Last night Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil pressed me for guesses on the four acting categories. I rolled my eyes, frowned, hemmed & hawed, wilted and finally gave in. Here are the general assessments, and here are the picks of the “experts” (i.e., know-it-alls like myself). Which, in the present context, means “know nothing at all.”

I missed a recent critics screening of Jim Cameron‘s T2 3D. So I paid $21 and change to see it yesterday at the AMC Century City 15. And I didn’t like what I saw. At all. I left after an hour, or just after Arnold Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton and Edward Furlong drive into the desert to hide out and stock up on weapons.

As with Titanic 3D, Cameron has applied his 3D conversion techniques sparingly. You can tell it’s 3D, of course, but the stereoscopic effect never slaps you across the face, and so after a while you forget that it’s there. Before you know it you’re just sitting in a theatre watching plain old T2, which I’ve seen maybe 25 or 30 times because the kids were really into it when it came out on laser disc.

On top of which the illumination isn’t bright enough. The image I saw through my 3D glasses was way too dark. I don’t know what the foot lambert illumination was, but the movie looked like shit, like mud, like shade. During last October’s press junket for Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, director Ang Lee said that 3D projection should be shown with 30 foot lamberts of illumination. Most 3D films are projected in commercial cinemas, he said, at much lower levels.

HE to Cameron: Have you driven down to Century City to see what T2 3D looks like? You’ve put in a lot of work to make this 1991 classic look as good as possible, and then AMC management delivers an absurdly low illumination level and basically pisses all over the film. You won’t be pleased.

I felt so irritated and bummed out by the cruddy look of T2 3D that when I got home I immediately popped in my T2 Bluray, just to flush out the murk. It looked and sounded great on my 65″ inch Sony 4K. Clean and crisp and sharp as needles. To hell with 3D conversions. In fact, to hell with 3D.

Hugs and condolences for the friends, fans and colleagues of influential horror film maestro Tobe Hooper, who died yesterday at age 74. There’s no question that Hooper did himself proud with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (’74), a low-budget slasher thriller that I’ve never liked but have always respected. The following Wikipage sentence says it all: “It is credited with originating several elements common in the slasher genre, including the use of power tools as murder weapons and the characterization of the killer as a large, hulking, faceless figure.”

Hooper made a life out of his facility with horror. He career-ed it to the max. But after The Texas Chainsaw Massacre he never struck the motherlode again, not really.

You can’t give Hooper serious credit for Poltergeist, which was mostly directed by Steven Spielberg. And no, I’m not a fan of Lifeforce. If you want to be cruel about it you could call him a feverish, moderately talented fellow who got lucky only once, and that was it. Hooper was tenacious and industrious and always kept going, and of course he dined out on the original Saw for decades. No harm in that.

L.M. Kit Carson, the renowned screenwriter, producer and journalist whom I proudly called a friend and ally from ’86 until his passing in 2014, was friendly with Hooper. They shared a Texas heritage and worked together on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre 2 (’86), a misbegotten piece-of-shit sequel that Cannon Films produced and which I, a conflicted Cannon employee at the time, wrote the press notes for. Carson introduced me to Hooper as a gifted writer who really understood the satirical tone of Carson’s brilliant Saw 2 script. If only Hooper had absorbed it as fully and translated it to the screen with a similar panache.

Carson wrote a tangy piece about Hooper for the July-August ’86 issue of Film Comment, called “Saw Thru.” Here’s an excerpt that explains the genesis of TTCM:

“Near broke at Christmas ’72, Hooper got tangled in the last-minute-shopper mob at a Montgomery Ward and shoveled into the heavy equipment department. Suddenly he was standing face to face with a big wall display of glinting chainsaws. All sizes. Row above row. An uneasy-making sight mixed with the tinsel, bright Christmas balls, red ribbons. Whu.

“And an abrupt Christmas crackup thought flicker-lit a few of Hooper’s brainy synapses: Quickest damn way out of here tonight is just to yank-start one of those chainsaws and cut a path to the door. It was a joke, but only a half-joke. An image that sold itself a bit too strongly.

“Hooper got the hell out of Montgomery Ward, went home with a chainsaw in his brain, and starred piecing together a movie. ‘In about 30 seconds I saw the movie right in front of me,’ he said.”

Warmer air, extreme weather, super-intense hurricanes and flooding are becoming more and more common. Hell, even routine. It’s all in Al Gore, Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk‘s An Inconvenient Sequel, and you know they could easily weave in footage from the current rain deluge in Houston, which is being called one of the worst flooding incidents in U.S. history. Houston is a liberal cosmopolitan city in many respects, but how many climate-change-denying Trump supporters in the greater Houston area are putting two and two together this morning? “Naaah, it’s God’s will…no different than the locust plague that Moses brought upon ancient Egypt.”

HE readers are sick and tired of hearing about how Luca Guadagnino‘s Call Me By Your Name (Sony Pictures Classics, 11.24) was regarded as a major grand slam by critics at last January’s Sundance Film Festival. Ecstatic raves, shifting tectonic plates, 100% Rotten Tomatoes rating, etc. Then came the first hint of an attitude when Variety‘s Kris Tapley complained of a CMBYN “mafia, which is already overbearing.” I’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop ever since.

Now I’ve spoken to a savvy, somewhat older industry guy who gets around, and he’s offered to bet me any amount that CMBYN won’t be Best Picture nominated. He said “it really didn’t work for me”, and he knows a couple of other guys from his age-peer group (including a film festival honcho) who feel the same way. Dismissive, shaking their heads, nope.

Among this fellow’s observations: (a) Luca is unquestionably a skillful director, and the film is “very well made” and the locations are dreamy and beautiful, but (b) it’s “way too long” because he “looked at [his] watch four times”, (c) he “just didn’t buy the attraction between Armie Hammer and Timothy Chalamet,” partly because Chalamet was “too into” a local teenage girl and because Hammer was too aloof and uninterested for too long, and (d) he saw it as somewhat analogous to Robert Mulligan‘s Summer of ’42 with Armie in the Jennifer O’Neil role and Chalamet as Gary Grimes, but that he prefers Summer of ’42.

He said that the older crowd is going to have difficulty with some of the sexual intimacy scenes. When I replied “but Luca doesn’t really show anything…it’s mostly just a lot of kissing along with a simulated [sex act],” he said “the young guy takes the older guy’s underwear and puts it over his head and smells it? This is a perfect Outfest movie.”

He also said he wasn’t all that impressed by Michael Stuhlbarg‘s father-son moment with Chalamet at the end, partly because “[Stuhlbarg] says he’s never had that kind of passionate episode in his own past, the kind that Timothy has just had, and so right away Stuhlbarg is kind of pissing on his relationship with his wife, which seems pretty healthy.”

Bottom line: “Either you buy into a movie like this or you don’t,” he said. And he didn’t. And there you have it. I cover the waterfront, and it takes all sorts.

In response to the Orpheum Theatre’s recent decision to permanently shun Gone With The Wind, here’s an HE rebuttal to Lou Lumenick’s anti-GWTW rant, posted on 6.26.15:

“Lumenick is not wrong, but I feel misgivings. I don’t believe it’s right to throw Gone With The Wind under the bus just like that. Yes, it’s an icky and offensive film at times (Vivien Leigh‘s Scarlett O’Hara slapping Butterly McQueen‘s Prissy for being irresponsible in the handling of Melanie giving birth, the depiction of Everett Brown‘s Big Sam as a gentle, loyal and eternal defender of Scarlett when the chips are down) but every time I’ve watched GWTW I’ve always put that stuff in a box in order to focus on the real order of business.

“For Gone With The Wind is not a film about slavery or the antebellum South or even, really, the Civil War.

“It’s a movie about (a) a struggle to survive under ghastly conditions and (b) about how those with brass and gumption often get through the rough patches better than those who embrace goodness and generosity and playing by the rules. This is a fundamental human truth, and if you ask me the reason Gone With The Wind has resonated for so long is that generation after generation has recognized it as such. If you want to survive you have to be tough and scrappy and sometimes worry about the proprieties later on. Anyone who’s ever faced serious adversity understands the eloquence of that classic Scarlett O’Hara line, ‘I’ll never be hungry again.’

“I think GWTW particularly connected with 1939 audiences because they saw it as a parable of the deprivations that people had gone through during the Great Depression.

26 months ago former N.Y. Post film critic Lou Lumenick called for a shunning of Gone With The Wind because of “undeniably racist” attitudes embedded in its story and characters. And now that politically-correct projection has become a reality, at least as far as Memphis’ Orpheum theatre is concerned.

Earlier this month Orpheum management said it would no longer show Gone With The Wind as part of the Orpheum Movie Series due to complaints, presumably from African-American viewers and ultra-p.c. types. The theater’s board deemed the 1939 film “insensitive” after receiving “numerous comments” that stemmed from a screening on Friday, 8.11.17. The Clark Gable-Vivien Leigh film, once the most beloved Hollywood epic of all time, has been dropped from next year’s planned summer movie series.

“While title selections for the series are typically made in the spring of each year, the Orpheum has made this determination early in response to specific inquiries from patrons,” per a statement from The Orpheum Theatre Group. “The Orpheum appreciates feedback on its programming from all members of the mid-south community. The recent screening of Gone With the Wind at the Orpheum generated numerous comments. As an organization whose stated mission is to ‘entertain, educate and enlighten the communities it serves,’ the Orpheum cannot show a film that is insensitive to a large segment of its local population.”

The racism in GWTW is “no longer tolerable in our current socio-political climate,” Lumenick argued. While noting that GWTW “isn’t as blatantly and virulently racist as D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, which was considered one of the greatest American movies as late as the early 1960s, but is now rarely screened, even in museums,” Lumenick suggested that GWTW “may one day disappear from the cultural conversation and suffer a permanent downgrade when it comes to estimating the all-time great films.”

Posted on 10.6.16: “Hurricane Gloria came roaring across lower Fairfield County in the wee hours of 9.28.85, and I was there, man, standing in my parents’ front yard in Wilton, Connecticut, sometime around 1:30 or 2 am. That howling sound, 90 mph winds, huge trees bending. The full force of it ebbed after ten minutes or so, but I’ve never forgotten that feeling, that energy.” Posted this morning: Call me a hurricane junkie if you want, but if I’d been in Rockport, Texas last night I would’ve been looking to safely absorb what I could of Harvey’s raw ferocity.

What makes this shot great? The red light is on and glowing.

President Trump had no moral authority or credibility after his off-the-cuff Charlottesville comments, but now he’s in the minus realm after paroling former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe “pink underwear” Arpaio. The Arizona Republic called Trump’s pardon “a sign of pure contempt for every American who believes in justice, human dignity and the rule of law.” The pardon is a message, of course, to others who may be facing prosecution for Trump-associated crimes or misdemeanors down the road: “Man up, zip it, don’t roll over on me when prosecutors start applying pressure. Do this and I’ll pardon you if you get sentenced.”

From Arpaio’s Wikipage: “Arpaio claimed that his requirement that inmates wear pink underwear…saved the county $70,000 in the first year the rule was in effect. Arpaio subsequently sold customized pink boxers (with the Maricopa County Sheriff’s logo and ‘Go Joe’) as a fund-raiser for Sheriff’s Posse Association. Despite allegations of misuse of funds received from these sales, Arpaio declined to provide an accounting for the money. Arpaio’s success in gaining press coverage with the pink underwear resulted in his extending the use of the color. He introduced pink handcuffs, using the event to promote his book, ‘Joe’s Law: America’s Toughest Sheriff Takes on Illegal Immigration, Drugs and Everything Else That Threatens America.’ Arpaio has said ‘I can get elected on pink underwear… I’ve done it five times.'”

Initially Steven Spielberg and Amy Pascal‘s Pentagon Papers flick was known as The Post, and then as The Papers.  Today it officially went back to being called The Post.  A good enough title, I guess, but a bit sleepy.  No echoes or undercurrents.  We all know the logline — Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham gradually takes the bull by the horns when the Nixon administration attempts to suppress the printing of a once-secret history of governmental lying about the Vietnam War. What are the two greatest sounding award-season titles? Phantom Thread and Call Me By Your Name.

I’m no fan of Good Time, but the following statement by co-director Josh Safdie is exactly on-target as far as understanding where people are at in terms wanting or not wanting exposition and back-stories in movies.

“There’s zero exposition in [Dunkirk], to the point where you don’t even know who the characters are at times. But that adds to the element of the mass of people, of the experience of being one of 400,000. I think people are ready to move on from the idea of exposition, of ‘Let’s set it up and spoon-feed you information.’ I think, on an everyday basis, people do a lot of deduction in real life, especially when no one knows what’s real and what’s fake, and fake news this and that. I think people like to do their own detective work.” — Safdie speaking to Austin Chronicle‘s Richard Whittaker in an 8.18 interview.

“There are NO backstories or character fill-ins of any kind in Chris Nolan‘s Dunkirk, and it’s utterly wonderful for that.” — from “Origin Stories Can Kiss My Ass,” posted on 8.1.17.