Posted earlier today by Paul Schrader. Here’s hoping the Sight & Sound Stalinists see it…

If you’re unfortunately tethered to an unhappy and dysfunctional family and can barely stand your siblings during holiday gatherings, you can at least take comfort in the fact that the battling O’Neals were always worse off.

The father of all this misery, of course, was the late Ryan O’Neal, who apparently insisted on disliking his children, never apologizing and blowing them off repeatedly.

Posted early today by the N.Y. Post’s Dana Kennedy:

Respect and praise for the late Tom Smothers, whose provocative views and attitudes in the late ‘60s made The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, which aired on CBS for two years and two months (February ‘67 to April ‘69), the hippest mainstream show on television.

If you were youngish and dropping acid, listening to progressive rock (Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, The Who), loving films like The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde and The President’s Analyst and generally hating the Vietnam War, you almost certainly watched this intensely spiritual (in a Nehru jacket sense of the term), anti-establishment show on a fairly regular and reverent basis.

CBS finally cancelled the Smothers Comedy Hour over regional complaints that it had pushed the counter-culture envelope too far.

Tom has passed from cancer at age 86.

[Posted on 3.26.21]

Just so we’re clear, Carl Reiner‘s Where’s Poppa? and Peter Yates‘ The Hot Rock delivered the one-two punch that made George Segal into a marquee brand.

Segal was a respected, well-liked, plugging-away actor throughout the ’60s, and he definitely elevated his stock rating with his lead performance in Irvin Kershner‘s Loving (’70 — 3.4.70).

But Reiner-Yates added the boldface, above-the-title stardom factor to Segal’s guilt-ridden, self-flagellating, Jewish-guy thing, and he was off to the races.

Poppa (a cult film, not a hit) was released on 11.10.70, and The Hot Rock (a silly ensemble caper comedy for guys) arrived on 1.26.72 or 14 months later.

Pre-Poppa and post-Hot Rock Segal were entirely different entities.

With these two in the bag, Segal landed the titular role in Paul Mazursky‘s Blume in Love (6.17.73), and thereafter he wasn’t just a star but a complex ’70s soul man — the highest rung of the realm.

And then, 14 months after Blume, came Segal’s Bill Denny in California Split (8.7.74) — another grand-slammer.

And then God lost interest and Segal’s hot streak ended, just like that. Segal kept working for another 40 years after that, and good for his spirit and tenacity. But what a rude jolt.

1970 through ‘74: “You’re finally really hot, George…you’re totally cool and everyone digs you.” 1975 and onward: “Okay, you’re still good but time to cool things down.”

I’m truly lucky to have a strong constitution and therefore good health. And I absolutely love doing the column and living this rat-a-tat life on a day-to-day basis, but the best part of my journalistic hot–shot life is over. 1991 to 2019 — 28 years when things were pretty good and often delicious and sometimes wonderful. I’m simply too poor these days. Savoring the joys and adventures of yore is out of reach —that’s the long and the short of it.

If you know George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty–Four”, you surely know the sinister character of “O’Brien,” a duplicitous double agent who pretends to be Winston Smith’s friend but is actually a member of the Thought Police. OBrien’s goal is to seek out and persecute thought criminals.

I’m not saying David Poland is a manifestation of a woke O’Brien but he is unmistakably projecting a false flag narrative when he posts bullshit like the tweets below. Poland is either completely self-deluding, which doesn’t square with the fact that he’s very sharp and socially aware, or he is simply an agent of smoke and propaganda who is spewing this crap in order to politically protect himself.

You know what’s a lot better than you might expect? Rollercoaster (’77), a Jennings Lang-produced disaster thriller, made near the end of the big-budget disaster-flick cycle.

Rollercoaster was promoted as a drop-your-socks Sensurround experience, and it was that to a certain extent. But it was mainly an intelligent, low-key, logic-driven chase thriller.

You’d figure with the disaster-flick promotion there would be at least two or three scenes of rollercoaster cars flying off the tracks and people being killed, etc. There’s only one such scene, however, and it happens during the first half-hour and that’s it.

The rest is all cat-and-mouse stuff with amusement park inspector George Segal on the trail of psycho yuppie bomber Timothy Bottoms.

I would’t necessarily call it Hitchcockian but it uses elements of suspense to engaging effect.

Rollercoaster was written by Richard Levinson and William Link, the guys who created Colombo. It’s nicely (as in carefully, patiently) directed by James Goldstone (The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight —-’71); Goldstone’s big-screen career was unfortunately killed when he directed When Time Ran Out… (’80).

Here’s a link to the whole film.

A little less than three years ago I posted a roster of HE’s top 20 Henry Fonda films. There was some pushback over my placing Sergio Leone‘s Once Upon A Time In The West, in which Fonda played a blackhearted villain named Frank, in 15th place.

I put it there because it wasn’t a “Henry Fonda” performance, but an aberration in the vein of Fort Apache. And yet even Fonda’s Fort Apache performance as Lieutenant Colonel Owen Thursday, a stiff-necked, emotionally constipated fanatic, represented an aspect of his own nature. (Peter Fonda once said this in an interview.) Frank was a bizarre showhorse role — completely divorced from Fonda the man and Fonda the legend.

In 19 of the 20 performances listed below Fonda was basically playing himself, which is how we’ve always preferred him.

1. 12 Angry Men
2 The Ox-Bow Incident
3. The Grapes of Wrath
4. The Lady Eve
5. The Best Man
6. The Wrong Man
7. Young Mr, Lincoln
8. Drums Along The Mohawk
9. My Darling Clementine
10. You Only Live Once
11. Fort Apache
12. On Golden Pond
13. The Boston Strangler
14. The Fugitive
15. Once Upon a Time in the West
16. Advise and Consent
17. Slim
18. Jezebel
19. The Tin Star
20. Jesse James

Arguably the worst stinkers of Fonda’s career were Mr. Roberts, Fail Safe (a technically good film that I’ve only rewatched once — that means something) and Sex and the Single Girl.