“Operating Table,” initially posted on 8.15.13: “John Frankenheimer‘s Seconds is a black drag to sit through. A dark, creepy, chilly-hearted downer from start to finish. Mainly about malevolence and threats and intimidation and dread. ‘Interesting,’ yes, because of the creepy Orwellian (or do I mean Burroughsian?) tone and James Wong Howe‘s nightmarish black-and-white cinematography. But it’s mostly punishing.

“Seconds lasts 107 minutes and aside from the grape-stomping scene there isn’t even a 30-second passage that delivers anything that comes close to enjoyable. The movie makes you feel like there’s a needle in your neck the whole time.

“Rock Hudson spends pretty much the entire film looking over his shoulder and sucking in cigarette smoke and acting like one of the most haunted and miserable fucks who ever agreed to star in a film about a haunted, miserable fuck.

“The dweebs like Seconds because it’s a modern horror story about middle-class entrapment and corporate malevolence, and because some of James Wong Howe’s camerawork vaguely recalls the severe angles and surreal set design in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. But if you watch it from a gut Joe Popcorn level (i.e., without your honorary scholastic film lover cap on) it will send you into a tailspin of depression. It’s not ‘scary’ — it’s suffocating. It’s about ‘how much longer does this last?’ It’s about hitting the fast-forward button during the slow scenes.

“The fundamental thing that you can’t buy is that John Randolph could be transformed into Hudson through plastic surgery. It would have been ten times more interesting if Frankenheimer had just had Hudson wear lots of older-guy makeup with a putty nose and chin and neck wattle. Randolph is maybe 5’11 or six feet tall compared to Hudson’s six-foot-five, and it’s just ridiculous that plastic surgeons would be able to add five or six inches of height to his frame.

Every time I re-watch this hour-long interview Marlon Brando makes more basic sense and Dick Cavett, whom I’ve loved and admired for decades, seems a little antsier and shiftier.

My favorite slim jeans are dying. It’s been happening for the last couple of months, and it’s sad how they always give up the ghost in the same ways. First the knees thin and fray and rip, and then the crotch area thins and frays and then a hole appears. Then I try and sew them up but the crotch area frays again, and then the knees develop more holes or then big-ass rips. Which I realize is cool in department-store circles.

But you can’t continue when the crotch starts to go. And after a while you just accept that sooner or later jean-death is inevitable. There’s no stopping the process.

It’s like dealing with a dying pet. You take them to the vet and feed them medicines and pay for the expensive procedures (I know a couple who paid almost $10K for a tumor-removing operation for their dog, only to see him drop dead a couple of months later on the kitchen floor), but the end is the same.

“Jobs may be back but they pay squat, especially compared to the rising costs of housing, health care and education. Employers are continuing to cut pension and health care benefits, and jobs are less secure than ever. One in five jobs is held by a worker under contract without any unemployment insurance or sick leave or retirement savings. And housing costs are now skyrocketing, with a large portion of Americans paying a third or more of their paychecks on rent or mortgages.” — Robert Reich.

After a late September screening of Green Book (Universal, 11.16) I mentioned to a film-critic friend who loves Peter Farrelly’s film as much as I do that film snobs would be coming for it. “Film snobs?” he said derisively, contemptuously.

Last night HE commenter Bobby Peru mentioned a reaction to Green Book, overheard either during the screening or afterward. “And even though I wasn’t one of them, several journalists in the room giggled at the final scene’s embraces,” Peru wrote.

This, to me, is like the first shot fired at Fort Sumter. If I had been there with Peru and if I had suddenly morphed into Jack Nicholson‘s Badass Buddusky, I would have gone up to one of the gigglers and said, “I’m gonna kick your ass around the block for drill, man.” Okay, maybe I wouldn’t have been that belligerent, but Lordy, I hate the snooties.

One of the most reliable indications of a toxic film-snob mentality is a primal aversion to anything that delivers well-fused, well-finessed mainstream-ish elements in service of a familiar but hugely satisfying emotional payoff.

The snobs HATE this kind of thing. Some kind of genetic disorder took over their sensibilities when they hit their mid teens or perhaps when they began college, and they just aren’t susceptible to this kind of assured, emotionally rooted, feel-good thing, even one that unfolds within a disturbing social context. They recoil and flick their fingers and go “no, no…too emotionally effective…not for us.”

And so Peru, totally and irreversibly in the tank for A Star Is Born, mentions dismissals of the film’s final line and final embrace. But the crowd I saw it with at Toronto’s Elgin theatre LOVED that final line. They loved the film. They cheered it like drunken fans of a home-town hockey team. My older son Jett and his wife Cait “LOVED” Green Book whey saw it a week ago, he told me.

This is war, I’m telling you — the film snobs and the gay-culture-favoring Star Is Born-sies on one side, and the fraternal, warm-hearted Green Book worshippers on another.

Don’t overlook the gay culture subtext. Yes, that remark may initially sound curious as both films are pro-gay narratives and experiences. The difference is that while Green Book deals with an admirable gay character from the mid 20th Century who’s something of a stuffed shirt, A Star Is Born is gayer in a more modern and celebrative sense.

Farrelly’s film may be experiencing (or may experience later this month) a certain subliminal pushback from certain fellows who’d rather not immerse themselves or otherwise submit to the early ’60s experience of Don Shirley — a brilliant jazz pianist, as expert and gifted in his realm as James Baldwin was in his, living in a repressed era and relying on his considerable dignity to cope on a daily basis with the double yoke of being black and gay.

This Back Roads trailer tries to whip things into a lather a little too quickly, but I’m sensing intensity. Based on Tawni O’Dell’s 2004 novel and obviously not a remake of the same-titled 1981 Martin Ritt film with Sally Field and Tommy Lee Jones.

“Alex Pettyfer, probably best known to audiences as the novice male stripper in Steven Soderbergh‘s Magic Mike, always aspired to more. Following years of being sold as little more than a slab of meat to lust after, it’s been an uphill battle for the actor to convince audiences that he has more to offer. With Back Roads, his first go-round in the director’s chair, Pettyfer takes his future into his own hands.” — from Marshall Shaffer’s Tribeca Film Festival review of Back Roads, posted on 4.24.18.

Boilerplate: “After his mother (Juliette Lewis) goes to jail for shooting and killing his abusive father, Harley Altmyer (Alex Pettyfer) is left to care for his three younger sisters in a rural Pennsylvania town. The uneducated Harley works two dead-end jobs to preserve what’s left of his family, including the rebellious, sexual 16-year-old Amber (Nicola Peltz). He finally begins to feel hope when he connects with an older, married woman (Jennifer Morrison). But when shocking family secrets emerge, Harley’s life begins to spiral downward.”

Just another trumpet-player in Grand Central Station, right? No — it’s Eganam. For what it’s worth I played trumpet in my early teens, and I believe I have a certain ear for anyone gifted and playing extra-smooth. A few others were paying as much attention as I was, and there was a fair-sized pile of cash in the guy’s tip bucket. From the site: “Born in Ghana, West Africa, Eganam migrated to the United States in February 1999, at the age of ten. Seven months later he began playing the trumpet. On 9.27.15 he performed at Carnegie Hall with the International Youth Philharmonic Orchestra. Now a member of the United Nations Symphony Orchestra and a student of New York Philharmonic’s Ethan Bensdorf, Eganam is working toward becoming a world-renowned trumpeter and music educator.”

On 10.4 I posted a Best Supporting Actor riff titled “Mahershala Ali Again. Really.,” which advanced the notion of a second Best Supporting Actor Oscar for the Green Book co-star. On 10.26 I posted another called “Mahershala Ali Kick-Ass Syndrome,” which noted that 15 out of 25 Gold Derby “experts” had put Ali at the top of their Best Supporting Actor spitball lists…a seeming lock to win.

Today Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil took a stab at explaining the Mahershala surge.

Gold Derby-wise, Ali has not only jumped in front of Beautiful Boy‘s Timothee Chalamet in the Best Supporting Actor race, but “seems to have established a firm lead,” O’Neil notes.

This is at least one category, it seems, in which “less” may be judged to be of greater value than “more”. Chalamet’s drug-addict performance is anguished and intense in a kind of Lee Strasberg acting-class way — a guns-blazing thing — while Ali’s Don Shirley, a brilliant pianist, is quiet and subtle. So why is Ali suddenly out-pointing Chalamet by such a significant margin?

Because the viewer senses a guarded sadness in Shirley, and a guy who’s a bit too rigid and controlled. Understandably, you come to realize, but he’s breathing only through his music. Ali acquaints you with Shirley bit by bit, layer by layer. Before long you’re hoping to see him kick back and breathe a little.

“Timing is part of the reason,” O’Neil writes. “Green Book is now screening widely to industry audiences across Hollywood, and enjoying fresh, happy buzz as word spreads that it might be the next Best Picture winner and also that — watch out, pay attention — Viggo Mortensen could win Best Actor too. Really! And Peter Farrelly for Best Director.”

Yesterday I peddled three or four miles to a Lenscrafters to fix my distance glasses. It’s right near a typically calming but soul-less megamall called the Oglethorpe. I locked the bike to a lamppost (i.e., adjacent to the main outdoor parking lot), and then visited a Barnes and Noble to do some filing. I wound up staying there about five or six hours.

When I came back out for the bike I couldn’t open the number-code lock. I have a phone-photo of the code, of course, and I’ve used it successfully ten or twelve times since last weekend. But yesterday it wouldn’t do.

I called the bicycle rental shop before closing time but they didn’t answer. I called again for good measure. I sent two “EMERGENCY!” emails with an explanation + photos of the pole-locked bike. I finally had no choice but to leave it there — what was I going to do, pitch a tent and sleep there to discourage thieves?

I’m still trying to reach the bicycle rental people. I have to leave for the airport in 45 minutes and they won’t pick up. Who runs a bicycle rental business without posting an emergency cell-phone number? Or routinely checking emails for possible emergencies?

I know they’re going to try and charge me for some kind of stress-and-recovery fee, which really wouldn’t be fair. I did nothing wrong.

11:30 am update: The rental shop FINALLY called back, said they’d pick up the bike, not to worry, etc.

A follow-up to last night’s “Will Joe Popcorn Save Rhapsody?” post: I’ve said two or three times that Bryan Singer‘s Bohemian Rhapsody (20th Century Fox, opening tonight) is a generally pleasing in-and-outer — humdrum or “bizarrely anodyne” during stretches, but also one that occasionally catches the heat and delivers serious highs. Then it’s back to anodyne.

The Bohemian Rhapsody problem is that the Queen guys (Brian May in particular) wouldn’t grant rights to a biopic that didn’t deliver a basically positive spin — i.e., “Freddie had his excessive episodes but the fans loved him and the band plus he cared about his mum and dad and wife as far as it went, and of course the songs still rock.” So that’s the yoke — why the film doesn’t feel whole, much less transcendent.

It’s nonetheless a sporadically pleasing thing to sit through, and it really is unfortunate, I feel, that critics and editors (the Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic fraternity that has rendered verdicts of 57% and 49% respectively) aren’t a little more comme ci comme ca about equivocating in an honest way when a film is a solid half-and-halfer.

The phrases “reasonably passable,” “not half bad and sometimes better than that,” “could be a lot worse,” “basically decent” and “imperfect but not a burn” are used by this columnist when the shoe fits, but you’ll hardly ever read them in a typical review. Because critics are trained early on to either pan or approve — to basically lean one way or the other. Don’t confuse the reader by sounding wimpy or uncertain.

Except the flighty, spazzy nature of Bohemian Rhapsody doesn’t (or at least shouldn’t) allow a critic or viewer to lean one way or the other. It’s a once-in-a-blue-mooner that sidesteps suckage but at the same time doesn’t quite get there. In mountain-climbing terms it’s about two thirds of the way between base camp and the peak. Okay, halfway.

Double clarification: The “bizarrely anodyne” comment is from a 10.31 New Yorker piece, “A Truly Perfect Thirty Seconds of Queen“, by Amanda Petrusich.

A fair number of film critics are about to change their tune about Bohemian Rhapsody (20th Century Fox, 11.2), or at least tone down their pissy attitudes. Sometimes Average Joes know better, and this might be one of those rare occasions. I’ve never been a “power to the unwashed popcorn inhalers” type of guy, but this time I feel differently.

[Click through to full story on HE-plus]

HE is leaving Savannah late tomorrow morning. It certainly felt like a lively and plugged-in thing all around, morning to midnight, and the weather was perfectly brisk and fall-ish every day. Yesterday I re-watched and re-contemplated Marielle Heller‘s Can You Ever Forgive Me? and came away with the same doubled-down enthusiasm for Melissa McCarthy‘s Best Actressy performance that I discovered during Telluride. More filings later this evening. I’ve never spent a Halloween evening roaming around Savannah and taking in the atmosphere — tonight will be the first.