…and I was surprised to discover that I immediately felt a certain compassion for Keifer Sutherland‘s Lieutenant Commander Phillip Queeg. He seemed far less certain of himself than Humphrey Bogart‘s 1954 version, who behaves in a far more high-strung and looney-toonish way at times.

Right away I said to myself, “Sutherland is not playing a bad guy…he’s playing a focused Navy lifer who’s afraid of losing face by way of slipping on a banana peel.”

And I really liked Tom Riley‘s performance as Lieutenant Willis Keith — a far more interesting performance (wittier, twitchier, faster on his feet) than the one given by Robert Francis in the Edward Dmytryk original.

I felt constantly repelled by those clunky, thick-soled black shiny shoes that all the Navy guys wear in this film. Jesus, they look awful.

As recently as 2017, the headline of a GQ article by Scott Meslow asked “Will Moviegoers Ever Be Comfortable Watching Two Dudes Kiss?“

Little did Meslow realize that six years later all kinds of explicit gay sex (i.e., the kind that goes way beyond lips and tongues) would be bustin’ out all over.

Last February I caught Episode 3 of HBO’s The Last of Us series, titled “Long, Long Time.” The episode abandoned the basic zombie apocalypse narrative in order to tell a domestic love story (a sad one) between two middle-aged men with hairy chests and beards (Nick Offerman, Murray Bartlett). My reactions were divided between earnest admiration and serious internal groaning. I wrote that I’d been permanently traumatized by a sex scene in the upstairs queen bed. Even today I shudder thinking of Bartlett blowing Offerman off-screen…Jesus God.

Just before Telluride I caught a screening of Pedro Almodovar‘s Strange Way of Life, an older-guy love story costarring Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal. It contains a fair amount of joyful, slurpy kissing between the younger versions of their characters, played by José Condessa and Jason Fernández. And early on Pascal mentions “the smell of cum”…don’t ask.

A few days later I experienced a mixed reaction to Andrew Haigh‘s All Of Us Strangers, a classy, ultra-swoony, top-tier capturing of an intimate gay relationship. It costars Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal, whose characters do a lot more than kiss — anal, fellatio, chest licking of sperm droplets. I knew it was a well-made film but…

Last month Todd Haynes announced that his next project will be a 1930s-era gay love story with explicit sexual content that will venture into “dangerous territory.” The lovers will be an older corrupt cop (Joaquin Phoenix) and a younger Native American character.

So if Meslow pens a GQ update, the headline might be “Will Moviegoers Ever Be Comfortable Watching Joaquin Phoenix Doing God Knows What With A Younger Dude?“

Alternate Meslow Title: “What Happened To The Good Old days of Straight-Friendly Gay Behaviors?” 2nd Alternate Title: “Do Moviegoers Want to Even Think About Older Dudes Having Sweaty Sex Together, Much Less Watch it?“

To say “times have changed in a relatively short time” is putting it mildly.

41 years ago Sidney Lumet‘s Deathtrap, an adaptation of the 1978 Ira Levin play, upset audiences with a very mild kiss between Michael Caine and Chris Reeve, whose characters are co-conspirators in an elaborate murder scheme. Reeve told “Celluloid Closet” author Vito Russo “that the kiss was booed by preview audiences in Denver, Colorado“, and that “a Time magazine report of the kiss spoiled a key plot element and cost the film $10 million in ticket sales.”

In “Murder Most Queer“, author Jordan Schildcrout described a Deathtrap screening in which an audience member screamed, “Say it ain’t so, Superman!” at the moment of the Caine–Reeve liplock.

HE’s own Dixon Steel recently reported that the audience “hissed” when he saw Deathtrap at Westwood’s Regent theatre.

When Steel attended a 1980 screening of Brian De Palma‘s Dressed To Kill at Manhattan’s New Amsterdam theatre, the audience “turned on the movie, booing and screaming at the screen” when it was revealed that the killer was Michael Caine in drag.

In short, basic hetero behaviors haven’t changed that radically over the last 40 years. Left to their own instinctual devices audiences would probably be coughing and clearing their throats at these recent depictions of gay sex. Alas, woke tyranny has taught them to shut the fuck up or risk social condemnation.

From “How RFK Jr. independent presidential run would shake up 2024 race,” a N.Y, Post piece by Diana Glebova:

Kennedy “would probably pull a little bit from both parties,” agreed Republican strategist John Thomas, who predicted a Kennedy candidacy would draw more support from Biden’s support, given the enthusiasm of the 45th president’s “rock solid” base.

“I would imagine RFK Jr. is more of a problem for Biden as an independent than he was as a Democrat,” Thomas said, “because Biden was able to kind of crush him by ignoring him.”

I’ve been watching horror videos this morning…Hamas murdered hundreds of Israeli citizens over the weekend…fanatics beheading Israeli corpses, kidnapping women and children, and of course raping women in what appears to be the most horrendous attack upon Jews since the Holocaust. Am I overstating? The visual evidence says not even somewhat.

There’s a certain way of “being” when you record a podcast, and the key to that being is not giving a fuck.

Here’s the link…

Posted from Cannes on 5.17.23:

I’m sorry but I’ve never been a fan of Hirokazu Kore-eda, the humanist, kind-hearted, Ozu-like Japanese director whom everyone (i.e., the Cannes mob) admires. I “respect” his signature focus (sad, anxious, troubled families going through difficult times), but his films (Shoplifters, Broker, Like Father, Like Son) have always bored my pants off.

Which means, of course, that I don’t like Kore-eda’s humanism…right? The humanism is fine, of course. But I’ve always found his stories frustrating because they seem to just go on and on.

I certainly felt this way during today’s Salle Debussy screening of his latest film, Monster, which deals with school bullying, repressed rage and various family misunderstandings.

It struck me as repetitive and meandering and lacking in narrative discipline. I began to feel antsy after the first hour, and then this feeling seemed to double-down. My soul was screaming during the final half-hour of this 125-minute film, which felt more like three hours. I was silently whimpering.

I’m not condemning Monster or calling it a bad film. I’m just saying the world of Kore-era is not for me, and never will be. This doesn’t make me a bad person, or so I’m telling myself. I know that at the 95-minute mark I leaned over and muttered to a friend, “I don’t know how much more of this I can take.”

Todd McCarthy‘s approving review of Fast Charlie is a little too flourishy in terms of tallying the shooting victims.

Opening line: “Rasty and nasty with a cherry on top, Fast Charlie is a down-home Southern gangster yarn with a staggering body count but a sweet taste awaiting the survivors at the end of the day.”

HE exception: “Staggering”? The actual Fast Charlie body count is four on-screen and eight guys total. No offense but McCarthy’s review kinda makes it sound like it’s competitive with Sam Peckinpah‘s The Wild Bunch.

In my 9.20 review, I called it “half of a laid-back, settled-down relationship drama between Pierce Brosnan‘s Charlie, a civilized, soft-drawl hitman who loves fine cooking, and Morena Baccarin‘s Marcie, a taxidermist with a world-weary, Thelma Ritter-ish attitude about things. And half of a blam-blam action thriller.”

McCarthy: “This adaptation of Victor Gischler’s 2003 novel ‘Gun Monkeys‘ is an inelegant affair that gushes hot blood all over the place but leaves enough room for an appealingly credible May-December romance to grow in the midst of the constant mayhem.”

Pierce Brosnan as low-key, gourmet-food-loving assassin in Fast Charlie.

During last night’s Mill Valley Film Festival q & a (l. to r.): Scott Allen Perry (songwriter), Fil Eisler (score composer), second-unit director Warren Thompson, book author Victor Gischler, director Phillip Noyce.

HE: I chose to focus on the Pierce Brosnan-Morena Baccarin thing because that’s where the soul and the nourishment are, and I chose to downplay the shootings because shootings are inevitably rote. Plus McCarthy didn’t mention the laundry chute sequence, Pierce’s gourmet appetites or the Morena’s freelance gig as a taxidermist…little quirks and character touches that stand out.

McCarthy: “Whereas senior movie mafia and gangster characters through the decades have tended to be revered — if only for simply having survived for decades — it nonetheless seems that Charlie Swift (Brosnan) may not get the respect he deserves from the bad-guy wannabees who populate the bayou country of Louisiana. Young hot-shot punks often think they’re better than anyone, but the fit, gray-haired Charlie knows the score much better than they do and some of the reckless show-offs don’t last very long.

“The way the first victim bites the dust immediately sets the darkly seriocomic tone for the entire film, and it’s an approach that veteran Australian director Phillip Noyce manages to more or less sustain no matter how gruesome and perverse any given situation may become.

“[The film] puts you in a position to either embrace [the violence] as fun or discard it as foolish. What tilts you in the former direction is the energy Noyce injects into the silliness as well as the kick that results from pushing the material so far. The filmmakers look to have gone all out to make something of this and it more or less pays off in its outlandish boisterousness.”

“The [Brosnan-Baccarin] scenes are nicely written. Despite the fundamentally preposterous nature of their situation, the actors invest their performances with a palatable sense of their hopes, desires and uncertainties. The result is a conclusion that seems both wish-fulfilment and not entirely implausible, even if, as Charlie admits, ‘In my line of work, it’s best not to have any long-term plans.'”