Regrets and condolences over the passing of Wolfgang Petersen, but when I heard earlier today I nodded and thought a bit about his career accomplishments, but nothing erupted. First-rate fellow, efficient action and thriller chops, respected and admired. I had a good time with In The Line of Fire and portions of The Perfect Storm, but the only Petersen film that really knocked me flat…

Before 2017 I felt a fairly profound social kinship with 95% of film critics out there. Socially, I mean. Parties, lunches, late-night cafe hangs at film festivals, etc. Except for the dicks, phonies and elitists, which you’ll run into in any profession.

But since ‘17 a new breed of critic has come into being — SJWs, virtue signalers, representationals, safeties. Radicals with a woke axe to grind. I see them at screenings and mutter, “Oh, Jesus…keep your head down.” No talking to them, no trust or relaxation, no respect…fuck that noise. They’re almost the enemy. They certainly aren’t true-blue movie Catholics — they’re like the McCoys to my own crew, the Hatfields. Or something like that.

Why would 78 year-old Robert DeNiro play a pair of legendary 20th Century mafia bosses, Vito Genovese and Frank Costello, in the same film? To what end? It can’t work. I’m thinking of Kissin’ Cousins, a 1964 Elvis Presley film…same action.

Rep. Liz Cheney will go down to defeat this evening in Wyoming. We’ve understood this for many months. She’s toast. But ask yourself — when was the last time that a nationally known politician stood up and said, “I’d rather take a bullet in the neck than compromise on my basic principles”?

On Monday, 8.15 Rebecca Sun posted a THR story about the Academy’s recent decision to apologize to Sacheen Littlefeather, 75, for the abuse she suffered after announcing to an audience of Academy members in the spring of 1973 that Marlon Brando was politely declining his Best Actor Oscar over the industry’s dismissive, disrespectful treatment of Native Americans.

As a result Littlefeather, an aspiring actress, was blackballed — one of the earliest cases of Hollywood cancel culture, albeit at the hands of mainstream centrists and conservatives. (The wokester left wouldn’t own cancel culture for another 45 years.)

Sun’s is a sturdy, well-written piece, and yet she waits until paragraph #13 to announce what may have been a deciding motive on the Academy’s part to publicly apologize and also announce a special Sacheen Littlefeather tribute in September.

Littlefeather, she writes, is coping with metastasized breast cancer. This may or may not indicate an imminent situation (I’m deeply sorry if that’s the case), but it was almost certainly read by the Academy as a timetable message — that if they wanted to make amends with Littlefeather, soon would be a better time than later.

As mentioned yesterday, Sacheen Littlefeather is an adopted, self-invented name — her original name is Marie Louise Cruz.

Another take on Littlefeather’s life is offered in Lisa Snell’s Native Times interview piece [10.26.10].

What sensible, fair-minded person would look you straight in the face and insist that Stanley Kubrick‘s Eyes Wide Shut is the best film of the ’90s? Think about that.

EWS is many things — curious, dreamlike, flat, anti-realistic, visually commanding, mesmerizing in its own weird way. But a film this clenched and constipated and covered in starch cannot sit at the top of anyone’s best of the ’90s list…no! Only a critic who believes in fuck-you eccentricity for its own side would stand by Kubrick’s final film.

And yet this, I regret to report, is what IndieWire‘s David Ehrlich has done.

The EWS celebration is part of “The 100 Best Movies of the ’90s” (8.15), an exhaustive rundown by Ehrlich, Eric Kohn and Kate Erbland — three-fourths of Indiewire‘s virtue-signalling quartet (Anne Thompson being the final member). Their top ten, and in this order: Eyes Wide Shut, Close-Up, Schindler’s List, Beau Travail, Hoop Dreams, Goodfellas, After Life, Titanic, The Long Day Closes and Safe.

But Ehrlich is to be saluted for including Titanic among the top ten. James Cameron‘s epic has been a very unfashionable film to celebrate over last couple of decades. I only put it at #30 on my list, and qualified things by stating that I was primarily enthusiastic about the final hour and especially the last ten minutes. Ehrlich doesn’t pussyfoot around — he praises the whole thing…intimacy, lead performances, extras, VFX and all.

In IndieWire‘s view Pulp Fiction ranks 14th, Malcolm X is 16th, Clueless is 20th, Unforgiven ranks 26th and Fargo (HE’s pick for the decade’s best) is 31st.

Hollywood Elsewhere hopes and trusts that Merrick Garland and his team know what they’re doing — that they have the goods to take Trump down. Because if they don’t and Trump wiggles free and becomes the Republican Party nominee, he’ll lose the popular vote but wind up stealing the election with the help of all those regional MAGA stooges he helped get elected, etc.

Garland’s idea, as I understand it, is to prosecute Trump on a violation of some kind of governmental documents security thing and thereby legally block him from running in ‘24. Just like the feds got Al Capone on income tax evasion rather than bootlegging, racketeering and murder. Sam Donaldson mentioned the Capone strategy on CNN two days ago (8.14)

Let’s hope they make this happen effectively and inarguably, so that the Republicans don’t blah-blah their way around it at their convention.

Garland is in a very precarious and paradoxical situation: using the rule of law to fight a political party whose platform is that it no longer respects or believes in the rule of law.

There is reason for guarded optimism. I’m encouraged by the comments made by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in that 8.8. New Yorker piece, written by Susan B. Glasser and Peter Baker New Yorker piece. They’re military men (Mark Milley, James Mattis, et. al.) , and it’s clear that they understand the danger. The whole law-enforcement community does.

They all have one mission: to keep Trump from running. So if you ask me, going after Trump on this Al Capone level is a brilliant move.

Everything’s flush, nothing is real, living is easy and everyone in your hallowed orbit is either a dear friend, a close acquaintance or a devoted assistant…I’m drowning here…”don’t surround yourself with yourself…move on back two squares.”

The tide has been turning against Elvis for several weeks now. Everyone has more or less the same complaint — it’s too slick to trust, isn’t genuine or human-level sincere, too whirlygig, aggressively selling itself to a fault…except for the final Vegas section, which is pretty good.

An official Academy letter was sent by Academy president David Rubin to Sacheen Littlefeather [aka Marie Louise Cruz] on 6.18.22, but only revealed today. It’s titled “Statement of Reconciliation“:

Dear Sacheen Littlefeather,

I write to you today a letter that has been a long time coming on behalf of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, with humble acknowledgment of your experience at the 45th Academy Awards.

As you stood on the Oscars stage in 1973 to not accept the Oscar on behalf of Marlon Brando, in recognition of the misrepresentation and mistreatment of Native American people by the film industry, you made a powerful statement that continues to remind us of the necessity of respect and the importance of human dignity.

The abuse you endured because of this statement was unwarranted and unjustified.

The emotional burden you have lived through and the cost to your own career in our industry are irreparable. For too long the courage you showed has been unacknowledged. For this, we offer both our deepest apologies and our sincere admiration.

We cannot realize the Academy’s mission to “inspire imagination and connect the world through cinema” without a commitment to facilitating the broadest representation and inclusion reflective of our diverse global population.

Today, nearly 50 years later, and with the guidance of the Academy’s Indigenous Alliance, we are firm in our commitment to ensuring indigenous voices—the original storytellers—are visible, respected contributors to the global film community. We are dedicated to fostering a more inclusive, respectful industry that leverages a balance of art and activism to be a driving force for progress.

We hope you receive this letter in the spirit of reconciliation and as recognition of your essential role in our journey as an organization. You are forever respectfully engrained in our history.

“Half A Basterd,” posted on 7.11.08:

Quentin Tarantino‘s script of Inglorious Bastards seems twice as fake as the Italian village in Blake Edwards‘ What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?, and that was pure mid ’60s Hollywood bullshit. It’s faker than Hogan’s Heroes, even. If Tarantino has done any research about France, Germany or any World War II particulars other than watch World War II movies, I’ll eat my motorcycle tool kit.

He doesn’t care, of course, and that’s why he’s Quentin Tarantino. You can feel him in his element, living in his head and flaunting a clever, dumb-ass yarn that entertains every step of the way, and — this is the cool part — in a kind of oddly sophisticated fashion. Which is what he’s been doing since Pulp Fiction.

The spelling errors, I have to say, are a complete hoot. Something in me refused to believe that Tarantino is just a spelling moron. He’s either an idiot movie savant of some kind, or he sat down and decided to deliberately misspell stuff in order to give the people reading it a little tickle. Toying with them, flaunting his supposed illiteracy, but doing it to a degree that seems a wee bit insincere.

That said, the errors may be dead real, and if so it’s almost impressive on a certain level. Tarantino could have easily told a freelance editor to clean up the mistakes. The fact that he didn’t spells confidence.

Over and over he writes “heer” rather than “Herr,” the German name for mister. He writes “merci be coupe” when he means “merci beaucoup.” There’s a line that goes “the Feuhrer himself couldn’t of said it better ” when he means “couldn’t have said it better.” He tries to pluralize the French-Jewish family name Dreyfuss to great comic effect. We are told that the Dreyfuss family includes a mother named “Miram” and a brother named “Bob.” (“Hey, Bob, get me one of them there quawssaunts, would ya?”)

He spells Dr. Goebbels as Dr. Gobbles…gobble, gobble! (And then he spells it “Geobbels” later on.) Tarantino seems constitutionally incapable of typing the word “you’re” — he has to write “your” every time. We’re told at one point that “there gonna die” instead of “they’re gonna die.”

Adolf Hitler is described as a “manic” instead of a maniac. Time and again people in Hitler’s company address him as “mine Feuhrer” instead of “mein Feuhrer.” We are told that German soldiers have “brought the world to there knee’s” instead of “brought the world to its knees.” Not long after this QT uses the word “wennersitnitzell,” by which he means “weinerschnitzel.” (I think.)

This is too dumb, too hayseed. It has to be a put-on.

And then comes an American GI character from Boston named Donny who carries a baseball bat and has come to be known as…I won’t say it, but it’s genius-level. (And I’m not being snide.) The nickname for Brad Pitt‘s Lieutenant Aldo is Aldo the Apache. (Because of his penchant for scalping Nazis.) There’s a great scene with a German Sgt. Rachtman being interrogated by Aldo and his men, each one of the Hebrew persuasion, and Rachtman being asked where some nearby German troops are holed up, and he answers “fuck you and your Jew dogs!”

We’re introduced to Jewish characters named “Mr. Goorowitz” and “Mrs. Himmelstein”? These are names from a ’50s comedy skit on Your Show of Shows or The Jackie Gleason Show.

Over and over it’s “Basterds” this and “Basterds” that — why is the “b” capitalized? At one point a character is asked, “How did you survived the ordel?” (This is an exact transcription.) Tarantino even spells “gimme” wrong — “gimmie.”

One of the most barbaric and morally repellent scenes in war-movie history happens in Quentin Tarantino‘s Inglourious Basterds (’09).

I’m speaking of the baseball-bat murder of an anti-Semitic German soldier — Sergeant Werner Rachtman (Richard Sammel) — by Sergeant Donny Donowitz aka “The Bear Jew” (Eli Roth). Rachtman isn’t murdered for his racist beliefs, mind, but for refusing to betray his fellow German soldiers by helping the Americans to capture or kill them.

I’m sorry but it my book a soldier who refuses to help the enemy slaughter his comrades, even at the cost of his own life and even if he harbors ugly and inhuman attitudes, is honorable.

Originally posted on 8.24.09: The moral scheme in Inglourious Basterds decrees that German troops were serving an evil criminal regime and therefore THEY, the troops, were evil and criminal as well as viciously anti-Semitic, so snuff ’em out like rats. Shoot ’em, club ’em, exterminate ’em.

IGB is basically a table-turning game in which Tarantino decided to have fun by letting Germans suffer en masse the way Jews suffered en masse at the hands of the SS and other Nazi command types who carried out the Holocaust.

Consider looking at this situation from the other side of the coin.

It is still shocking news to some ostrich-heads out there that Americans were the bad guys in the Vietnam War (i.e., a great industrial nation coming down full-force upon a peasant society and calling out the furies). By this token the troops who served this policy were bad guys as well, or even, if you want to really fulminate and get angry about it, just as bad as average German grunts were “bad” for serving their side during WWII.

Except grunts are grunts. They don’t formulate policy. They sign up and go through basic training and shoot the enemy and try to survive so they can come back to their families. And yet by the standards of some, U.S. grunts serving in Vietnam were okay and just trying to get through the Vietnam War — regular guys, one of us, etc. German grunts, on the other hand, were evil and deserved to be slaughtered with baseball bats.

What myopic idiocy!

IGB is playing a facile, cheap and repugnant game. Two vicious wrongs really don’t make a right, guys. And by relishing the idea of slaughtering average-Joe Germans — by revelling in their elimination like cheering baseball fans in the bleachers — Tarantino degrades the morality of Jewish survivors…indeed, the moral residue of the entire horrific Holocaust experience.