Still in Toronto due to a pair of Air Canada flight cancellations yesterday (one due to a sick pilot, the other due to New York weather)…you don’t want to know. Not to mention Justin Trudeau‘s infuriating insistence upon masking. I left Paris yesterday morning at 8 am. By the time I arrive tonight I’ll have been travelling for roughly 42 hours.

Here’s what Gene Maddaus’ 6.1 Variety story partly reported about today’s Johnny Depp-Amber Heard defamation trial verdict:

Here’s how Maddaus summed it all up:

And here’s the Variety headline above Maddaus ’ story — technically correct but obviously a spin job — an attempt to portray Depp’s victory as a bit muddled, a half-and-halfer.

Two days hence Watcher (IFC Midnight), which I’ve been hyping since last January, finally opens. It’s an expert, quietly creepy, Polanski-level thriller, and well worth the price.

Set in present-day Bucharest and costarring Maika Monroe (It Follows), Karl Glusman and Burn Gorman, Chloe Okuno and Zack Ford‘s film is unquestionably scary and unnerving.

In my view it stops short of elevated horror — it’s more of a low-key, Roman Polanski-level thriller in the vein of Repulsion and The Tenant. First-rate chills and anxieties ensue. And not the “midnight movie” kind either.

Scream-level morons may respond in their usual way, but Watcher is as good as it gets with this kind of palette and approach.

4:30 pm Paris time, 10:30 am New York time. We’ve been airborne since 1:30 pm with nearly five hours to go. I chose Air Canada to save $$… big mistake.

All the sublime Parisian soothings of the last four days were erased this morning in one fell swoop. Everything has been hell. 5:30 am wake-up, idiotic Uber driver, wallet explosion on Roissy bus to CDG, interminable air terminal lines, etc.

Air Canada made me get a $35 Covid test, and we’re all wearing fucking masks on the flight. News flash: The pandemic is more or less over, guys, and fuck Monkey Pox. I hate hate HATE this crap so much.

Slight consolation: I’m wearing a very cool-looking Cannes Film Festival mask.

I needed something to take my mind off of this morning’s awful Air Canada / Charles DeGaulle gauntlet (150 minutes of Chinese water torture waiting), so I re-read last night’s thread about the unfortunate casting of Moses Ingram in the Obi Wan Kenobi Disney+ series.

It’s one of HE’s most fascinating threads in recent months, and I want to congratulate VicLaz6 for revealing to the world what a pack of salivating racist dogs many of the commenters are.

Seriously, most of the adverse comments alluded to impressions that Ingram’s Baltimore patois didn’t seem to belong in the Star Wars realm — the style and manner of her performance doesn’t fit, and therefore hurts the show’s credibility. (Along with the allegedly poor calibre of her acting plus the lousy writing.)

But the basic thrust, many said, was that the fault was less Ingram’s and more the casting directors.

I haven’t read most or even a fair percentage of the negative responses overall — only the HE sliver — and for all I know a good portion have been flat-out racist in nature. But something tells me the reactions are probably more mixed, and that Ewan McGregor’s fairly sweeping denunciation of all the naysayers as racist was unfair.

Regional Friendo: “Just saw Top Gun: Maverick…holy shit, that last act! Someone’s seen and plagiarized [a film released in 1977]!

HE: “Yup.”

Regional Friendo: “Wow…the hard-to-hit target, the steep mountain run [equals vulnerable target in ’77 film], even down to [Maverick costar repeating exactly what costar of ’77 film did during a big climactic action moment]. Five fucking Maverick writers to come up with that?”

HE: “As I’ve written, I would have respected it more if they’d followed the ending of The Bridges at Toko Ri (’54).”

Regional Friendo: “No way that was gonna happen. Too much money to make back.”

HE: “It would have hit home if they’d both died.”

Regional Friendo: “It’s not that kinda film. The audience would’ve revolted.”

HE: “‘Not that kinda film’? You sound like Jerry Bruckheimer.”

Regional Friendo; “I’m just telling you like it is
It’s exactly a JB film…it’s an audience film, not for Oscars. No studio would have green-lighted a film in which Cruise AND Teller die in the end.
It is what it is.”

The racist reactions to Moses Ingram’s casting as an Empire villian in Disney+’s Obi Wan Kenobi series are ugly and unfortunate. On the other hand one of the side complaints may be more about a lack of a certain class bearing.

All films set in the past or in fantasy realms have adhered to certain ways of speaking for the good and bad guys. Generally speaking villains allied with or backed by powerful forces tend to sound more disciplined and mannered in a high-class way than their underdog victims.

In Stanley Kubrick‘s Spartacus (’60), for example, the slaves were played by proletariat types with American accents while the Romans were played by British actors or distinguished college-dean types.

Likewise, in the Star Wars realm the classic approach has been (at least back in the old days) that the Empire baddies have sounded like officious, cultured British elites, or at least like people who went to expensive prep schools.

I’m going, of course, by the example set 45 years ago by Peter Cushing‘s Grand Moff Tarkin in the original Star Wars (’77).

Billy Dee Williams‘s Lando Calrissian sounded like a smooth American hustler, of course, in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. But it wouldn’t have worked as well if Williams had been cast as an Empire villain.

I don’t care who plays who in Disney+’s Obi Wan Kenobi series, but I can half-understand why some might say that a female Empire villain shouldn’t sound like a tough Baltimore girl. She should sound like a RADA instructor or a senior official with British Airways or a Whitehall bureaucrat of some kind.

I just think it’s fair to mention the pattern established by Cushing and others in the old days. Otherwise I couldn’t care less and I’m certainly not going to argue about it.

THR, 5.31:

My all-time favorite pre-geezer Eastwood vehicle is Don Siegel‘s Escape From Alcatraz (’79). My favorite unregenerate-geezer Clint is Gran Torino (’08). Today he hit 92.