HE-Attacking Scumbags Thwarted For Now

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Malicious Asian bots have attacked HE twice over the last several days (7.15 and 7.19), and then yesterday the site was taken over by a bloodthirsty pillaging cyclops virus. Today the site was put into maintenance mode, and then the Liquid Web folks initiated a malware scan. Two hours ago they told me things were cool. The site was taken out of maintenance mode and here we are, tentatively clean and healthy. The people who did this should be tied and bound and thrown into a muddy lake filled with hungry crocodiles.

As Imagined by Arnold Bocklin

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This 1896 Arnold Bocklin painting, currently on display at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, is titled “Odysseus and Polyphemus.”

MFA copy: “Böcklin’s original training as a landscape painter shines through in this unconventional interpretation of an episode from Homer‘s ‘The Odyssey’. Crashing waves meet jagged rocks in a spray and scurry of foam. While escaping from the island of the cyclos Polyphemus — a one-eyed, ill-tempered, cave-residing giant — Odysseus shouts out taunts as Polyphemus heaves a boulder after the boat.”

HE sidenote: It appears that while Polyphemus is not wearing an animal skin around his waist, Bocklin, like Christopher Nolan, has done what he can to obscure any notions that Polyhemus might have a giant dangling schlongola.

MFA: “Unlike Academic colleagues who treated ancient mythology with reverence and solemnity, the Swiss-born Arnold Böcklin often played up strange, grotesque, and even ridiculous elements of these stories, conjuring a pre-Classical world governed by violence and lust.”

Best “Odyssey” Comment of the Weekend

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From HE regular and East Hampton gadfly Bill McCuddy:

“Mrs. McCuddy wanted to leave after the Samantha Morton pig-out scene. For me there is much to admire but in the end the whole movie can be summed up by sailors saying ‘Hey, that’s a nice beach, let’s land there’, followed five minutes later by ‘RUN!!!‘”

Two…Make That Three “Manhunter” Complaints

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In honor of the next Friday’s (7.24) theatrical debut of Michael Mann‘s Manhunter: The Final Cut, I’m posting three mild complaints.

1. Bad climactic payoff: I watched the original 1986 version again last night, and I’m sorry but the big violent finale inside Francis Dollarhyde‘s home doesn’t work for me. Just as Joan Allen‘s Reba Maclane is about to be killed by Tom Noonan‘s psychotic Dollarhyde, blind FBI profiler Will Graham (William Petersen) leaps through a large wood-framed window, and thereby cuts his face and pretty much knocks himself unconscious. (Graham’s eyes actually close!) Dollarhyde blows away three or four cops in rapid succession with a pump shotgun, but decides to leave Graham alone. Graham then magically awakens and starts shooting Dollarhyde over and over, four or five slugs. I just didn’t buy it, and I think this was due to Mann not figuring out the action well enough.

2. What is Graham doing with his life on Captiva island (an actual Florida island located south of Fort Myers). He retired from his police job but on what kind of pension? He’s in his mid to late 30s and is doing what with his life? Fucking his beautiful wife, hanging out with his son, doing errands around the house, staring at the gulf?

Does he have any kind of job? How much of a pension could he be collecting after only a few years with the FBI? Has he invested some dough in the market? I can’t relate to a guy who just lies around in cutoffs and fucks his wife as he gazes out at the Gulf of Mexico.

I realize that the implied message of Manhunter‘s opening scene is that Graham is hiding from himself. Chasing killers is what he wants to do. He had to “retire” because it nearly destroyed him. But the essence of Will Graham is that he doesn’t want to sit around and do nothing. So he’s not just lying around in cutoffs. But I still resent anyone who hides out. Get off your ass, grapple with it, etc.

3. I really hate it when the always-simmering, always-close-to-exploding Graham suddenly bolts out of an office, prompting Dennis Farina‘s Jack Crawford to chase after him as he shouts “Will! Will! Will!” Enough with that shit. Just shut up.

On 7.18 Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman wrote that Manhunter: The Final Cut is actually weaker compared to the 1986 original.

Excerpt: “With rare exceptions, I’m not a fan of director’s cuts. There are two reasons for that. First, they’re hardly ever better; they’re almost always worse. (In the case of something like Apocalypse Now Redux, they can ruin a movie). But apart from the fact that directors restoring their pet lost scenes seldom adds much and usually subtracts, there’s a larger issue at stake. A great movie is a work of art that has an identity in the universe, like a novel or a painting. If you love it, you don’t want to see that identity changed.

“The content of Manhunter: The Final Cut is the same as the Restored Director’s Cut of the film that came out on DVD in 2003.

“It adds a couple of minutes to the scene with Graham at the Atlanta police station (he now overexplains things; it was better when he just said, of the killer’s motive, ‘It’s in his dreams’), and there are a handful of added lines in the first scene with Lecter. The film also loses a few things (like the splattered condiments in the shootout with Dollarhyde — I missed that ketchup bottle!). But the biggest change is the addition, at the end, of a scene in which Graham, with his badly bruised face, goes to visit the next family. It’s an incredibly bad scene! I revere Michael Mann, but he made a mistake here. Beyond that, you don’t tamper with a movie like Manhunter. It is what it is, and what it is is sacred.”

Graham’s wife was played by Kim Greist, who retired from acting a quarter-century ago. She lives in Stamford, Connecticut, or roughly 12 miles from Wilton. She was born in ’58; was 27 or 28 during filming.

“Don’t Tell Me I’m Not Seeing What I’m Seeing”

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I for one would never, ever cast my 2028 vote for J.D Vance…not a chance. Because I fully expect that Gavin Newsom or some other sensible liberal will be the Democratic Presidential candidate.

@abcnews Mark Twain prize recipient Bill Maher says his vote “is in play” for the 2028 election, adding that he is open to voting for JD Vance. #billmaher #jdvance ♬ original sound – ABC News

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Nolan and Camerini Versions Are Strikingly Similar in Some Respects

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The cyclops sequence in the 1954 Italian-produced Ulysses, directed by Mario Camerini and starring the intrepid Kirk Douglas, isn’t substantially different from Christopher Nolan‘s 2026 version.

Difference #1: The 1954 cyclops is wearing an animal skin around his waist so the camera doesn’t need to avoid his giant schlong by covering it in shadow.

Difference #2: After the cyclops has been blinded and the men have escaped the cave and boarded their ship, the cyclops stumbles out to a cliff and throws a giant boulder in their direction. It kersplashes right next to the ship. Nolan adheres to the Camerini sequence for the most part, but for some reason he ducks the boulder splash. Odd call because a huge boulder crashing into the sea is a good “money” scene.

We Park Our Cars In The Same “Odyssey” Garage

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Emily Butler: “The Odyssey is a pretentious movie made by a pretentious man who believes that he’s God’s gift to filmmaking. This movie has serious, heavy-handed storytelling problems that Hollywood will coninue to ignore. They will give Nolan praise and accolades and awards so they can turn around and shove it in our faces and say ‘no, it’s an award-winning movie…you’re ignorant and you’re wrong.”

This 20something woman sees all, says all, knows all…she is my Odyssey voice and I, to a certain extent and in certain realms, am hers.

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Similarities & Differences Between “The Odyssey” and “The Wild Bunch”

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…besides the indisputable fact that Sam Peckinpah‘s 1969 classic western is a much, much better film than Chris Nolan‘s $250M newbie. Where to start, where to start…?

They’re both about a group of armed, desperate, roaming-around men, adrift and semi-rootless amidst a vast, unsafe environment (Southern Texas and Mexican desert vs. the ancient Aegean sea), looking for some kind of comfort or solace or financial fulfillment…something. And yet both films culminate in a spectacularly violent and cathartic finish, which their respective viewers have been looking for all along.

On one hand there’s the grizzled Wild Bunch leader (William Holden‘s Pike Bishop) and his wily, ornery crew of six or seven (Ernest Borgnine, Warren Oates, Ben Johnson, Edmond O’Brien, Jaime Sánchez, Bo Hopkins), some of whom don’t survive the journey. The Odyssey journey from Troy to Ithaca is led by the worn and haunted Odysseus (Matt Damon), king of Ithaca and the commander of a crew of…oh, 20 or 25, including his second in command Eurylochus (Himesh Patel).

The Bunch and Odyssey crews encounter, endure and finally elude or defeat the manipulations of various predators, worldly in the Texas-Mexico realm and otherworldly among the Aegean islands.

Desirable women appear and entice, some human and others not.

Bishop and Odysseus are both haunted souls, grappling with their respective pasts and not feeling all that good about themselves or their futures.

The main difference is that you don’t need to drop a tab of mescaline or eat a handful of shrooms in order to better appreciate The Wild Bunch. Okay, you don’t “need” mescaline to fully enjoy The Odyssey but popping a tab would sure help.

The bottom line is that the Peckinpah film uses an element that The Odyssey hasn’t the slightest interest in — i.e., an actual story that generates story tension.

Bunch dispenses plenty in the way of psychological tension and suspense (not a drop of either in The Odyssey), plus it abounds with conflicted characters, a long pursuit on horseback, an exploding bridge, a bank robbery, a train robbery and a theme that asks “where to go and what to do when the road reaches an end?”

Supplemental: Millions of Millennials and Zoomers are seeing The Odyssey this weekend, but most of them have never even heard of The Wild Bunch. Their loss.

One final thing: I don’t recall Damon saying anything especially memorable at the end of The Odyssey (certainly not in a catchy, pocket-drop sense), but I’ll never forget the final line spoken in The Wild Bunch: “It ain’t like it used to be, but it’ll do.” Plus The Oydssey has no mythical keeper lines like “let’s go.”