Jeff Wells This, in my view, is Martin Scorsese‘s best short-burst performance since his psychotically jealous husband-slash-voyeur in Taxi Driver (’76). Which we’re not allowed to mention these days because of the ugly racist current.
What happens between Marty and Seth Rogen in The Studio is lightweight and surface-skimmy, of course, but at the same time…well, it has something because it alludes, at least, to betrayal and soullessness.
The only Primetime Emmy nominations that accelerated my blood today were the 13 noms for The Pitt, and particularly a Best Drama Series nom for the show itself as well as a Best Actor in a Drama nom for Noah Wyle, who also exec produces.
I loved the opening episode of Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg‘s The Studio (especially Martin Scorsese‘s cameo performance as himself) as well as “The Oner”, but I lost interest after the obsequious, one-note Ron Howard episode.
I think it’s a totally sick and disgusting joke that the most recently aired The White Lotus season (#3), which was horribly written and utterly devoid of dramatic tension, has been nominated for anything.
I’m down with The Penguin as far as it goes, but I’m also sick to death of Severance, Hacks, The Bear and The Last of Us being nominated for anything, much less winning this or that trophy…get outta my life.
Variety‘s Naman Ramachandran (7.15.25): “Gregg Wallace‘s co-host John Torode has been fired from BBC‘s MasterChef following an investigation that substantiated an allegation [that] he used racist language in the workplace.”
I’ve read that some of Torode’s offending utterances were overheard back in ’18, but maybe there’s more to it.
So what did Torode say exactly? One presumes he wasn’t vulgar or stupid enough to use flagrantly racist language or epithets, but I’d love to know what his verbal offenses actually were.
They were probably remarks that skirted the line between familiar, no-big-deal racial shorthand (i.e., referring to a light-skinned African American as cappuccino or cafe au lait, let’s say) and casual conversation, but who knows?
I would never dream today of saying “spade cat” (it’s a ’60s and ’70s street term), but I was all but burned at the stake a couple of years ago for insisting that back in the day and in the realm of the street “spade cat” was a term of respect. It alluded to a POC who was hip and Zen-cool and subterranean and perhaps even “experienced” in the Jimi Hendrix sense of that term.
Another term I wouldn’t dare verbalize today is “bloods,” but this was also a term of cultural acknowledgment and respect. It certainly wasn’t informed by racist spite. It refers to a close familial fraternity among POCs…trust, recognition, shared heritage, history. Someone told me it came from a phrase in Sly Stone‘s “A Family Affair,” to wit: “blood’s thicker than the mud.”
When you consider some of the ugly racist terminology heard in M.A.S.H., the first two Godfather flicks, Karel Reisz‘s Who’ll Stop The Rain (“hold it there, tamale pie”), Mississippi Burning, several Quentin Tarantino films and even HBO’s The Sopranos, “spade cat” and “bloods” (not that anyone would be dumb enough to use them in any workplace) are decidedly vanilla. But they’d still get you fired.
We all understand that POCs are never admonished or whacked for using terms that belittle or diminish whites (“whitey”, “Wonderbread”, “whitebread”, “honky mofo”, “preppy cracker”, “trailer trash”, “yokel”) — it only works the other way around.
I don’t know when this Robert Redford interview was taped, but he was still very movie-star handsome so let’s figure the mid ’80s. Sometime around The Natural. A good five years before Indecent Proposal, let’s say. Something like that.
I really miss the company of confident, easygoing, good-looking, classic-era movie stars.
Redford: “We had so much fun doing [Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid]…the most fun I’ve ever had making any film. I remember the experience of it coming out, and I remember being surprised by the kind of success it had. I wasn’t prepared for that at all. I think it had to do with more than just ‘guys running out of time’. It had to do wih a certain kind of bonding and a certain kind of connection…a real friendship.”
Last night I watched three or four Twilight Zone episodes from the very first season (early fall 1959 to early ’60). The standout was “Perchance to Dream“, which was basically about Richard Conte grappling with a fear of death and a particular fear of suffering a heart attack during a creepy dream.
The episode first aired on November 27, 1959. Three weeks later Conte, who was nudging 50 at the time, began playing another heart attack victim in the original Ocean’s 11. His character was electrician Tony Bergdorf, who drops dead on the Las Vegas Strip tarmac right after the New Year’s Eve heist goes down.
For the viewing public those heart attacks played like a one-two punch, and impressionistically they stuck. Conte lived, worked and prospered for another 15 years after Ocean’s 11, but he was always the heart-attack guy. And then he keeled over from a real-life heart attack on 4.3.75. He died on 4.15.75 — tax day.
Career-wise, Conte’s richest and luckiest period was the early to late 1940s — Guadalcanal Diary, The Purple Heart, A Bell for Adano, A Walk in the Sun, 13 Rue Madeleine, Call Northside 777, Cry of the City.
Paul McCartney‘s version of “My One and Only Love“, a song that dates back to 1947, is from Kisses on the Bottom, a 2012 album I’ve never even listened to.
The below version of “Bluebird” (during a ’74 Wings concert) is a better-sounding performance than the initially recorded version that appeared on Band on the Run (’73).
The instant I saw the white, woolly-haired Zlatko Buric in Superman, portraying Boravian president Vasil Ghurkos with broad gestures and some kind of thick Slavic accent, I immediately thought “okay, a Vladmir Putin-like despot as well as an ally of Lex Luthor, and clearly up to no good.”
And when Boravian troops are shown invading or otherwise hassling their neighboring country of Jarhanpur, I naturally saw this as a reenactment of Russia invading Ukraine.
But a whole lot of TikTok wokeys are seeing a different analogy. Vasil Ghurkos is not Putin but Israel’s Bibi Netanyahu, they’re saying, and Jarhanpur is not Ukraine but Gaza.
Could I get a show of hands from the HE community about which real-world analogy seems the more plausible?
Ghurkos is obviously too much of a vulgar, intemperate, arm-waving blowhard to serve as a convincing stand-in for Bibi, who is well-known for his non-accented English, trimly cut white hair and conservative, well-tailored business suits. But tell this to the TikTokers.
“Everything was too fast…it was like the actors were trying to force me to believe this movie….I’m sorry, I’m sorry…I never cringed so hard…not the movie that everyone said it was.”
This guy (supasilenz) knows.
@supasilenz_ Honest Superman Movie review …and yeah guys idk bout that. I was waiting for this movie to be at least decent and im jus not a fan . Tiktok over hyped this way too much #fyp #foryoupage #foryou #superman #movie #honest #supermanmovie #moviereview ♬ Classic classical gymnopedie solo piano(1034554) – Lyrebirds music
Burton’s Camelot dancing begins around the five-minute mark.
Second iime, “Carol Burnett Experience”:
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I wish I could find my 46-year-old review of Francois Truffaut‘s Love on the Run. I seem to recall not being much of a fan, largely because I thought the film depended on too many Antoine Doinel flashbacks, reaching all the way back to The 400 Blows (’59).
Jean Pierre Leaud, still with us at age 80, was 34 during filming.
The director of a private school that Leaud attended in the eighth grade wrote the following to Truffaut: “I regret to inform you that Jean-Pierre is more and more unmanageable. Indifference, arrogance, permanent defiance, lack of discipline in all its forms. He has twice been caught leafing through pornographic pictures in the dorm. He is developing more and more into an emotionally disturbed case.”
That was me! At age 12 or 13 I was also rebellious, “emotionally disturbed” and leafing through nudie magazines.
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James Gunn‘s Superman is about so much stuff — big jolts, goofing off, silliness, monsters, emptiness, jerking off, twists and turns, urban destruction, social media trashings, the basically rancid nature of Average Joes and Janes — that it’s not really about anything except sadism…sadism directed at David Corenswet‘s Man of Vulnerability, and sadism directed at the audience.
The damn thing runs 129 minutes, and at least 80% or 85% — call it 110 minutes — of this crazy-ass, scatterbrained, no-holds-barred exercise in aggressive, over-visualized and sound-slammed fuckyou-ism (comic-book geeks will be delighted but people with taste will be rolling in nausea)…this effing film is largely about Superman getting his ass whupped, and that makes it not just repetitive and tiresome but infuriating after the first 45 or so.
Note to a friend: “I realize that no major critic wants to shit on comic-book movies — light scolding is permitted, but no dumping on them — because hard pans of such films tend to make critics sound mean-spirited, old-fogeyish and out of touch. And I’m not saying Superman doesn’t have a diseased scheme of its own, a kind or cancer-ridden, audience-despising worldview, but how in the world could anyone give this thing a pass?”
While watching I was muttering to myself “this film is fucking evil” but if I actually write this — if I literally call it a Superman flick with a 666 tattoed on its neck — the HE commentariat will say I’m mean-spirited, old-fogeyish and out of touch.
As noted, it’s mostly about Corenswet getting the shit beat out of him….pounded, bloodied, gut-slammed, bone-crunched, Kryptonited, cancelled, jailed, all but killed, goaded, derided, doubted, made to scream and howl ad nauseum. It’s Gunn’s intention, obviously, to make Superman into a whiny little bitch…to show him suffering, wincing, screaming, weeping, moaning, wailing.
HE to Gunn in my fifth row seat: “Will you fucking ease up on this shit? There’s more to life than just suffering.”
Corenswet is beaten more savagely, continuously and relentlessly in this thing than Jim Caviezel was beaten and bloodied in Mel Gibson‘s The Passion of the Christ. And that’s saying something.
Who wants to watch a once-heroic, true-blue figure (i.e., heroic back in the old Chris Reeve era) get bashed and bruised and pounded over and over and over and over and over and over?
And how, in the opening scene, does Corenswet manage to get bruised and bloodied in the first place? How does that work exactly? Yeah, he’s “human” in a certain emotionally vulnerable sense, but he’s also Superman.
And what’s with Krypto the attack dog? Why is he even in this thing? Krypto the white poodle presumably arrived from Krypton along with the infant Superman, so that would make him 30 years old or a really old fart in dog years…roughly 136.
I would really hate to jump into the churning sizzling brainpan of James Gunn and splash around. The man has no discipline, no soul, no shrewdness, no sense of restraint……he’s so geeked up and CG-pretzel twisted that he’s become a kind of mad fiend or gila monster.
If by clapping my hands three times I could eradicate James Gunn-ism from the face of the earth and hurl it into an eternal flaming hellscape, I would clap my hands three times.
Superman deals so much story at such a whooshing, whizbang pace that I was choking on it. I was swatting at the plot turns like flies.
“I don’t give a shit about any of this,” I was muttering. “Fuck all these people, all these meta-folks with their bullshit costumes and whatnot. I don’t want or need this shit in my life. And I pretty much hated the main characters. If Rachel Brosnahan‘s Lois Lane had been killed, I wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow….fine! The only character I really didn’t want to see killed, Corenswet aside, was Edi Gathegi‘s Mister Terrific. I would haver been totally fine if Skyler Gisondo‘s Jimmy Olden has been killed…no sweat at all.”
The fact that Gisondo looks like a young Bruno Kirby (he has a cucumber-sized nose) makes the idea of Sara Sampaio‘s Eve Teschmacher having a crush on him seem ridiculous. Women who look like Sampaio never give guys with big honkers the time of day.
I would have been totally at peace if every last person in Metropolis had been drowned or burned or squashed to death. Okay, except for a pretty woman who is saved by Superman from being crushed by a falling building. I don’t know her name but she’s attractive.
Nathan Fillon‘s Green Lantern wears the worst, dumbest-looking blonde wig every worn by any actor in the history of motion pictures.
I recognized the played-Leonard-Bernstein guy in a cameo, of course; ditto Angela Sarafyan from Westworld.
“A tragicomic story about the impossibility of a couple’s life….neither a pornographic film, nor a sociological exposé, nor a moral lesson.” — Frank Ripploh on Taxi Zum Klo.
HE to Ripploh: Okay, yeah but not really. It’s really about dickdickdickdickdickdickdickdickdickdickdickdickdickdick…about a gay school teacher who loves cruising around West Berlin during that brief window of limitless sexual opportunity that gay men enjoyed in the mid to late ’70s before AIDS came along and brought all kinds of devastation.
The fact that Manhatan’s only theatrical boooking of the 4K restoration or Taxi Zum Klo is at the Metrograph…that should tell you something. If you’re not familiar with hardcore gay cinema, perhaps you should think twice.
I saw Taxi Zum Kmlo 44 years ago at the N.Y. Film Festival, and all I could say back then was “well, it’s certainly amiable and good humored, and it’s definitely a groundbreaker in terms of watching guys do each other…later.”
Apparently there actually is an outfit called Anus Films (the logo is obviously a riff on the one for Janus Films), and apparently it really does have something to do with Taxi Zum Klo, though I know not what. Okay, maybe it’s a put-on but it had me fooled.
Posted on 8.31.09: “As long as we’re talking no-nos and ‘thanks but no thanks’, I don’t really want to see guys in whatever kind of shape doing each other. I know that all modern cineastes are obliged to politely sit through gay sex scenes, but doing so requires a certain amount of grimming up. Sorry, but this stuff (Salo, Taxi Zum Klo) makes me squirm in my seat. And I’m allowed to feel and say this without anyone calling me this, that or the other thing. I know the p.c. things I’m supposed to say. I know how to play the game and blah-blah my way through a discussion of films of this type. But if you can’t man up and say, ‘Well, this is how I really feel about this,’ then what good are you, Jimmy Dick?”