HE approves of The Last Days of Saigon, a forthcoming five-part series about numerous desperate, last-minute scrambles to save lives as North Vietnamese forces approached the South Vietnamese capital in April 1975.

Phillip Noyce will direct with showrunner Stuart Beattie having written major portions of the script.

Noyce’s The Quiet American (’02), a first-rate remake of the 1958 original, was set and shot in Vietnam. The Last Days of Saigon will reportedly be shot mostly in Australia with some location work set aside for Southeast Asia.

The series will presumably play like a dramatic narrative rendering of Rory Kennedy‘s excellent doc, Last Days in Vietnam.

Posted on 6.13.14:

“I felt profoundly moved and even close to choking up a couple of times while watching Rory Kennedy‘s Last Days in Vietnam yesterday at the Los Angeles Film Festival.

“The waging of the Vietnam War by U.S forces was one of the most tragic and devastating miscalculations of the 20th Century, but what happened in Saigon during the last few days and particularly the last few hours of the war on 4.30.75 wasn’t about policy.

“For some Saigon-based Americans it was simply about taking care of friends and saving as many lives as possible. It was about good people bravely risking the possibility of career suicide by acknowledging a basic duty to stand by their Vietnamese colleagues and co-workers and loved ones (even if these natives were on the “wrong” or corrupted side of that conflict) and do the right moral thing.

“Kennedy’s incisive, well-sculpted (if not entirely comprehensive) 98-minute doc is basically about how a relative handful of Americans stationed in Saigon — among them former Army Captain Stuart Herrington, ex-State Department official Joseph McBride and former Pentagon official Richard Armitage — did the stand-up, compassionate thing in the face of non-decisive orders and guidelines from superiors (particularly U.S. Ambassador to South Vietnam Graham Martin) who wouldn’t face up to the fact that the North Vietnamese had taken most of South Vietnam by mid-April and would inevitably conquer Saigon.

“It was obvious as hell to almost anyone with eyes and ears, and yet Martin and other officials, afraid of triggering widespread panic, wouldn’t approve contingency plans for evacuation until it was way, way too late. So the above-named humanitarians and their brethren decided it was “easier to beg for forgiveness than to ask permission” and did what they could — covertly, surreptitiously, any which way — to save as many South Vietnamese as they could.”

Hugh Grant to the aggressively shallow, plus-sized Ashley Graham during last year’s red-carpet segment: “The whole of humanity is here…it’s vanity fair” — an allusion to William Thackeray’s 1848 novel about the social pursuits of quarter-of-an-inch-deep, upper-crust types in London…diversions of the idle and undeserving rich, signifying absolutely nothing.

Hulu intends to produce an eight-episode series about the wrongful prosecution and incarceration of femme fatale Amanda Knox, who will be played by Margaret Qualley.

The problem is that Qualley is too old for the part. Knox was 20 when Italian authorities in Perugia became convinced that she might have murdered her roommate, Meredith Kercher, in late ’07 — Knox was a foxy young flower back then, freshly bloomed. The attractive Qualley is 30 and looks it — she might have passed for 20 five years ago, but she’s no spring chicken now.

On top of which the Knox story has been thoroughly mined and explored over the last 13 years or so. How many times can average Joe and Janes be expected to show interest?

In 2011 saw the release of a negligible Lifetime TV movie, Amanda Knox: Murder on Trial in Italy. Two years later came “Waiting To Be Heard”, a Knox-authored memoir. In 2014 Michael Winterbottom‘s not-so-hot Face Of An Angel opened. In 2016 a Netflix documentary, Amanda Knox, appeared. And then, of course, came Tom McCarthy‘s Stillwater (’21), which is largely based on the Knox saga.

The Hulu series is basically about Knox and husband Chris Robinson, who felt exploited by Stillwater, wanting to make some dough. They’re exec producing along with Qualley, Warren Littlefield, Lisa Harrison, Ann Johnson and Graham Littlefield. Monica Lewinsky is also exec producing.

“Knox vs. McCarthy Again,” posted on 8.8.21:

In an 8.6 HE riff titled “McCarthy Coolly Dismisses Knox Beef,” I linked to Janelle Riley’s 8.4 Variety interview with Stillwater director-cowriter Tom McCarthy.

McCarthy responded to the gist of Amanda Knox‘s complaint about Stillwater being fundamentally based on her 2008 murder conviction and subsequent exoneration, and her not having been consulted prior to filming. McCarthy also mentioned that her statements were somewhat undermined by the fact that she hadn’t yet seen the film.

Yesterday Knox posted a series of tweets about the McCarthy interview [excerpts after the jump], and made some reasonable points. However, she also tweeted the following:

HE response to friendo: “Seeing Stillwater would not be an ‘ideal date night’ and that’s why she still hasn’t seen it yet? But she would be amenable to seeing it, she said earlier, if Focus would invite her to a screening. The date night remark was playful, but she invites skepticism.”

Friendo to HE: “You have to admit that it’s hilarious when, in being asked at the outset in the new interview what his inspiration for the movie was, McCarthy says, ‘One inspiration was a relative of mine who had a fractious relationship with her father. I asked if she minded talking to me about it.” This after previously not being afraid to openly and preemptively acknowledge the Knox case was a springboard, before he had to worry [that Knox might be] endangering his Oscar campaign. Now Knox is incidental, he claims, while asserting that he was inspired by a friend. That kind of covering-one’s-ass (publicly and badly) is the hallmark of a really insubstantial person, or a scaredy-cat on the run.”

HE wants Poor Things‘ Emma Stone to win the Best Actress Oscar on Sunday night, and if not Stone then Anatomy of a Fall‘s Sandra Huller…please.

I’m just looking forward to a day in which identity won’t count for that much in Oscar voting. If you dip into your soul and bring the stuff that matters, then you’re eligible to be nominated and perhaps even likely to win. Quality, quality, quality of delivery.

Academy members voting to reject commonplace prejudice or blanket dismissals in decades or centuries past is primarily about them and not the actor or performance in question. Wokesters have been playing this trendy little game for six or seven years now, and it’s time to shut it down.

When the day comes that quality is valued more than equity or virtue-signalling, actors like Lily Gladstone will have to sink or swim based on their own chops, instincts and abilities…whether or not they can bring the necessary craft, depth and soul…a performance constructed from deep within or not at all.

Does anyone think that Da’Vine Joy Randolph‘s locked-in Best Supporting Actress win has anything whatsoever to do with identity? Okay, maybe a little but she’s been winning all season long because of how good she is in Alexander Payne‘s The Holdovers…period. I knew she was a slam-dunk Oscar nominee a half-hour after the film had begun screening in Telluride’s Werner Herzog theatre. I leaned over and muttered this to Sasha Stone.

Does anyone think that May December‘s Charles Melton was an early Best Supporting Actor favorite because he rode an identity horse (South Korean lineage + being a symbolic stand-in for underaged victims of sexual assault)? You’d better believe it, and thank God that nag gave out on him.

Does anyone believe that Sayonara‘s Miyoshi Umeki won her Best Supporting Actress Oscar over identity, way the hell back in 1958? She won because she played a selfless, devotional wife who died (along with Air Force husband Red Buttons**) due to racial prejudice. Plus her performance was significantly more affecting than the ones given by Carolyn Jones (The Bachelor Party), Elsa Lanchester (Witness for the Prosecution), Hope Lange (Peyton Place) and Diane Varsi (Peyton Place).

I realize that Gladstone’s identity campaign has stirred a sizable army of woke gladhanders and that the odds favor her winning, but this shit has to stop. It really does.

From Brian Rowe‘s “Five Reasons Why Emma Stone will still win Best Actress for Poor Things“, a Gold Derby articled dated 3.8.24.

Posted by World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy on 3.6.24: “Can Gladstone win the Oscar despite not being nominated by BAFTA and her role being a supporting turn? She appears in less than 1/3 of Killers runtime (56 minutes), whereas Stone is practically in every scene of Poor Things. If Gladstone had been campaigned in the Supporting category then she’d already have that Oscar in the bag.”

** Buttons’ performance resulted in a Best Supporting Actor win.

….in the matter of Kung Fu Panda 4.

I’m not putting down Jack Black or Awkwafina for voicing the characters of Po and Zhen, respectively, in exchange for a sizable paycheck.

Sutton would never beg me to take her to see this DreamWorks parent punisher, but if she did I would give her a gentle hug and suggest that we watch instead…I don’t know, The Empire Strikes Back or something.

…was surging through the system of President Joe Biden (adderall?), but it served him well…sometimes the right drugs are perfect blessings, and Joe needs to keep injecting that magic energy cocktail over and over and over again….keep taking it between now and election day.

The Movie Godz will absolutely not complain if this happens. Who really and truly loves Martin Scorsese‘s condemnation-of-evil-white-greedheads Oklahoma film? I don’t know a single soul who loves it. Only the ideological wokeys are hardcore fans. Marty’s brand has stood for excellence and verve for so many decades, going all the way back to Mean Streets. Let this elephant go — just let it go.

On 9.24.22, or roughly 19 months ago, I tapped out a longish piece about a traumatic encounter with an old pally inside Wilton’s Village Market.

Although I’d regarded this guy as a great friend and an excellent human being for decades, he’d alarmingly turned into a wokester fanatic sometime in ’20 or ’21 or thereabouts. Goaded by his three Millennial-aged daughters, he’d decided I was suddenly allied with society’s bad guys and that I’d more or less become some kind of suppressive, anti-feminist, Harvey Weinstein-like figure.

I’ve seen red over a few things in my time, but my mind turned into molten lava when the Chance Brown condemnation came down. How fucking dare you?

I didn’t mention his name in the Village Market piece, but referred to him as “Strelnikov” as his chilly ranting reminded me of Tom Courtenay‘s communist enforcer in David Lean‘s Doctor Zhivago (’65).

His actual name was Chance Browne, a cartoonist (“Hi and Lois“) and musician and an all-around good fellow until the Great Awokening turned his head around.

I’m revealing Chance’s identity because (deep breath) he died last Friday afternoon from pancreatic cancer. His family requested radio silence at first, but Chance’s sister broke the news on Facebook a day or two later, and I’m figuring “okay, olly olly in come free.”

Here’s what I posted a day after his passing:

“The greatly talented, often joyful and widely beloved CHANCE BROWNE has left the earth and has merged with the infinite. He is now at one with legendary astronaut Dave Bowman at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, gazing down upon our blue planet with a certain childlike amazement.

“Chance passed yesterday afternoon (Friday, March 1st) around 1 pm. Taken down by pancreatic cancer, which he had only recently discovered.

“My heart is broken but what else can I or anyone else say? This is obviously a different deal than the passing of John Lennon (43 years and 2 months ago), and yet it feels emotionally similar in a certain way. To me at least. This sounds kinda silly but I thought Chance would just keep on Chance-ing forever. I really did. I thought he’d just keep going. I really thought we all had an eternal lease on life.

“I am shocked and thrown by this terrible waffle-iron…this feeling of having been clobbered on the side of my face or my head or whatever. I haven’t felt this shocked and thrown by the passing of a good and gentle soul in such a long time. But it’s happened. We may as well grim up and face it and join hands and ask ourselves who we are now and who we used to be, and where we’ve been and where we’re all going. We’re all getting there, no exceptions. Chance has simply left a bit earlier. He’ll almost certainly be waiting.”

Chance found out that he was more or less doomed a month and a half ago. On the afternoon of 1.17.24 he messaged a mutual friend, Mike Connors, as follows: “I have bad news, my brother. I just got diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer (!). I’m starting chemo tomorrow. I feel like dice must feel when they get shook up and thrown down the table. I may last another six months to a year or more with chemo. I love you and I’m sorry to leave the party too soon. I’ve got some time so we’ll talk.”

Alas, this never happened. This message was their last exchange.

Untimely passing cartoon, roughed out by Chance 11 or 12 years ago:

I’ll always be a fan of action flicks and suspense thrillers that end hard, clean and decisively and no fooling around, like the last minute or so of John Frankenheimer‘s French Connection 2 (’75).

But I’m an even bigger fan of edgy pulse-pounders that end with great denouements. Denouements are meditative wind-down sessions…summary scenes that provide a nice breather as both the main characters and the audience are given a chance to consider what’s happened, sort out some of the loose ends and maybe imagine what’s to come.

My all-time favorite denouement is the second-to-last scene in Three Days of the Condor (’75) — a nice dialogue scene between Robert Redford‘s “Turner” and Max Von Sydow‘s “Joubert”, standing outside of Leonard Atwood‘s suburban Virginia home at the break of dawn.

Another fave is the final scene in The Social Network, a let’s-get-real moment between Jessie Eisenberg‘s Mark Zuckerberg and Rashida Jones‘ junior attorney at a law office in Palo Alto…early evening.

There could have been an Apocalypse Now denouement that might have mirrored the ending of Joseph Conrad‘s “Heart of Darkness,” which Francis Coppola‘s 1979 Vietnam film is based upon. Martin Sheen‘s Cpt. Willard could have visited the Long Island home of the widow of Marlon Brando‘s Colonel Kutz, whose last words are “the horror! The horror!” When she asks about Kurtz’s final moment of life, Willard tells her that he wept as he called out her name. A good denouement, but Coppola felt that leaving Vietnam and transitioning to Great Neck or Oyster Bay would have been too much of a shock to the system.

Is the final scene in Red River (“You’ve earned it”) an apt and satisfying denouement or a forced and even silly ending that doesn’t quite work? (I’ve always liked it but that’s me.)

The famous Psycho denouement, in which a sandpaper-voiced psychiatrist (Simon Oakland) explains how Norman Bates killed his mother and her lover and thereafter stole her corpse and decided to become his mother in spirit — to “give half his life to her, so to speak” — feels a bit labored by today’s standards. It does, however, set up the final scene between Anthony Perkins and that fly, which is dead perfect.

Please name some other great ones.

For a last and final time HE strongly objects to a suspected Academy preference for the Best Actor Oscar to be handed to Cillian Murphy.

Murphy gives a far more persuasive performance as an oddball alien from the planet Tralfamadore than as super-physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer in Chris Nolan’s Oppenheimer.

I’ve read “American Prometheus” and seen a great deal of footage of the actual Oppie, and there’s no question that this brilliant fellow was semi-human — that he radiated somewhat human qualities, mannerisms, characteristics. This is the one central thing that Murphy doesn’t convey.

Even with his dual head antennas, My Favorite Martian star Ray Walston was more relatably human than Murphy’s Oppie.

If Murphy wins it’ll strictly be an Oppenheimer coat-tails thing, and I really hate that Academy voters (particularly the SAG-AFTRA knuckle-draggers) are apparently unwilling to show a little mental discipline and differentiate and be fair about this, for God’s sake.

Because it’s wrong, wrong, terribly wrong to blow off Paul Giamatti’s obviously superior, more fickle and flavorful and far more human performance as Barton Academy’s curmudgeonly classics professor Paul Hunham, the lead in Alexander Payne‘s The Holdovers.

Plus Giamatti gave one of the 21st Century’s greatest and most cherished performances as aspiring novelist and wine connoisseur Miles Raymond in Payne’s Sideways (‘04). And he wasn’t even nominated for this! Are you kidding me?

Giamatti obviously owns the winning narrative. They blew him off 19 years ago but they can’t do it twice…c’mon! He’s owed big-time, and the refusal of the Oppenheimer sweep lemmings to step back and acknowledge this is truly, deeply offensive.