The last time I saw Ving Rhames on his feet and actually walking was in Pulp Fiction (’94), or a little more than 29 years ago. I’m speaking of the scene in which Rhames’ Marsellus Wallace is walking across a street in some godforsaken L.A. suburb (Hawthorne?) and happens to spot Bruce Willis‘s Butch Coolidge behind the wheel of his shitty car, etc. Two years later Rhames gave his first performance as Luther Stickell in Brian DePalma and Tom Cruise‘s Mission: Impossible (’96), and has been with the franchise ever since.

I’m not saying Rhames hasn’t been been seen on his feet or walking in his other film roles (Dave, Striptease, Con Air, Out of Sight, Entrapment, Bringing Out the Dead, Dawn of the Dead, I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry). but I don’t remember any of them. (Sorry.) All I can recall about Rhames is that he’s always sitting on his ass.

Best Screen Rant pitch meeting video of all time….seriously. Two years old, and I’ve only just watched it.

And the first animal is jettisoned.

I’m sorry but as much as I wanted Farahani Edit’s mostly-pink Barbenheimer-and-Nazis trailer to delight and transport, it doesn’t. It stops and starts and the sound drops out a couple of times. Fatal errors!

I still haven’t seen Barbie, of course, but being reminded yesterday of Greta Gerwig’s co-authoring of Disney’s seemingly woke-as-fuck Snow White bummed me out. This plus her reported interest in directing a Chronicles of Narnia film and her apparent general leanings as a writer-director since 2019’s Little Women, which seemed to signal an ardently feminist chapter…a proverbial turning of the page as she began to swim in a politically ideological stream…

Gerwig is obviously an inventive and visually exacting filmmaker, but I’m less taken with the incarnation that has come to be seen, felt and heard over the last four or five years than who she seemed to be (and with whom I fraternized two or three times) during her Obama-era output…her Greenberg, Frances Ha, Mistress America and Lady Bird period (2010 to 2017) when she was radiating a curiously appealing take on 21st Century life…truly imaginative and wonderfully peculiar…among the most idiosyncratic and organically rooted creative minds out there.

“Antonioni Gerwig,” posted almost exactly ten years ago:

Posted on 11.16.16:

Posted by filmmaker Matthew Wilder, director-writer of American Martyr, cowriter of Paul Schrader’s Dog Eat Dog:

This may sound silly and it probably is, but a voice out of the space-time continuum is telling me that Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie (‘64) can and should be rebranded, rejuvenated and re-culturalized by merging original Marnie poster art with the ironic girlie bullshit kitsch design of Barbie marketing and more particularly “Barbenheimer.”

There’s always been something vaguely suffocating about Marnie; it’s simply a matter of saying “okay, let’s add apocalyptic to suffocating and substitute red for pink and see if the cat licks it up.”

I can’t explain where this idea has come from exactly, and I certainly haven’t worked out any of the thematic details. I only know that in some strange way Barbie and Marnie have begun to bleed together in my mind. I’m 97% certain that Marnie cultists (Richard Brody, Dave Kehr, Glenn Kenny, et. al.) would somehow approve. .

I don’t know how many comedies or half-comedies have resorted to a certain overworked bit, but many dozens have done so.

I’m talking about two or three or four characters realizing that something awful or calamitous or mortifying has just happened, and their uniform response is to scream “aaaaagggghhhhhh!”

If I’ve seen this once I’ve seen it 80 or 90 times, maybe more. And I’ve never laughed, not once.

If a bearded wizard were to come up and say “if you want, I can erase every last ‘aaaagggghhhhhh!’ scene that’s ever been used” I would say “yes…please!”

Question: Four or five decades ago some director invented an “aaaaggggghhhhh!” scene. It must have gotten a huge laugh the first two or three times or people wouldn’t still be drawing from that well.

So what film was the first? Was Bob Clark the responsible party?

I got started on this because there are at least two “aaaggghhh!” moments in Barbie apparently, at least according to a couple of trailers I’ve seen.

“Aaaaggghhh” almost certainly started in the early 1940s black-and-white era with (a) Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, (b) the Three Stooges and (c) Joan Davis in Hold That Ghost! (’41), arguably the all-time greatest Abbott and Costello comedy.

A friend says that Our Gang‘s Alfalfa (Carl Switzer) let go with a few “aaaggghhh!” screams in his day; ditto Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall in one or two Bowery Boys shorts.

But “aaaggghhh!” didn’t become a repeated, profoundly irksome cliche until much later.

Inner voices had been telling me that “aaaggghhh!” was launched around the dawn of the early ‘80s hormonal sex comedies, otherwise known as the tits ‘n” zits genre which began with Risky Business (‘83), which wasn’t itself tits ‘n’ zits but actually an urbane and sophisticated adult comedy.

But “no, wait, hold on,” a more probing voice recalled.

The more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that “aaaaggghhhh!” actually began sometime in the mid to late ‘70s.

Someone has mentioned an early incarnation in Steven Spielberg’s 1941 (‘79), particularly from the bellowing larynx of Ned Beatty.

Then it hit me there were at least one or two big “aaaggghhh!” moments in I Want To Hold Your Hand, a 1978 slapstick screwball comedyabout the Beatles’ first U.S. arrival in February ‘64, directed by a young eager-beaver Spielberg protege named Robert Zemeckis. The under-appreciated cult film and box-office whiff costarred Nancy Allen and the always reliably hyper Eddie Deezen.

There were also a couple of full-throated “aaaggghhh!” moments in Zemeckis’s Used Cars (‘80), most memorably from the late, great Frank McRae (who passed in ’21) and the legendary Gerrit Graham.

I’m not 100% sure but I seem to recall (although I may be mistaken) a Gerrit Graham “aaaggghhh!” in Brian DePalma’s Phantom of the Paradise (‘74).

Boiled down, the principal responsible parties are most likely Zemeckis, DePalma, Graham, McCrae and Deezen. But mainly Zemeckis.

The most egregious and agonizingly unfunny “aaaggghhh!” moment (as in “will you assholes please shut the fuck up?”) is in Joel and Ethan Coen‘s Raising Arizona — a moment shared by twin beefalos John Goodman and William Forsythe.