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The only hothouse flower among the current Best Picture contenders, arguably, is Sarah Polley’s Women Talking, and we all know that hayloft talkathon never had a snowball’s chance in hell — it was nominated purely for the sake of #MeToo tokenism.

…and the Charlie’s Angels hey-hey peaked 45 years ago so it doesn’t matter to under-40s or anyone else for that matter, but my God, that show was beyond reprehensible in its absolute disregard for even a semblance of realism of any kind, and its general embrace of sterility/puerility. It was Velveeta, and that didn’t stop anything. It ran between ‘76 and ‘81.

If only Aaron Spelling had instead produced Quentin Tarantino’s Fox Force Five. Ironically, I mean. With QT- level dialogue.

Posted on 12.4.19:

…there’ll be hell to pay. Just saying. Word around the campfire says James Mangold’s Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny and Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla (biopic of Priscilla Presley) will also make the Côte d’Azur journey. They’d better!

I stopped getting high in 1974, and that decision came none too soon. It was time to get real and focused and stop farting around, and try to make movie journalism happen.

It took another five or six years to find my feet in that regard, but that’s writing for you — unless you’re a genius (which I’m not) it can take as much as a decade to become even half-proficient at it.

Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye, which I’ve seen countless times, opened on 3.7.73. Film-wise the glorious ‘70s were still happening, but it all began to change in 1974, and if there’s one film from that fairly turbulent and convulsive year (Nixon resignation, close to the end of the great ‘70s film era with Jaws and Star Wars right around the bend, not to mention the beginnings of disco and punk) that has genuine staying power, it’s this one — a year ahead of schedule.

Altman was a serious pot-head, of course, and his hot-streak films (late ‘60s to late ‘70s) reflect that proclivity as well as the times — deconstructing, alternating, exploring, goofing off and playing it by ear.

The difference on my end was that in ‘73 I was starting to think about shirking all that and cleaning out all the closets. So I wasn’t really on Altman’s wavelength, and yet I love The Long Goodbye for all the ways that it captured in amber what the early to mid ‘70s felt and sounded and smelled like.

Altman’s primary motivation wasn’t to deride and dismiss Raymond Chandler’s hard-bitten shamus. He merely decided, quite sensibly, to make a private detective film within the realm of ‘74 (counter culture giving way to Me Generation narcissism, Nixon collapse, hash brownies, sinking into cynicism, anti-traditional you-name-it) and that meant, obviously, that the 1940s version of Phillip Marlowe (as interpreted by Humphrey Bogart and Dick Powell) no longer existed and had to be jettisoned.

What took its place was something vaguely stoned and misty — dry mockery and improvisation and a laid-back Zen cat attitude on the part of Elliott Gould. It all added up to “all those hard-boiled, tough-guy cliches no longer apply…maybe they never did…everything is shifting, devolving, being re-defined.”

Altman was always about poking the bear and trying to catch the wind, and he was never into genre stuff. He may have mainly wanted to dig down and deconstruct and have fun, but he also wanted to craft a Marlowe film that would reflect and comment upon what was happening back then — culturally, spiritually, morally.

Altman called The Long Goodbye “ a satire in melancholy.”

Except for the lampooning of gangster tropes by way of those goons who work for Mark Rydell’s Marty Augustine, the satire works. Plus Vilmos Zsigmond’s constantly slow-tracking, circular-arc camera, the 1948 Lincoln Continental, the Malibu security guard with the movie-star impressions, Khoury brand cat food, “Hooray for Hollywood,” etc.

Heavily accented Mexican official: “When did you last speak with the deceased?”

Gould: “The diseased? Yeah, right.”

2.1.23 Facebook post by Joseph MccBride: “Today, February 1, we celebrate the birthday (in 1894) of the world’s greatest filmmaker, John Ford, born John Martin Feeney in Cape Elizabeth, Maine. There is no director whose films I return to more often and with more pleasure and insight than those of Ford.”

#JohnFord birthday
Rare interview of John Wayne & John Ford, talking about how John Ford changed the course of Duke's career when he cast him in Stagecoach 🐎 pic.twitter.com/FNRLcWiAtV

— La femme merveilleuse invisible (@larwoolf) February 1, 2023

It took me too long to watch Josh Seftel‘s Stranger at the Gate, a 26-minute doc that’s been nominated for a Best Documentary Short Film Oscar.

I finally saw it last night, and I immediately understood. The filmmaking chops aren’t the thing, although it’s an intelligent, well-ordered effort from start to finish. The thing is the narrative — what actually happened with Richard (Mac) McKinney, a former Marine who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, developed PTSD and acute Islamophobia. He was so consumed that he decided to kill dozens of Muslims on a local mosque in his home town of Muncie, Indiana, but it didn’t work out that way.

The why and how of McKinney’s change of heart is what turns the key…what makes the watching of this film fairly close to sublime. Please submit to it — it’s only a half-hour, and it really has an effect by the end.

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I was sometimes a rebellious and hair-trigger type during my senior year in Wilton High School. I goofed around, was given detention a few times. I was busted for smoking once in the men’s room, and also in the women’s room.

The notion in the latter case was that I’d be less likely to be found out if I was catching a smoke wih the girls, who were totally cool with me by the way. But I was popped regardless, and the vice-principal and head disciplinarian, Richard Sell, made a point of carefully interviewing the girls who were in the bathroom at the time, wanting to know if I had behaved in an inappropriate fashion. They all said “nope.”

I nonetheless had a checkered history with Sell, and it all came to a climax sometime in April or May. An altercation of some kind happened. Disobedience over something. Sell startled me by grabbing my arm, and I, being an idiot, pushed back hard, knocking him off balance. You don’t do that to the vice-principal of your high school, but I wasn’t an emotionally mature fellow back then, to put it mildly.

A case could have been made, in fact, that I’d flat-out struck the poor guy, and that wouldn’t have meant suspension but expulsion. But you know what? Dick Sell let it go. With the wisdom of Solomon he graciously and compassionately let me slide. I was filled with enormous gratitude for this, and I’ve never forgotten it. I was facing the electric chair, and Dick gave me parole.

Sam Smith, 30, is the king of the world…a perfect person wearing nipple tassels. The only problem is that he’s put on too much weight. I liked him more when he was slender and dark-haired.

Robert Altman‘s The Long Goodbye (’74), 4:03:

Marty Augustine (Mark Rydell): And I understand you…you’re nervous.
Phillip Marlowe (Elliott Gould): I’m not nervous.
Augustine: Yes, you are. You’re nervous like I am. When I was a kid in high school [and] I used to dread gym class. Absolutely dread it.
Marlowe: Why was that?
Augustine: Because I didn’t have any pubic hair until I was 15 years old.
Marlowe: Oh, yeah? You musta looked like one of three little pigs.

Kim Morgan, Elliott Gould outside the New Bev — Monday, 1.30.23.

Aaron Sorkin‘s “reimagined” production of Camelot begins previews begin on 3.9.23. The official opening happens on Thursday, 4.13.23. Andrew Burnap as Arthur, Phillipa Soo as Guinevere and Jordan Donica as Lancelot. Not quite on the level of Richard Burton, Julie Andrews and Robert Goulet, are they?

The question is “why?” — why would Sorkin want to fiddle around with a 63-year-old Lerner & Loewe musical that came to be known as a metaphor for the JFK years? What’s the point?