Issur Danielovitch, otherwise known as Kirk Douglas, passed today age 103. Cheers, salutes and celebrations for a truly legendary fellow — an ego-driven, headstrong, no-nonsense hardhead, thinker and studly swaggerer during his day. A real pusher, doer, striver. It’s funny but all of that hard-nosed stuff has fallen away now that he’s left the earth, and all I’m hearing in my head right now is Alex North‘s Spartacus overture.

Douglas was one of the first male superstars to adopt a persona that was about more than just gleaming white teeth and manly heroism, although he played that kind of thing about half the time. But Douglas also dipped into the dark side, portraying guys who were earnest and open but hungry, and who sometimes grappled with setbacks and self-doubt and hard-fought battles of the spirit.

Douglas’s peak years as a reigning superstar and a producer-actor known for quality-level films ended 56 years ago with his last steady-as-she-goes lead in a fully respected film — John Frankenheimer‘s Seven Days In May (’64).

Douglas kept working and writing and flooring the gas as best he could, but out of his 103 years only 15 were spent at the very top.

He broke through at age 33 as a selfish go-getter in Champion (’49) and then fed the engine with 19 or 20 high-calibre films — Young Man with a Horn (’50), The Glass Menagerie (’50), Ace in the Hole (’51), Detective Story (’51), The Big Sky (’52), The Bad and the Beautiful (’52), 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (’54), The Indian Fighter (’55), Lust for Life (’56), Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (’57), the masterful Paths of Glory (’57), The Vikings (’58), The Devil’s Disciple (’59), Strangers When We Meet (’60), Spartacus (’60), Town Without Pity (’61), Lonely Are the Brave (’62), Two Weeks in Another Town (’62) and finally the Frankenheimer film.

Big stars will sometimes flirt with journalists from time to time. They’ll turn on the charm for a week or two and then “bye.” I was one of Douglas’s flirtations back in ’82, for roughly a month-long period between an Elaine’s luncheon thrown by Bobby Zarem on behalf of the yet-to-shoot Eddie Macon’s Run, and then the filing of my New York Post piece about visiting the set of that Jeff Kanew-directed film in Laredo, Texas.

I hit it off pretty well with Douglas during the luncheon, in part because I talked about how much I admired Lonely Are The Brave and how Eddie Macon seemed to be roughly similar to that 1962 classic (i.e., a tough lawman pursuing a sympathetic, good-guy outlaw). Douglas talked about anything and everything at the luncheon, and I remember his being fairly wide-open with his impressions about Stanley Kubrick (i.e., “Stanley the prick”), with whom he’d famously partnered on Paths of Glory and Spartacus.

Our Laredo interview happened between takes. Neither of us regarded Eddie Macon’s Run as anything more than a servicable B-level programmer so we mostly discussed Douglas’s career hallmarks, and to my satisfaction he realized early on that I knew all about his good films. All those years and years of watching Douglas’s older films, and now all that TV time was paying off like a slot machine.

I told him I half-loved the foyer freakout scene with Lana Turner in The Bad and the Beautiful. And much of The Devil’s Disciple. And almost all of Champion. And every frame of Paths of Glory and Lust for Life and Lonely Are The Brave. And then I made an attempt at quoting his “eight spindly trees in Rockefeller Center” speech from Ace in the Hole. Douglas was drinking a bourbon (or something fairly stiff), and I remember his leaning forward at this point and saying, “You’ve really done your homework.”

You have to sit up and take notice of any new Sally Potter film, and I mean especially one that will premiere at the 2020 Berlinale. Bleecker Street Media will give Potter’s relationship drama a limited release on 3.13.20.

The Roads Not Taken boilerplate: “A day in the life of Leo (Javier Bardem) and his daughter Molly (Elle Fanning) as she grapples with her father’s chaotic mind. As they weave their way through New York City, Leo’s journey takes on a hallucinatory quality as he floats through alternate lives he could have lived, leading Molly to wrestle with her own path as she considers her future.”

Does anyone on the face of the planet believe that Fanning could possibly be the biological child of Bardem and…who’s playing his wife, Laura Linney? (Take a gander at the actual parents, Stephen and Heather Fanning.) What are the odds of a dark-eyed man of Spanish blood fathering a girl who looks like a tall Swedish milkmaid?

What does this clip tell you about the intelligence and awareness levels of average voters out there?

Iowa primitive (female, 70something): “How come [the fact that Mayor Pete is gay] has never been brought out before?”
Iowa precinct captain: “It’s common knowledge.”
Iowa primitive: “I’ve never heard it!”
HE observer (standing nearby): “It’s the content of a candidate’s character, yokel granny, and not his/her domestic predilection.”

Too many people don’t listen, don’t read, don’t scan the headlines, don’t watch newscasts and don’t want to know from nothin’, and yet they still make decisions. That’s why we are where we are right now. Uninformed voters have harmed this country before, and they will harm it again.

I never thought I’d feel this way about Mitt Romney, but currents of admiration are surging. He’s still “Mitt Romney” and therefore still, in some ways, the contentious dick who ran against Barack Obama in 2012. But he has my vote today. He will, of course, catch hell from the lunatic right for this. A profile in courage.

I might have a couple of free hours at the end of tomorrow (i.e., Thursday), depending on how the column goes. Perhaps I can rumble down to the Grove around 5 or 6 pm and pay nearly $20 to see Cathy Yan‘s Birds of Prey? I missed the all-media screening so I have to see it, right? Sounds like a plan.

From Owen Gleiberman’s 2.5 Variety review: “Coming after the stand-alone phenomenon of Joker, Birds of Prey is a comic-book movie that isn’t pretending, for a single moment, to cast a spell of poetic awe. Yet it’s still a compellingly novel popcorn jamboree. Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel were female-superhero movies that offered the empowerment of earnest fantasy. Birds of Prey offers the empowerment of utter irresponsibility. The women in this movie look badder than those previous heroines did because, for the most part, they just don’t give a fuck.”

Gleiberman finishes this paragraph with one of the saddest declarative statements I’ve read in recent years: “With any luck, that should all translate into a major hit.”

So in other words Birds of Prey (aka The Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) is about enraged fuck-all nihilism and, in a certain social-undercurrent way, anti-brute-male revenge porn. I don’t know about the HE community, but I think it’s is so cool when this sort of material is delivered with a savage wink, and with ten times the necessary emphasis!

Perhaps one day Birds of Prey will play alongside Emerald Fennell and Carey Mulligan‘s Promising Young Woman, the Sundance ’20 entry which, according to World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy, is drawing from the same well.

“I wouldn’t use the word ‘restrained’ when describing Promising Young Woman,” he says. “There’s nothing subtle about this movie, and it’s not realism at all. It’s a post-#MeToo fantasy, a feminist version of Death Wish…a justifiably angry woman (Carey Mulligan) punishing filthy men. Mulligan is depicted as heroic without any real-life consequences or police investigations or social media gotchas. It gives you a lot to chew on and talk about post-screening — in a sense it’s right at the forefront of the post-#MeToo conversation — but then again it’s not saying anything new. And it’s definitely a world apart. It charges into extreme realms.”

The possible problem with female revenge porn, it seems, isn’t the justified anger that propels these films, but the broad-brush overkill that’s been deployed. To go by Ruimy and Gleiberman, I mean.

Coralie Fargeat‘s Revenge (’17), a rape-and-revenge action horror flick, was cut from a similar cloth.

In my judgment there’s been only one commendable (if not quite excellent) female-revenge film so far — Jennifer Kent‘s The Nightingale. I believed and admired that 2018 film start to finish, despite Kent allowing the story tension to dissipate during the last 15% or 20%.

Ragin’ Cajun: “We gotta decide what we want to be. Do we want to be an ideological cult, or do we want to have a majoritarian instinct — to be a majority party? I am scared to death. We gotta get relevant. The urban core is not gonna get it done.” What’s he really saying? Forget Bernie, Joe may be done, think about Sensible Pete.

Kurt Russell has better, thicker, wavier hair than Karl Marx, and the shorter length on the sides is easily more flattering than Marx’s wild bushy side-growth, which is the size of bulky headphones.

Karl Marx

Kurt Russell as captured in a W magazine piece (copy by Lynn Hirshberg, photos by Angelo Pennetta) called “Once Upon a Time In Hollywood Gets a Sequel at Quentin Tarantino’s Dream Party.”

The Beast started it by refusing to shake Speaker Pelosi‘s hand. Huffy petulant fatass. Pelosi was therefore within her rights to rip up Donald Trump‘s speech (three sheets), and impassively at that! I’ve watched it over and over.

Until this morning I’d never thought of Bernie Sanders in terms or images that were even vaguely indicative of any sort physical properties or biological urgency or anything along those lines. For years I’ve only thought of him as a tough, flinty, straight-shootin’ mofo — white-haired, blunt-spoken, Brooklyn-accented, cut the bullshit. Now, suddenly, I’m thinking of some kind of wolf-like predator with certain primal qualities or tendencies that I’d rather not get into if it’s all the same.

…to put money on Parasite winning Best Picture. Imagine. Not happening…sorry!

Betting Guy to HE: “The various odds — especially on best picture — are rather close. They will eventually converge as people ‘shop around’ for bets. I would say it would be worthwhile betting on Parasite for Best Picture. The odds are similar to what they were for La La Land Land (the favorite) and Moonlight. And, no, I don’t think people unfamiliar with betting will understand the odds postings, although they can be easily explained.”

If I was writing a semi-fictionalized HBO docudrama about last night’s Iowa caucus debacle, I would include a scene in which Shadow CEO Gerard Niemira is spotted in a Davenport parking lot by a crowd of pitchfork-wielding locals. “There he is…get him!” someone shouts. The mob chases the terrified Niemira across a field and into a wooded area with a couple of video crews following. The panting, panicking Niemira (who has an irresistably punchable face) climbs a half-dead pine tree as the angry Iowans surround him like the crowd chasing Boris Karloff in The Bride of Frankenstein. They begin to throw stones. One connects, Niemira falls to the ground, and the mob jumps like a pack of wolves, or like the costars of Lifeboat beating the tar out of Walter Slezak.