On a 2001 Charlie Rose Show about Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures, Christiane Kubrick was asked to define a certain personality trait or mental attitude that genius-level filmmakers seem to share in common. She said this is unknowable and therein lies the fascination.

HE says “holdupski.” HE defines that mindset as an educated “fuck it” thing…mindful and respectful of artistic history and precedent, but not especially intimidated by same…an attitude that says “okay, these other filmmakers did it this or that way and that’s fine, but I’m here now and this is my film so fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.”

In a phrase, a genius artist is often possessed of a certain kind of reverent irreverence.

Every major-league director I’ve spoken with in person over the decades (and we’re talking quite a few) shares this trait.

While watching this I was also struck by how radiantly young the 59 year-old Martin Scorsese looked during this taping, certainly compared to now. Guys in their 50s and even their early 60s can look really great if they’ve watched their diets and haven’t done too many drugs in their youth. And it’s believed that Scorsese, remember, was a total cokehead in the mid ’70s so he came out of that dungeon without too many bruises.

Posted on 8.7.19: “Speaking as an X-factor white guy from a middle-class New Jersey and Connecticut upbringing, I don’t feel repelled or disgusted by my Anglo-Saxon heritage and family history.

“I deeply regret the cruelty visited upon immigrants and various cultures of color by whites, naturally, but the fact that racist or tribal attitudes were common throughout most of the 20th, 19th and 18th Centuries in this country and for centuries earlier in Europe, the Middle East and even Africa doesn’t mean that white people (more particularly my parents, grandparents and great-grandparents, reaching back to the mid 1800s) were inherently evil.

“By current standards my ancestors may seem insufficiently evolved, agreed, but they were born into a certain culture and were dealt certain cards, and most carried the weight as best they could. They weren’t born with hooves, tails and horns on their heads.

“Nor do I feel that elemental decency is absent among the majority of white people today. Okay, among middle to upper-middle-class coastals.

I feel profoundly repelled by the attitudes of your backwater Trump supporters, of course, but they are not me or my own. I come from a family of “good”, well-educated, imperfect people who had their occasional issues (including alcoholism) but believed in hard work, discipline, spring cleaning, ironing their own shirts and trimming the hedges and mowing the lawn on Saturday afternoons, and who exuded decency and compassion for the most part.”

Updated: I am not the devil’s spawn, and neither are my two sons and certainly not my granddaughter. I’ve witnessed and dealt with ignorant behavior all my life, but I’ve never bought into the idea of Anglo-Saxon culture being inherently evil. Please.

Frank Thring’s Pontius Pilate by way of Gore Vidal: “Where there is great striving, great government or power, even great feeling or compassion, error also is great. We progress and mature by fault. Perfect freedom has no existence. The grown man knows the world he lives in.”

This 9.17.22 video, shot by “Year Zero with Wesley Yang“, is an argument about gender ideology between Billboard Chris (the billboard says “children cannot consent to puberty blockers“) and hyper Zoomer girl with the white glasses. It could be an interesting discussion if you could hear more of what they’re saying, but the jet planes keep roaring overhead. I’m with Billboard Chris…sorry.

It’s no surprise that Steven Spielberg‘s The Fabelmans has nabbed the Toronto International Film Festival’s People’s Choice award, given the glowing reviews and all. The People’s Choice award is a strong indicator of across-the-board appeal. Then again previous winners have included Belfast, Jojo Rabbit, Room, The Imitation Game, Precious, etc. So you never really know.

Imagine if the beloved Martin Scorsese had announced that Killers of the Flower Moon will be his last film and that he’ll henceforth he’d be devoting himself to novel-writing. Or if, God forbid, James Cameron or Kathryn Bigelow or Alexander Payne or Guillermo del Toro were to announce the same.

Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, trust me, would almost certainly collect a few admiring quotes from colleagues while lamenting the eclipse of a great and prodigious talent. Their stories would also list some of his or her more luminous career highlights.

So what did the trades publish in response to Woody Allen’s announcement that he’ll be retiring from filmmaking after he completes work on his 50th film, a Paris-based dramedy that’s allegedly in the vein of Match Point? They mainly recited police-blotter stuff — dry, flat summaries of how Allen’s career has been diminished in the eyes of wokesters and the mainstream press over the past few years due to Dylan Farrow‘s account of what allegedly happened on 8.4.92 with no logical counter-views, and how Amazon cut him loose, his autobiography was dropped by Hachette and he’s had to rely on European financing, etc.

In so doing Variety and The Hollywood Reporter have effectively said the following: (a) “Well, it’s not surprising that Allen is finally throwing in the towel,” (b) “We can’t honestly say that we’re distraught over this news” and (c) “Maybe it’s not such a bad idea that Allen goes away and stays away, considering his current reputation.”

On 7.28.22 Indiewire‘s Christian Zilko and Ryan Lattanzio reported that Allen had told Alec Baldwin that he was thinking of retiring, and they posted the same kind of chilly summary.

HE to Variety‘s Anna Marie de la Fuente, The Hollywood Reporter‘s Ryan Gajewski, the Indiewire team and their editors (along with all the others who’ve posted similar remarks): “No offense, guys, but you’re showing disrespect in a way that strikes most of us as odious and repellent. You honestly make me want to throw up.

“Allen is incontestably a great filmmaker — a man of considerable genius and relentless innovative creativity, a guy whose output has enhanced the quality and worldliness of American cinema over the last 55 years, and whose sterling reputation as a filmmaker will be remembered and cherished long after the authors and editors of these repulsive trade articles will have died and been forgotten.

“This is a man, remember, who made 15 great or near-great films over a 45-year period (starting in the mid ’70s and ending in the early 20teens) — Annie Hall, Interiors, Manhattan, Stardust Memories, Zelig, Broadway Danny Rose, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Hannah and Her Sisters, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Husbands and Wives, Bullets Over Broadway, Mighty Aphrodite, Match Point, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Midnight in Paris (15).

Not to mention 18 others that most of us regard as sturdy and respectable — What’s Up, Tiger Lily?, Take the Money and Run, Bananas, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, Sleeper, Love and Death, A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, Radio Days, Another Woman, Alice, Everyone Says I Love You, Deconstructing Harry, Celebrity, Sweet and Lowdown, Small Time Crooks, Melinda and Melinda, Irrational Man, Blue Jasmine.

Only one other world-class director has cranked out as many first-rate films over a period that lasted over half a century — Alfred Hitchcock.

How dare you dismiss this man with your implied derision and disdain? Do you understand that in the greater scheme of things Allen is a man of considerable wit and vision and artistic consequence and that you and yours, comparatively speaking, are insects?

HE to Blonde spoiler whiners: This post discusses the August 1962 death of Marilyn Monroe, which is what Andrew Dominik‘s Blonde (Netflix streaming, 9.28.22) ends with.

HE to friendo #1: “Yesterday I slogged my way through Andrew Dominik‘s Blonde, which I regard as artful torture porn. And then I happened upon a Matt Lynch tweet that analogized Blonde and a landmark 1988 film, and the instant I read it I said ‘yes!'”

“I’m thinking not just of the incessant dismissals and degradations and spiritual uncertainties, but the anguished and agonized relationship between the main protagonist and the elusive ‘father.’

“Just as Willem Dafoe sips a goblet of sacramental wine before submitting to his final fate, Norma Jean swallows alcohol and barbiturates before her final episode of passion at her Fifth Helena Drive abode (the delivery man, the fuzzy tiger, the shattering note). And like Dafoe’s Jesus, a spectral Marilyn smiles and separates from death, and greets the immortality that she still enjoys today a la Andrew Dominik.”

Friendo #1 to HE: “That’s a brilliant interpretation. Celebrity is in its own way like religion. It still is. The fandoms online are like churches. Which says more about us than it does Marilyn. Lynch is saying we treat her like a kind of deity. Very smart. The myth is the truth.”

Friendo #2 to HE: “Well, there’s no doubt that she was a supreme martyr of 20th-century feminine glory and trauma. But the Jesus comparison feels a little abstract to me. What I think you’re possibly leaving out is that Blonde, dark as it is, is not torture porn. It’s a movie that’s trying to capture who Marilyn Monroe really was.”

HE to Friendo #2: “I really do think it’s primarily torture porn of an artful nature. Yes, it does capture who Monroe really was, but at what a price! Yes, it’s about the MYTH, or precisely THE TRAGIC but TRANSCENDENT MYTH. Marilyn suffered for our sins, but she’s lived eternally ever since and, in an underlined and undeniable sense, more splendidly and blessedly over the last 60 years than she did in her own biological life span, which lasted only a mere 36 years.

“The last thing Marilyn does, after dying, is become a happy ghost…she separates from her body as she smiles delightedly at the camera. As if to say, ‘The torment is finally over, and now the eternally blessed myth takes over, and I will revel in the glory of that myth for ever and ever.’” Or, if you will, “It is accomplished.”

Friendo #2 to HE: “That’s what I liked about Blonde. It’s probably the best account of what was truly occurring inside Monroe’s mind. Other depictions have failed in trying to convey the inner torture she was feeling.”

HE to Friendo #2: “Oh, it was torture, all right!”

Friendo #2 to HE: “I think it’s torture psychodrama. That’s what’s fascinating about it. She’s one of the most important artists of the 20th century, and I found the spectacle of what was happening inside her quite gripping. The cornerstone of her trauma, remember, isn’t all the men who exploited or didn’t understand her. It was her insanely abusive upbringing. It’s boring to say but that, in a nutshell, is why she was so fucked up.”

HE to Friendo #2: “Agreed. The mother and the father were demonic.”

Friendo #2 to HE: “Not just because the Hollywood system was patriarchal and exploitative and oppressive. But because the Hollywood system crumpled this already broken person.”

HE to Friendo #2: “After meeting and hanging with Montgomery Clift, Monroe told a friend ‘I’ve just met someone who might be as fucked up as I am, and maybe more so.'”

Friendo #2 to HE: “I don’t see how all of that, portrayed truthfully and with a fair degree of artfulness (although there are a number of things in the film I didn’t care for), adds up to ‘torture porn.'”

HE to Friendo #2: “Artful torture porn.”

Friendo #2 to HE: “And the bottom line is — this is the grand paradox the movie captures — Marilyn’s search for ‘daddy’ became the cornerstone of her art.”

HE to Friendo #2: “Good point. Especially the squinting, Arthur Miller-like daddy figure she speaks of in Some Like It Hot. Not to mention Clark Gable (The Misfits), Louis Calhern (The Asphalt Jungle), George Sanders (All About Eve), Laurence Olivier (The Prince and the Showgirl), and even, in a stretch, Charles Coburn and Cary Grant in Monkey Business.”