After 21 months of scintillating baby vibes within a passive, moody or euphoric, in-and-out dynamic, the suddenly much-more-verbal-and-assertive Sutton actually called me “papa” a few times yesterday and two or three times motioned me to sit down next to her (patting the seat to indicate where I should plant my butt) and reached out and took my hand and led me around several times.

Her moods are rather moody as she’s now in her “terrible two” phase and giving her mother attitude (it began several weeks ago), but from my humble perspective it’s quite a thing when your granddaughter suddenly addresses you by name and urges you to do this or notice that with three- or four-word sentences.

Hundreds of billions have been through this, but it was the first time for this particular horse.

Last night I drove all the way to Pleasantville’s Jacob Burns Film Center (45 minutes) to see Christian Petzold‘s Afire. Then I had to drive back, of course — another 45 for a total travel experience of 90 minutes.

Afire really isn’t worth all that time and gasoline. Because it requires the viewer to spend the entire running time (103 minutes) with one of the emptiest, most self-absorbed, clueless and physically unattractive characters I’ve ever hung with in my moviegoing life.

We’re speaking of Thomas Schubert‘s Leon, a fat, seemingly untalented, self-deluding writer for the first 85 or 90 minutes. And yet following a third-act tragedy that I won’t disclose, Leon suddenly becomes a gifted writer. Quelle surprise!

And so the film, we realize, isn’t as much about pudgy, fucked-up Leon as the difference between spinning your wheels for no discernible reason and writing true and straight about something real. And what improving your game can sometimes involve (i.e., a horrific inferno, the charring of flesh, the blackening of bones, being faced with terrible finality).

So the ending isn’t half bad but the first 85 or 90…God! Immature, pissed off, lost-in-the-proverbial-woods Leon obsessing about the highly attuned, rail-thin Nadja (Paula Beer) and never making any headway because he’s such a fleshy, mopey, self-deluding asshole.

Yesterday’s boilerplate: “While vacationing by the Baltic Sea, writer Leon (Schubert) and photographer Felix (Langston Uibel) are surprised by the presence of Nadja (Beer), a mysterious young woman staying as a guest at Felix’s family’s holiday home. Nadja distracts Leon from finishing his latest novel and, with brutal honesty, forces him to confront his caustic temperament and self-absorption. An encroaching forest fire threatens the group as Nadja and Leon grow closer, and tensions escalate when a handsome lifeguard and Leon’s tight-lipped book editor also arrive.”

If I was a film director I wouldn’t dare make a movie as thin, irritating and lacking in tension as the first two acts of Afire are. I was instantly annoyed and glancing at my watch and feeling sorry for myself, being stuck with this obviously not-very-good film and coping with air-conditioning that was too cold.

All I can say is thank God Schubert never gets naked, and double thank God he and Beers never do the actual deed. (Early on sex happens off-screen between Beer and another guy who’s mainly gay.) That’s not saying stuff doesn’t happen between them, or that their interactions aren’t faintly interesting from a certain perspective.

I was just grateful that Petzold respected the sensibilities of persons like myself. His discretion was gratifying. For he spared me the sight of Leon’s cashew-sized appendage…down on my knees!

In a comment HE reader Canyon Coyote tried to casually normalize beefalo + thin girl relationships, which he says are par for the course in his neck of the woods. I’ve spotted such pairings but c’mon, they were highly unusual before the obesity plague began to encroach roughly 20 years ago.

As I noted yesterday, Schubert is actually a bit heavier than John Belushi in Animal House and not that far from his appearance during his final Chateau Marmont cocaine speedball chapter, and only a few heaping plates of pasta short of obese. Just saying.

During yesterday’s federal court arraignment Donald Trump was asked by Judge Moxila A. Upadhyaya for his name. “Donald J. Trump,” he replied, adding “John!” Upadhyaya then asked for his age. “Seven-seven,” he answered.

If only Trump had said “seven and seven,” his reply would have sounded half-cool. Especially coming from a guy who doesn’t drink. Because he would have been alluding to both his age and the downmarket goombah saloon drink favored by Harvey Keitel (or was it Robert DeNiro?) in Mean Streets — Seagrams 7 and Seven-Up on the rocks.

But “seven-seven” just meant he was uncomfortable with saying “seventy-seven,” which conveyed a certain insecurity or wimpishness.

Yesterday evening I told a journalist friend I was having trouble reaching out to associates of a certain famous guy over a certain matter (never mind what). And so I mentioned a thought about possibly dropping off a sealed note at the famous guy’s home. Couldn’t hurt, right?

Journo friend was mildly alarmed by this. He actually used the word “stalker” in our discussion. Dropping a note in a mailbox is stalking?

The first time I tried the letter-drop approach was in December 1980. I had pitched a Peter O’Toole interview to GQ, and they said “okay, go for it” and ICPR publicist Carl Samrock approved it by, I understood, laying the groundwork. So I flew to London, and O’Toole’s rep said “what interview?…we didn’t agree to this.”

How did I save the day? In journo-friend terminology I “stalked” O”Toole by finding his Hampstead Heath address (Guyon House, 98 Heath St., London NW3 1DP, UK) and dropping off two or three letters (successive) in his mailbox, begging him to grant me a little time so I could fulfill the assignment.

After the second or third letter they agreed. I was given 45 minutes at O’Toole’s home. Downstairs parlor. Our chat happened a day or two after John Lennon was murdered — 12.9.80 or 12.10.80.

I might not have been the most skilled or confident journalist at the time, but he gave me the absolute bare minimum in terms of time and open-heartedness. (I remember thinking as I left his home, “Wow, a bit of a prick but at least we spoke.”) We also chatted during a 1981 press event for My Favorite Year, and once again he wasn’t all that mensch-y.

O’Toole was probably one of those guys who needed a few drinks to really relax. I know he tended to regard conversations as an opportunity to pronounce and speechify.

So no, it wasn’t a great interview, on top of which only half of it was recorded due to some glitch in my ghetto-blaster recording device. I nonetheless managed to throw together a reasonably good article.

HE to journo pally: “Do you sincerely believe that if I were to drop off a letter at [the famous actor’s] building and he were to read it after his lobby concierge guy passed it along…do you sincerely believe that the blood would drain out of the guy’s face upon opening and reading the letter? Do you honestly believe that he would be seized with anxiety and paranoia and might reach for a sedative?”

From HE’s O’Toole obit (12.14.13): “He was a legendary lover of drink, a magnificent royalist, a classical actor for the ages with one of the most beautiful speaking voices ever heard. Fire in the blood and diction to die for. O’Toole was a legendary personality (he could be great on talk shows), the half-mad blonde beauty of Lawrence of Arabia, an inhabitor of King Henry II (twice), the wonderfully spirited fellow who rebounded with The Stunt Man, the voice of the gourmand in Ratatouille…a brilliant man in so many respects.

“In private he could be a bit of a snob (or at least with the occasional journalist) but when he chose to be ‘on’ O’Toole snapped and crackled like lightning.

“He had five peak periods in his career. The first peak was a three-year period (’61 to ’64) starting with his being hired to play T.E. Lawrence and then making the film and exploding onto the scene when Lawrence of Arabia opened in late ’62, and then following up with his best performance ever as King Henry II in Peter Glenville‘s Becket.

“He lost ‘it’ for a period in the mid ’60s but then got it back as Henry II redux in Anthony Harvey‘s The Lion in Winter (’68). Then he returned again with that hilarious performance as a hippie-ish paranoid schizophrenic in The Ruling Class (’72). The fourth rebound happened between ’80 and ’82 with his performances in The Stunt Man, the TV epic Masada and My Favorite Year. The fifth and final rebound happened in the mid aughts with Troy, Venus and his voicing role in Ratatouille.

“I loved who he became when the spirit burned within. When he had great dialogue to run with, when the movie and the director were right and the stars had aligned.

“And I loved his snarliness. Listen to this wondrous passage from Becket. This was a man who knew from the crackle of electrons and who didn’t shrink from the moment or the role or anything else. He never ‘existed’ in the Llewyn Davis sense of the term. I never really knew who he really was deep down but when the moment required it O’Toole was one of the most intensely alive actors of all time.”

Excerpted from Camille Paglia‘s discussion of her book, “Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism“, at the Brooklyn Public Library on 3.16.17:

Before I launch into yet another Exorcist article, the latest of several I’ve posted since HE’s launch nearly 20 years ago, please listen to this Nixon-era testimony from a senior National Theatre usher. It was recorded roughly 49 and 1/2 years ago.

And here we are nearly a half-century later with another Bluray re-issue and David Gordon Green‘s The Exorcist: Believer (10.13.23). I don’t want to know about this stuff. How many times can our faces be sprinkled with the same old holy water?

I own a superb-looking Bluray of The Exorcist (’73). I rewatched it last year on the Sony 65″ OLED, and it was pure heaven. So there’s really no need at all to own the upcoming 4K 50th anniversary Bluray (streeting on 9.19.23). None whatsoever.

“Bygone Sensibilities,” posted on 5.26.15: A few days ago and for no timely reason at all A.V. Club‘s Mike Vanderbilt posted a piece about original reactions to William Friedkin‘s The Exorcist, which opened in December ’73. It reminds you how jaded and cynical the culture has since become. The Exorcist gobsmacked Average Joes like nothing that they’d seen before, but you couldn’t possibly “get” audiences today in the same way. Sensibilities have coarsened. The horror “bar” is so much higher.

But there’s one thing that 21st Century scary movies almost never do, and that’s laying the basic groundwork and hinting at what’s to come, step by step and measure by measure. Audiences are too impatient and ADD to tolerate slow build-ups these days, but Friedkin spent a good 50 to 60 minutes investing in the reality of the Exorcist characters, showing you their decency and values and moments of stress and occasional losses of temper, as well a serious investment in mood, milieu and portents.

In short, the first hour of The Exorcist is wrapped in the veneer of class — a genuinely eerie score, flush production values and the subdued, autumnal tones in Owen Roizman‘s cinematography. It’s only in the second hour that the brutal stuff begins.

The best parts of The Exorcist don’t involve spinning heads or pea-soup vomit. I’m talking about moments in which scary stuff is suggested rather than shown. The stuff you imagine might happen is always spookier.

Such as (1) that prologue moment in Iraq when Father Merrin (Max Von Sydow) is nearly run over by a galloping horse and carriage, and a glimpse of an older woman riding in the carriage suggests a demonic presence; (2) a moment three or four minutes later when Merrin watches two dogs snarling and fighting near an archeological dig; (3) that Washington, D.C. detective (Lee J. Cobb) telling Father Karras (Jason Miller) that the head of the recently deceased director Burke Dennings (Jack McGowran) “was turned completely around”; (4) Karras’s dream sequence about his mother calling for him, and then disappearing into a subway; (5) that moment when Regan MacNeil (Linda Blair) mimics the voice and repeats the exact words of a bum that Karras has recently encountered — “Can you help an old altar boy, father?”

My favorite bit in the whole film is that eerie whoosh-slingshot sound coming from the attic.

Listen again to this senior usher at Westwood’s National Theatre talking about people fainting and having to be brought around by smelling salts, and also to another employee, Cathy Hewitt, talking about the resilience of audiences as they stood in line for hours on end, sometimes even in the rain. They’re describing a culture and a sensibility that seems as quaint and bygone as that opening narration in Orson Welles‘ The Magnificent Ambersons when he talks about how people used to get around by horse and buggy and took their time and never seemed to be in too much of a hurry.