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We all know that Joe Rogan has been spreading disinformation about Covid and the vaccines, and has thereby played to the crazies. Rather than just look the other way, Neil Young has removed his music from Spotify, which funds Rogan’s show, and thereby demonstrated that he has balls of steel.

HE to Rogan: I love your show and will continue to listen, but the fact is that you and your ilk have extended the pandemic and made things worse. God knows how many people are dead because of your bullshit.

Hollywood Reporter‘s Clara Chan: “Spotify is in the process of removing Neil Young’s catalogue of music from its service after the artist published — then took down — an open letter with an ultimatum: deal with the vaccine misinformation coming from Joe Rogan’s podcast, or lose Young’s music.

“We want all the world’s music and audio content to be available to Spotify users. With that comes great responsibility in balancing both safety for listeners and freedom for creators. We have detailed content policies in place and we’ve removed over 20,000 podcast episodes related to COVID since the start of the pandemic. We regret Neil’s decision to remove his music from Spotify, but hope to welcome him back soon,” the spokesperson told THR.

“In his letter, which was originally published on his website Jan. 24, Young said, ‘I am doing this because Spotify is spreading fake information about vaccines – potentially causing death to those who believe the disinformation being spread by them. [Spotify] can have Rogan or Young. Not both.”

In a 1.26.22 Hollywood Reporter interview with West Side Story costars Rachel Zegler, Ariana DeBose and Rita Moreno, Rebecca Sun, who has skin in the game of “sharing the perspectives and stories of the underserved,” offers the actresses a chance to firmly and unambiguously throw costar Ansel Elgort under the bus, once and for all.

The issue is that completely debunked bullshit charge about Elgort having sexually assaulted a 17 year-old named “Gabby” when he was 20, despite every piece of testimony (Twitter and otherwise) indicating that nothing resembling an assault ever happened and that the worst Elgort could be accused of was ghosting Gabby after being intimate with her.

That’s all it was — seven years ago he acted insensitively or callously and thereby hurt her feelings. Which he’s said he’s sorry for and ashamed of.

So do Zegler, DeBose and Moreno throw him to the wolves? In a manner of speaking, kind of.

The talented, good-looking Elgort (great singing voice) appears to be a pleasant guy, and he presumably behaved in an agreeable and considerate way during filming. The normal inclination among friendly costars would be to say “this isn’t my affair but to me, Ansel is cool…I like him a lot…he’s a true professional and an elegant man…he gets my up-vote.” But Zegler, DeBose and Moreno have all spoken dispassionately and absent any affection or consideration for the guy.

Zegler: “We made a movie two and a half years ago, and a lot has gone on in the world since then. A lot has changed very publicly, and privately as well. There’s been a lot of awakening.”

HE-Zegler translation: “Twitter has wanted Ansel dead and dismembered for 18 months now, and I’m not stepping into this. If his career is over, it’s over, but don’t make me an accessory after the fact. I’m not in this. Plus Twitter has decided that any relationship defined by a ‘power imbalance’ — Ansel was famous, Gabby was nobody — is an indictment in itself, and Ansel, who may or may not be an evil predator, will have to weather this storm on his own. I don’t know from the details, and I’m certainly not going to get detoured into a big Ansel discussion in this interview, which is about glorifying me, Rita and Ariana.”

DeBose: “Nobody really knows what’s going on in anyone’s head. Only the people who were involved in that situation know what actually went down.”

HE response to DeBose: “True, but if you’d read anything about this you’d at least understand that the intimate relations between Ansel and Gabby were consensual and legal by the laws of New York State, and that Gabby’s complaint basically boiled down to having her feelings hurt.”

Moreno: “I think it would have been absolutely horrendous and wrong for anyone to take sides in that matter. It’s not for me to make those judgments.”

HE-Moreno translation: “Leave me out of this, I’m looking for my second Best Supporting Actress Oscar. Ansel’s issues, whatever they may be, are not my affair.”

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Perhaps later this year the New Beverly Cinema will program a superficially linked double bill — Phillip Noyce‘s The Desperate Hour and William Wyler‘s The Desperate Hours.

Five months ago Noyce’s film played at the Toronto Film Festival as Lakewood. Now it’s got a catchier title. Here’s my 9.21 review with the title switched out:

An adult all alone and on a phone, having to talk his or her way out of (or through) a tough, high-pressure situation. I don’t know how many times this set-up has been built into a compelling feature, but I’m thinking at least four**.

The very best is Steven Knight‘s Locke (’14), an 85-minute character study about a construction foreman (Tom Hardy) grappling with issues of personal vs. professional responsibility. Three years ago Gustav Möller‘s The Guilty, a gripping, Danish-made crime thriller that I just re-watched yesterday, delivered similar cards. Last weekend a same-titled remake, directed by Antoine Fuqua and starring Jake Gyllenhaal, played at the Toronto Film Festival, and will debut theatrically on 9.24 before hitting Netflix.

Now there’s Phillip Noyce‘s The Desperate Hour, which stars Naomi Watts as Amy, a widowed, small-town mom reacting not only to news of a Parkland-esque high school shooting, but to the possibility that her sullen and estranged son Noah (Colton Gobbo) may be involved in some way.

Nearly two-thirds of this 84-minute film (47 minutes) are focused solely on Amy and her iPhone in a remote wooded area. We’re talking about a torrent of smooth steadicam footage plus several overhead drone shots and some elegant editing (kudos to Lee Haugen), plus Watts stressing, emoting and hyperventilating her head off — a one-woman tour de force.

Right away I was thinking Noah might be the shooter, and that, you bet, made me sit up and focus all the more. And that’s all I’m going to say.

My second reaction was about Amy’s iPhone, and what an amazing reach it has. She’s in a woodsy area a few miles from town (I didn’t catch how many reception bars were showing) and yet she experiences only a couple of signal drop-outs, and she’s watching all kinds of video and whatnot without a hitch.

I was also impressed by her iPhone’s battery — what power! (I never leave home without a back-up battery for my iPhone 12 Max Pro — I have too many active apps and the battery is always draining hand over fist.)

Despite all that’s going on at the high school and having to juggle all kinds of incoming info, Amy continues to jog during most of her phone marathon.

If there’s one thing that viewers will be dead certain of, it’s that Watts will stumble and suffer an ankle injury. I was telepathically begging her not to. HE to Watts: “C’mon, stop…don’t…there are all kinds of obstacles on your forest path and you obviously need to focus so just start speed-walking”…down she goes!

The pace of The Desperate Hour is very fast and cranked up, and Amy is nothing if not resourceful. She manages to persuade an auto mechanic whom she doesn’t know to supply crucial information about Noah’s whereabouts, as well as info about a possible shooter’s name and contact info. All kinds of conversations and complications ensue, and you’re always aware that Chris Sparling‘s script is determined to increase the stress and suspense factors.

Most of these efforts felt reasonable to me, or at least not overly challenging or irksome. The Desperate Hour is a thriller. I didn’t fight it. I accepted the rules and requirements.

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Living, the Ikiru remake that played Sundance ’22 last weekend, has been acquired for distribution by Sony Pictures Classics.

Directed by Oliver Hermanus and adapted on the page by Kazuo Ishiguro, this modest British period drama stars the great Bill Nighy. He’ll almost certainly be among the Best Actor contenders, and will almost certainly be on the award-season campaign trail starting next fall.

Living is a fine, honorable, occasionally touching film but not, I submit, the masterpiece that some have called it. It didn’t strike me as some kind of enhancement or special strengthening of the original 1952 Akira Kurosawa classic; it struck me as maybe a little more than a tasteful remake, but not much more than that. I respect and approve of Living. Can we let it go at that?

In a Best Picture Oscar spitball piece, IndieWire’s Anne Thompson has called Spider-Man: No Way Home a “long shot”. She has this deeply emotional, hugely successful Sony release in 20th place — a lower ranking than those shared by THR‘s Scott Feinberg or TheWrap‘s Steve Pond, but in the same ballpark.

Thompson’s top-ten noms are purely about safety, purely about raising a damp finger to the wind and adding her voice to the chorus of conventional thinkers.

I know that I speak for hundreds of industry veterans by saying that the elite Feinberg-Pond-Thompson mindset being knocked off its axis would be absolute heaven.

Please consider clapping your hands in order to tell this crew how full of shit they are. Peter Pan author James M. Barrie once urged audiences to clap in order to keep Tinkerbell alive — I’m asking the same thing here. Vote for the millions of younger ticket buyers out there, for those who’ve paid to see S-M: NWH more than once because it pushes a button that they wanted pushed before they knew it. Vote to show respect for a film that falls short of profound art but which really turned them on. That means something.

If Blanche Dubois had the floor, she would urge the following to Academy and guild members: “Don’t hang back with the snoots!”.

I’m not talking about which Best Picture contender is “better”, whatever that means. I’m talking about how a Spider-Man Best Picture nomination would startle these smug know-it-alls, those handicappers from the land of stupor. I’m talking about the sheer pleasure of this prospect.

Oscar nomination voting begins two days hence — Thursday, 1.27.22. Voting ends on Tuesday, 2.1.22. The nominations will be announced on Tuesday, 2.8.22, with the ceremony happening on Sunday, 3.27.22 — roughly eight weeks away.

Not once in my life have I spoken the anachronistic term “broad”. It’s been out of circulation for decades, and yet in 2005 Urban Dictionary posted the following definition: “Word for a woman. Less respectable than lady but much more respectable than bitch. As in ‘Man, look at those two broads…they are smokin’!”

Bitches and ho’s used to be (and perhaps still are) common terms within urban hip-hop culture, okay, but broads? Not in this century or even the second half of the 20th. It was used by coarse types (gangsters, gamblers, saloon singers) during the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s, okay, but started to fade in the ’50s.

Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart used “broads” in “The Lady Is A Tramp,” a 1937 tune they wrote for “Babes in Arms“. It’s also in the 1957 film version of Rodgers and Hart’s Pal Joey when Rita Hayworth sings “I’m a broad with a broad, broad mind.” Humphrey Bogart, Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack crowd almost certainly used the term from time to time. It’s impossible to imagine Ronald Colman, Cary Grant or Gary Cooper saying it, but I’ll bet it was part of Bob Hope‘s vocabulary — ditto Desi Arnaz‘s.

In Some Like It Hot a Spats Columbo henchman (Harry Wilson) flirts in an elevator with “Josephine” and “Daphne” (Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon) by asking, “Pardon me for askin’ but haven’t we had the pleasure of meetin’ you two broads before?” (In response to which Lemmon says, “You must be thinking of two other broads.”)

All that said, I laughed when I saw this ancient ad for Mervyn LeRoy‘s Broad Minded, a 1931 Joe E. Brown comedy.

Now that it’s on the table, HE hereby proposes that Browne, LeRoy, Broad Minded screenwriters Bert Kalmer and Harry Ruby, Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, Frank Sinatra and Rita Hayworth be posthumously cancelled. At the very least, The Academy Museum (i.e., “Woke House”) should post an apology for Hollywood culture having encouraged sexist attitudes by using this deplorable term in certain films. The museum should also sign a pledge to never install exhibits that include the above.

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The Austin-residing Dylan Wells stepped in today and solved the agonizing missing-comments Patreon problem** that has been plaguing Hollywood Elsewhere for more than a week. Other well-meaning tech guys tried to fix the issue and failed. This is the difference between being a professional-level tech guy and a genius-level one. Dylan reports that a Disqus update caused the problem. Hollywood Elsewhere is enormously thankful to Dylan for “slaying the dragon,” so to speak.

Dylan’s summary of the problem that no longer exists (thank God):

How curious that a new teaser for Guillermo del Toro‘s animated re-telling of Pinocchio focuses not on Geppetto or his carved-wood son Pinocchio or the kids turned into donkey slaves, but on a sophisticated insect Sebastian J. Cricket, obviously related in some way to Jiminy Cricket.

What has a fucking cricket to do with all this, especially a tale that considers the shadow of Benito Mussolini??

Guillermo’s “dark, twisted retelling of the famous Carlo Collodi fairytale, about a wooden puppet who comes to life and dreams of becoming a real boy, takes place in 1930s Fascist Italy. When Pinocchio comes to life, he turns out not to be a nice boy, causing mischief and playing mean tricks. But at its core, Pinocchio is “a story of love and disobedience as Pinocchio struggles to live up to his father’s expectations.”

I’ll tell you right that John Cameron Swayze Mitchell looks too skin-and-bones to play Joe Exotic, who’s always had roundish, semi-jowly features. Kate McKinnon as Joe’s nemesis Carole Baskin…I’m fine with that. With McKinnon, not the show. I hate watching egoistic with horrible taste in clothing and hairstyling lowlifes make their lives even lower.

From Sam Tonkin’s 1.24.22 story in London’s Daily Mail, “Futuristic flying ‘AirCar’ that can transform from a road vehicle into a plane in under THREE MINUTES is certified to fly after passing safety tests in Slovakia“:

“AirCar certification opens the door for mass production of very efficient flying cars,” said Professor Stefan Klein, AirCar’s inventor, the leader of the development team and test pilot. “It is official and the final confirmation of our ability to change mid-distance travel forever.”

“The project’s co-founder Anton Zajac said: “Fifty years ago, the car was the epitome of freedom. AirCar allows us to be free again.”