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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.”

News flash: “Bill Murray Faces Avalanche Of New Accusations,” a 10.14 Deadline story by Tom Tapp, is basically out of the past. Because two of the “new” allegations are between 29 and 39 years old, having occured in 1983 and 1993.

On a 10.13 episode of “Good Mythical Morning“, Seth Green related how Murray got into a spat with his nine-year-old self during a 1983 taping of Saturday Night Live. It ended with Murray picking up Green by the ankles, saying “the trash goes into the trash” and dumping him into a trash can. And of course, it happened early in the Reagan administration.

Green’s story (which arrives around the 16-minute mark) is bizarre but it’s also…I don’t know how to describe it. Perversely funny by way of mock cruelty? It obviously alludes to a lack of gentle or kindly behavior on Murray’s part, but dropping a presumably mouthy, munchkin-sized, red-haired nine-year-old into a trash can…yes, Murray was being a dick (I certainly would have never done anything like this) but a big older guy dumping a precocious, Howdy Doody-sized nine-year-old into a trash can…I dunno but there’s something mildly funny about that. I don’t approve, of course, but “the trash goes into the trash”…I’m sorry but that’s a funny-cruel line.

Tapp’s Deadline story also mentions a recollection from former SNL star Rob Schneider, about how Murray conveyed an intense loathing for SNL cast members Adam Sandler and Chris Farley when he guest-hosted the show in ’93. Again — a moderately alarming story about Murray’s manner and temperament, but it happened during the second year of the Clinton administration. “The least of the hate was to me,” Schenider said. “I took great pleasure in that [Murray] hated me less, because he’s my hero.”

There’s also a rehash of the Geena Davis / Quick Change story, which happened in 1990 and is revealed in her new book, “Dying of Polteness.” Murray acted is a creepy sexual manner, she recalls.

The Lucy Liu Charle’s Angels story, which haoppened 22 or 23 years ago, is also rehashed.

There’s not much doubt that Murray has been (and possibly still is) an odd ornery cuss from time to time, but Tapp’s article has been triggered by a standard showbiz mob pile-on instinct. Get Bill, beat him up, trash him every which way, etc.

Sunday and early Monday were Sutton visitation days in West Orange, New Jersey. Sutton, Cait and Jett, I meant to say. The four of us.

I heard about Nikki Finke as I was crossing the George Washington Bridge. I had to pull over on 280 West (near Newark) in order to post a brief headline acknowledgment. I wanted to downshift and blow off the big bad world but the Finke thing was too big.

Jett to HE: “You know what, dad? All you want to do is make out with the dogs and play with Sutton like you’re both in pre-school daycare. You’re soft, no discipline. I guess it’s a grandfather thing…”

The only bad part of the visit was being more or less forced to watch episode #8 of House of the Dragon. Me: “How can you guys watch this crap?” Jett: “Welcome to the world of streaming content, dad. It’s fine. Nobody’s being hurt by it.”

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Brim-wise Todd Field‘s hat is obviously similar to the one worn by John Wayne in Rio Bravo (’59). But the thick hat band is pure urban noir, like the brown tough-guy hat worn by the 68-year-old Laurence Tierney in Norman Mailer‘s Tough Guys Don’t Dance (’87).

Wayne was 51 when he and Howard Hawks shot Rio Bravo in the summer of ’58; Field is currently somewhat older.

Following last night’s Academy screening of Todd Field‘s TAR, Cate Blanchett and costars Nina Hoss and Sophie Kauer joined The Frame‘s John Horn for an on-stage discussion.

The immediate reaction in the room was “what’s with Blanchett and Hoss wearing identical Mondrian outfits?” But according to an HE friendo who attended, Horn never even mentioned the identical outfits, much less asked what was behind the coordination.

HE to friendo: Tar is a fascinating if infuriating film, and Average Joes and Janes are going to find it mystifying and irksome. It refuses to tip its hand or lay its cards on the table. It’s a high-toned tease.

The almost uniformly rave reviews for this elegant but annoyingly oblique film are why people don’t trust critics.

I was totally shattered when I saw it in Telluride. I was expecting to be turned on and perhaps illuminated or even levitated, but it was so reluctant to offer specific comprehensions and tie it all together for the sake of the dumb-asses that it damn near broke my heart.

It’s going to die when it opens wide.

Friendo to HE: I was transported by the paranoia. Totally had me in fear.

HE to friendo: That was excellent, I agree. A very palpable sense of paranoia. But what had actually happened with the girl who [redacted]? Who had rejected whom?

Friendo to HE: The trailer was completely a lie.

HE to friendo: In what sense a lie?

Friendo to HE: It sold a completely different film experience. Bald-faced lie.

HE to Friendo: But it looked and felt so ravishing…the flush autumnal vibes of Berlin and New York were intoxicating.

Friendo to HE: But I loved the film.

HE to friendo: What was with the big black dog? And the attractive Russian cello player wasn’t even attracted to Lydia, and who ate her lunch like a peasant?

Friendo to HE: The dog was her paranoia. She knew she’d done stuff that was going to catch up to her.

HE to friendo: Not one single erotic scene. Not so much as a slight hint of sex. In that sense a curiously barren experience.

Friendo to HE: Lydia was clearly grooming her.

HE to friendo: But to no avail. So who cares? It was a blind alley, a dead end.

Friendo to HE: I cared. Because there would be another Lydia + young woman relationship.

HE to friendo: Nearly ever powerful person in world history, especially the creatively powerful and world-famous, has used his or her power to persuade attractive young people to fuck or pleasure them or serve as arm-candy. They’ve all done it. Lydia Tar is no different. Way of the big, bad, grown-up world. And after you turn 20 you have to figure that stuff out.

Friendo to HE: Except now those powerful seducers will be destroyed by the New Puritanism.

HE to friendo: Lydia was a brilliant, arrogant, egoistic handful but she didn’t deserve career ruination.

Friendo to HE: The film is an anti-woke manifesto.

HE to friendo: It actually seemed to hesitate on that front. I thought it might be anti-woke but it held back.

Friendo to HE: Not sure it held back.

HE to friendo: Respectful disagreement.

Friendo to HE: It only held back because Lydia was as much a catalyst as a victim.

HE to friendo: Loved Blanchett, of course. But desiring various sexual conquests often goes hand in hand with being a genius or a powerful person. Geniuses want what they want, and they often get it. It’s been the way of the world for centuries.

Friendo to HE: It WAS the way of the world.

HE to friendo: So we’re all going to trudge through the freezing snow of the woke gulag for the rest of our lives? Terrific.

Friend to HE: It will pass with the nuclear winter.

HE to friendo: You think Mozart didn’t have his way? You think Leonard Bernstein didn’t go there? You think Isadora Duncan and Picasso and Tallulah Bankhead weren’t total hounds? You think Marlene Dietrich didn’t use her fame and power to seduce women and men left and right?

Friendo to HE: Of course. But this is now.