Conversation between HE and World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy, about an hour ago:

HE: A connected friend just assured me “there will definitely be an Oscar season…don’t worry about that.”
Ruimy: Okay, but Oscar eligibility rules will have to change.
HE: Allowing streaming-only features to compete, you mean?
Ruimy: And they’re going to have to have the year to end in late January or even mid February, just this one time. Because there are so many titles waiting to open. And then have the Oscars in March sometime.
HE: Plus Anne Thompson’s idea of the Oscar telecast being a kind of patriotic industry event…we can get moving again when the vaccine finally hits!…the ultimate Night of a Thousand Stars event…that makes sense.
Ruimy: Yeah, I liked Anne’s idea, but we should still give out awards for the usual categories. If we’re still in lockdown by fall then at least make it fun for movie fans and allow streaming movies to be eligible.
HE: No lockdowns after August…please!
Ruimy: Yeah, but we don’t even know how next week will look in the country. Movie theatres may still be closed by fall, don’t you think?
HE: We’re already looking at theatres closed through most of the summer. Three and a half, four months. Now you’re talking five, six months? C’mon!
Ruimy: Movie theatre are confined spaces. If someone who has COVID coughs then the people around him/her are virus toast.
HE: I just want those Open Up zombies to start experiencing their own medicine, if you catch my drift.
Ruimy: These teabag protests are going to be growing more and more every week. It’s going to become its own kind of pandemic. Especially with Trump fanning the flames. It’ll leak through all 50 states.
HE: Blue state liberals are going to defy the lockdown?
Ruimy: Bumblefucks will rise up everywhere. Fox News and other conservative media are now full-on promoting a lift to the lockdown to help prevent the destruction of Trump’s booming economy. People who have lost their jobs, businesses and those who were surviving from paycheck to paycheck will all be part of these protests. It doesn’t mean that what they’re doing is right but they’re really desperate right now. A Great Depression is coming if this continues for even another month.

Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan‘s Hollywood (Netflix, 5.1) recreates and reimagines late ’40s and ’50s Hollywood. Talented and dynamic women, gay guys and people of color occupying significant slots in the power structure. And with gay guys not as closeted as they actually were, and one couple openly holding hands in one snippet.

But of course, re-thinking America’s ethnic and sexual history has been in fashion since Hamilton, or over the last five years. Not exactly a radical move in 2020.

The problem is that nobody looks or sounds like a charismatic presence. They look and sound like attractive actors trying to inhabit that realm. The guy playing Rock Hudson, Jake Picking, doesn’t begin to exude the same kind of charisma.

Hollywood exec producer Janet Mock: “We turned to the past for direction, uncovering buried history to spin an aspirational tale of what ifs: What if a band of outsiders were given a chance to tell their own story? What if the person with greenlight power was a woman? The screenwriter a black man? What if the heroine was a woman of color? The matinee idol openly gay? And what if they were all invited into the room where the decisions are made, entering fully and unapologetically themselves to leave victorious and vaunted, their place in history cemented.”

Hats off to “HotPockets4All” for the primary image — I added the Shatner CU.

The theoretical essence of the Open Up tea-bag movement (please correct me if I have it wrong) is something along the lines of “better to risk death or even die (while helping others to do same) than submit to a severely shuttered, economically smothered way of life that amounts to a kind of living death.”

Is that more or less it? Because it feels like a plot element from The Omega Man.

For decades the consensus has been that The Thing With Two Heads (’72) is a mild hoot and worth seeing at least once. I’ve never had the slightest urge (my favorite Ray Milland-Roger Corman collaborations are The Man With The X-Ray Eyes and The Premature Burial) but now I’m thinking about it. The current winter of our discontent allows all sorts of bats into the belfry.

The problem if that it’s apparently not streamable and paying 20-plus for a DVD (not even a Bluray?) is a bridge too far.

More or less based on Stanley Kramer‘s The Defiant Ones (’58), the majority view is that TTWTH wasn’t funny or creepy enough. The director was Lee Frost. The screenwriters were Frost, Wes Bishop and James Gordon White.

…the below photo (posted as part of a 2.25 story called “Don’t Stand So Close To Me”) was an attempt at humor. A publicist friend tweeted or messaged me on Facebook to say, “Okay, you need to calm down” or words to that effect. And I replied, “Just having a little fun” or words to that effect. Seven weeks.

At best I was mixed on Slumdog Millionaire during the 2009/’10 Oscar season. I was 40% admiring and 60% annoyed, but I knew it wouldn’t do to make a fuss. So I had to sit there and take it for six damn months. In that sense it was a long Oscar season. Haven’t watched it since, will never watch it again.

Posted on 11.30.08: “How can anyone watch Slumdog and not be down with Jamal’s enormous dignity, strength of spirit and intelligence? And I understand (or think that I do) that Jamal’s life story is primarily a device that allows Boyle to dramatize the evolution of Mumbai chaos-culture over the past 15 or 20 years.

“But I just can’t believe that a kid who’s been subjected to such relentless cruelty and brutality his entire life — slapped, beaten, exploited, betrayed, booted, whipped, shat upon and made to suffer like a homeless dog day after day, year after year — would end up with this much patience and resolve and focus. Treat an actual dog like this and he’ll be incapable of showing anything but his teeth.

“Nor did I believe that the beautiful Freida Pinto‘s Latika wouldn’t be soiled and corrupted by her upbringing also, or that she’d stay emotionally loyal to and in love with Jamal through thick and thin. Things change, people grow up and move on, life is hard, get what you can, and nobody will save you but yourself. I know, I know…surrender to it, believe in love.

“But the cruelty in this film is relentless. Ugly behavior reigns during the first two acts. Except for the cop (Irfan Khan) who interrogates Jamal throughout the film, nearly every male character in Slumdog Millionaire is a cutthroat Fagin or Artful Dodger.

“And all through Slumdog I was muttering to myself how much I hate the Mumbai overload — the poverty, the crowding, the noise, the garbage landscapes, the public outhouses, the ugly high rises…the whole squalid cornucopia. I’ve never been especially interested in visiting urban India, but Slumdog settled things once and for all. If someone slips me a first-class Air India ticket from JFK to Mumbai, I’m trading it in for passage to Vietnam or China or Kampuchea or Katmandu.”

Johnny McQueen is a wounded, bleeding, half-delirious figure throughout Carol Reed’s classic 1947 film — after the robbery he’s never fully “there” and thereafter lies near the door of death, which constantly sings and beckons to him…”come to me, release your burdens, let me comfort you with my shroud”. And so Mason’s whole performance isn’t a tour de force but a fever-dream thing, and pretty much one-note — be honest. Poor rumpled Johnny is never strong or even conscious enough to say “I should do this” or “but I can’t do that.” He’s limp tissue, an invalid, a half-cognizant lamb waiting for the slaughter. His loyal girlfriend does him a favor at the end. Not a problematic performance as the sadness and resignation are constant and seeping, but certainly a limited one.

“Somehow, in their own way, the Rolling Stones split the difference, by performing ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want.’ (They could have said, a la Bono, ‘Donald Trump stole this song, and we’re stealing it back,’ but did not.) It was easy to focus on the practical aspects of what they were doing: Were they playing together, or recorded sequentially? Why did Ronnie Wood’s licks appear to be live but Charlie Watts’ air-drumming not so much so? Certain elements of that conjoined performance may remain a mystery, until they’re explained to us. But it was kind of delightful, regardless — even as it imparted the slightly unnerving message that what we want — the old normal — probably isn’t what we’re going to get.” — from Chris Willman’s Variety review, filed just before midnight.

Donald Trump left our country unprepared and unprotected for the worst public health and economic crisis in our lifetime — and now we're paying the price. pic.twitter.com/aCxcqQqUqw

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) April 18, 2020

Never saw this before today. Good quality, excellent color, nicely mixed. Madison Square Garden, New York — 8.1.71. I saw Dylan play live exactly once, at Chicago’s Auditorium Theatre in 2005. The Never Ending Tour.

The other day I was saying to a friend that in 1960 industry attitudes about films like Psycho (shock and scare, psychologically twisted protagonist, knife murders and perversion) were regarded as basement-dwelling genre films, and that the most that could happen, even with Psycho‘s phenomenal financial success, were Oscar nominations and not wins.

The friend reminded that Bernard Herrmann‘s Psycho score, easily one of the most distinctive and influential ever composed, wasn’t even nominated. Obviously a major snub — Herrmann’s score should have won.

All I can figure or theorize is that Herrmann might have been personally disliked or otherwise regarded askance by colleagues. (Or something in that realm.) I’ve never read a biography of the man. Has anyone?

Alfred Hitchcock was handed a Best Director nomination that year, but Billy Wilder won for The Apartment. Janet Leigh was nominated for Best Supporting Actress (an odd call as she didn’t deliver in any kind of striking way), but Elmer Gantry‘s Shirley Jones won. Psycho was also nominated for best black & white cinematography (John Russell), but Freddie Francis won for Sons and Lovers. Psycho‘s black & white art direction and set decoration was nominated (Joseph Hurley, Robert Clatworthy, George Milo), but the Oscar was won by The Apartment‘s Alexandre Trauner and Edward G. Boyle.

Incidentally: Whatever happened to the idea of Universal releasing a Bluray of the slightly more risque German version? I’d buy it without blinking.