Great Anticipations

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Variety has asked a few critics to riff on some 2018 films they’re especially looking forward to. The list contains two forehead-slappers — Steven Spielberg‘s Ready Player One and Ava DuVernay‘s A Wrinkle in Time. (If you can’t tell what the latter has in store by way of last month’s trailer, you need to watch it again.) Leave it to Peter Debruge to speak excitedly of these.

Amy Nicholson has singled out Alex Garland‘s Annihilation, but you know that Paramount’s decision to preview it at last March’s Cinemacon and then push it into an early ’18 release indicates some kind of droop factor.

I was confused by Richard Kuipers‘ mention of Anthony Maras‘ The Palace, a thriller about the 2008 Mumbai attacks, as it’s been referred to as Hotel Mumbai for the last year or so.


Roma director Alfonso Cuaron during a March 2017 press conference about the end of filming.

I completely share Owen Gleiberman‘s excitement about Alfonso Cuaron‘s Roma, Bryan Singer‘s Bohemian Rhapsody, Asghar Farhadi‘s Everybody Knows and Damien Chazelle‘s First Man.

HE’s leading ’18 hotties (apart from the Cuaron, Chazelle, Farhadi and Singer): Martin Scorsese‘s The Irishman, Luca Guadagnino‘s Suspiria, Adam McKay‘s Backseat, Steve McQueen‘s Widows, Terrence Malick‘s Radegund, Barry Jenkins‘ If Beale Street Could Talk, Bjorn Runge‘s The Wife, Felix von Groeningen‘s Beautiful Boy, Spike Lee‘s Black Klansman, Jennifer Kent‘s The Nightingale, Paolo Sorrentino‘s Loro (life of Silvio Berlusconi), Paul Verhoeven‘s Blessed Virgin and Laszlo Nemes‘ Sunset, a drama set in pre-WWI Budapest. (14)

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Frank Miller Gang at Train Station

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Loony-right spokespersons are always in lockstep when it comes to news-show interviews. The current unified, Trump-mandated message is “the justice department is harboring a corrupt, agenda-driven, deep-state cabal,” etc. The troops, in short, appear to be fluffing up the bed for either (a) Trump’s dismissal of special prosecutor Robert Mueller or (b) his replacing Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein with a pro-Trump overseer who will hinder or restrict Mueller’s investigation. When and if this happens, an immediate and widespread response is essential.

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“Addicted To Outrage”?

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It feels funny to be agreeing with Tucker Carlson’s essay about Matt Damon. As everyone knows Damon was recently all but lynched for remarks he shared with Rolling Stone‘s Peter Travers ten days ago. “There’s not a single sentiment in [what Damon said to Travers] that’s not defensible or that 90 percent of the American population would find over the top or outrageous,” Carlson said. “It’s all within bounds or it would have been last year. [But] because a handful of Twitter users don’t like it, the rest of us have to pretend that Matt Damon is somehow guilty of something awful, and if we don’t pretend, we may ourselves be seen as collaborators in whatever crimes he supposedly committed and forced to share his punishment.”

The Wild Boys

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There’s a contingent that feels Call Me By Your Name isn’t queer enough. It’s too chaste, too subtle, too geared to “str8” guys like myself. Maybe they’re right. Maybe the thing keeping Call Me By Your Name from true greatness is the absence of a nice splooge shot.

Once More With Feeling

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A 2nd annual Park City Women’s March will happen on Saturday, 1.20, at 9 am. Barring some unexpected hazard and exactly like last year, Hollywood Elsewhere will be there with bells on. Passions were running high 11 months ago, but with the building of the #MeToo movement over the last ten weeks plus the 16 (or is it 19?) Trump assaults plus the generally deranged mindset of his administration since 1.20.17, the fervor should be even stronger next month. Here’s a tee-shirt link.

Duck Soup

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31 years ago and four months after a calamitous U.S. debut, Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz‘s Howard The Duck opened in England with a new title — Howard…A New Breed of Hero — and without any indications (at least in the print ads) that the hero was white and feathered. I don’t know if this approach was used in other European territories, but it would’ve made sense, given what happened with the straightforward U.S. sell. If IMDB figures are correct (total U.S. haul was $16,295,774, worldwide gross was $21,667,000), the European marketing didn’t help. Honest admission: I’ve never watched Howard The Duck start to finish — I’ve only seen a third of it on DVD.

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Blue Christmas

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A friend who lives overseas wrote the following earlier today: “I’m really suffering, and I feel really alone and broken. The closest people to me have all betrayed me in the last days. Go figure. The truth is that this world is not good, and people are afraid of the things they truly crave. I try so hard to be so good and give to so many, but receive so little of that care or kindness or closeness in return. And it hurts the most when it’s on a day like today, on Christmas. Yes, I know, just a random holiday but still.”

HE response #1: “If we were sitting in a cafe somewhere and you said ‘the closest people to me have all betrayed me in the last days,’ I would naturally say ‘whaddaya mean…betrayed you how?’ I’m presuming that at least one of these betrayals had to do with a woman hurting your feelings. Well, you don’t need me to tell you that this is sadly and eternally par for the course. Ask Frank Sinatra. Lovers ignore, pull back, occasionally bruise, cause hurt, sometimes even draw blood. Obviously not all the time but often enough for what I’ve just written to be a cliche. Quelle surprise!”

HE response #2: “What can I tell you? People mainly look after themselves. I don’t think that rule of existence is going to change any time soon. My grandparents used to have a green candy-serving bowl in their living room, and I distinctly recall chuckling as a nine or ten year-old at the slogan painted upon it: ‘People are no are no damn good.’ Ever since I’ve been measuring human behavior against this somber assessment, and my considered opinion today is that more than a few people (especially those blessed with good genes and decent educations and non-traumatic upbringings) are actually quite ‘good’ as far as kindly, considerate behavior goes.

“But you’ll never find a center of happiness if you’re looking for others to do it for you — to offer love and respect and care for you in the right ways — to provide that balm, those hugs, that emotional support system that we all want and need. That was probably what my grandparents were irked about, and they had several friends and a large extended family to hang out with from time to time. Friends and lovers are blessings but not solutions, and they never will be. Take yourself off that treadmill, get shut of it. Here comes another cliche: ‘Happiness and sadness are illusions — opposite sides of the same coin.’ We’re all part of a single, spherical, immaculate universe of chance and destiny. Buy a copy of the Bhagavad Gita, listen to Van Morrison on vinyl, sail into the mystic.”

HE response #3: “Or get hold of the Bluray of Brian Desmond Hurt‘s A Christmas Carol.”

20 Years and Change

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I worked as a freelance staffer for People magazine from August of ’96 through early ’98. I was glad for the income but was never comfortable with the anxious atmosphere inside the 12th floor People offices in West Los Angeles, particularly the tense, watchful vibes that I often got from bureau chief Jack Kelly. Kelly was always giving you a look that said “I’m a wee bit concerned about what you may be doing or not doing….should I be?” He would always close the door when he dropped by the office of this or that staffer to chat. A nice enough guy but he gave me the creeps.

I was visiting the kids in the San Francisco area when I heard about the plane-crash death of John Denver, which had happened on the afternoon of Sunday, 10.12.97. I called the office and volunteered to drive down to Monterey and Pebble Beach to do some reporting. I arrived early Sunday evening and began knocking on doors. People correspondent Ken Baker, who later became an E! News gossip guy, had also just arrived in the area and was doing the same thing.

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Eyes of Jack Sholder

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“An amusing, at times hilarious monster-hunt thriller, and at the same time highly attuned to and in fact feeding off social currents and attitudes of the late ‘80s…disdainful of country music and ghetto blasters, mindful of cocaine and the assholes who were still snorting it back then, and seriously in love with muscle cars.” — tweeted yesterday about a 12.21 Digital Bits review of the Warner Archive Bluray for The Hidden.

Song of India

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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.

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