I hate this kind of credibility-defying, pushed-to-the-limit thrill sequence. Harold Lloyd used to make comedies out of such situations, but Vertical Limit director Martin Campbell and screenwriters Robert King and Terry Hayes played it straight. The apparent idea was to out-do a similar opening sequence in Renny Harlin‘s Cliffhanger (’92), but it’s one CG bullshit stunt after another.

Boilerplate: Tragedy strikes a family of three — Peter Garrett (Chris O’Donnell), his sister Annie (Robin Tunney) and their father, Royce (Stuart Wilson) — as they scale a sheer cliff in Monument Valley. After two falling amateurs leave the family dangling, Royce forces Peter to cut him loose to save Peter and Annie from a horrible, howling, skull-shattering demise.

I have to admit that when the climbers whose carelessness started all the trouble…when these two fall to their deaths, it’s hard not to raise your fist and shout “yes!”

Vertical Limit opened 19 and 1/2 years ago. Call it 20. Doesn’t seem that long, does it?

O’Donnell, 29 or 30 during filming, was still recovering (at least in his own head) from Batman and Robin (’97). Even with the financial success of Vertical Limit ($215M worldwide), O’Donnell took a four-year hiatus. He returned to features in Bill Condon‘s Kinsey (’04) but was pretty much a TV guy after that. He’s now in his late 40s and starring in NCIS: Los Angeles.

Tunney was enjoying a career spurt at the time. She’s now 47, hanging in there, playing poker.

How many of us have dreamt of finding a huge amount of cash in a bag or suitcase somewhere? With no papers or ID or anything to indicate whose money it is…no clues at all.

Please read this short N.Y. Post story and tell me if you agree with what was done when roughly $1 million in untracable bills (and with no security cam footage being taken) was found on a rural road in Virginia’s Caroline County.

The same approximate thing happened to me when I driving for Checker Cab in Boston in ’72 or thereabouts. Somewhere near Mass General a young woman who’d flagged me down climbed into the back and excitedly announced that a wallet was lying on the floor. With cash in it. It came to a little over $400 ** but with no cards, photos or identifying paper of any kind. Not a single scrap of vague information to go by. So we split it 50/50, and it was glorious because there was no basis for feeling guilty. Manna from heaven.

** In ’72 $400 was worth roughly $2,453.48 in 2020 dollars.

Former Today host Matt Lauer has posted a Mediaite essay about Ronan Farrow‘s passing along a rape allegation in “Catch and Kill” and more particularly about Ben Smith’s anti-Farrow N.Y. Times piece (5.17), “Is Ronan Farrow Too Good to Be True?”

Lauer (whom I’m not especially comfortable quoting) has posted his essay for roughly the same reason that Robert Kennedy announced his Presidential candidacy in the wake of Eugene McCarthy‘s surprise showing in the ’68 New Hampshire primary — because perceptions have changed and right now the winds are relatively calm from Lauer’s POV.

Lauer isn’t denying he was a manipulative, predatory hound during his Today heyday, but he does state the following: “On October 9, 2019, I was falsely accused of rape. The allegation came from Brooke Nevils, the same woman whose complaint resulted in my termination at NBC. It was made public as part of the promotional rollout for a new book by Ronan Farrow. This accusation was one of the worst and most consequential things to ever happen in my life. It was devastating for my family, and outrageously it was used to sell books.

“At no time did Brooke Nevils ever use the words ‘assault’ or ‘rape’ in regards to any accusation against me while filing her complaint with NBC in November of 2017.”

A little more than 16 years ago (i.e., sometime in early April 2004) I interviewed Man on Fire director Tony Scott inside a Four Seasons hotel room. I’d been knocked flat by Man on Fire, and could’ve easily besieged Scott with questions for a couple of hours, but I only had the usual 15 minutes.

As we discussed this or that I was suddenly struck by how cool his hiking boots looked. Smooth brownish tan deerskin with red laces…excellent! I had to ask where he’d got them. I don’t remember his exact reply but it was some familiar outlet — a Bloomingdale’s or an A16. “I’m struck because I’m a hiking boot nut and they don’t look like anything I’ve ever seen,” I remarked. “I found them in the women’s section,” Scott replied. His feet were small enough and he obviously didn’t care.

“Wow”, I said to myself, “this is how serious directors think. Scott doesn’t care if an article in question was made for women or men…he just cares if it looks right.”

I was also charmed because, I realized, Scott shared my attitude about apparel. Or vice versa, I should say. Totally X-factor, indifferent to the norm.

A good part of the HE readership would bristle at the idea of wearing a shoe or T-shirt or scarf or windbreaker made for women. But I never have. I was savaged by commenters a decade or so ago when I bought a pair of canary-yellow laceless sneakers. “Wear a man’s shoe!” the commenters grumbled. “I’m wearing what I like,” I replied. This is the difference between guys who are enslaved to the code of muscularity and machismo vs. those who are free-thinkers.

Partly because of our shared shoe sensibility, I was extra-devastated when Scott committed suicide in August 2012.

Back in the old days of commercial aviation (i.e. three months ago and earlier), civilians used to fly whenever and wherever. I used to fly to New York City, London, Paris, Nice, Prague, Key West, Honolulu, Hanoi…you name it. Big Apple-wise I always flew into JFK or Newark, but this final approach to LaGuardia is quite beautiful. East across Queens and over uptown Manhattan, following the Hudson River south, curving about the Battery (you can see the WTC pools next to Freedom Tower) and forth to Midtown and east across Queens (observe the remnants of the ’64 World’s Fair as well as good old Shea Stadium) to LGA…magnificent. I really miss flying. (The below video was shot three-plus years ago, but who cares?)

A tough, sassy hombre with ties to law enforcement (Mel Gibson by way of Bruce Willis) tries to thwart a team of thieves in a high-rise while a hurricane rages outside. The thieves are led by a flamboyant sociopath (David Zaya, inspired by Alan Rickman‘s “Hans Gruber”). A lawman (Emile Hirsch by way of Reginald VelJohnson) helps the renegade within the bounds of the law while a near-and-dear family member (Kate Bosworth, continuing a tradition begun by Bonnie Bedelia) frets big-time. And the pressure mounts.

Puerto Rican activists are pissed, of course, because the idea of thievery by high-end native criminals is a racist trope, and only foam-at-the-mouth gringos like Gibson and director Michael Polish (remember the Polish brothers?) would cook up such a fantasy.

It’s not clear if these same voices were the ones complaining about Steven Spielberg‘s West Side Story, and particularly the song “America” in which some Puerto Rican immigrants say they prefer Manhattan to their native land…a “lie” that only racist dogs like Stephen Sondheim would perpetrate.

Boilerplate: Gibson and Bosworth portray a father and daughter, the former refusing hurricane evacuation orders and the latter an MD who wants him to leave. Hirsch plays a local cop named Cardillo (goddamn it…Hirsch is of “German, Jewish, English and Scots-Irish ancestry“!), who steps in to help Bosworth persuade Gibson to skedaddle. Gibson, a retired cop, becomes involved in Cardillo’s mission to prevent Zaya’s gang from heisting a hidden $55 million.

Force of Nature (Lionsgate) opens direct-to-video on 6.30.

Rick Worley‘s “Woody Is Innocent” essay (posted four days ago — 5.14.20) lasts two hours and 34 minutes. Very exacting and specific — all fibre, no fat. If you don’t have that much time to invest, the first 12 minutes more or less covers it. In my opinion Allen’s innocence is irrefutable. The Mia Farrow allies and Woody haters (including the #MeToo-ers who continue to intimidate and terrify U.S. distributors) will never listen, of course. Here, again, is Moses Farrow’s Woody-exonerating essay.

Fat-shaming is not only verboten, but descriptive terms that even flirt with the perimeters are also outlawed. In this verbally cautious realm you’re not supposed to call anyone “morbidly obsese,” and yet earlier today Nancy Pelosi referred to Donald Trump with the m.o. term.

Incidentally: I’m not disputing Pelosi’s use of said term, which basically means “heavier than garden-variety obese.” But I wonder what term she would have chosen if she’d been with Tatyana and I at El Matador beach last Sunday. I’m sorry but we saw some women who were truly scary in this regard.

Michel Piccoli, the renowned French actor who seemed to costar in almost every noteworthy French film in the mid to late 20th Century, has passed at age 94. I’ve been trying to decide which Piccoli performance is my favorite, and I honestly can’t decide. Okay, maybe his weary, blocked painter in Jacques Rivette‘s La Belle Noiseuse (’91).

He was always a reliable, trustworthy presence. An actor who always seemed to calm things down. Always plainspoken, genuine, discreet.

And the late ’60s and ’70s, it seemed to me, was his peak era, although he kept going as a working actor through the next three succeeding decades. One of his last theatrical films, Lines of Wellington, opened in 2012.

Among Piccoli’s best films: Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt, Alfred Hitchcock‘s Topaz (’69), Louis Malle‘s Atlantic City, Luis Buñuel‘s Diary of a Chambermaid (’64), The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (’72) and The Phantom of Liberty (’74), Claude Chabrol‘s Wedding in Blood (’73), Claude Sautet‘s Vincent, François, Paul and the Others (’74), Marco Ferreri‘s La Grand Bouffe (’73), Leos Carax‘s Holy Motors (’12).