Friendo: I don’t like Tiktok. I don’t know this guy or why I should care. Even assuming he’s right. He seems potentially dangerous
HE: Of course he’s right! Are you kidding me?
Friendo: People are too angry.
HE: It depends what you’re angry about.

@jotojavin Wrong on So many levels. In the words of Pink Floyd “leave them kids alone” #doctor #sons #boys #physical #girls ♬ original sound – JoToJaVin

HE sez: This guy was justifiably enraged that the doctor in question, a follower of radical wokester protocol, was, by asking his nine-year-old son about gender identity, encouraging the kid to begin an inner dialogue about who or what he might actually be deep down.

By asking for an answer to this question, he felt that they were “planting a seed” in the poor kid’s head by way of psychological subterfuge. Kids are very malleable and influencable, of course, and he strongly objects to this nine-year-old being dropped into “this shit,” as he puts it.

Look at Zoomers — 15% or 20% identify as trans or gender fluid or gender ambiguous on some level. They’re saying this, of course, because they want to be cool (or certainly not UNcool) and they want to merge with the social flow of their peers for safety’s sake.

The guy, in short, is an Average Joe traditionalist, and if you ask me Average Joe traditionalism is an okay thing. It’s not the only mindset by which to process and respond to the sometimes bizarre nature of social standards in 2023, but it’s certainly a legitimate one.

Especially when you consider that doctors only began to ask average nine-year-old boys about their gender preference…what, a couple of years ago or three? And that nine year old boys were NEVER asked about their gender preference before ‘20 or ‘21, and in fact weren’t asked the same by family doctors and physicians during the entire immigrant history of this country (and were almost certainly never asked this by caregivers in Native American communities prior to the mid 1600s) and were never asked this by caregivers and physicians for HUNDREDS and in fact THOUSANDS of years in various European, Middle-Eastern, African, Aboriginal and Asian cultures around the globe.

Okay, this Average Joe dad is angry and alarmed, and there are some of us who don’t relate to his manner of speaking & would prefer that he state his objections to gender questioning in a more measured and thoughtful and college-campus-y way, but this rattled fellow DOES have many THOUSANDS of years of tradition in his side of the ledger. You have to give him that.

To put it bluntly, kids have been taught and guided and disciplined in a certain general way through the millennia, and then along came trans theology and activism TWO or THREE YEARS AGO. And this guy is saying, quite reasonably, “what’s up with this?” and more precisely “WHAT THE LIVING FUCK IS GOING ON HERE, MAN?”

Is there a single die-hard Star Wars fanboy who doesn’t want Kathleen “diversity is really important to us” Kennedy fired and banished to the ice planet of Hoth for the rest of her natural days? Right now the pile-on fervor has never been stronger, particularly in the wake of the box-office disappointment of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.

According to The Guardian‘s Charlotte Edwardes, and more specifically Oppenheimer star Cillian Murphy, director Chris Nolan doesn’t have a telephone, an email address or a computer: “He’s the most analogue individual you could possibly encounter,” Murphy says.

About Oppenheimer itself, Murphy calls it “an extraordinary piece of work…very provocative and powerful…it feels sometimes like a biopic, sometimes like a thriller, sometimes like a horror. It’s going to knock people out…what [Nolan] does with film, it fucks you up a little bit.”

A journalist friendo knows a sketchy someone who’s claiming it’s “a bit dull.” (The source, I’m told, is not to be trusted.) Another journalist knows someone who saw Oppenheimer a few weeks ago, and this fellow has described it as “slightly pretentious but with a knockout 30-minute finale.”

On 3.21.23 I posted a warning…actually a feeling of anxiety and trepidation about Nolan’s sound mixing of Oppenheimer. Please God (or please Chris) — allow me to understand the dialogue in this upcoming film. Please don’t drive me crazy with the fucking mix…please. There is no one in the cinematic universe who would be more overjoyed than myself if the dialogue turns out to be audience-friendly.

The Empire Strikes Back climax with a Nolan sound mix:

An excellent exploration of the Nolan sound aesthetic going back to The Dark Knight:

There is no joy in Mudville over the sluggish response to Adele Lim‘s raunchy Joy Ride, which was produced by Point Grey Pictures’ Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg.

Deadline‘s Anthony D’Alessandro projected between $7 and $9M at 2,820 locations; now the weekend tally is looking closer to $6.5M. A $1,100,000 haul on Thursday, and $2,600,000 yesterday — $3,700,000 so far. Friday’s per-screen average was $922.

Although the film sent me into a black pit of depression and I only laughed once, I’m not personally delighted by this shortfall. Lim directs with urgency and vigor, and Cherry Cheva and Teresa Hsiao‘s well-structured script delivers heart as well as vulgarity. I’d decided by the finale that I didn’t completely hate it, and that ain’t hay.

But I knew the formerly titled Joy Fuck Club was a dead fish when I saw the B-minus CinemaScore rating plus that statement by David Poland that he’d returned for a second viewing with his wife and 13-year-old son. Yes — I’m referring to an adjunct of the Poland curse.

A Warner Archive Bluray of Howard Hawks‘ Land of the Pharoahs (’55) pops on 7.18. It features grainy WarnerColor and a 2.55:1 aspect ratio.

In a September ’78 issue of Film Comment Martin Scorsese stated that Pharoahs was one of his guilty pleasures. It’s certainly “big” and colorful — it was partly shot in Egypt — and boasts a lot of great-looking sets and costumes, and Hawks used something close to 10,000 extras.

But the only thing that’s truly great about Pharoahs is Dimitri Tiomkin‘s score.

The musical accompaniments by the Russian-born Tiomkin often had a soaring, grandiose, even bombastic quality, but his scores were so rousing they almost served as characters in and of themselves.

The greatest Tiomkin scores: Duel in the Sun, It’s a Wonderful Life, Red River, The Men, The Big Sky, High Noon (film historian Arthur R. Jarvis, Jr. once claimed that Tiomkin’s music “saved” that Oscar-winning Fred Zinneman film), The High and the Mighty, The Guns of Navarone, Strangers on a Train, I Confess, Dial M for Murder, The Thing from Another World, Giant, Rio Bravo, The Alamo.

A week and a half ago (6.26.23) I noted the 40th anniversary of the opening of Twilight Zone: The Movie, and mentioned an interest in wanting to find a copy of Stephen Farber and Marc Green‘s “Outrageous Conduct: Art, Ego, and the Twilight Zone Case” (1.1.88).

I asked my local library if they had a copy — they did not. But they offered to search for a copy at other libraries in southwestern Connecticut. Two days ago they told me they’d found one and that it had been sent down by courier. I’m now reading it. Smoothly written, excellent reporting. Thanks to the Wilton Library.

Any agent or talent manager will tell you that once an actor has broken into the Hollywood big leagues by starring or costarring in a critically hailed or commercially successful film, they need to score again within, say, the next five to ten years. They can’t just cruise along indefinitely in a moderate or mezzo-mezzo fashion — they need to equal what they accomplished with their first flurry of hits.

Ten years ago Margot Robbie was launched with a spritzy, attention-getting role as Leonardo DiCaprio‘s gold-digger wife in The Wolf of Wall Street, a critical knockout that earned over $400 million.

Robbie has done relatively well for herself since, save for her recent losing underwhelming streak of the last four years — Harley Quinn in Birds of Prey (’20) and The Suicide Squad (’21), a puzzling, dead-end lead performance in David O. Russell‘s perplexing and calamitous Amsterdam (’22) and especially her abrasive and misbegottten Nellie LaRoy in Damien Chazelle‘s Babylon (’22), a breathtaking critical and commercial flop.

Then again Robbie delivered an appealing cameo in Adam McKay‘s enjoyable, critically praised The Big Short (’15). Two years after that (’17) she not only starred in but produced I Tonya (’17), an indie-level mockumentary that was mostly critically approved (I hated it) and earned $53.9 million — not bad for a hand-to-mouth indie that cost $11 million to produce. Two years later she played Sharon Tate in Quentin Tarantino‘s Once Upon A Time in Hollywood (’19). The same year she played a fictitious character in Jay Roach‘s Bombshell, a Fox News / Roger Ailes expose. The following year she produced Emerald Fennell‘s Promising Young Woman (’20).

So she’s hung in there pretty well, but Barbie, it appears, will be Robbie’s first heavy-throttle, high-octane hit since The Wolf of Wall Street.

Whether or not it’ll score critically is another story.

A regional friend who gets around says he’s hearing “very mixed” reactions to Barbie. There are tea leaves to be read…tea leaves under a cloak of secrecy. A couple of pallies saw Barbie over the last couple of days and were asked to signed NDAs.  If Barbie was some kind of great or exceptional, wouldn’t exciting buzz be circulating now, like the Mission Impossible 7 buzz was all over the place for the last several months? In the same sense downbeat reactions to Indy 5 were detectable for months on end. So if Barbie is a big winner, why would you have industry vets sign NDAs? I’ll tell you why. Because loose lips sink ships.

Posted by World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy about a week ago: