…until tomorrow morning (Thursday, 9.27, 9 am) but I can at least disclose that it’s easily the best of the three, and I don’t mean the scariest — I mean the most arthousey, the least popcorned and bullshitty, the most inventively shot and staged, the most gently intimate and most adult-angled (no kids!).

And it costars perhaps the coolest cat in film history — the smartest, most well-behaved, most street-wise feline since that black cat stole the show in 1962’s A Walk on the Wild Side. (The Day One cat is mostly white, and his real name is Frodo.)

All hail director-cowriter Michael Sarnoski (Pig).

And “booo!” to John Krasinski.

HE–posted on 2.10.21:

…are things likely to be in midtown Manhattan?Just asking.

The other day (a little after dinner hour) I was slowly making my way around a Whole Foods or Fresh Farm parking lot, and I happened to drift into a one-way lane that was against the directional arrow. Speed-wise I was driving like an 88 year-old…nudge, nudge, putter, putter…and figured “okay, this won’t hurt anyone…it’s just a parking lot”.

But then along came a pink-faced, silver-haired fellow in a Volvo wagon with an overweight woman riding shotgun, and when he saw me inching my way forward in the wrong direction he went into Samuel Fuller Shock Corridor mode…an expression of major sputtering outrage. His window was halfway down and I could actually hear this 70something dingleberry going “haaayyyy!!!”

My reaction was to pretend I hadn’t seen or heard him. In actuality I was rolling my eyes and muttering to myself, “C’mon, man…it’s not like this is Planes, Trains and Automobiles and I’m John Candy in a devil costume, driving on the wrong side of the highway….’you’re going the wrong way! You’re going to kill somebody!’ And it’s not To Live and Die in L.A. with me speeding down a major highway against traffic and causing trucks to jacknife. It’s a parking lot, for God’s sake, and I’m going roughly 5 mph…get past it.”

The Volvo wagon outrage guy couldn’t do that. He had to turn up the outrage…”heaaayyyy!!!” I have news for guys like this — hay is for horses.

…I decided a few days ago that I had to buy a new 4K Bluray player (a Panasonic DP-UB420-K) when my two-year-old Sony 4K UHD player appeared to be dying.

I was wrong — the Sony remote was apparently dying, except it wasn’t because the “fresh” batteries I had put into the remote weren’t fresh. (My bad, my dopey.) The Sony was fine and all is well — it’s downstairs in the living room as we speak.

The point is that when the Panasonic DP-UB420-K arrived I knew it was probably shit because it didn’t weigh anything. I lifted the box and it weighed as much a set of cloth dinner napkins. I don’t buy or use any electronic device that doesn’t feel substantial from a weight perspective — it has to feel at least a little bit hefty. I don’t care if that makes me sound like an old fart — I won’t buy anything that doesn’t feel at least a bit heavyish.The Sony 4K feels great in this regard — it weighs as much as a small micro-wave unit for the kitchen.

I immediately went down to Whole Foods to return the Panasonic. Within minutes the refund notification ($265) was in my inbox. Take this featherweight 4K UHD Bluray player and shove it!

A Cialis heart attack is an intense burning sensation mixed with a feeling of serious nausea. I popped a Cialis pill the night before last, and yesterday I was struck by a Cialis chest-pain episode along with near-vomiting.

It happened on a patch of grass near a service station where my car was being worked on. I was talking to Sasha Stone when the sensation hit. I was barely able to breathe.

I’ve never had heart trouble, and every day I take Atorvastatin (cholestoral-lowering medication), Lisinopril (blood-pressure medication), Naproxen, Magnesium and Prevagen.

Harvard health excerpt: “ED pills are safe for healthy hearts, but all men with cardiovascular disease should take special precautions, and some cannot use them under any circumstances. The problem is their effect on arteries. All arteries, not just those in the penis, generate nitric oxide, so any artery can widen in response to Viagra, Levitra, or Cialis, causing blood pressure to drop temporarily by 5-8 mmHg, even in healthy men.

“Organic nitrates are drugs that widen arteries by increasing their supply of nitric oxide; that’s how they open the partially blocked coronary arteries in patients with angina. But because nitrates and ED pills both act on nitric oxide, the drugs don’t mix; healthy volunteers given Viagra followed an hour later by nitroglycerin see their blood pressures drop by 25–51 mm Hg, a potentially dangerous amount.

“All experts agree that men who are taking nitrates cannot use ED pills; this includes all preparations of nitroglycerin (short-acting, under-the-tongue tablets or sprays), long-acting nitrates (isosorbide dinitrate or Isordil, Sorbitrate, and others, and isosorbide mononitrate, Imdur, ISMO, and others), nitroglycerin patches and pastes, and amyl nitrite or amyl nitrate (so-called poppers, which some men use for sexual stimulation).”

In IndieWire‘s “The 100 Greatest Westerns of All Time,” Bill Desowitz (aka BD) writes the following about Richard Brooks‘ The Professionals (’66):

“Before The Wild Bunch, there was Brooks’ marvelous ode to friendship, loyalty, and disillusionment: A prestigious film that earned two Oscar nominations for Brooks (director and adapted script) and cinematographer Conrad Hall. While it lacked the stylistic bravado and fatalistic doom of the legendary Sam Peckinpah Western, Brooks’ crack at the genre was action-packed (with a sequence aboard a fast-moving train) and philosophically insightful (with lots of sarcastic quips).

“Oil baron Ralph Bellamy hires four soldiers of fortune to rescue his kidnapped wife (Claudia Cardinale) from revolutionary leader-turned-bandit Jack Palance: Planner Lee Marvin, dynamite handler Burt Lancaster, wrangler Robert Ryan, and archer Woody Strode. Turns out Marvin and Lancaster were friends with Palance, and, sure enough, nothing is what it seems. Filmed mostly on location in Death Valley and near Lake Mead in Nevada, the 87-day shoot required lots of efficient planning and day-for-night shooting by Hall and his crew.”

How the hell does “a marvelous ode to friendship, loyalty, and disillusionment” end up in 97th place on a list of 100 great westerns? Oh, and Palance’s Jesus Razq is not a “revolutionary leader-turned-bandit” — he’s a scrappy guerilla fighter. Taking what he and his small army need to survive, but no banditry at all.

A few days I called The Professionals one of three best films of 1966:

Four years ago I posted HE’s list of the 22 greatest westerns, to wit:

…to the point that I’ve memorized most of them.

Maher: “When the French cooked Joan of Arc, she was still pink in the middle.”

…or filmmaker who’s made one movie (even a shitty one), you’ll almost certainly be invited into the Academy.

No disrespect for SAG negotiator Crabtree-Ireland or Past Lives helmer Celine Song, but woke ethnicity passes have degraded the AMPAS brand.

It used to mean something to be embraced by your Academy peers over some generally acknowledged degree of professional distinction or accomplishment. Now a significant percentage of Academy membership invites are DEI–driven.

Which means, obviously, that DEI cult considerations will matter more and more down the road. Which is why Joe and Jane Popcorn are no longer Oscar-loyal…they can see how cut off from reality the Oscar awards have become since the spread of woke cancer. Which is why I was so overjoyed by the Best Actress triumph of Poor Things star Emma Stone. Merit over equity! Hallelujah!

Tom Hanks and Robin Wright in Robert Zemeckis’ Here (Sony, 11.15), an Our Town-ish, passing-pages-of-time film, has been exclusively previewed by Vanity Fair’s Anthony Breznican.

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.”