The most interesting aspects of Louise Fletcher's performance as Nurse Ratched in Milos Forman's One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, which I honestly never liked all that much (and this is from a guy who played Dr. Spivey in a Connecticut stage version of Ken Kesey's play): (1) Instead of being butch-bossy, she was subdued and icy; (2) the combination of those hazel eyes and that slightly opened mouth had a macabre effect; (c) the 1940s Ann Sheridan hair style said more about Ratched than anything she said or did in that film.
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Last night I ran into an old friend who’s no longer a friend because he’s more or less turned into a wokester fanatic. Yes, the viral insanity has even permeated the exurban, tree-shrouded hamlet where I now hang my hat. I won’t name names but the words between us were (mostly on his end) awful.
It happened inside Wilton’s Village Market sometime around dinner hour, and it started when I saw him poking around the exotic cheese section. He was wearing jeans, a T-shirt, a fall jacket, a smallish hat and a black mask. No point in ducking the guy so I walked over and offered a greeting. Small talk followed.
Then I asked what was up with the mask, and stated in moderate but plain terms that the pandemic is over, and then asked how many booster shots he’d had, etc. I told him I’ve had four, and that I succumbed to the Omicron virus late last year. One of the reasons he wears a mask, he said, was to wind up people like me. And then we were off to the races.
He began ranting about the anti-woke assholes who refused to be vaccinated last year, and I agreed, I said, that the anti-vaxxers didn’t help matters at all, especially those who refused to mask up. Then he expanded the topic to include all anti-woke people of whatever persuasion, and I said, “Well, that’s me…I’m an anti-wokester because of the shrill lunatic attitudes of the woke left.”
And then the subject drifted over to my deluded enemies in the #MeToo congregation, which mainly stems from that unfortunate March ’21 episode in which I posted a friend’s Oscar-related opinion about how the horrific Atlanta massage parlor shootings (which the left tried to characterize as a racial hate crime until the facts began to dispute that) might blow favoring winds in the direction of Chloe Zhao.
I took the sentence-long comment down after a brief Twitter flare-up, but the haters were on a rampage and before you knew it I was being blamed for everything including the burning of the Reichstag, even though I’d actually done zip. As in Z-I-P. I had written dead fucking nothing.
Then he looked me in the eye and said I deserved all the rain that had fallen on my head since that episode, and said — this was classic — that I was just as deplorable of a human being as Harvey Weinstein. I gulped. “You can’t be saying that…you can’t be,” I replied. But he was. He’s King Lear with three Millennial daughters, you see, and they’re all wokesters and he feels he owes them his allegiance. So we’d basically entered cuckoo-bird territory.
I’ve known this guy since high school, and have regarded him for decades as one of the best and brightest, a guy whose views and judgments I’ve always felt were wise and on-target…I could have never imagined that this guy, of all people, would look me in the eye and essentially call me a piece of shit who deserved to die.
It was like speaking to Tom Courtenay’s “Strelnikov” character in Dr. Zhivago during that train-car scene with Omar Sharif. It was as if this former friend had been taken over by a woke pod person from Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Decades of trust and affection and mutual respect, and this guy had chucked it all over a moronic woke-vs.-anti-woke, Hatfield vs. McCoys blood feud.
I wrote him a couple of hours later. “You’re aware that 70-plus years ago a hardcore cabal of allegedly patriotic rightwing Americans devoted themselves to punishing people who’d sympathized with Communism in the ‘30s,” I said. “Careers and lives ruined because righties were trying to purify America and cleanse it of Communism.
“Has it occurred to you and your fanatical spawn that you’re trying to do exactly the same thing now? You and your woke Robespierres are looking to cleanse the country of the wily anti-woke pathan. You’re doing the same damn thing, man. And you know what? People hate who you are, and what you’re about. I just can’t believe that you’ve turned into a woke seed pod. It’s scary.”
I whined about this supermarket trauma to a friend, and the friend decided to write Strelnikov and share a few thoughts.
At least Christopher Walken‘s Dwayne, the brother of Diane Keaton‘s Annie Hall in Woody Allen‘s same titled film, was polite about it. Before sharing his shattered glass, car-crash death fantasy, he asked Alvy Singer, the stand-up comedian played by Allen, if he could confess something. By sitting down Alvy was saying “sure, Dwayne…shoot.”
If I’d been Alvy I wouldn’t have said “excuse me, Dwayne, but I have to be back on planet earth.” I would have said that I’ve also channeled a few brief death fantasies, and they’re not that big of a deal (or they don’t need to be that big of a deal) because they’re mainly about feelings of drifting and helplessness and career panic.
These feelings fester inside lots of young guys, i would have said, and especially those who are feeling pressured by society or parents or their own sense of guilt to get out there and achieve something. It’s just a signal, Dwayne, that you need to face whatever your challenge may be head-on. Life can be terrifying, but it’s even worse if you don’t man up and do something about what’s rattling you.
In short, Dwayne, you need to move out of your parents’ home and start fending for yourself. You need to start wrestling with the rough-and-tumble of life rather than hiding behind secure walls.
In my mid 20s I twice experienced a death dream that wasn’t too different from Dwayne’s. I was inside a commercial jet that had lost power, and it was tumbling downward through the clouds, going faster and faster. I could hear the fuselage skeleton groaning and cracking as the plane fell. I was a dead man. A flaming inferno death was only 25 or 30 seconds away, if that. And then I’d wake up.
In a comment thread about Ken Burns', Lynn Novick and Sara Botstein's The U.S. and the Holocaust (PBS), the six-hour doc about the prevalence of anti-Semitism in this country during the 1930s and ’40s, HE comment guy "bentrane" explained something:
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I’ve seen two-thirds of The U.S. and the Holocaust, the six-hour Ken Burns doc that focuses on anti-Semitism in this country during the 1930s and ’40s. It’s a stunning indictment of the way this country used to be, or certainly the way it used to think. And of course, it stirs thoughts of other forms of racial and ethnic prejudice that have permeated U.S. society since the Eisenhower era. I can honestly say that these four hours made me more fully aware of the degree of heartlessness in this country between 75 and 90 years ago. You sit there and listen to Peter Coyote‘s narration and you just feel more and more numb and forlorn. I’ll watch Part 3 sometime this weekend.
With The Association's "Cherish" being used prominently in the The Greatest Beer Run Ever, I'm reminded of how this mid-to-late '60s pop group didn't fit the mold. '60s pop groups had to have reasonably good-looking guys -- that was the standard set by the Beatles, Herman's Hermits, The Dave Clark Five, etc.
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Ask any half-thoughtful person if they feel that the post-#MeToo reputations of Harvey Weinstein and Woody Allen are roughly analogous, and they'll most likely say "hardly...a single, highly disputable allegation is a far cry from several credible accusations of sexual assault and rape." The fact is that the association persists only in the minds of certain journalists. Claudia Eller's just-posted Variety interview with Cannes Film Festival jury president Cate Blanchett is a case in point.
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In mid 1967, an under-educated, under-achieving alcoholic moron (Zac Efron‘s “Chickie” Donohue) from a Manhattan working-class neighborhood foolishly decides to use his Merchant Marine credentials to travel to war-engulfed Vietnam in order to give beer hugs to his military-serving buddies, but gradually has his eyes opened to the real-life horror and particularly the bullshit that LBJ and General Westmoreland have been leaning upon to justify it.
At the end he returns to his home in Inwood, New York, with a somewhat more mature attitude — “less drinking and more thinking.”
Will someone please tell me what’s so awful about a movie that tells that more or less fact-based story? Particularly if the film in question delivers decent performances, reasonably convincing dialogue, tight pacing, semi-realistic depictions of combat and one absolutely killer line of dialogue?
Here it is: Somewhere in a jungle hell-hole Donohue is about to leave a landing zone on a helicopter, and one of his anxious and exhausted G.I. buddies is regarding him with concern. A fellow grunt notices and says, “You don’t have to worry about him. Every once in a while, you’ll run into someone who’s too dumb to get killed.”
Yes, I’ve finally seen Peter Farrelly‘s The Greatest Beer Run Ever (Apple, streaming on 9.30) and it’s a tolerable sit and sometimes better than that. And there’s absolutely no question in my mind that the current aggregate ratings — 44% Rotten Tomatoes, 35% Metacritic — have been motivated by politics and score-settling. For nearly four years the arch-backed film critic cabal has been dying to punish Farrelly for Green Book having won the Best Picture Oscar three and a half years ago, and now they’re sticking it to him with relish, and to Beer Run for fun.
I’m saying this because I know (i.e., not guessing) that in a fair and just world, Beer Run would be averaging so-so or not-bad scores. Scores that say “this movie has a couple of problems, okay, but not lethal ones…it may not be good enough to be raved about, but it’s a decent try and a moderately passable in-and-outer. In HE’s mind it’s a solid ground-rule double, and in baseball that’s a totally respectable thing. You didn’t whiff or pop out, and you’re in a position to score if the next guy slams a single. But in movies if you don’t hit a homer or a triple, you’ve somehow failed.
A majority of critics are saying Farrelly has struck out or been thrown out at first, and they’re just not being fair or honest. They’re basically saying “because this film isn’t as authentic as it could have been in some respects, and because it isn’t political-minded in a way that we’d prefer and because of two or three aesthetic choices that we disapprove of, and because most of us have been dying to take Farrelly down anyway…for all these reasons we’re going to do our best to kill Beer Run.
“Some of you will pay to see it and find it a decent enough thing, and we don’t care about that. We’re writing from within the social-political membrane of an elite cabal and that’s all your going to get from us…elite cabal viewpoints.”
This is the value of myself and Hollywood Elsewhere — a site that occasionally has the character and the courage to say that a film achieving a level of ground-rule double accomplishment is nothing to be ashamed of, and is certainly nothing to trash or urinate upon. The Greatest Beer Run is what it is, and I know it’s a decent (and sometimes better-than-decent) thing as far as it goes.
I absolutely approved of the central arc or journey of the story, which I summarized above. And yet I gradually understood more and more that, to paraphrase Richard Masur in Risky Business, it’s not quite good enough to be called Ivy League. It might’ve worked but it didn’t quite get there. Perhaps the scope was too vast — a spotty but sprawling Apocalypse Now-ish war flick with a civilian perspective — and it simply exceeded Farrelly’s grasp. Which is nothing to be ashamed of as he clearly tried like hell. And like I’ve said two or three times, a few portions hit the mark, and now and then it surprises you.
I was definitely surprised by Farrelly’s decision to play “Cherish,” the 1966 Association song, on the soundtrack as a suspected Vietcong collaborator is brutally murdered. The song has been set up earlier in the film when Chickie tells his barroom buds that he really likes it, but at the same time a viewer will have to admit that “Cherish” is one hell of a counterpoint, given what’s being depicted.
Prior to its Toronto Film Festival debut, Apple’s plan for Peter Farrelly’s The Greatest Beer Run Ever (Apple) was to open theatrically on Friday, 9.30 and begin streaming a week later (10.7). But just before it got hammered by Toronto critics, Apple moved everything up a week.
Curious as it may seem, Beer Run is opening today in New York but without an all-media screening preceding this booking. (Which never happens.) And yet Apple has arranged for an all-media Manhattan screening on Thursday, 9.29 — one day before the Apple streaming begins.
Theatrical bookings of Beer Run are also happening today in Los Angeles and Dallas.
For what it’s worth, I’ve never in my life heard of an all-media screening that happens a week after a film has opened theatrically. Or, for that matter, only a day before it begins streaming.
Intrigued, I’m on my way into the city to catch a 5 pm screening of Beer Run at the Union Square Regal. Yes, right now.
We all understand a lot of critics had it in for Peter and this movie before they saw it. They hated Green Book four years ago, and now they’re delivering payback for it having won the Best Picture Oscar. Whatever the actual merits of Beer Run, these folks were locked into hate mode.
The Wikipedia age still says Beer Run “will be released in select theaters and on Apple TV+ on September 30, 2022.” Time for an update!
Sasha Stone on Bardo: “In my opinion, Bardo [will probably] work best as a stoner movie, like 2001 was once upon a time. Get baked, trip out. I think if you are coming from the perspective of a film critic and you’re trying to string together some sort of plot or meaning you will find fault with the film itself, rather than shifting your perspective ever so slightly and making an effort to see where Inarritu is coming from. I don’t know, just a suggestion.”
From “Bardo Certainly Swings For The Fences,” posted on 9.3.22:
The release of Ignite Films’ 4K UHD Bluray restoration of William Cameron Menzies‘ Invaders From Mars (’53) has been delayed. It was announced months ago that the loaded Mars package would ship on Monday, 9.26, or four days hence. I don’t know what may have caused the delay, nor have I been told what the new release date is. One presumes it won’t be too far in the future.
Vietnam veteran John Kerry, best known as Barack Obama‘s Secretary of State (2013 to 2017), a Massachusetts U.S. Senator from ’85 through ’13 and Democratic nominee for President in ’04, has weighed in on The Greatest Beer Run Ever (Apple, 9.30) in the pages of the Boston Globe.
For what it’s worth, this may be the first time Kerry has publicly opined on a motion picture…ever.
As Peter Farrelly’s currently playing film is one of the first Hollywood movies set entirely during the Vietnam War in many many years, Kerry saw Beer Run early and took an immediate liking. He’s actually seen it twice, I’m told.
Kerry: “[I’m] reminded of the story of a forgotten Marine in the iconic photo of the flag-raisers over Iwo Jima, the one with his back to the camera. He had been killed in action the very next day, and no one ever told this young man’s grieving mother that her son was the one leaning over and planting the pole on the top of Mount Suribachi. Not until a down-on-his-luck, unhappy Ira Hayes shook himself upright, hitchhiked from Arizona to Texas, found his buddy’s mother and informed her that her son was a great man who’d never be forgotten.
“Like Chickie Donohue’s gesture to the mother of his fallen friend, these are wartime reminders of bonds that endure beyond the battlefield.
“The Greatest Beer Run Ever doesn’t challenge viewers like Oliver Stone’s Platoon or Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. It doesn’t have to do that. Its power is bringing to life people and places that anyone who has served in uniform, or grown up in a neighborhood or community defined by loyalty and friendship can relate to — and reminding us that we often can rediscover those bonds in the hardest of circumstances.
“That was one of the realities of Vietnam, where young men put their lives in each other’s hands, and, regardless of where they came from or where they were headed, created lifelong ties as enduring as any built on the streets of Chickie’s Inwood. For those of us of the Vietnam generation, the film is a poignant reminder that, whatever we did in that time and whatever our political perspective, how we experienced Vietnam is inextricably intertwined with who we experienced it with.
“But for all of us, the film can serve as a reminder that even in times of great division and conflict, hopefully we can find common ground; if not, at least we can find our common humanity. Learning that lesson hopefully does not demand that we travel thousands of miles from home as Chickie had to, but that we can find that spirit right here at home, again.”
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