Rod Stewart did a brief interview on Real Time with Bill Maher last night, and it was during this chat that I decided that “Some Guys Have All The Luck” is my all-time favorite Stewart track. In my head the 1973 Persuaders version (written by Jeff Fortgang) doesn’t even exist. The 1984 Stewart version is too perfectly realized — an open-and-shut case.
Stewart was 39 when he recorded “Some Guys” — he’s now 77. He doesn’t look drastically younger, but his appearance is pretty good, considering all the partying. And he seems happy.
In ’86 or thereabouts I party-chatted with Alana Stewart Hamilton, who had divorced Stewart (or vice versa) a year or two earlier. I don’t precisely remember how long I lasted, but it was somewhere in the vicinity of ten minutes, give or take. I remember feeling good about that.
As HE regulars know, Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone is a standout contributor to Voir, the David Fincher-produced Netflix special about movie worship.
Sasha authored and narrated “Summer of the Shark,” a short film about her movie-impressed childhood in the mid ’70s. I shared my enthusiasm five months ago.
Anyway, Netflix is pushing Sasha’s work in two Emmy categories — Outstanding Narrator and Outstanding Writing for a Nonfiction Program.
These Portland State University students who are former PSU professor hassling Peter Boghossian because he’s playing a “game” that might rattle the delicate sensibilities of trans people or which doesn’t necessarily involve kowtowing to the wokester party line…these students are bad news.
YouTube guy: “These are spoiled children and adult enablers who have never learned anything and want a special status given to them because they demand it. If you disagree it’s ‘harmful’ and if you question it, it’s ‘violence’ against them.”
Anyone who infers that free and open speech might “hurt” or cause “harm” or “trauma” to a non-binary person who uses “they” and”them” pronouns…no offense but if we were living under a third-century Roman dictatorship and I was the dictator, I might have these PSU students thrown to the lions…who knows? It would depend on my mood.
Boghossian: “Following the unexpected cancellation of our Reverse Q&A at Brown University, we created an ad hoc event on the streets of Portland. Here, we are exploring the reasoning behind agreement or disagreement with the claim: ‘There are only two genders.’ We were approached by a group of students and here’s what happened.”
Boghossian’s crew filmed this video on May 11, 2022 outside a Portland State University building that houses the department of social work.
Say it again: TopGun: Maverick is a totally square, totally flash-bang, sirloin steak, right down the middle, Tom Cruise-worshipping, un-woke, stiff-saluting, high-velocity, bull’s-eye popcorn pleasure machine.
If you submit to it, that is. For this is a formula thing, this movie…one super-mechanized, high-style, bucks-up thrill ride with a few heart moments sprinkled in. Au Hasard Balthazar, it’s not, so if you see it with, say, a Mark Harris attitude (and he wasn’t wrong when he put down the original Top Gun nine years ago), you won’t have as good of a time.
If you can just park your quibbles and show obeisance before power…if you can surrender to this military glamour fantasy, this glossy Joseph Kosinski breath-taker, this thundering Cruise + ChrisMcQuarrie + JerryBruckheimer G-force engine, this audience-friendly, holy-shit delivery device…if you submit you’ll enjoy it and then some.
What else are you going to do? Fight it? Stage a protest with speeches and placards?
Everything in TopGun: Maverick is hardcore, highly strategized, mechanized, high-octaned, and totally fucking shameless. It’s like a two-hour trailer for itself. High style, brash energy, fleet editing, classic rock (even the 65-year-old “Great Balls of Fire” is celebrated), movie-star smiles, TopGun nostalgia and a totally driller-killer finale.
Pete “Maverick” Mitchell (Cruise) is a somewhat rakish, middle-aged loner who lives only to fly solo while pushing the limits. After losing his test pilot gig, Mav is assigned to be an instructor at the Top Gun Academy in San Diego. His students include Rooster (Miles Teller), the son of Anthony Edwards‘ “Goose” who despises Maverick for taking his name off the Naval Academy list. (There was a reason.) There’s also the brash Hangman (Glen Powell) and a cool woman pilot, Phoenix (Monica Barbaro).
Maverick’s former rival Iceman (Val Kilmer), a retired admiral, has convinced the commanders that Maverick is the best guy to prepare pilots for a top-secret mission — the destruction of a uranium enrichment plant in some snow-covered mountainous region. Fighter jocks need to swoop in, detonate and get the fuck out before enemy missiles and dogfights ensue. You know what’s around the corner.
Remember Luke Skywalker‘s big Death Star challenge at the climax of StarWars: A New Hope? Portions of that classic action sequence are recalled here. Oh, and also like Star Wars, the enemy has no face, only a dark gray helmet…no nationality or ethnicity.
There’s a moment near the end of Top Gun: Maverick when it seems as if the finale of another film about fighter jocks — Mark Robson‘s The Bridges at Toko-Ri (’54) — is being replayed. You’ll recall that it ends with William Holden and Mickey Rooney huddling in a muddy ditch and being killed by North Korean troops. If only the Kosinski-Cruise-Bruckheimer film had gone the distance in this respect.
But the absence of even a shred of wokeness is wonderful. Remember that it’s locked into a mid ‘80s mindset to start with, and that it was written and filmed before the woke thing kicked in bigtime.
Everyone in TopGun: Maverick (even the afflicted Val Kilmer) is attractive — lean, perfectly cut hair, great teeth, fine complexions. Tom Cruise, currently nudging 60 but 56 and 57 during filming, looks like a 48 year old who works out, eats healthily and gets facials. Jennifer Connelly, playing his Maverick character’s 40something girlfriend, has never looked more radiant. Jon Hamm, Ed Harris…all the older dudes have flat abs.
There’s just no room in this well-tended realm for the graying, heavy-set, mid-60ish Kelly McGillis, who played Cruise’s lover, Charlie, in the 1986original. And even if she’d kept herself in shape…let’s not go there. McGillis is fine, she never would’ve made the cut, the producers liked Connelly, let it go.
Posted on 6.9.15: “Nancy Wells, my dear mom, passed Sunday night. She gave me everything — life, love, love of the arts (she turned me on to Peter Tchaikovsky, Ingmar Bergman, Alfred Hitchcock, John Updike, Frank Sinatra, George Gershwin…the list is infinite) and particularly love of theatre.
“She was the beating heart and balm of our family — 90% of the joy and spunk and laughter came from her, and she basically saved me and my brother and sister from my father’s alcoholic moodiness when we were young. (Not to diminish my dad’s influence too much — he gave me the writerly urge along with the barbed attitude, such as it is.) But I would have been dead without my mom’s emotional radiance and buoyancy.
“My mom loved show business, plays, films, music. She worked for NBC and BBC in the old days, acted in several plays in New Jersey (including Somserset Vaughn‘s The Constant Wife) and directed two or three plays at the Wilton Playshop. She was partnered in her own real-estate business in the late ’70s and early ’80s.
“She had been gradually slipping away for a couple of years (during my last visit in early May she didn’t even open her eyes). Now, at last, her peace is absolute.”
The sudden eruption of publicly-witnessed female sexuality in the mid ’50s…we get it. The damp, vulgar, pelvic-region kind. Which is why so many thousands of conservative-minded viewers of Elvis Presley‘s first-ever televised performance on The Milton Berle Show (4.3.56) wrote in to say how appalled and even horrified they were.
Earlier today HE commenter Patrick Juvet wrote the following: “Robert Harris knows the difference between genuine film grain and video noise, which you don’t. All of your rants against ‘digital mosquitos’ were often aimed at Sony transfers done by Grover Crisp‘s people — transfers that allowed all of the natural film grain to shine through (more than it would have in a film print ) and were praised to the skies by Mr. Harris in his reviews.”
HEreply: “Did you just say the Sony transfers ‘allowed all of the natural film grain to shinethrough’ and even ‘more than it would have in a film print’? Did you just say that?
“FILM GRAIN HAS NEVER SHINED THROUGH…EVER. Film grain is a visual affliction that classic-era dps were forced to finesse as best they could. It was a pestilence. If Gregg Toland could have made grain disappear by clapping his hands three times, he would have clapped his hands three times…TRUST ME!
“There has never been anything the least bit glorious or edifying or transcendent about film grain. It’s cinematic fog. (Not that there’s anything wrong with fog if you’re Fritz Lang and you’re shooting Manhunt with Walter Pidgeon. The London scenes, I mean.)
“Film grain is built into the image so it’s wrong to try and erase the stuff, but anyone who advocates for more film grain to show up on a Bluray of a classic film than the amount that was naturally visible to theatrical audiences is a grain perv…they have something psychologically wrong with them, I mean.
“And theatrical audiences of the ’30s, 40s and ’50s, by the way, weren’t clobbered with the stuff. The idea of film grain ‘shining through’ on home video more than it did in theatres is repugnant. It’s sick. You and people like you are like FOOT FETISHISTS, only it’s grain that turns you on, not the shape of women’s toes and the shade of their nail polish.”
The outcry triggered by the Frank Langella Fall of the House of Usher incident — i.e., getting whacked for mild crossing-the-line offenses — boils down to an issue of degree. How to deal with questionable on-set behavior that isn’t that bad within the greater scheme of things?
Nobody wants silence or indifference if an actress believes she’s been violated to some degree, even if the violation was a matter of small potatoes. If an actor does something that most of us would regard as vaguely uncool while performing a scene, appropriate measures should ensue. The vague offender should be taken aside and told in respectful but direct terms to stop being vaguely uncool or overly familiar or whatever the complaint is about. If an actor is any kind of pro they’ll listen and acknowledge and adapt.
But when is it appropriate for an actress with a legit complaint to “go nuclear” over a relatively minor transgression? That’s what Langella’s costar allegedly did — she “walked off the set” and didn’t return, according to Langella’s account.
This is also what Keke Palmer allegedly did when costar Bill Murray pulled her pigtail (or something in that general nyuk-nyuk, horsing-around realm) on the set of Being Mortal. Palmer was apparently inconsolable and is possibly still feeling that way. How else to interpret the fact that Being Mortal was shut down two weeks ago (on 4.20.22) and yet producers still haven’t announced that the film is resuming production? How many weeks of fretting does an actress need to recover from on-set joshing around when the josher has solemnly apologized?
Under these circumstances was “going nuclear” really necessary? Any professional actor will confirm that there’s a certain take-it-as-it-comes, turn-the-other-cheek, rough-and-tumble quality that comes with working with other thesps under the usual professional pressures. Something unexpected or unwelcome might occasionally happen, but sometimes it’s the better part of wisdom to just roll with that shit, as in water off a duck’s ass.
As we speak the presumption is that Langella may now be regarded as a risky hire (if not a cautionary tale by way of persona non grata) because of what “happened.”
But ask yourself this: If you were a producer would you want to hire an actress who has gone nuclear over her leg being touched or being hugged or having heard an off-color joke of some kind? Put another way, if you were a producer could you imagine saying to your casting colleagues, “You know that interesting actress whose complaint led to a temporary shutdown of a Netflix show and re-casting a major role and re-shooting weeks’ worth of material? I really want to hire her for my next film. She just has a certain quality that is perfect for a certain character. What do you guys think?”
And what about the idea of an actor submitting to the reality of a character and going with that, at least as far as a scene in question is concerned? The offended actress was playing the “young wife” of Langella’s Roderick Usher character, right? Let’s imagine what Langella and the actress in question were professionally obliged to imagine on that fateful day (3.25.22) — that Usher and his wife are real people involved in an actual marriage, and involved in some sort of physically intimate moment.
If you were Rodrick Usher’s wife would you freak out if your husband touched your leg or gave you a hug or said something a little bit rude or uncalled for? All marriages encounter rough patches and dicey situations, and a certain flexibility or tolerance is necessary to weather them.
Thenewtrailerfor Olivia Wilde’s Don’tWorryDarling (Warner Bros., 9.23) suggests a sexy, high-style period creep-out about middle-class conformity and submission to Big Corporate Brother.
Seemingly set in the ‘50s or early ‘60s. A mood similar to that of Martin Ritt‘s NoDownPayment (‘57), and clearly a metaphorical kin to Don Siegel’s Invasionof theBodySnatchers (‘56).
And right away they blow the mood by playing Brenton Wood’s “TheOogum BoogumSong,” which came out in ‘67 — an era in which fretting about cookie-cutter conformity had been left behind and people were into a whole ‘nother doobie-toke realm.
So right away you know that Wilde’s film is…uhm, playing by its own rules.
30 and 1/2 years after the appearance of this catchy little piece, an HE tribute to former Entertainment Weekly illustrator S.B. Whitehead — truly tops in his field.
