I said earlier I’ve no particular problem with Dylan Mulvaney endorsing Bud Light. But the decoration on this Bud Light can gobsmacked me. I thought inclusion was the new idea — not just beer bruhs chugging Bud Light during football games but all sizes, shapes and persuasions. But the decoration plainly says “gays and trans people only.” Sober for 11 years, I haven’t been up to speed on beer cans for quite some time.** Sorry.

Last night I caught my second viewing of Air, and it seemed to gain somewhat. It certainly didn’t diminish. My third viewing will be with subtitles, and then it’ll really gain.

I especially loved how Matt Damon‘s eloquent emotional pitch to the Jordan family near the end is off-the-cuff, and in so doing echoes the second half of Martin Luther King‘s “I have a dream” speech, which was also largely improvised, and is discussed early in the film. This is called “refrain” — one of the most solid and dependable tricks in the book.

But one minor thing has stuck in my craw.

Director Ben Affleck‘s decision not to show Michael Jordan is an understandable one. “”He exists above and around the story, but if you ever concretize him, if you ever say, ‘Yes, that’s Michael Jordan,’ they’ll know it’s not, really..it’s fake,” Affleck explained in a People interview. I thought if they bring everything they thought and remembered about [Michael] and what he meant to them to the movie and projected it onto the movie, it [would work] better.”

And so Jordan stand-in Damian Delano in only seen from the rear, and Jordan’s voice is only heard once on a phone line (“hello”). The physical Jordan/Delano presence only happens toward the conclusion (i.e., during the afore-mentioned Nike pitch meeting plus one or two others). But here’s the thing — the camera’s avoidance of Jordan’s face and Affleck not even allowing us to hear a few words from the guy also feels “fake.” The dodge feels too conspicuous. It intrudes upon the reality of that climactic moment and the overall third-act flow.

I don’t know what the solution could have been or if one was possible, but if I’d been directing I would have persuaded the present-tense Jordan, 60, to record a few lines of dialogue. Maybe a few quips, maybe a pungent observation of some kind,. Hearing the Real McCoy certainly would’ve helped.

On the other hand would it have been that hard to find a young Michael Jordan look-alike? We all know that movies are fake from start to finish — what matters is conviction and bringing your best game to the table.

It could have been argued by the producers of The Longest Day (’62) that Dwight D. Eisenhower was too big of a historical figure and that people would instantly know that Henry Grace, the set decorator who played the nation’s 34th president in an early scene, was just some joker pretending to be Ike.

Of course audiences knew that, but the second that Grace’s face appeared on the big screen, it worked. Audiences appreciated the effort and approved for the most part. Grace’s voice was dubbed by voice actor Allen Swift.

A couple of days ago I was a bit startled by a Variety headline for a Chris Willman interview with Marcus Mumford. It was about the recently-premiered PBS Joni Mitchell tribute concert (Gershwin Prize) that happened in February, and more particularly Mumford’s belief that Mitchell is “singing better than ever in 2023.”

It’s great that Mitchell is singing and playing guitar and sounding pretty good, particularly in the wake of having suffered a brain aneurysm in late March of 2015. She was in fairly bad shape after that tragedy, but she’s recovered (or at least is recovering) to a significant degree, and praise be to God for this.

In a 2013 interview with the National Post‘s Jian Ghomeshi Mitchell said that her soprano singing voice was pretty much kaput, and that she’s now an alto.

The key question to me is “is Joni still smoking?” Because that’s almost certainly what helped to bring about her aneurysm. She initially lost her ability to speak and walk, and still needs a little help getting around as we speak.

I was so concerned about Mitchell’s well-being in the wake of the aneurysm that I once hand-delivered an admonishing fan letter to her Spanish home in Bel Air. I insisted I was one of her biggest fans and begged her to think about vaping instead of sticking with tobacco.

Mitchell may have decided that life isn’t worth living without the pleasure of unfiltered cigarettes, but maybe not. She once said in an interview that she began smoking at age 9 or 10 or something. At a certain point the body just can’t take the nicotine and the toxins and complications will manifest.

It’s wonderful, in any event, that Mitchell has regained (or is in the process of regaining) her singing and guitar-playing abilities. She’ll turn 80 on 11.7.23.

Posted on 3.31.15: I attended a short, smallish concert that Mitchell gave at Studio 54 in October ’82 to promote “Wild Things Run Fast.” The crowd was not huge, maybe 150 or so, and I was standing fairly close and pretty much dead center. No female artist has ever touched me like Mitchell**, and I was quite excited about being this close to her.

I was beaming, starry-eyed and staring at her like the most self-abasing suck-up fan you could imagine, and during the first song her eyes locked onto mine and I swear to God we began to kind of half-stare at each other. (Some performers do this, deciding to sing for this or that special person in the crowd.) Her eyes danced around from time to time but she kept coming back to me, and I remember thinking, “Okay, she senses that I love her and she probably likes my looks so I guess I’m her special fanboy or something for the next few minutes.”

Mitchell was dressed in a white pants suit and some kind of colorful scarf, and she sang and played really well, and I remember she had a little bit of a sexy tummy thing going on. Sorry but that had a portion of my attention along with the songs and “being there” and a feeling that I’d remember this moment for decades to come.

** My beloved Patti Smith ranks a close second.

On 8.5.15 L.A. Times staffer Noah Bierman reported that Jerry Lewis had donated a copy of The Day The Clown Cried, an unfinished 1972 holocaust drama that Lewis had directed, written and starred in, to the Library of Congress.

It was stipulated, however, that the film couldn’t be screened “for at least ten years,” and only then with the permission of the Lewis estate. (Lewis passed on 8.20.17 at age 91.)

On 10.14.15 (or two months after the Bierman piece) I was informed by Mike Mashon, head of the Moving Image section on the LoC campus, that the embargo on TDTCC would be in place “for ten years,” and would therefore extend until 2025.

Although the LoC apparently intends to eventually screen The Day The Clown Cried at its Audio Visual Conservation campus in Culpeper, Virginia, curator Rob Stone has stated the LoC does not have a complete print of the film.

Posted on 6.15.16: I’m hardly an authority when it comes to Jerry Lewis‘s never-seen The Day The Clown Cried (’72), but to my knowledge an assembly of scenes from the finished film has never been shown to anyone.

I’ve read all the articles, I’ve read the script, I’ve seen that BBC documentary that popped last January, and I’d love to view it when the embargo is lifted nine years hence (i.e., in 2024). But I’ve never watched actual scenes.

This morning a friend passed along a 31-minute Vimeo file (posted two months ago but yanked on Thursday morning…sorry) that provides the first real taste of Clown, or at least the first I’ve ever sat through.

It’s basically a compressed, German-dubbed version of Lewis’s film that’s intercut with acted-out portions of the script by a troupe of 70somethings. It’s taken from Eric Friedler‘s 2016 documentary called Der Clown.

And you know what? I don’t see what’s so godawful about it.

Okay, the scheme is manipulative bordering on the grotesque — Lewis as a German-Jewish clown in a Nazi concentration camp who’s ordered in the final act to amuse a group of children being sent to the “showers” — but that elephant aside it didn’t strike me as all that agonizing or offensive. Really. Lewis’s performance seems more or less restrained as far as the writing allows, and the story unfolds in a series of steps that seem reasonably logical. The supporting perfs and period milieu seem decent enough.

When everyone finally sees The Day The Clown Cried in 2024 (or ’25) the verdict may be that it’s not a mediocre, miscalculated effort (or that it is…who knows?), but I didn’t smell a catastrophe as I watched this whatever-you-want-to-call-it. Plus it costars HE’s own Harriet Andersson.

Ari Aster’s Beau Is Afraid (A24, 4.21) was previewed yesterday (Saturday, 4.1) to a paying audience at Brooklyn’s Alamo Draft House (445 Albee Square, Brooklyn, NY 11201), and Variety’s Brent Lang was apparently there to endure it.

Before reading any further, HE readers are requested to read Wikipedia’s longish Beau Is Afraid synopsis, which goes on for eight bulky paragraphs.

Presuming that the synopsis is legit, Aster’s 179-minute “horror comedy” (set to open in select IMAX theaters on 4.14 before opening wider on 4.21) is apparently some kind of grotesque, audience–punishing fantasia — a surreal acid trip version of a 21st Century Alice in Wonderland-meets-Homer’s The Odyssey, except with a bloated, gray-haired, “twitchy and over-medicated” Phoenix in the Alice role — and not for the faint of heart.

A few excerpts from Lang’s article, which was filed late Saturday afternoon:

(1) Q&A moderator Emma Stone to Aster following the screening: “Are you okay, man?”

(2) The film features a paint-drinking, antagonistic teenaged protagonist (Kylie Rogers), an animated sequence, a “recurring gag involving Phoenix’s distended testicles”, and “a sex scene with [the mid 50ish] Parker Posey that may rank among the wackiest ever committed to film.”

(3) “The [Draft House] crowd seemed to love it, although the general public may have a tougher time” with this “bladder–testing epic.”

(4) Aster comment during the Stone Q&A: “I want [the audience] to go through [Phoenix’s] guts and come out of his butt.”

(5) The black-garbed Phoenix attended the screening but chose not to participate in the Q&A.

Lang’s article ends as follows:

Posted on 1.10.23:

I’ve just re-watched Steven Soderbergh‘s Kafka (’91), a half-spooky, half-gloomy noir that looks and feels like early 1920s German expressionism. It’s mostly and appropriately shot in black-and-white, but it’s such a downer to sit through that it almost feels euphoric when the film suddenly shifts into color during the last 15 minutes or so.

Written by Lem Dobbs and handsomely shot by Walt Lloyd, the Prague-set period flick (1919) fictionalizes the adventures of the fearful and paranoid Franz Kafka (Jeremy Irons) as he attempts to uncover the dark plottings of a creepy cabal of ne’er-do-wells who operate out of “the castle” that overlooks the city.

Kafka didn’t go down too well when it opened 31 years ago, and I can’t say it works any better today.

Irons overdoes the anxious, often terrified, bug-eyed thing. After a while you’re saying “Jesus, will you stop twitching and glaring and play it cool for a change?…channel some Lee Marvin and at least pretend to be a man.”

Okay, it’s not that bad. I was bored, yes, but I didn’t hate sitting through it. It’s just that my heart rate went down.

It’s a serious shame that an HD version isn’t streamable. The 480P version that I watched today looks awful…so soft and bleary at times that it almost seems out of focus.

Sometime in ’21 Soderbergh created a new version of Kafka, titled Mr. Kneff. Re-cut, re-imagined and dialogue-free with subtitles. It screened at the Toronto Film Festival that year, and was supposed to be released as part of a Soderbergh box set sometime in late ’21 or maybe sometime in ’22. It never happened, but I’m told the box set will show its face sometime…aahh, who knows? But maybe later this year.

The climactic final act of Kafka abandons black-and-white for color (which my eyes rather enjoyed) and becomes a kind of Indiana Jones film. Briefly.

Irons enjoyed a great big-screen run of A-quality films between the early ’80s and mid ’90s — roughly 12 or 13 years. The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Moonlighting, Betrayal, Swann in Love, Dead Ringers, Reversal of Fortune, Kafka, Damage, M. Butterfly, The House of the Spirits. In ’84 I saw Irons opposite Glenn Close in the first Broadway version of The Real Thing. He was the absolute king of the world back then.

I’ve enjoyed re-reading my second-hand (i.e., possibly inaccurate to some extent) story about Irons and temporary Kafka costar Anne Parillaud. The piece was initially initially posted in 2009.

Dead-center horizon lines are banal, agreed, but the best outdoorsy photos, paintings and cinematic compositions are about whatever works, depending on the ingredients…the mystical altogether, balance and intrigue…God’s eye is God’s eye, and horizon lines be damned. I’ve been snapping photos since I was 12 or 13 so don’t tell me, John Martin Feeney.

A highly unusual and disturbing thing happened in bucolic Wilton on the morning of Tuesday, 3.21, or five days ago. A 39 year-old married guy was stabbed to death by a 31 year-old nutbag neighbor. The victim’s name was Arinzechukwu “Red” Ukachukwu (tough pronounce), and the killer was and is Sebastian Andrews, a 31 year-old guy who was living with his father and an older brother on Wilton’s Indian Hill Road.

The victim and his wife, Alisha Lager, bought their home “after the pandemic,” according to a toothless story by Hearst Media Group’s Peter Yankowski. Lager is left to care for their two-year-old son.

I found an attractive, magic-hour photo of the couple on Lager’s Facebook page. The victim, the assailant and Lager — all Millennials.

Yankowski: “Born on 1.12.84, Ukachukwu was a creative entrepreneur, musician and a tech wizard. He was raised in Brooklyn by parents who were active in the Nigerian community. He attended private schools and then Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts. In 2005 he graduated from the University of Albany with a degree in economics.”

Fox61’s Matt Caron reported that at last Wednesday’s hearing Andrews asked to speak and was advised by his attorney, Kevin Black, not to say anything. The state’s attorney said that “there appears to be some sort of psychological issue involved.”

The arrest warrant reports that Andrews alleged that he found Ukachukwu “trespassing on [his father’s] property several times.” This appears to be an unsubstantiated claim.

Compounded with the “psychological issue,” facts suggests that the killing was some kind of bizarre racial hate crime, perhaps in a vein vaguely similar to the 2020 killing of Ahmaud Arbery. Who stabs a neighbor with a kitchen knife and then drags his body into a garage and then takes a shower and calmly waits for the cops to arrive?

The crime was reported by Andrews’ father, who saw the killing happen in real time. Nobody has spoken to him, nor has anyone explored if his now-jailed son had some kind of social media history. I poked around and found nothing.

In yesterday’s pan of the revolting and deplorable John Wick: Chapter Four, I should have mentioned my grudging respect for an extended, uncut overhead shot of Keanu
Reeves going from room to room and blasting bad guys at every turn with the camera constantly maintaining its God’s-eye viewpoint.

In a 3.25 interview with TheWrap‘s Scott Mendelson, dp Dan Laustsen (totally unpronouncable) explains that the scene utilized a set built on one of the Studio Babelsberg sound stages.

Laustsen: “It’s one crane shot and one spider cam shot where we are starting on the stairs and flying around. We did in eight or ten takes. The light must be outside the set. We see the whole set. That’s the challenge when your shots are wide and the entire set is in view.”

John Wick 4’s god’s-eye gunfight has been called the “Hotline Miami” scene but I was surprised to see Chad name an even more obscure indie game as inspiration

HONG KONG MASSACRE is Hotline Miami x John Woo, and JW4 beautifully adopts its top-down look & gargantuan muzzle flashes pic.twitter.com/hGU3A47icE

— ChristianV (@GenreFilmAddict) March 26, 2023