The other night I streamed a handsome high-def version of George Stevens‘ Gunga Din on Amazon. I still love it for the nicely choreographed action in the first half-hour and the serious tension of the final 40 minutes (prisoners, snake pit, hostage, Sam Jaffe‘s “stupid courage,” triumphant defeat of Thug army, Kipling’s poem, Jaffe resurrected in a corporal’s uniform). That leaves 47 minutes of material that isn’t exactly tiresome or “bad” but which taxes your patience in certain ways.

I’m probably wrong in thinking that Gunga Din was the first big-budget Hollywood adventure to mix acrobatic adventure, winking humor and servings of serious drama in one package, but it was certainly one of the first. Stevens knew about laughs and slapstick choreography from having worked for comedy producer Hal Roach in the early ’30s, and he certainly used those skills here.

Victor McLaglen, Cary Grant in George Stevens’ Gunga Din.

Is there a single Millenial out there who’s even heard of this film, much less seen it beginning to end? I wonder. It doesn’t even begin to speak their language. But the afore-mentioned hour-plus (especially the opening 30) delivers so much dash and zest. You can’t help but marvel at how the individual cuts and pieces fit together just so.

In a piece called “It’s Criminal,” New Republic critic Otis Ferguson severely criticized Gunga Din for celebrating the authority of British colonialism without hesitation and at the same time depicting the “thuggee” terrorists (anti-colonialists who were more or less a late 19th Century version of India’s Viet Cong) as mere cutthroats. “So much for the content,” Ferguson concluded. He added as an afterthought that the “form” of Gunga Din is quite entertaining, rousing, thrilling, etc.

N.Y. Times critic B.R. Crisler addressed only the form in a N.Y. Times review that was published on 1.27.39:

“At its best, Gunga Din is an orchestration, taut with suspense and enriched in the fighting scenes with beautifully timed, almost. epigrammatic bits of ‘business‘ and a swinging gusto which makes of every roundhouse blow a thing of beauty.

I’m almost teary-eyed with nostalgia for time I spent in New York City during the 2013 Christmas holiday. Six or seven days, whatever it was. I took a friend to see The Wolf of Wall Street at the gone-but-not-forgotten Ziegfeld on a Saturday night, and it was just heaven. The whole night was actually. The energy, the air, the aromas…all of it. Christmas isn’t really Christmas unless you’re roaming around midtown and lower Manhattan at night, and then maybe taking a train to visit friends in the suburbs for a day or two. Or if you’re roaming around London, which I was lucky enough to do in December of ’80. Nippy weather, overcoat, gloves, etc. The chillier the air, the better the holiday.

Remember those dim-bulb Academy members who harangued Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio after that first Academy screening because they didn’t get the satirical thrust behind all the coarse vulgarity (which was delivered both literally and within “quotes”)? And how Scorsese and DiCaprio had to attend screening after screening and patiently explain that they were depicting the louche adventures of Jordan Belfort and his cronies to make a point about the character of the buccaneers who have fleeced this country and will definitely fleece again? Remember the brief shining moment of Hope Holiday?

It’s been 13 and 1/2 months since Donald Trump was elected President, and my anger about what’s happened to this country since 1.20.17 has been tempestuous. But the root of my rage is still, the night before Christmas, aimed at older GenX and boomer-aged establishment Democrats who advanced and financed the candidacy of Hillary Clinton, and eventually locked it down in the spring of ’16.

I voted for Clinton for all the usual sane, forward-looking reasons, but Hillary and the genderists and especially the entrenched Democratic mafia types who muscled her through the primary and delegate-pledging process…they are the main reason we’re currently stuck in the psychotic hellscape of the here-and-now. For Hillary is and was so polarizing, so hated by the bubbas, so unable or uninterested in trying to reach out to poor whites. The bumblefucks voted for Trump, yes, but a significant majority of them, I’m convinced, mainly voted against Clinton, and there can be no forgiving the liberal establishment donor class for making this scenario inevitable.

Any viable, dynamic woman candidate who wasn’t Hillary…if only someone had pushed through.

An anecdote from a six-month-old podcast between Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capeheart and Justin Gest, author of “The New Minority: White Working Class Politics in an Age of Immigration and Inequality,” which explains the dug-in, deep-down mindset of rural bumblefucks who supported Trump and who will continue to support him despite the psychotic poison he and his cabinet have been spewing for the last 11 months.

Gest: “[For poor, working-class whites] racism has become an instrument of silence…it is a way of invalidating people…white working class people are not the silent majority, they are the silenced majority…many of them feel silenced by the political correctness brigade…Democrats used to be pro-union and pro-working class [but] since the late ’80s and early ’90s they’ve become [increasingly] allied with the financial class…there are 660 counties in the U.S. that are 90% or 80% white, and earning below the median income in the U.S….of those poor counties, how many did Hillary Clinton win? The answer is two.”

Yul Brynner owns this scene in The Ten Commandments. Poor Anne Baxter is defeated by the grotesque dialogue, but somehow Brynner isn’t bruised. His deep baritone voice, buff bod and sexual confidence (he was 34 or 35 at the time) rule.

I wonder if this scene would be written, much less go before the cameras, in today’s climate. Things have gotten so political. I’m trying to imagine the reaction to a scene in a big-budget, major-studio film in which an arrogant sexist ruler (a) professes a complete lack of interest in whether or not his presumed future wife loves him and (b) is only interested in conjugal rights once she becomes his queen.

Or am I being too cynical?

Yul Brynner (formerly Yuliy Borisovich Briner) was coming off a phenomenal B’way run as King Mongkut in The King and I, and enjoying all kinds of acclaim. 1956 was a huge trifecta year for Brynner with the film version of The King and I opening on 6.28.56, The Ten Commandments premiering a little more than three months later, on 10.5.56, and Anatole Litvak‘s Anastasia debuting on 12.13.56.

Three and and a half months after Anastasia‘s big-city debut (or on 3.27.57) Brynner won a Best Actor Oscar for his King and I performance.

From Scott Tobias’s 9.11.17 Variety review: “In the wake of the 2008 recession, some investors looking to recoup their losses from the subprime mortgage crisis traded one fraud for another, turning the inflated value of China’s economic boom into another bubble destined to be popped. Jed Rothstein’s wildly entertaining The China Hustle blows the lid off another multibillion-dollar heist built on complex financial instruments and a whole lot of smoke and mirrors.

“Though it resembles the docu-journalism of Alex Gibney films like Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Rothstein’s irreverent, can-you-believe-this sense of humor makes the anti-capitalist message go down even easier.

“Far from a postmortem, the film uncovers a scandal that’s still ongoing, with parties on one side bullish about promoting Chinese stocks and parties on the other looking for empty stocks to short. And as with the widespread malpractice that torpedoed the housing market in 2008, there are no rules or incentives for investment banks and brokers to stop perpetuating shady deals, so long as the commissions keep rolling in.

“’There are no good guys in this story, including me,’ says Dan David, the charismatic whistle-blower who serves as the film’s prevailing voice and de facto tour guide.

“Working at a tiny investment firm in small-town Pennsylvania, David and his brother took a massive hit in the 2008 collapse, but resolved to stay in business and figure out creative ways to earn back their clients’ investment dollars. What they discovered was something called a ‘reverse merger’: Because Chinese companies couldn’t be traded directly in U.S. stock exchanges, hundreds of them were ‘merging’ with American shell companies that still had a presence on the New York Stock Exchange or other trading floors. In theory, American investors could then seize on the opportunity to profit from the gains of an ascendant economy.

A couple of weeks ago Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson and Eric Kohn revealed something interesting about voting for contenders in this or that category on year-end ballots. They both spoke of “gaming” the system in order to favor artists of color. They discussed this during a “Screen Talk” podcast (#176) that posted on 12.8.17.

Thompson (starting around the 8:28 mark): “This is a horrible way to put this, but I know when I was filling out my Critics Choice ballot, there were a couple of categories where I did lean into a couple of movies including Get Out and Mudbound and Shape of Water…where I wanted to make sure there were some people of color on my ballot…I did! And you probably did too.”

Kohn: “Of course. I will cop to that, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. I think this would be a problematic tendency if the quality wasn’t there. But [it is], and so this is a year in which you can lean into those options without feeling guilty.”

Thompson: “What I noticed I did…what I did was that I made them higher. On my ballot. In each case. I moved them up to make sure that it was recognized. As opposed to putting them as #4 or #5 or something like that. Academy members are going to do the same thing.”

I’m mentioning this because of a comment posted yesterday by Australian HE reader Jeffrey Edwards, to wit:

“As a result of the #Oscarssowhite hysteria, regressive leftists are seemingly expecting Oscar voters to consider a potential nominee’s skin color as a primary factor when deciding who to vote for,” he wrote.

Edwards then imagined their thought processes being something akin to “Well, I would like to vote for Michael Stuhlbarg for Best Supporting Actor because I think his performance truly merits a nomination. However, all the actors I nominate for that category will be white so instead to avoid outrage I’d better vote for Jason Mitchell in Mudbound because even though I thought he was just solid and would prefer to vote for Stuhlbarg, I’d rather avoid incurring the wrath of hysterical people on [Twitter].

Alexander Payne‘s Downsizing, an intelligent, well-made film with a fascinating hook, is a dead puppy. It earned $768 per screen after opening yesterday in 2668 situations. This on top of the 52% and 63% respective scores from Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic plus a Cinemascore C grade. Deadline‘s Anthony D’Alessandro reports that under-25 viewers “hated it.”

I’m still advising HE readers to catch it this weekend. It’s not a typical “burn” but a sometimes brilliant disappointment. It delivers, in fact, a very good-to-excellent first act and a reasonably decent second act. But it commits hari-kiri in the third act, and in so doing destroys the initial good will that it had during the first…oh, 35 or 40 minutes. I’m truly sorry. My respect to Mr. Payne and his collaborators. Everybody drops the ball once in a while.

Here’s how I put it four and two thirds months ago (“Downsizing Deflates, Treads Water in Telluride”):

“Everyone knows the boilerplate. A futuristic setting and a dazzling, astonishing scientific discovery from Norwegian scientists that allows humans to reduce themselves to five inches tall. In so doing small volunteers live much more luxuriously and lavishly (their financial holdings are worth much more) while hundreds of thousands if not millions of carbon footprints are sharply reduced, and a far healthier environment results. Or so it seems at first.

“The story is about shlumpy physical therapist Paul Safranek (Matt Damon) and his shallow wife Audrey (Kristen Wiig) deciding to get small and live lavishly inside a downsized tiny town. A controlled environment inside a plastic dome, safe from birds and cats and other predators.

“The truth is that Downsizing starts off like a house on fire (loving it! yes! so great! Christoph Waltz is a hoot!) and then it starts to droop around the 40-minute mark, and then it really droops and sags when the movie moves to Norway. (No, I’m not going to explain what means, just that the film goes there during the final act.)

The brilliant aspects of this justly praised scene from Luca Guadagnino‘s Call Me By Your Name, apart from the dialogue and Michael Stuhlbarg‘s exquisite delivery, are (a) the very slow zoom-in as Stuhlbarg begins speaking, (b) the subtle rumble of thunder at the :22 mark, (c) the gentle addition of Sufjan Stevens‘ piano at the 1:56 mark, and (d) the way Timothee Chalamet refrains from melting until the very end. Clip editor’s note: Things should’ve faded to black before Chalamet asks “does mom know?”

Yesterday on Facebook Paul Schrader threw some left-handed shade upon Steven Spielberg‘s The Post, which opened yesterday in New York and Los Angeles. And then Bret Easton Ellis followed suit.

The Post, said Schrader, “feeds the myth that the system actually works. That the events of 1971 could be repeated today. I can hear Trump/Fox chuckling: yeah, let Hollywood and the media believe that myth if it keeps them pacified. We fixed that. It will never happen again.”

Ellis: The Hillary Clinton of prestige movies: lost in a bubble, smug, completely clueless, made by the establishment. [And conveying] a refusal to understand Trump’s appeal. This is the kind of lost and naive movie that unknowingly explains exactly why the mainstream media are where they are now — this story from 1971 has absolutely nothing to do with what is going on in 2017 (we are in a much more complicated moment) and yet it pushes a theory that is so flattering to journalists that despite the glaring weaknesses of the movie (and its thesis) they are going crazy over it. The Post is a myth only left-wing millionaires could buy.”

Village Voice critic Bilge Ebiri: “I disagree that The Post is all that convinced it can happen again. The hazy nostalgia with which it depicts bustling newsrooms is very pointed — it’s making a case that the kind of journalistic institutions that allowed for this kind of reporting are dinosaurs. It’s a very sad movie, in that sense.”

Excerpt from HE review, posted on 12.6: “A smartly written, well-performed tale of how and why Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham (Meryl Streep) decided to man up and a grow a pair in the thick of the Pentagon Papers episode of June 1971, The Post is far and away my favorite Spielberg film since Saving Private Ryan. Call it Spielberg’s best, certainly his least problematic, in two decades.

“The critical verdict hasn’t been unanimous but I fell for it, and I mean all the way through and not just during the manipulative third act, which, if you have any stored-up sentiment about the glory days of 20th century dead-tree journalism, will definitely melt you down. I knew I was being sold a Spielbergian bill of goods but I bought it anyway.  I gushed out some thoughts the day after, and a New York friend replied, ‘Calm down, Tonto…it’s very good but not great.'”

Another critic friend: “It never made me tingle the way Spotlight or All the President’s Men did. Plus it has too many Spielberg-y touches: the little girl selling lemonade (Jesus!), that [redacted] ending. It all felt forced rather than organic, despite strong performances from Streep and Hanks.”

“It was also two hours of people going ‘We can’t do that!’ and others saying ‘We have to do that!’

This Oswald family footage, taken on 11.22.62 or Thanksgiving Day, is indistinguishable from tens of thousands of home movies taken that very same afternoon. Family celebrations are pretty much all the same, and are always about facades. The insisted-upon emotions of these gatherings (happiness, contentment, alpha vibes) always mask the undercurrents. The likelihood on this pre-Christmas weekend is that everyone in your clan is doing reasonably well or at least trying to do better, and planning for the best. But you never know. “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” (Note: I’d never seen this 8mm footage before this morning.)

Because I didn’t review Michael Gracey, Hugh Jackman and James Mangold‘s The Greatest Showman when everyone else did, I conveyed an impression that I haven’t seen it. Except I have. I caught it on the Fox lot on 12.13, and then…well, I kind of put it aside. It’s not that I hated the damn thing or even disliked it. It’s not so much painful to sit through as draining. It’s a big, fat, empty-headed, old-school musical with an exclamation point, and by that I mean a musical with nothing going on inside. All The Greatest Showman wants to do is shovel the exuberance as it over-produces and over-sells.

Using a simplistic pruning of the life of P.T. Barnum as a narrative thread, it’s basically a series of splashy music videos strung end to end. It’s not bad, I didn’t hate it, you could do worse, etc. Jackman and his costars — Zac Efron, Michelle Williams, Rebecca Ferguson, Zendaya, Keala Settle — perform well under the circumstances. It’s just that Gracey tries so hard and the film feels so synthetic.

Last night I felt a bit nauseous after visiting a Michael Kors store in the Beverly Center. All that glitter garb, all those gold chains and sparkly shoe buckles and gaudy cluelessness, and with Michael Kors branding on just about every item. Kors seems to be selling uptown threads to people without much taste, to people who wouldn’t know stylistic understatement if it bit them in the ass. People of limited education who don’t get it, who feel they need to make some kind of vaguely vulgar, attention-getting statement in order to matter.

These are the people, I told myself, who will love The Greatest Showman. I’m not putting the movie down per se. It is what it is, and some will have a fairly good time with it. But Jesus, it feels so vapid, so lacking in edge and so consumed by a desire to entertain the most impressionable Vegas-visiting schmucks in the room.

20,971 petitioners apparently want George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh to “do a Ridley Scott” with Matt Damon‘s cameo in Gary Ross‘s Ocean’s 8 (Warner Bros., 6.8.18), an all-female soft reboot of the Ocean’s trilogy. That or cut Damon’s cameo altogether. I knew that Damon has been under fire for, in the opinion of some, not condemning sexual misbehavior with sufficient severity, but I hadn’t realized until today that he’s almost regarded as a Kevin Spacey-type ogre. Almost.

Damon hasn’t been accused of sexual harassment or assault by anyone, but he is regarded as some kind of apologist or look-the-other-way type when it comes to the behavior of male abusers like Harvey Weinstein. Damon sounded relatively sane and reasonable to me when he spoke a week ago to Rolling Stone‘s Peter Travers about the current #MeToo climate, but the Robespierre contingent disagrees.

“Matt Damon should not be in this movie,” a Petitionsite essay declares. “[His] inclusion would trivialize the serious nature of the charges against sexual abusers like Weinstein and show massive disrespect for the brave women speaking out. It would also send a terrible message about the inevitability of — and lack of accountability for — sexual harassment in the workplace that four in ten American women experience. I’m calling on Oceans 8 producers George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh to toss Damon’s Oceans 8 cameo where it belongs: on the cutting room floor.”