I won’t divulge his name or even the country where he operates from, but yesterday HE spoke to a real-life, honest-to-God streaming pirate.

I was poking around about the pirating of Fast Charlie and the apparent inability or unwillingness on the part of Vertical Entertainment to do very much about it.

I’d been told that Vertical’s communications with pirates basically boils down to AI threats and warnings. Pirates don’t listen because AI threats are bullshit. So I asked this guy…call him Long John Silver…about who, if anyone, he might actually be afraid of? Who does he take seriously?

Long John Silver: “We don’t know much about Vertical. We know Muso and other similar services, and we know that they use AI for notices but (a) they don’t follow up, and (b) what can they do when our servers are in countries they have no control over? Servers change so much, and it’s not worth it for them to chase one or two movies.

“Plus takedown notices only come when we host on services such as Dropbox or Google drive. They’re not effective when chasing torrents.

“Why should we take companies like Vertical or anyone else seriously? It’s been 25 years and they haven’t done anything. They can’t do a thing if they don’t know who/where we are.

“If it’s a genuine movie or a fake movie pretending to be real, we still earn from ads. You might find it interesting that when fakes are floating around, real movies get downloaded much less.”

Ed Harris‘s “happiness is bullshit” rant is a glorious retort to Sally Hawkins‘”Poppy” character, an emotional fascist who taunted people left and right with “are you happy?” sentiments, in Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky (’08).

It’s from the under-appreciated Kodachrome, and was written by Jonathan Tropper.

I hated Jason Sudeikis‘ character, an overly sensitive 40ish candy-ass who still can’t get past his dying dad’s (Harris’s) show of parental indifference when they were both younger.

Sudeikis to Harris: “When’s my birthday?” 

My father wasn’t much in the affection department either, weenie.  Man up.

May December has been snubbed, snubbed, snubbed by the SAG Awards nominations. It’s not that I’ve been against Charles Melton as much as unable to understand the bizarre enthusiasm for his sufficient but no-great-shakes performance by Gotham Award suck-ups, New York Film Critics Circle, etc. Now, alas, it’s all gone south. No SAG-AFTRA support, no Oscar nom.

…based primarily on merit, depth, artistic distinction.

I have a feeling that Sam Peckinpah’s 1969 western classic is closer to the hearts of boomers and GenXers, and that under-40s are kinda “meh” if not altogether disinterested. Too sexist (all the women are depicted as disloyal and whore-ish), too violent (especially for Zoomer candy-asses), too fatalistic and end-of-the-roadish. At least it’s not racist.

“Simply the finest film ever produced between these American shores. The masterpiece of masterpieces. Film achieves its highest calling: art, incitement, revelation, challenge, elegy, physical redemption of reality that sets a bar no one else, including Peckinpah, ever reached. Yeah. I kinda like it.” — Steven Gaydos, 8.27.19.

Ditto: When The Wild Bunch opened it was regarded as the last revisionist wheeze of a genre that had peaked in the ’50s and was surely on its last legs. It was also seen, disparagingly, as a kind of gimmick film that used ultra-violence and slow-mo death ballets to goose the formula.

Now it’s regarded as one of the best traditional, right-down-the-middle westerns ever made. This kind of writing, acting and pacing will never return or be reborn. Lightning in a bottle.

“What Citizen Kane was to movie lovers in 1941, The Wild Bunch was to cineastes in 1969,” Michael Sragow wrote, adding that Peckinpah had “produced an American movie that equals or surpasses the best of Kurosawa: the Gotterdammerung of Westerns”.

“After a reporter from the Reader’s Digest got up to ask ‘Why was this film even made? I stood up and called it a masterpiece; I felt, then and now, that The Wild Bunch is one of the great defining moments of modern movies.” — from 9.29.02 article by Roger Ebert.

Vincent Canby on William Holden‘s performance as Pike Bishop, from 6.26.69 N.Y. Times review: “After years of giving bored performances in boring movies, Holden comes back gallantly in The Wild Bunch. He looks older and tired, but he has style, both as a man and as a movie character who persists in doing what he’s always done, not because he really wants the money but because there’s simply nothing else to do.”

Edmond O’Brien: “They? Why they is the plain and fancy ‘they’…that’s who they is. Caught ya, didn’t they? Tied a tin can to your tails. Led you in and waltzed you out again. Oh, my, what a bunch! Big tough ones, eh? Here you are with a handful of holes, a thumb up your ass and big grin to pass the time of day with.”

Satirizing an alleged Native American tribal tradition…no one would dare shoot a scene like this today.

“We are coming towards a great reckoning of our past. The more that these stories can be told in a truthful way, the more it can be a healing process.” — Lily Gladstone quoted in U.K Vogue.