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Last May Lee Hill riffed on what killed the Mickey Rourke brand:

“Too much insecurity about what it is to ‘be a man in today’s world’ has derailed so many great American actors. Marlon Brando is at the top of this list. Warren Beatty isn’t on that list because he was addicted to politics and romance (and also managed to work that into his film work). Rourke sought solace in boxing as James Caan did in rodeo and treated his primary gig as a lark.

“I also think that so many actors of a certain generation lacked a formal education beyond high school and relied so heavily on intuition and not always savvy business advice…I’m sure that didn’t help either.

“The bottom line is that people stopped going to Rourke’s films because no one wants to see a great actor coast through a piece of shit movie when they are paying for parking, a babysitter, and trying to forget a shitty day at work, etc.

“And somehow in recent years we have arrived at the opposite extreme with Timothee Chalamet, who would probably start to have a really interesting career when he hits puberty around the age of 45.”

Two days ago (Monday, 10.11) Netflix Co-CEO Ted Sarandos sent a lengthy email to Netflix employees following the Dave Chappelle trans controversy over The Closer, according to Variety‘s Matt Donnelly.

Sarandos basically doubled down on Netflix’s support for Chappelle and reiterated the company’s intention to not pull The Closer.

I wish I could report that Sarandos’ email also said something like “a lot of us are frankly tiring of woke Twitter fanatics losing their shit whenever a performer says or tweets the wrong thing, including things they may have said 10 or 20 years ago, the idea being to cancel a show or ruin a career and generally spread terror throughout the community.”

I would be an even happier man if I could add that Sarandos wrote, “I’m not the only one who’s sick of this woke bullshit. Almost everyone is, and I’m talking about moderate liberals and people like Chappelle and Jimmy Kimmel and Sasha Stone and Bill Maher and Jerry Seinfeld as well as Average Joes and Janes who watch Netflix.

“Most of us hate you, in fact, and we’d really like to dump you on some South Pacific island so you can all torture and cancel each other and leave us the fuck alone.

“Woke crusades started out great in ’16, but it quickly got out of hand, and over the last three or four years the liberal media world has been snowflaked and Twitter-terrored to death, and a lot of us are really sick of it. And if you don’t like me saying this out loud, that’s too fucking bad. Because you can always quit.”

Alas, Sarandos didn’t say any of this. But I’ll bet you twenty dollars that he was thinking at least some of it when he wrote the message.

“We know that a number of you have been left angry, disappointed and hurt by our decision to put Dave Chappelle’s latest special on Netflix,” Sarandos wrote in an email obtained by Variety.

“With The Closer, we understand that the concern is not about offensive-to-some content but titles which could increase real world harm (such as further marginalizing already marginalized groups, hate, violence etc.)

“Last year we heard similar concerns about 365 Days and violence against women. While some employees disagree, we have a strong belief that content on screen doesn’t directly translate to real-world harm.

“The strongest evidence to support this is that violence on screens has grown hugely over the last thirty years, especially with first-party shooter games, and yet violent crime has fallen significantly in many countries. Adults can watch violence, assault and abuse — or enjoy shocking stand-up comedy — without it causing them to harm others.”

Donnelly: “That Sarandos would wade into a debate about the potential harmful effects of content is notable, given that those who condemn Chappelle’s jokes have specifically cited the physical danger that anti-trans ideology poses to that community.”

Is this the beginning of the end of woke terror and a return to sensible liberalism? Maybe, maybe not. But it smells to me like teen spirit.

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Yesterday Joseph McBride, author of the forthcoming “Billy Wilder: Dancing on the Edge” (Columbia University, 10.26), announced on Facebook that he’d just recorded a commentary track for a forthcoming Kino Bluray of Wilder’s Some Like It Hot (’59).

The Bluray is 4K UHD. This will be the first time that SLIH has been released in this format (3840p x 2160p). Your standard Bluray resolution is 1920p x1080p, of course. The Kino transfer will be the same beautiful version that Criterion released in November 2018.

And yet there was a problem with the Criterion Some Like It Hot, and that was the 1.85 aspect ratio. It needlessly and nihilistically slices off the tops and bottoms of the image, which has been 1.66 since the beginning of time.

Very slight slicings, agreed, but why chop off perfectly good visual information? It’s nothing short of perverse and diseased, but that’s the occasional way of Criterion eccentricity. They can be serious jerks when they feel like it.

Open message to Kino Lorber: “Why not differentiate your SLIH release by offering more than just a 4K UHD version? Why not give Billy Wilder‘s film more height by using a 1.66:1 aspect ratio? That’s the a.r. that everyone went with before Criterion came along with their completely unnecessary 1.85 version. Aspect ratio obsessives like myself would be deeply grateful if you would oblige.”

Before the handsome Criterion Bluray version came along the entire civilized world had agreed that Some Like It Hot is a 1.66 film.

That included Kino Lorber itself, which released a Some Like It Hot Bluray with a 1.66:1 a.r. in May 2011.

An old ’90s Criterion laser disc of SLIH, released in the early ’90s, used either a 1.66 or 1.37 a.r.

Look at any non-Scope United Artists release from the ’50s or ’60s; they were all mastered at 1.66 on laser discs and DVDs.

Look at these DVD Beaver screen capture pairings — the higher 1.66 versions are obviously above, the 1.85 versions below.

In a No Time To Die debate piece with Owen Gleiberman (“Is No Time to Die a Triumph or a Letdown? And Where Does the James Bond Series Go From Here?“), Variety critic Peter Debruge has written the following:

“The question now on everyone’s mind is who will take over for Craig. I suspect future installments will transpire in a parallel (but only just) dimension, the way past hand-offs have gone. That means we probably won’t see Lashana Lynch again.

“But introducing a Black woman as 007 opens the doors to a whole range of actors, and proves that of course Idris Elba or Riz Ahmed or Florence Pugh (my vote, if any Eon execs made it this far) could fill those shoes. He’s been played by a Scot (Sean Connery) and an Aussie (George Lazenby) already.”

The notion of Pugh being a successor to Daniel Craig and all the other Bond boys over the past 60 years…this idea is beyond ludicrous.

I’m not allowed to say this, but here goes anyway. Pugh, who recently went through the soul-draining Marvel motions with ScarJo in Black Widow, is TOO LITTLE to be play a Bond-like MI6 figure. She’s only 5’3”, for decency’s sake. I don’t think Lynch will get the gig either, but at 5′ 9″ she at least has the stature.

I know that nobody cares about bulk and muscles and upper body strength these days. A seasoned action director recently insisted to me that effective movie fighting is all about balance and agility and Thai combat techniques, etc. Whatever, man. But there’s no way in hell that Florence Pugh will come within 100 miles of playing a 007 figure down the road.

I might not have a problem with Riz Ahmed stepping into the role. The only problem is that he’s kinda short also — only 5′ 8″.

I won’t precisely say what happens at the end of No Time To Die, but it happens for two reasons — partly a dramatic one (which I respect within the realm of the plotting, James Bond‘s character arc, the emotional payoff and whatnot) but mostly for a political one.

The latter is about the producers’ belief that the curtain had to come down on Bond because his studly, smugly sexist, martini-sipping, tuxedo-wearing attitude had become an anachronism, and that this mid 20th Century character had to relinquish the reins in the woke era. Sooner or later all tropes become old hat and need to be retired. We all get that, except that this mid 20th Century character began to relinquish the sexist reins 25 years ago, and for the most part did relinguish them 15 years ago.

For that Bondian current of studly sexism is, in fact, a decades-old cliche — pretty much confined to the Sean Connery, George Lazenby and Roger Moore periods and pretty much brought to a close during the Pierce Brosnan era, and more or less absent during the time of Daniel Craig (’05 to ’21 — Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace, Skyfall, Spectre and No Time to Die).

And the wokesters don’t care — the Bond “thing” had to be symbolically terminated all the same.

Critics won’t say it was a political call, but it was — the last 40 minutes work dramatically on their own terms, as noted (and some will shed tears), but the finale was primarily implemented to satisfy “them.” Don’t kid yourself, and don’t let anyone blow smoke about this.

Excerpt from Matt Belloni‘s latest “What I’ve Heard”…

The two finest films I saw at last month’s Telluride Film Festival were Joe Wright‘s exquisitely made Cyrano (UA Releasing, 12.31) and Reinaldo Marcus Green‘s King Richard (Warner Bros., 11.19). As things currently stand, these are also the most deserving Best Picture contenders…no question. Here, at long last, is the Cyrano trailer:

Posted on 9.2.21: “I’ve been watching filmed adaptations of Edmund Rostand‘s Cyrano de Bergerac for decades (Jose Ferrer‘s 1950 version, Steve Martin‘s Roxanne, the 1990 Gerard Depardieu version, and Michael Lehmann‘s The Truth About Cats and Dogs). Wright’s newbie — an inventively choreographed musical, fortified by first-rate production design and wonderfully lighted cinematography — is arguably the most spiritually and poetically buoyant version of them all.

The acting is top-tier, the musical numbers are arresting, the dialogue is as good as this sort of thing gets, and it’s a truly authentic time-tunnel experience (save for the presentism in the casting, which is par for the course these days).

Peter Dinklage has absolutely hit the jackpot with his titular performance — he’ll definitely be Best Actor-nominated. The film will almost certainly end up being Best Picture-nominated, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the year-end consensus is that Cyrano is a “better” musical than Steven Spielberg‘s West Side Story and Jon Chu‘s In The Heights combined.

Based on Schmidt’s 2018 stage musical of the same name (in which Dinklage and Haley Bennett costarred before moving onto the film version), Cyrano is easily Wright’s best film since Anna Karenina. Seamus McGarvey‘s exquisite cinematography reminded me of David Watkins‘ lensing of Richard Lester‘s The Three Musketeers (’73) — it’s a real trip just to watch and sink into on a visual level alone.

Kudos to Cyrano costars Kelvin Harrison Jr., Bashir Salahuddin and Ben Mendelsohn.

SPOILERS ALLUDED TO WITHIN THE FOLLOWING: Last night I watched Daniel Craig‘s last and final James Bond film, knowing full well what the storyline was and particularly what the ending would deliver.

And I enjoyed it thoroughly. I was never bored, and was seriously impressed with Cary Fukanaga‘s pacing, cutting, visual discipline and overall chops. There’s never any doubt that this is a grade-A package made by grade-A people. Plus it’s Craig’s best Bond since Casino Royale, and one of the best overall. And knowing about the ending didn’t fucking matter at all. There’s a difference between watching a film as an adult, and watching one as an infant.

The pleasure of any film is in the way it unfolds — that special-touch factor, the art of it, the timing, the polish, the undercurrent, the first-classiness of it all. How the story is told, not the story itself…right? Singer, not song.

Plus the whole plot is sitting on the film’s Wikipedia page. Al Pacino in The Insider: “The cat totally out of the bag…”

On top of which Craig doesn’t play a boorish old-school sexist. He never has really. He plays a good, decent, smart, non-arrogant fellow in No Time to Die, and when the big moment comes it’s rather sad and classically invested in. And that’s where I shed my single, solitary tear.

Let no one doubt that the ending of No Time To Die was written by people who are terrified of seeming tethered to the past (who isn’t?), and are triply terrified of wokester (especially #MeToo) wrath, and that the ending was written to make a point — i.e., we’re in a new world, and there’ll be no more of that old “shaken, not stirred” broth…that smooth, sexist, tuxedo-wearing, martini-sipping swagger. We’re ending that shit here and now.

And it’s completely foolish and stupid, by the way, for the film to say at the end of the closing credits that JAMES BOND WILL RETURN. No Time To Die is not a Marvel or a D.C. film.

Friendo to HE: “I can’t say for sure what the Bond producers will do, but there’s way too much money on the table for them to just say goodbye to James Bond. And Barbara Broccoli is on record as saying that the character won’t be a woman. Bond will be back, with a new actor (probably a Caucasian), and they’ll present it as a reboot.”

HE to Friendo: “But they’ve conclusively eliminated that possibility. The only way to get around this would be inject Marvel and D.C.-styled plotting.”

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True story: “I was driving along Melrose Ave. near Doheny in late 1983. (Or was it early ’84?) I noticed that a new BMW in front of me had a framed license plate that came from a dealer in Westport, Connecticut, where I had lived only five years earlier and which is next to my home town of Wilton.

“I pulled alongside the Beemer and saw right away that the driver was Anne Baxter, who looked pretty good for being 60 or thereabouts. I rolled down my window and said, “Hey, Westport…I’m from Wilton!” And Baxter waved and smiled and cried out “Hiiiiii!” [Originally posted on 2.8.13.]

I realize that many Millennials and Zoomers have no idea who Baxter was, but eventually a generation will come along that has never heard of them. I can’t recall the name of the Westport dealership where Baxter bought her Beemer. For decades Baxter lived at 25 Knapp Street in Easton.

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“Sean Baker’s Red Rocket (aka ‘Dog Erection’) teeters on the line between mostly legitimate film festival-smarthouse cinema and relentlessly depraved and disgusting sociopath-porn.

“It’s ‘good’ in the sense that Baker isn’t afraid to show his lead character, Simon Rex‘s “Mikey Saber”, dive into gross and reprehensible behavior but most of the supporting players besides. We’re talking bottom-of-the-barrel Texas trash here. Nor does Baker feel obliged to deliver some form of moral redemption for Mikey, which I respect. Yes, Baker occasionally delivers slick chops and whatnot, and yes, Mikey has a sizable horse schlong (even when flaccid), but the scuzz factor in this film is REALLY rank. It was not a pleasant sit, but that’s the point, I realize.

“The Galaxy crowd totally hated it — a quick shattering of applause and then silence and hasty exits.” — posted from the Telluride Film Festival on 9.4.21.

The “naked Mikey wearing a huge red donut” poster is much more audience-friendly than any stand-out aspect of the film, although I should offer side props to Susanna Son, who makes an impression as “Strawberry,” Mikey’s gullible, up-for-anything girlfriend.

In Damian Chazelle‘s Babylon (Paramount, 12.25.22), Brad Pitt plays a dapper, in-some-ways-John Gilbert-resembling movie star who, shall we say, runs into some difficulty during Hollywood’s transition from silents to sound in the late 1920s to early ’30s. Margot Robbie plays Clara Bow, according to the IMDB.

Pitt was captured yesterday during a break from filming at The Ebell of Los Angeles (743 So. Lucerne Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90005), which is often used for period filming. The Ebell includes a clubhouse building and the 1,270-seat Wilshire Ebell theatre.

“Fellini Satyricon meets Day of the Locust,” posted on 7.21.19: “I’ve partially read a May 2019 draft of Damien Chazelle‘s Babylon, his theatrical follow-up to First Man. Babylon is a late 1920s Hollywood tale about a huge sea-change in the nascent film industry (i.e., the advent of sound and the up-and-down fortunes that resulted) and about who got hurt and those who survived.

“A la Quentin Tarantino‘s Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, Babylon offers a blend of made-up characters and a few real-life Hollywood names of the time — Clara Bow, Anna May Wong. Paul Bern and an “obese” industry fellow who represents Fatty Arbuckle. (I’m presuming there are many others.) I’ve only read about 40% of it, and I’m certainly not going to describe except in the most general of terms. It runs 184 pages, and that ain’t hay.

“Most of Chazelle’s story (or the portion that I’ve read) is amusingly cynical and snappy, at other times mellow and humanist, and other times not so much. It takes place in the golden, gilded realms of Los Angeles during this convulsive, four or five-year period (roughly 1926 to 1931, maybe ’32) when movie dialogue tipped the scales and re-ordered the power structure. Everyone above the level of food catering had to re-assess, re-think, change their game.

“It starts out with a long, bravura sequence that will probably impress critics and audiences in the same way La-La Land‘s opening freeway dance number did. Except Babylon is darker, raunchier. The first 26 or 27 pages acquaint us with the main characters (one of whom may be played by Emma Stone) while diving into the most bacchanalian Hollywood party you’ve ever attended or read about. Cocaine, booze, exhibitionist sex, an elephant, the singing of a lesbian torch song, heroin, blowjobs, and a certain inanimate…forget it.

“Unless Chazelle embarks on a serious rewrite, the 27-minute opening of Babylon is going to seem like quite the envelope pusher. It’s basically Fellini Satyricon meets Day of the Locust meets the secret orgy sequence in Eyes Wide Shot meets the Copacabana entrance scene in Goodfellas. Plus Baz Luhrmann‘s The Great Gatsby meets The Bad and the Beautiful meets Singin’ in the Rain meets The Big Knife…that’ll do for openers.”

On 9.17 I conveyed admiration for Roger Durling’s costly amber-red Jack Nicholson glasses. 16 days later I received a poor man’s version of Durling’s costly red specs (Blubox, $125, made in Australia), and I’m very happy with them.

Clark Gable was in his late teens when this photo was taken with his dad around ’19 or ’20. He’s almost freakish looking. Baby Huey-ish, over-fed or even chubby. Imagine if Gable’s head was shaved and he was wearing a Dan Aykroyd conehead. I’m fairly sure he had his ears surgically pinned back when he began to happen as an actor in the mid to late ’20s. And yet by the mid ’30s Gable was a huge matinee idol. It just goes to show that sometimes actors don’t really become their iconic selves until they hit 30 or 35 even, and have acquired a few creases and character lines.

Please post photos of actors or actresses who really didn’t look attractive or have that X-factor thing in their mid to late teens, but grew into it later on.