And if there’s a God, The Many Saints of Newark (Warner Bros./HBO Max, 10.1) will play at Telluride. You can tell it has character, texture…you can tell it’s an actual film made by and for people who are invested in Tri-State area mythology. And you can sense that ardent fans of this film will be…how to put this?…somewhat less enamored of Black Widow.
I can relate, by the way. I grew up (painfully) in New Jersey, and I didn’t apply myself in high school either.
Posted on 12.19.19:
Black Widow (Disney, 7.9) has been screened for the usual salivating suspects, including your MCU fanboys and fangirls. I’ll bet $10K that their reactions are, for the most part, completely without meaning or resonance or trust. At 134 minutes it’s almost certainly going to be a form of punishment for anyone who isn’t a Marvel cultist, especially given that it’s half an origin story — a form of imprisonment in itself. A significant (large?) percentage of critics will default with positive reviews due to the gender representation factor (Scarlet Johansson, Florence Pugh, Cate Shortland directing). But you know what’s coming. Almost certainly a burn, completely negligible, etc. I’m not looking forward to sitting through two hours and 14 minutes of this — what reasonable person of taste would be? Plus Natasha Romanoff has left this mortal coil. Yes, of course — death is an utterly meaningless concept within the MCU, but I saw Endgame…
Speaking as a daily columnist who’s tried the patience of HE readers like Zoey Rose (“I’m just tired of the constant pieces about woke culture and [how] the Khmer Rouge is out to get him and all his white friendos,” etc.), I’m genuinely worried about mentioning Amazon’s Inclusive Storytelling guidelines, a just-revealed blueprint or master plan for suffocating verve, creativity and crackling energy in the name of inclusion and sensitivity and smoothing everything out as much as possible.
HE to Zoey Rose: Is there any way I can report and comment about this horrifying state of affairs without pissing you off? Or will any mention of regimented corporate wokeness alienate your affections? I’d really like to touch on this, but the thought of trying your patience fills me with hesitation.
I’ll just cut to the chase and say that I’m completely in synch with Sasha Stone’s take, to wit: “It’s one thing to encourage inclusive hirings behind the camera, but once they start getting into storytelling and the formation of characters, content, and theme to promote a specific ideology then we are no longer looking at art. We are looking at full-blown wokester propaganda.” Put another way, it’s well-intended Big Brother-ism. Or, if you will, progressive virtue-signalling.
You think the Academy’s Representation and Inclusion Standards for Oscar Eligibility (announced on 9.8.20) were strict and suffocating and antiseptic? Amazon’s are much worse.
Stone: “Most audiences today, old and young, can spot a ‘woke’ message coming from a mile away. The more a film lectures them the less likely they are to want to watch it. Here are a few quotes from Amazon’s Inclusion Playbook and Inclusion Policy — now imagine being the people hired to monitor the films to make sure they meet all of these criteria. Better yet, imagine movies like The Exorcist, Blue Velvet, Chinatown, Do the Right Thing, Bull Durham, Casablanca or The Player being made under these rules:
Alfred Hitchcock films are about…where should I start? Anxiety, murder, threats, suspense, unsettling intrigues, unfairness, innocent characters caught in a tight spot, paranoia, creepy undercurrents, more suspense, knives, scarves, pistols, etc. But that’s not what the creator of this T-shirt has in mind. For what he/she is longing for is a sense of conservative order and a feeling of being safe from chaos. Hitchcock films are always about immaculate control — about Alfred’s ability to create and in fact dictate a world that always behaves according to his own cautiously conceived rules and refinements, not to mention his dry sense of humor. As Hitchcock once said, ““Some films are slices of life…mine are slices of cake.”
…putting 60% to 70% of Hollywood Elsewhere behind a Patreon paywall, that is, you’re greatly mistaken.
I would like nothing better than for Hollywood Elsewhere to just cruise along like it has for the last…God, it’ll be 17 years on 8.4.21. (And nearly 23 years if you count the October ’98 launch of my Mr. Showbiz column, which was lamentably titled HOLLYWOOD CONFIDENTIAL.) I really wish I could’ve kept going as a free site until 8.4.23 — 20 years, nice and tidy.
Alas, the monsters began arriving on Maple Street back in early ’18, and before I knew it “the terror” had begun to infiltrate everywhere.
HE began making modest amounts of dough almost immediately after launching in August ’04, and the income began to grow a bit more by ’07 or ’08. For about seven years (’10 to ’16, let’s say) HE award-season ads were pulling down decent six-figure revenues, and from this I was able to savor a modest lifestyle that included travel, buying the rumblehog, Italian lace-ups, Prague touch-ups and so on. Hardly a life of luxury, but, as Randy Newman might’ve put it, “it was all right.”
Then came the politically correct lizards and crocodiles and Komodo dragons, and before I knew it ad revenue had begun to shrink. Because “they” didn’t like me (or were afraid of seeming vaguely supportive) and so little by little revenue began to dwindle. Or as Lady Bird Johnson used to say, to “dwinnel.”
The ’20 and ’21 Oscar season (COVID) was the worst in HE history. There’s no sense kidding myself from where I sit right now. I have to either launch a paywall and do the best I can (or the best we can, I mean…myself and HE ad guy Sean Jacobs) with the ’21 and into ’22 Oscar season, or find some freelance writing gigs or, God forbid, send out resumes and find a (choke) “job.”
Over the last two or three years some truly wonderful Millennials and Zoomers in the publicity and marketing end of things (initially at film festivals and then within distributor offices) decided that I’d become a kind of pariah. Except I’m not. I’m the same columnist I’ve always been — the same mentality, the same passion, the same edge. What’s changed is that the culture has tipped into a kind of rigid woke mindset — say the right things and repeat the party dogma or you’ll be cancelled.
I am a humanist, a sane person, a father, a husband, a good writer, and a left-center moderate. And I haven’t written anything, said anything or done anything to warrant pariah status. I haven’t changed — the culture has. Things have gone CRAZY in some ways. All I’ve said and written has been the same old plain-spoken stuff. I have a voice, a way of writing, etc.
Do we ALL have to sound like Anne Thompson and Eric Kohn in order to survive these days? Isn’t there room for just one of us — i.e., myself — to have a blunter, franker opinion?
The shunning of certain ex-Commie screenwriters happened between the early to late ‘50s, but that era finally ended. “Scoundrel Time”, somebody called it. The woke totalitarian era will come to an end also. Sooner or later, all pages are turned, all chapters end and all things pass.
I. Have. Done. Nothing. To. Warrant. This. Kind. Of. Treatment. Even that recent thing that got me kicked out of Critics Choice…that wasn’t me! I wrote nothing. A friend did and I posted it for 45 minutes. And then I took it down. It was nothing. It was bullshit. And yet Jen Yamato and Chris Bumbray‘s fanged teeth were soaked in saliva.
Thank God for the sanity and friendship emanating from the good people I’ve been lucky to regard as friends for the last two or three decades, and press credential-wise from the Telluride and Cannes camps. From my persepective these are the last sane people on planet earth.
Wokesterism is a social-political plague — the new iteration of Maximilian Robespierre, the New McCarthyism, the New Victorians and surely a form of Bolshevik Totalitarian Orwellian insanity. Wokesters are suppressors and punishers — they’re against any concept of freedom that you or I or any semi-liberal person might recognize. I can’t wait for the zeitgeist to gradually swing in the other direction and for these reprehensible jackals to be on the run and/hiding in tall grass. And again, my core beliefs are liberal moderate and I come from a place of adventure and satori and clarity of the soul.
Wokesterism is fundamentally guided by love and compassion and humanitarian goals and a respect for all modes of ethnicity and sexuality and what-have-you, agreed. But in the name of righteous cleansing these people have become the totalitarian brain police that William S. Burroughs was so properly terrified of…they’re against freedom of speech…they’re about punitive measures and suppression and ruining good people’s lives…in a phrase they’re the new Khmer Rouge…FUCKING FANATICS.
Critic friend several weeks ago….
“The weird thing to me in all of this is the number of people — i.e., more than half of Jeff’s readers — who do not get it because they simply cannot see what is going on. They are such lockstep, go-along-with-the-crowd personalities that they think Jeff is talking about some fantasy in his head, rather than a genuine universe of real ideas that can no longer be expressed in the public square of mainstream media.
“Every time one of them says ‘Give it a rest, Jeff!’ I think: Here is someone who is truly, definingly clueless. The house is on fire, and they just think it’s a warm day.”
Nobody loves great, earth-shaking cinema more than myself.
Friendo to HE: So have you watched Questlove‘s Summer of Soul (Searchlight, 7.2) yet?
HE to Friendo: This evening, I guess. Otherwise soon. Performances by major late ‘60s soul acts in Marcus Garvey Park, until the heading of the Harlem Cultural Festival. Cool — everyone loves a top-notch concert film. But what’s so wowser about it? Why all the heat and the awards during last January’s Sundance? Other than the fact that chummy indie guy David Dinerstein is one of the producers?
Friendo to HE: Mostly for the archival footage. The tagline is “this was the black Woodstock.” Same summer, same chapter in history. 300,000 people showed up in a span of six weekly free concerts, Sundays between 6.29 and 8.24.
HE to Friendo: Okay, but what’s the big deal? Other than the virtue signaling aspect?
Friendo to HE: Mostly it’s just about the great music and community aspect of the concerts, and how major media ignored this in favor of the Woodstock festival at Max Yasgur‘s farm. And how cans and cans of footage of the ’69 Harlem Cultural Festival was shot and then placed in a basement, where it sat for a half-century. And how we have a spiffed-up capturing of an historic music festival. Obviously it didn’t have the influence or impact of Woodstock. You can’t just rewrite history and say that these Harlem shows changed the course of history because…well, they didn’t. Nobody really knew about the ’69 Harlem Cultural Festival until recently.
HE to Friendo: Great music, community celebration, surging emotions…terrific. But the Woodstock analogy isn’t analogous.
Friendo to HE: It’s such a 2021 thing. Reframing history according to present-day terms, otherwise known as “presentism.”
The complete title, by the way, is Summer of Soul (…Or, When_ the Revolution Could Not Be Televised). Except hour-long specials of the concert were broadcast by WNEW Metromedia (Channel 5) on Saturday evenings throughout June, July and August — 10:30 to 11:30 pm.
There’s something to be said for Mervyn LeRoy‘s direction of Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (’44) — steady, workmanlike, no surprises but no potholes either. LeRoy always stayed within his safety zone, but he was a good, reliable “house” director. His best film was They Won’t Forget (’37), a Warner Bros. courtroom drama based on the real-life lynching of Leo Frank in 1915.
Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo was strictly a WWII morale-builder but a better-than-decent one, and a first-rate action film during the final third. You can totally lean on the solid, straightforward performances from Van Johnson (“I lost my ship!”), Robert Walker, Spencer Tracy, Phyllis Thaxter, Robert Mitchum.
I was especially taken by the extra-handsome, perfectly lighted cinematography by Robert Surtees (The Bad and the Beautiful, Ben Hur) and Harold Rosson (The Wizard of Oz, Singin’ In the Rain), and the fleet, finely timed editing by Frank Sullivan. Plus I’d never seen it in HD.
I began watching last night with the idea of being put to sleep. I fast-forwarded through the first half (training, relationships, flyboy camaraderie) but wound up watching the rest. This happens occasionally.
World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy is polling critics on the five best films of 2021.
HE’s favorite film of the year thus far, hands down, is Thomas Anders Jensen’s Riders of Justice: A truly original stand-out with a deliciously skewed, deadpan sense of humor. On 5.21 I insisted that violence wasn’t funny or certainly couldn’t be sold as such, and I was dead wrong. Riders’ dry, low-key comic tone is really something. I wasn’t expecting anything as original feeling as this. It’s quite the discovery. I’m actually intending to watch it again this weekend.
My second favorite is Jasmila Zbanić‘s Quo Vadis, Aida?, which played at last year’s Venice and Toronto festivals before opening stateside on 3.15.21. It’s a blistering, horrifying, you-are-there account of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre — 8000 Bosnian men and boys murdered in cold blood by Serbian troops under the command of Ratko Mladic. For me it ranks alongside other Bosnian brutality-of-war dramas like In The Land of Blood and Honey, Welcome to Sarajevo and No Man’s Land. Not a suspense piece or a classic war drama but a mother’s perspective saga that asks “who if anyone will survive the coming massacre?” You can feel it coming from around the corner. Devastating.
Third is Simon Stone‘s The Dig (Netflix, 1.15.21). I called this tale of the famous Sutton Hoo dig of 1939, which uncovered a sixth-century Anglo Saxon burial site, generally pleasing as far as this kind of modest and unassuming British period drama goes. I loved Ralph Fiennes‘ performance as real-life archeological excavator Basil Brown — his gutty working-class accent is note perfect, but the performance is in his eyes…at various times determined, defiant, sad, compassionate. And Carey Mulligan‘s Edith Pretty…talk about a performance at once strong, heartbreaking (as in sadly resigned) and resilient. I admired it despite an idiotic subplot about a married Lily James wanting to schtup the daylights out of a young, good-looking fellow, Rory (Johnny Flynn), whom she meets on the dig.
HE’s #4 is Phillip Noyce‘s Above Suspicion. On 4.1 I called it a jug of classic, grade-A moonshine — a brilliant, tautly paced, perfectly written action thriller (i.e., rednecks, drug deals, criminals, lawmen, murder, car chases, bank robberies) that plays like an emotional tragedy, and is boosted by an ace-level performance from Emilia Clarke. Most people would define ‘redneck film’ as escapist trash in the Burt Reynolds mode, but there have been a small handful that have portrayed rural boondock types and their tough situations in ways that are top-tier and real-deal. My favorites in this realm are John Boorman‘s Deliverance, Billy Bob Thornton‘s Sling Blade, and Lamont Johnson‘s The Last American Hero. Noyce’s entry is the absolute, dollars-to-donuts equal of these, or at least a close relation with a similar straight-cards, no-bullshit attitude. And it revives the strategy of William Holden‘s narration of Sunset Boulevard.
My fifth favorite is, despite its financial failure, Jon Chu and Lin-Manuel Miranda‘s In The Heights. On 6.8 I called it “good, grade-A stuff — engaging, open-hearted, snappy, well-composed, catchy tunes, appealing performances, razor-sharp cutting. One character-driven vignette after another. Dreams, hopes, identity, hip-hop, neighborhood vibes, community, self-respect…all of it earnestly feel-good. There’s no fault in any of it except for the minor fact that I was quietly groaning. Okay, not “groaning” but half-in and half-out. Admiring but disengaged. There isn’t a single moment in which I didn’t appreciate the effort, the professionalism, the heart factor, Alice Brooks‘ vibrant cinematography…all of it is fine and commendable, and I must have checked the time code 10 or 12 times, minimum.”
Yesterday I noted how IndieWire‘s Zack Sharf was so terrified of using the term “Black western” that he wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole in his riff about a new trailer for The Harder They Fall. Instead he went with Netflix’s term — a “new school Western.”
The folks at Essence were less intimidated. Their headline for Brande Victorian’s 6.24 article reads as follows: “The First Trailer For The Star-Studded Black Western The Harder They Fall Is Here.” The term “Black Western” is also used in the lede paragraph. Holy shit!
Posted on HE-Plus on 7.1.19 / money exchange rate updated: In North by Northwest Cary Grant‘s Roger Thornhill drops a lot of cash on a lot of random expenses — cabs, beverages, tips, bus tickets, dry cleaning. I’ve calculated that he spends a minimum of $275 in 1958 dollars, which comes to roughly $2522 in the 2021 economy. That’s a lot to be carrying around.
The film was shot in the summer of ’58, when the only credit card was Diner’s Club and no one had ever heard of debit cards. Thornhill, on the run from the law and unable to just stroll into a local bank for a withdrawal, had to pay for everything with pocket cash.
Roger Thornhill’s NXNW expenses / final accounting:
(1) Pays for cab from Madison Avenue to the Plaza hotel — call it $10 with tip as he’s also paying the driver to take his secretary to another destination; (2) Tips Plaza Hotel/Oak Room bellboy — another $5; (3) After the DUI adventure in Glen Cove and the visit to the Townsend estate, he and Jesse Royce Landis (his “mother”) somehow get back to Manhattan, presumably by cab — probably $25 or $30. ($45 so far)
(4) Back at the Plaza, he gives his mother $50 as payment for persuading the concierge to slip her a key to George Kaplan‘s room in the Plaza ($95); (5) Tips Plaza Hotel valet, looking for information — $5; (6) Takes cab from Plaza to U.N. building — call it $10 to be safe; (7) Presumably takes another cab to Grand Central following the U.N. knifing — $5 to $7. ($117.) (8) Doesn’t buy coach seat on 20th Century Limited, but once in Chicago Thornhill takes a bus to somewhere in southern Indiana farm country. Probably $12 or $15. ($132.)
After surviving the cropduster attack, Thornhill returns to Chicago with a free “ride” (i.e., stolen pick-up truck). Visits Eve at the Ambassador East. Pays AE cleaning service to have his dusty suit “sponged and pressed” — probably $10 or $12. ($144) Probably buys fresh dress shirt, underwear and socks — figure another $20. ($164)
Flies from Chicago to Rapid City with Leo G. Carroll‘s CIA “professor” — air fare covered by government.
Pays for coffee in Mount Rushmore cafeteria — a dime. Escapes from Rapid City hospital, takes longish cab ride up to Van Damm’s Mount Rushmore rental (a Frank Lloyd Wright original) — probably at least $20 or $25. And then pays for his and Eve Kendall‘s train fare back to NYC (call it $60 for two, maybe more).
Wait…I forgot about the Gibson and the brook trout Thornhill ordered in the dining car while chatting with Eve.
That’s a grand total of $250 minimum. Add $25 in random incidentals (penny-ante stuff) and you’re talking $275. In 2021 the value of a single 1958 dollar is $9.17, which translates into $2522 but let’s call it $2600….hell, make it $3K.
Who walks around with the equivalent of $3K in their wallet or money clip?
Having been tasked by President Biden to engage with the southern-border immigration crisis, Kamala Harris has been repeatedly criticized by rightie belligerents (including the Flatulent Florida Fatass himself) for not visiting the southern border and doing the requisite photo-op and press conference, blah blah.
Harris resisted at first, but now she’s finally caved — Politico is reporting that she’ll be visiting El Paso on Friday.
Do you want to hear a game-changing maneuver that will shut those cheap fucking righties up for good? Harris and a couple of tough security guards need to secretly do a Brubaker — she and the two bodyguards need to change into some tattered Target clothing and slip quietly into Mexico (Laredo, say) and then make their way by bus or foot toward the U.S. border and try to cross illegally, mixing with actual illegals and coyotes and really experiencing the reality of the situation. First-hand experience.
“Do a Brubaker” alludes to incoming prison warden Robert Redford anonymously pretending to be a prisoner and absorbing the situation as he never could through the usual official channels. I could have said “do a Sullivan’s Travels” but most of the readership wouldn’t recognize the title.
Kirk Douglas‘s last brawny action film was Jeff Kanew‘s Eddie Macon’s Run (’82), which he made in his mid 60s. He continued to play strong characters in challenging situations into the early aughts (The Man From Snowy River, Tough Guys, Final Countdown, Greedy), but the rugged action stuff seemed ill advised after Eddie Macon — why push it?
Harrison Ford (born on 7.13.42) was different — Douglas was Douglas but Ford had his own path to follow, and so he continued to make action films into his ’70s. Alas, he fractured his ankle (or was it his leg?) during shooting of Star Wars: The Force Awakens in 2014, when he was 71. (More bad luck than age-related.) And then those piloting mishaps occured — the Venice golf-course crash on 3.5.15 (the plane’s fault, not Ford’s), and two strategic landing errors — one at John Wayne Airport on 2.3.17, and a second at Hawthorne airport on 4.24.20.
And now he’s suffered a shoulder injury on the set of Indiana Jones 5, and is taking a break from filming while the wound is treated.
We all admire Ford’s spirit and gumption, but he’ll be 79 next month — it’s not exactly a surprise that he’s succumbed to injuries and errors of judgment, is it? Same difference when Robert DeNiro, a year younger than Ford, damaged one his quad muscles last month while working on Martin Scorsese‘s Killers of the Flower Moon.
Part of the syndrome is psychological, I’m guessing. When presented with a physical challenge of some kind, older guys will say to themselves “I might be in my 70s but I feel like I’m 47…fuck it, I can do this, no sweat.” And then they do the thing and the body — surprise! — doesn’t perform as expected.