Except there’s obviously no THE in the title…

HE-posted on 8.31.24:

In the current Club Random podcast with Bob Zemeckis, Bill Maher confesses to having melted down during the Omaha Beach cemetery scene in Saving Private Ryan…the moment when the old-geezer version of Matt Damon collapses at the sight of Cpt. Miller’s (Tom Hanks) gravestone…because the actor who played old Damon, Harrison Young, strongly resembled Maher’s late father, who had passed three or four years before Ryan opened in ’98.

Posted in mid-April of 2018: Last weekend I watched a 4K streaming version of Steven Spielberg‘s Saving Private Ryan. There’s no question that this 1998 WWII drama is one of the most brutally realistic and emotionally affecting war films ever made, and is certainly among Beardo’s finest. And yet I found myself flinching at the occasionally forced or unlikely moments, at the too-broad “acting” and emotional button-pushings. It kept ringing my phony gong. “Jeez, I don’t know if I even like this movie any more,” I said to myself. “Even the Omaha Beach landing sequence is starting to bother me.”

I had the same kind of reaction when I rewatched Close Encounters of the Third Kind in ’07, or 30 years after it opened. The bottom line is that Spielberg’s sentimental or overly theatrical instincts aren’t aging any better than John Ford‘s similar tendencies.

The greatest offense comes from Harrison Young‘s awful over-acting as the 75-year-old Ryan. His face is stricken with guilt as he shuffles through the Omaha Beach cemetery, and he walks like a 90-year-old afflicted with rheumatism. In ’87 I visited this same cemetery with my father, who’d fought against the Japanese during WWII. He was quietly shaken, he later said, but he held it in because that’s what former Marines do under these circumstances. They show respect by behaving in a disciplined, soldier-like way. They don’t moan and weep and flail around like some acting-class student.

I almost lost it when the teary-eyed Young collapsed upon the grave of Cpt. Miller (Tom Hanks). “Oh, for God’s sake!” I said out loud. “Show a little dignity…be a man!” Kathleen Byron‘s performance as white-haired Mrs. Ryan is almost as bad. All she does is eyeball her doddering, bent-over husband. The whole family, in fact, is staring at the old coot like he’s about to keel over from a heart attack.

Then comes one of the most dishonest cuts in motion picture history, going from a close-up of Young’s eyes to the D-Day landing craft carrying the Ryan squad — Hanks, Tom Sizemore, Edward Burns, Barry Pepper, Adam Goldberg, Vin Diesel — as they approach Omaha beach. Matt Damon‘s Ryan (Young’s 21-year-old counterpart) won’t meet them for another couple of days, when they’re inland a few miles.

I don’t believe that loaded-down soldiers drowned after being dropped by landing craft into 15 feet of water. That might have occured in real life, but I didn’t believe this in Saving Private Ryan — it just seemed absurd. I didn’t believe that bullet wounds would cause the water off Omaha Beach to turn red with blood — in fact Spielberg’s crew poured 40 barrels of fake blood into the water to achieve this effect. The basic effect is one of Hollywood exaggeration blended with historical, real-life horror.

Then comes Hanks’ big zone-out moment when he hits the beach. He’s an Army captain in the thick of battle with machine-gun bullets whizzing by and guys getting drilled and blown apart, and he chooses this moment to go “Ohhh, I can’t think or move…it’s too much…I’m so upset by war and its carnage that I need to go catatonic for a couple of minutes…don’t mind me…I’ll come back to life after this sequence is over.” I’m sitting there going “get it together, man! You wouldn’t do this in a Samuel Fuller or Howard Hawks film…you’re only zoning out because Spielberg likes the idea of spacing out and turning the sound down.”

But it’s a worldwide blessing to hear the bells of Notre Dame ringing again. Five and two-thirds years after the April 2019 fire, The cathedral will re-open next month. Warren Zevon: “Jubilation across the land.”

Donald Trump has always been and always will be an animal….a whimsical ego monster (“He doesn’t listen to anybody“) with arguably the shortest attention span of any U.S. president, ever. He’s the brusque force of fuck-you evil in the second half of Ali Abassi‘s The Apprentice….oh, I’m sorry, you haven’t seen it yet? I don’t regard Joe Biden as the same light as Trump, but in my heart of hearts, I feel more anger at Joe because he ushered in this scenario…his obstinate, arrogant refusal to bow out of the race before mid-July paved the way for the 11.5 catastrophe.

I’ve despised Trump for years, and am sadly accustomed to his bullshit. But Biden, to me, is almost worse in a certain way. He couldn’t let go of his Irish ego for months and months, and now the U.S. of A. will be taking it up the ass for the next four years and change.

After innumerable savorings and re-savorings of Rod Serling‘s The Twilight Zone over the last several decades (no one ever seems to speak all that fondly of Night Gallery) and almost 50 years after Serling’s untimely passing at age 50, where is the acute hunger for a family-approved Serling documentary?

I’ve read all about Serling’s pre-Twilight Zone life and have seen Patterns and Requiem for a Heavyweight a couple of times and have watched all the noteworthy Twilight Zone episodes (which I own on Bluray) over and over…so what’s the idea exactly? To reach Millennials and Zoomers who’ve never heard of him?

Leonardo DiCaprio’s Appian Way will produce the Serling doc; Jonah Tulis will direct. Serling’s daughters, Jodi and Anne, are in for a hefty slice of the action as executive producers.

“They do what they want to do / say what they want to say / live how they want to live / play how they want to play / dance how they want to dance…kick and slap a friend, eeyo!…the Addams family!”

Consider the facial expression on 6′ 9″ Barron, a.k.a. “Lurch”.

…except for the $475 price tag plus shipping…can’t do it. Made in Italy, of course. If I was in Florence or Venice or Milano I could buy these for roughly half the price.

A couple of weeks ago I ordered a personalized jean jacket to give to Sutton for her third birthday (11.17).

I bought it from a Chinese company called Woodemon. Ther package was shipped and tracked by SF-international.

Two days ago (Sunday, 11.10) the SF tracking info said the package had been delivered to HE’s Wilton abode…except it hadn’t been.

The delivery company was closed yesterday for Veterans Day, but after much online searching and suffering I managed to discover three photos taken by the delivery person — photos that made it clear the jacket had been delivered to the wrong location — a home painted bluish-gray with a grassy front yard plus a white mailbox with the street number and a tiny red flag. The carrier also took two photos of the package and the shipping label.

As the name of my condo community begins with the name “Wilton”, I went searching around for streets with that name…two of them…zip.

This morning I went to the Wilton post office and showed the boss (40ish dark-haired woman) the messenger photos, and asked if she or any of the mail carriers recognized the home in question. She said it looked like it was located on a street I hadn’t inspected — Wilton Acres. I went right over there and bingo…mystery solved! Two cars parked in the driveway. A small dog barking inside.

I rang the bell next to a shed door two or three times, and then rapped loudly on it. I noticed that the door was very slightly ajar so I opened it and stepped inside and knocked on the kitchen-adjacent house door three or four times. No response except for the dog.

I went back to my car to search for the occupants on Facebook (their names were on address labels inside the shed), and then all of a sudden a moustachioed Wilton cop was rapping on my passenger window. “What are you doing here?” he asked.

I got out, explained the basics, showed him the delivery photos and my ID etc. It turns out the occupant had a video security system that sent her video footage of me poking around, and so she called the fuzz.

The satisfied, calmed-down cops spoke with the home owner at her place of employment. Ten minutes later she drove up and went inside and gave me four white plastic packages — the jean jacket plus three others that contained scarves that also hadn’t been delivered to my address earlier this month and last month, despite notices saying they had been.

My name, address and phone number were clearly printed on the labels. If the Wilton Acres woman had any good-neighbor inclinations she could have easily called or texted and explained that she had some of my stuff, etc. I would have gratefully come over and picked them up, or we could’ve met somewhere. That’s what I would’ve done, trust me, if someone else’s deliveries had been left at my place.

But over a period of a week or two she did nothing. In her defense she leads a busy life and has kids and a dog and all, but still.

Five days ago (11.7) I posted a piece titled “How Will Trump’s Victory Affect Oscar Noms?” My basic take was that any award-worthy film that defies or argues against Trump or Trumpism (Emilia Perez, Karla Sofia Gascon‘s sure-to-be-Oscar-nominated “lead” performance, The Apprentice, Conclave) will probably win favor among the Academy’s hardcore progressives (i.e., the Jamie Lee Curtis branch).

Yesterday (11.11) former IndieWire guy and current @EDGLRD hotshot Eric Kohn addressed the same topic in a Hollywood Reporter piece (“How the Oscar Race Responds to Donald Trump“) and offered roughly the same conclusion.

With most of America not so much saying “yay, Trump!’ as “fuck the wokey,” Kohn believes that Hollywood’s leftist vanguard will push back strongly against Joe and Jane Bumblefuck by saying in effect “screw you guys…more wokey-wokey…we’re digging in!”

Kohn: “The 2017 Best Picture win for Moonlight both reflected and influenced a Trump-era bid for change…the choices the Academy will soon make can only do the same.”

Kohn, however, seems to think that Sean Baker‘s Anora presents some kind of anguished portrait of struggling have-nots. Anora, he says, is “a paean to the struggle of finding stability in a country that forces its lower-class survivors to hustle at all costs,” and that it serves as “a barometer of the mood of the many unsure or uneasy about the election results — right down to the teary exhaustion of its closing moments, when two characters drawn together by happenstance melt into the frustrations of their shaky futures.”

The joy and rapture of Anora lies is the glorious and obvious fact that it’s not wokey-wokey in the least, and thank God Almighty for that heavenly blessing.

Kohn’s article also states that Brady Corbet‘s The Brutalist, a 1940s saga of a tobacco-and-heroin-addicted Hungarian architect struggling to adapt to American capitalism, is “a sobering and uncannily timely testament to the contradictions between American immigrant promise and the inequalities that keep it unfulfilled for so many,” blah blah.

Kohn more or less concludes that if you’re against the cruel exploitation of immigrants you may want to think about giving Corbet’s film a Best Picture Oscar (or something like that).

The funniest part of Kohn’s piece states that Trumpies will have difficulty with the egalitarian spirit of The Brutalist. “Those who view Donald Trump as a cartoonish reality-TV character now threatening an American way of life will find much to identify with in the wakeup call endured by Adrien Brody’s Laszlo Toth,” Kohn opines. “Others who crave Trump’s more draconian approach to border control may not make it through The Brutalist.”

That’s me he’s talking about! I hated The Brutalist and found it so off-putting that I bolted during the intermission. Kohn is therefore implying I’m a Trumpie, but as much as I despise the woke mind virus, I voted for Harris because I considered her far less problematic than Trump.

The Brutalist is an agonizing film to sit through, and I’m predicting across-the-board rejection by Academy stalwarts. I hated it.

Excerpt from my 11.7 articl4: “I also think that more people will suddenly want to stream Ali Abassi‘s The Apprentice, a well-written, superbly acted drama about young Trump’s relationship with rightwing pitbull attorney Roy Cohn. If they have any respect for the grade-A artistry involved, they’ll certainly want to consider Best Picture and Best Director noms as well as a Best Supporting Actor nom for Jeremy Strong, at the very least.

“I don’t want to give anything away, but there’s also…how to put this?…a sign-of-the-times, wokey, gender-fluid acceptance factor to be found in Conclave. Which should help it among the Jamie Lee Curtis “we all need to lock arms and tell Trump to go fuck himself” crowd. [Note: The Conclave thing has nothing to do with gender transitioning.)”

I’m probably beyond the reach of psychotherapy, but thanks to all for the birthday greetings.

Here’s a link for an L.A. Times Calendar piece that I wrote 31 years ago about Dan Richter, the ’60-era mime who played the bone-tossing Moonwatcher in Stanley Kubrick‘s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Here are three scans of the original article — #1, #2 and #3.

My father met Dan at a Connecticut AA meeting in ’91 or thereabouts, and at my dad’s suggestion I called a while later and visited Dan at this home in Sierra Madre for an interview.

I remember he was dealing with chemotherapy at the time and not walking all that well, but he’s still here and doing fine.

In 2022 Richter published a 2012 memoir — “The Dream Is Over” — that’s mainly about a four-year period that he spent off-and-on with John Lennon and Yoko One (’69 to ’73).

Nancy Porter, an old childhood friend who was also living in Sierra Madre in ’93, came with me to visit Dan at this mountainside home. She later complained that he talked too much about himself. “But he’s the guy who picked up the bone to the strains of ‘Thus Spoke Zarathrusta’,” I replied. “And…you know, he hung with Lennon all those years and his stories are fascinating.”

If you’re hanging with someone who has lived large and touched serious history and has several first-hand recollections to share, you sit and absorb and give thanks. Either you get that or you don’t.

With Thanksgiving just around the corner it’s time to expand A Complete Unknown’s earlybird viewing audience. I’m getting a little tired of Kris Tapley’s annoying discretion and silence. If Timothee Chalamet really has slammed the ball into the bleachers, what deep-down, jingle-jangle thoughts occurred when you, a Mangold pally or so I’ve heard, heard the crack of the bat? And what about Edward Norton as Seeger? And all the other players? C’mon…