Either you know these six scary words like the back of your hand as well as what movie they’re from and what they mean, or you don’t.

From a Beyond The Frame article on Roman Polanski‘s Rosemary’s Baby (’68), written by David E. Williams and posted on 3.29.17:

This 47-minute Criterion Collection documentary about the making of Rosemary’s Baby is drop-dead brilliant — a huge turn-on about a perfectly made film. I’ve been watching this 1968 classic for over half a century. Easily among the best horror flicks ever made, and one of the best films of any genre or era, directed by anyone or anyhoo.

If you haven’t seen the Criterion doc, please remedy that. Now, for example.

Paramount’s Rosemary’s Baby 4K disc (shitty jacket art) arrives on 10.10.23.

It’s two-day-old water under the bridge and not that big of a deal, but Carlos Santana folded like a coward. He said it straight and plain like any doctor or biologist or sane human would have said it prior to the Crazy Town takeover, and then his nervous nelly manager and agent got to him (i.e., read him the riot act) and he recanted like a good widdle boy.

Yes, Ozzy Osbourne actually bit a bat’s head off –a cruel and atrocious act. Bats deserve as much of a shot at health and happiness as any other species. I’m sorry but I feel much closer right now to Carlos the pussy than Ozzy the biter.

Deadline update:

Preface: The insanity out there is such that anyone sharing sensible, scientific views about transgender issues has become, in the eyes of some wokesters, extra-heinous due to the recent horrific murder of Laura Ann Carleton, 66, in Cedar Glen (just east of Lake Arrowhead) by Travis Ikeguchi, a 27-year-old wackjob who was killed by police in a shootout.

In other words, if you hold sensible, moderate opinions about trans choices and lifestyles you’re an accessory to murder. This is why the term “Crazy Town” has caught on these days; because some on the extreme left have completely lost their minds. [End of preface]

Friendo: “’HumanaHumana‘ is very bright, Jeff, and consistently on-point. I was reminded of this yet again in his comments on your post about that sworn enemy of all trans people, Carlos Santana.

“But what really amazes me is the sheer volume of zealots who descend upon you every time you post your anti-woke stuff.

“I can’t get over this. You’d think the ratio of woke to anti-woke would be the opposite of what it is — 20% woke vs. 80% anti-woke, let’s say, or at worst 50/50.

“But nope — it’s more like 90% woke-favoring vs. 10% sensible and grounded in reality.

“Would you have seen this coming as recently as ten years ago?

“Imagine if someone had said the following to you back in 2013: “Jeff, let’s say that in the near future, cross-gendering and cross-dressing becomes a political football. Let’s imagine that in 2023, you wrote a comment in support of a rock star who affirmed the idea that there are only two genders and that basically roosters and roosters and hens are hens.

“If you had to guess, what percentage of your readership would AGREE with your support of this man, and what percentage would CONDEMN it?”

“Wouldn’t you have guessed (as I would have) that at least 80-90% of your readership would come down on the side of common sense? That is, in SUPPORT of the gender binary?”

I’ve just finished reading an IndieWire Emmy-hype interview with The Last of Us co-showrunner Craig Mazin.

Written by Ben Travers, it gets right into the divided reactions to Episode 3, which was titled “Long, Long Time.” Divided, I mean, between heartfelt admiration (although some critics were afraid of going negative for fear of being called homophobes) and serious squeamishness, especially in the matter of Nick “please don’t drop that towel!” Offerman.

Posted on 2.1.23: “So the producers of The Last of Us decided to abandon the basic zombie apocalypse narrative in order to tell a domestic love story (a sad one) between two middle-aged men with hairy chests and beards.

“It’s very well finessed all around (I half-chuckled at the gay strawberries scene until it led to smooching) but I’m afraid I’ve been permanently traumatized by that sex scene in the upstairs queen bed.

“Watching a prelude to the naked-ass Bartlett giving naked-ass Offerman a blowjob…good God in heaven and Jesus H. Christ! I’m not endorsing the IMDB review bombing, but I understand it. I’ll be having nightmares about this, and about images of bear sex in particular.

“I will never, ever derive the slightest amount of anything from watching older bearded guys…I don’t want to think about it.

“I was terrified of watching Offerman and Bartlett…truly and profoundly uncomfortable. And I’m saying this as one of the biggest fans ever of Brokeback Mountain.”

Travers excerpt: “When The Last of Us released its third episode, ‘Long, Long Time,’ reactions surfaced faster than fungi on an infected host.

“Many (including IndieWire) praised the episode for its aching love story, wherein Bill (Nick Offerman), a survivalist holed up in a makeshift fortress, and Frank (Murray Bartlett), a stranger who wanders into one of Bill’s traps, fall in love and — despite their post-apocalyptic environs — build a life together. Seeing that life unfold marks a pivot (or departure) from the original plot, tracking new characters whose story can stand on its own, even when it eventually loops back to our primary leads.

“Not everyone liked it. Today’s day and age of second-screen viewing paired with snap judgements doesn’t always reward atypical TV structure, and ‘Long, Long Time’ faced its share of backlash.

Mazin: “Some people didn’t like Episode 3 because, you know, gay stuff. And then they kind of retroactively try and come up with a [different and inoffensive] reason why. [But] one of the complaints I saw was, ‘Oh, it’s just a filler episode…it doesn’t advance the story.’ And I was like, ‘I think this episode advances the story more than any other episode we have’ — because it’s not plot, it’s character. It’s the letter Bill leaves behind to Joel that powers the rest of the show.”

…a critic I know posted an image that belittled Chris Christie. I wrote the following in response: “Why are you showing hostility to the only Republican candidate who has bluntly labeled Donald Trump a sociopath criminal? Nikki Haley has criticized Trump but none of the others have said in so many words ‘this guy is obviously an unbalanced hooligan and unfit to be president.” And you’re TRASHING him? What’s wrong with you? Christie has, yes, in some ways shown himself to be a transactional opportunist, but what he’s been saying about Lex Luthor is balls-up.”

The last time I heard a film character use the term “balls-up”, by the way, was in John McNaughton‘s Mad Dog and Glory (’93) — David Caruso‘s “Mike” telling Robert DeNiro‘s “Wayne” that he did a brave thing when he came upon a store robbery in progress. Now that I think of it, I don’t recall anyone using this term at all in any context. The screenplay was written by Richard Price — maybe Price coined it.

I’m trying to recall the first time I heard the above line, which has to be one of the most familiar men-in-war cliches of all time.

A voice is telling me it’s either from (a) Howard Hawks‘ Red River (i.e., a spooked Walter Brennan spooked before an Indian attack, or possibly Noah, Berry, Jr. saying the same thing later in the film), or (b) Cy Endfield‘s Zulu (Michael Caine or Stanley Baker spooked by a possible dawn attack by Zulu warriors), or (c) a World War II pre-battle scene (possibly Raoul Walsh‘s Objective, Burma! or Lewis Milestone‘s A Walk in the Sun).

I know for a fact that a version of this line is heard near the end of George Roy Hill‘s The Little Drummer Girl (’84). In a pre-dawn moment Kalil the Palestinian terrorist (Sami Frey) and Charlie the conflicted heroine (Diane Keaton) are sleeping in a remote country cottage that has been surrounded by Mossad special forces who intend to either capture or kill Kalil. Frey suddenly wakes when he realizes that the usual early morning sounds of nature are absent…he says something about not hearing birds or grazing cows. (No, I never got around to watching the 2018 BBC version, in which Keaton’s role was played by Florence Pugh.)

My other favorite line of this type is “I don’t like it when things go too good, and I don’t like it when things go too bad…I like ’em in between.” This line was definitely spoken by Hank Worden‘s “Sims Reeves” character in Red River.

I’ve no intention of seeing Dune: Part Two no matter when it gets released. It had been slated to open on 11.17.63, and before that on 11.3.23, and prior to that on 10.20.23. It’s now scheduled to open on 3.15.24, or roughly seven months hence. Because of the SAG/AFTRA strike. Whatever.

The candidates who helped themselves the most during last night’s Republican debate were Nikki Haley (the most sensible and presidential sounding) and Vivek Ramaswamy. Tbe best of them, Chris Christie, didn’t do as well as he should have, but he said some good things. Haley came off the best.

Two or three times in my teens I ran away from home. Briefly, I mean. My friends and I wanted to see the world by way of hitchhiking adventures during spring vacation or summer holiday.

I never asked for my parents’ permission as it was understood they’d never approve. Everything was always “no, no, too dangerous, too late, too reckless, too rowdy,” etc. Not to mention “you need to buckle down and study harder or your life will be ruined.” My 16 year-old view was “how could my life be any worse?”

I would be grounded when I returned, of course, but at least my friends and I got to be Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady for a few days. Kings of the road.

Anyway it was this impulse that led to a brief episode when I sat in a rural South Carolina jail for a day and a half on suspicion of murder. In the mid ’60s.

A friend and I were hitching in some off-the-highway area west of Charleston. The cops, we later learned, were on the lookout for some guy with longish hair who had killed a middle-aged woman, or something like that. Beatle-length hair was a semi-exotic thing in the rural south back then. My hair was John Lennon-on-the-cover-of-Rubber Soul-styled, and that was all the local fuzz needed. They pulled over, asked where we were headed. One of the cops, adorned in a jacket and tie and a pair of reflector shades, smiled and said he needed to take us in and check our stories out. He called me “Ringo.”

We were booked on a vagrancy charge and put into a two-bunk cell. It was one of those mid-sized jails with eight cells, four on either side of a middle walkway. The lighting was on the darkish side.

There was a young African American dude in the cell across from ours, and he, too, was impressed by my Lennon hair. He was staring and grinning as his hands gripped the bars of his cell. The light was such that his white eyeballs and white teeth stood out as he smiled and sang “she loves you, yeah yeah yeah…she loves you, yeah yeah yeah.”

After 36 hours I somehow managed to get myself verified as non-dangerous and law-abiding without giving the cops my parents’ phone number. Maybe my friend’s father vouched for me. Or a cousin or someone. I forget.

There’s a new Rebecca Keegan THR article about Sofia Coppola‘s Priscilla (A24), and the support she got from Priscilla Presley, whose life with Elvis Presley from age 14 to 24 (barely pubescent girlfriend to wife-mother) is the subject of the film.

Repeating for emphasis, the article says that the Tinkerbell-sized (4’11”) Cailee Spaeny plays Priscilla “from age 14 to age 24.”

In other words Coppola’s film omits the last three years of Elvis and Priscilla’s strained and occasionally tempestuous relationship (they separated in February 1972 and divorced the following year), not to mention Presley’s untimely death in August ’77.

Priscilla wasn’t around at the time, of course, but c’mon…it’s about her long relationship with Presley and Coppola ignores his death, which happened only four years after their 1973 divorce?

To go by Keegan, the film’s 14-year saga happens between Priscilla’s first meeting with Elvis in 1959 at a party in Germany (she was born in May 1945) and sometime in mid 1969, or roughly two years after their Las Vegas wedding on 5.1.67. Exactly nine months later the now-deceased Lisa Marie Presley was born (2.1.68).

A few weeks or months later Priscilla “began taking private dance lessons” while the constantly-catting-around Elvis was filming Live a Little, Love a Little (released on 10.23.68), and she fell heavily for the instructor, identified only as “Mark” in Priscilla’s “Elvis and Me.” They did the nasty but not for long.

Priscilla had another, longer-lasting affair with Afro-haired karate instructor Mike Stone in ’72, but that, apparently, was after her separation from Elvis. There was apparently some back-and-forth, some push-pull variance of feeling. Presley forcefully had sex with Priscilla after he got wind of the Stone affair, or something like that. They did, however, divorce the following year. And yet they were seen holding hands after it was finalized.

The forceful-sex story seems to contradict reports that Elvis declined to have sex with Priscilla after Lisa Marie’s birth. (He apparently had some kind of bizarre hangup about mothers being used goods.) As many Presley biographers have reported, Elvis was totally into jailbait, or young teens starting around the age of 14.

All in all, Coppola’s film bypasses a lot of dramatic potential. It doesn’t even include their separation and divorce…c’mon.

Keegan’s story ends with this paragraoh: “[Last] May, Coppola screened the film for Priscilla. ‘When I saw the movie, I tried to separate myself and live it as if I was just a fan or just someone that’s wanting to see the movie,’ she says. ‘At the end, I actually…I was quite emotional. Only being 14. You look back and you go, ‘Why me? Why am I here? Why am I driving in a limo, going through the gates of Graceland with Elvis?’”

She meant that? Priscilla, 78, knew who Elvis was as well as his many biographers, and she was actually wondering why she was being driven through the gates of Graceland at age 14 or 15 or whenever it was?

It goes without saying that Keegan never mentions the bizarre 18-inch height disparity between Spaeny and Jacob Elordi, who plays Elvis in Coppola’s film.

The real-life Elvis and Priscilla were separated by eight inches of height — Elvis was 6’0″ and Priscilla was (and presumably still is) 5’4″. But in the film, the former Priscilla Beaulieu (later Presley) is played by the 59-inch-tall Spaeny (roughly the size of a ten-year-old) and Elvis is played by the 77-inch-tall Elordi.

Any film starring or costarring Paul Mescal gets an HE demerit. I really, really don’t like this guy, and I’ll repeat what I said yesterday, which is that if I were gay I wouldn’t “do” him on a bet. (Somebody replied that Mescal wouldn’t “do” me either…fine.) I’ve only seen Mescal in Aftersun and I’m already sick of him.

This aside, Garth Davis‘s Foe looks and feels like a bummer. Mescal’s character is “informed by a stranger that he’ll be sent to live on a large space station, and his wife (Saoirse Ronan) will be left in the company of someone else”?…eff that jazz. I know this film is going to put me into a very bad place. Saoirse Ronan clearly gives another first-rate performance…sorry.