Post-posted, 9:28 pm: A sincere apology is hereby conveyed to a journalist-critic because he believes I’ve dishonored his family. I repeated in this short piece my longstanding dislike of martial-arts action scenes and the whole Asian martial-arts genre. But rather than quibble with the guy I hope he’ll accept this apology. What I wrote was simply an opinion about a certain kind of fare. An expression of aesthetic disdain that I’ve conveyed many times. (I also loathe Bollywood films.) I’m nonetheless sorry for hurting the journalist-critic’s feelings and those of his family.

Earlier: Mile 22 (STX, 8.17), the latest Peter Berg-Mark Wahlberg action flick, looks pretty good. Generic but efficient. Back in the ’90s and early aughts Jerry Bruckheimer and Joel Silver used to own this genre. Their names were synonymous with this kind of thing. Remember the Black Hawk Down hoopla? Now it’s “eh, Berg and Wahlberg again…fine.”

I tend to pull back when I spot an Asian actor, stuntman, fight choreographer and martial artist in the cast. Films of this sort have to appeal to the Asian market, of course, but I really don’t care for martial-arts fight scenes. I never have.

Sidenote: When I first heard this title I thought of “Mila 18,” a 1961 Leon Uris novel abut the Warsaw Uprising. In August 2017 Harvey Weinstein announced that he’d produce a film based on the novel, and that he himself would direct. But that went south, of course.

To me the worst drivers are the pokeys — the ones who react to problems and obstructions in an extra-slow, extra-cautious fashion. Most of the time I just steer my rumbling, gurgling Yamaha (doop-doop-doop, dungh-dungh-duhgh) around them, but when I’m driving the Mini-Cooper they can be infuriating. When you’re on two-wheels you can always spot them fairly easily — I actually call them trouble-makers. Because they actually make things miserable for other drivers.

Identifying trait #1: A pokey will sometimes idle six or eight feet behind the white barrier line at a traffic light. They stay away from the white line because the idea of venturing into traffic intimidates them, and so hanging back feels safe and soothing.

Identifying trait #2: When the light turns green and pokeys are in the left-turn lane, they won’t nudge their way into the crossroads like any good driver — they’ll wait at the white line like old ladies (sometimes because they are old ladies) until the coast is totally clear.

Identifying trait #3: When approaching a car on a four-lane street that’s partly obstructing the right lane (i.e., sticking out just a bit during an attempt to parallel park), the pokeys will always stop dead and wait for the car-parker to finish the job. They’ll never look behind them and scoot around the obstructing auto — a task that usually involves going into the left lane just a little bit. Pokeys are too chicken to do this, and this is why in a fair and just after-life they would burn in hell.

Identifying trait #4: When pokeys are looking for a place to park on a residential street, they always slow down to 5 or 10 mph but without arm-signalling cars behind them to go around. It’s always me me me me me me me me, etc.

Identifying trait #5: When they see a curbside parking spot pokeys always pull in front and then back into it, thereby maximizing the obstruction time for other cars. They never just duck into the space hood-first and then wiggle around, like I do when I’m driving the Mini.

Josephine Decker‘s Madeline’s Madeline (Oscilloscope, 8.10) was high on my Sundance ’18 list, due to the recommendations of two or three critic friends. I tried to catch it, but the scheduling didn’t work out. It currently has a 93% Rotten Tomatoes rating — great. But the trailer, “directed” by Winston Hacking, totally rubs me the wrong way. It’s like chalk on a blackboard. I’m now half-persuaded that I’m going to despise the film.

Could Gregory Ellwood‘s 1.15.18 Playlist review be a warning? “Madeline’s Madeline is certainly not for everyone,” he wrote, “and while that might not sound like a ringing endorsement, it’s solicited in the context that the film is an experience that will test some viewers’ patience, as all good art often does.” The headliners are Helena Howard, Miranda July and Molly Parker.

N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott has become a pet peeve around these parts. Last January he posted “My Woody Allen Problem,” which all but ignored the glaring doubts and ambiguities coloring the charges against Allen, especially since the 5.23. posting of Moses Farrow’s essay, which pretty much closed to the book on the case. And last night he darkened my brow by persuading me to watch Lover Come Back (’61), the crusty, throroughly constipated Rock Hudson-Doris Day sex comedy. Scott didn’t actually steer me wrong last night — I happened to watch a 8.4.09 N.Y. Times “Critics Pics” essay in which Scott praised it to the heavens.

Lover Come Back is strangely “funny” to Scott, and presumably to others. Or it used to be. It helps if you can tolerate broad, wafer-thin farce, which leaves me out. Or if you’re down with an arch parody of middle-class sexual attitudes as they existed in the early JFK years, but there isn’t a single line or situation that reflects the human experience as I know it. To really get Lover Come Back you probably need to be coming from a place of straight-jacketed middle class propriety and sexual suppression — then it’s a laugh riot.

All I can tell you is that I didn’t so much as crack a smile, much less chuckle or guffaw. There are two or three lines that aren’t half bad, one about “seaweed jockey shorts” and another from one hospital orderly to another: “Now that’s what I call cutting it close.”

I guess it’s not really A.O. Scott‘s fault — it’s mine. I did it. I found Lover Come Back on Amazon Prime and watched it of my own free will.

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I’d been thinking about attaching a foxtail to the Yamaha Majesty for years. For some reason I did nothing, and for some reason I suddenly jumped on the case last week. The tail arrived yesterday. Done.

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“Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement is crushing. It sends a stark message to the tens of millions of Americans who have long turned to the court for the vindication of many of their most cherished rights and protections: Look somewhere else. That place is the ballot box. So show up and vote. In the absence of a Supreme Court majority that will reliably protect human dignity, universal equality and women’s right to control their own bodies, it is up to Americans who cherish these values to elect politicians at every level of government who share them.” — N.Y. Times editorial, posted on 6.27.

For the first time in months I’m feeling a profound kinship with Variety‘s Kris Tapley, who’s blocked me on Twitter and is always scowling and avoiding eye contact at press gatherings. I’m saying this because Tapley shares my admiration for Stefano Sollima and Taylor Sheridan‘s Sicario: Day of the Soldado (Columbia, 6.29). He recently spoke with costars Josh Brolin and Benicio del Toro.

“Movie’s great,” Tapley says to Del Toro as they begin. “Might be better than last time…I love it.” Del Toro’s Alejando Gillick character was cold and hollowed out and vengeance-driven in Sicario, Del Toro explains, but in Soldado he experiences “an awakening of a conscience [that] brings humanity back to the character.”

The Guardian‘s Peter Bradshaw: “This movie is just so piercingly disturbing and riveting. There is something of Kathryn Bigelow in the night-vision scenes, Michael Mann in the large-calibre weaponry and high-speed convoys, and something also of the Coens’ No Country for Old Men, which like this film stars Josh Brolin. And as a grandiose, episodic story of evil, it has something of Christopher Nolan’s Batman films. It is a violent action noir, rocket-fuelled with its own reckless cynicism.”

The Telegraph‘s Robbie Colin: “Quite honestly, it’s a thrill to see a mid-budget thriller crafted along such mature, unflashy lines — not least one with a right-leaning political bent, which hasn’t lately been much of a signal of aesthetic finesse, give or take the odd American Sniper or Hacksaw Ridge. Both Brolin and Del Toro play classic right-wing heroes — they’re grizzled predators whose hunting ranges uneasily intersect, each prepared to make snap judgements that run against their orders, providing it’s for the best as they see it.

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I’ve said this three or four times, but I have no problem at all with a Denzel Whoop-Ass flick. I love watching Denzel kick the shit out of those young white guys in the trailer. I just want the film in question to be grade-A or at least above average. The odds of this happening with Antoine Fuqua at the helm are not very good. Fuqua has shown time and again that he’s strictly a B-level journeyman if you forget about Training Day, which I believe he got lucky with. I’ve said seven or eight times that Tony Scott‘s Man on Fire is the greatest Denzel whoop-ass flick ever made. I’m sorry but Fuqua is no Scott. Sony will open The Equalizer 2 on 7.20.18.

Last night at the Aero I caught my second viewing of Matt Tyrnauer‘s Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood (Greenwich, 7.27). Tyrnauer and the film’s subject, the legendary Scotty Bowers, sat for a post-screening q & a with Deadline‘s Pete Hammond. Like the film, the discussion delivered charm, candor and much laughter.

I noted a few days ago that this 98-minute doc is an honest, believable portrait of the life (present and past) of a 90something guy who was a sexual go-between for gay or bisexual Hollywood stars in the 1940s, ’50s, ’60s and ’70s. The film is partly based upon Bowers’ six-year-old memoir, “Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars.” Tyrnauer’s film is well-assembled, well-narrated, intimate and often touching.

There’s one aspect of the doc that the politically correct brigade won’t like, and that’s Scotty’s declaration that he was happily and homosexually active when he was 11 or 12. And with several priests even! He wasn’t coerced or manipulated or taken advantage of, he says — he knew exactly what he was doing and was entirely the captain of his own ship.

A certain marquee-brand director told me the same thing back in the mid ’90s, that he was having sex with older guys when he was roughly the same age. I related because I was leafing through nudie mags when I was eight or nine. I wasn’t sexually active until my late teens, but if a pretty older woman had invited me indoors when I was 12 or 13 or 14, I would have been delighted.

Responsible adults don’t like to hear this stuff, and as a rule I realize that sexual activity at a tender age can be highly traumatic for many if not most. But certain people start earlier than others.

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Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy announced today that he’ll retire as of 7.31. The 81 year-old jurist, a conservative moderate who often performed a swing-vote function, is well aware that this decision will allow President Trump an opportunity to fundamentally tilt the Supreme Court in a hard-right, corporate-favoring, Gorsuch-like direction. Thanks, brah…history will remember you for this.

Kennedy presumably understands what an existential threat to democracy Trump is, and that his replacement nominee will almost certainly be a rabid-dog rightie. Kennedy knows, of course, that the considerate thing (as far as the country is concerned) would have been to wait until early ’19, by which time the midterm elections might give liberals a majority in the House and/or Senate. But naahh.

Is Kennedy ill or something? Even if he’s suffering from late-stage cancer he should hang on until the very end. The judicial and legal character of the U.S. of A. hangs in the balance.

Today’s N.Y. Times report states the obvious. “A Trump appointee would very likely create a solid five-member conservative majority that could imperil abortion rights and expand gun rights.”

Last night HE correspondent David Chien attended a special 70mm mag-track screening of James Cameron‘s The Abyss (’89). Fox Movie Night, 6:30 pm, Zanuck theatre on the Fox lot. Thanks to Schawn Belston and James Finn for the invite. Here’s David’s report:

“The Zanuck was about half-filled. I haven’t been in this theater in over a decade — last time was for a weekend screening of X-Men: The Last Stand with the screenwriters in attendance. The theater is nice and cozy and state-of-the-art. In particular, its sound system holds up quite well. The space reminds me of the Aero in Santa Monica but with better upholstery and vibe. I have a soft spot for screening venues (such as the Academy Theater) at which food is prohibited.

“As people were filing in, a slideshow/video was projected (digitally) on the screen, featuring details about 35mm-to-70mm conversion on a projector as well as production photos and quotes about The Abyss. One that stood out: Gale Anne Hurd stating that this was the hardest film she ever made (I believe it). One fact that stood out: The Abyss was the first film of its kind to record sync-sound while actors were submerged in water (the weight of this achievement had not occurred to me as deeply until last night during the actual show).

“The screening started on time. Finn nd Belston shared additional details about the screening. The 70mm print used last night is especially rare as Kodak no longer produces this type of acetate film stock. Also, as a 6-track mag print, the analog sound associated with this version of the film is rather unique. For this Fox Movie Night event (something specifically for Fox employees and their friends/family), the planning took months. Apparently, the projectionist spent weeks to adjust picture and sound. On the website, in70mm.com, I located The Abyss projection letter, signed by Cameron and Hurd, on which they explain the importance of brightness and volume. I suspect the projection team at Zanuck studied such notes.

“The 70mm print still had the Cineplex Odeon logos and two Fox trailers attached. First up was War of the Roses. It was immediately apparent how damned loud the presentation would be (for me, a good thing, as I enjoy that kind of immersive volume). Then, there was a largely text-based teaser (one which I had never viewed) for Die Hard 2. Its punchline moment had the theater laughing.

“This was the theatrical cut of The Abyss. Like other films of the era — Aliens, Terminator 2, JFK, The Professional — I usually leaned towards the shorter versions. From a theatrical perspective, the tighter pacing and focused narrative play better for me. I feel the same about Close Encounters, which of course The Abyss owes a great debt. I also noticed this time how much of The Abyss was appropriated by Interstellar. Nolan was there last night, by the way — sitting dead center in the front row, Tarantino-style, for the most immersive journey.

“What can I say about The Abyss? I grew up watching it many times, with my father, via several editions of laserdisc sets. CLV and CAV, theatrical and extended, pan-and-scan (Super 35mm formatted) and letterboxed. It is a technical marvel, Das Boot meets Close Encounters. The last time I watched it — and the only time theatrically — was at the Aero, in fact, back during the summer of 2009. We were promised a 70mm print of both The Abyss and Aliens. If memory serves, that night it was only a 35mm of the former but a beat up 70mm of the latter. And Cameron was there and made an awfully funny joke about Michael Mann being way more of a pain on set than he.

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