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Note to HE community: Please pay attention to this post, but especially to the final five paragraphs — thank you.

Yesterday Gordon Klein, a veteran professor at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, posted an essay on Bari Weiss’s Substack about being hounded and threatened by campus wokester fanatics for not going along with a suggestion (contained in a 6.2.20 letter from a “non-black” student of Klein’s) that he grade his Black students with “greater leniency than others in the class” because, you know, they have it tougher than white students and need all the support they can get.

Excerpt from 6.2.20 letter: “The unjust murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, the life-threatening actions of Amy Cooper and the violent conduct of the [University of California Police Department] have led to fear and anxiety which is further compounded by the disproportionate effect of Covid-19 on the Black community.

“As we approach finals week, we recognize that these conditions place Black students at an unfair academic disadvantage due to traumatic circumstances out of their control.”

In other words, the white student was claiming, Black students are too socially handicapped and emotionally traumatized to get their shit together and study and apply themselves to the curriculum. Given all the social and psychological pressures, the only decent thing to do is give them a pass if their grades aren’t up to snuff.

More specifically, the final exam that Black students take should be a “no harm” exam — one that would be counted only if it boosted one’s grade.

Klein found this suggestion appalling, and as a result was subjected to a campus-wide hate and removal campaign in which he was tarred and feathered as “woefully racist.” This was followed by a suspension on 6.5.20, followed by a near-firing. He is now suing UCLA over this whole affair.

I was struck by this episode because it reminded me of a similar incident that happened when I was in 11th grade in Wilton High School — a critical year in terms of grade-point averages and applying to various colleges. I had been earning poor grades in everything except English composition and gym, and so I wrote a letter to the WHS principal and others in charge, pleading for leniency because I had it tougher than other students due to (a) an abusive alcoholic father, (b) a bad case of low self-esteem, (c) an inordinate aversion to boring classes, and (d) a deep-seated preference for listening to rock music.

I know this sounds satiric, but I did have it tougher than others back then. Or so I believed.

Excerpt from Wilton high-school letter: “The unjust, bloody beating that I received from my father when I was 16, along with various psychological pressures impacting my teenage mind…various forms of emotional torture, sexual intimidation by hot girls who haven’t found me sufficiently attractive, and the traumatizing conduct of the Wilton Police Department in their brutal confiscations of cases of beer, [confiscations] that have deprived me and my friends of the pleasures of getting buzzed on weekends, not to mention the fear and convulsions caused by the disproportionate effect of primal sexual urges that plague me night and day…

“As Wilton juniors approach finals week, I’m requesting that you recognize and sympathize with the fact that the afore-mentioned pressures and conditions, all of which are out of my control, have placed me at an unfair academic disadvantage. I therefore request that Wilton High School allow me to take ‘no harm’ final exams in my various courses — ones that would be counted only if they boost my grade.”

Wilton administrators refused my request, and soon after my life took a turn for the worse. It took me years to recover and take a stab at movie journalism. It is my earnest hope that present-day college professors and department heads and deans can see past the brusque and dismissive attitudes of the past and urge that all attending Black students to be treated with appropriate scholastic leniency.

I visit and re-visit Mark Harris‘s “Mike Nichols: A Life.” It’s obviously been thoroughly researched and Harris has always been a smooth and engaging writer (and I love the chapter on the making of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolff) but for whatever reason I can only digest a modest portion at a time. And then I nod off or get distracted and wander away and forget about Harris-Nichols, and then, a week or a month later, I’ll start reading again. And always late at night.

I’m now reading the Graduate chapter, and a year-old exchange between Joe Leydon and myself is coming to mind.

Leydon: “Something else about The Graduate and not unlike The Sterile Cuckoo, which followed two years later. It appears timeless because it’s not at all reflective of its time. You’d never know from looking at these films (both of which I love, and both of which I saw back in the day) that the Vietnam War was going on.”

HE response: “The Graduate actually was reflective of its time as far as your vaguely stifling upper-middle-class norms were concerned. Anti-Vietnam War and anti-Dow Chemical napalm fervor (‘Dow shall not kill’) was hot on university campuses but not in your cushy suburbs. I can tell you that in Wilton, Connecticut — that leafy, well-tended, exurban hamlet that I felt half-oppressed and half-drugged by — the anti-Vietnam War thing only caught on in the aftermath of all the ’68 convulsions (MLK and RFK killings, LBJ folding his tent, Chicago Democratic Convention riots) and beyond.

“In ’66 and ‘67, the middle-class miasma was mainly about singing Beatles songs at parties and getting high and zoning out…an odd blend of vague resignation and regimentation and cruising around for nocturnal adventure. Whiffs of sexual secretions and Brooks Brothers shirts that smelled like pot (although scoring was very hard unless you were “in” with certain folkies and/or hung out with certain people in Westport) and and the sounds of Buffalo Springfield and Revolver and Sgt. Pepper. In short, the Vietnam War didn’t really begin to intrude upon this strata of American culture (Brentwood and Beverly Hills being somewhat similar to Wilton) until the Tet Offensive and then Johnson’s announcement that he wouldn’t be running again, etc.

“So Nichols and Graduate screenwriter Buck Henry did, in fact, capture the way things were for the Benjamin Braddocks and Elaine Robinsons in ’66 and ’67.”

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“The Unchosen One” is a curiously moving short doc (15:58), directed by Ben Proudfoot, about how feelings of loss and hurt have lingered inside ex-child actor Devon Michael, now 32. They resulted from Michael not being chosen by George Lucas to play Anakin Skywalker in The Phantom Menace (’99).

Michael was one of three finalists for the role — himself, Almost Famous costar Michael Angarano and Jake Lloyd. Lloyd got the part, of course, and we all know how critics and fanboys responded.

Would things have turned out any better if Michael had been chosen? Perhaps not given the quality of Lucas’s film and the presence of Jar-Jar Binks, but my sense is that he probably would have been better than Lloyd, partly because of a certain curt intensity and directness of manner — guarded but watchful — and partly because almost anyone would’ve been an improvement over Lloyd. I’ve always presumed that Lucas chose Lloyd at least partly because of his cute looks.

I’m again recalling that moment when hundreds (including Paul Thomas Anderson) poured into Mann’s Village in Westwood to see the world premiere of the Phantom Menace trailer. It happened in the early afternoon of Thursday, 11.6.98. Every Los Angeles film fanatic with blood in his or her veins was there. The movie that nobody stayed for after the trailer was shown was Edward Zwick ‘s The Siege, which the crowd was mocking with a chant….”Siege! Siege! Siege!”

And then The Phantom Menace opened on 5.19.99, and the whole thing came tumbling down. It doesn’t matter how much money that mostly tedious film made. In the minds of many it destroyed the Star Wars theology. True believers were shattered, crestfallen.

The notion of seasoned people in their 40s and 50s undergoing identity crises and indulging in impulsive, unconventional behavior began with Sam Peckinpah‘s The Wild Bunch (’69), the main protagonists of which were all long-of-tooth. In the cultural blink of an eyelash, wildness was suddenly an older-person thing. The spiritual-sexual side of this syndrome was explored by Tom Wolfe in the early ’70s, aka “the Me Decade.” A minor signifier was Middle Age Crazy (’80), a totally disappeared dramedy with Bruce Dern and Ann-Margret.

But then teens have always been wild, and 20somethings have always lived lives of Fellini Satyricon. Hell, the only people living modest, carefully regimented lives these days are expectant parents (like Jett and Cait) — otherwise it’s hoo-hah time from 12 through 75.

Now comes a qualifier by way of Will Smith and Denzel Washington. Middle-age crazy is composed of two phases — the “funky 40s” and the “fuck-it 50s.”

Will Smith to GQ‘s Wesley Lowery: “Throughout the years, I would always call Denzel. He’s a real sage. I was probably 48 or something like that and I called Denzel. He said, ‘Listen. You’ve got to think of it as the funky 40s. Everybody’s 40s are funky. But just wait till you hit the fuck-it 50s.’

“And that’s exactly what happened,” Smith recalls. “[Soon after my life] just became the fuck-it 50s, and I gave myself the freedom to do whatever I wanted to do.”

Many of those things are detailed in “Will” (11.9.21), Smith’s semi-“autobiography” that was co-authored by Mark Manson (author of “Everything is Fucked: A Book About Hope” and “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life”).

Smith: “I totally opened myself up to what, I think, was a fresh sampling of the fruits of the human experience.”

Lowery: “And so Smith set out on a journey to find himself, and find happiness. He rented a house in Utah and sat in solitude for 14 days. He traveled to Peru for more than a dozen rituals [involving the sipping of a plant-based psychedelic called ayahuasca], even though he’d never even smoked weed and barely drank. (‘This was my first tiny taste of freedom,’ Smith writes of his first experience. ‘In my fifty plus years on this planet, this is the unparalleled greatest feeling I’ve ever had.’) He opened a stand-up show for Dave Chappelle. He began traveling without security for the first time, showing up in foreign countries and working his way through the airport crowds unaccompanied.

The fact that Smith defines “exotic high” as flying commercial and working his way through airport crowds without a pair of security goons…this in itself tells you he’s an odd duck. What’s next…hitting a Rite-Aid at 11 pm all by his lonesome and buying some paper towels and maybe an ice cream cone?

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As noted a few days ago, the trailer for Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Licorice Pizza (UA Releasing, 11.26) indicates that it’s mainly a romantic relationship story about age-disparate characters played by Cooper (son of Phillip Seymour) Hoffman and rock musician Alana Haim.

Cooper’s character is an aspiring actor named Gary Valentine; Haim is apparently playing a late-teens or 20something woman named Alana Kane. We see them go through initial attraction, flirtation, awkward sexual stuff, warmth, misunderstandings, getting back together, etc.

May I ask something? Hoffman and Haim play younger-older — there’s a line in which she says “I think it’s weird that I hang out with Gary and his 15 year-old friends all the time.” In actuality Hoffman is 18 (17 when the film was shot) and Haim is 29 — 11 years apart. That’s a significant gulf when you’re young.

Imagine if Licorice Pizza was about an older-looking dude (and played by a 29 year-old) falling in love with a 15 year-old girl who’s played by an 18 year-old actress. If so, the reaction could be in the realm of Dear Evan Hansen. People might say “so it’s about a cradle robber…a guy who’s unable to grow up and is hiding in the cave of a youthful romance with a girl who’s too young for him?”

But because #MeToo has given women more agency and independence, it’s totally cool for a 29 year-old to be cast as a somewhat older woman who falls into a relationship with a kid who’s wet behind the ears. Yes, only a nervy director like PTA would even go there, but be honest — Licorice Pizza couldn’t happen with the sex roles reversed.

9.20.21: It seems to me that if you’re a major-league director making a supposedly important film about a couple of love-struck kids (even though the off-screen Haim is pushing 30), you can go with one unknown as long as you pair him/her with a skilled name-brand actor, but you can’t have two unknowns carrying the film because no one will care all that much.

I mean, movies deal in familiar faces and personalities for a reason…right?

There are basic rules about young person relationship movies. Rule #1 is that at least one of the kids should be a half-familiar face, which helps with the comfort factor. Rule #2 is that the kids have to be at least somewhat attractive, not just to each other but to the audience. I’m sorry but ginger-haired Cooper Hoffman looks nerdy and freckly. I can’t put myself in his shoes. I really can’t. Haim isn’t anyone’s idea of a knockout either. The idea seems to be “the odd couple.”

Yes, David Bowie‘s “Life on Mars” helps to some extent.

I might give a damn or even care a great deal about these two when I start watching the actual film, but my first honest reaction was “the movie rests on their shoulders?”

The film has been described as a ‘70s San Fernando Valley thing, focusing on the TV industry with a partial focus on Bradley Cooper‘s Jon Peters, L.A. City Council member Joel Wachs (Benny Safdie), a film director (Tom Waits) and Sean Penn as a smiling, big-personality guy in a slick gray business suit.

There’s a snippet between Hoffman’s character and and Cooper / Peters in which Peters mentions his “girlfriend” Barbra Streisand, followed by a back and forth about how to pronounce the second syllable of her last name. StreiSAND is the correct pronunciation.

Again: Why exactly would Peters, famously paired with a world-famous actress and with ambitions to produce and become a hot shot…why would Peters smash some car windows with a golf putter, and then shout and celebrate this aggression? Guess I’ll find out.

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Yesterday Robert Rossen‘s The Hustler celebrated its 60th anniversary. It opened on 9.25.61.

All the principals except Piper Laurie are long dead — director Robert Rossen, costars Paul Newman, Jackie Gleason, George C. Scott, Myron McCormick, Michael Constantine, dp Eugene Shuftan, editor Dede Allen — and it’s still a thing of ripe beauty in many respects.

And yet for decades I’ve felt irked by the script’s nagging moral undertow, voiced by Laurie’s Sara character. In an Act Two scene (a picnic), Sara marvels at Eddie Felson’s gift for pool-shooting (“Some men never feel like that”), and yet she berates him for playing for money. What’s Eddie supposed to do, become a bus driver or short-order cook and play for free on weekends?

And I’ve always been irritated by the grim expressions of McCormick’s Charlie. Once Felson starts playing Minnesota Fats in the temple of Ames Billiards, Charlie seems intimidated and bummed out by the stakes, the vibe…by everything. Shuftan’s elegant cinematography tells you what a joy the game can be, but Sara and Charlie do nothing but groan and lament. They’re a drag to be around.

Four days ago The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg posted his first forecast about the Best Picture Oscar race, and he put Reinaldo Marcus Green, Zach Baylin and Will Smith‘s King Richard at the top of the list.

Feinberg was completely correct in doing so for a simple, undeniable reason. Of all the contenders seen so far King Richard is the only one that is (a) exceptionally well made, (b) perfectly acted and (c) makes you feel good in an honest, fully earned, non-pandering way.

There are no other Best Picture hopefuls that have even come close to managing this feat. No other 2021 film so far has delivered this kind of effective emotional pizza. Plus it’s a mostly all-black sports film** (the saga of tennis stars Venus and Serena Williams) about a super-competitive family from Compton, and in particular about a thorny, whip-cracking dad (i.e., Smith’s Richard Williams) who was far from perfect.

Smith is a Best Actor lock; ditto Aunjanue Ellis as his combative wife + mother of phenomenal daughters.

King Richard delivers a metaphor that everyone will understand and relate to — if you want to win, you have to be hardcore.

There are several films I haven’t seen, but I can still tell (or make a very good guess about) which ones will meet these three criteria.

Using Feinberg’s list as a template, here are my no-bullshit assessments as things currently stand. The boldfaced titles are the only ones that stand a fraction of a chance of beating King Richard. (I’ve also boldfaced King Richard for emphasis.)

1. King Richard (Warner Bros., 11.19) — The only Best Picture contender right now that looks like a real winner.
2. Belfast (Focus, 11.12) — Sentimental, cloying and manipulative family drama — an Irish Roma with an overly cute central kid character + wall-to-wall Van Morrison.
3. A Hero (Amazon) — Brilliant Asghar Farhadi film that will most likely be slotted in the Best Int’l Feature category.
4. The Power of the Dog (Netflix. 11.17) — Exceptionally well made, skillfully acted period drama about Montana ranchers writhing in denial and misery with a little touch of anthrax — makes you feel really, really bad. All hail Jane Campion, but the only time you feel good about The Power of the Dog is when it ends.
5. Dune (Warner Bros., 10.22) — Torture to sit through for some; delightful for genre geeks. Not a prayer of being nominated for Best Picture.
6. C’mon, Cmon (A24) — Haven’t seen it, but for years my basic motto has been “beware of Mike Mills.”
7. CODA (Apple, 8.13) — Appealing but not good enough — a feel-good sitcom about a hearing-impaired Massachusetts family in the fishing business, and a high-school age daughter who wants to sing.
8. Spencer (Neon/Topic, 11.5) — Not a chance. Agony to sit through. Strictly a platform for Kristen Stewart‘s Best Actress campaign.
9. The Lost Daughter (Netflix, 12.31) — Haven’t seen it but I’m told it’s somewhere between okay and not that great.
10. Cyrano (MGM/UA, 12.31) — Brilliant musical. Joe Wright‘s finest effort since Anna Karenina. Exquisite Best Actor-calibre lead performance by Peter Dinklage.

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(Top) Morning mist and fields of flowering poppies in Umbria’s Piano Grande — highlighted in 9.23.21 N.Y. Times piece titled “The Vibrant Resilience of Castelluccio di Norcia.”

(Bottom) Podere Belvedre farm in Val d’Orcia, visited and snapped by your truly in May 2000.

Snapped sometime in late May of 2000

No Time To Die helmer Carey Fukunaga to THR‘s Tatiana Siegel: “Is it Thunderball or Goldfinger where, like, basically Sean Connery’s character rapes a woman? She’s like ‘No, no, no,’ and he’s like, ‘Yes, yes, yes.’ That wouldn’t fly today.”

Of course it wouldn’t. Such a scene would never be considered. But it didn’t “fly” 57 years ago either.

Even by mid ’60s standards the Goldfinger “barn” scene was a silly jape. The joke was that Connery’s 007 was such an irresistable hound that even Honor Blackman‘s Pussy Galore, an avowed lesbian, succumbs to his overbearing masculinity after resisting for three or four seconds. Remember also that Blackman’s surrender happens after a judo match in which she and Connery throw each other around.

True, Connery is on top of Blackman during the moment of capitulation, but the attitude is half-comedic. The playful music conveys the mood.

Perhaps Fukunaga is partly recalling a scene from Alfred Hitchcock‘s Marnie, in which Connery’s Mark Rutland actually rapes the frigid titular character (Tippi Hedren), whom he’s just married. Marnie and Goldfinger were released the same year (’64) and two months apart — Marnie on 7.22.64, Goldfinger on 9.18.64 (in England) and 12.22.64 (in the U.S,).

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The New York Film Festival press screening of Joel Coen‘s The Tragedy of Macbeth happens on Friday morning, 9.24. Several public screenings of the A24 release will happen a few hours later (Alice Tully, Walter Reade and two other venues).

There’s an embargo, as always. Critics can never post reviews of the opening-night NYFF film until that night.

I’ve been detecting “uh-oh” reactions for a while now, but let’s cool our jets until the moment arrives.

Roman Polanski‘s shortened but reasonably faithful Macbeth (’71) ran 140 minutes; Coen’s version runs 105.

The trailer for The Tragedy of Macbeth pops on Tuesday, 9.21.

The sprawling Connecticut ranch-style home (French doors, spacious, big lawn, sycamore trees) owned by Katharine Hepburn‘s wealthy mother in Bringing Up Baby became a real thing. Howard Hawks, director of the 1938 screwball comedy, and his wife “Slim” built a home based on the design. They either called it “Hog Canyon” or it was built in Hog Canyon — I could never figure out which. (Originally referenced in “Legendary Movie Homes,” posted on 3.17.21.)

Somewhere in these United States, 35 to 64 year-olds** have been invited to see Aaron Sorkin‘s Being The Ricardos later this week. Word around the campfire is that Javier Bardem‘s performance as Desi Arnaz is the standout element, and a likely contender for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar. The descriptive copy in the invitation is a bit windy, but here it is:

“Being the Ricardos, directed by Aaron Sorkin, charts the ups and downs of Hollywood legends Lucille Ball (Nicole Kidman) and Desi Arnaz (Javier Bardem) in creating their iconic I Love Lucy TV show, which both strengthened and destroyed them as a couple.

“Even though the series allowed them to play house and become people they weren’t in reality (but wished they could be), the movie examines how being the top pop icons of the day took a toll on both their personal and professional lives in an inventive and unique style, filled with kinetic energy.

“As Lucy and Desi prepare over the course of a single week to shoot an episode that will go down in history as having some of the funniest and most memorable scenes to grace television, we will be enthralled to peek into why despite all of that passion and success their world-famous relationship could never be.”

Cutting to the chase: Arnaz’s Cuban upbringing taught him that catting around outside the bonds of marriage was perfectly acceptable or at least workable.

Excerpt from Chicago Tribune interview with their daughter Lucie Arnaz: “My father loved women, and Latin American countries have a whole different code of ethics. There’s the home with the wife, and the house with the mistress. Each is highly respected by the other.

“Unfortunately, my mother was from upstate New York, and my father couldn’t get her to go along with that concept.”

A 1955 Confidential article alleged that the Cuban-born actor told a friend, “What’s she so upset about? I don’t take out other broads. I just take out hookers.” (Reported in an 8.13.20 Vanity Fair article, titled “Did Desi Really Love Lucy?“)

Obviously Arnaz was an inconsiderate sexist dog. If a husband is determined to run around to his heart’s content, he at least needs to keep it on the down-low. Out of respect for his wife’s honor, I mean. Never push it in her face. Allow her to think that things might be okay.

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