All along I’ve felt that Penny should have shown more caution in trying to restrain Neely. I don’t think he intended to kill this allegedly threatening, mentally unstable guy. I think the situation just got away from Penny, and before he knew it (five minutes — three minutes captured on video) Neely was dead.
It’s very easy to make Monday morning armchair judgments, and it’s a different thing altogether when you’re in a tough situation in the heat of the moment. Neely was, by all accounts, sounding and acting like a dangerous asshole, and if I had been in that subway car a voice is telling me I wouldn’t have had any objection to Penny holding him down.
There are people, of course, who will accuse me of coming from a racist place — me and and others holding a similar opinion. I don’t agree, of course. If you start shit by scaring people and acting like a dangerous asshole, you’re obviously asking for trouble. What happened wasn’t entirely Neely’s fault but it was mostly his.
That said, Penny should have shown more caution as Neely didn’t deserve to die. Then again it’s very easy to say whatever from the comfort of a home or an office.
Chris Christie is, of course, like many politicians, a transactional opportunist, but of all the declared candidates for the Republican presidential nomination right now, Christie is the only one to call a spade a spade as far as Donald Trump‘s sociopathic conduct and mentality are concerned.
All the other candidates are too afraid of alienating the MAGA voters — only Christie is manning up by saying “this guy is really truly bad news.”
Steve Schmidt: “There’s a lack of appreciation about how quickly democracies, indeed our democracy, can fail….one side is completely delusional and fantastical, generating constant propaganda all the time…we’re in the middle of a backlash…we are living through a backlash…if an extremist movement took power once, it can happen again, and if it does again, our demoocracy as we’ve known it will be over.”
Two or three years old. Blown water pump, late ’60s, Bakersfield, watermelons…before cell phones…Chevron gas card…fried chicken, corn on the cob, “keep the faith,” etc.
On Friday (6.9) HE commenter “The Multiplex” reported the following: “For what it’s worth, in Disney’s DCP asset list the currently-streaming version of The French Connection is listed as ‘2021 William Friedkin v2.'”
HE reply: “May I ask precisely where you read the term ‘2021William Friedkin v2‘? I thought it might be at the tail end of the currently streaming version on the Criterion Channel. I checked and it’s not. I also Google-searched “2021 William Friedkin v2” + French Connection…zip.”
And yet this info is seemingly fortified by a statement from The Criterion Channel, passed along by “The Connection” in a 6.9.23 HE story titled “HE to Friedkin re Censorship Fracas.” CC’s statement said that “according to our licensor [Disney], this is a ‘Director’s Edit‘ of the film.”
If this is legit info, the obvious implication is that after a half-century of The French Connection being presented in its original form, ugly racial dialogue and all, director William Friedkin has woke-censored or otherwise desecrated his own film.
I am personally horrified by this possibility. But if this has indeed happened, there can only be one response from the film’s worldwide community of fans and scholastic admirers, and that response is “what the living hell, Billy?” Followed by “please tell us you didn’t approve this!”
Because deleting the racially offensive scene in question is worse than “Greedo shoots first” or Steven Spielberg changing those government agent guns to walkie-talkies at the end of E.T., which he later apologized for.
If Friedkin initiated or approved the deletion, he did so not because he had a creative change of heart (which is always a bullshit move to begin with) but in order to appease the woke scolds — a mob clamoring for a transitional political-cultural statement that suits their current agenda — and nothing more.
Friedkin knows (or at least he used to know) that art is made of sterner and more endurable stuff.
Still, the idea of Friedkin being the chief culprit doesn’t make sense if we consider what he said on the occasion of The French Connection‘s 50th anniversary, or a year and a half ago.
“I had both Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider ride around with Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso, the real cops their characters were based on. They mimicked what they saw, which is what I wanted. I had seen all that behavior months before, and they were seeing it fresh before they did the film. Gene did not want to go that far. He thought the guy was really racist, but I didn’t — I thought it was an act that he was doing to survive in the street. Gene actually found the character very tough to play.”
“[And yet] Friedkin says that if he were to remake The French Connection today, not much would change. His goal was to portray policing as he saw it and leave it to audiences to decide for themselves, not to valorize or critique it. Still, amid national conversations about police reform and police brutality, he wouldn’t be eager to tackle the subject matter again.
“I don’t think I’d make a cop film today,, but if I did, it wouldn’t be much different. And I would try to capture the action and the dialogue that persists and exists today. You’d be amazed how very close it is to what it was. I don’t celebrate that behavior, but I’m fascinated by it.”
How could Friedkin have said the above and approved a deletion of the scene in question?
Glenn Kenny has stated that he’s researched and is writing a forthcoming article that gets to the bottom of things, or at least which allegedly absolves The Criterion Collection from responsibility in this mucky matter. I just checked Criterion’s streaming of The French Connection this morning, and it still offers no warning about the missing footage. Until such a warning appears, The Criterion Collection is most definitely not off the hook.
HE to Kenny: Criterion vandalized Adam Holender‘s original Midnight Cowboy color scheme with a vulgar teal saturation, and I’m an asshole for pointing out the obvious?
Are you telling me that Criterion’s greenish Cowboy capture [below] is the more natural-looking of the two? God’s blue sky is greenish turquoise in the Criterion. Has anyone ever seen a sky that looked this putrid?
Are you reading what Tooze is saying? He found the color-tint desecration of Midnight Cowboy to be somewhat off-putting and what-the-fucky, but then he “got used to it.” He decided to succumb to the greenish teal re-imagining because Criterion served it up and they know best, right?
Look at the main title image comparisons above — the browner, dustier, desert-tan version from the 2012 MGM Bluray is obviously more natural than the greenish Criterion version beneath it…c’mon! Look at the color of Jon Voight‘s shirt below this — blue in the older shot, blue-green in the Criterion. Look at the kitchen dishwasher — more or less natural looking in the MGM Bluray version, soaked in muddy green in the Criterion.
A little more than three years ago Criterion screwed up in a similar way when they horizontally compressed Brian De Palma’s Dressed To Kill while adding a greenish-yellow tint to the color. A public outcry led to a correction. Will fans of this legendary Best Picture winner go along with Criterion’s greenish-teal re-do, or will they grab their pitchforks and torches and march down to Criterion’s Manhattan headquarters?
“Westerners Cannot Kidnap Other Moviegoers on ‘Mermaid,'” Global Times article, 5.26: “Some American leftists are imposing their own politically correct values on Chinese audiences, expecting them to embrace the film the same way as Western audiences have.
“This expectation is unreasonable since Chinese don’t have such political correctness, as the country’s modern history is more about being invaded by Westerners rather than colonizing or oppressing black people.
“Instead, China has always maintained [status quo] relations with Africa and has never needed an ‘atonement’ mentality prevalent in Hollywood.”
Hence it became apparent a couple of days ago that The Little Mermaid is more or less a dead fish in China and South Korea, primarily because of “racist” pushback among journalists, social-media users and Average Joes and Janes.
As far as those two territories are concerned, Mermaid has become Disney’s very own Bud Light misfire.
CNN’s China desk reported that the woked-up Disney reboot has “bombed with moviegoers in China and South Korea amid racist critiques in some quarters over the casting of Black actress Halle Bailey as main character Ariel.”
But Chinese fans have rejected Bailey’s casting over her non-traditional appearance. Pic had scored 5.1 out of 10 on Douban, a longstanding Chinese movie review website. On Maoyan, a Chinese movie review and box-office tracking site, one user lamented that “the fairy tale that I grew up with has changed beyond recognition!” An instagram user in South Korea reportedly complained that the movie had been “ruined” for them, adding “#NotMyAriel.”
In Japan, where the film will open on 6.9, an online forum user reportedly wrote “don’t trample on my cherished childhood memories and the image of Ariel.”forum user wrote.
In an editorial published on 5.25, the Global Timessaid it had “caused a debate about representation in entertainment and highlighted the challenges of adapting beloved, traditional tales.” It added that Disney’s casting of Bailey was part of an overall “politically correct” effort to “force inclusion” of minorities represents “a lazy and irresponsible storytelling strategy.”
HE reader responses to yesterday's "Odious Hit Piece" indicate that my side (i.e., sensible centrists with a leftward tilt) has really lost the culture war, at least among the elite/urban/media-wise hipster types who comment on HE.
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Yorgos Lanthimos‘ Poor Things (Searchlight, 9.8) is a kind of Bride of Frankenstein story.
Boilerplate: A young woman, Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), is a corpse brought back to life by scientist Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe). Baxter had her brain swapped with that of an unborn fetus, resulting in her having an infant’s mind. While designed to be Baxter’s companion, her sexual appetite causes her to pursue other men, including Max McCandless (Ramy Youssef) and a foppish lawyer named Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), with whom she elopes and embarks on a hedonistic odyssey around Europe, Northern Africa and Central Asia. Freed from the prejudices of her times, Bella demands equality and liberation.
Poor Things costars Christopher Abbott, Margaret Qualley, Kathryn Hunter and Suzy Bemba.
SPOILERS WITHIN: Celine Song‘s Past Lives (A24) is a very subtle, oh-so-very-gently expressed love story — a story about things unsaid and certainly not acted upon.
The action between the lovers, Nora and Hae Sung (played as adults by Greta Lee and Teo Yoo), happens in three stages.
One, a primal and very nourishing attraction they feel as 10-year-old children in Seoul, only to be separated when Nora’s parents move the family to Toronto. Two, aspiring playwright Nora and aspiring engineer Hae Sung Skype-chatting at age 20 but never arranging to meet. And three, both still wanting to see each other after a separation of 20 years and with Hae Sung having flown to New York to visit the now-married Nora, both conveying volumes of feeling with their eyes but doing zip to try to make this long-simmering romance finally kick into gear.
You can feel the “In Yun” every step of the way, but Nora and Hae Sung are so polite and constrained and well-behaved, and are certainly mindful of the feelings of poor Arthur (John Magaro), Nora’s bearded husband with the rag-mop haircut and obviously the odd man out in this situation.
All through the second and third acts you want the lovers to somehow break through and say something and risk emotional exposure or even erupt in some messy way, but they don’t, they won’t and they never will.
You’re silently pleading with both to “please risk it….please don’t allow yourselves to become Anthony Hopkins at the end of The Remains of the Day…even if it’s just a big hug and a long kiss at the airport as Hae Sung is about to fly back to Seoul…a little catharsis, please!”
Past Lives, in short, is all about subtext, impossible distances, zero physical contact, impossible social constraints and quietly pleading, gently leaking expressions.
A couple of hours after seeing Song’s film I told a friend that it’s “a woman’s version of a Wong Kar Wai film about soul-crossed lovers who never get aroused much less climax, and without the Chris Doyle lensing.”
I understand why people might admire or even adore Past Lives. I certainly understand why almost every critic (except for Alison Wilmore) has done handstands, and why the Sundance crowd flipped for it last January.
I respect it, but it doesn’t quite do the thing.
The late Sydney Pollack used to say that the most affecting love stories are ones that don’t end happily. Example #1 is the final scene in Pollack’s The Way We Were. There’s no denying that it works — you can’t help but feel it.
The ending of Past Lives is poignant and affecting, but it leaves you hungry and somewhat disappointed. I know, that’s the point but still. It certainly doesn’t envelop and hold you the way Pollack’s closing scene did. It just doesn’t.
Is it a Best Picture contender? It’s a very respectable little film, but it doesn’t really ring the bell. It’s too disciplined, too schematic, too committed to not letting anyone even flirt with the possibility of emotional release (except for the Zampano moment at the very end). It’s a movie about sad, bittersweet denial…no, no, no, no, can’t, can’t, can’t, can’t, shouldn’t, shouldn’t, shouldn’t, shouldn’t.
