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One of the most deeply rooted images of my entire filmgoing life. If I could find a nice impressionist rendering on canvas I’d hang it on my living-room wall.

Name some noteworthy films that started out as one thing, and ended up as another.

All serious-minded films are designed and executed with a certain moralistic or thematic or sensationalist intention. They’re made to stir emotions. Or merely excite or amuse. Or cast light upon certain aspects of the culture. Or make some kind of political point…whatever. But every so often the intended doesn’t happen when the film plays before paying audiences and it becomes something that the filmmakers never expected.

This is what happened to Martin Ritt‘s Hud (’63). The below excerpt from a 2003 conversation with Hud screenwriters Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank, Jr. and Michigan Quarterly Review‘s William Baer explains the basics.

The most obvious kind of “wait, what happened?” is when a film is made as a straightforward drama or melodrama, only to “land’ as an unintentional comedy because of ineptitude or an overload of attitude or something. Another is when a film is ostensibly made as some kind of half-crude exploitation but is nonetheless received as a sophisticated genre commentary in “quotes” (Mark Lester‘s Truck Stop Women), or something along these lines.

BAER: “Well, Hud was certainly a unique picture in many ways, but, most significantly, it dared to portray a central character who was a pure bastard, and who remained totally unredeemed and unrepentant at the end of the picture.”

RAVETCH: “Yes, we sensed a change in American society back then. We felt that the country was gradually moving into a kind of self-absorption, and indulgence, and greed. Which, of course, fully blossomed in the ’80s and ’90s. So we made Hud a greedy, self-absorbed man, who ruthlessly strives for things, and gains a lot materially, but really loses everything that’s important. But he doesn’t care. He’s still unrepentant.

FRANK: “In our society, there’s always been a fascination with the ‘charming’ villain, and we wanted to say that if something’s corrupt, it’s still corrupt, no matter how charming it might seem. Even if it’s Paul Newman with his beautiful blue eyes. But things didn’t work out like we planned.

BAER: “It actually backfired.”

RAVETCH: “Yes, it did, and it was a terrible shock to all of us. Here’s a man who tries to rape his housekeeper, who wants to sell poisoned cattle to his neighbors, and who stops at nothing to take control of his father’s property. And all the time, he’s completely unrepentant. Then, at the first screenings, the preview cards asked the audiences, ‘Which character did you most admire?’ and many of them answered ‘Hud.’ We were completely astonished. Obviously, audiences loved Hud, and it sent us into a tailspin. The whole point of all our work on that picture was apparently undone because Paul was so charismatic.

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Give Shia LaBeouf‘s Honey Boy an A for honesty, and an extra A for soul-baring. It warrants respect and admiration — for LaBeouf’s screenplay and lead performance (playing his own abusive dad), for the performances of Noah Jupe and Lucas Hedges who play LeBeouf (called Otis Lort) at ages 12 and 22, respectively, and for the efforts of Israeli director Alma Har’el.

Since opening on 11.8, Honey Boy has been critically praised (Rotten Tomatoes 94%) and polled well with Joe and Jane Popcorn (91% on RT, an IMDB rating of 7.5.)

Honey Boy is a straight-up,  take-it-or-leave-it thing — half  cinematic therapy (LaBeouf wrote it in rehab) and half sordid family saga. It tells the truth about what Shia endured as a kid and what he’s grappling with now as a 33 year-old. And it’s no stroll in the park. But it doesn’t sidestep or shilly shally. It’s trustworthy.

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We’ve all come to know the LaBeouf saga over the last 13 or so years, and how reactive and turbulent and issue-laden it’s been all along. He became a successful child actor at age 9 or thereabouts (around ’95) and then a 21 year-old marquee name with his lead performance in Disturbia and then, starting in ’08 or thereabouts, an obviously troubled hotshot with standout performances in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (’10), Lawless and The Company You Keep (’12), Nymphomaniac (’13), Fury (’14), American Honey (’16), Borg vs McEnroe (’17) and The Peanut Butter Falcon (’19).

Not to mention the arrests, altercations, conflicts, provocations. Over the last decade LaBeouf has become far better known for his issues than his talent or achievements.  By the term “issues” I’m alluding to what some have perceived as obnoxious, self-regarding behavior.  But that’s a fair call, LaBeouf has said.

“I don’t think you were wrong for thinking I was a dick,” he told The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg a while back. Feinberg had confessed to feeling guilty for making dismissive assumptions about him in recent years as he repeatedly wound up in the headlines for all of the wrong reasons. “I think context is really important,” LaBeouf explained. “And I think what Honey Boy does is contextualize who I was publicly, and kind of plays on it. And I’m grateful it’s effective.”

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Lost in the general holiday zone-out, obscured by the bombing of Cats and out-shone by the respectable box-office hauls of Little Women ($33.5M domestic) and Uncut Gems ($22.7M) is the curious foundering of Jay Roach‘s Bombshell.

It isn’t tanking exactly, but it doesn’t seem to be connecting either.

After two and a half weekends in wide release (1,480 situations) the R-rated #MeToo dramedy is currently looking at a $17M domestic total. That’s bad news for a film that cost $33 million to make, not counting marketing. The Rotten Tomatoes rating was 67%, but the audience score is a not bad 83. The IMDB rating is 6.6.

I don’t know if this lack of b.o. energy will penetrate the industry membrane by way of diminished support for Charlize Theron‘s Best Actress chances, but I’m sensing that it might.

A few weeks back one or two HE commenters predicted that Bombshell would fizzle. I thought it would do a lot better than it has. It’s a crafty, well-made film with an urgent theme, but for whatever reason (creeping #MeToo fatigue?) Joe and Jane Popcorn seem to be only half-attentive. I’m sorry about this. At the very least I thought Bombshell would develop legs.

Riding the flying Triumph over the barbed wire is the Steve McQueen moment everyone remembers**, but his stardom was officially sanctified with his return to Stalag Luft III. The whole camp came to a standstill. With everyone — German commanders, guards, inmates — staring at Cpt. Virgil Hilts and hanging on his every utterance, director John Sturges was telling the audience that McQueen was the King of Cool and that further attention would be paid. There but for the awful grace of God went Rick Dalton.

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Race is the principal reason that your Fox News bumblefucks are so blindly loyal to The Beast.

The U.S. was generally a European-descendant white country during the 18th, 19th and most of the 20th Century, and it technically still is with 60.7% of the U.S population composed of non-Hispanic whites. But by 2050 whites will only represent 47% of the population. The country is basically tipping in a pluralistic, multicultural direction. For a half-century the Republican party, which adopted a kind of Anglo Saxon Maginot Line mentality (the “Southern strategy”) and which today is represented by guys like Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy and Jim Jordan, has been the party of white resistance.

And so lunatic righties see themselves as defending the Alamo, and they see Trump, for all his appalling ignorance, arrogance and self-destructive behavior, as a fat Jim Bowie or an orange-faced Davy Crockett mixed with a New York City crime boss.

This is their last stand and they know it, and he’s all they’ve got. They know that sooner or later General Santa Anna‘s troops (multiculturals, LGBTQs) are going to scale the walls and bayonet them to death and ravage their daughters and mitigate the bloodline all to hell.

On top of which they know that urban liberals not only despise them for their Trump allegiance but because they embody what has become a full-on racial epithet — “crusty older white person.” (Just ask Rosanna Arquette.)

So they don’t care. They’re the Wild Bunch shooting it out with General Mapache‘s troops. They’re dead men, but at least they’ll know the dark satisfaction of causing as much chaos and destruction as possible before they fall to the floor, bleeding and cut to pieces.

What’s the current U.S. population? Roughly 330,149,796 as of 12.16.19. In 1620 the non-Native (i.e., immigrant) American population was around 2300 persons. That number had grown to 2.5 million by 1776, and then 31 million by 1860, 76 million by 1900, 180 million by 1960 and 282 million by 2000.

White guys “settled” this country (i.e., stole, slaughtered, railroaded, plantationed, bulldozed, capitalized) fair and square. And now the non-elite, non-urban, under-educated sector of whitebread culture has been marginalized and discredited, and is on the verge of being finished.

This is why Michael Moore is saying that Trump, God help us, has a fighting chance of being reelected in 2020. Because they’ve latched onto an idea that they’re fighting for their very existence.

Bumblefuck despair and depression is the main reason that average life expectancy in the United States has been on a decline since 2014. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention cites three main reasons: a 72% increase in overdoses in the last decade (including a 30% increase in opioid overdoses from July 2016 to September 2017), a ten-year increase in alcoholic liver disease (men 25 to 34 increased by 8%; women by 11%), and a 33% increase in suicide rates since 1999.

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On one hand I’m in league with Joe Popcorn as far as WTF reactions to Uncut Gems are concerned. On the other I’m stunned by negative or “later” reactions to Robert Eggers‘ The Lighthouse, which is easily among 2019’s ten best if not the top four or five.

The sad truth is that 97% of ticket buyers can’t get beyond subject matter. “So what happens? Two lighthouse keepers go crazy on a rocky island in the 1890s”…no, much more than that. You can’t tell them “it’s the singer, not the song.” You can mention the visual atmospheric highs…black and white, 1.19 aspect ratio, King Triton, the demonic seagull, magnificent production design…and 19 out of 20 popcorn inhalers will reply “so?”

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HE filing from 8:30 am to 12:30 pm. Left for Sonoma and parts surrounding around 1 pm. A brutal drive through clogged East Bay traffic…80 (Oakland Bay bridge) to 580 to 101, etc. Tatyana did some wine tasting ** at the Artesa Winery, which is located amid the usual greenish brown vineyard hills; the main structure overlooks everything in the region and even allows you to see San Francisco in the distance. Then over to Sonoma (I haven’t attended the Sonoma Film Festival for a good six or seven years) and the usual roaming around. Then over to Petaluma, down the 101 and back to the city.

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Eleven days after “Little Women Has a Little Man Problem,” a 12.17 Vanity Fair piece by Anthony Breznican, and six days after Janet Maslin tweeted that “the Little Women problem with men is very real” (on top of HE’s simultaneous posting of “Gender Instinct,” which addressed some of the ins and outs), another “stand up for Little Women” piece has appeared.

Today’s variation is in the wokester N.Y. Times and titled “Men Are Dismissing Little Women — What a Surprise.” The author is blogger-columnist Kristy Eldredge.

Couple this with the outraged pushback that followed the snubbing of Little Women by the Golden Globes as well as SAG and you have one of the most impassioned and sustained arguments for Oscar justice in award-season history, and the most ardent since…what, the foreign language committee snubbing of Four Months, Three Weeks, Two Days?

Maslin’s 12.21 tweet identified what she saw as a basic attitude blockage on the part of dudes towards Gerwig’s film. Which had manifested, she said, in a refusal or reluctance to see it, based on insect antennae vibrations they’d been picking up.

On the same day “El Friendo” sent a response to Maslin, attempting to explain that the insect antennae readings are based upon something real, and that guys are not the problem but the film is. Here it is again:

“So I’m the problem if I don’t include Little Women on my best-of-the-year list, per Maslin. Because I’m a guy?

“Per Maslin, I am not allowed to say the performances were fine but the William S. Burroughs cut-up approach to the narrative, and the decision to lay wall-to-wall music over every scene to make up for the emotional dissonance of the fractured narrative didn’t work for me.

“Yes, I’m to blame for not approving of and/or not being thrilled by these creative decisions. Because I’m a guy.

“Little Women flat-ass doesn’t work mostly because Amy Pascal indulged Greta Gerwig in a stupid idea. Had the exact same movie been produced at Disney, they would have said ‘No William Burroughs bullshit; and maybe even dialed the stupid music score mouthwash back from drowning every fucking scene.”

“This is not what God would want…”

In God We Trust pic.twitter.com/xbMCTDhgp4

— Jon Voight (@jonvoight) December 19, 2019

Question: What’s the one thing you must never, ever say to a filmmaker? Answer: “I didn’t much care for your film…sorry.”

I’ve confessed this to a very small number of directors and screenwriters over the years, and each and every time their response has been a kind of silence that conveys “I don’t know you any more” or “you don’t exist”.

All they know is, you’ve just told them that a beloved child that they’ve sired and nurtured for months or years and then fed and disciplined and raised as best they could…all they know is that you think their child is ugly or maladjusted or a beast of some kind.

They would much rather have you lie or half-lie to them and tell them half-truths and emphasize any positive thing you can think of or invent. They don’t want anything straight from the shoulder. At all.

So why after all these decades have I continued to occasionally level with this or that filmmaker from time to time? Because I respect them, and I can’t bear the idea of lying to them. So I tell them what I think in the gentlest and most diplomatic terms I can come up with, and their response is always “why didn’t you lie to me, asshole?”

(l. to r.) Directors Roundtable guys Noah Baumbach, Greta Gerwig, Fernando Meirelles, Martin Scorsese, Lulu Wang, Todd Phillips.

A couple of months ago I sent a letter to a filmmaker I greatly respect. I wasn’t a huge fan of the new film, and rather than tap-dance around the truth I thought it would be respectful to lay it on the kitchen table in plain but gentle terms.

“No one has been a bigger, more devoted fan of your uniquely self-owned work and creations than myself,” I said, listing three or four films that I’ve quite admired.

“It is therefore with a heavy heart and nothing but remorse that I must share my subdued reaction to [film title]. I’m sad to say that it’s a tradition-breaker. I’m very sorry. I appreciate what your strategy was, and I felt your personality in it, and I loved [this or that portion]…I can only say or rationalize that this kind of thing happens now and then to the best of filmmakers and the most robust of talents.

I concluded with “onward and upward…new challenges, new hills to capture, new dreams to explore, etc.”

I never got a response, but I was told by a go-between that my letter wasn’t appreciated.

In a recently-posted Hollywood Reporter Directors Round Table, Little Women director Greta Gerwig says that “all of my [tough moments] are petty. Like people telling me, without me asking, that they didn’t like my movie.”

In response to this Joker director Todd Phillips says, “That’s the worst.” And Gerwig replies, “It wasn’t for me. Go fuck yourselves!” And everybody has a good laugh.

Every honest critic and comment-threader has said he/she was aware of CG de-aging manipulation in the early stages of The Irishman, but that they gradually forgot about it. Or accepted it the way we all accept performances in which an actor wears a wig (Jack Nicholson in Prizzi’s Honor) or a fake nose (Nicole Kidman in The Hours) or what-have-you.

I don’t know how many millions were spent on Irishman CG but honestly? On my 15″ Macbook Air the iFake version looks better. It’s a lower resolution version and it screams CG finessing, of course, but given what it is, it looks better.

What kind of money do you suspect that the iFake guy spent compared to what Scorsese and Netflix spent? When I first heard of the intention to de-age De Niro, I was expecting to see a version of his Vito Corleone from The Godfather, Part II. I didn’t, of course. The iFake versions look like CG, of course, but DeNiro and Pacino look younger, smoother, etc. If I was willing to accept the uncanny valley thing that Scorsese delivered, how much more difficult would be to accept the iFake version?

Youtube comment (Mr. Coatsworth): “This looks really good for freeware, but it won’t hold up on a cinema screen or 4K television. I saw The Irishman in the theater and, while there were moments where the CGI on De Niro and Pesci was obvious, Al Pacino never looked the least bit fake, in my opinion. It was amazing. Your Al Pacino de-aging looks very obviously like the face is just pasted in. All in all yours look very blurry, but of course for the amount of time and money you spent, excellent work!”