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[Originally posted on 2.17.15.]

There was a period between my 20th and 21st birthday when I had no job or goals or academic engagement…nothing. I was in my Bhagavad Gita mystical phase, no fooling, except the constant urge to party and frolic and basically pursue the spiritual pretty much dominated everything. Partying and then recovering the next day so I could party again the next night…well, there was actually more to it than just that.

It’s not that I didn’t try to have a kind of “life.” I would land a job I hated and then lose that job. I read the New York Times every day but I ingested a lot of substances and did a lot of sleeping and day-dreaming. I dabbled as a dealer of pot and hallucinogens. Occasional tripping, hitchhiking, chasing girls, wherever the day took me…bars, parties, music and especially (this was huge) lying totally ripped on a floor with two smallish Marantz speakers on either side of my head.

At some point my parents decided to strongly communicate their disfavor. They wanted me to understand that this lifestyle had nowhere to go but down so they kicked me out of their comfortable Cape Cod-style home in Wilton, Connecticut. I would crash here and there but occasionally I’d have nowhere to go.

So I’d show up at the Cape Cod around midnight or 1 am and throw pebbles at my sister Laura’s window. To keep me out every night my father would lock the garage basement door plus the dining-room door that led to the basement stairs, so I needed Laura to let me in. After a couple of taps she’d come to the window and then meet me downstairs. I remember I had to raise the sliding garage doors one inch at a time so as to not make any noise.

Laura and I would tiptoe upstairs in pitch black and I’d sleep inside the closet in my room. My parents both worked during the day and were gone by 9 am, so I’d come down around 10 am or so and get some breakfast, etc.

I forget how many times this happened but I’d say at least 15 or 20. Laura was there for me every time. I’m not saying she acted in some extraordinary fashion but she did the good, kind thing.

Laura’s schizophrenia became pretty aggravated around then, and the truth is that we didn’t have very much to say to each other through the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s. She had a much higher IQ than I (or so I was told) but she was pretty much off the rails. Laura had a hard life. I took her to Italy (San Donato, Rome) with me in ’03 — that was pretty much the summit of our adult bonding.

Laura died of cancer in April of 2008, and it just hit me this morning that I never told her how extra double thankful I was for all those times she gave me the gift of a warm, snug sleep on the floor of my bedroom closet. If she could read this or perhaps hear me on some level…

Chance Browne painting of Seir Hill Road (where I spent my high school years) in Wilton, CT. — my parents’ Cape Cod home (45 Seir Hill) was just down the road.

Panzano, Italy — May 2017.

Rome, last May.

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There are three kinds of excellent horror film endings, but they all put the chill in and stay there after the closing credits.

One, those that add something totally unexpected at the very end, a la Carrie White‘s bloody hand poking through the burnt embers and grabbing Amy Irving in Carrie.

Two, those that double down by adding a dash of surreal, rule-breaking creepitude a la Anthony Perkins‘ demonic grin blending with his mother’s rotted skull in Psycho.

And three, those that allude to real-world concerns or social tremors, as in The Thing From Another World when a news reporter warns the world to “watch the skies…keep looking, keep watching the skies“, the notion being that James Arness‘s Mr. Clean is actually out there in some form.

What late 20th Century or 21st Century horror films deliver one of these variations?

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What is actually being said here? Ask yourselves that.

The message seems to be “unless you’re a person of color and even if you’re Robin D’Angelo, stay away from Wakanda Forever on its opening weekend. Seriously. If you know what’s good for you. Because any whiteys who show up regardless…well, you’ll be branding yourself as anti-black, in a sense.”

I’m not saying this would happen, but imagine if some deranged cracker were to tweet that Black people need to avoid opening-weekend screenings of some all-white movie…The Fablemans, say, or next summer’s Oppenheimer. Imagine if the corresponding slogan was “Black people need to stay away from The Fablemans so white people can enjoy that movie in peace.”

If you go to see Wakanda Forever on opening weekend, you are anti-black.

White people need to stay away so that black people can “enjoy that movie in peace”. pic.twitter.com/QTieYLjfwA

— iamyesyouareno (@iamyesyouareno) October 30, 2022

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After debuting last May in Cannes and hitting several film festivals and opening worldwide over the last three or four months, Marie Kreutzer‘s Corsage (IFC Films) will open stateside on 12.23 — one of the last significant commercial bookings.

Third to last actually.  The historical drama opens in England on 12.30.22, and in France on 1.25.23.

“Royally Uninterested,” posted on 5.20.l22: “I regret reporting that Corsage, which screened at 11 am this morning, didn’t sit well. I found it flat, boring, listless.

“The Austrian empress Elizabeth (Vicky Krieps) is bored with her royal life, and the director spares no effort in persuading the audience to feel the same way.

“Krieps plays up the indifference, irreverence and existential who-gives-a-shit?.  

“Somewhere during Act Two a royal physician recommends heroin as a remedy for her spiritual troubles, and of course she develops a habit. I was immediately thinking what a pleasure it would be to snort horse along with her, or at least during the screening.

“Corsage is unfortunately akin to Pablo Larrain‘s Spencer and Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette — stories of women of title and privilege who feel alienated and unhappy and at a general loss. I’m sorry but this movie suffocates the soul.

“In actuality Empress Elizabeth was assassinated in 1898, at age 51. For some reason Kreutzer has chosen to end the life of Krieps’ Elizabeth at a younger point in her life, and due to a different misfortune.

“This is one of the most deflating and depressing films I’ve ever seen.”

Everything’s cool now (I think), but for three or four days a close friend was giving me the cold-shoulder treatment because I’m not a fan of Martin McDonagh‘s The Banshees of Inisherin.

The truth is that I am a fan of some of it but I couldn’t abide the idea of a significant fiddle-playing character mutilating himself in order to emphasize to a former friend (a non-musician) that he really, really doesn’t want to chit-chat anymore.

I’m sorry but I found this behavior to be incomprehensible, not to mention repugnant.

HE to friendo: “Banshees obviously has its virtues and charms and its pictorial beauty and whatnot, but the [afore-mentioned nihilism] is ridiculous. THR‘s Scott Feinberg isn’t demonic for sharing my reaction or vice versa. There are many sane people out there who’ve found this film mystifying. I really don’t think I deserve to be shunned or banished for feeling this way. I respect many things about it. It’s not ‘bad’ as much as infuriating.”

Observational friendo #2: “[Sometimes movie lovers] will invest the year-end movie contest with an unreasonable ideological fervor. And thus Banshees, like Belfast, is somehow praised as a great film with traditional, classic, old-fashioned and in some ways masculine virtues…a film that that all good people must rally behind. In disliking Banshees you were pissing on The Cause.

“We’re all looking for an Oscar movie to keep The Dream alive. But once a special film is discovered and praised in certain quarters, people who don’t like it are somehow annihilating the dream.”

HE regulars are asked to recount stories about friendships and relationships that went through a bad patch or were even torn asunder due to a major disagreement over a film.

Early next year, Roger Durling‘s Santa Barbara Film Festival will present the 2023 Maltin Modern Master award to Jamie Lee Curtis. Not because of her legendary scream queen rep (recently underlined by her starring role in Halloween Kills) but because of her broad performance as a wackjobby IRS agent in A24’s Everything Everywhere All At Once**.

We all respect the endurance (persistence?) of Curtis’s career, but the truth is that Everything Everywhere aside she hasn’t been in any reasonably good films in over 20 years. I’m not being mean — that’s just factual.

Curtis’s peak years were from the late ’70s to mid ’90s, and principally in the ’80s. Her three finest films, in this order, are Charles Crichton and John Cleese‘s A Fish Called Wanda (’88), John Landis‘s Trading Places (’83) and James Cameron‘s True Lies (’94).

Other noteworthy JLC vehicles, listed sequentially, are Halloween (’78), The Fog (’80), Love Letters (’83), James Bridges‘ Perfect (’85), Diane Kurys‘ A Man in Love (’85), Kathryn Bigelow‘s Blue Steel (’90), John Boorman‘s The Tailor of Panama (’01) and Rian Johnson‘s Knives Out (’19).

HE to Durling: The perfect presenter of the actual award would be John Carpenter, to whom Curtis owes her entire breadwinning career.

** The perfect ending aside, I mostly loathed this curiously successful film. but that’s water under the bridge.

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Patti Lupone recently said that B’way ticket prices are “insane.” I knew they were painful but it’s been a few years since I actually pondered (i.e., fantasized about) a purchase. I also presumed Lupone had turned on the hyperbole spigot. Then I looked at prices for Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt. Okay, Telecharge isn’t as punishing.

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I’d just like to explain once and for all that Don Siegel‘s original Invasion of the Body Snatchers (’56) was always intended as a metaphor about the blanding and uniformity of American culture in the mid ’50s. That’s the only interpretation that really works, and I really don’t want to hear any argument.

Siegel originally shot Body Snatchers within a 1.85:1 aspect ratio. (Which meant of course that once upon a time there was a 1.37 open-matte “boxy” version.) The low-budget creeper (final budget was $382,190) was shot by cinematographer Ellsworth Fredericks between 3.23.55 and 4.27.55 — 23 days. The cast and crew worked a six-day week with Sundays off.

The production went over schedule by three days “because of the night-for-night shooting that Siegel wanted.” Additional photography took place in September 1955, filming a framing story that Allied Artists had insisted upon (i.e., Kevin McCarthy warning Whit Bissell about the seed pods and insisting he’s “not crazy!”).

Producer Walter Wanger protested the use of the Superscope aspect ratio (2.00:1). Its use had been included in early plans for the film, but the first print wasn’t made until December ’55. Wanger felt that the SuperScope cropping caused the film to lose sharpness and detail. I for one would love to see the 1.85 version — probably doesn’t exist. That said, I’m more or less okay with my Bluray version.

In Maria Schrader‘s She Said, the performances of Zoe Kazan and Carey Mulligan as N.Y. Times reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, respectively, “seem” to be even-steven in terms of screen time.

They’re not actually — Kazan has about 20 minutes more screen time that Mulligan does. And yes, Kantor is working on the Hollywood sexual harassment story a little before she and Twohey join forces. And Kazan comes close to choking up in a couple of scenes in which she interviews victims of Harvey Weinstein.

But the film doesn’t play like a senior-junior partnership thing. The Kantor-Twohey dynamic is roughly the same as Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman‘s Woodward and Bernstein in All The President’s Men — and so it doesn’t really add up that Kazan will be pushed for Best Actress and Mulligan for Best Supporting Actress, as Gold Derby‘s Daniel Montgomery and Chris Beachum reported earlier today.

It’s not a problem, mind, that Universal has decided to play it this way. Kazan and Mulligan are both excellent, however you want to slice it.

And poor Chadwick Boseman, rest his soul, is no more. And that means there’s a hole in this sequel that can’t be filled.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is basically a film about women warriors with Marvel bling. I challenge anyone watching the trailers to tell me who the lead is, or what the story’s about.

You might presume that the most prominent character is Angela Bassett‘s Ramonda, the grieving Queen Mother of Wakanda, but Letitia Wright‘s Shuri is apparently the one carrying the ball…the quarterback, if you will.

The trailers don’t suggest this, of course. The trailers are saying, in fact, that this film has no center, no gravity.

Honestly? I don’t even want to see it. It looks like a headache, a slog.

Forbes‘ Scott Mendelson:

[Updated]. I don’t have time or the energy to write something deeply felt about each and every Scott film, but there’s absolutely no question in my mind the The Counselor deserves its #4 slot, that the first half of Matchstick Men is dead brilliant, and that A Good Year (ranked at #8) is a much better film that many people realize.

In this order…

1. Alien

2. The Duellists

3. Thelma and Louise

4.  The Counselor

5.  Blade Runner

6.  American Gangster

7.  Matchstick Men

8.   Gladiator  

9.   Kingdom of Heaven (extended version)

10. A Good Year

11.  Black Hawk Down

12. Black Rain

13. The Martian

I don’t feel that strongly care about the rest. Okay, I hate Prometheus and Alien: Covenant. Ditto Legend. Someone to Watch Over Me is piffle. I found House of Gucci half-tolerable, but I’m not sure I’d want to watch it again.

The Last Duel was better than half-decent. I don’t even remember 1492: Conquest of Paradise or Body Of Lies. Scott’s Robin Hood was half-watchable, G.I. Jane is negligible; ditto Exodus: Gods and Kings, White Squall, Hannibal.

I was actually okay with All The Money In The World.

The Los Angeles Film Critics Association announced last Wednesday that the org will follow the lead of the Spirit and Gotham Awards by abandoning gender-based acting awards. When LAFCA members vote in December they’ll hand out two Best Lead Performance trophies (either gender or gender-neutral) and two awards for Best Supporting Performance (ditto).

But the vote, I’ve been told, was far from  unanimous. In fact, it was damn near evenly split. It can be reported, in short, that nearly half of LAFCA doesn’t agree with the hardcore LGBTQ-supporting woke apparatchiks within the organization.

I’m told there’s a certain Stalinist fervor within this gender-neutral cabal — a belief that they’re doing God’s revolutionary work by dissolving gender and opening things up to all sorts of wrinkles, attitudes and permutations.

There’s also a conviction that anyone who doesn’t agree 100% on this issue is a naysayer or a foot-dragger, and that the apparatchicks therefore need to band together to make sure that the other side (i.e., those who believe that gender-based acting awards should be kept and that this will benefit actresses) is out-maneuvered or otherwise marginalized.

The LAFCA gang met last Saturday (10.8) in West Los Angeles, and the gender-neutral acting awards vote was 27 in favor, 22 against and with four abstentions. I’m told that the historical tendency has been for abstentions to translate into negative votes (i.e., voters who don’t necessarily agree but don’t want to argue or alienate), so let’s presume that the vote came down to 27 for, 26 against.

And that’s not counting the members who decided to vote in favor of the gender-neutral thing because they’re mice, and that it seemed safer to go along than to face challenges.

It was announced at the meeting that LAFCA had 60 members before the vote, and that a new admission made the tally 61.

I’m told that even discussing the gender-neutral vote appeared to alarm the apparatchiks. The topic of “nonbinary”-identified people is considered part and parcel of the larger discussion of LGBTQ rights — a zero-sum discussion.

Not incompatible: (a) gay couples and their families being entitled to equal protection under the law and (b) women being entitled to the dignity of acting categories which recognize that sex is an essential component of performance, and are therefore worthy of separate recognition.

Let’s imagine that a LAFCA member who doesn’t favor gender-neutral acting awards had spelled out his/her reasons for being against it. What would they say? How would they make their case?

The main argument, I would think, is that gender-neutral awards are arguably anti-woman.

Boiled down, the LAFCA system wasn’t broke so why the hell did the apparatchicks insist on “fixing” it? I’ll tell you why. Because wokeism is a cult and a newfound religion, and it’s believed that people who don’t parrot and follow the wokester line are on the wrong side of history. Kind of the same philosophy shared by Tom Courtenay‘s “Strelnikov”, the supporting character in David Lean‘s Dr. Zhivago.

A LAFCA member with senior standing: “I didn’t attend the meeting because I completely disagreed about their decision to revamp the acting awards by doing away with gender distinctions.”