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Casting-wise, blackwashing has been a thing since the woke dambreak of ’16 or ’17. For decades Hollywood adhered to whitewash casting, and now that European paleface culture has been identified and discredited as the root of all social evils, the tables have turned — simple enough.

But I wouldn’t call the latest alleged blackwashing rumpus — i.e., Nico Parker (daughter of Ol Parker and Thandiwe Newton) being cast as Astrid Hofferson in the forthcoming live-action version of How To Train Your Dragon — especially significant.

It’s a deal, okay, but a relatively small one. Not worth anyone getting into a twist.

True, Cressida Crowell‘s original children’s books were set in a Scandinavian Viking world, which for centuries has been a white-ass culture. (Just ask Kirk Douglas.) Ditto the 2010 Dreamworks animated version — white-ass Viking men and women from top to bottom. But the new social rules (including the doctrine of presentism) require that white-culture-based stories be reassessed and updated.

Casting directors understand that it’s politically safer to roll with diverse or multicultural mindsets, even if casting an actress of color as the heroine of a centuries-old Scandinavian saga defies any common understanding of Viking history.

Diminishing the visual presence of whiteness by going multicultural has been happening for six or seven years now (ratification of the Academy’s inclusion standards made it official in 2020). Politically speaking it boils down to this: if you don’t want industry people to give the side-eye, you need to play along.

Plus one other thing: Nico Parker was very good as the daughter of Pedro Pascal‘s Joel in HBO’s The Last Of Us.

Ryan Gosling’s idea, I’m presuming, was that post-Barbie he needed to butch himself up, hence the 19th Century gold prospector beard and the styled but un-styled Sutter’s Mill coif. At the same time he didn’t want to over-smother the Barbie association, hence the unbuttoned, chest-baring black shirt and the pink western duster

Peter Yates The Friends of Eddie Coyle (’73), the Boston crime noir which HE has been praising for many years, will screen at Santa Monica’s Aero theatre on Sunday, June 4th. Pic opened a little less than 50 years ago — 6.26.73.

Director-screenwriter Larry Karaszewski will deliver a few introductory remarks prior to showtime.

My introductory remark is that the jacket art for Dave Grusin’s soundtrack album is misleading. A guy hanging one-handed from a gun barrel obviously alludes to a cliffhanger thriller of some sort. Eddie Coyle is emphatically not that. It’s a sullen, downbeat drama about cops, bad guys, wise guys, unlucky guys and all kinds of betrayal and mistrust.

Based on the George V. Higgins novel, it’s about Eddie Coyle (Robert Mitchum), an aging, bone-weary, lower-level weapons dealer who’s trying to make ends meet. Alas, Coyle is also looking at a long prison stretch for driving a truck with stolen goods. His only way out, he gradually realizes, is to rat out some of his “friends.”

One of the guys he’s selling to is Jimmy Scalise (Alex Rocco), the head of a gang that’s pulling off a series of bank robberies on the North Shore.

Here’s a taste of some of the George V. Higgins dialogue.

The following is a deliberate mangling and perversion of Patton Oswalt‘s recent commencement address at the College of William and Mary:

“To the graduating class of 2023, I have 59 words to share: Every new generation is appropriately and admirably intolerant of ugly currents in the human condition and concurrently determined to enhance, elevate or otherwise improve the quality of life or die trying, but are you guys aware right now of how deeply despised most of you are?…generationally speaking, at so young an age? By the vast majority of Americans, I mean, and not just your red-state types but damn near everyone.

“Your image is basically that of a bunch of entitled, judgmental, overly sensitive, whiny-ass little shits on social media, and this is why many of us hate your guts.

“Given, I mean, the apparent determination of a decent-sized portion of your graduating class to subject this once reasonably half-liberal, half-center-right country to a furthering of woke Stalinist terror….to keep the revival of China’s Great Cultural Revolution chugging along like a great 19th Century steam engine.

“You guys really need to stand up and take a bow…seriously.

“You are the first generation that has really and fully embraced a commitment to gulagism…to social isolation, humiliation and career suffocation for the wrong people.

“A 100% commitment to (a) “Are you now or have you ever been a person who doesn’t get it and therefore needs to have the shit beaten out of him/her on Twitter?”, (b) “Are you now or have you ever been disturbingly non-progressive, in some way out-of-step or guilty of insufficient understanding of a pressing social issue or agenda?”, (c) “Are you now or have you ever been some kind of closet discriminator…a person whose views are (or once were) politically retrograde, politically insensitive or in any way dismissive of any socially marginalized or discriminated-upon group?”

“I mean, you guys have a really steep hill in front of you. Democracy’s crumbling, truth is up for grabs, the planet’s trying to kill us and loneliness is driving everyone insane.

“You’re about to enter a hellscape where you will have to fight for every scrap of your humanity and dignity, and you do not have a choice to be anything but tyrannical and punitive to an extreme. Just ask Nikolai Lenin — he knew how to play tough cards. These are the times you’re living in right now, and many of us hope they’re bringing serious pain into your lives right now.

“It’s been truly amazing to see how your generation has rebelled against every bad habit of every generation that came before, reaching all the way back to the WWII ‘greatest generation’. Everything that the old farts have let calcify, you have kicked against and demolished. You’ve rejected that whole 24/7, no-days-off grind. You’ve rejected apathy. You’ve rejected ignoring your mental health because ‘you’ve gotta muscle through it no matter what’. You’ve rejected alienation and cruelty. You’ve rejected not trying to include everyone. And you’ve rejected not looking out for each other.

“Which is why millions really and truly depise you as we speak. Hell, I hate you from a certain perspective. Because your radical purity is truly awful and oppressive and unhinged.

“I can’t wait for you guys to get older and gradually put aside your specious bullshit. I can’t wait for your rigid ethical standards to gradually slacken and become compromised. I can’t wait for you to develop health issues.”

Saying ixnay to SEXISM, RACISM, FATPHOBIA, HOMOPHOBIA, TRANSPHOBIA, ABLEISM (i.e., giving shit to handicapped people and generally lording it over them) and HATEFULNESS is well and good and noble. But of course wokesters are the spiritual fathers and mothers of AGEISM, or a general all-around dismissal of older white people (and males in particular) who “don’t get” or have otherwise barked at the tenets of woke Maoism. Nobody is more ageist than wokesters — they own it from here to eternity, and it will be carved into their gravestones.

There is no apparent visual evidence that famed director Howard Hawks was ever young. There are many indications, in fact, that he was literally born at age 46 with short silver-gray hair and wearing a series of exquisitely tailored tweed sport jackets.

Hawks gradually aged, of course, into his 50s, 60s, 70s and beyond. He passed at age 81 in December 1977.

Which other Hollywood heavyweights were never young or at least persuaded a good portion of the world that they began their lives in their 40s?

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I identify as cisgender, fine, but I don’t think I want to identify as “cis” any more. The cisgender community (those who are not LGBTQ, trans, fluid, gender-nonconforming, whatever) represents around 95% of the populace, right? A few years ago the five-percenters decided that the 95-percenters have to identify as “cis”, which sounds like a blister or a boil. Who gave them this authority?

No offense but instead of “cis” I’d rather be known as an AUSG — an average, unassuming, straight grumpy guy who pops Cialis from time to time. What’s wrong with that?

@elder.blue_collar #question from @elder.blue_collar another installment of the insufferable ramblings of the left. Is gender a social construct? #theopendebate #fyp ♬ Morsmordre（莫斯莫多） – Crazy Donkey

Remember that Pauline Kael line that went something like “this is the kind of bad film that only a gifted director could make”? She was alluding to a strange capability among pantheon directors, which is the ability to make the occcasional stinker despite the odds favoring success.

Take, for example, Howard Hawks’ Monkey Business (’52) — a screwball comedy that leans way too far into silliness and absurdity and for the most part isn’t funny. Hawks got the mescaline comic chemistry right in Bringing Up Baby and Ball of Fire but somehow completely botched it here.

The basic unfunny idea is that an adult suddenly behaving like an adolescent is an embarrassment all around, and that “youth” is over-rated and that we’d all be better off being older and more settled and singing “we’re poor little lambs who’ve lost our way…baah-baah-baah.”

It’s about an accidentally concocted youth serum that turns everyone into an obstinate, obnoxious seven year old with no social disciplines.

Cary Grant’s seven-year-old personality is one thing, but early on he also acts like an 18 year-old who’s suddenly interested in Marilyn Monroe. It has something to do with the strength of dosage. In some cases (like Charles Coburn’s) the youth potion makes the recipient sexually frisky, or (in the case of Ginger Rogers) sexually competitve and jealous.

You know what might’ve helped? Shooting the damn thing in color. A color palette might have conveyed a certain spiritual uplift, a certain buoyancy.

Please name a few films that shouldn’t have failed given the pedigree of the talent (directors, writers, cast) but insisted on doing so regardless.

Nicole Holofcener‘s You Hurt My Feelings (A24, 5.26) is basically about an older writer named Beth (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) who feels devastated when she accidentally overhears her therapist husband Don (Tobias Menzies) confess to a close friend that he doesn’t much care for her latest book.

This is a film, in short, about the necessity of supportive lying by those close to aspiring writers (lovers, family, spouses, good friends). Writers can’t reasonably expect honest assessments from anyone close, and there’s really only one way to play it if a significant-other writer asks for constructive criticism — you’ve no choice but to be positive and supportive because any kind of mixed or mezzo-mezzo response will only poison the well or drive a wedge between you.

On top of which if you’re possessed by any kind of real talent you would naturally understand this going in. If you’re any kind of solid, perceptive, grade-A writer you should know how good you are without being told, and if you don’t know this you’re probably a second-rater…be honest.

There’s no winning in intimate situations of this sort. As a rule artists never want to hear that their child is ugly or homely or under-developed or God forbid deformed, and like I just said if a writer doesn’t know this about their own kid they’re probably mediocre anyway and not worth the hassle. People close to you will never level with you about how good your writing is, mainly because every emotional instinct in their body is telling them “go easy, be supportive, be loyal and avoid blunt statements of any kind.”

Boiled down Holofcener’s film is approvable in a moderately satisfying way. It’s a perceptive, well-layered, occasionally amusing, engagingly acted film. But it didn’t tell me anything I didn’t know going in. And it doesn’t have one of those big blow-out scenes…one of those scenes in which it all comes spilling out in one big gush.

Chris McKay‘s Renfield opened theatrically six or seven weeks ago. A financial and critical bust (cost $65 million to make, earned a domestic theatrical tally of $25 million), Renfield quickly acquired a toxic reputation. My reaction wasn’t so much one of disappointment or disapproval as one of great furious anger — I felt seriously enraged. I wanted to bolt after 20 minutes or so. I didn’t quite make it to the 50-minute mark.

Thoughts from esteemed director and fellow New Jerseyan Joe Dante, received early this morning: “Bad in ways I couldn’t have imagined…it stinks…;I’m still reeling.”

HE’s brief review was written inside Leows Lincoln Square just before catching Ari Aster‘s Beau Is Afraid, which I was unexpectedly knocked out by. Renfield is streaming and about to hit Bluray, etc. HE community reactions are hereby requested.