Ford Again

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Why isn’t a high-def version of Peter Bogdanovich‘s revised, expanded version of Directed by John Ford, which came out on DVD seven and a half years ago, streaming on Amazon or Netflix or wherever? One of the finest docs about a legendary director ever made and it’s still on DVD?

On 11.6.06 I posted an HE piece about Ford, called “Snarly Softie.” It was triggered by a viewing of Bogdanovich’s doc, which had its big debut on Turner Classic Movies in the spring of that year. The DVD popped two and a half years later, on 9.15.09.

That Ford piece I posted yesterday about his World War II service and more specifically his post-D-Day bender (which is mentioned in Netflix’s Five Came Back) led me back to the ’06 article:

“I’ve tried and it’s impossible — there’s no feeling just one way about John Ford. His movies have been wowing and infuriating me all my life, and after seeing Peter Bogdanovich‘s Directed by John Ford, the muddle is still there.

“But Bogdanovich’s film gives you a feeling — one that seems clear and genuine — that you’ve gotten to know the old coot better than ever before, that you’ve really and truly seen past the bluster and the scowl and the cigar, beyond the scrappy Irish machismo and into some intimate realm. After many years of saying “Ford sure made some great films but what a snappy old prick he was,” I’ve finally come to like the guy. And I feel I owe Bogdanovich a debt for that.

“I tried to say this during my Monday afternoon phone chat with Bogdanovich. We spoke for 25 or 30 minutes. And I never quite said what I felt the film had taught me about Ford, which is that he was a shameless softie who used a snarly exterior manner to keep people from getting inside and discovering who he really was. But of course, his films made that pretty clear on their own.

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Let Bumblefucks Suffer The Consequences Of Their Own Electoral Stupidity

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In a 3.19 New York article called “No Sympathy For The Hillbilly,” Frank Rich examines the whole social-political psychodrama that we’re currently embroiled in for 23 long paragraphs. His assessments are sharp as a tack, but you’re waiting for him to say “aah, the hell with it” and spill his guts about the rurals who insist on voting against their interests no matter what — i.e., the bumblefucks. And then he finally does:

“Perhaps it’s a smarter idea to just let the GOP own these intractable voters. Liberals looking for a way to empathize with conservatives should endorse the core conservative belief in the importance of personal responsibility. Let Trump’s white working-class base take responsibility for its own votes — or in some cases failure to vote — and live with the consequences.

“If, as polls tell us, many voters who vilify Obamacare haven’t yet figured out that it’s another name for the Affordable Care Act that’s benefiting them — or if they do know and still want the Trump alternative — then let them reap the consequences for voting against their own interests. That they will sabotage other needy Americans along with them is unavoidable in any case now — at least until voters stage an intervention in an election to come.

“Trump voters should also be reminded that the elite of the party they’ve put in power is as dismissive of them as Democratic elites can be condescending. ‘Forget your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap,’ Kevin Williamson wrote of the white working class in National Review. ‘The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible.’

“He was only saying in public what other Republicans like Mitt Romney say about the ’47 percent’ in private when they think only well-heeled donors are listening. Besides, if National Review says that their towns deserve to die, who are Democrats to stand in the way of Trump voters who used their ballots to commit assisted suicide?

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Huge Relief As Corporate-Fellating Republican Leadership Cancels Trumpcare

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From N.Y. Times: House Republican leaders, facing a revolt among conservatives and moderates in their ranks, pulled legislation to repeal the Affordable Care Act from consideration on the House floor Friday afternoon in a spectacular defeat for President Trump on the first legislative showdown of his presidency.

“House Speaker Paul Ryan: “We’re going to be living with Obamacare for the foreseeable future.”

“Ryan had rushed to the White House shortly after noon to tell Mr. Trump he did not have the votes for a repeal bill that had been promised for seven years — since the day President Barack Obama signed his landmark health care act into law. Trump, in a telephone interview moments after the bill was pulled, blamed Democrats and predicted that they would seek a deal within a year, he asserted, after ‘Obamacare explodes’ because of high premiums.”

Continuity, Distinctive Style Are Important

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A re-design is underway of Hollywood Elsewhere. The idea is to make it look and feel more 21st Century (the design mentality of the current site is 13 years old — it actually looks like it could have been designed in the late ’90s), and to load faster and be more ad-friendly and so on.

I’m down with this, but my concern all along has been to make sure the new site conveys a distinct “things haven’t changed that much” feeling — an assurance that HE’s identity and attitude is alive, intact and continuing within this new design. The new site should say “sure, this look significantly different in some ways, but it’s still very much the site that I’ve built, poured my heart into and self-branded over the last 12 and 1/2 years.”

A fresh, here-and-now design is essential but, as I’ve told the designers, Hollywood Elsewhere is nothing if not about my personal brand — my views, attitude, personality, passion, errors, shortcomings, gushings, travels, tenacity, aspect ratios, experience, arguments, prejudices…all of it. The new design needs to recognize this and embrace continuity.

Please look at the test site as it now stands. Keep in mind that it’s a very early stab. I’m not hugely unhappy with the mobile version but the classic HE identity, I feel, has been all but erased. The initial idea was to take a generic uptown design, which looks like a Paris fashion magazine and which I thought was half-decent, and merge it with HE’s style and personality.

The small, almost-postage-stamp-sized HOLLYWOOD ELSEWHERE logo in the top left says it all. The designers of this test site seem to be interested in obscuring if not erasing the entire identity of Hollywood Elsewhere, which has been running since August ’04. (HE has actually been punching it for 18 and 1/2 years if you count my Mr. Showbiz, Reel.com and Movie Poop Shoot incarnations between October ’98 and July of ’04.)

It’s a mistake, for starters, to jettison the HE Hollywood sign logo, to not use my photo for identity purposes, to not use the same copy and headline fonts. Continuity is vital.

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Ratner Reality Check

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Yesterday EW and others went with a story about Ratpac producer Brett Ratner calling Rotten Tomatoes “the destruction of our business”, mainly because Batman v Superman was hurt by its 27% rating. BvS also earned a 44% Metacritic score — that didn’t matter? And what about the fact that Batman v Superman was mostly a drag to sit through, and that everyone more or less agreed with that view?

The viral thing that really damaged the reputation of Batman v Superman, I feel, was the sad Ben Affleck junket-interview footage overlaid with Simon & Garfunkel‘s “The Sounds of Silence.” One look at Affleck’s forlorn expression and people who hadn’t seen BvS just knew.

By the way: Ratner’s comments were from last weekend during his visit to Sun Valley Film Festival (3.15 to 3.19). As EW filed Thursday morning Ratner’s comments were most likely issued sometime late Wednesday, so someone sat on this for at least three days and possibly four. Whoever reported Ratner’s comments (a journalist? a festival staffer?) is a real go-getter.

Related development: In a hastily called press conference this morning, the producers of La La Land, Moonlight, Manchester By The Sea, Hell or High Water and Zootopia joined Ratner in condemning the Rotten Tomatoes effect.

“The fact that our films all scored in the mid to upper 90s is beside the point,” saidu La La producer Jordan Horowitz. “Yes, these scores probably reflected the fact that our films are very well made, emotionally affecting and widely admired, but the important thing from our perspective is to stand by Brett and movies like Batman v Superman, and to remind everyone that the point of modern megaplex cinema is to sit there in meek submission as you’re pounded and drowned by comic-book formula and CG torrents and the imaginings of guys like Zack Snyder. That’s what really matters, and is why we all love movies.” [Note: This is a made-up parody quote — a couple of readers have actually asked if it’s real or not.]

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Omen

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The question on Time‘s new cover arguably captures the cultural mood as closely as the famous “Is God Dead” cover did when it popped on 4.8.66. A little more than a year later, or sometime in the summer of ’67, Rosemary’s Baby director Roman Polanski took a shot of Rosemary (Mia Farrow) looking at the cover while waiting to see Dr. Hill (Charles Grodin), an obstetrician. The film’s story spans from late September of ’65 through June of ’66. (Ira Levin‘s novel was published on 5.12.67.) The film shows John Cassevetes‘ Guy watching a live broadcast of Pope Paul’s 10.4.65 visit to Yankee Stadium. And when Rosemary’s pregnancy is confirmed she’s told that the due date is 6.28.66. The visit to Dr. Hill’s office would have happened just before the June birth but the appearance of the Time cover is close enough, especially given that an April issue could have easily been in anyone’s waiting room a couple of months later.

“You Make Me Sick With Your Heroics…

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“There’s a stench of death about you. You carry it in your pack like the plague. Explosives and L-pills — they go well together, don’t they? And with you it’s just one thing or the other: destroy a bridge or destroy yourself. This is just a game, this war! You and Colonel Nicholson, you’re two of a kind, crazy with courage. For what? How to die like a gentleman. How to die by the rules. When the only important thing is how to live like a human being!”

No Evasive Action

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Why don’t technically-sophisticated, state-of-the-art space vehicles in recent space flicks (Life, Passengers, Gravity) have the ability to track oncoming objects and/or debris and alter their flight path in order to avoid collisions? Remember the oncoming-Russian-missile sequence in Dr. Strangelove (“confirmed…definite missile track…continue evasive action”) and how Slim Pickens‘ B-52 banked and swerved and did all it could to avoid the missile? And how they managed to see the missile coming with this amazing technology called “radar”? Why can’t these space vehicles, 1000 times more technically advanced than an early ’60s B52, detect an approaching threat and commence evasive action (ducking, dodging, swerving) to steer clear of harm’s way? I’ll tell you why they can’t. Because the filmmakers like collisions. The rule in these films is that if an object or a debris field of some kind is coming your way, YOUR SPACE VEHICLE IS GOING TO TAKE A BIG HIT, period. No radar, no escape…it’s a demolition derby up there.

Orbiting Actors Deserve To Die

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Daniel Espinosa‘s Life (Columbia, 3.24) is bullshit — an absolutely dreadful, soul-draining Alien ripoff. It’s basically just another CG display show (the monster is an unstoppable CG jellyfish-sting ray named Calvin) and an assurance of death among a crew of six on an International Space Station, and a question of how painful and gorey or grotesque their endings will be. We’re talking about rote handbook plotting, completely tired and 100% predictable…no snap, no freshness…unimaginative, uninvolving, checking my watch every 15 minutes.

Any critic who gives this thing a thumbs-up should never, ever be trusted again. Despite its first-rate CG and production values, Life is the very definition of a derivative piece of dogshit. On top of which Espinosa makes it perfectly clear at the finale that a sequel called Life: Eat The Earthlings is almost certainly in the offing. Don’t flatter yourself, pal. The only factor behind green-lighting this thing was a belief that the Calvin CG would be so cool that audiences wouldn’t be able to resist.

I was rooting for Calvin like my son Jett roots for the N.Y. Giants. For the cardinal sin of stupidity I wanted to see the crew members (Jake Gyllenhaal, Rebecca Ferguson, Ryan Reynolds, Hiroyuki Sanada, Ariyon Bakare, Olga Dihovichnaya) die horrible slithery deaths…”get them, Calvin!….get them!…die, actors, die!” And since I didn’t give a damn about any of them and was also bored stiff by Calvin (too omnipotent, too slithery, no weaknesses, no intrigue), the film seemed to take about two and half hours to end, even though the running time is 103 minutes.

Let’s say for the sake of argument that you and a slithery monster are sharing a space capsule that’s about to re-enter the earth’s atmosphere. You’re dead meat and you know it — no hope. But before the monster crawls into your mouth and transforms your bodily organs into currant jelly, you have a chance to make an adjustment. You can angle the capsule’s re-entry so that the heat shield doesn’t protect the capsule from the furnace-like conditions that occur during re-entry, which would cause the capsule to burn and melt and disintegrate into 10,000 flaming cinders. Which would kill the monster and save countless earthlings from a terrible fate.   If you have any heroism or nobility it’s the only thing to do.

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Ford’s Bravery, Drinking, Sentimentality

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What terms or descriptions come to mind when you say the name John Ford? The first thing I think of is “revered auteur-level director,” the second is “exquisitely balanced visual compositions,” the third is “cranky personality,” the fourth is “Irish sentimentality” and the fifth is “enjoyed drinking too much.” But I have a new sixth term after seeing Five Came Back — “Sent home from Europe after going on a three-day bender after witnessing the horrors of D-Day.”

This is a shorthand summary, delivered by director Laurent Bouzereau and writer Mark Harris in the forthcoming three-part Netflix documentary, about why Ford’s work for the War Department ended soon after the D-Day invasion.

In yesterday’s rave review I wrote the following about this incident and also Ford’s post-WWII films: “Ford, who incurred the wrath of his military superiors after descending into a three-day alcoholic bender after witnessing the bloody D-Day slaughter (4000 Allied troops died on 6.6.44), became less of a Grapes of Wrath or Informer-styled social realist and increasingly devoted himself to Western myths and fables, which could be seen as a kind of sentimental retreat.”

Ford biographer Joseph McBride has read Harris’s 2014 book but hasn’t seen the Netflix doc, but he’s taken issue with the above-described summary and has passed along his own account of Ford’s activities and status following the D-Day invasion. I passed along McBride’s recap to Harris so he could respond or clarify.

What follows is (a) McBride’s D-Day account, (b) Harris’s response and (c) McBride’s dispute with my view that after the war Ford’s films invested more and more to Western myth and sentimental notions about the past.

McBride #1: “I cover the post-D-Day period in “Searching for John Ford“, pp. 397-404. Ford did go on a bender for a few days after his supervising of the massive D-Day filming operation for the U.S. Navy. (Ford was serving with the Navy and the OSS.) He was on a boat anchored near Omaha Beach when the invasion began on June 6, 1944, and hit the beach later that day.

“The OSS wrote of Ford, ‘After landing he visited all of his men in their various assignments, and served as a great inspiration by his total disregard of danger in order to get the job done.’ “The film footage shot by his cameramen and by automatic cameras on landing boats was sent to London for assembly into a secret film shown only to Churchill, FDR, and Stalin.

“I write that Ford went on a bender at a house in France serving as headquarters for a combat camera outfit of the Army Air Forces First Motion Picture Unit, after ‘badly needing to unwind from the supreme tension of the invasion,’ adding that he was ‘physically and emotionally spent.”

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I Believe In America

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Cinemacon‘s Mitch Neuhauser announced earlier today that Big Sick star and co-screenwriter Kumail Nanjiani will receive the CinemaCon Comedy Star of the Year Award on Thursday, 3.30, inside Caesar’s Palace Colosseum. Congrats, but there’s still the question about whether anyone will remember Nanjiani’s name, much less how to spell it.

Every time I think of this dry-attitude comedian and Silicon Valley costar I say to myself “yeah, yeah, whatisname…karma Khalil Mangiafani…whatever.” Honestly — that’s as far as I get. But I’m working on it. I love Nanjiani’s droll, low-key performance in The Big Sick (Amazon/Lionsgate, 6.23), but I can’t get my brain to cooperate.

The trick in remembering a difficult name is to link it with something easy and familiar. Ten years ago I was having trouble remembering the name of former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and then I read that Katie Couric, who had experienced the same problem, had learned it by saying “I’m a dinner jacket,” which mimics the cadence and some of the sound.

Except I can’t think of anything I know that sounds like Kumail, which I believe is pronounced “koo-mile.” This is a big stretch but all I can think of is Boy George singing “Karma Chameleon” or, even stretchier, the female Hindu god Kali, whom Eduardo Ciannelli‘s anti-colonialist “thugs” worshipped in George Stevens‘ Gunga Din. Or Khalil, a Palestinian terrorist played by Sami Frey in George Roy Hill‘s The Little Drummer Girl (’84).

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Angry, Blunt-Spoken Mom Knees Local Cops In Groin

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I’m going to need a little time to figure how the Left Banke’s “Walk Away Renee” relates to Martin McDonaugh’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (Fox Searchlight, sometime this fall). But it’s obvious Frances McDormand is going to be a Best Actress contender — tough-talking, grief-struck mom puts a pair of Trump Country lawmen (Woody Harrelson, Sam Rockwell) through hell because they’re more concerned with giving black guys a hard time than finding the person who raped and murdered her daughter. 

 McDormand’s last big score was in HBO’s Olive Kitteridge; her most acclaimed screen performances have been in Moonrise Kingdom, Burn After Reading, North Country, Almost Famous and — her crowning glory — Brainerd police chief Marge Gunderson in Fargo, which opened 21 years ago. 

On 10.21.16 an HE tipster who’d attended a Three Billboards research screening called it “an incredibly smart, dark comedy with a great script.”