There’s a certain way of “being” when you record a podcast, and the key to that being is not giving a fuck.

Here’s the link…

Posted from Cannes on 5.17.23:

I’m sorry but I’ve never been a fan of Hirokazu Kore-eda, the humanist, kind-hearted, Ozu-like Japanese director whom everyone (i.e., the Cannes mob) admires. I “respect” his signature focus (sad, anxious, troubled families going through difficult times), but his films (Shoplifters, Broker, Like Father, Like Son) have always bored my pants off.

Which means, of course, that I don’t like Kore-eda’s humanism…right? The humanism is fine, of course. But I’ve always found his stories frustrating because they seem to just go on and on.

I certainly felt this way during today’s Salle Debussy screening of his latest film, Monster, which deals with school bullying, repressed rage and various family misunderstandings.

It struck me as repetitive and meandering and lacking in narrative discipline. I began to feel antsy after the first hour, and then this feeling seemed to double-down. My soul was screaming during the final half-hour of this 125-minute film, which felt more like three hours. I was silently whimpering.

I’m not condemning Monster or calling it a bad film. I’m just saying the world of Kore-era is not for me, and never will be. This doesn’t make me a bad person, or so I’m telling myself. I know that at the 95-minute mark I leaned over and muttered to a friend, “I don’t know how much more of this I can take.”

Todd McCarthy‘s approving review of Fast Charlie is a little too flourishy in terms of tallying the shooting victims.

Opening line: “Rasty and nasty with a cherry on top, Fast Charlie is a down-home Southern gangster yarn with a staggering body count but a sweet taste awaiting the survivors at the end of the day.”

HE exception: “Staggering”? The actual Fast Charlie body count is four on-screen and eight guys total. No offense but McCarthy’s review kinda makes it sound like it’s competitive with Sam Peckinpah‘s The Wild Bunch.

In my 9.20 review, I called it “half of a laid-back, settled-down relationship drama between Pierce Brosnan‘s Charlie, a civilized, soft-drawl hitman who loves fine cooking, and Morena Baccarin‘s Marcie, a taxidermist with a world-weary, Thelma Ritter-ish attitude about things. And half of a blam-blam action thriller.”

McCarthy: “This adaptation of Victor Gischler’s 2003 novel ‘Gun Monkeys‘ is an inelegant affair that gushes hot blood all over the place but leaves enough room for an appealingly credible May-December romance to grow in the midst of the constant mayhem.”

Pierce Brosnan as low-key, gourmet-food-loving assassin in Fast Charlie.

During last night’s Mill Valley Film Festival q & a (l. to r.): Scott Allen Perry (songwriter), Fil Eisler (score composer), second-unit director Warren Thompson, book author Victor Gischler, director Phillip Noyce.

HE: I chose to focus on the Pierce Brosnan-Morena Baccarin thing because that’s where the soul and the nourishment are, and I chose to downplay the shootings because shootings are inevitably rote. Plus McCarthy didn’t mention the laundry chute sequence, Pierce’s gourmet appetites or the Morena’s freelance gig as a taxidermist…little quirks and character touches that stand out.

McCarthy: “Whereas senior movie mafia and gangster characters through the decades have tended to be revered — if only for simply having survived for decades — it nonetheless seems that Charlie Swift (Brosnan) may not get the respect he deserves from the bad-guy wannabees who populate the bayou country of Louisiana. Young hot-shot punks often think they’re better than anyone, but the fit, gray-haired Charlie knows the score much better than they do and some of the reckless show-offs don’t last very long.

“The way the first victim bites the dust immediately sets the darkly seriocomic tone for the entire film, and it’s an approach that veteran Australian director Phillip Noyce manages to more or less sustain no matter how gruesome and perverse any given situation may become.

“[The film] puts you in a position to either embrace [the violence] as fun or discard it as foolish. What tilts you in the former direction is the energy Noyce injects into the silliness as well as the kick that results from pushing the material so far. The filmmakers look to have gone all out to make something of this and it more or less pays off in its outlandish boisterousness.”

“The [Brosnan-Baccarin] scenes are nicely written. Despite the fundamentally preposterous nature of their situation, the actors invest their performances with a palatable sense of their hopes, desires and uncertainties. The result is a conclusion that seems both wish-fulfilment and not entirely implausible, even if, as Charlie admits, ‘In my line of work, it’s best not to have any long-term plans.'”

Surely the Gaza militants — principally Hamas but also Hezbollah — understand that launching an all-out war with Israel will end in rockets and ruin. Backed by the U.S., Bibi is about to unload Israel’s full military might big-time.

Israel obviously needs to defend itself, but their maneuvers will soon turn savagely offensive. The Hamas attacks, in short, will prove a suicide move, so why bring about their own self-destruction?

Furious and illogical rage. Rage so infernal and absolute that it can’t be stilled. Some don’t like to be reminded that there’s a history behind this, but here it is:

However welcome and applauded they may have been during the Clinton era, the 1993 Oslo Accords were an incremental step in a long process that has steadily been about Palestinian disenfranchisement, oppression, humiliation and generally getting the shit end of the stick.

The Oslo Accords ratified a peace agreement between Israelis and Palestinians, founded upon recognition by the Palestine Liberation Organization of the State of Israel (as in “the right to exist”) and a recognition by Israel of the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people (“self-rule”) and as a partner in negotiations, etc.

But over the last three decades there has been a steady encroachment and usurpation of Palestinian West Bank territory by Israeli settlers and the Israeli military, and the Palestinian pie slices have gotten thinner and thinner.

In 1975 U.N. resolution 3379 declared that Zionism was “a form of racism,” and even though 3379 was renounced in ’91, the ’75 resolution stands as a historical statement of widely-shared opinion.

Today Israel controls well over 60% of the West Bank, and Palestinian economic development has been stymied and/or obstructed. Please watch “Israeli settlements, explained | Settlements Part I,” a 2016 Vox report.

I thought I had listened to Joni Mitchell‘s “You Turn Me On” too many damn times. And then I listened to this ballsy version…Joni, Neil Young and the Stray Gators…the absolute best.

It has long been my conviction that HE commenter Castor Troy, Jr. is a liar and a flinger of mud pies. I find him detestable, and here’s one reason why.

Chris Rock‘s Martin Luther King film will be based upon Jonathan Eig’s “King: A Life. It’s been described by its publisher as an “intimate portrayal of King as a courageous but emotionally troubled individual who demanded peaceful protest while grappling with his own frailties and a government that hunted him.”

Initial HE reaction: Emotionally troubled?? Because he routinely cheated on his wife (Coretta Scott King) with white women in hotel rooms? Didn’t that just make him a standard-issue hound? Maybe he felt he needed perversity in his life to counter-balance everything else?

I wrote yesterday that football star and actor Jim Brown “was into white women also. Was this due to Brown being a somewhat frail, emotionally troubled guy, or was it because his tastes simply led him in this direction?

“Remember that Spartacus scene in which Laurence Olivier‘s Marcus Licinius Crassus says he enjoys both snails and oysters? Were Crassus’s appetites a result of his being an emotionally unstable fellow? As J.J. Hunsecker once said, ‘Are we kids or what?'”

What did Castor Troy, Jr. make of this? Like a good little scumbag, he slandered.