Originally posted on 8.30.15: “The older Richard Brooks‘ In Cold Blood gets, the more Hollywood-ized it seems.

“Much of the film has always struck me as an attempt by Brooks to almost warm up the Perry Smith and Dick Hickock characters (played by Robert Blake and Scott Wilson) and make them seem more ingratiating and vulnerable than how they were portrayed in Truman Capote‘s nonfiction novel.

“You can always sense an underlying effort by Brooks and especially by Robert Blake to make the audience feel sorry for and perhaps even weep for Perry Smith. That guitar, the sad smile, the traumatic childhood. Take away the Clutter murder sequence and at times Blake could almost be Perry of Mayberry. Scott Wilson‘s Dick Hickock seems a little too kindly/folksy also.

“These are real-life characters, remember, who slaughtered a family of four like they were sheep. I realize that neither one on his own would have likely killed that poor family and that their personalities combusted to produce a third lethal personality, but I could never finally reconcile Blake and Wilson’s personal charm and vulnerability with the cold eyes of the real Smith and Hickock (which are used on the poster for the film).

“In Cold Blood is nonetheless a striking, reasonably honest, nicely assembled re-telling of the Smith & Hickock story. I respect it. I worship Connie Hall‘s cinematography. I love the editing. Quincy Jones‘ blues combo score is partly haunting and even mesmerizing and partly laid on too thick at times. The film is certainly a cut or two above mainstream fare of the ’60s. But it’s not a great film. It feels a bit too cloying and manipulative too often. Those memory and dream sequences (the sound of the mother’s voice going “Perrrry!”) are a bit much.

HE reader Michael Gebert posted this in response: “Yes, I think this is right and well put. It’s made at kind of the last moment of postwar FDR-Kennedy liberalism that was idealistic about the possibility of reforming, well, everything, if we can catch it early enough with a big dose of Freud.

“It’s sometimes referred to as noir, just because it was one of the last big-studio features in black-and-white, but it’s the complete opposite of noir, which assumes that society is as dirty as the criminals and that chance bets against you. In Cold Blood is a throwback to New Deal crime films like 20,000 Years in Sing Sing or Angels Have Dirty Faces. Within a few years that idealism would be completely overthrown, criminals would be taunting maniacs like Manson or Andy Robinson‘s Zodiac type in Dirty Harry, a lower species in need of wiping out.

“It’s kind of amazing to think that in five years, social attitudes could change so rapidly.

“So yes, it’s exceedingly well made, but lives in such a different world that it’s hard to relate to. It’s certainly hard to find any sympathy for the mindless thugs who killed the Clutters like cattle in their basement.”

…being dropped because of hung jurors…anyone who approves of the prosecution of Daniel Penny being downgraded to criminally negligent homicide is almost certainly a racist and probably a Trumpie.

Okay, not really.

Seriously, any veteran NYC subway commuter who’s had encounters with aggressive mental wackos was on Denny’s side from the get-go.

Maybe the legions of other wackos out there will ponder the sad fate of Penny’s choke-hold victim, Jordan Neely, and mutter to themselves, “Hmmm, maybe I should make a greater effort henceforth to not make subway riders cringe and cower when I go into my routine?”

In all my years on this planet I spoke to Sean Connery only once, during a roundtable at a 1982 New York press junket for Richard Brooks‘ Wrong Is Right.

I wasn’t much of a fan of the film (nobody was) but it was thrilling to absorb the vibe and smell the aroma of the manly, bigger-than-life Connery.

He wasn’t much of a kidder but he had an engaging smile. Every answer he gave was straight from the shoulder, bordering on blunt.

The word around the campfire at the time was that Connery had made a successful advance upon a female journalist during a hotel-room interview, although not necessarily during his Wrong Is Right activities.

We all have impulses, of course, but we control them for the sake of decency and our careers and reputations. But if you were Sean Connery back in the day, perhaps not each and every time.

Restrained but affirming machismo will always be cool. The calm, sensible mindset of a guy who wields a certain kind of rugged glamour and a certain amount of entertainment industry dominance…it was good for the soul to sense that, and even taste it through close proximity.

Connery was clearly a gentleman and imbued with a certain diplomatic finesse, and he was very handsomely-dressed in that hotel room, and he smelled good (soap, subtle musk cologne) and wore newish, polished, well-crafted footwear**.

When I was sitting three or four feet away from the then-52-year-old Connery I felt the right kind of vibes. This is a good place to be, I said to myself.

The world was a whole different place during the early Reagan era. Urban gay culture had begun to flourish (the Studio 54 heyday had happened only three or four years earlier) while AIDS was only beginning to be whispered about, but notions of abundant diversity had yet to manifest (the Central Park Five injustice was only a year old at the time) and white hetero straight guys like Connery were, unlike today, not regarded as inherently problematic or regressive or morally arrested — they held a certain sway. And fine sexual opportunities for young heteros like myself were rather wonderful, I don’t mind saying.

Merit ruled over equity (what’s equity?), transitioned biomales weren’t competing in women’s sports, Oscar handicappers didn’t know from identity campaigns, woke merely referred to not being asleep, etc. E.T., The Verdict, Blade Runner, Tootsie, First Blood, Five Days One Summer, The Year of Living Dangerously, etc. I would have that time again.

** Nobody wore whitesides in 1982 — civilization had been spared as they hadn’t been invented yet — but if by some bizarre quirk of time-shifting style or fashion Connery had somehow been wearing whitesides that day, the whole subdued machismo thing would have been shattered.

HBO-wise Adam Driver peaked with “Girls” but theatrical feature-wise he peaked with his Stephen Sondheim-singing moment in “Marriage Story” — I loved him in that scene.

But then he all but assassinated himself by starring as one of most loathsome, thoroughly demonic characters in cinema history in Leo’s Carax’s “Annette”.

Then he played a morose pot-bellied academic flabby-ass in “White Noise”.

And then he played two — two! — Italian business-brand magnates (Maurizio Gucci, Enzo Ferrari) within a couple of years of each other. And I really liked Ferrari as far as it went.

And then he delivered the self-annihilating coup de grace by wearing James Mason-in-“Julius Caesar” hair in Francis Coppola’s mind-blowingly awful “Megalopolis.”

And then Driver appeared in a Kenneth Lonergan play at the Lucille Lortel theatre wearing GOLD-TOE socks, and that’s what really did it, I think.

Driver is finished for now. Not altogether but he needs to lay low. He’s certainly living proof that nothing recedes like success. He’s a good actor but I don’t want to ever, EVER sit through a histrionic, definitive-statement, large-personality Adam Driver movie EVER AGAIN.

Throw Stuff At The Screen

Honestly? If I was asked to pose for a Los Angeles magazine cover story with some other award-season blogaroos and they asked us to pose in pairs, let’s say, and if a colleague came up behind me and gave me a double-arm T-shirt hug like the one Adam Driver is giving Viggo Mortensen here, I would be cool about it but my first thought would be “the fuck?” My second thought would be “okay, I’m getting a warm erotic man-hug here, but does that mean I should tenderly place my right hand over the right arm of my man-hugger?” To me this photo is only a step or two removed from that 1963 shot of Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it’s just not me. I’ll do an arm-around-the-shoulder hug if I’m posing for a shot with a male friend or one of my sons, but that’s about it.



We come to this place out of habit. Some of us, at least. To lament what we no longer have. To contemplate the grim milieu…a once-stirring art form that obviously has no interest or faith in the soul of things.

We used to come to movie theatres for magic. Once upon a time.

Back when movies were much better in general…craftier, sturdier, richer, less “sensitive”, less instructive, nervier, more explorational.

Movies that were more into quality for its own sake, and less about…it’s depressing to even describe , much less endure.

The better movies used to be about how life actually felt for people living it day by day…hah!

Movie theatres once had an aura of worship…some of us actually saw them as churches…hah!

We used to come to theaters to laugh, to cry, to care. Because we need that, all of us.

We need that easy-to-describe feeling we all get when the lights begin to dim.

That feeling is…hello?…simply called irrational anticipation.

We’ve heard on social media that the film we’re about to watch is a problem of some kind, as most films are these days.

But against all reason we want to believe in ecstasy, or least in luminous possibility…that it might be a kin of The Godfather or The Verdict or A Separation, or maybe another Anora.

If there’s one thing that 95% of movies mostly don’t do these days, it’s taking us somewhere we’ve never been before.

The person who wrote that “movies today do more than entertain, but make us feel somehow reborn”? That person needs to be taken out behind the stables and horse-whipped.

Empty dazzling images on a sizable screen.
Sound that we can feel in our ribs….fine.

“Somehow heartbreak feels good in a place likе this”? Once in a blue moon, if at all. Please.

“Our heroes feel like thе best part of us, and stories feel perfect and powerful”? Bullshit.

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Earlier today the American Film institute released a Ten Best Movies of the Year roster (i.e., Motion Pictures of the Year).

The ten include Anora (yay!), The Brutalist (booo!), A Complete Unknown (yay!), Conclave (yay!), Dune: Part II (approvable), Emilia Perez (highly ambitious trans-identity piece…entirely decent but calm down), Nickel Boys (stylistically audacious), A Real Pain (Yay!), Sing Sing (more of a documentary than a narrative) and Wicked (aggressively impactful).

What’s missing? Tim Fehlbaum and Scott Feinberg‘s September 5. Why is it missing? Sasha Stone posted the following speculation five weeks ago (i.e., late October):

“The problem with [September 5] right now is obvious. Much of Hollywood, or at least the loud half, is anti-Israel now. They believe our government is involved in genocide. They are angry enough that Jonathan Glazer devoted his whole Oscar acceptance speech to this subject last year. On the other hand, there are probably lots of Oscar voters who feel differently but who aren’t comfortable speaking out. So that’s a problem. The other problem is that the Oscars are ruled by actors and generally like movies with lots of stars in them.

The other reason (unmentioned by Sasha) is that while September 5 is sturdy, gripping and highly watchable, it doesn’t blow your socks off.

Elliot Gould about working on Robert Altman‘s M.A.S.H. (’70), quoted on mash.fandom.com: “Sometimes Bob would get flustered. We were fighting the clock and he [was facing the pressure of having] to do it a certain way by a certain time otherwise you got into golden hours.

“And I remember this scene in M.A.S.H. — it was actually a scene that Sylvester Stallone, whom I’ve only met a couple of times, appears in…Stallone has said he doesn’t admit that he was ever an extra in any movie but he admits that he was an extra in M.A.S.H. And when I told that to Bob he said, “No, I don’t accept that Sylvester Stallone was in my movie…I don’t accept it.”

A 1.2.70 N.Y. Times story by Bernie Weinraub (“For Film Extras, Variety Is Certain, Stardom Isn’t“) reports that movie extras were “paid a daily minimum of $29.15.”

Altman once claimed that M.A.S.H was the first major studio film to use the word “fuck” in its dialogue.[ The word is spoken during the football game near the end of the film by Walt “Painless Pole” Waldowski when he says to an opposing football player, “All right, bud, your fucking head is coming right off!”

Yesterday Jett called and said, “You’ll never guess where I am….Koreatown! And it” — Los Angeles, he meant — “smells exactly like it always did. It all came back the second I stepped out of the Uber.”

There are three different geographical aroma pockets in that haunted, infected, worn-down, architecurally underwhelming city.

(1) The stink of congested mid-city nabes and boulevards, which is what most of it smells like. (“Once the stink of L.A. gets into your bones” is one of Charles Bukowski‘s greatest lines.) (2) The mostly delightful fragrance of the affluent canyons and hills and hiking trails. And (3) the beachy areas, which is to say a mixture of sea air, grassy soft-soil cliffs, fast food wrappers, road tar and gasoline vapors.

You just need to occasionally take a moment and sample as much of it as possible. A few minutes of olfactory meditation.

I recall walking down an open-air ramp out of a DC-10 at LAX in the late spring of ’81, and leaning my head slightly back and taking a few sniffs and saying to myself, “This definitely doesn’t smell like New York.” You could taste the jet exhaust and melting tar and carbon dioxide, of course, but also the faint scent of dirt and sand and marshy grasses and the nearby Pacific Ocean, and the flowery fragrance of Jacaranda trees or something in that realm, and the faint smell of tacos or hot dogs or something like that.

That was 43 years ago, of course. That kind of aroma salad is gone from the LAX area for good now. Dead and gone.

But there are a few scent pockets here and there. You just have to get out of your car to really inhale them. Which no one ever does, of course.

The problem with so much of Los Angeles today, of course, is that too much of it is covered in asphalt and steel and plastic and concrete shopping malls and massive apartment buildings, and it doesn’t smell like anything exciting or promising…certainly nothing you’d want to stick around for.

I used to talk to Robert Towne about how Los Angeles used to smell in the 1940s, particularly after reading his screenplay of The Two Jakes (which is much better than the film) for some great descriptions of the fragrances that were fairly commonplace. Or talk to anyone who remembers what it smelled like from time to time in the ’70s even (despite the town being covered in horrible smog back then) or the early ’80s.

Paris is probably the greatest aroma town I’ve ever sunk into. A feast wherever you go. The Seine at night, outdoor markets (especially in the pre-dawn hours), the aroma of sauces and pasta dishes coming from cafes, warm breads, scooter and bus exhaust, strong cigarettes, strong coffee, fruit stands, gelato shops, etc.

Cannes is a heavenly aroma town during the annual May festival with the briney sea air, especially at night. Tuscany, Rome, the Amalfi Coast, etc I could go on and on.

It’s official: THR’s Scott Feinberg is no longer the award-season best friend of September 5 (Paramount, 12.23), the Black September docudrama that Scott insisted for weeks was the highest-ranked, most-likely-to-prevail Best Picture contender. He’s walked away and is casting September 5‘s fate to the wind. Life can be cruel.

Among Feinberg’s top ten, five truly stand tall…movies with something really going on inside ** (and in this order): Anora, Conclave, A Real Pain, All We Imagine As Light, September 5.

** Something besides mere identity issues or tedious Brady Corbet brushstrokes or franchise spectacle.

Glenn Kenny to Ben Reddick in mid 1930s: “Stop trying to make the term ‘Oakie’ happen. It sounds like something a 12-year-old would say, and I don’t care if Woody Guthrie had used it a couple of times “

The great Daniel Craig has snagged the National Board of Review’s Best Actor trophy for his portrayal of a skittish, emotionally vulnerable yage man in Luca Guadagnino’s Queer….whoo-hoo!

Meanwhile the influence of the great Martin Landau was felt among the Spirit Awards’ gender-neutral Best Lead Performance nominees with the absence of The Brutalist‘s Adrien “cry me a river” Brody.

What does that tell you, that Brody’s a likely winner in the big game? The man wasn’t even nominated.

Anora‘s Mikey Madison was nominated in this category, however. Ditto Sebastian Stan for his performance as Donald Trump in The Apprentice….cheers!

Plus Anora snagged a total of six Spirit Award nominations, including one for Yura Borisov as Igor, the compassionate baldy with a soul.

On top of which the NBR guys totally blew off Emilia Perez.