Imagine all the exhausting work that went into installing the suicide lever, and particularly the reasoning for having it in the first place.

“Let’s see…there’s always a chance I’ll be feeling a little down-in-the-dumps one of these days, and that I may want to kill myself,” Henry Frankenstein (or was it Doctor Pretorius?) might have reasoned. “But instead of swallowing a painless black capsule, wouldn’t it be far preferable to tumble to my death while being crushed by heavy stones?”

Christopher Nolan‘s Tenet ain’t openin’ on July 17th no more. The super-expensive, time-shifting Warner Bros, release, which exhibitors are counting on to re-start theatrical with a bang, will now open on 7.31.20, or two weeks later. It was also announced today that Wonder Woman 1984, which had been slated to open on 8.2, has been bumped back two months to 10.2.20. Obviously the feeling is that Joe and Jane Popcorn may not be as ready to return to theatres as presumed.

Please take note of the completely predictable, bow-wow, tail-wagging-the-dog thinking that went into Robbie Collin’s 6.12 Telegraph essay, “Let’s Not Kid Ourselves — Tropic Thunder‘s blackface joke is no better than Bo’ Selecta.”

I hereby propose the immediate lifetime cancelling of Robert Downey, Jr. and Ben Stiller for this heinous spoonful of cinematic cyanide satire, and of course the immediate removal of Tropic Thunder itself from all streaming services. Not. Kidding. Goofing around.

“Try To Imagine Tropic Thunder Being Released Now,” posted on 11.9.18:

Ben Stiller‘s Tropic Thunder was released just over a decade ago. You know what would happen if Stiller had never made the original but had somehow made the exact same film and released it today, right? You know what would happen. At the very least Robert Downey, Jr. would be executed and sushi’ed on Twitter.”

There’s quite a striking difference in the RT reactions to Judd Apatow‘s The King of Staten Island — critics are less enthused (69%) than the mostly tickled-and-satisfied Joe Popcorn crowd (90%). A similar critical disparity is happening with Spike Lee‘s Da 5 Bloods — 91% thumbs-up from critics compared to a 78% Joe Popcorn rating.

Reddit reactions to Da 5 Bloods are all over the map — it’s either a home run or a bunt.

IMDB ratings, meanwhile, are a tad underwhelming for both films — 6.6% for Da 5 Bloods, 6.5% for KOSI.

HE reminder: “The King of Staten Island made me smile and guffaw and even laugh out loud several times (highly unusual for an LQTM-er). And I believed every word of it…every line, emotion, situation, character. It’s peddling sardonic humor that doesn’t feel schticky, although I guess it is. The tone is low-key raw, kinda nervy, certainly unpretentious and 90% bullshit-free.

“Okay, it softens up during the final passage, but I welcomed this with open arms. Because a film about wall-to-wall, start-to-finish nihilism would be too much. And the length (136 minutes) doesn’t feel longish but completely necessary and natural.”

Yes, I’m aware that the “Blac Rabbit” version is a year old, but it only took off yesterday on Twitter. Sidenote: I’ve said this before but the alternate version of “Eight Days A Week” (with the opening and closing “ooooh”) is much more transportive than the official version.

These guys knocking “Eight Days a Week” out of the fucking park on an NYC subway platform is fantastic … pic.twitter.com/XRnyDNIuN2

— Super 70s Sports (@Super70sSports) June 10, 2020

In an official statement called “Academy Aperture 2025,” Academy CEO Dawn Hudson has announced new efforts to increase diversity in the film community, including plans for a more inclusive Oscar race.

“While the Academy has made strides, we know there is much more work to be done in order to ensure equitable opportunities across the board,” Hudson said in a statement. “The need to address this issue is urgent. To that end, we will amend — and continue to examine — our rules and procedures to ensure that all voices are heard and celebrated.”

To this end, “the Academy and the Producers Guild of America (PGA) are creating a task force of industry leaders “to develop and implement new representation and inclusion standards for Oscars eligibility by July 31, 2020.”

Right away I asked myself “what exactly will this mean”?

More Academy members of color and different cultures, one presumes, but what else?

Are we talking about some kind of new Hays Code, only this time focusing on racial inclusion and positive messaging rather than matters of sexual behavior and violence and immorality, which sparked the establishment of conservative depiction standards in films starting in ‘34 and lasting until ‘66 or ’67?

Inclusion standards in terms of what? Subject matter? As in “stories that don’t reflect or represent positive attitudes and dynamics about ethnicity vs. whiteness”?

Are we talking about the Academy approving or otherwise supporting the hiring of persons of color in the casting of films and miniseries and whatnot? Are we talking about refusing Oscar recognition if this or that film doesn’t feature a certain percentage of characters of color in the stories being told?

Are we talking about a new industry-wide standard that might result in films like Mank, set in the early 40s and concerned largely with white characters, being vaguely frowned upon?

I’m just thinking out loud but what would “new representation and inclusion standards” actually mean?

A couple of hours ago I asked a couple of Academy spokespersons for some specific clarification…crickets.

Journo pally #1: “Yes, you should ask all these questions, publicly. Representing those of us who can’t.”

Journo pally #2: “All very good questions about a clear move to restore the kind of rules and censorship many of us worked very hard to sweep away in the late ’60 and early ‘70s. The days of ‘anything goes’ are coming to a close. Look at the banning of Gone With the Wind. Is everyone so delicate they can’t look at things made in the past under different circumstances and put them in historical perspective?”

Dave Chappelle‘s George Floyd riff starts at the 5:00 mark and ends at 7:30. And then it picks up again after the 8:00 mark. But in the middle of this, at 7:35, comes his Don Lemon riff, which made me laugh out loud. After describing Lemon as “that hotbed of reality,” Chappelle says he flinched when Lemon called out showbiz celebrities for not being sufficiently angry or demonstrative enough about Floyd’s murder. “This [n-word] was talkin’ about everybody…I was screamin’ at the TV, ‘I dare you to say me, [n-word]….I dare you. This is the streets talkin’ for themselves…they don’t need me right now.”

At 14:55, Chappelle calls Laura Ingraham the c-word. He also calls Staten Island “an awful place…yuk.”

The 26-minute set was filmed on Saturday, June 6 in Yellow Springs, Ohio.

Gus Van Sant‘s masterful Drugstore Cowboy opened 30 and 1/2 years ago. I just bought a rental as it’s been a while. Matt Dillon‘s “Bob Hughes” will always be his finest role.

He was 24 or 25 during filming, and his career wasn’t exactly surging at the time.

Dillon’s debut performance in Jonathan Kaplan‘s Over The Edge (’79), performed when he was 14 or so, put him into orbit . Through the ’80s he was a solid marquee attraction, but the vitality had been ebbing. And then along came Drugstore Cowboy in the fall of ’89, and Dillon was right back on top.

Now he’s 56, and boy, does time fly.

My second favorite Drugstore Cowboy character? James Remar‘s “Gentry”, a narcotics detective. Followed by Kelly Lynch‘s “Diane.” And William S. Burroughs‘ performance as himself…perfect.

For my money Spike Lee‘s 3 Brothers short, which debuted last week on CNN, is as emotionally effective as Lee’s Da 5 Bloods (Netflix, 6.12). After watching it two or three days ago I saw the below photo of Muhammud Ali and the quote that goes with it, and that got me also. What a magnificent figure of bravery Ali was…such a champion in all respects.

The tragic experience of Bill Nunn‘s “Radio Raheem”, who was choked and killed by the bulls in Lee’s Do The Right Thing (’89), was of course a forerunner of the murders of Eric Garner and George Floyd.

Raheem’s fate was based upon the real-life Michael Stewart, who died in the custody of NYC police in 1983 after being arrested for spray painting a subway wall.

Do The Right Thing is about a cultural conflict in Brooklyn’s Bed-Stuy, between two or three Italian pizzeria guys and their African American customers.

Raheem’s ghetto blaster is a trigger. In the view of Raheem and friends, assaulting passersby with ear-splitting music was a celebration of identity and culture, but to most New Yorkers back then (and I’m speaking as an ex-resident who lived in Manhattan fom ’78 to ’83) ghetto blasters were a scourge.

Is it racist to say that those obnoxious, suitcase-sized devices made life occasionally hellish for Manhattanites, and especially for Central Park visitors on warm weekends? Because it’s true. A friend once told me about a kid on a bike who was blasting sounds near an open pasture in southern Central Park, and somehow the kid lost his balance and the blaster fell and shattered and was silent. A few people leapt to their feet and started cheering.

Posted on 8.13.12: “It’s still Jaws. It’s still that mid-level, beach-read, good-enough-but-don’t-get-carried-away movie that made all kinds of money, blah blah. I watched about 40 minutes’ worth [of the 2012 Bluray] and found it fine. It’s clever and crafty and obviously engrossing. But it’s just okay. I can’t for the life of me understand why people hop and down about this thing and go ‘wow, great film!’

“At the very beginning the young blonde girl who’s about to get eaten is running along the beach with a drunk guy following, and rather than act like any normal or semi-normal human being on the planet earth, she takes her clothes off the Spielberg way. She yanks her sweatshirt off and drops it on a grassy sand dune to the right. Then she runs a bit more and pulls one of her sneakers off and throws it to the left. And then the other sneaker. And then her jeans. By the time she’s running into the water she’s scattered her clothes over a 100-foot stretch of beach.

“Nobody would do that. They just wouldn’t. In the real world even a drunk girl would drop her clothes in a rough pile of some kind, but not in Spielbergland. Spielberg always finds some way of pulling you out of a film with unnatural human behavior.”

A couple of days ago the below copy appeared within Abid Rahman’s 6.9 Hollywood Reporter story about HBO Max [temporarily] removing Gone With The Wind from the streaming service. The erroneous info was quickly deleted.

Mistakes happen, but this was a whopper. The first half of Gone With The Wind takes place before and during the Civil War, of course, and the second half in the war’s aftermath. And who ever heard of a plantation “in” Atlanta?

Against my better judgment and despite my disappointment with the Jaws 4K Bluray, I’ve ordered the 4K Spartacus (Universal Home Video, 7.21).

Because a 4K disc of a large-format film (Spartacus was shot in the VistaVision-like Technirama process) that’s been drawn from a 6K harvest promises to look extra rich and detailed, and because restoration guru Robert Harris, who oversaw the original 1991 restoration as well as the 2015 4K digital restoration (which again was harvested from the 6K scan), supervised the finessing of the 4K disc.

If the 4K Spartacus Bluray doesn’t deliver an unmistakable bump, there’s gonna be trouble. That’s all I’m saying. I won’t take well to being burned twice.