If there’s a general consensus about the Depp-Heard verdict, it’s probably something like “it’s finally over…let it go…whatever the truth of it, Depp seemed more honest than Heard plus he’s certainly more likable…it’s gone on long enough…let it go.”

From “Why We Love to Watch a Woman Brought Low,” a 5.20 N.Y. Times essay by Jessica Bennett:

“One might have thought — or, at least, I might have thought — that we’d be in a more enlightened place by now. And yet despite the public reckonings of #MeToo and the recent reexaminations of pop culture figures — Britney Spears, Pamela Anderson, Janet Jackson and others — there is precious little introspection over the widespread hatred of Ms. Heard.

“This trial seems to have exposed some of the rhetorical weaknesses of #MeToo. ‘Believe women’ for example — a phrase that was meant to underscore how rare it is for a woman to lie about her own abuse — had somehow morphed into ‘believe all women,’ which left no room for the outlier. That has apparently become, as the comedian Chris Rock put it this week, ‘Believe all women…except Amber Heard.’

“The intent of that early slogan was, in part, to encourage the public to treat women who speak up with basic dignity and respect, however messy and imperfect they or their stories may be. Yet none of that seems to have trickled down here.”

@gamethinkingtips Initially, I believed #amberheard. Then I watched the trial, saw the evidence… & realized that I’d been CONNED 😡 @gamethinkingtips #justiceforjohnnydepp #deppvsheard #johnnydepp ♬ original sound – Amy Jo Kim

Regional Friendo: “Just saw Top Gun: Maverick…holy shit, that last act! Someone’s seen and plagiarized [a film released in 1977]!

HE: “Yup.”

Regional Friendo: “Wow…the hard-to-hit target, the steep mountain run [equals vulnerable target in ’77 film], even down to [Maverick costar repeating exactly what costar of ’77 film did during a big climactic action moment]. Five fucking Maverick writers to come up with that?”

HE: “As I’ve written, I would have respected it more if they’d followed the ending of The Bridges at Toko Ri (’54).”

Regional Friendo: “No way that was gonna happen. Too much money to make back.”

HE: “It would have hit home if they’d both died.”

Regional Friendo: “It’s not that kinda film. The audience would’ve revolted.”

HE: “‘Not that kinda film’? You sound like Jerry Bruckheimer.”

Regional Friendo; “I’m just telling you like it is
It’s exactly a JB film…it’s an audience film, not for Oscars. No studio would have green-lighted a film in which Cruise AND Teller die in the end.
It is what it is.”

An awful lot of people (i.e., at least two and possibly three) wear Crocs in Kelly Reichart‘s Showing Up, and I don’t mean the Balenciaga kind. And their presence in this quiet, sluggish but not-overly-problematic film represented…well, a slight problem.

To me Crocs are just bad — bad omens, everything I hate, unsightly, bad all over. And every time I saw one of Reichart’s characters walking around in these rubber swiss-cheese loafers it gave me a bad feeling. I didn’t cringe every time, but a voice inside went “aw, shit.”

Michelle Williams wears Crocs in this thing, and yet (significantly) this didn’t interfere with my liking, relating to and even enjoying her character — “Lizzie Carr”, a 40ish figurine sculptor who lives in a rented home in the Portland area, and who is preparing for a showing of her art in a nearby storefront-slash-salon.

Lizzie regards almost everyone and everything with an air of subdued consternation or vague resentment or sardonic resignation…my general spiritual territory.

I can’t say that Lizzie (or any other character in Showing Up) is involved in an actual story. For Reichart is naturally adhering to her familiar scheme of avoiding narrative propulsion like the plague. She’s into women and laid-back men and mulchy atmospheres and odd, low-energy behavior and whatnot. There are no second-act pivots in a Reichart film because there are no first, second or third acts, or at least not the kind that I recognize.

The only thing resembling a story in Showing Up is the plight of a wounded pigeon. The poor bird is mauled by Lizzie’s Calico cat, and left with a broken wing. Lizzie and her landlord, Jo Tran (Hong Chau), put the pigeon in a shoe box and take turns looking after it. During Lizzie’s art show at the close of the film, the pigeon is unwrapped and set free and off it goes into the wild blue yonder.

Unfolding in suburban Portland, Showing Up is, of course, concurrently set in deep Wokeville. To an anti-wokester like myself, it’s like watching a film set in Communist East Germany in the ’60s, ’70s or ’80s. The very notion of a film about Wokeville women and the inconsequential, low-energy men in their lives (ex-husbands, beardos, dads, brothers, laid-back co-workers)…a social satire set in this organic, unhurried, arts-and-craftsy environment could be an opportunity for something alive and biting. But not with Reichart at the helm.

Showing Up has been described as a comedy, although it didn’t strike me as such. It has a vagueiy slouchy observational attitude. Every 10 or 15 minutes it elicits a subdued titter.

This is because the focus is entirely on vaguely morose Lizzie, whose general outlook is not, shall we say, bursting with optimistic expectation. She’s in a kind of a downish place start to finish. This is partly due to Tran’s lazy reluctance to fix the hot-water heater.

One of the best moments happens when Lizzie, fuming over her inability to take a hot shower, beats up a couple of plants in Tran’s small front-yard garden. Please…more or this! But that’s the end of it.

That’s all I have to say about Showing Up. It’s not bad by Reichart standards…oh, wait, I’ve already said that.

“Maybe childhood makes you sad sometimes, but there are other solutions besides ‘hand me the dick-saw.’I’m sure the vast majority of parents do not take this lightly, and [know] that it’s very hard to know when something is real or just a phase. Being trans is different — it’s innate — but kids do have phases. Gender fluid? Kids are fluid about everything. If kids knew what they wanted to be at age eight, the world would be filled with cowboys and princesses. I wanted to be a pirate. Thank God nobody scheduled me for eye removal and peg-leg surgery.” — from last night’s “New Rules” crescendo of last night’s Real Time with Bill Maher.

I took this video inside the Cannes press conference salon on 5.17.15. Call it a period of relative calm before the storm. The #MeToo movement would launch two years and five months later, and over the following year the first stirrings of the woke Robespierre plague began to be felt. Peak terror was felt during ’19,’20 and ’21. All in all the plague has been with us for four and a half years now, going on five. It’s just about run its course, but the real death throes won’t be felt until the November ’22 midterms.

From “The Moment I Realized Carol Was Toast With Older Viewers (i.e., Academy Voters)“, posted on 2.2016: Todd Haynes‘ Carol may have been, for me, the most emotionally affecting relationship film of 2015. I’m not going to rehash all the praise-worthy elements (Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara‘s fully felt performances, Ed Lachman‘s 16mm cinematography, the early ’50s vibe of repression and propriety). It so perfectly captured, for me, what it feels like to be in love (“I know how it feels to have wings on your heels”). I particularly remember what a high it was to see it in Cannes…everyone was levitating, it seemed.

“Then I saw it again six months later — in late October, or a month before it opened commercially on 11.20 — at the Middleburg Film Festival. Middleburg is a more conservative town than Los Angeles, of course, but it’s similar to the Academy in that it’s full of wealthy over-50 white people. And the instant Carol finished playing in the main conference room of Middleburg’s Salamander Resort and the lights came up, you could feel the vibe. They ‘liked’ and respected it, but they didn’t love it. The atmosphere was approving and appreciative, but a bit cool. And I said to myself, ‘Okay, that’s it…not even Christine Vachon dreamed that Carol could win Best Picture Oscar but after Cannes I thought it would probably be Best Picture-nominated because it’s so affecting and classy and poised….now I don’t think that’ll happen.’

“It went on to win big with critics and industry groups, but older whites never embraced it. They somehow didn’t see themselves in it.”

“There are basically two kinds of people,” critic Harlan Jacobson observed in the mid ‘80s. “Those who think of Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd when they hear Moonlighting, and those who think of Jeremy Irons and Jerzy Skolimowski.”

Last night a Wilton friendo said, “Oh, I saw that. The other one.”

HE: “The Jeremy Irons? It opened 40 years ago.”

Friendo: “The one I saw was five or six years ago. A black kid…”

HE: “That was Moonlight. (beat) Whadja think of that?”

Friendo: “Ehh. Didn’t like the ending.”

Somewhere in Time opened on 10.3.80, but was filmed in the spring of ’79 or 18 months earlier. This synchs with Jane Seymour‘s account of her on-set affair with costar Christopher Reeve.

In late 2017 Seymour confided some of the details to the Herald Sun: “[Chris] was a wonderful man. We fell madly in love while we were doing the movie. We were both single, but kept it very hidden.”

Reeve and Seymour broke it off when Reeve’s ex-girlfriend, Gae Exton, revealed she was pregnant with a child — Matthew Exton Reeve, as it turned out, born on 12.20.79

“That was the beginning of the end of an amazing relationship,” Seymour said. “Chris and I were close friends until the day he died [in 2004].

Exton gave birth to a second child, Alexandra Exton Reeve, in December 1983.

HE-posted on 7.31.17: I haven’t written about Jeannot Szwarc‘s Somewhere in Time for 13 years, or since the sad passing of Christopher Reeve on 10.10.04. I’ve said before that Reeve gave one of his better performances in it.

I’ve never called Somewhere In Time a great or even especially good film, but it did develop a cult following about a decade after it opened, and it has — or more accurately had — one of the most beautifully executed single-shot closing sequences in a romantic film that I’ve ever seen, and one that almost certainly influenced the dream-death finale in James Cameron‘s Titanic.

I’m speaking of a longish, ambitiously choreographed, deeply moving tracking shot that’s meant to show the viewer what Reeve’s character, Richard Collier, is experiencing on his passage from life into death. I saw it at a long-lead Manhattan screening of Somewhere in Time 37 years ago, but no one has seen it since. 

That’s because some psychopathic or at the very least criminal-minded Universal exec (or execs) had the sequence cut down and re-edited with dissolves. The version I saw allegedly no longer exists. All that remains today is the abridged version.

The sequence was a single-take extravaganza accomplished with a combination crane and dolly. It happened as Collier is dying on a bed in a Mackinac Island Grand Hotel room. His spirit (i.e., the camera) rises up and above his body, and then turns and floats out the hotel-room window and into a long, brightly-lighted hallway and gradually into the waiting embrace of Collier’s yesteryear lover, Elise McKenna (Jane Seymour).

One of the most realistic line-readings in The Godfather happens when James Caan’s Sony Corleone warns the beaten and bloody Carlo (Gianni Russo) to never again brutalize his sister Connie (Talia Shire), Carlo’s wife. What makes it great is that Sonny is so winded from beating up Carlo that he’s forced to take a breath after saying “touch” (beat) and then “…my sister again I’ll kill ya.”

And yet this scene has been blemished for a half-century by a small but memorable error that could have been easily fixed.

“There’s Still Time, Brother,” posted on 9.19.08:

Early this morning HE reader Frank Booth, commenting about the Francis Coppola/Robert Harris restoration of the Godfather films, made a good point about an irritant in the original 1972 film — one that’s been bothering me for decades.

He was speaking of the second-act beating scene in which Sonny laughably air-punches Carlo. There’s no missing the mistake because the shot is perfectly positioned to catch it — a nice clean side-angle. And it’s so distinct that it takes you right out of the film. When Booth saw a theatrical screening “it took a minute or so of the Sicilian wedding for the audience to stop giggling,” he says.

And yet despite all the digital refinements and restorations, not to mention that massive re-edit of Parts I and II that resulted in The Godfather Saga in the mid ’70s, Coppola has left that mistake in — minor, yes, but one that slightly interferes with the enjoyment of this film each and every time.

All Coppola would have to do is cut away from the Sonny-Carlo beating for a a second or two and show…whatever, one of the hoods standing nearby, one of the little kids watching the fight, a master shot from a different angle. There must be extra footage lying around. All Coppola would need is 24 to 36 frames.

If you had directed The Godfather, would you want that mistake to remain in the definitive print for centuries to come? I wouldn’t. If George Lucas can make Greedo shoot first, Francis Coppola can fix Sonny’s air punch.

Yeah, I know…Mort who?

It’s been asserted for years by people seemingly in the know that the actual composer of the famously eerie Invaders From Mars score is not Raoul Kraushar, as I’ve stated a few times on HE, but longtime Republic Pictures composer Mort Glickman.

Reporting has it that Kraushar was a Hans Zimmer-like operator and compiler who would hire guys to ghost-write scores, which Kraushar would then take credit for.

I’ve been persuaded that the claims about Glickman may have merit. Okay, that they’re probably legit.

I am therefore apologizing if in fact (as it appears) I have passed along bad intel. Kraushar was apparently not the Invaders From Mars composer, and I apologize for previously failing to report that Glickman, a stocky, bespectacled guy who looked like a 1950s grocery-store clerk and could have played a behind-the-counter colleague of Ernest Borgnine‘s in Marty…Glickman was the maestro!

Three people have made the case — (1) David Schecter, co-producer of Monstrous Movie Music, a “series of re-recordings which feature a wealth of classic music from many of everyone’s favorite science fiction, horror and fantasy films”, (2) Janne Wass in a 2016 article for scifist.wordpress.com, and (3) William H. Rosar, author of a 1986 CinemaScore article titled “The Music for Invaders From Mars.”

Rosar excerpt: “Credited to Raoul Krau­shaar, a Paris-born composer who was educated in the United States and began working in films in 1928 as a musical assistant and later music director, the music for Invaders From Mars has frequently been singled out as one of the best 1950s science fiction film scores, its eerie choral arrange­ments and bleak aca­pella ‘conjuring up visions of a dying Mar­tian land­scape or the wailing of fright­ened minds in hell,’ as one reviewer wrote.

“Recently, however, it has come to light through several reliable sources that Krau­shar may not have scored Invaders From Mars at all, but instead only conducted it, the score having been written instead by Mort Glickman, a con­tracted ghost writer.”

The first heads-up came from Schecter, who wrote the following in a 3.31.22 HE comment thread about the restored, soon-to-premiere Invaders From Mars:

“Raoul Kraushaar couldn’t compose his way out of a paper bag. I work in the film music industry and am considered one of the experts in classic sci-fi and horror music. I even spoke to Raoul, who was very good at ‘skirting the issue.’ Kraushaar was notorious for using ghost-writers, and I knew some of the composers who wrote for him, including Bert Shefter (who wrote with Paul Sawtell).

“And all the composers back then knew that Kraushaar wasn’t a composer — he was a ‘compiler.’ It was legal to use ghost-writers, but that doesn’t mean people shouldn’t know the real story.

Your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to provide examples of two kinds of “comic” performances. The first kind is a performance that’s intended to be comic within a comedic film, but in fact isn’t the least bit funny or even chuckle-worthy. The second kind is a performance that is, in fact, quite funny if not hilarious but in a weird, perverse way — a performance that you cant help but be tickled by even though it unfolds in a film that in no way presents itself as a comedy.

HE’s example of the first kind is Mindy Kaling‘s comedy-writer character in Nisha Ganatra‘s Late Night, a 2019 feminist relationship comedy. Kaling’s “Molly Patel” is hired to write jokes for Emma Thompson‘s (“Katherine Newbury’s”) late-night talk show, but (a) she isn’t the least bit funny, (b) she hasn’t the personality or attitude of a good (i.e., brilliant) comedy writer, and (c) she doesn’t deliver a single funny line. All Molly cares about is being respected in the work environment and not being treated as a token POC hire, which of course she is.

Why is it a struggle to believe that Molly (who has never before written professional-grade comedy and has mostly been hired because she’s a woman of color) is a comedy writer worth her salt? Because most jokes that “land” and actually make people laugh are always a little cutting and sometimes flirt with cruelty. A certain pointed irreverence is essential. Molly has none of that.

HE’s best example of the second kind of “comic” performance is Ben Kingsley‘s in Sexy Beast (’01). During a Four Seasons interview I told Kingsley that I regarded his “Don Logan” as one of the funniest I’ve ever seen in a film that obviously wasn’t a comedy, and he got it — he was delighted that I understood what he was going for.

I’m guessing that maybe 5% of those who saw Sexy Beast found Kingsley’s performance “funny,” if that. But that was partly the point — you had to have a perverse attitude about that kind of psychotic gangster character in the first place. Ian McShane‘s “Teddy Bass” wasn’t the least bit amusing, of course — he was an ice-old sociopath start to finish. As was Don Logan, except Kingsley went for something more — he pushed the energy and absurdity of that enraged character so that you couldn’t help but at least snicker. Especially in the very last scene, which is one of the “funniest” ever in this vein.

Other examples of either kind?