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Hugs and condolences for the friends, fans and colleagues of influential horror film maestro Tobe Hooper, who died yesterday at age 74. There’s no question that Hooper did himself proud with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (’74), a low-budget slasher thriller that I’ve never liked but have always respected. The following Wikipage sentence says it all: “It is credited with originating several elements common in the slasher genre, including the use of power tools as murder weapons and the characterization of the killer as a large, hulking, faceless figure.”

Hooper made a life out of his facility with horror. He career-ed it to the max. But after The Texas Chainsaw Massacre he never struck the motherlode again, not really.

You can’t give Hooper serious credit for Poltergeist, which was mostly directed by Steven Spielberg. And no, I’m not a fan of Lifeforce. If you want to be cruel about it you could call him a feverish, moderately talented fellow who got lucky only once, and that was it. Hooper was tenacious and industrious and always kept going, and of course he dined out on the original Saw for decades. No harm in that.

L.M. Kit Carson, the renowned screenwriter, producer and journalist whom I proudly called a friend and ally from ’86 until his passing in 2014, was friendly with Hooper. They shared a Texas heritage and worked together on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre 2 (’86), a misbegotten piece-of-shit sequel that Cannon Films produced and which I, a conflicted Cannon employee at the time, wrote the press notes for. Carson introduced me to Hooper as a gifted writer who really understood the satirical tone of Carson’s brilliant Saw 2 script. If only Hooper had absorbed it as fully and translated it to the screen with a similar panache.

Carson wrote a tangy piece about Hooper for the July-August ’86 issue of Film Comment, called “Saw Thru.” Here’s an excerpt that explains the genesis of TTCM:

“Near broke at Christmas ’72, Hooper got tangled in the last-minute-shopper mob at a Montgomery Ward and shoveled into the heavy equipment department. Suddenly he was standing face to face with a big wall display of glinting chainsaws. All sizes. Row above row. An uneasy-making sight mixed with the tinsel, bright Christmas balls, red ribbons. Whu.

“And an abrupt Christmas crackup thought flicker-lit a few of Hooper’s brainy synapses: Quickest damn way out of here tonight is just to yank-start one of those chainsaws and cut a path to the door. It was a joke, but only a half-joke. An image that sold itself a bit too strongly.

“Hooper got the hell out of Montgomery Ward, went home with a chainsaw in his brain, and starred piecing together a movie. ‘In about 30 seconds I saw the movie right in front of me,’ he said.”

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In response to the Orpheum Theatre’s recent decision to permanently shun Gone With The Wind, here’s an HE rebuttal to Lou Lumenick’s anti-GWTW rant, posted on 6.26.15:

“Lumenick is not wrong, but I feel misgivings. I don’t believe it’s right to throw Gone With The Wind under the bus just like that. Yes, it’s an icky and offensive film at times (Vivien Leigh‘s Scarlett O’Hara slapping Butterly McQueen‘s Prissy for being irresponsible in the handling of Melanie giving birth, the depiction of Everett Brown‘s Big Sam as a gentle, loyal and eternal defender of Scarlett when the chips are down) but every time I’ve watched GWTW I’ve always put that stuff in a box in order to focus on the real order of business.

“For Gone With The Wind is not a film about slavery or the antebellum South or even, really, the Civil War.

“It’s a movie about (a) a struggle to survive under ghastly conditions and (b) about how those with brass and gumption often get through the rough patches better than those who embrace goodness and generosity and playing by the rules. This is a fundamental human truth, and if you ask me the reason Gone With The Wind has resonated for so long is that generation after generation has recognized it as such. If you want to survive you have to be tough and scrappy and sometimes worry about the proprieties later on. Anyone who’s ever faced serious adversity understands the eloquence of that classic Scarlett O’Hara line, ‘I’ll never be hungry again.’

“I think GWTW particularly connected with 1939 audiences because they saw it as a parable of the deprivations that people had gone through during the Great Depression.

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26 months ago former N.Y. Post film critic Lou Lumenick called for a shunning of Gone With The Wind because of “undeniably racist” attitudes embedded in its story and characters. And now that politically-correct projection has become a reality, at least as far as Memphis’ Orpheum theatre is concerned.

Earlier this month Orpheum management said it would no longer show Gone With The Wind as part of the Orpheum Movie Series due to complaints, presumably from African-American viewers and ultra-p.c. types. The theater’s board deemed the 1939 film “insensitive” after receiving “numerous comments” that stemmed from a screening on Friday, 8.11.17. The Clark Gable-Vivien Leigh film, once the most beloved Hollywood epic of all time, has been dropped from next year’s planned summer movie series.

“While title selections for the series are typically made in the spring of each year, the Orpheum has made this determination early in response to specific inquiries from patrons,” per a statement from The Orpheum Theatre Group. “The Orpheum appreciates feedback on its programming from all members of the mid-south community. The recent screening of Gone With the Wind at the Orpheum generated numerous comments. As an organization whose stated mission is to ‘entertain, educate and enlighten the communities it serves,’ the Orpheum cannot show a film that is insensitive to a large segment of its local population.”

The racism in GWTW is “no longer tolerable in our current socio-political climate,” Lumenick argued. While noting that GWTW “isn’t as blatantly and virulently racist as D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, which was considered one of the greatest American movies as late as the early 1960s, but is now rarely screened, even in museums,” Lumenick suggested that GWTW “may one day disappear from the cultural conversation and suffer a permanent downgrade when it comes to estimating the all-time great films.”

It’s been 26 years since I suffered through Micheal Lehman‘s Hudson Hawk. I’d kinda forgotten the particulars, although it all came rushing back when I began watching clips. The only thing I liked about it was James Coburn playing George Kaplan. Not Coburn’s performance, mind, but screenwriters Steven de Souza and Daniel Waters‘ decision to pay tribute to North by Northwest‘s “non-existent decoy.”

No, I didn’t decide to hate Hudson Hawk because just about everyone trashed it or because it cost $65 million and earned $17.2 million or any of the other lynch-mob rationales. I hated it all on my lonesome because it struck me as smug and arrogant and unfunny, and because watching it was like being held down on the pavement as Bruce Willis and producer Joel Silver strolled over, bent down and farted in my face.

Go ahead — open your mind to Richard Brody’s revisionist assessment (“The Misunderstood Ambition of Hudson Hawk”) in the current New Yorker. It’s an intriguing argument, if unpersuasive. Because those YouTube clips don’t lie. Sink into that haughty attitude, those frosty vibes, that rot and corrosion.

And remember that Brody led the charge in that strangely successful campaign to elevate (resuscitate?) the reputation of Alfred Hitchcock‘s disastrous Marnie, which was verified when a 2015 BBC Culture poll ranked Marnie as #47 among the 100 Greatest American Films of all time. This led to one of the all-time greatest HE comments (“brenkilco” remarking that this Brody-led fraternity is “insidious and frightening…they’re just like ISIS except instead of beheading people they like Marnie“) but also to a 7.23.15 HE piece called “O Come All Ye Marnie Haters!”

Now Brody is trying to restore Hudson Hawk to respectability. Hey, why not? Larry Karaszewksi agrees with him. By all means read the piece, but also watch the below clip. In the space of 164 seconds it will start to drive you insane.

James Cameron‘s argument with Wonder Woman, as explained in an 8.24 Guardian interview, was basically that Gal Gadot looked too dishy, too made up, too objectified. Which was basically a shot at director Patty Jenkins for catering to traditional male-appetite Hollywood fantasies. Cameron would have preferred a butchier, more bad-ass Wonder Woman in a kind of mid-’90s Linda Hamilton mode.

Jenkins’s Twitter reply: “Cameron’s inability to understand what Wonder Woman is, or stands for, to women all over the world is unsurprising as, though he is a great filmmaker, he is not a woman. Strong women are great, [but] if women have to always be hard, tough and troubled to be strong, and we aren’t free to be multidimensional or celebrate an icon of women everywhere because she is attractive and loving, then we haven’t come very far, have we?”

HE verdict: Cameron is right — Jenkins was catering to traditional Hollywood standards by making Gadot’s Amazon warrior a super fox as well as loving and maternal. But that’s cool. As I was watching it in a Paris plex last June I told myself, “This is different, this is good…Wonder Woman has a fuller, more caring heart than her male counterparts in the Marvel or D.C realm. And therefore she has her own identify, her own piece of superhero turf. Plus she has great eyes, hot legs and a really warm smile. I don’t have a problem with that.”

N.Y. Times critics A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis were recently asked to choose the five best New York movies for a special project called “One Film, One New York.” The winners were Spike Lee‘s Crooklyn, Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen‘s On the Town, Susan Seidelman‘s Desperately Seeking Susan, Ang Lee‘s The Wedding Banquet and Martin Scorsese‘s New York, New York.

Scott and Dargis were somewhat restricted by having to choose films that are more or less family-friendly or, you know, not too coarse or graphic or profane. Which is sorta like being asked to choose the best westerns in which gunslingers don’t wear six-shooter holsters around their waist.

On top of which New York, New York was regarded at the time of its release as a notorious cocaine movie. A whole lotta tootin’ goin’ on, and yet 40 years later a pair of top-tier critics…forget it.

I haven’t re-watched any of their picks since their original release, and that goes double for New York, New York. I caught it a little more than 40 years ago, and only once at that. It’s basically a ’40s and ’50s period piece about a singer and a saxophone player (Liza Minelli, Robert DeNiro) who discover that they’re incompatible after getting hitched in a hurry and having a kid, largely because the sax player has a temperamental nature.

I’ve written a couple of times that it has one terrific scene — i.e., when De Niro is thrown out of a club that Minelli is performing in, and he kicks out several light bulbs adorning the entrance way as he’s manhandled out by the manager and a bouncer. If I could only find that scene on YouTube, but there’s no trace of it.

You still can’t stream New York, New York, and for people with limited search abilities (like myself) the only way to catch a high-def version is to buy a 2013 English import Bluray.  

It’s sad that the print edition of Village Voice is going away, sure, but I can’t honestly say I’m devastated. I never pick up a newspaper. Nobody does. But I’ve always liked — hell, cherished — the fact that the Voice is there. If I could guarantee that the print edition would survive by snapping my fingers three times, I would do that. Who wouldn’t? I’m just as sentimental as the next guy.

The newsprint Voice is an atmospheric artifact — a tangible remnant of the Manhattan that I lived and struggled and sometimes barely survived in from late ’77 to mid ’83. When I think of the effort and feeling and discipline that have gone into each Voice issue, even recently, even with me living in West Hollywood, and what its absence will do to downtown culture, etc. Not that anyone under 40 will notice all that much.

I was a New Yorker when the Voice definitely mattered. Reading the new issues of it and the Soho Weekly News at the Village Bowl (a little diner on West 13th near 8th) back then — what an affinity that was. I would take the issues home, leave them at my Sullivan or Bank Street apartments, carry them with me for something to read on the subway.

But I almost never pick up print these days, and when I do it’s only for a fast skim. My reaction would be the same if the L.A. Weekly, which has been printing since ’78, were to turn into an online-only publication. I picked up a copy at Amoeba last week, and that’s saying something. But I’m not saying anything nervy here. The printed Voice launched almost 62 years ago, on 10.26.55. I’m sorry.

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Milton Lawson to Jeffrey Wells: “Longtime fan of the site, here to show you a new short story you might enjoy called ‘Roger Ebert and Me‘. It’s a short 10-page comic about a true Movie Catholic enduring a crisis of faith. Filled with cinematic easter eggs. I know you’re not the biggest fan of the comics medium but sometimes it can be put to great use beyond the spandex superhero realm. Check it out? Here it is.

Wells to Lawson: It’s perfect up until the moment where your character talks about his mother, and Roger says she wouldn’t want you to give up hope. That’s fine, but it goes off the rails after that. Roger is not the Silver Surfer. He cares and has great insight, but he doesn’t have special cosmic powers, and he’s not the bringer of perfect, inspired solutions. He was just a brilliant critic who died too soon. You can’t put him on too high of a pedestal.

What needs to happen is this: You and Roger visit the diner where the Looper scene with Bruce Willis was shot. (Or the Baltimore diner from Barry Levinson‘s Diner.) As you’re walking toward an empty table, Roger notices Gene Siskel talking to another young cineaste like yourself.

Roger: “Uhh, Gene? The hell are you doing here?”

Gene: “Well, I’m dead too so I can do anything I want. And I can dispense life wisdom as well as you can, Roger, and probably a little better.”

Roger: “You never quit, do you, Gene?”

Gene: “Oh…Roger, this is Kevin Zackey, by the way. Kevin? Roger. Kevin’s going through a rough patch.”

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I’m told that Kate Winslet isn’t the only one who delivers a grand-slam, award-worthy performance in Woody Allen‘s Wonder Wheel (Amazon, 12.1). Unexpected as it may sound, Jim Belushi scores strongly and sympathetically as Winslet’s schlubby-nice-guy husband who grapples with some kind of Chekhovian anguish when her waitress character, Ginny, takes up with Justin Timberlake‘s Mickey, a Brooklyn lifeguard.

Has Jim Belushi scored with an Oscar-calibre supporting performance in Woody Allen’s Wonder Wheel? As Marcus Licinius Crassus said in Spartacus, “Time will solve that mystery.”

A tipster believes that Belushi’s turn will probably generate Best Supporting Actor talk after Wonder Wheel debuts at the New York Film Festival on 10.14. Which, of course, would constitute a huge career rebound for Belushi, who’s been steadily working since his ’80s and early ’90s heyday (Red Heat, Salvador, K-9, Thief, Curly Sue) but in an under-the-radar, off-the-grid fashion. Or at least the grid that I pay attention to.

If the talk turns out to be valid, Belushi will have a perfect Oscar-season narrative along with a much-admired performance — riding high in the ’80s, loses the big-screen mojo, quietly plugs away for the last 25 years, does pretty well on TV (including his According to Jim series from ’01 to ’09, as a co-lead in The Defenders, a comedy series with Dan Aykroyd in 2010 and ’11 + a recent four-episode role in Twin Peaks) and is now suddenly back in the big game as a possible Oscar contender at age 63.

How did Belushi happen to land the role? Why him and not any number of higher-profile character actors who were probably considered? Last summer Woody was quoted saying that he cast Belushi because he was “absolutely perfect for it.”

Belushi as he appears in Wonder Wheel, as Kate Winslet’s cuckolded husband.

Morgan Freeman deserves to be the the next recipient of the SAG Life Achievement Award. The trophy will be presented at the 24th annual Screen Actors Guild Awards on 1.21.18. But when I think of Freeman I think “immaculate actor, major brand, beautiful voice but for the last 17 years has mostly taken paycheck work.” How lucky or choosy has Freeman been in terms of scoring good roles in top-tier or reasonably decent films? Starting with his breakout role in Street Smart (’87), Freeman has a total of ten films on his serious honor roster: Clean and Sober, Glory, Driving Miss Daisy, Unforgiven, The Shawshank Redemption, Se7en, Amistad, Million Dollar Baby (Oscar winner for Best Supporting Actor), The Bucket List (okay, a so-so film but Freeman was first-rate) and Invictus. Eleven films out of…what, 100 or thereabouts? And most of them in the ’90s. But he did his best in what he was able to grab. And Freeman’s pre-Street Smart perfs were distinctive, particularly his angry-convict scene with Robert Redford in Brubaker.

The 20th anniversary of There’s Something About Mary is 11 months off, but Fox Movie Night’s James Finn and Schawn Belston are celebrating it next week (8.29) all the same. Ben Stiller told the Farrelly brothers that he didn’t like the hair gel scene — thought it was unbelievable and therefore not funny. I felt the same way. The audience was roaring with laughter as I sat in my seat like a sphinx. The only Mary scene I really laughed at was Matt Dillon‘s with the dog.

Bobby and Peter Farrelly were touched by lightning for seven years — from Dumber and Dumber to Me, Myself and Irene. Their 21st Century track record has been spotty, but I’ll never back off in my admiration for 2012’s The Three Stooges. During a late ’90s phone interview I asked for their opinion of Ernst Lubitsch, and without missing a beat one of them said “who?” That’s confidence, that’s fearlessness.

Fox Movie Night used to screen classic studio-era films (All About Eve, The Ow-Box Incident), but nostalgia standards are changing. People in their late 30s and early 40s regard late ’90s films as kind of old-timey, ’80s films as moldy and crusty and ’70s and ’60s films as artifacts from the Iron Age.

Christian Bale as Captain Joseph Blocker in Scott Cooper‘s Hostiles, which will premiere at the Telluride Film Festival. Set in 1892, pic is about Blocker and some other soldiers (Jesse Plemons, Ben Foster, Timothee Chalamet) escorting a dying Cheyenne war chief (Wes Studi) and his family back to his tribal lands. Could Bale be playing the great-grandfather of Dan Blocker, who starred in NBC’s Bonanza several decades hence, or is he just another rugged individualist given to blocking his emotions?

Christian Bale in Scott Cooper’s Hostiles.