showering maybe a couple times a week. A certain smell that bombarded my nostrils when we entered the theatre.”

@olliebrenner Keeping it classy in the dirty dyt #dayton #daytonohio #ohio ♬ original sound – ollie brenner

12:47 pm: RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys is a truly fascinating and innovative arthouse experiment during the first 30 to 45 minutes, delivering nervy and daringly out-there chops with its avoidance of traditional boilerplate camera strategies, going for broke with a tilt-a-whirl visual scheme .

But the determination to mostly go with a vaguely Emmanuel Lubezski-ish strategy of having the camera or audience directly experience the lead protagonist’s POV wears down after a while, and what little narrative tension it has dissipates before long because Ross and Joslyn Barnes’ screenplay, based on Colson Whitehead’s 2019 novel, isn’t following a linear plot line, and the film basically goes on way too long (140 minutes).

Ferociously ambitious young directors make this mistake from time to time, over-indulging their whims and darlings, etc. This doesn’t exactly constitute a felony but the film, which tells a sad and brutal tale about a notoriously corrupt Florida reform school in the ‘60s, is definitely hurt by RaMell’s over-reach.

Nickel Boys deserves an A for ambition, and the performances are quite good (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor is the big stand-out) but it really does tax your patience and gradually runs out of gas, and a few plot events feel a bit confusing.