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I first heard of Sonny Chiba, the recently deceased martial arts superstar, in the early fall of ’93. It was during my first viewing of Tony Scott and Quentin Tarantino‘s True Romance, and specifically a scene in which Christian Slater‘s “Clarence Worley” praises Chiba for being the greatest martial arts actor in the world.

If Worley hadn’t delivered that ringing endorsement, I would’ve never heard of Chiba. In the 28 years since that first viewing, have I watched a single Chiba film? Have I watched any martial-arts films apart from Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon over the span of my entire life? Due respect but not a one — donut.** And I’m completely cool with that.

Due respect to Chiba all the same, and condolences to his friends, family, fans and colleagues. The 82 year-old performer died from Covid-19.

** Yojimbo, Sanjuro, The Seven Samurai and The Hidden Fortress don’t count.

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I am gratified to report that I’ve seen Paul Schrader‘s The Card Counter, and so that’s one film, at least, that I can write about before the Telluride Film Festival begins. I’ll most likely post my review concurrent with the Venice Film Festival debut. I could share a vague impression or two, but let’s hold off for now.

Okay, I’ll say one thing — for the most part The Card Counter is a smart, engaging, carefully measured and intriguingly detailed portrait of another solemn and lonely man…a classic Schrader character with a guarded way of being and living and surviving. But then Schrader promised this chapter-and-verse a year ago…

Schrader to L.A. Times guy Mark Olsen on 9.11.20: “I don’t want to get too deeply involved in the plot, but what I will say is [that] over the years I’ve kind of developed my own little genre of films. And they usually involve a man alone in a room, wearing a mask, and the mask is his occupation.

“So it could be a taxi driver, a drug dealer, a gigolo, a reverend, whatever. And I take that character and run it alongside a larger problem, personal or social. It could be debilitating loneliness like in Taxi Driver. It could be a midlife crisis [as] in Light Sleeper. It could be an environmental crisis like in First Reformed.

“So now I have a character and he’s in his room, he’s alone. And he has a mask on. And the mask he wears is a professional poker player. And the problem that runs alongside him is that he’s a former torturer for the U.S. government. So it’s a mix of the World Series of Poker and Abu Ghraib.”

That said I’m still a bit thrown by the poster that came out a few days ago…

Another tip of the hat to Robert Redford, who’s been on the planet for 85 years as of today. Never forget that his legend is rooted in a 12-year peak period — a heyday that began with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (’69) and came to an end with Brubaker (’80).

Three of my favorite Redford moments are (a) the silly laughter taping scene from The Candidate (’72), (b) the goodbye-to-Faye Dunaway scene in Three Days of the Condor (’75) and (c) the gentle finale in a 1962 Twilight Zone episode, titled “Nothing in the Dark”.

You can break his career down into three phases — warm-up and ascendancy (’60 to ’67), peak star power (’69 to ’80) and the long, slow decline in quality (’84 to his relatively recent retirement).

Redford’s best peakers, in this order: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (’69), All The President’s Men (’76), Three Days of the Condor (’75), The Candidate (’72), Downhill Racer (’70), The Sting (’73), Jeremiah Johnson (’72), The Hot Rock (’72), The Way We Were (’73), Tell Them Willie Boy is Here (’70), The Electric Horseman (’79) and Brubaker (’80) — a total of 11.

Think of that — over a 12-year period Redford starred in 11 grand-slammers, homers, triples and a couple of ground-rule doubles. That’s pretty amazing.

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HE re-welcomes the great Owen Wilson once again, but wait, wait, wait a minute…look at the size of those elephant collars! Guys haven’t worn shirts with collars the size of Dumbo ears since the mid ’70s. Are you telling me that contempo designers are trying to re-ignite these godawful things? Is this part of the normcore thing?

The scruffier get-up that Wilson wears inside the current issue of Esquire…that’s totally cool. But the guy who said “hey, I know….let’s bring back elephant collars!”…that guy needs to be hunted down with shotguns and machetes and poison darts.

My first chat with Owen happened over the phone in the summer of ’94, when he was 25. It was actually a three-way — myself, Owen and Wes Anderson. They were parked in Houston at the time but about to leave for Los Angeles for the development (guided by James L. Brooks and Polly Platt) and making of Bottle Rocket, which was no picnic. 27 years ago, man…time just flies out the door, doesn’t it?

Now we’re living in a completely different culture and a wholly different realm…just about everything that seemed loose and casually cool and pocket-droppy in ’94 is now highly suspect. For “we the people” are now living under the lash of woke terror. Once it was an extremely cool thing to be a pair of young white Texas dudes with a dry sense of humor and voices all their own…okay, let’s not get caught up in this.

The 52 year-old Owen has just been profiled by Esquire‘s Ryan D’Agostino, the idea being to promote (a) the Disney + Loki series in which Owen plays Mobius M. Mobius, even though it’s been running since last June, and (b) Anderson’s forthcoming The French Dispatch (Searchlight, 10.22), which was shot eons ago but was delayed, of course, by Covid.

Congratulations to Tatiana Antropova for passing her U.S. citizenship exam (written and oral) this morning with flying colors. She will officially become a U.S. citizen on Friday at 10 am when she takes the oath. Hollywood Elsewhere expects to capture the ceremony on video, of course. A bottle of champagne inside an ice-filled bucket is another good idea.

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Early this morning Steve “reprehensible scumbag” Brody was escorted out of the HE building by two beefy security goons. He asked for it repeatedly, and he finally got it. His absence is not regretted.

I’ve been attending all morning to a post-operative situation regarding Anya, who was neutered a week ago. Vet inspection, cat antibiotic, etc.

“The most frightening moment for our team came when our producer, Brent Swails, was taking some video on his iPhone and two Taliban fighers came up with their pistols and were ready to pistol-whip him, and we had to intervene and scream and it was actually another Taliban fighter who came in and said ‘no, no, no, don’t do that, they’re journalists.’

“But I mean really…I’ve covered all sorts of crazy situations [and] this is mayhem, this is nuts. This impossible for an ordinary citizen, even they have their paperwork….no way [are] they running that gauntlet. No way are they going to be able to navigate that. It’s very dicey, it’s very dangerous and it’s completely unpredictable. There’s no order, there’s no coherent system…and to me, it’s a miracle that more people haven’t been very serious hurt.” — CNN’s Clarissa Ward, 8.18, 5:26 am.

"Two Taliban fighters just came up with their pistols, and they were ready to pistol whip [our producer who was taking video]. We had to intervene and scream…” pic.twitter.com/3mvCCTlSQR

— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) August 18, 2021

Days after the Taliban reclaimed control of Afghanistan, CNN's @ClarissaWard reports on what life looks like in Kabul at the moment. https://t.co/lyKq0HKUjV pic.twitter.com/G6S4W1qNLu

— CNN International (@cnni) August 18, 2021

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Somebody recently said it would be great if Ridley Scott was on Twitter, because he’d be telling people “say what you like, mate, but otherwise fuck off and get bent” because he knows what he knows after several decades in the business and don’t tell him, etc. It would be so great! Shafts of sunlight piercing down from the clouds!

But of course, one of the reasons Scott has survived as long as he has is because he’s not stupid enough to be on Twitter in the first place.

There are almost certainly thousands of bright, experienced, knowledgable fellows who could transform the Twitterverse into a much more candid, blunt-spoken, less bullied environment, but they all have friends and publicists who’ve told them “good God, are you insane? Don’t even think about having a Twitter account.”

But oh, what a glorious world it could be if there were dozens or hundreds or thousands like Scott on Twitter, telling the jackals to go stuff it because he knows what goes.

Hollywood Elsewhere’s least favorite cinematographer of all time is Bradford Young, a guy who seemingly lives for murky, muddy, under-lighted images (A Most Violent Year, Where Is Kyra?, Arrival), seemingly shot through some kind of muslin scrim.

And I’m saying this as a devoted fan of Gordon Willis, the “prince of darkness” who peaked in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s. The difference is that Willis’s dark images have always been interesting and Young’s never have been. Young’s cinematography is about being at the bottom of a pond and half-covered in silt.

My first reaction to the new trailer for HBO’s Scenes From A Marriage miniseries (9.12.21) was “did Young shoot this?” And the answer was “no” — it was shot by Andrij Parekh, but clearly in a manner that apes the Young aesthetic, using some sort of natural light or muslin-scrim filter. One look at Parekh’s visual scheme and you’re thinking “oh, no…”

I watched the final episode of The White Lotus last night, and when it ended I texted the following to a friend: “I can now say that I’ve seen a roundly-praised HBO limited series that contained (a) a brief glimpse of male on male analingus and (b) a MCU of a middle-aged guy squatting and dropping two loads into a hotel guest’s suitcase.

It’s safe to say I’ll never forget these two moments. Ever. For the rest of my time on this planet.

The muncher and the seething social resentment shitter are played by 50 year-old Australian actor Murray Bartlett, so he’s definitely earned a place in the annals of cinema history.

Directed, written and exec produced by Mike White (writer of Beatriz at Dinner), The White Lotus focuses on several wealthy guests at a Hawaiian resort along with various staffers tending to their needs and appetites and whatnot. It’s basically a series about social classism or, put plainly, the behavior of self-absorbed, liberal-minded, bubble-residing lefty assholes, as observed by their social lessers.

Put more bluntly, The White Lotus basically says “these people live on their own secular planets, and we’re going to point this out to you over and over and over. And every time we reiterate this observation you can say to yourself ‘Jesus, what a bunch of nice, polite, petty-minded, self-absorbed, etc.”

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On 6.15 the great Scott Alexander (co-author of all the great Scott-and-Larry screenplays including Ed Wood, Man on the Moon, The People vs Larry Flynt and the miscast American Crime Story series about O.J. Simpson) posted the following on Facebook:

“I rewatched Moneyball last night. What a great movie!! So smart and hilarious and insightful. It’s one of those perfect grown-up films that we all wish studios still pumped out. I’m not even a sports guy, but I was howling through the whole thing. Bennett Miller, Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin [were] all batting a thousand. Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill are remarkable — understated yet engaging. And those crusty old scouts are a scream.

“Kudos to my pal Francine Maisler, who cast it, and producer Rachel Horovitz.

Rob McFarlane response: “I never knew how much I loved big, glossy, high-craft and character-driven Hollywood dramas until Hollywood stopped making them. Moneyball is a treasure.”

HE comment: The one thing I didn’t like qbout Moneyball was Billy Bean turning down the Boston Red Sox offer. He wants to pay for his daughter’s college education and he turns down a very fat and well-deserved check that will put him on easy street? Okay, so he’d be living in Boston, but his daughter was already air-commuting for visits. Would it have been THAT much of a problem to fly back and forth between LA and Boston? David Frost used to regularly commute between NYC and Londön, and he did that in his stride.

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