As a former employee of Kevin Smith (salaried columnist from ’02 to August ’04) and a longtime admirer of his films and his patter, I’m personally relieved and overjoyed that he escaped the Big Sleep last night after succumbing to a “massive” heart attack. That Instagram photo he released last night looks like a signature image from an alternate-universe version of Get Out — the only thing missing is a tear running down his cheek.

As a lifelong loather of almost all things Christian (mainly due to the rightwing political associations that have clung to this arrogant faith since the political takeover in the early ’80s), I naturally recoiled when I read those “praying for you, brah” tweets by Chris Pratt. The 38 year-old actor has acquired a rep as an allegedly conservative-minded fellow, so the shoe seemed to fit. I therefore understand or half-sympathize why Pratt was attacked for trying to go all Christian-smothery on Smith.

On the other hand the response from Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn struck me as sensible:

“So I just read Pratt’s tweet to Kevin Smith saying he would pray for him & made the mistake of reading the comments, many of which go off on Chris for saying he’d pray. If you’re offering Parkland shooting survivors prayers, but are unwilling to deal with the problems of gun violence in this country in a practical way, those prayers are empty. But no one expects Chris Pratt to shoulder doctors out of the way and perform heart surgery on Kevin Smith. Nor does Kevin need Chris to pay his medical bills. So I think his prayers are appreciated, and about all he can do.”

So all of a sudden and “out of the fucking blue,” as Chris Penn said in Reservoir Dogs, Paul Kersey (Bruce Willis) is suddenly a rightwing, pistol-brandishing Trump and NRA guy? We all understood the motive for Charles Bronson‘s Kersey becoming an urban vigilante who drilled bad guys because the cops wouldn’t do their jobs, but when did this activity become quote-unquote patriotic? Or is there something about the plot of Eli Roth’s soon-to-open film (MGM, 3.2) that I haven’t gotten wind of?

I’m presuming for now this is strictly an MGM marketing pitch, and that it has nothing to do with Willis going after ISIS or something in that vein. Could this poster be a lightning-fast exploiting of the widespread outrage when everyone learned that local Broward County cops and the FBI did nothing when told that Parkland massacre fiend Nikolas Cruz was well armed and ready to explode?

Yesterday I marathoned through all four hour-long episodes of David Hare and S.J. Clarkson‘s Collateral, which will begin streaming on Netflix on March 9th.

I can’t review it until this Wednesday (2.28), but I can at least call it a brilliantly written, exquisitely acted British conspiracy thriller of the highest order. Which is more or less what all the British critics have been saying.

It’s about a murder, but is not so much a “whodunit” but a “whydunit,” as Hare has said. I’ll leave it there for now.

Carey Mulligan, as Detective Inspector Kip Glaspie, owns this series with quiet, exacting authority. You can read her every thought and current in each and every moment. She’s just a genius at guiding you along and making you root for Kip every step of the way.

Remember how everyone loved Helen Mirren as Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect, the British cop series? Mulligan matches Mirren line for dry line, inflection for inflection, slightly raised eyebrow for slightly raised eyebrow. She’s at the absolute top of her game here.

A BBC Two series, Collateral began airing in England on a sequential episode basis on Monday, 2.12. The fourth episode will air on Monday, 3.5. Netflix will stream all four episodes simultaneously four days later.

HE to Journo Pals, sent this morning: “Has anyone received an invite to Eli Roth and Joe Carnahan‘s Death Wish (MGM/Annapurna, 3.2)? It opens in four days and I haven’t received jack squat.” Journo #1: “Nope.” Journo #2: “Uhhm, no.” Journo #3: “No, but I’m not exactly eager to see it either.”

Word around the campfire says that Carnahan’s 2015 script is better than the rewritten hodgepodge that the film is based upon.

Posted a few weeks ago: I’m not saying the home-invader murderers in Eli Roth and Joe Carnahan‘s remake of Death Wish should be from this or that tribe, but the U.S. is a multicultural society, after all, and it does seem a tiny bit chickenshit that the bad guys are generic white scumbags, or cut from the same cloth as the three invaders (Jeff Goldblum played one of them) in Michael Winner’s 1974 original.

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The last four or five minutes of Joel and Ethan Coen‘s A Serious Man is one of the all-time greatest finales of 21st Century cinema, hands down. Because it summarizes the basic ethos of the film — “If God doesn’t like you, you’re fucked and that’s that” — and because the approaching tornado storm is so perfectly ominous. The visual effects maestros were Oliver Arnold, Andy Burmeister and Alexandre Cancado of Luma Pictures.

Here’s a brief chat I had with the Coens on 9.13.08, during the Toronto Film Festival.

“Slow Death by Jewish Kiki,” posted on 9.11.09: “Joel and Ethan Coen‘s A Serious Man is a brilliant LQTM black comedy that out-misanthropes Woody Allen by a country mile and positively seethes with contempt for complacent religious culture (in this case ’60s era Minnesota Judaism). I was knocked flat in the best way imaginable and have put it right at the top of my Coen-best list. God, it’s such a pleasure to take in something this acidic and well-scalpeled. The Coens are fearless at this kind of artful diamond-cutting.

“The wickedly funereal tone and lack of stars means it isn’t going to make a dime, but it’s a high-calibre achievement by the most gifted filmmaking brothers of our time, and it absolutely must rank as one of the year’s ten Best Picture nominees when all is said and done. The Academy fudgies will not be permitted to brush this one aside, and if they do there will be torches and pitchforks such as James Whale never imagined at the corner of Wilshire and La Peer.

“The worldview of this maliciously wicked film (which isn’t “no-laugh funny” as much as wicked-bitter-toxic funny, which I personally prize above all other kinds) is black as night, black as a damp and sealed-off cellar. Scene after scene tells us that life is drip-drip torture, betrayal and muted hostility are constants, all manner of bad things (including tornadoes) are just around the corner, your family and neighbors will cluck-cluck as you sink into quicksand, etc.

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It’s warm today in Los Angeles — 65 degrees and only 11 am. The cold snap (evening temps in the 40s, which felt like 30s due to winds) is over for now. Soon it’ll be March, and then comes April and May. And then the fifth anniversary of the 6.19.13 death of James Gandolfini. I’m mentioning this because this morning I happened to re-read one of the ugliest comment-thread pile-ons in the history of this column. It followed a plainly-written “this is how it happened” piece about my having “crashed” (in a vague manner of speaking) Gandolfini’s funeral service at Manhattan’s St. John The Divine on 6.27.13.

For two days I was seething with rage while coping with a broken heart. The ugliness amazed me although a few commenters, at least, understood and respected the fact that I attended out of love and respect. Variety‘s Stephen Gaydos said it best in 6.28.13 post: “Wells is a huge [Gandolfini] fan and so he paid his respects to a guy who was talented and died too young. Those are the facts. The rest is cockatoo chatter.”

At the end of a local ABC News report about the funeral[above], the anchor guy states that “the funeral was closed to the press.” The beat-down I received that day was partly about my having claimed that press wasn’t invited (or at least that I wasn’t) and that I had to circumvent stern-looking women with clipboards who were checking names, etc.

Here it is again: “I got hated on big-time for tweeting about having crashed James Gandolfini‘s funeral this morning at Manhattan’s St. John The Divine. Yes, I flippantly used the term “funeral crasher!” because that’s what I was. But it’s the singer, not the song. The haters ignored the fact that I (a) asked for God’s forgiveness in having crashed, (b) ascribed my crashing success to the intervention of angels, and (c) said that I crashed with reverence and respect for James, David Chase and all the “made” Sopranos guys. The rush-to-judgment pissheads simply weren’t listening. They never do. They’re scolds…shrill finger-wagging scolds going “tut-tut!” and “no, no, no!”

“I didn’t crash Gandolfini’s funeral like some giggling monkey, and I didn’t take the subway up there this morning with the intention of crashing. I crashed it solemnly like some devoted choirboy or Sopranos family soldier. I just grimmed up and shuffled up the cathedral steps and…well, go ahead and laugh but I honestly believe that I got past security because some angel from heaven who lived in my area of New Jersey when he or she was mortal happened to look down from heaven at that moment and said ‘whoa, wait up…he’s okay…fuck it, let him through.’

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Sometime in mid-July of ’99, or 18 and 1/2 years ago, I suffered through an all-media screening of Jan DeBont‘s The Haunting. I went with the hope that DeBont, whose stock had plummeted two years earlier after the catastrophe of Speed 2: Cruise Control, might rebound if he would only pay tribute to Robert Wise‘s The Haunting (’63) by relying on eerie suggestion rather practical and CG effects. Alas, he ignored Wise’s approach entirely.

“The Haunting isn’t merely bad,” I wrote in my Mr. Showbiz column. “It’s one of the emptiest, most ineptly plotted, synthetically programmed, pointlessly overdone summer movies I’ve ever seen. I’m now completely convinced that this is the movie that drove Liam Neeson to the brink of retirement. The film’s final close-up is of Neeson and Catherine Zeta Jones wearing looks of utter exhaustion with a hint of self-loathing, and you have to figure that gearing themselves up emotionally for this shot couldn’t have been much of a stretch.”

The Haunting wasn’t a financial wipeout — it cost $80 million to make, earned $91.4 million domestically and $177 million worldwide. But it was so grueling to sit through…well, I don’t know that The Haunting was the reason behind DeDont not landing another directing gig until three years had elapsed — Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life (’03). But it sure didn’t help.

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This ScreenPrism essay about the films of Stanley Kubrick is only six days old — it was posted on 2.18. Boiled down it basically says that Kubrick’s films all say the same thing, which is that humans are ignoble, disruptive and untrustworthy creatures consumed by self-denial and various foolish mythologies and delusions, but that the visual framings used by Kubrick to tell variations of this same sad story can be deeply lulling and at the same time transporting. Similarly, this essay is so soothing on a certain level that it will engage your mind and especially your memory while at the same time putting you into a kind of trance. I stopped listening to the young woman’s narration after two or three minutes, and yet I continued to absorb what she was saying by a kind of osmosis, by sinking into the clips like some kind of heated pool or bathtub. An amazing process.

Barry Levinson‘s Horsing Around In The Shower is based on a script by Debora Cahn, John C. Richards and David McKenna. It seems to primarily be a journalism saga, pitting the late Joe Paterno (Al Pacino), Penn State’s legendary football coach who disgraced himself by looking the other way while Jerry Sandusky (Jim Johnson) did what he did with God-knows-how-many young guys, against real-life Patriot News reporter Sarah Ganim (Riley Keough), who’s now working for CNN.

To go by the trailer Joe’s wife Sue (Kathy Baker) looked the other way also. HBO will debut the 102-minute film, which is actually called Paterno, on 4.7.

Again — you have to see Amir Bar-Lev‘s Happy Valley (’14) before watching the Levinson version.

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