Jeff Wells “Do I have to pretend [this stuff] is cool in order to keep my liberal ID card? Sorry — can’t do that.”
“Wokeness is no longer an extension of liberalism — it’s more often taking something so far that it becomes the opposite — at a certain point inclusion becomes promotion. Endlessly talking about gender to six year-olds isn’t just inappropriate — it’s what the law would call entrapment.”
It hit me yesterday that Josie Rourke, who made her bigtime feature directing debut with Mary, Queen of Scots, has been absent from the flush realm since Mary opened in late ’18. There are reasons for that, of course. One is that people like me felt novocained to death, Mary being an overbearing exercise in woke presentism.
“It Hurts To Watch This Film,” posted on 11.16.18: Josie Rourke‘s Mary, Queen of Scots is a slog and a drag — a hard-to-follow, sometimes infuriating attempt to make a 16th Century tale of conflict between willful cousins (the titular, flinty Mary vs. Queen Elizabeth of England) into something relevant to the convulsive culture of 2018.
I found it a slog because I didn’t give a flying fuck about anyone, and because the damp air (which wafted out from the screen) and chilly-looking Scottish exteriors made me want to wrap myself in scarves and sweaters. Why would anyone want to live in Scotland in the first place? It’s all fog and peat and stone castles. I just wanted to build a fire and huddle.
I spent the entire 124-minute running time trying to understand why I hated this film almost immediately. Have you ever walked into a crowded room and decided on the spot that you really don’t care for the vibe of a certain person standing near the punch bowl? It was like that. Within minutes I was seething with irritation. There were several factors, I gradually realized.
I felt alienated by Rourke’s attempt to impose a woke social atmosphere upon 16th Century Scotland and England — by applying a strong women-vs.-sexist pig narrative and going with multicultural casting choices. I’m not saying it’s invalid to adopt this approach (knock yourselves out), but I did find it numbing to sit through.
Early on I was telling myself I need to see Charles Jerrot‘s same-titled 1971 version with Vanessa Redgrave and Glenda Jackson. I don’t recall this film at all, but I was muttering to myself that it has to be better than the newbie…it HAS to be.
I resented having to wade through the thick Scottish accents, and realized early on that I’d have to wait for a subtitled screener to understand all of the plot intrigues. It’s one of those historical flicks in which nothing is fully clear until you go to Wikipedia and read the actual histories.
I admired Saoirse Ronan‘s feisty performance as the titular character (she’s always good) but hated the blatant “acting” by the secondary characters. Every actor explicitly conveys how their character is feeling about what’s going on — whether they’re pleased, unhappy, sad, suspicious, unsettled or whatever — and after 15 minutes of this I was ready to scream. Please, assholes…stop “acting”!
I felt especially hostile to James McArdle‘s performance as the Earl of Moray, Mary’s resentful half-brother. My second most despised performance was Jack Lowden‘s as Lord Darnley — he preens, he poses, he goes down on Mary, etc.
Beau Willimon‘s screenplay is overly complex and labyrnthian — I gave up trying to follow all the twists, turns and betrayals, especially toward the end.
Three days ago I rewatched Robert Benton‘s Places in the Heart (9.21.84). Sometimes older films hold up and sometimes they can seem a bit softer or less formidable in retrospect. Well, you can sheath that sword because the sands of time haven’t diminished Places in the Heart in the slightest. In my book it’s a truly great film. The church communion scene at the very end still turns me into mush.
Sally Field‘s “you really like me!” speech upon winning the Best Actress Oscar has been endlessly belittled, but over the last 40 years I’ll bet that few have given the film another shot and really settled into her performance. Her Edna Spalding is fairly magnificent…about as pained and stressed and rock-solid as it gets.
Director-writer Benton, who’s still with us at age 91, really knew rural, Depression-era Texas, having been born and raised in the backwater of Waxahachie (where Places in the Heart takes place) and you can feel that authority and authenticity in every scene.
Heart includes uncomfortably frank depictions of racism, and there’s no way in hell that the wokesters would allow such a film to be made today. But every frame is real and honest and humane. It’s touching, grueling, affecting…the way it really was back then, at least in Benton’s recollection.
I don’t want to hear one HE comment-threader argue this point…not one!
And the cast….good God! Field, John Malkovich, Danny Glover, Lindsay Crouse, Ed Harris, Amy Madigan, Lane Smith, Terry O’Quinn, Bert Remsen.
There’s a scene in which Smith urges the financially strapped Field to allow Malkovich’s “Mr. Will”, his blind brother-in-law, to stay with her as a lodger. Field’s initial response is “this isn’t a good time,” which I partly understood. At the same time I was muttering to myself, “Don’t say ‘no’ to Malkovich staying with you…please! He’s John Malkovich!”
Malkovich’s career erupted that year. His Heart performance resulted in a Best Supporting Actor nomination. He played a tough photojournalist in Roland Joffe‘s The Killing Fields. And he played Biff in a celebrated Broadway revival of Death of a Salesman, costarring with Dustin Hoffman. I caught Salesman in the spring or summer of ’84, and five minutes after Malkovich came on stage I said to myself, “Jesus fuck, this guy is amazing.”
This morning the House of Representatives approved giving Ukraine $60 billion for defense; ditto $26 billion for Israel.
The vote was 311 to 112. A majority of Republicans — 112 — voted against it and one, Representative Dan Meuser of Pennsylvania, voted “present”…coward. The Dems waved Ukrainian flags, which pissed off the righties.
The measure requiring either the sale of TikTok by its Chinese owner or banning the app in the United States passed 360 to 58.
N.Y. Times: “’Our adversaries are working together to undermine our Western values and demean our democracy,’ Representative Michael McCaul, Republican of Texas and the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, said Saturday as the House debated the measure.
“’We cannot be afraid at this moment. We have to do what’s right. Evil is on the march. History is calling and now is the time to act.’
“’History will judge us by our actions here today,’ McCaul continued. ‘As we deliberate on this vote, you have to ask yourself this question: ‘Am I Chamberlain or Churchill?’
“For months, it had been uncertain whether Congress would approve new funding for Ukraine, even as momentum shifted in Moscow’s favor. That prompted a wave of anxiety in Kyiv and in Europe that the United States, the single biggest provider of military aid to Ukraine, would turn its back on the young democracy.”
This CNET video includes a crudely animated reconstruction of the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman on the night of 6.12.94. I’m uncertain as to when it originally aired — possibly in the mid ’90s or certainly more than 20 years ago.
I had never watched this horrorshow until after the death of O.J Simpson on 4.10.24.
The key portion begins around 4:35…ghastly.
It should be noted that the animated action doesn’t square with the earwitness account of local resident Robert Heidstra, who testified that he heard a male (almost certainly Goldman) yelling “hey! hey! hey!” around the reported time of the killings, or 10:35 pm.
NEW: The man who lit himself on fire outside of Trump’s trial in NYC has been identified as Max Azzarello.
“My name is Max Azzarello, and I am an investigative researcher who has set himself on fire outside of the Trump trial in Manhattan,” his manifesto read.
“This extreme act… pic.twitter.com/xDjTgNDS6r
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) April 19, 2024
THIS IS HORRIBLE!
An unidentified individual has just set himself on fire outside the Trump Trial in Manhattan in front of the courthouse.
I will say this again. This is the most ridiculous form of protest you can do.
Let the trial play out. Stop listening to crazy people… pic.twitter.com/9kNaktofzp
— Brian Krassenstein (@krassenstein) April 19, 2024
The eyes are the window of the soul…
(top) Donald J. Trump; (middle) Jeffrey Hunter as Jesus H. Christ in King of Kings (’61); (bottom) Robert Ryan as John the Baptist in same film.
…that I wish I’d been able to attend.
I liked Travolta better when he had some hair. The egg-bald-with-a-beard thing is okay, but not what I would call “preferred.”
I’m sorry but a very hotsy-totsy Hollywood screening of a 4K DCP restoration of Alfred Hitchcock‘s North by Northwest will happen two days hence, and I need to hear reactions from sophistos who can roll up their sleeves and evaluate the quality of the restoration like pros.
People have been waiting for a NXNW 4K restoration for many years. Talk about long-anticipated, pulse-quickening, etc.
What kind of a bump or enhancement does the new restoration offer, and in what way exactly? Be specific. Or is the restoration more in the realm of a sturdy, respectable capturing of what the currently purchasable Bluray already offers?
Those planning to attend the Saturday, 4.20 viewing at the TCL Chinese IMAX theatre (it starts at 2:45 pm) need to send reviews to HE as soon as possible.
44 years ago I attended a glorious Radio City Music Hall presentation of Kevin Brownlow‘s restoration of Abel Gance‘s Napoleon (’27) — a Francis Coppola-sponsored, once-in-a-lifetime cinematic happening that knocked everyone’s socks off…three 35mm projectors and a super-wide screen (those triptych sequences!), a live symphony orchestra conducted by Carmine Coppola…a magnificent trigger switch…genuinely exciting blood-pump cinema.
Many different versions of Gance’s masterpiece have been screened over the last century, and all were quite lengthy.
The world premiere version happened at the Paris Opera in April 1927, and it ran 4 hours and 10 minutes. A nine-hour version played the following month at Paris’s Apollo theatre. A six-hour, 43-minute version was sent to the U.S. in 1928. Many different cuts shown at varying film speeds were exhibited worldwide over decades. The Coppola-Brownlow version shown at RCMH in 1980 ran four hours with a longish intermission. It’s also viewable on Bluray, of course, with a running time of 333 minutes.
All to say that a brand-new Cinematheque Francaise version is premiering at next month’s Cannes Film Festival — seven hours total but shown in two parts. The first half (which will run three hours and 40 minutes) will screen on Tuesday, 5.14. HE will attend, of course.
Gance’s Napoleon is a much more vital and essential film than Ridley Scott and Joaquin Phoenix‘s Napoleon — I can tell you this without qualification. What ever happened to the idea of streaming a much longer version on Apple?
I never saw Jeannot Szwarc and Carl Gottleib‘s Jaws 2 (’78) because I knew it would be dogshit.
Even though it was produced by Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown and costarred Roy Scheider, Lorraine Gary and Murray Hamilton, it was obviously corned beef hash. But before today, I had never seen a frame of it, and I must say that the water-ski-attack-meets-exploding-motorboat scene is hilarious!
Is there another scene as ludicrous? Does Hamilton’s mayor character get eaten? Answer: No — Murray is spared.
Jaws 2 cost $30 million to produce; it wound up earning $102,922,376 domestic and $105,978,000 foreign for a total of $208,900,376.
Richard Linklater‘s caper-esque Hit Man premiered…what was it, seven months ago? The big debut happened at last September’s Venice Film Festival, then a couple of weeks later at the Toronto Film Festival (where Netflix picked it up) and then the New York Film Festival.
Everyone loved Hit Man — the most popular light-hearted thriller of 2023. And then it kinda dropped out of sight, at least as far as advance screenings were concerned. Those not paying close attention might have thought it had opened. It never did, of course.
And now it’s back! Back to the future! One of 2023’s most likable hit movies is opening theatrically on May 24th, and will begin streaming on Netflix on June 7th.