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TMZ is reporting that Full House‘s Bob Saget has died. He was only 65, and in the middle of a multi-city tour and, to go by recent tweets, having a great time. “Multiple sources” have told TMZ that Saget passed late this afternoon (Sunday) at Orlando’s Ritz-Carlton. Quite unexpectedly. Very sorry.

Loving beyond words being on tour —And doing an all new show of standup and music. Hope to see you out there. More dates being added continually as we go further into 2022… For tickets, go to: https://t.co/nqJyTi0Dbk pic.twitter.com/ECSOpGt1K0

— bob saget (@bobsaget) December 9, 2021

I’m sorry to report that Woodstock organizer-producer Michael Lang has passed at age 77. Taken by cancer (non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma) at Manhattan’s Sloan Kettering hospital…tough break. I last spoke with Lang at the June 2009 Manhattan press junket for the Woodstock Bluray, which I own to this day. He struck me as lucid, settled, self-accepting and open to possibilities.

It’s less well known that Lang provided the funding for the re-shooting (or extended shooting) of Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson‘s original black-and-white Bottle Rocket short. Here’s how I explained it on 7.28.11:

It’s fairly common knowledge that the key movers and shakers in turning Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson‘s Bottle Rocket (’96) into a “go” feature were the late Polly Platt, producer-screenwriter L.M. Kit Carson and concert promoter and Woodstock ’69 maestro Michael Lang.

Bottle Rocket was green-lighted because Carson slipped the 13-minute black-and-white Bottle Rocket short — directed by Anderson, co-written by Wes and Owen and exec produced by Carson and Lang — to Platt in early ’94. The short had just played at Sundance, and Platt was involved in cutting the doomed musical I’ll Do Anything with director James L. Brooks.

Carson had seen a few minutes of rough footage that Anderson had shot, and convinced Lang to invest $7500 to pay for the short’s production costs.

“Polly was the person who persuaded Jim Brooks to watch the Bottle Rocket short during lunch break,” says Carson. “They were in the editing room on I’ll Do Anything, and she stuck the tape into a VHS player and and made him watch it. When it ended Brooks looked up and said, ‘What’s anybody waiting for? Make a deal. This is a go picture.’ No-shit-thanks, Polly Platt, for this movie.”

Here’s part 1 and part 2 of the original Bottle Rocket short.

“Wes and Owen had showed me some rough footage,” Carson recalls. ” It wasn’t even a cut-together film. I got Michael Lang to write a check for $7500, and we took that and re-shot the short.”

Current Sundance honcho John Cooper was a programmer at the time, and he told Carson’s partner Cynthia Hargrave that the short “‘has to be 13 minutes and no longer” so that’s the length they cut it to.

After the Sundance showing Carson sent the tape to Platt at the recommendation of producer Barbara Boyle, who’s now a senior professor/chair/something-or-other with UCLA’s film program.

Bottle Rocket being greenlighted by Brooks and Columbia “was a major moment….a comet coming out of the universe and hitting Wes Anderson on his left shoulder,” says Carson.

(l. to r.) The late Polly Platt, Wes Anderson, L.M. Kit Carson, Michael Lang.

…and perhaps even breathtaking happened in my head when I accidentally mis-titled Jane Campion’s 1920s Montana western. All I knew was that the attitude suggested by The Power of the Doug felt curiously liberating. If the first name of Benedict Cumberbatch’s smelly, snarly, well-educated, self-loathing gay guy had been “Doug” instead of “Phil”, the whole package would have radiated a different mood or tone. Just don’t ask me to explain.

…about being blissfully and contentedly ignorant about movies. To hear it from Alia Shawkat, there are definite generational differences between Zoomers and Millenials (including sexual histories).

I’m not saying that exploratory, real-world, adult-level filmmaking has disappeared altogether. It pops up on rare occasions — Parallel Mothers, King Richard, The Lost Daughter, Drive My Car, The Worst Person in the World, Riders of Justice, Zola, Licorice Pizza, The Card Counter. It just seems that so many films are woke instructionals — movies that seek to educate audiences about how things shouldn’t be and where our brave and gleaming future lies, and how things should have been in the past (i.e., presentism).

Woke Stalinism hasn’t entirely taken over the streaming narrative art form (i.e., movies), but it’s certainly changed the game. The basic idea is to instruct the general population how to think and behave. It’s 1930s social realism with a 21st Century spin. Movies are no longer for the most part about entertainment or transportation or soul-massaging — they’re about lessons from the comintern.

The Power of the Dog instructs all macho stinky gay guys to own their lives and bodies and not devote themselves to making the lives of others so miserable. The Tender Bar instructs us to disregard the fact that young lads who resemble a Jordanian version of a tweener Omar Sharif can easily and naturally grow up to look like Tye Sheridan, or at least that it’s more important to pretend this could happen than to acknowledge biological reality. (While concurrently instructing all film critics to not even mention this aspect of the film, if they know what’s good for them.) Belfast tells us to smile and bask in the warmth of the family unit and the joys of puppy love and karaoke-style singing. (And not so much about “the troubles”, especially considering that Kenneth Branagh‘s childhood family members are Protestant and therefore somewhat loyal to the British.) The found footage of Summer of Soul instructs us to celebrate African-American culture and the joy of great thumpin’ and crankin’ and wailin’ (including the sounds of the legendary Sly and the Family Stone), and to remind industry and press veterans that if they fail to nominate Summer of Soul for Best Documentary then they might be racists, and might therefore have to face appropriate penalties for same.

Posted on 3.22.21: “The bottom line is that the erratic pursuit of sweeping, penetrating, soul-touching art (a rare achievement but one that has occasionally manifested over the decades) has been more or less called off, it seems, because such films or aspirations, in the view of certain #MeToo and multi-cultural progressives, don’t serve the current woke-political narrative.

“There is, in fact, a historical precedent for what’s going on right now, and it’s nicely recounted on page 30 and 31 of Tom Wolfe‘s “The Painted Word“. Because what happened in the modern art world in the 1930s — i.e, the dominance of “social realism” — precisely mirrors what’s going on today.

“For upscale, sensitive-person, social-reflection dramas have fallen under the influence of a new form of ’30s social realism and, it could certainly be argued, are being used to illustrate and argue against social ills that wokesters regard as evil and diseased. The result has been a new form of enlightened propaganda cinema.”

Friendo: “Yellowstone shocked everyone when it turned out to be a huge hit, even though it’s basically hardcore macho men and sexy women. Which is something you never get from movies these days. Everything has been muted, feminized, Stalinized. Putting a female in the lead of a movie like the most recent Terminator…who gives a shit? Wokesters have just spun things out with no real sense of who they are — it’s just ‘knock down the next thing.’ But what they’ve done to film art is crushing, just crushing.”

Jordan Ruimy: “I read your ‘wokeness has taken over American film’ piece (we’ve been saying this since Moonlight / Get Out**). It’s honestly a great reason to just full-on embrace European cinema. They don’t have much wokeness. Cannes and Venice, brah. Very soon our yearly top ten lists will be 90% Euro cinema.”

** HE adds: “And the kowtowing tyranny of Bob Strauss-style critics.”

I always carry around three combs because sooner or later I’ll lose one of them and then I’ll be down to two.

The best kind of comb isn’t too large + has a rubbery, bendable quality. This black comb [below] was perfect — my #1 default. The other two were semi-acceptable but not really — too large, too brittle, one is blue.

Anyway a couple of weeks ago the black comb disappeared. I looked and looked and looked and couldn’t find it — heartbroken. I have five backup combs (right size & bendability) that I keep in a trinket box, but I didn’t want to deplete my reserve. I exhaled and imperceptibly slumped and grumpily resigned myself to the loss of the blackie.

Then this morning I washed and aired out a dark blue couch comforter, and lo and behold blackie re-appeared. It made my day, but this is my life. I lose stuff all the time — combs, chargers, connecting cords. It’s always something. Stressful, anxious, unceasing.

Pretty much the entire cast (significant-name-wise) of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Paradine Case (‘47), which is partly a courtroom drama but mainly a saga of sexual obsession and unrequited desire that ends in total humiliation. Extremely minor Hitchcock + the Kino Bluray allegedly blows from a perspective of HD quality. Speaking as a Hitchcock completist I’d like to see the Bluray, but something psychological is preventing me. I would rent it in a second, but you can’t.

What needs to be done at this stage in our social-political evolution is an investigation into the possibly racist decisions made by Peter Jackson in the making of his Lord of the Rings trilogy. Why didn’t Jackson anticipate presentism? And why was he so oblivious to the notion of casting actors of color? I don’t want to sound overly scolding or militant, but it might be necessary to haul Jackson before a committee and rake him over the coals.

And why, by the way, couldn’t Denethor (John Noble), Grima Wormtongue (Brad Dourif) and Saruman (Christopher Lee) be gay?

With her wins from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and (today) the National Society of Film Critics, Parallel Mothers‘ Penelope Cruz has now won two major-league Best Actress awards. Plus 13 out of 27 Gold Derby go-along whores have included her among their top-five spitball picks.

HE has never harbored the slightest doubt about the award-worthiness of Cruz’s performance. And yet Cruz isn’t among the six nominees for the Critics Choice Awards Best Actress award. They didn’t even nominate her! And yet it’s been claimed that the CCAs are predictive of the Oscars — sure!

HE also applauds the NSFC’s first-runner-up support of The Worst Person in the World‘s Renate Reinsve (42 votes); ditto handing its Best Supporting Actor trophy to Reinsve’s costar Anders Danielsen Lie (who’s also quite good in Bergman Island).

Otherwise the NSFC went hog-wild for Drive My Car — Best Picture, Best Director (Ryusuke Hamaguchi), Best Actor (Hidetoshi Nishijima) and Best Screenplay (Ryusuke Hamaguchi and Takamasa Oe).

Drive My Car is a morose, slow-paced film about coping with grief and long-festering guilt (i.e., the trials and tribulations of grief monkeys). It’s strictly an art-house sauna movie for elite, ivory-tower critics — a respectable effort by any measure, but a movie that resides in its own cave and doesn’t begin to even try to capture or engage with or reflect anything about mainstream life in the years 2020 or ’21. It could have been made in 1957 or ’63 or ’86 or ’92.

NextBestPicture‘s Matt Neglia recently had the temerity to suggest that Drive My Car, having won Best Picture trophies from NSFC, LAFCA and the NYFCC, is cut from the same cloth as Goodfellas, Schindler’s List, L.A. Confidential, The Hurt Locker, The Social Network and Spotlight. Neglia is one of those film nerd types who lives on his own planet, or, if you will, inside his own rectum. There’s no reasoning with guys like this.