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The packaged food industry has been erasing racial stereotyping in terms of brand names and marketing. Last September Mars, Incorporated changed Uncle Ben’s Converted Rice (aka Uncle Ben’s “Perverted” Rice) to Ben’s Original. And Quaker Oats’ deep-sixed Aunt Jemima pancake brand will henceforth be known as Pearl Milling Company pancakes. Companies keeping in step with the times, etc.

When’s the last time Hollywood Elsewhere ate a breakfast plate of Aunt Jemima pancakes or enjoyed a bowl of Uncle Ben’s rice? Not since I was eight or nine years old, and I really don’t care.

But (and I say this with a slight twinge of trepidation) I have a sentimental attachment to the character of “Gussie”, a black maid working for Jim and Muriel Blandings (Cary Grant, Myrna Loy) in Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (’48), and especially the WHAM ham ad slogan that Gussy dreams up at the finale — “If you ain’t eating WHAM, you ain’t eating ham.”

Obviously Gussie is just as much of a woke cultural prohibition as Aunt Jemima or Uncle Ben or Uncle Remus from Song of the South. You know that wokester activists would like to digitally erase Gussie out of existence if they could; ditto Hattie McDaniel‘s “Mammy” in Gone With The Wind. But if they did, Mr. Blandings wouldn’t end with that socko slogan. It’s a problem.

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Henry Hathaway‘s North to Alaska, a 1960 western comedy with John Wayne, Stuart Granger, Fabian, Ernie Kovacs and Capucine, ends with a three-minute and 40-second brawl in the muddy streets of Nome.

An outdoorsy action helmer who began in the ’20s, Hathaway wasn’t drawing upon a slapstick comedy background like, say, George Stevens might have, but this fistfight sequence is as carefully choreographed as Victor McLaglan, Cary Grant and Douglas Fairbanks‘ fight against the thugs in the first act of Gunga Din (’39). Ramming goats, a barking seal, a Salvation Army band…very broad and silly.

There are two accidental bits with Wayne — his hat is knocked off while he’s not wearing his toupee (:10), and then he slides backward through mud and lands under a mule, who starts kicking.

The best bit comes at 2:37 when Kovacs lands face-first into a puddle of liquid mud and then a barrel (apparently pulled along with an invisible fishing line) rolls over him.

Kovacs during liquid-mud pratfall.

After losing two films and being dropped by WME as well as by his personal publicist, Armie Hammer was already bruised, bleeding and on the ropes. And then along came Forbes‘ Scott Mendelson with a coup de grace…”nice knowin’ ya, pal!”…Peter Cushing with a wooden stake and a mallet.

In a piece titled “Armie Hammer Is Expendable“, Mendelson starts with the following: “Armie Hammer is a classic example of a handsome and talented white actor, arbitrarily treated like a movie star despite having almost no hit movies to his name.”

In other words, Mendelson seems to be saying, Hammer was on his way out anyway so no great loss. Wow.

Hammer’s intemperate boudoir behavior caused all the trouble, of course, but what did he actually do, illegally speaking, to deserve a career death sentence? I’m still trying to figure this out.

He was over-zealous in his kinky appetites — I get that part. And he ignored safe words. He allegedly didn’t force anyone to do anything (right?), but women who willingly went along with the games apparently got miffed when their relationship with him ended, and so they decided to “out” him by posting texts. Or something like that. This, at least, is what they were saying last night on Real Time with Bill Maher.

All I can say is that when this town decides to stab someone in the neck with an ice pick, it doesn’t fool around.

Passed along on Twitter by Russell Crowe, re-posted on Facebook by Tim Appelo, and slightly edited by yours truly:

“Christopher Plummer…I worked with him twice. The Insider (’99) and A Beautiful Mind (’01). Good man, fine actor.

“We were sitting on the Beautiful Mind set one day, and for some reason we began talking about Network (’76). Particularly the performances of Peter Finch and Ned Beatty. He told me that in the London theatre world of the 60s that Finch had a fearsome reputation. He’d come to the West End from Australia and had brought with him a certain inability to suffer fools combined with a deep unquenchable thirst the moment the curtain came down.

“Chris was at an actor’s party with a young lady he’d just started seeing. Somewhere far down Kings Road in Chelsea. She had recently broken up with Finch. Peter arrived looking for her and was in a very confrontational mood. Finch followed the couple around the party, making disparaging remarks. Eventually the young woman had enough and told Chris that they should leave. Not a lot of black cabs at that end of Chelsea late on a Sunday night, but luckily the young lady had her own car. So they left the party, Chris feeling somewhat relieved.

“As they got into her car and readied to drive off, the back door opened and Finch jumped in. ‘Take me back to Soho,’ he bellowed. ‘There’re no cabs.’ Thinking acquiescence wiser than confrontation at this point, off they drove. But the journey [was soon colored by] Peter spewing a torrent of abuse from the back seat. About Chris, about her, about trust, truth, love, sex, talent…non-stop.

“As they were approaching Sloane Square the young lady pulled over and ordered both men to get out. “Both?”, Christopher asked. “Yes, both of you,” she replied. So they did and she sped off without looking back.

“So here was Christopher, the young Canadian just beginning his career and Finch — drunken, aggressive, boorish, actorly genius under lamplight. Chris told me he was chilled with fear. Peter had threatened him with physical violence a number of times and he felt for sure he was about to suffer a beating at the hands of someone who’s performances he had admired greatly. Too cruel.

“Finch turned to Plummer, eyes ablaze, and in an instant the anger left his face, and the piercing knives of his eyes resolved into something impish and charming. “Thank fuck we got rid of her” he bellowed mellifluously, echoing off the empty street. He then whispered, “Let’s find a drink.” They [soon] became friends.

“I loved working with Chris on The Insider. He was just so impressive. It was a travesty that his role didn’t receive an Academy Award nomination because everyone talked about and knew that it was [one] of a handful of truly formidable performances that year.

“We worked together again on A Beautiful Mind. Occasionally we would spend time together after work. He preferred one on one — a good drink, not just any drink. I appreciated his candor and wisdom.

“As actors do in the big circles we swing around, and we fell out of touch. I reached out to him in 2012 after he won his Academy Award to say ‘on behalf of Finch and I, welcome to the club.’ He laughed.

“Rest In Peace, Mr. Plummer.”

Yes, I’m still a sentimental physical-media fool. The ardor has cooled over the last five years, but I’m still inclined to plunk down $20 on almost any decently remastered 4K Bluray of a respected, large-scale ’50s film. The key issue is whether or not it was shot in the VistaVision process. Which The Ten Commandments (’56) definitely was. How much better can it look? Will it deliver a significant bump over the 2011 Bluray version? My head tells me “maybe” but my gut says “naahh, probably not that much…okay, maybe a bit.”

Alfred Hitchcock‘s North by Northwest and To Catch A Thief were shot in VistaVision — what’s the hold-up? And what about the legendary Ben-Hur (’59), which was shot in Camera 65**? I’ve been “hearing” about a 4K version of William Wyler‘s multi-Oscar winner for several years now. The 60-year anniversary came and went two years ago.

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Hollywood Elsewhere saw Sian Heder ‘s much-adored, Sundance award-showered CODA this morning. It’s moderately appealing and nicely made for the most part. Understand, however, that it’s an “audience movie” — aimed at folks who like feel-good stories with heart, humor, romance and charm.

It’s about a shy Gloucester high-school girl named Ruby (Emilia Jones) with a decent if less than phenomenal singing voice. She’d rather attend Boston’s Berklee College of Music than work for her deaf family’s fishing business, we’re told. The film is about the hurdles and complications that she has to deal with in order to realize this dream.

CODA is one of those “real people struggling with life’s changes and challenges” flicks, but given the fishing-off-the-Massachusetts-coast aspect it’s fair to say it’s no Manchester By The Sea — trust me. It’s a wee bit simplistic and schticky and formulaic -— okay, more than a bit — and contains a fair amount of “acting.”

Emilia Jones in Sian Heder’s CODA.

For my money Jones overplays the quiet, withdrawn, still-waters-run-deep stuff, but it’s an honest performance as far as it goes — she has an appealing, unpretentious rapport with the camera. Eugenio Derbez‘s performance as an eccentric, Mexican-born music teacher is probably the film’s best single element. Bearded, baggy-eyed Troy Kotsur and 54 year-old Marlee Matlin are engaging as Ruby’s live-wire parents.

Matlin and Kotsur are the source, actually, of some clunky sexual humor (frisky parents noisily going at it during the late afternoon, randy Kotsur urging chaste Ruby to make her boyfriend wear “a helmet” during coitus, that line of country). Except the jokes don’t really land, or at least they didn’t with me.

In a phrase, CODA is not a Guy Lodge film.

But CODA is an okay film. It works here and there. It didn’t give me a headache. I can understand why some are enthusiastic about it. It deserves a mild pass. Heder is a better-than-decent director.

Friendo: “It’s a by-the-numbers family romcom with an added progressive-minded openness for the deaf.”

(Posted from iPhone while waiting in line at the Tijuana border, heading back into the States.)

Hollywood Elsewhere won’t be able to stream Rebecca Hall‘s Passing until Wednesday, 2.3. But I’m reading and hearing things. Based on a same-titled 1929 book by Nella Larsen and mostly set in 1920s Harlem, Passing is about a married woman of color — Ruth Negga‘s Claire Kendry, whose blonde hair and half northern-European features allows her to pass for white, which was deemed desirable 90-odd years ago.

Claire’s racist husband Jack Belew (Alexander Sarsgard) believes her to be as white as Calvin Coolidge. This, I’m told by a colleague who’s seen it, is a stumbling block. The story focuses on the reunion of Kendry and Irene Redfield (Tessa Thompson) and a subsequent attraction that kicks in and leads to tragic consequences.

Friendo: We’re supposed to believe that Skarsgard, Negga’s very racist husband who uses the N-word freely, is completely oblivious to the fact that his wife may have some black ancestry. He believes he married a 100% white woman.
HE: But Negga, though light-skinned and wearing a blonde wig in the film, is obviously mixed race to some degree. Just ask those scurvy racist crackers in Loving — they did everything they could to break up her marriage to Joel Edgerton. Oh, and I love that Passing was shot in black and white.
Friendo: The film is very well made, but its biggest flaw is the implausibility I mentioned. There is no way a racist husband would not realize that Negga has at least some African-American blood. He even mentions that he hates “them” even if they have a small fraction of non-white DNA.
HE: Jessica Kiang’s Variety review was unqualified in its praise. In her view, the movie is nothing short of heavenly.
Friendo: I assume Coda, Summer of Soul and Passing will all be winning something by the end of the festival.

Tessa Thompson (l.), Ruth Negga (r.) during filming of Rebeca Hall’s Passing.

HE to Demian Bichir (sent on 1.15.21):

Greetings, bruh. Long time, hope you’re good. I was very moved by your sad Deadline essay about poor Stefanie. I’m so sorry for what befell her. Very few of us seem to acknowledge, even privately, how tenuous and fragile our hold on stability or safety is, much less happiness. I’m so sorry.

By the way I liked you a lot in Robin Wright‘s Land, which I saw last night. I’m glad Robin chose you, believed in you. Your humanity came through. I didn’t think it was dramatically satisfying or appropriate for your character to [spoiler info]. I liked your character and valued his presence, and so I felt irked and cheated by [spoiler info].

But I also have to say that while I respect Wright’s attempt to offer some kind of comment about soul-cleansing isolation and to carve out some kind of naturalist ethos, I really didn’t care for her character, Edee Mathis, at all. Robert Redford‘s Jeremiah Johnson was human and relatable — Edee isn’t. What a profoundly stupid, self-involved, slow-to-awaken woman…she loves her isolation and her general disdain for other people too much. She doesn’t even keep her SUV near her cabin in case there’s an emergency? Idiot!

When you and your sister (Sarah Dawn Pledge) found Edee lying on the floor of her cabin, starved and half-frozen and near death…I’m sorry to share this but on another level I’m not. When you found her like that I was thinking “this idiot did this to herself out of flat-out stupidity and arrogance, and so by the laws of nature and natural consequence”…I probably shouldn’t say this but I was thinking that if she passed it would be more interesting than if she’d lived.

There’s a moment in which Edee looks at your character and says with a slight tone of suspicion, “Why are you helping me?” After you and your sister have literally saved her form the jaws of death, she looks you right in the eye and asks why, and with a vaguely snippy tone to boot. When a viewer feels this negatively about the central character in a film…well, it’s not a good thing. Even a nominally “bad” character can enlist audience sympathy if the film is handled right. I felt more emotionally supportive of Michael Corleone in The Godfather, Part II than I did for Edee Mathis. I felt more compassion for Boris Karloff‘s monster in The Bride of Frankenstein.

If Edee had died in her cabin I would have said to myself “tough break but just desserts…this is the law of life and survival…now Edee will never have to deal with another human being ever again.”

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Nothing matches the excitement of being half-buried by a perfect white snowscape, and the cozy pleasure of staring at falling snow from inside a warm home. I’m generally less transported when a big snowfall starts melting but until that point, it’s like I’m eight years old again.

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After a period of curious silence, Variety critic Dennis Harvey has finally spoken out about Carey Mulligan’s objection to a portion of Harvey’s 1.26.20 review of Promising Young Woman, which many have interpreted as a disparagement of Mulligan’s attractiveness.

Variety‘x mea culpa: “Variety sincerely apologizes to Carey Mulligan and regrets the insensitive language and insinuation in our review of Promising Young Woman that minimized her daring performance.”

Variety‘s apology didn’t appear until Mulligan complained to the N.Y. Times‘ Kyle Buchanan in a 12.23.20 profile.

Carey Mulligan in Promising Young Woman.

The Guardian‘s Catherine Shooard speaking to Harvey in a 1.28.21 article:

“I did not say or even mean to imply Mulligan is ‘not hot enough’ for the role,” Harvey has told Shoard. “I’m a 60-year-old gay man. I don’t actually go around dwelling on the comparative hotnesses of young actresses, let alone writing about that.”

Harvey added that he has been “appalled to be tarred as misogynist, which is something very alien to my personal beliefs or politics. This whole thing could not be more horrifying to me than if someone had claimed I was a gung-ho Trump supporter.”

Harvey said “he avoided the social media discourse triggered by the fallout on the advice of Variety, who said it would “blow over”, and friends who said nobody commenting appeared to have read the review and that some people had said “I must be advocating rape, was probably a predator like the men in the film.” Good God! There’s no terror like that of the Khmer Rouge. They’ve made plastic suffocation bags fashionable again.

Harvey has also questioned the timing of the controversy, as Hollywood Elsewhere has two or three times. He’s noted that his review “had apparently been found unobjectionable enough to escape complaint for 11 months, “until the film was finally being released, promoted and Oscar-campaigned”. Only then [was] his review was “belatedly labelled ‘insensitive’ and flagged with an official ‘apology’”.

Variety’s editors “had not raised any concerns with the review when he first filed it,” Harvey tells Shoard, “nor in subsequent months until [Buchanan’s New York Times article [appeared].”

Harvey’s professional fate “remains uncertain,” Shoard writes. Harvey: “It’s left in question whether after 30 years of writing for Variety I will now be sacked because of review content no one found offensive until it became fodder for a viral trend piece.”

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Hollywood Elsewhere to Scott Alexander: Don’t shit me.

In France they kiss on Main Street, and in India they poop whenever the mood strikes, and right out in the open. And then they laugh about it.

It all started yesterday with HE positive reaction to The White Tiger. Which was followed by the following Alexander post on Facebook:

HE to Alexander: Did you like the “laughing uproariously while squatting and shitting” scene, Scott? I ask because the photo above is from this exact moment in the film. Squatting and shitting is what the main protagonist is laughing about. He and some other laughing, sophisticated fellow.

I thought it was…uhm, mildly appalling. But then I’m a prissy metrosexual dandy type. I wish I could say that the memory of this scene will fade, but it won’t. It’s been burned into my brain. Or smeared, I should say.

When was the last time you, Scott Alexander, defecated in public while enjoying a hearty horse laugh? I myself have never done this. Oh, it’s never done in Los Angeles, you say? It’s a lower-caste Indian culture thing? Okay. Well, it sure was exotic!

Maybe it’s just a matter of cultural conditioning. We all tend to nature on a daily basis — why not do it publicly and laughingly?

What if American cinema had at least acknowledged public shitting as something that happens from time to time? What if, say, Cary Grant had decided to drop a deuce by the side of the road during the crop-dusting scene in North by Northwest? What if Dana Andrews had taken a big steaming dump while inspecting those old dusty WWII bombers near the end of The Best Years of Our Lives? What if Gary Cooper had decided to (heh-heh) mark his territory in the middle of Main Street in High Noon when Grace Kelly and Katy Jurado were clopping by in a horse wagon? “Do not forsake me, oh my darlin’…”

“White people are on their way out. This is the century of the brown man and the yellow man. I’ve broken out of the coop.” Translation: Kill your masters and don’t look back.

Based on a 2008 novel by Indian author Aravind Adiga, Ramin Bahrani‘s The White Tiger (Netflix, 1.22) is a Nicholas Nickleby-like saga of a low-born, small-village grinning wannabe, Balram Halwai, who hustles his way into a chauffeur gig in Delhi, and then on to Bangalore, where he launches his own taxi business after [spoiler hide] and stealing his cash.

It’s basically about class divisions In India — appalling poverty, Hindu vs. Muslim, caste, loyalty, corruption, payoffs, outsourcing, hunger.

Notes as I watched: “A hungry, clever, intelligent young man from a lower caste learns the rules of the game, figures out the angles, turns a bit ruthless, makes his way up the ladder, gets what he wants.

“Bahrani is an excellent director. The native Indian atmosphere is rich and fascinating, the film is well-edited and nicely shot. A complex tale of ambition, corruption, hunger and lust for power. Inch by inch, rung by rung, darker and darker. Learn to smile as you kill.

“I know where this film is going. By hook and by crook, Balram is going to make it. Even if it requires the unfortunate murder [spoiler stuff]. It’s a Dickens tale with a touch of O Lucky Man. The long journey, the long road and all the potholes along the way.

“But I have to ask everyone who’s told me that I have to watch this, what’s the big deal exactly? I mean, it’s quite the class-A package, quite the immersion, very good writing, a respectable effort….a window into the real, rough-and-tumble India. But what am I supposed to do with it exactly?

“Nicholas Nickleby as a smiling and obsequious but surprisingly ruthless fellow in the end. Who doesn’t appear to be smart enough to even bury the body. Or bleach his teeth. Much better than Danny Boyle‘s Slumdog Millionaire, but that’s not saying a great deal.

“Only two ways to the top. Crime or politics. Is it that way in your country too?

Friendo: “It’s an engrossing movie. All about the disparity between rich and poor in India. It’s staggering how the poor live. If it has any flaw, it would be that it’s too short. This could have worked even better as an epic, with an additional hour showing his rise to the top. Call it capitalism run amok. They should have showed him going full-on Scarface in the last third.”