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Said before, saying again: I harbor no ill feelings about Val Kilmer. The opposite, in fact.

I helped report that “Psycho Kilmer” Entertainment Weekly article that ran in mid ’96, but I had a nice chat with him at a party he threw at his home back in ’04 or thereabouts. (He had just finished working on Oliver Stone‘s Alexander.) I ran into Kilmer again in the fall of ’11 while having lunch with Descendants costar Judy Greer. We waved and smiled as Kilmer sat at a nearby table. When I tried to pay the bill the waitress told me the check had been taken care of by “that man sitting over there,” except Kilmer had left by that point.

In Taffy Brodesser-Akner‘s “What Happened to Val Kilmer?” (N.Y. Times, 5.6.120), the 60 year-old Kilmer asks, “You don’t think we will be going to Cannes? How about the Olympics? The Olympics has never been canceled except in time of world war.” You can’t cancel the world, right? Bad things happen, but you still need art.

Val Kilmer as captured last month by N.Y. Times photograoher Jeff Minton.

TBA: “And I thought: Right? Right! You still need art. You still need forward momentum. You still need to believe that all your effort wasn’t for nothing, that we could — we will — survive a dark moment in history and that when that happens, we won’t be left without the things that made those moments decipherable and meaningful and therefore tolerable.

“The world outside had seemed to be getting so, so bad for so, so long, and this was the first whiff of overarching hope and positivity that I’d witnessed in I couldn’t remember how many months or years now — so much so that I almost couldn’t identify it when I saw it. The last glowing embers of hope coming from Val Kilmer? The movie hunk of my youth, who disappeared unceremoniously and now presented with an entirely different appearance and a bizarre accounting of where he’d been?

“But there was something familiar about it, like a faint knocking that came from inside me: It was the special kind of optimism that maybe only the faithful have, the enduring belief that some force will come along and save us from the centrifuge of despair we’ve found ourselves in. When is the last time you saw that up close?

Later in the piece: “Perhaps we had created the coronavirus out of our fear and wickedness — children in cages, the rich hoarding wealth; perhaps we had only the suggestion of a virus. I grew up with too many messianics in my household. I found this kind of thing too easy to believe, if only because it was more believable than the fact that in 2020, my young, healthy colleagues were in the hospital, the streets were bare, I was stuck inside my house and nobody knew how long that might go on for. It was so hard to parse all the fear that permeated society now — what was real and what had come as a result of our own hysteria. During the day I’d think that it was the fear that was hurting us most.

“But at night my husband would shake me to wake me up because I’d been crying in my sleep. More quickly than I could have imagined, the world took on the hallucinogenic quality of right before you fall asleep, when everything is outsize and nothing makes sense. The margins on my suspension of disbelief started to close in on themselves, and the borders of things began to diminish, and now the world seemed like a word you stare at so long that it becomes nonsense.”

The only title that would even begin to make sense would be Lick The Blood Off My Hands, but that’s a job for a dog and not Joan Fontaine.

It apparently never occured to director Norman Foster, producer Richard Vernon, screenwriters Leonardo Bercovici and Walter Bernstein or original author Gerald Butler that nobody is ever going to kiss the blood off anyone’s hands. Even if the blood is freshly spilt kissing the bloodied area wouldn’t remove it — at best you’ll create little lip-pucker impressions in the region of the wound. Blood always dries quickly and turns a dark reddish brown, and once that happens even dogs wouldn’t be able to lick it clean.

I’ve seen most of the major ’40s noirs, but I never came close to this puppy because of Butler’s title.

Joe Biden‘s vice-president can’t shouldn’t be chosen for cosmetic or charismatic reasons. The right vp would have to be ready to step into the Oval Office on a moment’s notice, and with Uncle Joe you have to consider what could happen in a year or two or three, given his age and whatnot.

For me the ideal partner would be Elizabeth Warren, but at the same time I’m not sure she’s the best choice from an electoral perspective, as her Democratic primary campaign never really connected and she never polled well in battleground states.

Kamala Harris is my second choice, and Susan Rice my third. Stacey Abrams is brilliant and extra-articulate and forceful — you tell me if she’d be a knockout campaigner or major ticket enhancer. Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer seems a bit wet behind the ears but maybe not.

It takes a certain amount of character and maturity to simultaneously walk and chew gum about a certain film — to be able to disagree with the content (or some aspect of it) but at the same time admire the chops or the expertise with which it casts a certain emotional spell.

If wokesters disagree with what a film is saying, they’ll write it off without a second thought. Serious cineastes take a broader view. They may not respect or even despise where a film is coming from but the reputable ones can’t reject it entirely if it hits the emotional mark, or if it’s superbly made.

The oldest example is Leni Reifenstahl‘s Triumph of the Will — reprehensible content, mesmerizing technique.

A recent example is Peter Farrelly‘s Green Book, which a chorus of cranky Shallow Hals derided for daring to operate within the realm of 1962 and thereby not in synch with 21st Century wokester values. I knew all that, but there was no denying that Farrelly’s film was emotionally affecting — that the connection between Viggo Mortensen and Mahershala Ali‘s characters carried a kindly, comforting current.

Jean Luc Godard was probably the first serious film demon to acknowledge this dichotomy, In a Cahiers du Cinema piece Godard admitted to being seized with affection for John Wayne‘s Ethan Edwards at the end of The Searchers when he picks up Natalie Wood and says, “Let’s go home, Debbie.” This is a “dishonest” moment from a 20th Century perspective as Ethan is a racist sonuvabitch, and there’s no way he’s going to renounce his gut feelings at the very last minute. But for Godard, the moment was transcendent.

I revisited this idea yesterday when I re-posted a Gunga Din riff from 12.24.17: “Otis Ferguson‘s review of this 1939 adventure flick called it a racist and arrogant celebration of British colonial rule. And yet I’ve been emotionally touched and roused by this film all my life. The last half-hour of Gunga Din is perfect, but it ends with Sam Jaffe‘s Indian ‘bhisti’ basking in post-mortem nirvana over having been accepted as a British soldier.” An appalling idea when you think about it, but it works.

I’ve always hated the shallow fantasy notion of superheroes and the corporate, FX-dependent theology of Marvel and D.C. films, but from time to time I’ve been surprised to find myself buying into the bullshit, Avengers: Endgame being the most recent example.

A couple of times I’ve mentioned how Billy Wilder‘s The Spirit of St. Louis says the wrong things by (a) ignoring the dark underside of Charles Lindbergh — “a nativist anti-Semite who admired the fascist state and urged the United States to stay out of the war because Nazi victory was certain,” as an HE commenter once put it — and (b) shamelessly embracing the idea of heavenly assistance just before the exhausted Lindbergh (James Stewart) is about to land his plane at Le Bourget field in Paris. He starts to lose it — freaking and whimpering over a sudden inability to focus on the basics of landing a plane. Then he thinks back to a “flying prayer” that a priest had passed on, and he blurts out, “Oh, God, help me.” And of course he lands safely. It’s a cheap Sunday-school trick, but Stewart’s acting and Franz Waxman‘s music sells it.

Leonardo DiCaprio was 19 or 20 when this MTV chat (posted a couple of weeks ago, allegedly taped on 2.5.95) happened. He says he was in Paris to finish shooting The Basketball Diaries, but how could that be when Diaries premiered at the ’05 Sundance Film Festival a couple of weeks earlier? He more likely was there to begin shooting Agnieszka Holland‘s Total Eclipse, right?

LDC’s actual quote about youth (at 4:38) is “I’ll never get to be young again…this is my time to be young.”

This reminds me of Mr. Robinson’s remark to Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate, after learning that Ben has just turned 21. Mr. Robinson (lighting a cigar): “That’s a helluva good age to be. Because Ben…?” Braddock: “Sir?” Mr Robinson: “You’ll never be young again.”

After living in this town for 37 years and being enough of an Alfred Hitchcock junkie to have visited Cropduster Junction four years ago, you’d think I would’ve gotten around to eyeballing Hitch’s legendary Bel Air home at 10957 Bellagio Road. But I never did until last night around 7:30 pm.

It’s a spacious, well-shaded ranch-style home with a huge sycamore tree in the front yard, but with way too much paved concrete in the front and side areas. The cement makes it look like a small country club that expects heavy in-and-out traffic.

The home is right on top of a Bel Air golf course fairway, which is cool, but last night’s atmosphere was ruined by some asshole on the other side of the golf course blasting a Brittany Spears tune.

Hitch died here in 1980 — his wife Alma passed two years later.

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Tara Reade‘s accusation of sexual assault against Joe Biden is offically kaputski. It ended this morning with a story by AP”s Alexandra Jaffe, Don Thompson and Stephen Braun. It says the following: “Tara Reade, the former Senate staffer who alleges Joe Biden sexually assaulted her 27 years ago, says she filed a limited report with a congressional personnel office that did not explicitly accuse him of sexual assault or harassment.

“’I remember talking about him wanting me to serve drinks because he liked my legs and thought I was pretty and it made me uncomfortable,’ Reade said in an interview Friday with The Associated Press. ‘I know that I was too scared to write about the sexual assault.’

“Reade said she described her issues with Biden but ‘the main word I used — and I know I didn’t use sexual harassment — I used ‘uncomfortable.’ And I remember ‘retaliation.’

“Reade described the report after the AP discovered additional transcripts and notes from its interviews with Reade last year in which she says she ‘chickened out’ after going to the Senate personnel office. The AP interviewed Reade in 2019 after she accused Biden of uncomfortable and inappropriate touching. She did not raise allegations of sexual assault against Biden until this year, around the time he became the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.”

Plus she’s cancelled the Fox News interview that was to have happened tomorrow (i.e., Sunday).

Pally to HE: “She’s such a fucking liar.”
HE to Pally: “If she didn’t complain about sexual assault through official channels in ‘93, this whole thing is OVER. ‘Chickening out’ doesn’t cut it.”
Pally to HE: “I was thinking about the actual thing she described, the assault taking place in some sheltered, semi-public area. Imagine being in public with ANYONE and sticking your fingers inside the woman — that would NEVER happen. In private, yes, but not in public. Her original story is like ‘I wasn’t wearing stockings because it was hot.’ She left that detail in — as if she’d thought about it and had to explain why he could have such easy access. Had she been telling the truth — if Biden had actually assaulted her — he would have invited her to his private office or a hotel and then starting kissing her, etc. Even Weinstein knew that. Practiced predators know they have to hide what they’re doing.”

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Hotshot director Phillip Noyce (Above Suspicion, The Quiet American, Newsfront, Rabbit-Proof Fence, Clear and Present Danger, Dead Calm) and daughter Ayanda, taken relatively recently by Show Me What You Got director Svetlana Cvetko. Svetlana technically risked her life by snapping this and other shots, but I’m told she wore a head-to-toe Zamat suit the entire time.

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I’ve decided that the coolest sailing ship owned by a Hollywood hotshot was John Ford‘s USS Araner — 106 feet, 147 tons, a significant presence in Donovan’s Reef, now moored in Honolulu. (Ford bought her in 1934, sold her in ’71.) The second coolest is a tie between James Cagney‘s Swift of Ipswitch (bought in ’40, sold in ’58) and David Crosby‘s Mayan, which he owned for 45 years. The third coolest is Humphrey Bogart‘s 55-foot Santana (’45 to Bogart’s death in ’57).

Yes, I’d have trouble defining the differences between a schooner, yawl, sloop, sailboat, ketch and cutter. But I love the romance of the sea plus the idea of having enough time to sail away on one of these things, under whatever circumstance.

John Ford’s USS Araner (’34 to ’71).

James Cagney’s Swift (’40 to ’58).

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“A novel angle on achieving notoriety in the art world is revealed in The Painter and the Thief, an engrossing Norwegian documentary born of the unlikely but resilient bond between a young female artist (Barbora Kysilkova) and a career criminal (Karl-Bertil Nordland) who stole two of her large canvases. Benjamin Ree’s second feature doc, after Carlsen, a widely seen 2015 portrait of Norwegian chess prodigy Magnus Carlsen, thrives on its odd couple pairing of two societal misfits in turmoil brought together by real circumstances — a situation that most fiction writers would reject as too contrived. Substantially in English, the film has an unusual and positive nature that will help find it homes in docu-friendly markets.” — from Todd McCarthy’s 1.123.20 THR review.

Yesterday the combined forces of Steven Gaydos and “Norton Ghomestead‘ tried to discredit a popular notion that Pauline Kael’s epic-sized New Yorker rave of Bonnie and Clyde was a key factor in that 1967 film’s revival, following a dispiriting late-summer release.

Ghomestead maintained that “Warner Bros. promotion guys, realizing that savvy showmen in the south were doing well with [Bonnie and Clyde] as a Thunder Road-like tale of high spirited lawbreaking, smartly capitalized on that [and thereby gradually] made it a hit”.

Gaydos reposted his 2003 Variety piece (“Truth takes bullet with Clyde tale”) which basically said that the legend about Kael’s review is not supported by research and that the film gradually became a hit through old-fashioned blood, sweat and tears — i.e., the promotional kind.

HE reply: I see. Thanks, guys, for straightening me out. So to sum up (and please correct me if I’ve got this wrong), Pauline Kael’s landmark reassessment in The New Yorker had little if anything to do with saving Bonnie and Clyde. Instead it was the Warner promo guys re-selling it as a “Thunder Road-like tale of high-spirited lawbreaking” to redneck audiences.

A film inspired by the French New Wave, a film that was clearly ahead of its time, a film that Francois Truffaut was initially interested in but passed on, a film with an art-filmy impressionistic sequence when Bonnie and Clyde visit her frail old mom, and another when they’re found wounded and bloodied by Okies,,..this alternately edgy and poignant film was reborn when WB sales guys pitched it to Nehi Cream Soda-drinking yokels. So Pauline Kael was incidental at best. Got it. Check.

I’ll accept the Gaydos assessment — “Bonnie and Clyde [was] carefully nurtured from Montreal to Manhattan with both studio and private promotion, solid reviews and solid business and given time to build into a breakout hit just as dozens of other films of the era had” — blended with the impact of the Kael piece, but that’s as far as I’ll go.

Without tossing out the redneck promotion side-story, the likeliest scenario is that Beatty saved the film (and his own financial ass) by refusing to back off in his dispute with the antagonistic Jack L. Warner, to the point of threatening legal action.

Wiki excerpt: ” At first, Warner Bros. did not promote Bonnie and Clyde for general release, but mounted only limited regional releases that seemed to confirm its misgivings about the film’s lack of commercial appeal.

“Beatty, Bonnie and Clyde‘s producer and star, complained to Warner Bros. that if the company was willing to go to so much trouble for Reflections in a Golden Eye (they had changed the coloration scheme at considerable expense), their neglect of his film, which was getting excellent press, suggested a conflict of interest; he threatened to sue the company.

“Warner Bros. gave Beatty’s film a general release. Much to the surprise of Warner Bros.’ management, the film eventually became a major box office success.”

Paul Campos has posted a 4.29 article on lawyersgunsmoney about Joe Biden accuser Tara Reade. It’s essential reading. Rather than rehashing, just read it and ask yourself for 15 or 20 seconds why Reade’s 4.6.19 account of what allegedly happened between her and Biden in ’93 was one thing, and something else entirely when she told it to NPR’s Katie Halper on 3.25.20.

Campos: “I first commented on the story [last] Monday because Lynda LaCasse told Business Insider that Reade had told her the far more extreme assault story in 1995 or 1996, when they were neighbors. What I didn’t know at the time was that LaCasse had spoken with Reade in 2019, when Reade publicized the first story,” etc.

Just read it, just read it.

Campos conclusion: “Now of course none of this is conclusive by any means. It’s possible that Reade is in fact telling the truth about what happened, or perhaps that she’s telling the truth about what she thinks happened, although it actually didn’t happen. But it seems far more probable, weighing all the available evidence, that she’s lying about the purported sexual assault.”