29 years after the release of Geoffrey Wright‘s Romper Stomper (’92), one of the most indelible, pared-to-the-bone, punch-kick-and-wallop flicks about hate groups ever made, I happened to re-watch an especially memorable gang-fight scene.
In this unfortunate era of #StopAsianHate, the scene feels cathartic as hell and even joyous in a certain sense. I would love to see such a scene reenacted in any present-day environment in which anti-Asian sentiment is presumed to reside.
It starts with six or seven skinheads (led by an astonishingly young and slender Russell Crowe) beating up on three or four Vietnamese guys in a family-owned pub. But word gets out immediately, and a large mob of furious Vietnamese youths arrive and beat the living crap out of the skinheads. Hate in and hate out. Bad guys pay the price. Glorious! Hashtags are well and good but, as Woody Allen said about Nazis in that MOMA-party scene in Manhattan, baseball bats really bring the point home.
Wiki excerpt: “Director John Boorman chose locations that were ‘stark’. The LAX walkway down which Marvin strode originally had flower pots lining the walls. Boorman had them taken out.”
…in a present-tense context? I’m not sure but maybe it’ll come to me if I think hard. Perhaps if I ask the HE commentariat? I seem to recall that Arthur Miller’s 1953 play was an allegory about some kind of prosecutorial atmosphere that was going on in the early ’50s. Ahh, forget it. Wasn’t Miller some kind of a leftie crackpot? What did he know anyway? Why didn’t he try harder to just, you know, entertain people and give them a little respite from their troubles?
Johnson has written the two Knives Out sequels and will now direct them with Daniel Craig reprising his role as the Hercule Poirot-like Benoit Blanc.
The big HE question is whether or not Ana de Armas‘ “Marta”, the central character in Johnson‘s original Knives Out, will return in the sequels. If so, Johnson will have to decide if she’ll continue to wear those annoying Saks Fifth Off hipster pants (cuffs three or inches above the shoe line) that only upmarket, cutting-edge Millennial women and style-enslaved actresses wear.
If Johnson is smart he’ll steer clear of this questionable wardrobe choice and start fresh. If, that is, de Armas will be returning in the first place.
Eight years ago Johnson and I shared a nice Indian dinner in Paris. We met at the now-shuttered Angeethi (36 rue de la Roquette) as Johnson had just been to a Wagner opera at the Bastille Opera. Johnson was the first Hollywood hotshot to urge me to try Uber, which I had never ridden at that point. He also told me about Tunnel Bear, a VPN service that was created in 2011.
The more I hated the hyper jackhammer insanity of Uncut Gems (’19), which wasn’t so much “directed” as mainlined by the crazy hypodermic Safdies, the more I fell in love with the memory of Karel Reisz and James Toback‘s The Gambler (’74) — a film that considers the gambling-junkie pathology in tragic-poetic terms.
I can rent a high-def streaming copy any day of the week, but I’d love to own a first-rate Bluray as a keepsake. An Imprint Bluray is out on 5.26.21, at a cost of $34.95, Isn’t that a bit much? And isn’t the orange packaging a stopper? It sure is on this end.
Seasoned Filmmaker to HE: “I’ve come to strongly believe that Promising Young Woman is hitting the 60-plus White Male Academy voters (which still constitute the majority) in a sweet spot, and that for this reason Emerald Fennell‘s film is bound to be the upset Best Picture winner that Parasite was last year. Trust me — Promising Young Woman is the film that ALL my voter colleagues in LA and overseas are raving about.”‘
HE to Seasoned Filmmaker: “Really? Huh. And what do your friends think of Nomadland?”
Seasoned Filmmaker to HE: “Non-urgent admiration for Nomadland.”
HE to Seasoned Filmmaker: “I feel the same way about Nomadland but at least it doesn’t have a glaring error like Promising Young Woman — it has more overall integrity and a unity of purpose.
“But can you tell me why older white guys are so taken with Promising Young Woman?
“It’s a dry, arch & acrid indictment film of not most but ALL young males on the prowl. It doesn’t say most of them are indecent predators (a harsh but arguably valid point of view) but ALL of them are, as even Bo Burnham’s nice guy pediatrician boyfriend is revealed at the end to be a friend and apologist of a rapist.
“On a certain level I admire Fennell’s boldness of vision (however extreme) because this is how strong social-vision directors have tended to operate from Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel onward. But pulling the rug out on audiences during the last 15 minutes by suddenly identifying Burnham as just another bad guy is a mark of mediocre writing — a capitulation to an industry-wide rule that a last-minute twist is required of all scripts.”
Seasoned Filmmaker to HE: “So many Older White Male Academy members have a skeleton in their closet. Younger Academy men do as well. Moonlight and Parasite allowed the Academy to atone for #OscarsSoWhite. Right now Academy members want more than anything to not be caught on the wrong side of Cancel Culture. Promising Young Woman is this year’s Parasite.”
HE to Seasoned Filmmaker: “Okay, got it — Promising Young Woman has a possible edge on the Best Picture Oscar because of the Woke Terror factor. It’s the culturally safe choice — a kind of ‘get out of jail’ card to be used in case of an emergency.”
Seasoned Filmmaker to HE: “It’s all in the mind…but yes.”
A day or two later I watched a KL companion disc — a Bluray of Feldman’s In God We Tru$t, a 1980 anti-religion, anti-corporate satire that proved to be Feldman’s undoing.
The film contained a brief riff that insulted Universal/MCA by comparing it morally to the Ku Klux Klan. Feldman was told to remove the bit but he refused, contractually fortified as he was with final cut. In so doing he effectively terminated his five-film deal with Universal.
Plus InGodWeTru$t wasn’t very funny. Not a total wash (it’s an inventive effort and carefully assembled) but that mescaline-in-the-blood feeling was in low supply.
Spencer’s commentary is just as first-hand candid and knowledgable as his Beau Geste shpiel, but the God We Tru$t saga is basically a downer. I’m sorry but it’s hard to feel intrigued, much less turned on, by a story about a comic genius who simultaneously killed himself (Feldman smoked five to six packs of cigarettes per day) and deep-sixed his career at roughly the same time. It’s an emotional tale from Spencer’s perspective, but tinged with a wasteful residue.
Feldman died of a heart attack in a Mexico City hotel in 1982, while filming Yellowbeard.
Our favorite Sunday hiking path…Whittier Drive and Lexington, north to Bridle Lane and then left on Angelo Drive and up, up, up and winding like a snake, right on Davies Drive, up and down and winding down to Cielo Drive and down to Benedict Canyon south, right on Roxbury and back to Lexington. Roughly a two-hour journey including breathers.
I wouldn’t watch Godzilla vs. Kong under any conditions…not for free, not if you offered to pay me $50 or $100, not if you offered to pick me up at my home in an SUV limo…nothing would suffice.
Excerpt #1 from David Rooney’s 3.29 THR review: “The pinhead, pear-shaped figure and tiny hands perhaps inevitably mean Zilla will always be runner-up in both the beauty and personality portions of the pageant.”
There are many ways of describing the physique of Fatzilla, but “pear-shaped”? Okay, we get it. Critics can’t be too careful these days.
“In the sometimes laborious franchise-crossover tradition of Moneymaker 1 vs. Moneymaker 2 — think Freddy vs. Jason, Alien vs. Predator, and ugh, Batman v Superman — Godzilla vs. Kong is a worthy enough match, and definitely a giant leap forward from their first battle, in the 1963 Toho production.
“If only it had the wit of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.”
HE add-on: Hell, if only it had the wit of Abbott and Costello Meet The Mummy.
Jett, Cait and I had a great time in Hanoi in mid-March of 2016 — a year and three-quarters before the launch of wokester terror. Why am I mentioning this now? Because Facebook brought it up…
Three and three-quarter years ago a few friends joined Tatiana and I in celebrating our June 2017 marriage at The Little Door, a Parisian-style brasserie.
We returned to that Third Street establishment last night for a light dinner. We love the cozy vibe, the blue paint, the fireplace and the candlelight, and the food is always pretty good. And the conversational levels are low so you can actually hear each other.
We had a nice, peaceful 60 or 70 minutes, but then a group of seven or eight Zoomers came along and sat down near us, and before long they started shriek-laughing…good God. We knew it was time to leave.
It’s okay for Hollywood Elsewhere to post opinionated headlines and somewhat slanted stories because this is an attitude-and-opinion site — I yam what I yam. But the trades, like your mainstream news sites (N.Y. Times, WashPost, TheWrap, USA Today, Daily Beast), are obliged to present a fair-minded, pseudo-balanced front.
Alas, in stories about the CBS Sunday Morning/Paramount + interview with Woody Allen that began streaming today, Variety and The Hollywood Reporter haven’t even attempted to offer a semblance of even-toned coverage. Neither publication is making the slightest effort to seem “fair” about anything — their editors are clearly Allen haters and in the tank for Dylan Farrow, and they don’t care if anyone gets that impression or not.
It is particularly egregious, I feel, that Variety‘s headline states that in the Paramount + interview Allen “Rehashes Old Arguments” in his defense of himself regarding the 1992 sexual abuse allegation.
Imagine if, say, a witness to last May’s George Floyd murder were to offer recollections of what he/she saw and heard to 60 Minutes, say, and a mainstream newspaper were to report the next day that the witness had “rehashed old observations.” The editors and perhaps the publisher of that newspaper would be forced to resign within 48 hours, and the paper itself would thereafter be regarded as inherently racist. There would be calls to shut it down or at least change the name.