Briarcliff, baby!

HE to Briarcliff honcho Tom Ortenberg: You’re my hero, Tom! Balls of steel. May God smile upon you.

In “The 100 Greatest Westerns of All Time,” a 6.25 article by IndieWire‘s Christiqn Blauvelt and Wilson Chapman, Kevin Costner‘s Open Range — easily one of the best westerns ever made — is listed in 94th place.

And Nicholas Ray‘s Johnny Guitar (’54), a jaded, baroque, campy western that British critic Gavin Lambert called “one of the silliest films of the year,” is listed at #1.

These choices automatically make Blauvelt and Chapman suspicious characters.

I’m not saying the Blauvelt-Chapman rundown is wholly disreputable. I agree with many of the films they’ve singled out for praise. But Shane, Red River, High Noon, The Ow-Bow Incident, Treasure or the Sierra Madre and The Wild Bunch should be right at the top, and they aren’t.

I haven’t time to post all my HE-vs.-IndieWire disputes, but in the meantime..

“Do Millennials & Zoomers Feel Anything for The Wild Bunch?“, posted on on 1.9.24: I have a feeling that Sam Peckinpah’s 1969 western classic is closer to the hearts of boomers and GenXers, and that under-40s are kinda “meh” if not altogether disinterested. Too sexist (all the women are depicted as disloyal and whore-ish), too violent (especially for Zoomer candy-asses), too fatalistic and end-of-the-roadish. At least it’s not racist.

“Simply the finest film ever produced between these American shores. The masterpiece of masterpieces. Film achieves its highest calling: art, incitement, revelation, challenge, elegy, physical redemption of reality that sets a bar no one else, including Peckinpah, ever reached. Yeah. I kinda like it.” — Steven Gaydos, 8.27.19.

Ditto: When The Wild Bunch opened it was regarded as the last revisionist wheeze of a genre that had peaked in the ’50s and was surely on its last legs. It was also seen, disparagingly, as a kind of gimmick film that used ultra-violence and slow-mo death ballets to goose the formula.

Now it’s regarded as one of the best traditional, right-down-the-middle westerns ever made. This kind of writing, acting and pacing will never return or be reborn. Lightning in a bottle.

“What Citizen Kane was to movie lovers in 1941, The Wild Bunch was to cineastes in 1969,” Michael Sragow wrote, adding that Peckinpah had “produced an American movie that equals or surpasses the best of Kurosawa: the Gotterdammerung of Westerns”.

“After a reporter from the Reader’s Digest got up to ask ‘Why was this film even made? I stood up and called it a masterpiece; I felt, then and now, that The Wild Bunch is one of the great defining moments of modern movies.” — from 9.29.02 article by Roger Ebert.

Vincent Canby on William Holden‘s performance as Pike Bishop, from 6.26.69 N.Y. Times review: “After years of giving bored performances in boring movies, Holden comes back gallantly in The Wild Bunch. He looks older and tired, but he has style, both as a man and as a movie character who persists in doing what he’s always done, not because he really wants the money but because there’s simply nothing else to do.”

Edmond O’Brien: “They? Why they is the plain and fancy ‘they’…that’s who they is. Caught ya, didn’t they? Tied a tin can to your tails. Led you in and waltzed you out again. Oh, my, what a bunch! Big tough ones, eh? Here you are with a handful of holes, a thumb up your ass and big grin to pass the time of day with.”

If you don’t know how to pronounce the last name of Nazi Germany’s late fuhrer (i.e., the top guy during the Third Reich), it means, quite obviously, that you’re not well educated.

Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt: “It would take someone five minutes to Google ‘Jake Tapper Donald Trump’ to see that Jake Tapper has consistently frequently likened President Trump to Adolf Hilter,” Leavitt said as Hunt interrupted her.”

Robert Mitchum’s career began in 1945, when he was 28. It ignited in ‘47, when he hit 30. And he was 25 when this beach photo was taken.

Mitchum looked so young in 1942 that he was barely recognizable according to “Jeff Bailey” in Out of the Past standards. Some guys peak between their mid 20s and mid 30s and some in their mid teens or early 20s. But if you haven’t peaked by age 25, you’ll never get there.

HE to highly-valued web designer Mark Frenden, who’s been cooking up HE-related promotional banners and ad concepts for many years:

Date: 6.25.24

Subject: HE 20th Anniversary Ad Banners

If you could be persuaded, I’d like to cook up some HE ads or ad banners for a celebration of HE’s 20th anniversary. 

The actual launch date of HE was 9.8.04, but I was working on it for many weeks before that so let’s call it August. I’d like to start posting these ads in early July and keep them around.

The concept, I’m thinking, would be (a) the standard HE logo on top, (b) the words “20th Anniversary!” or “20 Years of Verve & Attitude” or perhaps both on an alternating basis, and at the bottom of the ad art would be a Dylan quote — “Look out, kid…it’s somethin’ you did.”

I’d also (or secondarily) like to use an alternate Dylan quote — “20 Years of Schoolin’ and They Put You On The Day Shift.”

I also like “20 Years of Verve, Attitude & Arduous Sentence-Sculpting,” but that’s nine words.

Apart from the basic composing of the ads, you would be creating a colorful font for “20th Anniversary!” + “20 Years of Verve and Attitude.”’ And the right kind of visually blended caligraphy for the two Dylan quotes. 

The HE ad sizes would be the usual full-width equivalent of 300 x 250 and 300 x 600.  I’d like them to be 640 pixels wide and the height corresponding to this.  Or you could come up with your own ad dimension.

Mr. Frenden created this all-time HE classic :

Whatever drug Joe Biden was on during his State of the Nation address (adderall?), HE is hoping he injects an even stronger dose of the stuff for Thursday night’s debate.

As furious as I am about Withered Joe not quitting and allowing a younger Democrat to run in his place, I want him to “win” on Thursday and certainly defeat The Beast in November.

I suspect that the no-interruptions rule (i.e., if it’s not Trump or Biden’s turn to speak, their microphone will be silenced) will favor Biden. If this mike-cutoff system wasn’t in place Trump would just blather on in an attempt to roughly elbow aside Biden. Trump needs the blathering personality factor — being restricted to concise statements of alleged fact is not going to help him.

If Biden manages to speak clearly and firmly and repeatedly calls out Trump on his proven criminality and psychopathic contempt for democracy, he’ll look like a “winner.”

But if Trump out-vigors him — if he conveys more strength by way of an impudent snappiness of mind and a defiant piss-hound attitude —- Joe will be all but finished.

Joe needs to bitchslap Trump’s fat ass — he needs to crack the whip hard. He needs to say over and over what we all know, which is that Trump is an animal.

And one other thing: Joe needs to tell voters that he understands why many of them want a chronic liar and convicted felon to return to the Presidency. It’s because Trump is against the wokesters (i.e., the “POCs and lesbians and trannies and male-despising women are God’s Angels” gang….the “we support kids getting hormone blockers and cutting their dicks off” fraternity…the “all white males are bad and need to be punished” crowd) and they want somebody to kick their asses.

An HE tip-of-the-hat to Guillermo del Toro, winner of the 2024 Jesse Plemons award for Dramatic Weight Loss.

I don’t know what the subject was, but if I had to guess I would say it had something to do with votes, campaign cash or poon.

JFK was known to use the “p” word, but in the 21st Century only a sexist dog would even toy with such a term. What should I use in its place? Tail? Talent? I know — just as bad. Women of distinction?

People are still wondering why the anemic, all-but-finished Sundance Film Festival is leaving Park City. It’s something to do with money, I realize, but what are the particulars?

Four days ago THR‘s Scott Feinberg reported that Boulder, Colorado may be the new host city of the Sundance Film Festival. Feinberg called it a “strong candidate.”

I re-read Feinberg’s piece this morning and was kinda flabbergasted by a paragraph that asks why Sundance is leaving in the first place. Feinberg implies that the reason is that because certain Utah laws are homophobic and transphobic.

Friendo: “This is from your Knox Bronson post from yesterday…”

Friendo: “‘Mainly by his kind’ — meaning white men.

“And…

“White women ‘shut the door on other races.’

“Jeff, who the eff is this Clementine Kruczynski?
person? And why the eff is he/she so effing comfortable being racist??

“And why is nobody on the HE threads calling her out on it?”

After poking around the Walmart shoe section and having no luck, I flagged an overweight Walmart floor person.

HE: “May I ask a question? I’m looking for those soft shoe pads…you know, you slip them into your shoes for comfort?”

Floor person: “That aid udda shoedairsh.”

HE: “Shoe gain?”

Floor person: “No, sir — the shoe department.”

HE: “Aahh, thank you!”

There was no point saying that I’d already done a couple of laps around that department. There was only a sense of ennui, hopelessness. I finally found the pads upon my third try.