With Chris Pine‘s Poolman (Vertical) opting for a single-word title rather than Pool Man, why is Doug Liman‘s forthcoming Road House (Amazon, 3.21) not spelled as a one-word thing also (i.e., Roadhouse)?
Pine is Poolman’s star, director and co-writer, not to mention one of its four producers. His costars include Annette Bening, Danny DeVito, Jennifer Jason Leigh, DeWanda Wise, Ray Wise, Juliet Mills, Stephen Tobolowsky and Clancy Brown.
DEI theology plus general progressive support for (or at least tolerance of) trans-gender procedures among minors appears to be weakening and perhaps even coming to a gradual end on various fronts. In HE’s view that’s not altogether a bad thing. One could argue it’s even reason for relief.
Six or seven years of anti-white-baddie thinking among lefties, an elite movement that more or less peaked with the George Floyd protests of May and June 2020, has had its effect. Ditto pro-trans-procedure sentiment among ardent progressives. But now, at long last, a pushback thing seems to be manifesting.
Today (3.14) N.Y. Times columnist John McWhorterbravely argued that standardized SAT tests aren’t racist, and thus contradicted long-accepted woke dogma that standardized testing propagates injustice by enforcing white privelege.
A day earlier (3.13) Public‘s Michael Shellenberger and Alex Gutentag posted an article titled “The End of the Transgender Craze Is Near.” The subhead reads “the backlash against ‘gender-affirming care’ and trans-identified males in women’s sports and prisons is accelerating.”
The same day (3.13) an NBC San Diego report about a retail theft ring seemed to indicate that a movement to amend or even eliminate Prop 47, approved by California voters a decade ago to reduce California’s prison population, might be gathering steam. Prop 47’s decriminalizing of retail theft has resulted in mass theft operations like the one recently busted in Bonsall. The bad guys aren’t just the Bonsall couple but the wokey legislators behind Prop 47, which basically said to communities of color and economic deprivation “we understand that it’s hard to survive out there so we won’t make it a felony if you guys want to occasionally rip off retailers.”
Four days ago the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced an astonishing decision to bestow a major-category Oscar (i.e., Best Actress) based upon — are you sitting down? — the merit of a nominated performance rather than celebrating the non-white identity of a competing actress. What could the world be coming to?
Eight months ago an HE piece titled “Dropping Like Flies” (7.1.23) reported that four Hollywood DEI execs had either resigned or been let go; three days later another ankling in this vein was reported.
Last August Deadline‘s Michael Cieplyreported that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences has quietly stepped back from the absolutism of the 2024 representation and inclusion standards — i.e., “The Maoist DEI virus is weakening and receding.”
What do HE readers think? Are poltical and cultural changes starting to take effect or what? Are the wokeys starting to search around for pockets of tall grass?
Franklin is an eight-episode Apple miniseries about the randy statesman, inventor and roving ambassador. Directed by Tim Van Patten and written by Kirk Ellis and Howard Korder, it’s based on Stacy Schiff‘s “A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America” (’05). The series launches with three episodes on 4.12.24, and concludes on 5.17.24.
Mr. Franklin was a wise, ingenious and well-educated printer, inventor and statesman, but he was also a serious hound, and I fully expect to see this aspect of his personality depicted…the life of a charming, pot-bellied smoothie who ravaged dozens of Parisian women during his ambassadorship and beyond.
I don’t know what the voice of the Boston-born Franklin sounded like, but it’s a near certainty that Michael Douglas said “fuck it, I’m going to play Franklin with my own deepish, gravelly voice and let the chips fall where they may.”
The 79 year-old Douglas is the right age to play Franklin — he hits the big eight-oh on 9.25.24.
Franklin lived in France (mostly Paris, based in a home in Passy) for nearly 20 years, from late 1776 until sometime in 1785. For roughly eight years Franklin served as the United States ambassador to France, and in so doing persuaded France to lend financial assistance to the United States fight against the British.
Forward to Schiff’s book: “In December of 1776 a small boat delivered an old man to France.” So begins an enthralling narrative account of how Benjamin Franklin — seventy years old, without any diplomatic training, and possessed of the most rudimentary French — convinced France, an absolute monarchy, to underwrite America’s experiment in democracy.
“When Franklin stepped onto French soil, he well understood he was embarking on the greatest gamble of his career. By virtue of fame, charisma, and ingenuity, Franklin outmaneuvered British spies, French informers, and hostile colleagues; engineered the Franco-American alliance of 1778; and helped to negotiate the peace of 1783. The eight-year French mission stands not only as Franklin’s most vital service to his country but as the most revealing of the man.”
“The Holdovers is a movie defined by its dialogue. The writing is fantastic. The voice of the Giamatti character. The words of…everybody.
“The accuser (i.e., Frisco author Simon Stephenson) said that The Holdovers ripped his script off ‘line-by-line.’ And Variety included this angle without questioning it.
“But is there even a whisper of truth to this charge? That, I think, is the point that needs to be made.
“Because if it’s just the plot, it came from that 1935 French movie, Marcel Pagnol‘s Merlusse. (It really did.) If it’s just other elements of the “concept”…well, Hollywood movies lift stuff like that from other movies every fucking day.”
I’ve just finished reading a mind-blowing Variety article by Tatiana Siegel (posted on 3.9 at 10:13 am) that contains chapter-and-verse charges of plagiarism against either Holdovers director Alexander Payne or Holdovers screenwriter David Hemingson, or both.
The particulars are too voluminous to be recounted or even compressed here, but the basic allegation is that Payne read a very similar 2013 script by Stephenson called Frisco, which was on the 2013 Black List roster, and that (this is directly from the Siegel article) “Payne had [read] the Frisco script in both 2013 and again in late 2019, right before Payne approached Hemingson about collaborating on [The Holdovers]. That contention seems to be backed up by emails involving several Hollywood agencies and producers.”
The Siegel article contains a 33-page “Introductory Document” titled “FRISCO and THE HOLDOVERS,” and it pains me to admit that it seems — emphasis on the “s” word — fairly damning in its particulars.
Speaking for myself I find the mere suspicion of the great Alexander Payne (Citizen Ruth, Election, About Schmidt, Sideways, The Descendants, Nebraska, Downsizing, The Holdovers) having deliberately engaged in out-and-out plagiarism just inconceivable. It can’t be what it seems. It just can’t be.
First-rate auteurs and their collaborators simply don’t behave this recklessly and foolishly, especially when there’s a paper trail and chapter-and-verse evidence this vivid and specific. Stealing from a 2013 Black List script is just insanity…self-destructive insanity.
Murphy gives a far more persuasive performance as an oddball alien from the planet Tralfamadore than as super-physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer in Chris Nolan’s Oppenheimer.
I’ve read “American Prometheus” and seen a great deal of footage of the actual Oppie, and there’s no question that this brilliant fellow was semi-human — that he radiated somewhat human qualities, mannerisms, characteristics. This is the one central thing that Murphy doesn’t convey.
Even with his dual head antennas, My Favorite Martian star Ray Walston was more relatably human than Murphy’s Oppie.
If Murphy wins it’ll strictly be an Oppenheimer coat-tails thing, and I really hate that Academy voters (particularly the SAG-AFTRA knuckle-draggers) are apparently unwilling to show a little mental discipline and differentiate and be fair about this, for God’s sake.
Because it’s wrong, wrong, terribly wrong to blow off Paul Giamatti’s obviously superior, more fickle and flavorful and far more human performance as Barton Academy’s curmudgeonly classics professor Paul Hunham, the lead in Alexander Payne‘s The Holdovers.
Plus Giamatti gave one of the 21st Century’s greatest and most cherished performances as aspiring novelist and wine connoisseur Miles Raymond in Payne’s Sideways (‘04). And he wasn’t even nominated for this! Are you kidding me?
Giamatti obviously owns the winning narrative. They blew him off 19 years ago but they can’t do it twice…c’mon! He’s owed big-time, and the refusal of the Oppenheimer sweep lemmings to step back and acknowledge this is truly, deeply offensive.
The financial success of Super Mario Bros, Oppenheimer and Barbie aside…
Critical Drinker: “Last year was a bit of a turning point for all this stuff in Hollywood. We’re going to see more of it, for sure…[woke-injection bullshit] isn’t going to go away overnight, but it’s definitely reached a point where it’s no longer financially viable. Certainly in the superhero realm. Superhero fatigue, oversaturation of the market, declining quality, spreading themselves too thin, perhaps hiring people to direct and write for reasons other than merit. Plus the political dimension of it has become tiresome.”
Two days ago Disney CEO Bob Igeradmitted to having read the proverbial writing on the wall and more or less bullhorned the following “whoa, Nellie!” message to Disneywokesters, which I’ve conveyed here in HE-styled rhetoric:
“All right, enough, dammit…we have to face facts…the Critical Drinker has been rightallalong and wehave to acknowledge the state of things, or at least I do…the new Disney law is “nomore wokepropaganda inourmovies”
“We’ve clearly alienated Joe and Jane Popcorn in the parenting community and we really have to get back to being goodoldfamily–friendlyDisney, and in case you’re not reading me, we’ll henceforth be re-assessing the advisability of using LGBTQIA and maybe even progressive femme-bot material in our animated features. We’ll be taking it one step at a time.”
Yesterday HE tried to get the hang of Zoom, as the first “Misfits” Zoomcast is set for Sunday afternoon with a peek-out sometime later that evening or Monday morning.
Alas, HE mostly failed in this effort, and I am therefore grateful to Glenn Kenny for having generously offered to do the Zoom inviting, due to my woeful lack of facility with this extremely user-unfriendly software.
I spent three or four hours yesterday trying to figure out the protocols, and I’m just not smart or patient enough, it seems. And so to protect my sense of self-worth I’ve decided that it’s Zoom’s fault, not mine. As a result I’ve come to despise Zoom with a burning Ahab-like intensity.
Zoom has actually re-awakened long suppressed feelings of stupidity and self-loathing within me…feelings that I experienced when I was 13 or 14 years old and bored to death in history class. I so hated studying mind-numbing textbooks that I would invent my own answers to pop quizzes. When asked who was James Watt, the 18th Century Scottish inventor of the semi-advanced steam engine, I would answer that he was a pioneer in developing and measuring the illumination levels in electric light bulbs, hence the quantifying term “watt” as in 75-watt GE bulbs.
This was my burden, my plight, my anguish. For I was inexplicably hostile to standard terminology and accepted doctrine, and felt stubbornly inspired to defy it any way I could. And now, thanks to Zoom, I am re-living the dull panel-colony horror of being the dumb guy in class. Or, you know, an intellectually rebellious 13 year-old or whatever.
Again — HE’s very first Zoomcast will happen as planned, but only because Kenny has stepped into the breach.
Ray Bolger‘s Scarecrow: “Oh, I’m a failure because I haven’t got a brain.”
Progressive lefty critics don’t want to know from harrowing depictions of violent, hardscrabble, non-white, hand-to-mouth, lower-income, mentally-stressed NYC natives howling and moaning and suffering the pains of hell in shitty, grubby, rat-infested apartments.
Because such depictions don’t blend with the progressive program and are generally bad for the soul. It doesn’t matter if Ryan King‘s screenplay was a Black List favorite. Critics don’t approve and that’s that. When I saw this film in Cannes last May I noticed two or three female jouurnalists walking out early.
Critics will, however. approve of or at least give a pass to Martin Scorsese‘s Bringing Out The Dead (’99), which is quite similar to Jean Stephane-Sauvaier‘s Asphalt City (Vertical / Roadside, 3.29) but is insulated to some extent by being 25 years old and therefore from another, less socially scrutinized era.
The idea for the new HE podcast is to call it “The Misfits“**, and to video record it on Zoom….three or four heads at a time. I’ve never organized a Zoom project so I’ll need to learn the ropes fast, including the basics of uploading the Zoomcast to Substack and getting the sound right.
HE friendo EdwardChampion, who knows the tech stuff top to bottom, has graciously offered a certain amount of guidance.
As the honcho I’ll participate each and every time, of course. You can never be sure who has real character and cojones and who doesn’t when the heat is on, but a couple of folks will turn out to be regulars, I’m sure, and some others will become every-other-weekers or once-monthly alternates.
The table settings are far from final but anyone who wants to step up to the plate and pick up a baseball bat and face those the pressure and the fastballs…the door is open.
Good amigo Sasha Stone is stepping back but has always been and always will be an excellent human being. Glenn Kenny is talking about chatting this weekend…here’s hoping. The feisty and fearless Tatiana Antropova is willing to give it a shot. HE regular “Eddie Ginley” and I will be speaking soon. Manhattan funny guy podcaster Bill McCuddy is down with the idea. “Zoey Rose” has said she’d like to jump in from time to time.
Two behind-the-camera friendos have backed out…okay. Jeff Sneider initially said in a thread that he wanted to co-host, and then he vaporized. Kristi Coulter indicated in the same thread that she might want to take part in a discussion or two, and then…
It’ll take two or three weeks to iron out the kinks, but the initial plan is to try and make the first bumpy Zoomer happen this weekend — probably on Sunday. It’ll happen for dead sure the following weekend.
Yesterday Sasha and I gave the weekly podcast a shot, and it didn’t work out. Sometimes the spirit is with you, and sometimes it isn’t. I’ll record something tonight on my own and post it tomorrow. Sasha and I will give it another try next weekend.
The issue, to be honest, was that some HE commenters said that Sasha was berating me. So we tried different ways to fix the problem (including adopting a nicey-nice “turn the other cheek” approach) but it wasn’t working. She’s frustrated with me and hates being the subject of the HE commentariat, and I feel inhibited talking to her. So we’re at an impasse.
Sasha thinks I should get a new partner but I think we have a good rapport at times. Does anyone want to volunteer to step into her place? Sasha would be overjoyed by this.
That wasn’t a serious question, of course. The vast majority of HE regulars are too chicken to do a podcast. I know this, they know this. Let’s cut the shit.