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Just under 15 years ago I had a delightful late-evening dinner at one of the most deliciously atmospheric old-school London restaurants I’ve ever visited. Back then the place was called Two Brydges — now it’s called the Brydges Place Club (2 Brydges Place, London WC2N 4HP). Six of us ate there after seeing Richard Schiff perform in his one-man play, Underneath the Lintel, at the Duchess theatre.

The Brydges Place Club is a members-only operation. It’s housed in a four-story Georgian-style building that dates back to the Dickensian era. I distinctly recall that the floor beams slightly sagged.

I’m an absolute fool for snooty old London eateries. I’m especially enticed by ruling-class establishments that look down on people who appear to lack a certain pedigree (i.e., joints that might possibly give Edgar Wright a hard time). I’ve been to a few others, including (a) Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese (145 Fleet St, London EC4A 2BU), (b) Wiltons’ (55 Jermyn Street, St. James, London), (c) Rules (Covent Garden, 34-35 Maiden Lane, London), (d) The Ivy (5 West St, London), (e) Simpson’s in the Strand (100 Strand, London, (f) F. Cooke (150 Hoxton St, London). What others?

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There are two kinds of irksome or infuriating 2021 movies — (a) the kind that I understand and admire from a certain perspective and kind of feel sorry for (like Don’t Look Up, The Power of the Dog, The French Dispatch, The Eyes of Tammy Faye, The Many Saints of Newark, Benedetta) and (b) the kind that I want to strangle to death (like Annette, Spencer, The Matrix: Resurrections and The Green Knight).

Please name your own list of films that you feel sympathy for despite their failing to cut the mustard, and those which you’d like to stick a steak knife in.

Years ago Variety‘s Joe Leydon mentioned the scene in Vertigo in which Judy Barton (Kim Novak) comes out of the bathroom with her Madeline Elster hair and outfit complete, and how this melts the heart and arouses the libido of Scotty Ferguson (James Stewart) and leads to heavy breathing.

Leydon suggested that if Hitchcock had bravely ended Vertigo with this scene, it would have been hailed as an art film all the more. The message would have been “who cares who killed the wife?….what matters is that Madeline has been reborn and Scotty is making love to her once again…glorious!”

Leydon was correct, but of course for this ending to work Hitchcock would have needed to omit the earlier flashback scene in which we learn that Judy was part of Gavin Elster‘s attempt to make Scotty an unwitting accomplice in the murder of Elster’s actual wife.

Imagine the balls of a movie that is ostensibly a drama about ghosts and murder…imagine such a film ignoring the murder plot in order to focus on the love story and the forcible transformation of a murder-plot accomplice (Judy) into the victim…mind-blowing!

A few years ago I suggested an alternate art-film ending for Michael Mann‘s Thief. The film should have ended, I said, with that big Los Angeles safe-cracking job involving a super-sized blowtorch. Forget Robert Prosky and the settling of scores and the nihilistic finale — what mattered was doing the job well.

HE is requesting the readership to come up with other alternative endings to classic films — endings that might not have satisfy from a conventional climatic perspective, but which would deliver on a whole ‘nother level.

I figured I’d re-watch Don’t Look Up, only this time with subtitles. Maybe it would kick up, I thought. I lasted about 35 or 40 minutes. Here’s how I explained it on Facebook this morning:

Exactly 14 years ago one of the greatest years for aspirational, middle-class, non-budget-busting, CG-averse, review-driven movies came to an end — 2007. Call it the last glorious year for this kind of film, for only 10 weeks later — on 3.14.08, to be be exact — Variety‘s Anne Thompson wrote about the imminent demise of this sort of fare.

Whatever vitality or opportunity that kind of theatrical film had going in ’07 (typified by Syriana, Munich, The Social Network, Babel, Proof of Life, Michael Clayton, Brokeback Mountain, American Gangster, Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead, No Country for Old Men, Superbad, There Will Be Blood, Zodiac), it would soon be squeezed and then gradually squelched by the Marvel / D.C. machine, and then by fucking Millennials, most of whom have never given a damn about middle-range theatrical dramas, and then by the gradual migration of such films and subject matter to cable and streaming, and then just to streaming.

And then came the first wave of wokester instructional dramas in ’17 or thereabouts. And then the final death blow — the pandemic that began almost two years ago (or around March 1, 2020).

It used to be that the movie year was composed of ten months of crap with a smattering of review-driven, award-seeking films opening between mid-October and mid December. Some of those would-be Oscar contenders would do good theatrical business or at least break even with profits to come from cable licensing and home video. But that’s finished now also. West Side Story died, King Richard died, etc. Only Spider-Man: No Way Home hit the jackpot.

The industry that I grew up with and measured my life against and thrived by until roughly four or five years ago…the movie industry of the late ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, aughts and the first half of the teens…that industry is more or less gone now. It was withering on the vine when the pandemic came along, and now it’s 90% dead, dead, fucking dead. Ditto the joy of life as I used to know it, in a sense…the joy of living by, for and through movies. I’m not saying that life is over, but the euphoric days will never return. Not in force, they won’t. Not like 2007.

There’s enough excitement and intrigue and discovery in new films to keep my pulse beating, so to speak, and there will always be the top-tier film festivals, of course, plus the HD streaming options today are miraculous. But the vibrancy of the movie-worshipping life I lived for so many decades…that wellspring of fresh nourishing water that I drank from so joyfully in theatres and at Cannes, Sundance, Toronto, Telluride….I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that the flush times for devotional cineastes like myself are pretty much…well, seriously diminished. Certainly in a theatrical sense. The game isn’t completely over and done with, of course, but it’s certainly on life support.

The pandemic didn’t kill everything, but it damn sure took the joy out of living.

“The Matrix: Regurgitations is a fucking ridiculous disaster of a film…that reads like a piece of clumsy fan fiction, written by a sweaty, overweight teenager from 2004…it accomplishes absolutely nothing….never should have been made.”

I was diagnosed with Omicron eight days ago and had more or less shed the effects of the virus by last Friday (12.24). The CDC says if I’m triple vaxxed and masked I’m good for roaming around and shopping, etc. I’m now triple bullet-proofed (three stabs + naturally enhanced post-Covid defenses + German genes) — less likely than ever to succumb.

Four years and four months ago, Tobe Hooper died at age 74. There’s no question that Hooper did himself proud with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (’74), a low-budget slasher thriller that I’ve never liked but have always “respected”. The following Wikipage sentence says it all: “It is credited with originating several elements common in the slasher genre, including the use of power tools as murder weapons and the characterization of the killer as a large, hulking, faceless figure.”

Hooper made a life out of his alleged facility with horror. He career-ed it to the max. But after The Texas Chainsaw Massacre he never struck the motherlode again, not really.

You can’t give Hooper serious credit for Poltergeist, which was mostly directed by Steven Spielberg. And no, I’m not a fan of Lifeforce. If you want to be cruel about it you could call him a feverish, moderately talented fellow who got lucky only once, and that was it. Hooper was tenacious and industrious and always kept going, and of course he dined out on the original Saw for decades. No harm in that.

L.M. Kit Carson, the renowned screenwriter, producer and journalist whom I proudly called a friend and ally from ’86 until his passing in 2014, was friendly with Hooper. They shared a Texas heritage and worked together on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre 2 (’86), a misbegotten piece-of-shit sequel that Cannon Films produced and which I, a conflicted Cannon employee at the time, wrote the press notes for.

Carson introduced me to Hooper as a gifted writer who really understood the satirical tone of Carson’s brilliant Saw 2 script. If only Hooper had absorbed it as fully and translated it to the screen with a similar panache.

Here are six things I know or believe about Hooper, based on personal experience.

(1) As editor of The Film Journal, I began hearing in the early summer of ’82 that Hooper hadn’t really directed Poltergeist. Then I ran a freelancer’s interview with Poltergeist producer Kathy Kennedy in which she more or less confirmed that Spielberg had to step in and take charge because of Hooper’s overly deliberative approach to directing. Many articles have since reported or contended that this was the case.

(2) Carson’s screenplay for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 was a total peach — a dry, darkly comedic kill-the-yuppies thing.  It was heralded and excerpted in an issue of Film Comment; it might have been Harlan Jacobson who wrote “it’s okay to like it”. Alas, Hooper totally fucked it up. The sly social satire stuff was totally out the window. I was there for the very first in-house screening. The movie was shit.

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…for the coming Democratic Party apocalypse is the anti–meritocracy education thing (i.e., deliberately lowering standards to make things more accessible for students of color). Instructing students about the history of American racism is a vital and necessary thing, but telling parents of smart or otherwise gifted students that merit and scholastic aptitude have no value or place in today’s system because we need to give less advantaged kids more of a chance…this + “parents need to butt out of this as their concerns are imaginary plus professional educators know best”…that is a FUCKING DEATH BOMB.

An excerpt from a 12.28 Matt Taibbi article titled “The Democrats Education Lunacies Will Bring Back Trump”:

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…and in so doing proclaim your hyper–sensitivity and woke assholery for the benefit of all your social media pallies. I’ve half a mind to drive to Westwood to pay to see Paul Thomas Anderson’s modest and meandering period dramedy again, as a way of saying “many of us hear you, MANAA homies…we get what you’re saying, but PTA was being honest to the period, you see, and his refusal to follow the presentism crowd is an honorable thing.”