On Sunday afternoon Jeffrey Wells (fresh from his special Invaders From Mars screening at the Bedford Playhouse) and Sasha Stone settled into another Phase One handicapping conversation (i.e., Oscar Poker). In and out, up and down, Andrea Riseborough, Critics Choice, etc. And then Sasha broke through with another vein of thought and Jeff said, “Wait, wait…that’s good…this is better than before.” And it all flowed from there.

The Critics Choice voters are total woke lemmings — they’ve gone over the cliff (i.e., are lacking in good taste) and are no longer predictive of the Oscars, and that’s final. And where did Brendan Fraser’s win come from? How did he muscle aside Colin Farrell and Austin Butler? HE applauds Cate Blanchett’s Best Actress win for Tar, of course.

Veteran producer friendo (i.e., burdened with a sense of taste): “It’s criminal that Everything Everywhere All At Once took Best Picture at the Critics Choice Awards. And RRR for Best Foreign? Get outta town.”

Sarah Polley’s Women Talking script (essentially a barn-dialogue primer about women standing up to white male sexual assault) winning the CC’s Best Adapted Screenplay trophy is curious, given the obviously superior investigative pedigree of Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s She Said screenplay.

The CC ceremony was some kind of award season glitch, a belch, an anomaly.. Voting the woke party line (sacralization of race, gender, sexuality plus focusing on emotional core issues over an instance of morbid self-destructive obesity) means NOTHING in this context.

Cate Blanchett’s Tar win aside, there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between Critics Choice voters lining up like stooges and voting a straight woke party ticket and, say, Democratic trade unions voting for Richard Daley’s Chicago Democratic machine ticket back in the ‘50s and ‘60s.

Wokeism is a cult and a scourge — its followers are indistinguishable from those obedient, red-book-waving Mao lapdogs during China’s “great cuitural revolution.”

I don’t know why I’ll always remember Captain Meathead, but somehow this late-night Park City encounter (1.17.14, or almost exactly nine years ago) has taken up residence. Probably because I loved the late Lynn Shelton’s Laggies (‘14) and…I don’t know. All seemed right with the world back in ‘14, and I was very happy for Shelton that night. Happy all around. I’m very sorry…well, for a great many things.

Posted a day ago: At the Oxford Union, Konstantin Kisin, a Russian-British satirist, podcaster, author and political commentator, recently made a case for “This House Believes Wokeness Has Gone Too Far”. The HE wokester brigade is hereby commanded to listen to this speech.

You Tube guys: (a) “Think of all the progress we’d make if our leaders felt this way, instead of pandering to woke idiots for votes and then just doing more of what is bad”, (b) “An absolutely phenomenal speech…I cannot stress enough how much it warms my heart to see people like Lisinb come out of relatively nowhere to carry the torch’; (c) “radiates with clarity!”, (d) “Can there please be more people like this guy, so civilization can hopefully be saved?”

Before this morning’s Bedford Playhouse screening of Invaders From Mars, I’ll be sharing a few words with the audience about the composer of the eerie musical score — the unsung Mort Glickman, an under-valued, under-the-radar guy if there ever was one.

In Laurent Bouzereau‘s two-hour Making of ‘Jaws’ doc, director Steven Spielberg says that John Williams‘ creepy leviathan score is responsible for half of the film’s effectiveness. Same deal with Invaders From Mars, which is chiefly distinguished by William Cameron Menzies‘ production design but would still amount to very little without Glickman’s input.

Glickman’s Martian choir music injects a profoundly creepy vibe…a sense of hovering otherworldliness…”a bleak acapella that conjures visions of a dying Martian landscape or the wailing of frightened minds in hell,” to quote from a 1986 Cinemascore article by William Rosar.

And poor Glickman, sub-contracted by Raoul Kraushar, didn’t even get screen credit — Kraushar claimed that honor. On top of which Glickman died of a heart attack two months before Invaders From Mars opened in April 1953. He passed on 2.27.53 at age 54.

Posted on 4.2.22: Yeah, I know…Mort who?

It’s been asserted for years by people seemingly in the know that the actual composer of the famously eerie Invaders From Mars score is not Raoul Kraushar, as I’ve stated a few times on HE, but longtime Republic Pictures composer Mort Glickman.

Reporting has it that Kraushar was a Hans Zimmer-like operator and compiler who would hire guys to ghost-write scores, which Kraushar would then take credit for.

I’ve been persuaded that the claims about Glickman may have merit. Okay, that they’re probably legit.

I am therefore apologizing if in fact (as it appears) I have passed along bad intel. Kraushar was apparently not the Invaders From Mars composer, and I apologize for previously failing to report that Glickman, a stocky, bespectacled guy who looked like a 1950s grocery-store clerk and could have played a behind-the-counter colleague of Ernest Borgnine‘s in Marty…Glickman was the maestro!

Three people have made the case — (1) David Schecter, co-producer of Monstrous Movie Music, a “series of re-recordings which feature a wealth of classic music from many of everyone’s favorite science fiction, horror and fantasy films”, (2) Janne Wass in a 2016 article for scifist.wordpress.com, and (3) William H. Rosar, author of a 1986 CinemaScore article titled “The Music for Invaders From Mars.”

I first saw Laurent Bouzereau‘s The Making of ‘Jaws’, an extra feature on the Jaws laserdisc, in ’95. 27 and 1/2 years ago. It’s since been included on the DVD, Bluray and 4K Bluray editions. It runs two hours and six minutes or something close to that. I was instantly gobsmacked by how honest and thorough and meticulous it was. Every significant chapter, every step of the journey. And a lot of it is funny. And everyone looks so young!

Almost everyone took part except for poor Robert Shaw, who passed in ’78, and the late Murray Hamilton, who departed in ’86. Spielberg, Zanuck and Brown, Sid Sheinberg, Richard Dreyfuss, Lorraine Gary, book author Peter Benchley, screenwriter Carl Gottlieb, Roy Scheider, dp Bill Butler, edtitor Verna Fields, John Williams, shark specialists Ron and Valerie Taylor, etc.

It’s absolutely the definitive account of how Steven Spielberg, Richard Zanuck and David Brown‘s 1975 thriller came to be. The doc is significantly better, it goes without saying, than Eric Hollander‘s The Shark Is Still Working (’12), which I caught a few years ago. Decent, approvable.

I re-watched Bouzereau’s doc last night, and it’s still transporting. I know the saga backwards and forwards and I loved every minute. The only thing it needs is someone acknowledging at the very end that the enormous success of Jaws yielded a mixed legacy. For Jaws and Star Wars basically brought about the end of the Hollywood’s greatest chapter (the late ’60s to late ’70s) by ushering in the era of the blockbuster. Nobody so much as mentions this in Bouzereau’s film….astonishing.

I’m also scratching my head about the seemingly scripted Andrea Riseborough Best Actress campaign for her performance in To Leslie. Her performance as an all-but-hopeless drunk who takes forever to hit bottom is…well, the first term that comes to mind is “whew!” Yes, she’s raw, real, scalding — you can’t help but say “wow, Andrea really went for it…I mean, she doesn’t care if the audience likes her character or not.”

Except an actor isn’t going to get Oscar-nominated just for craft and honesty alone. He/she has to deliver a performance that has at least some degree of empathy. If you’re playing a drunk the audience has to be able to least tolerate the character in question. There has to be, you know, a certain palatable sadness or sympathy factor or dark charm.

For the first hour of To Leslie, Riseborough — an excellent actress — is so committed to the psychology of a pathetic, lying, disreputable drunk that you can’t stand her. Or at least I couldn’t. She’s “great”, yes, but Jesus, man…

“And She Drinks A Little,” posted on 3.20.22 — an ironic date for me as I embraced sobriety exactly ten years earlier (3.20.12).

Having dealt with an alcoholic dad and coped with my own boozing issues until I embraced sobriety on 3.20.12, I’m not especially interested in films about alcoholics. Even without that history movies about drunks have always seemed more or less the same to me.

In Michael Morris‘s To Leslie, which recently screened at South by Southwest, Andrea Riseborough plays the 40ish Leslie, an all-but-hopeless drunk who’s nothing but rat poison to everyone she’s ever known or been close to, including her son.

The first 50 minutes or so are pure hell to get through, and then Leslie finally falls in with a couple of low-rent guys who run a 2nd-class motel. One of them, an amiable, low-key dude named Sweeney, is played by Marc Maron, and right away you’re asking yourself “is Sweeney a fucking idiot? Why has he offered Leslie a job as the motel’s maid? Why did he give her a chance? She’s obviously a lost cause and nothing but trouble.”

But he gives her a chance anyway, and after another relapse or two Leslie finally pulls out of the long downward spiral. But there’s so much ugliness in this film. I mean it’s really and truly awful.

Remember the opening scene in Bruce Beresford‘s Tender Mercies (’83), when Robert Duvall‘s Mac Sledge, a semi-retired country singer, is shouting and slugging someone and generally behaving like an abusive drunk? The ugly happens in one brief scene, and then Mac is on the mend for the rest of the film. But in To Leslie, Riseborough does the ugly for a whole damn hour before she starts to self-reflect and turn a corner. It struck me as too much to bear.

Riseborough’s performance is raw and scalding and frankly dispiriting. I believed her in every scene, but I also wanted to see her get hit by a truck. I didn’t believe Maron — I thought he was just laying on the charm with a shitkicker accent. But high marks for the other costars — Allison Janney, Andre Royo, Stephen Root, Owen Teague, etc.