Remember How Great This Was?

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My first viewing of Tom Tykwer‘s Run Lola Run happened roughly 25 years ago, and man, it gave me such a huge rush…pure mainlined cinematic ecstasy. Live action plus animation…brilliant! I felt so aroused it actually made me want to visit Berlin and maybe even live there for a while. I wound up hanging there two or three times between ’09 and ’10 and ’11 or thereabouts.

Franka Potente‘s finest moment + Moritz Bleibtreu, Herbert Knaup, Joachim Król, Nina Petri, etc.

Sony Pictures Classics will be re-releasing Lola theatrically on 6.7.24, boasting a new 4K restoration and a subsequent Bluray down the road. I could have asked for a link, but instead I’ll be catching a Manhattan screening a few days hence.

Kidman’s Big Night

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How many films has Nicole Kidman starred or costarred in over the last 35 years, or since her big debut in Phillip Noyce‘s Dead Calm (’89)?

She’s being AFI-tributed this evening, and given the fact that she’s shown excellent taste in choosing roles it’s hard to post a list of the very best as most of her films have been at the very least commendable or pretty good, and many have been very good or excellent.

She’s made very few stinkers or letdowns, which number about 12 by my yardstick — Far and Away, Practical Magic, The Stepford Wives, Bewitched, Fur, The Golden Compass, Nine, Stoker, Australia, Grace of Monaco, Destroyer and The Goldfinch.

A roster of Kidman’s finest films would have to include the following 15 — To Die For, Billy Bathgate, Eyes Wide Shut, Birthday Girl, Moulin Rouge, The Others, The Hours, Dogville, The Human Stain, Ranbit Hole, Birth, The Interpreter, The Family Fang, Bombshell, Being the Ricardos and The Northman (16).

I’m surely leaving a few out, but to me these are the gold-standard keepers.

#MeToo Is Over Six Years Old Now

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…and except for the music industry, the entire culture has been put on alert and has adapted to the new militant mindset, which is basically (1) don’t fuck with women, (2) women will boil your ass if you step out of line, and (3) women are gaining considerable power so watch out.

One of the offshoots, however, is that younger males are feeling diminished, partly or largely due to their own lethargy over being elbowed aside and largely degraded if not tossed on the slag heap.

Every time I see or read about an attractive, accomplished, dynamic-looking woman in her 20s, 30s or 40s, I automatically presume she’s (a) on iffy or shaky ground with her significant straight-male other and/or (b) not all that interested in relationships with young straight guys…I presume that she’s fairly tough, resourceful and independent, which often means single mom or possibly bi or gay or divorced or at the very least self-supporting, and also at the very least skeptical of relationships with younger to thirtysomething guys, partly because younger guys aren’t doing as well and are certainly less stable.

Leaving aside the triumphant feminist strides in all the major social arenas (which everyone applauds), this is a major psychological offshoot of the #MeToo revolution — i.e., a consensus view that younger guys are generally immature assholes or worse, and therefore need to be diminished if not marginalized because they’re probably more trouble than they’re worth.

Which they may well be. I’m not a young guy and don’t hang out with them as a rule — a know a few young guys but the only ones I know well are my two sons

Remember that 1972 John Lennon song, “Woman is The [N-word] of the World“? Different world, man…52 years ago. Start by replacing “woman” with “young straight white dudes”.

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And The HE Community Says…?

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I guess I’m so accustomed to movies being overlong or needlessly extended that I didn’t even mention the length of Challengers in my 4.16 review. Would I have preferred a 110-minute cut? Or, as Schrader suggests, 100? I only know I didn’t feel oppressed by the 131.

Misunderstood By More Than A Few

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Ten days ago I re-posted a generic HE viewpoint…my longstanding praise of Paul Brickman‘s Risky Business (’83)…basically a statement that this was far more than a teenaged horndog comedy but å social satire of the slyest, dryest and most on-target kind.

Risky Business was hugely enjoyable (“Who’s the U-boat commander?” is one of the funniest lines ever spoken by an actor whom no one had heard of back then and who still draws a blank) and yet the butt of the humor was obvious and consistent…the whole thing was aimed squarely at the unfolding early ’80s zeitgiest and louche wealthy-guy opportunism in particular…a congregation of social forces that indicated we were all starting to ease up and hang back and say “what the fuck?” more and more…swirling downwards into greed and effete whateverism.

Critic Emmanuel Levy, who’s been around forever, said precisely the same thing:

But I was astonished to discover last night that David Denby, one of my all-time favorite critics who was with New York magazine for many years before moving over to The New Yorker…I was astonished to read Denby’s 8.22.83 review and realize that he missed Risky Business almost entirely. Denby obviously saw it, but it went right around him or through him or over him. He allowed that Brickman has some talent but basically panned the film, calling it “corrupt” and “a clear failure.”

A clear failure? It’s one of the smartest, funniest, most perfectly realized, on-point social satire-slash-sex comedies ever made…it’s right up there with The Apartment and The Graduate…it simultaneously understands and chortles in a resigned, low-key way at upper-middle-class entitlement, and with the cynical knowingness of a Reagan-era Oscar Wilde.

Another of my favorite cinematic soothsayers back then, N.Y. Times critic Janet Maslin, also missed it…mind-blowing. Christian Science Monitor critic David Sterritt dismissed it also.

Roger Ebert, however, got it….good for him.

Criterion’s Risky Business 4K pops on 7.23.24.

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Windy

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Donald Trump has been wealthy beyond measure since at least the ’80s, and yet he can’t afford to fix his serious baldness problem? By simply taking the time to address it with the sevices of the right people?

If this miserable pig had gone to my Prague team 20 or 25 years ago these blowover moments would never happen because there wouldn’t be any scalp to cover up.

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Oldbermann Has Put It Mildly

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Yesterday six conservative members of the nine-member Supreme Court made it quite clear that they are whores for Donald Trump and fools for his plan to lay waste US democracy and bring fresh, ferocious, anti-democratic hell to this country if he wins in November…they will do whatever they can to shilly-shally their way out of the line of fire and submit to his agenda by any pretzel-contortioning that comes to mind.

Olbermann: “You, Samuel Allito, are personally backing America’s Hitler…as these six evil, corrupt, partisan, useless, anti-democracy gangsters on the Supreme Theocratic Court flailed around yesterday, looking for an excuse, any excuse, to bury the evidence against Trump and to fix the upcoming election…this destructive fascist court…you and I now know this.”

Sidestepping Sports

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“Challe” is not a word in any language, but it reminds me of chattle, which basically means movable goods. The second word could be some kind of shortened slang abbreviation or cryptic allusion to people who come from Niger, the landlocked West African country.