Journalists and editors being fallible, articles in the entertainment realm sometimes contain wrongos. Misspelled titles and names, misleading plot synopses, bad release dates, etc. What matters is how quickly the errors are spotted and corrected.

Last Saturday (6.17) Vanity Fair‘s Jordan Hoffman posted a fluff piece about the half-century-old relationship between Godfather collaborators Francis Coppola and Diane Keaton (“Diane Keaton Asks Francis Ford Coppola a Question 50+ Years in the Making“). Hoffman flubbed the title of Coppola’s forthcoming Megalopolis, spelling it Megapolis.

This wasn’t a felony. But his Vanity Fair editors never fixed it, and now this dumb-ass misspelling has been sitting on the site for four days — Saturday (6.17), Sunday (6.18), Monday (6.19) and today (6.20). It would have been mildly embarassing if the Vanity Fair editors hadn’t corrected the misspelling until Sunday, let’s say, but four days of inaction? These guys are out to lunch.

This signifies something, I fear. It probably signifies that people don’t care very much about Megalopolis. If they did somebody would’ve spotted the error last weekend. (If a journalist had written an article in early 1979 about Coppola’s forthcoming Apothecary Now, an editor would have instantly fixed it.) This probably means that when Megalopolis finally opens, people are going to watch it listlessly, half-attuned, perhaps in a slumbering mode.

For days and days the French Connection censorship story has confounded everyone. The “whodunit” factor, I mean, although it’s been obvious for several days that the nine-second deletion was done at the behest of director William Friedkin (formerly known as Hurricane Billy).

Has the 87-year-old Friedkin gone silly in his old age? Bending over in obeisance to the wokesters? I personally think —- all due respect —- that this formerly ballsy, gold-standard helmer should be roasted on a spit for censoring his own film. It sets a terrible precedent.

Last Wednesday (6.14) I summed it all up. The bizarre deletion of that brief French Connection scene (’71) has apparently been done with Friedkin’s approval or at his behest….good heavens!

On Friday, 6.9, HE commenter “The Multiplex” reported that “in Disney’s DCP asset list the currently-streaming version of The French Connection is listed as ‘2021 William Friedkin v2.'” This info, I noted, “is seemingly fortified by a statement from The Criterion Channel, passed along by “The Connection” in another 6.9.23 HE story titled “HE to Friedkin re Censorship Fracas.” CC’s statement said that “according to our licensor [Disney], this is a ‘Director’s Edit‘ of the film.”

So that’s it. Shame on that Friedkin mofo. And yet all the while several HE commenters have insisted that the issue won’t be settled until Glenn “the last word” Kenny has reported on it. I had expected Kenny’s piece to appear last week, but it didn’t. Behold…it finally surfaced this morning (“Who Censored ‘The French Connection’?” Is A Case That Only Popeye Doyle Can Solve“), and yet — hold on to your grief and your weltschmerz, Kenny fans! —the article contains no Friedkin smoking gun.

After reciting the same evidence that I reported several days ago — “2021 William Friedkin V2.” plus Criterion calling the censored version a “Director’s Edit” — Kenny merely says that “this ostensibly puts the ball in Friedkin’s court.” Ostensibly?

Kenny adds that (a) he’s “reached out to Friedkin through CAA and received no response” and that (b) “a film asset manager I’ve asked about this matter has reached out to Friedkin personally and received a response from Friedkin’s personal assistant saying basically nothing.” And the name of that tune is The Guess Who’s “No Sugar Tonight (In My Coffee).”

My favorite Kenny passage in the whole piece: “Jeffrey Wells, as mentioned, first brought the issue up on June 3rd, in a post titled “Criterion’s ‘French Connection’ Censorship.”

“Wells likes to cultivate a barrel-chested, combative, curmudgeonly air in his writings. (Commenting on the blanket of orange wildfire smoke that recently enveloped Manhattan, he shrugged it off, stating, “You should try breathing Hanoi air on a shitty day. Tough guys only.”) He’s long had differences with Criterion’s physical product practices, over issues like aspect-ratios and color timing. He almost invariably couches his complaints in ad hominem terms, and this French Connection business allowed him to really go to town in that respect.

“In one of several subsequent posts commemorating the Twitter rage over what many were still calling Criterion’s censorship of Friedkin’s film, Wells instructed the company’s president to ‘blow it out your ass,’ never specifying the “it” to which he referred. As with the inference that Criterion is some kind of ‘woke’ company, Wells believes that the label represents what he calls a ‘dweeb’ sensibility, and is populated by people who would more than likely snub him at receptions and on movie queues. And honestly, on the latter count, he’s probably not wrong, although not necessarily for the reasons he thinks.”

It’s been estimated that the Titan, the small, deep-sea, Titanic-spotting submersible that went missing early Sunday morning, can sustain the lives of five on-board travelers for 96 hours, or four 24-hour days.

The 23,000-pound Titan began descending around 4 am on Sunday, or roughly 53 hours ago. (It’s now 9 am eastern.) Start to finish Titanic dives last ten hours, including a 2 and 1/2 hour descent to the wreckage some 13,000 feet below.

If the five aren’t rescued by early Thursday morning, an agonizing finale awaits. The clock is ticking — at most rescuers have the remainder of today (Tuesday, 6.20) and all-day Wednesday.

This paragraph, from a N.Y. Times report, conveys the bottom line:

This also:

Or at least not from the voice of Hollywood Elsewhere. Earlier today (Monday afternoon, 6.19) Jeff and Sasha reviewed the box-office wreckage left by The Flash and Elemental, AMC caving in to wokester pressure over No Way Back: The Reality of Gender-Affirming Care, and the mixed matter of Jennifer Lawrence’s No Hard Feelings, which opens on Friday. Again, the link.

…to any sensible-parent, non-radical, cautionary-tale documentary that urges a stop-and-think response when it comes to proposed invasive transgender procedures. No Way Back was ganged up upon by hard-left activists, who apparently forced AMC to back off on screenings.

I somehow missed a nearly two-week-old Decider piece (posted on 6.7) about the French Connection censorship thing. The self-parodying bias shown by the author, Anna Menta, tells you everything you might want to know (or not want to know) about where some wokesters are coming from on this matter.

Revealing excerpt from Menta’s article: “The French Connection is an R-rated movie for adults, and so fans are arguing that new edits of classic films set a dangerous precedent that could influence media literacy and cinematic history. Others wonder why people want to hear the n-word so badly. The debate rages on.”

“Others wonder why people want to hear the n-word so badly“? Yup, she wrote that.

From The Troggs’ “Fatigue Is All Around“:

“I feel it in my fingers, I feel it in my toes / the fatigue’s all around me / And so the feeling grows

“It’s written on the wind, it’s everywhere I go / So if you really hate these fucking films / Come on and let it show.”

Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman, posted a few hours ago: “For the first time since the launch of the MCU, which was 15 years ago last month (when Iron Man was released in the U.S.), superhero fatigue is palpable.

“You can read it in the numbers, notably the post-pandemic figures, when we don’t have to put an asterisk next to a film’s box office performance: Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania opening huge ($106 million) only to collapse and underperform to the tune of $214 million; the tanking of Shazam! Fury of the Gods ($57 million); or this weekend’s [$55 million] for The Flash (the studio publicity, in floating a prediction of $70 million, was already scaling back expectations).

“You can feel it in Chris Hemsworth’s blithe willingness to trash last summer’s Thor sequel — not something movie stars are in the habit of doing, especially when the film in question was a hit.

“You can feel it in the reviews: the jadedness of critics when it comes to sitting through another warmed-over version of these tropes, that CGI, all that interconnected multiverse busy-ness, with less at stake each time.”

In response to reader comments about “Kael’s Huge Miss“, a friend has written the following:

“Basically I”m reading over and over again, ‘Kael was wrong all the time, Kael was wrong all the time, Kael was wrong all the time…,’ repeated like a mantra.

“In truth, she was right a lot of the time, as much as any critic is. She wrote thousands and thousands of reviews; a great many of them stand the test of time, in terms of critical judiciousness and a kind of timeless readability.

“And the ‘Kael was wrong’ mantra? No one on these forums ever — ever — says that sort of thing about Roger Ebert, who consistently, week in and week out on his fucking TV show, had far too much enthusiasm for bad movies, or missed out on plenty of good ones.

“I have no major problem with Roger’s judgments. He was a great critic. My point is: You can’t say ‘Kael’s judgment was lousy’ and at the same time say ‘Ebert’s judgment was infallible.’

“There’s simply no truth to that. It’s a complete double standard. I personally believe that the animus against Kael now is pure fanboy-cineaste sexism.”

Late yesterday or early this morning on a Facebook thread I was called a dipstick or a cretin or a clueless lame-o (or something along those lines) for drawing a blank on the absolutely mythic Sylvie Vartan, the ye-ye pop singer and actress who was partnered with the late Johnny Hallyday during most of the ’60s and all of the ’70s.

I hereby apologize to everyone for his unforgivable oversight, but I was unable to show contrition to Glenn Kenny, who delivered the Facebook assault. Here’s how I replied:

“Good for Sylvie’s singing career and general impact during the ‘60s and ‘70s. Good for each and every gifted or at least earnestly committed artist whose work has failed (through no glaring fault of their own) to penetrate my consciousness.

“But at the same time I’ll wager there are dozens if not hundreds of artists, artisans and people of merit and consequence whom I know of and respect but whom Glenn Kenny has somehow overlooked.

“The difference is that I take life as it comes while Kenny is a rancid curdling life form who lives to sneer and demean in order to elevate his own fragile sense of self-worth.

“Cheers to Vartan, 78, and now, if you guys will permit me, I’m going to continue on my long journey without her radiant and dazzling creations making much of a dent in my head or, no offense, having all that much impact upon the cosmic scheme of things.

“Alas, asi es la vida. Nobody gets out alive. That said, I wish Sylvie a long and happy continuance.

“I’m wondering, in all candor, if the song stylings of Sylvie Vartan have penetrated penetrated Kenny’s cranial membrane were it not for her 15-year marriage and general association with Johnny “wolf eyes” Hallyday.

“Innocent question: In Patrice Leconte’s The Man on the Train, why is Johnny ‘go fuck yourself’ Hallyday ALWAYS smoking an unfiltered Gitanes in every last fucking scene?”

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