This may be the ugliest pair of upscale men’s loafers I’ve ever seen in my life. The Bruno Magli / Bloomingdale’s people are actually asking $350 for them. If I was roaming around Bloomies and a sales person came up and said “as a valued customer would you consider accepting a pair of these loafers as a special gift?”, I would say “thanks very much but no thanks…no offense but I find that white stitching appalling and that silver clasp ornament offensive…these are loafers for 95 year-old mafia guys playing shuffleboard in a retirement community.”

NYC-area friendo: “Not to encourage your obsession with cancel-culture safeties and the Khmer Rouge, but what would happen if Randy Newman‘s “Good Old Boys” was released today? A brilliant, scathing, blatantly anti-racist album, as relevant today as it was when it was released in 1974. But satire doesn’t play if you don’t have context. And I dare you to find the right context for any 20-year-old junior at Smith College. If people can be castigated for even alluding to ‘the n word’ in context as opposed to the actual word, it’s Orwell time.”

HE to friendo: Of course it’s Orwell time. And if Newman had been born in 1983 or ’93 instead of ’43 and cooked up “Good Old Boys” on his own, no record company would touch him with a 20 foot-pole. And if he self-published the Khmer Rouge would send out assassins.

I was writing up an interview I did last week with Crisis director, writer, producer and costar Nic Jarecki (Arbitrage). An hour ago I happened to click on his film’s Rotten Tomatoes page and damn near fell backward. Jesus H. Christ!

Remember Tom Hanks‘ League of Their Own moment when he exclaims “there’s no crying in baseball!”? That’s me right now except I’m saying to the critics “you guys can’t give a 26% RT rating to a film that’s ambitious and moderately gripping and narratively efficient for the most part…it deserves a pass, for God’s sake! You can say it has an issue or two but nothing fatal…c’mon, it’s more or less fine!

“Are you dumping on it because Armie ‘Cunnilingus Cannibal’ Hammer is easy pickings right now? That’s not fair at all, and besides Hammer’s performance is perfectly sturdy and approvable.”

I know when I’m seeing a film that’s so cloying and clumsy and stupid that it drives me up the wall. That’s how I felt after seeing Pete Docter‘s Soul, and it got a 95% RT rating. Because it’s the first animated Pixar feature to focus on an African-American character, and so everyone loved it despite an infuriating plotline. I certainly didn’t “enjoy” sitting through J. Bklakeson‘s I Care A Lot, a broadly performed dark comedy about a predatory, court-appointed guardian of older people (Rosamund Pike), but the RT critics gave it an 81% rating.

In a fair and just world Soul would have earned a 45% rating, I Care A Lot might have gotten a 70% score and Crisis (Quiver, 2.26) would have cruised through to, say, an 82% score. Is Crisis as good as Steven Soderbergh‘s Traffic? No, but it’s smart and well assembled. This movie does not deserve to die! But it looks like it might, partly because of what the RT gang is saying right now.

It’s Armie Hammer. I know it’s Armie Hammer. The bastards are figuring “okay, the industry is giving him the temporary boot and he’s a rich white guy so I can trash this all I want and nobody will say anything.”

One of the fairest reviews I can find was penned by whattowatch.com’s Todd Gilchrist. “There’s nothing sexy about Crisis at all,” he begins. “Certainly in comparison to other drug trafficking operations and their perpetrators chronicled on television and in film, watching a kid cross the Canadian border with a backpack full of pills isn’t very exciting. But projected against the backdrop of this ‘invisible’ epidemic, writer-director Nicholas Jarecki aims to tell his very own Traffic by exploring the way that the pharmaceutical industry has become a legitimate face overshadowing what has become a cutthroat, lucrative and most of all destructive criminal enterprise.

“Earnest, predictably urgent performances by Gary Oldman, Armie Hammer and Evangeline Lilly help the audience navigate through just three arenas of this crisis — in boardrooms, the streets and suburban neighborhoods — while Jarecki creates a latticework that’s suitably complex but nevertheless doesn’t fully connect the dots between them.”

HE comment: A movie that “doesn’t fully connect the dots” doesn’t mean “eeww, it stinks!” It means “it’s not perfect but it’s not bad!”

Gilchrist: “Hammer plays Jake Kelly, an undercover federal agent trying to broker a multi-million-dollar deal for Fentanyl between his Armenian partners and a mysterious Canadian supplier named ‘Mother.’ Meanwhile, Lilly plays Claire Reimann, a recovering Oxycodone addict whose son dies under mysterious circumstances, prompting her to investigate what happened after the police label it accidental. And Oldman plays Tyrone Brower, a university professor who finds himself battling the pharmaceutical giant that provides his research funding after a test of one of their new, supposedly non-addictive pain killers produces some alarming results.”

Jordan Ruimy is finishing up his Best Films of the ’80s critics poll, which 200 critics have participated in. The #1 pick is no surprise but I’ll get into that when Jordan posts on Monday. He’s given me permission to discuss the film that occupies the #13 slot — Martin Scorsese‘s The King of Comedy (’83). Which Average Joes hated, of course. Critics are the only ones who truly love this deeply uncomfortable, hoi-polloi-loathing film. I adore three or four scenes (“His name is Pumpkin…you know a Pumpkin?” plus “you should get cancer!” are the top two) but mostly it’s a grueling sit. And yet, after a fashion, it’s a powerful look at celebrity wannabe-ism and the aggressive shallowing of American culture.

Scorsese had a tough time in the early to mid ’80s. Post-Raging Bull he thought about getting out of feature films, his health was up and down, The King of Comedy (’83) totally tanked, Paramount abandoned support of a higher-budgeted version of The Last Temptation of Christ (Aidan Quinn as Jesus, Sting as Pontius Pilate, etc.) and he was more or less forced to dive into the low-budget indie realm with the offbeat, comically perverse After Hours (’85).

But once the shooting and editing of After Hours were finished things began to look up. Scorsese took a director-for-hire gig on The Color of Money, which wasn’t all that great but had its moments. He finally assembled Last Temptation funding ($7 million) through Universal and began shooting it in Morocco in October ’87. And of course he’d begun developing and preparing Goodfellas by mid ’86 with Nic Pileggi‘s first-draft screenplay popping out sometime around November of ’86. By any measure Goodfellas was the crowning creative achievement of Scorcese’s ’80s period, even though it wasn’t released until the fall of ’90.

So basically the ’80s wasn’t a downer decade for Scorsese but his greatest if you step back and take it all in — the legendary Raging Bull, the fearlessly frank The King of Comedy and the weirdly burrowing After Hours, the occasionally interesting and commercially tolerable The Color of Money, the spiritually soaring and transcendent The Last Temptation of Christ (best Jesus movie + best death scene ever), and the mesmerizing gangster powerhouse that was Goodfellas. Three stone classics, two admirably offbeat digressions and one straight-down-the-middle star vehicle that isn’t too bad if you step back and ease up.

HE to Paul Schrader on Facebook:

Paul — I’m a contented owner of a Criterion Bluray of Lindsay Anderson‘s “If…” I recently re-watched it, and I was just swooning over the arc of it, the disciplinary culture that Mick Travis (Malcolm McDowell) and his two irreverent roommates and spiritual brothers-in-arms are less and less tolerant of…actually five when you count the dark-haired girl and the young blonde gay kid…the way it blends myth and romantic fantasy and sexuality and then escalates into surrealism and metaphors of violent revolution and finally explodes with outright murder and gunfire and grenades without actually, literally killing anyone.

It’s really quite phenomenal how it articulated the dreams of social upheaval that were simmering and percolating in the late ‘60s without actually embracing anything that could be called literally or pragmatically “political”…it was all a delirious sort of irrational longing or play-acting…a young man’s dream movie…a dream that was part poem, part mysticism, part loathing of strict Bible-quoting authoritarians, part snifters of brandy, part pot & psychedelia, part Paul McCartney‘s moustache, part black hat and cloak, part “Roland the headless Thompson gunner” in the Belgian Congo, part SDS, part homoeroticism from a distance, part William S. Burroughs…what a dive into the pool.

And then I came upon this “If…” review you wrote in June ‘69, and I can’t help but wonder how you could have possibly back-handed this film, which may have over-played or under-played in one way or another but was clearly channeling what was happening at that strangely unsettling, occasionally magical moment in time.

During the promotion of The Nice Guys (’16) Ryan Gosling called Abbott & Costello‘s Hold That Ghost (Universal, 8.6.41) “kind of a masterpiece.” I wouldn’t go that far, but it’s an agreeably silly deal — sloppy but lively, fast-paced, everyone’s on mescaline including the tough-guy gangsters**. On top of which I’m a fool for handsomely mastered 1080p versions of silvery black-and-white films of the ’40s. Which is why I’d love to get my hands on a Hold That Ghost Bluray.

The problem is that it isn’t selling or renting as an individual unit. You have to shell out $105 for an Abbott & Costello Complete Universal Collection box set. I wish the Universal home video guys would ease up and issue a stand-alone Bluray. That’s all I have to say.

Herewith a brief encounter with the legendary David Ogilvy, the Godfather of all Mad Men and the poet laureate of ’50s and ’60s smooth-as-silk advertising.

It happened in June of ’76 at Chateau de Touffou, a medieval French mansion Ogilvy had purchased in 1966. He had once been married to Anne Cabot, the sister of the mother of my girlfriend at the time, Sophie Black (a descendant of the Cabot family, later to become a fairly renowned poet), and so during our European travels Sophie arranged a drop-by.

Ogilvy was about 65 at the time. He was a wise, learned, blue-blood type with a capacity for snooty bon mots (he described his castle as being located “in the South Dakota of France“) but was quite friendly and gentle and polite. We got along pretty well. I told him my father had been a J. Walter Thompson exec back in the ’60s, and then a Direct Marketing pioneer in the ’70s.

Ogilvy spotted right away that my French was all but non-existent (if it had existed it would have been called moronic), and considerately told his wife Herta that we should only speak English.

David and Herta were as kind and gracious as they come. A delightful interlude. Ogilvy died in July 1999.

Chateau Touffou’s garden had the most luscious, apple-sized strawberries I’ve ever seen or tasted in my life. There was also an underground jail (a leftover from the middle ages) with tiny little cells…horrid.

The strawberries grown at Chateau Touffou were huge, almost apple-sized. If I had to classify their shape, I would say they were long-wedge

Friendo #1: “Kudos to the N.Y. Times for publishing Michael Powell‘s story about the Smith College kerfuffle surrounding Oumou Kanoute (“Inside a Battle Over Race, Class and Power at Smith College“). How this got published is a miracle. We need more journalists with brass balls to keep writing about this. PBS should do a Frontline on it, or will they be too afraid? This story reads straight out of Salem in 1692.”

HE to Friendo #1: “Smith College is, plainly and simply, nothing less than an insane asylum. Because the consciousness of the student body is clearly over the waterfall. As in stark raving mad. Oumou Kanoute is a fanatical paranoid — in a fair and just world she would face consequences.”

Friendo #2: “It’s the new cult consciousness, and it’s on college campuses everywhere. It’s about race and gender and fear and paranoia. ‘[Fill in the blank] is attacking me and/or making me feel unsafe!” It’s an absolute mental illness, and it’s spreading like wildfire.”

Two nights ago Woody Allen defender Robert Weide called out the Allen v. Farrow team — producer Amy Herdy, co-directors Amy Zeiring and Kirby Dick, HBO Docs — for the Episode #4 challenge to Moses Farrow‘s claim that there was no functioning electric train set in the attic crawl space where the alleged offense took place.

Weide called the doc’s presentation of a schematic drawing of the attic, allegedly supplied by Connecticut police, a “failed hat trick”. It suggested two possibilities, he said — Herdy, Zeiring and Dick are “really half-assed investigators” or “are inherently manipulative and dishonest.” He asked if they wanted him to reveal what he knows from court transcripts or if they’d prefer to do it themselves — “your move.”

After which, he said, “we can move onto all the other falsehoods you’ve jammed into your 4-hour hatchet job, [which] I can disprove without breaking a sweat.”

So when will someone (Weide, Allen v. Farrow producers) expand upon this? It’s been almost 48 hours. Hubba-hubba.

Friendo: “How long is Weide going to tease us about this? His implication is serious — that Herdy, Zeiring and Dick basically lied about the train set. If proven, this would blow a fatal hole in their reputation as filmmakers. I assume he’ll explain soon.”

If it came down to some psychopathic hooligan aiming a pistol at me and saying “let go of your dogs or you die,” I’d probably let go. The dogs would obviously be traumatized but they’d probably live and could possibly be recovered. Dog loyalty goes only so far in this corner. The soprano-voiced Ryan Fischer, an employee of Lady Gaga‘s, was walking three (or was it two?) of the singer’s French bulldogs. It happened last night on Sierra Bonita Ave. around 9:40 p.m. Lady Gaga, currently in Italy, is reportedly offering $500K for the dogs’ return.

The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg and David Rooney have posted a “should win” / “will win” piece about the Golden Globe awards, which will happen on Sunday, 2.28. Rooney offers the shoulds; Feinberg projects the wills.

Herewith are HE’s reactions with a particular focus on two questions in the matter of Best Picture, Drama. One, does the viewer want to “live” in the world of a given film or performance? (A major consideration that journos almost never ponder.) And two, what does the film in question say about life on the planet earth right now that strikes a resonant chord?

Best Picture, Drama

SHOULD WIN: Rooney says Nomadland
WILL WIN: Feinberg says either The Trial of the Chicago 7 or Nomadland.
HE SEZ: Nomadland is a sad, sporadically spirited mood poem about “houseless”-ness — about good people who’ve suffered blows and lost the battle but continue to push on like the Joad family. The cultural/political winds obviously point to a Nomadland win. We all feel the heart current, but who wants to “live” in this world of roaming 60-plus vagabonds who exchange stories, sit around campfires and take care of business in buckets? Answer: Nobody. Which is why The Trial of the Chicago 7 might win because hanging, strategizing and arguing with the likes of Hoffman, Kuntsler, Hayden, Rubin, et. al. is a more vital way to be.

What does Nomadland say about our current communal state that’s real and truthful? Thank God for strength, reaching out and resourcefulness in this most brutal difficult soul-draining of realms, but who rejects a good deal (safety, security, better hygiene, a bathroom) when it’s offered? What does Chicago 7 say? We may have our strategic differences and combative personalities, but there’s the spit and spunk of it all. Fight on!

Best Picture, Musical or Comedy

SHOULD WIN: Rooney says Hamilton (“In a weak category this year, it has to be Thomas Kail‘s performance-capture recording of the Broadway juggernaut that bottles the thrill of live theater with rare skill,” he says.)
WILL WIN: Feinberg says Borat 2.
HE SEZ: Hamilton is a play that was captured by cameras…period. Borat 2, a film that ridicules red-hat bumblefucks and Rudy Giuliani, will win. What does Borat 2 say about our current communal state that’s real and truthful? Answer: There are assholes aplenty out there (including the medieval sexists of Eastern Europe), and it’s fun to laugh at them. No harm, no foul.

Who wants to “live” in the world of Borat 2? Answer: No choice — we are living in that world.

Best Actress, Drama

SHOULD WIN: Rooney says Carey Mulligan.
WILL WIN: Feinberg says Mulligan. “Frances McDormand and Viola Davis won recently,” Scott reasons, “whereas Mulligan never has.”
HE SEZ: Mulligan. She’s good in Promising Young Woman in a dry, brittle, controlled fury way. She was at least five if not ten times more affecting in Sarah Gavron‘s Suffragette, Thomas Vinterberg‘s Far From The Madding Crowd, Lone Scherfig‘s An Education, in 2015’s Skylight on Broadway, in BBC/Netflix’s Collateral, etc. And she’s very good in The Dig. But sometimes you win for the performance that you win for — just happens that way. Mulligan won’t thank Variety‘s Dennis Harvey, of course, but that whole kerfuffle probably did a lot to cement her winer’s circle status.

Who wants to “live” in the world of Promising Young Woman? Answer: Not this horse. Young men are pigs, but I’d prefer to live in a realm in which guys who resemble Bo Burnham‘s pediatrician stay the way they were written for the first seven-eights of the film, and don’t pull a last-minute switcheroo to satisfying some arbitrary “we need a twist” requirement.

Best Actor, Drama

SHOULD WIN: Rooney says Ma Rainey‘s Chadwick Boseman.
WILL WIN: Feinberg says Anthony Hopkins (“Only Hopkins’ The Father is up for best pic, plus the HFPA adores him…eight noms going back 42 years!.
HE SEZ: Boseman might win, but a Best Actor trophy should be about more than expressing a great collective sadness about a young actor’s untimely death. The finest performance of Boseman’s career was James Brown in Get On Up. Plus “everyone knows that Boseman’s ‘Levee’ doesn’t blow the doors off the hinges — not really. It’s a poignant performance (especially during the scene in which Levee recalls a sad episode involving his mother). I understand the sentiment behind giving Boseman a special tribute, of course, but giving him a posthumous GG award for a performance that is no more than approvable feels like a disproportionate thing to do.” — posted on 2.10.21. The GG trophy should go to either Hopkins or Sound of Metal‘s Riz Ahmed.

Who wants to “live” in the world of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, The Father and Sound of Metal? Answer: Ixnay on the first two, but the world of Sound of Metal is vast and cosmic and full of wonder.

Best Actress, Musical or Comedy

SHOULD WIN: Rooney says French Exit‘s Michelle Pfeiffer (“Her withering hauteur and spent surrender elevate every moment”).
WILL WIN: Feinberg says Borat 2‘s Maria Bakalova.
HE SEZ: Rooney is right — the award should go to Pfeiffer. Critics have been hailing Bakalova’s praises all along, and she’s totally fine in the film but the fact that she’s won 19 Best Supporting Actress prizes around the country is, like…what? Strictly a falling-dominoes dynamic.

Best Actor, Musical or Comedy

SHOULD WIN: Rooney says Borat 2‘s Sacha Baron Cohen. (“Andy Samberg‘s role in Palm Springs doesn’t extend his range, Lin-Manuel Miranda isn’t Hamilton‘s strongest player, and James Corden is abrasive in The Prom.”)
WILL WIN: Feinberg says Cohen
HE SEZ: Cohen.

Last weekend I re-watched the extended cut of Ridley Scott and Cormac McCarthy‘s The Counselor (20th Century Fox, 10.25.13). It runs around 138 minutes, or 20 minutes longer than the theatrical cut.

I hadn’t watched the long cut in roughly seven years, and I’m telling you it’s aged beautifully — it’s a ruthlessly brilliant, ice-cold film about irrevocable fate and death by way of the Mexican drug cartels. And yet The Counselor‘s throat was cut by most critics, earning a meager 33% and 48% on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, respectively.

The Counselor Bluray includes an excellent “making of” documentary that lasts around…oh, 45 minutes or so. For whatever reason it’s not on YouTube.

Initial HE review: “I was so impressed by the profound assurance, philosophical authority and thematic clarity in Ridley Scott‘s The Counselor (20th Century Fox, 10.25), which I saw last night, that I pleaded with Fox publicists to let me say a few things despite the Thursday afternoon review embargo. They gave me permission to do so.

“I was also very taken by the visually seductive stylings (the dp is Dariusz Wolski with editing by Pietro Scalia) and what I would call a bold but almost reckless indifference to conventional audience expectations for a film of this type.

“I asked to speak to Counselor producers Nick Wechsler and Steve Schwartz, and they called about an hour later and we talked for…oh, 15 minutes or so.”

“Ignore Counselor Naysaysers,” posted on 10.24.13:

“Take no notice of The Counselor‘s 34% Rotten Tomatoes rating. It simply means that a lot of reviewers found the movie unlikable or unpleasant. Or they found it too scary to handle — they had to push it away in order to go on living their lives. But shame on those reviewers who are calling it a bad or poorly made film, or that ‘everyone’s speech is awash in gaudy psycho-blather and Yoda-like observations,’ which is blind bullshit. Or that ‘you can’t believe a word of it.”

“Yes, you can. You can believe every word. You simply have to understand and accept that The Counselor is expressing a cold and clear-eyed view of the Mexican cartel drug business with a very blunt and eloquent voice. It is an undistilled visit to McCarthyland, which is to say the bleak moralistic realm of novelist and (in this instance) first-time screenwriter Cormac McCarthy. You can say “wow, that’s one cold and cruel place” and that’s fine, but you cannot call The Counselor a bad or negligible or sloppily made film. I hereby declare these viewpoints anathema and excommunicate.

“Consider instead the praise from Toronto Star critic Peter Howell and St. Louis Post-Dispatch critic Joe Williams. Or the two hosannahs I posted yesterday. Or consider the words of N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis, who calls Ridley Scott‘s film “terrifying” and “implacable.”