I could never fully understand why Jason Reitman‘s The Front Runner, which opened five and a half years ago, was blown off by nearly everyone. The Sony Pictures docudrama is about the tragic fall of Presidential contender Gary Hart during the 1988 primary campaign.

I completely fell for it after the Telluride ’18 debut. It featured a commanding lead performance by Hugh Jackman and several delicious supporting performances. And it all but completely flopped — cost $25 million to make, earned $3.2 million theatrically, and was pretty much ignored on during the 2018 award season.

Seriously, what happened?

Posted on 9.19.18: Less than ten minutes into my first viewing of Jason Reitman‘s The Front Runner, I knew it was at least a B-plus. By the time it ended I was convinced it was a solid A.

It’s not a typical Reitman film — it doesn’t deliver emotionally moving moments a la Juno and Up In The Air. It is, however, a sharp and lucid account of a real-life political tragedy — the destruction of former Colorado Senator Gary Hart‘s presidential campaign due to press reports of extra-marital womanizing with campaign volunteer Donna Rice.

The Front Runner is an exacting, brilliantly captured account of a sea-change in press coverage of presidential campaigns — about a moment when everything in the media landscape suddenly turned tabloid. Plus it feels recognizable as shit. I immediately compared The Front Runner to Michael Ritchie’s The Candidate, Mike Nichols‘ Primary Colors and James Vanderbilt‘s Truth. It is absolutely on the same wavelength and of the same calibre.

Hugh Jackman delivers a steady, measured, well-honed portrayal of Hart, but the whole cast is pretty close to perfect — every detail, every note, every wisecrack is spot-on.

Why, then, are some critics giving Reitman’s film, which is absolutely his best since Up In The Air, the back of their hands? The Front Runner easily warrants scores in the high 80s or low 90s, and yet Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic aggregate tallies are currently in the high 60s — over 20 points lower than they ought to be.

I’ll tell you what’s going on. Critics can be cool to films that portray journalists in a less than admirable light, which is what The Front Runner certainly does. The Miami Herald reporters who followed Hart around and broke the Rice story are depicted as sleazy fellows, and the relationship between the Miami Herald and Hart is depicted as deeply antagonistic, especially on the Herald’s part. Hart screwed himself with his own carelessness, but the Herald is depicted as being more or less on the same level as the National Enquirer.

You can bet that on some level this analogy is not going down well with certain critics. Remember how Vanderbilt’s Truth (’15), a whipsmart journalism drama, was tarnished in the press for portraying the collapse of Mary Mapes‘ faulty 60 Minutes investigation into George Bush‘s National Guard history and alleged cocaine use? A similar dynamic is happening right how.

The principle behind my imminent submission to Monkey Man roughly parallels my sense of resignation and obligation to see Ken Loach‘s The Old Oak. I can’t wall myself off — I have to engage.

It’s obvious what kind of cards are being dealt here — resentful old Loachian guys in England’s northeastern region vs. Syrian refugees. And I know I’m probably going to struggle to hear a portion of the dialogue. (I’ve never seen a Loach film that wouldn’t have been improved by subtitles.) This is Loach’s last film, however, and I feel I owe it to him.

Favorite Loaches: The Wind That Shakes The Barley, Looking For Eric, My Name Is Joe, Poor Cow.

An HE commenter said the other day that I need to engage more with ongoing spring product, and therefore need to settle into Dev Patel‘s Monkey Man (Universal, 4.5), aka “John Wick in Mumbai” — the same revenge formula with a dunking of Indian nativist class rage…rage and revenge. I realize I have to endure it, but it’s obviously going to be painful. Patel: “I wanted to give it real soul, real trauma, real pain…and I wanted to infuse a little bit of culture.”

Back in the Nixon, Ford and Carter era I had a thing for Angel Tompkins. This was partly due to the fact that she’s my type (blond, great eyes, WASPy) but mostly because she’d delivered a mature, grounded, open-hearted performance as a cheating wife in Mel Stuart and Robert Kaufman‘s I Love My Wife, a minor but decent dramedy about a young married doctor (Elliott Gould) who cats around.

My memory is a bit hazy but Tompkins’ character, Helene Donnelly, was listlessly married to Dabney Coleman‘s Frank Donnelly, and her affair with Gould’s Dr. Richard Burrows was about more than just gymnastic distraction — she was all in, and you could really sense the unambiguous depth of feeling. It was Tompkins’ best role and finest-ever performance — nothing else she did came close.

The deal was doubly sealed after I spoke with Tompkins following a Rear Window screening on the Universal lot, sometime in late ’83 or early ’84. Okay, she struck me as a glib conversational surfer that night but almost everyone is like that after a drink or two. And perhaps my recollection of I Love My Wife is overly generous, but it wasn’t half bad.

Tompkins’ career hung in for a while but gradually tapered off. She married Ted Lang, described on her Wiki page as a film and comedy writer slash venture capitalist. She gradually became a political conservative (no problem) and then a Trumpie (good effing God).

And then today I saw this. Obviously not a statement that anyone with any sort of informed, straight-arrow perception or sense of rationality would share with a straight face. I’m distressed that Joe Biden didn’t pass the baton, but Tompkins seems to honestly believe that a blend of Satanic derangement syndrome and an anti-democratic agenda is the way to go, and it’s mystifying that an actress who seemed to have some sort of basic humanistic grasp of things way back when…it’s odd to think of a person going this far around the bend and becoming this fruit-loopy.

Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (’77) was the third and final Sinbad film. VFX by Ray Harryhausen, of course. Shot in ’75, the release was delayed two years due to Harryhausen’s exacting visual standards. And yet all of Harryhausen’s creatures used the exact same body language and exaggerated gestures. And who came up with that cyclops “erp” sound?

I’d never seen so much as a snippet of footage from this film until tonight. Clearly a bargain basement effort. It’s the visual equivalent of eating french fries at a Burger King

Directed, believe it or not, by distinguished stage and screen actor Sam Wanamaker (The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, Death on the Nile, Private Benjamin, The Competition, Raw Deal), who was in his mid 50s in ‘75. Talk about a paycheck gig.

The film stars Patrick Wayne (36 at the time), 22 year-old Taryn (daughter of Tyrone) Power, 24 year-old Jane Seymour and Patrick Troughton.

Stop-motion creatures were riveting in their early to mid 20th century heyday (early 30s to mid 50s). From the ‘60s onward it seemed as if Harryhausen alone kept this increasingly passé but surreal-seeming technique going…the exotic unreality, the rareness of it…an odd-bird visual realm that was neither “real” nor animated nor CG’ed.

And yet Harryhausen’s Sinbad films were curiously arresting as far as they went, and even the stiff and hokey Clash of the Titans (‘81) had its brief diversions. I still love the shadowy, torch-lit confrontation scene between Harry Hamlin and the Medusa serpent with the bow-and-arrow.

The constant problem, of course, was the difficulty of blending live-action humans with these creatures. They were almost always in separate shots. And of course, the action was always about the same choices — run or fight and possibly be killed ad infinitum.

I had never seen this scene from Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger before Wednesday night, and I’m sorry but I felt immediately underwhelmed. That midday, too-much sunshine visual palette, for one thing. And I instantly recognized those Spanish boulder-strewn hills from the battle scenes in King of Kings (’61). And what was the horn-headed cyclops looking to accomplish exactly?

Although born 100 years ago today, Marlon Brando is still “alive” in a sense, at least by the measure of a fair percentage of Millennials and Zoomers knowing his name and at least one of his great performances — Vito Corleone in The Godfather.

I’d be surprised if most of them have even heard of On The Waterfront, A Streetcar Named Desire, Last Tango in Paris, Viva Zapata, etc. Everything that seems eternal and granite-like crumbles and collapses into rubble and dust.

Posted on 9.30.17: Director-producer George Englund has died at age 91. The only half-decent film he directed was The Ugly American (’63), which starred Marlon Brando as a naive and somewhat arrogant Ambassador to “Sarkhan” (Thailand crossed with South Vietnam) during a politically tumultuous period.

It costarred Eiji Okada, the good-looking guy who played Emmanuelle Riva‘s lover in Hiroshima mon amour and also costarred in Woman in the Dunes.

The Ugly American, which had almost nothing to do plot-wise with Eugene Burdick and William Lederer’s 1958 best-seller, is not a top-tier film but a moderately good one, and it foresaw, of course, the misguided U.S. policies toward resentful Vietnamese patriots that would lead to so much horror and death for so many years.

Englund’s well-written book about Brando, “The Way It’s Never Been Done Before,” was published in 2004. It mentions a late-night soiree Englund shared with Brando in 1955, and which concluded with the two of them shooting the shit in a Santa Monica parking lot. Their conversation was interrupted by a cop, who wanted to know if they were up to something:

This pic.twitter.com/KxdIKw1diE

— Mitch Jackson (@mitchjackson) April 3, 2024

The cops. In uniform. Standing behind him . Any comment? https://t.co/dEFamXeBFw

— Charlie Sykes (@SykesCharlie) April 2, 2024

Around 9 am eastern an HE commenter called “Really?” wrote a response to last night’s post about (a) the Monday morning (4.1) suicide of cartoonist Ed Piskor over social media accusations of inappropriate texting conversations between Piskor and two women in their late teens, and (b) Jeff Sneider‘s 4.1 post about this tragedy (“Murdered by Internet Bullies“).

“Really?” to HE: “Did you google Piskor and the case for one moment? There’s obviously more to the story than somebody being ‘murdered by the internet.’ Pity that your obsession for cancel culture cancels your ability to be a critical thinker.”

HE to “Really?”: “Are you saying that speaking or texting suggestively or even lewdly to a young girl or two (young but above the age of consent) is a cancellable offense? Which can harm or kill a career or worse, as we’ve just seen with Piskor.

“Unwanted sexting sounds a bit icky, agreed, but if Piskor crossed a line the girl in question could have said ‘no way and hasta la vista’ and terminated the chat or conversation, no?

“Plus the age of consent in Pennsylvania is 16. Doesn’t that mean that in situations involving unwanted attention, lawmakers trust or expect or assume that teens 16 and over can and should exercise agency on their own part?

“It’s unfortunately part of the rough and tumble of life for teenagers to occasionally get hit on by older persons. (My mother used to warn me about predatory older women.) It’s obviously gauche and uncool but if it’s just a texting or phone situation there’s a fairly easy remedy.

“I clearly recall being hit on by an older gay guy in a Connecticut work situation when I was 17, and finding the idea highly distasteful. I told a couple of friends but did I write a complaint to his boss? No. Did I write a letter of condemnation to my local Connecticut newspaper? No. I simply said ‘nope, no thanks’ and moved on with my life. Imagine!”

“’Nobody gets moral unless they want to get something or get out of something.’ — Paddy Chayefsky, 1964.

Reply/comment from Sasha Stone an hour later:

“The same culture that pretends Poor Things is about sexual empowerment is shocked, shocked that sexuality is going on here. They order their little chess pieces to make sure everything is in strict compliance…”her agency” this and “grooming” that. They go along with an entire system that thinks it’s okay to confuse toddlers with conversations about their private parts to “decide” what gender they are. They go along with extreme and overt sexuality UNLESS — God forbid — a heterosexual male enters the chat.

“Even though certain younger but legal women are attracted to him, come on to him, pretend that they’re interested in him, if he takes the bait — PREDATOR!

“This is the most hedonistic, end-of-empire, Caligula-like culture I’ve ever lived through with one exception: masculine men cannot partake because eeww, icky predators. Give me a break. Hypocrites. And don’t bother lecturing me about power this and consent that. Text messages — please.”

Posted yesterday by Jeff Sneider in his “InSneider” newsletter — a sad reflection about the suicide of cartoonist Ed Piskor — “Murdered by Internet Bullies”

Ed Piskor took his own life on Monday morning at the age of 41. This followed allegations that he was being creepy online, though that’s where it ended.

One woman accused him of “grooming” her when she was 17 years old, though they never actually met, while another alleged that he tried to barter an industry connection for oral sex — the second accused thereby making it a “pattern” of predatory behavior.

The news was literally beginning to break as I was finishing Red Room, which is a wild coincidence, seeing as how Piskor seems very concerned with the concept of justice for those online creeps who organize, perpetrate, and view such red rooms.

WARNING: Piskor’s suicide note is absolutely devastating and heartbreaking to read.

Piskor writes that he was “murdered by internet bullies…massive amounts of them,” and while I think that’s rather unfair, as it was ultimately Piskor’s decision to end his own life, I do feel this could be a seismic moment for social media — a blight on society that I, obviously, participate in and sometimes benefit from. Other times, it has cost me a job.

I would love to leave Twitter altogether, but I feel like I need it to promote my work. It’s a deal with the devil — a Faustian bargain, if you will.

But imagine that — not being able to pay your bills or feed your family because of something you hastily wrote online. Obviously we all have free will, and there are consequences to our actions that we all accept, but those consequences should fit the crime. People are being “canceled” left and right when no actual crime has been committed.

Some, like Shane Gillis, can pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and rather than complain, they can instead find their audience, forcing the mainstream that once rejected them (looking at you, SNL) to come crawling right back. But others simply don’t have that kind of fight in them.

Some just succumb to the tidal wave and are swept under the water.

I believe in social justice, but that can be a slippery slope. And yet these days, social media plays judge, jury, and executioner. To fight back against the online mob is pointless. Once one forms against you — and it could, at any moment — you are helpless to its power. It can take everything you’ve built and strip you of it in a matter of minutes without even so much as an investigation.

You don’t even get to plead your case on social media, and those who dare to try only make it worse for themselves. Either way, the mob leaves them crushed and questioning their own self-worth. It’s happened to me, it’s happened to people I know, and it’s going to keep happening.

The allegation against Piskor didn’t kill him — it was the subsequent pile-on by people who think they know what happened and what the consequence should be — but they don’t. And neither do I.

I’ll be praying for Piskor’s family tonight. I don’t believe he’s a martyr, as I do believe he knew what he was doing and was up to no good, regardless of the age of consent in Pennsylvania (16, apparently), but if I was named in his note, I would struggle to sleep tonight. I’m curious whether they think a societal good was done here today, or whether they have any remorse for playing a part, in Piskor’s mind, in his death.

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