Chris Nashawaty‘s “The Future Was Now: Madmen, Mavericks, and the Epic Sci-Fi Summer of 1982” celebrates eight landmark films that opened 42 years ago — Conan the Barbarian, The Road Warrior, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Poltergeist, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Blade Runner, The Thing and Tron.

But only three of these were truly stellar and earthshaking — E.T, The Road Warrior and Blade Runner. The other five were noteworthy but problematic here and there.

Poltergeist was pretty good but not classic. I actually sorta kinda disliked The Thing (I prefer the 1951 Howard Hawks version to John Carpenter’s) and Tron. Ricardo Montalban was great in The Wrath of Khan but otherwise calm down.

I caught Aliens at the big Los Angeles all-media screening, which happened eight or nine days before the 7.18.86 opening. I had such a great time at the all-media that I went a second time at Westwood’s Avco on Wilshire Blvd. — the same theatre where Tarantino and his Video Archives pallies were. The all-media crowd was on fire, but the commercial screening (I attended an early evening show) was even better, more reactive, more roof-lifting.

Another feminized, woked-up, Kathy Kennedy-endorsed ruination of the original Star Wars entertainment brand has gone down in flames…thank the Lord!

Cailee Spaeny says “horror” three times in this interview clip, but says it correctly only once (i.e., the first time). The second and third time she says ‘WHORE.”

Horror is a two-syllable word that Marlon Brando had no trouble pronouncing correctly in Apocalypse Now (“The horror…the horror”) but Spaeny mouths a one-syllable version. When Spaeny said it the second time I thought she’d made a simple grammatical mistake, which we all do from time to time, but then she said it again.

Saying “horror” clearly is obviously not rocket science. You emphasize the first syllable but then you tell the back of your tongue to follow up with the second syllable, and Spaeny blows it twice.

Ask any RADA graduate to pronounce “horror” and they’ll nail it without effort. James Whale said it correctly. Ditto Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Val Lewton, Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee. Even Lon Chaney, Jr. said it correctly. But Spaeny can’t get there.

This is called the degradation of the King’s English by an Amurrican. This is called a lack of an exacting education. This is called a shopping mall way of speaking. This is basically a Millennial-Zoomer disease.

So Pedro Almodovar‘s The Room Next Door (Sony Pictures ClassicS, 12.20) costars Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, but with a few supporting characters.

Why, then, does it feel like a two-hander? It seems to be about Swinton’s war-correspondent character winding down toward finality. Could it be Pedro’s version of Wim Wenders‘ Lightning Over Water?

Swinton has described the film as “a natural successor, strangely, to Pain and Glory.”

Last night the cheering Chicago multitudes said over and over, “We love you, Joe!” But deep down they were saying, “For 24 days we thought you were determined to send us to hell, Joe…you seemed as committed to a Trump presidency as much any MAGA fanatic, and we were horrified and howling. We thought you’d not only lost your mind but turned into a kind of Irish banshee. But thank you, Joe…thank you for caving to reality…thank you for not murdering this country.”

From Peter Baker‘s “The Speech Biden Never Wanted To Give,” posted early this morning:

I hate the theatrical pretension of dabbing tears off your cheek with a handkerchief. Hate it!

DNC 2024 day1 #DNCConvention2024

Biden had a major brainfart during his angry speach n misspoke on "⚡power of women" part. Instead "electoral"️.. he was trying to say "electrical".

Elektryczna gafa Bajdena. pic.twitter.com/qrfa8yqZwQ

— peener (@saqsssss) August 20, 2024

And a part of me will never forgive AOC for having a funny-looking, galumphy, red-haired boyfriend with huge feet, a tiny-eyed “bin racoon” who was obviously not her match…a woman can’t run for president if the appearance of her boyfriend/husband is a topic of negative conversation.

I’d be surprised if film-loving Millennials and Zoomers had the slightest awareness of Peter Medak‘s The Ruling Class (’72). It’s too British, too mid-20th-Century and too propelled by class hatred (iconoclast British lefties despising old-school Whitehall elites) to connect with 21st Century viewers, but very few films fiddled with murder, sex, notions of universal love, vaudevillian music-hall humor and demonic horror like this one did. It may be the only film that successfully mixed these elements.

Peter O’Toole wore a straw-blonde Jesus wig during the first 65%, but his slightly reddish, honey-colored hair during the final 35% is a real trip….gleaming, eye-filling.

Economically, it is the lot of Average Joes and Janes to eat shit and take it up the ass from their social betters. Not fair but the way of the world, sad to say.

Gail Collins: “I admit price controls would be a tough plan to get through, politically speaking. But Kamala Harris is trying to lay some of the groundwork for her overall agenda, which on the fiscal side includes redistributing some of the mega-wealth of the upper class to folks who are struggling to reach the middle. I do like that scenario.”

Bret Stephens: “The best thing that can be said about her promise to go after price ‘gouging’ is that she knows it has no hope of passing and that she understands that every serious economist on the planet will warn her that the consequences of price controls would be shortages, hoarding and, soon enough, black markets. In fact, my only hope for Harris is that her agenda is for campaign purposes only and that she’ll become a normal Democrat once in office.

“On the other hand, as Catherine Rampell of The Washington Post pointed out last week, if your opponent is going to call you a ‘communist,’ it might be wiser not to propose legislation worthy of Venezuela. Or is there some political logic at work here that I’m missing?”

@michaelshellenberger

Kamala Harris & her supporters appeared to walk back their endorsement of price controls, but they didn’t. As such, Harris’ policies would still result in greater scarcity and higher prices of food, energy, and housing, reflective of the Democrats' opposition to economic growth.

♬ original sound – Shellenberger

He was a good, smart, theatrical fellow. Pushy but in a good way. Straight-from-the-shoulder questions. But I can’t decide on his peak period. Between the late ’80s and ’90s?

Let’s pretend that Bill Murray got hit by a truck yesterday and that it’s time for an obit. If I had an hour to grind one out I would insist that the most glorious year of Murray’s life happened 31 years ago — 1993 — when he delivered his two greatest performances — a sardonic Chicago loan shark named Frank “The Money Store” Milo in John McNaughton and Richard Price‘s Mad Dog and Glory, and a sardonic TV weatherman in Harold Ramis‘s Groundhog Day.

Murray was around 42 when he shot both.

Murray”s third-best performance happened five years later in Wes Anderson‘s Rushmore, in which he played Herman Blume, a wealthy Houston businessman (also sardonic) who falls in love with a grade-school teacher (Olivia Williams), and in so doing ignites a feud with a 15 year-old romantic rival, Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman).

Some thoughts about Milo, which I posted three years ago:

“Mad Dog and Glory is about a curiously touching friendship between Milo and Robert De Niro‘s Wayne — a timid, lonely Chicago cop who specializes in forensics and crime-scene photographs. Milo is a Chicago mob guy who becomes a big brother and ‘friend’ of Wayne’s after the latter saves his life.

“Milo is a lot like Murray in many ways, just not internally. He’s angry and doesn’t really like himself or his friends or his life. He wants to be somewhere else. He’s seeing a therapist to try and deal with the hostility, and he performs a stand-up comedy routine at a place called the Comic-Kaze Club, which he owns. But he doesn’t want to lose the gangster life either.

“Frank and Wayne’s connection begins when Wayne — joshingly called “‘Mad Dog’ by his cop pals — saves Frank’s life during a grocery store holdup by calming down a jittery holdup man and sending him away without bloodshed.

“Frank is initially appalled (‘You’re a cop?’), but the next evening, realizing what Wayne actually did and starved for a friend, Frank tries to reciprocate by getting friendly over drinks. The next day he sends Glory, who works at the Kamikaze Club, over to Wayne’s place, the idea being for her to stay with him and take care of whatever for seven days.

“The wrinkle comes when Wayne and Glory fall in love, and Wayne decides he doesn’t want her being Frank’s ‘favor girl’ any longer. But Frank won’t let her go (Glory has offered her services in order to save her brother from being killed over a debt) unless Wayne coughs up $40K…fat chance.

“The theme of the film is, basically, ‘no guts, no glory.’ That sounds like macho crap, but it’s well sold.

“I don’t know where Price’s script ends and Murray’s improvs begin, but Mad Dog and Glory is full of little Murray doo-dads. There’s his lounge-lizard rendition of ‘Knock Three Times,’ crooned at the beginning of a tense scene. His addressing De Niro as ‘ossifer’ (a term I hadn’t heard since I was a kid in New Jersey). The way he holds an air bugle to his lips and does a cavalry-charge bugle sound when De Niro’s cop friends come to his rescue at the finale.

“There’s a scene in a diner in which Frank’s intellectually challenged top goon, Harold (Mike Starr), who’s sitting nearby with a supermarket tabloid, points at a middle-aged man sitting at the counter and whispers to Milo, ‘Hey, Frank? Isn’t that Phil Donahue?’ A shot of the guy in question proves otherwise. Murray half turns in his seat and says, ‘Put the magazine down, Harold, before you hurt yourself.’

“Consider the melancholy in Murray’s eyes after his fight scene with De Niro at the finish. Frank is a predator, yes, but a bright and sometimes funny one, and the tragedy of his life is that he wants out and knows he won’t get there. He pulls a loose tooth out of his mouth, gestures at the gaudy Cadillac he’s sitting in and the gorillas he’s riding with, and says with a look of pure disgust, ‘This is my life.'”