Democrats haven’t even begun to acknowledge that average voters not only hate their woke attitudes and sensibilities, but want to punish them for years to come for trying to impose this lunatic theology upon the U.S.A.
Only a sensible left-center male (i.e., Newsom or Emanuel) has a chance of landing the 2028 Democratic nomination and defeating J.D. Vance, and that’s an optimistic belief.
Dead End: Paranormal Park was a 2022 Netflix animated trans-propaganda series for kids. It concerned a 17-year-old gay and transgender Jewish American boy who runs away to the theme park because of a “complicated” relationship with his family.
It ran for two seasons, launching on 6.16.22 and ending on 10.13.22. The show was canceled by Netflix in January 2023. Creator Hamish Steele confirmed the news on social media after the second season aired in October 2022.
Why didn’t the negative hoo-hah happen in’22 or ’23? Why has it only erupted within the last couple of days?
From yesterday’s (10.1) Oscar prediction riff — “Twelve 2025 Films with Exceptional Craft, Serious Content, Emotional Heft”:
I might dismissively, grudgingly accept Sinners winning the compensation prize of a Best Original Screenplay Oscar, despite the fact that such a win would be ridiculous, of course.
Weapons over Sinners, Weapons over Sinners, Weapons over Sinners.
Noms but no wins for the absurdly overpraised, identity-propelled & deeply schlocky Sinners — noms but no wins for the absurdly overpraised, identity-propelled & deeply schlocky Sinners — noms but no wins for the absurdly overpraised, identity-propelled & deeply schlocky Sinners.
I am ready and willing to die on this hill. I would feel radiantly blessed and fulfilled if a lightning bolt would strike me down on a hilly golf course for this. Kill me, kill me, kill me. For I am the lamb.
Let every voter and every nation know that Hollywood Elsewhere is THE default worldwide takedown site for Sinners. For this effing movie is blood-soaked, fang-toothed, ground-up mulch…a ludicrously bloody Samuel Z. Arkoff vampire cunnilingus programmer…Oscar diminishment to it, Oscar diminishment to it, Oscar diminishment to it.
https://hollywood-elsewhere.com/thick-rural-drawlin-mississippi-patois-cant-cut-through-it/
Here’s HE’s latest rundown of the 2025 films that really deliver the goods vs. the ones that shouldn’t in all fairness be regarded as even semi-heavyweight, because they’re not.
Let’s start…no, let’s finish with Gold Derby’s latest Best Picture rankings vs. HE’s cut-the-crap assessments.
The sturdy, real-deal films that certainly (or in two cases reportedly) deserve top rankings, in part because they deliver (or are said to deliver) serious emotion:
1. Joachim Trier‘s Sentimental Value (generates honest current, nails it, gets nothing wrong)
2. Paul Thomas Anderson‘s One Battle After Another (except it’s against the vibe shift and isn’t exactly stirring the pots of the red-state bumblefucks)
3. Chloe Zhao‘s Hamnet (except it was overpraised in Telluride, and I know at least one critic who’s sorta kinda frowning)
4. Bradley Cooper‘s Is This Thing On? (won’t see it for another week or so, but I have a gut feeling…)
5. Zach Cregger‘s Weapons
6. Kaouther Ben Hania‘s The Voice of Hind Rajib
7. Craig Brewer‘s Song Sung Blue (gut feeling)
8. Hasan Hadi‘s The President’s Cake (brilliant, transporting)
9. Kent Jones‘ Late Fame
10. Kathryn Bigelow‘s A House of Dynamite
11. Noah Baumbach‘s Jay Kelly.
12. (Special Feature Documentary Stand-Out) David Kittredge‘s Boorman and the Devil.
Complete Unknowns (haven’t seen ’em, totally clueless):
1. Mary Bronstein‘s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
2. Benny Safdie‘s Marty Supreme
3. Scott Cooper‘s Deliver Me From Nowhere
HE’s Takedown List (i.e., get outta town, don’t even ask to come back until mid ’26):
1. Sinners (ballgame’s over, nominations but no wins, overpraised by TikTokers…sorry, Coogler!)
2. Wicked: For Good (forget it, get outta here)
3. It Was Just An Accident (way overpraised in Cannes)
4. Avatar: Fire and Ash (not a chance)
5. Frankenstein (forget it)
6, No Other Choice (Park Chan Wook‘s best days are behind him)
7. The Secret Agent (way overpraised in Cannes)
Every so often I’ll find myself shaking my head and sometimes even shuddering at the terrible, awful finality of bullets and disease. Some people have given up the spirit long before the final chapter, but others are generators of such verve and beauty and brilliance that the word “tragic” isn’t enough when finality intervenes. When I think of the crackling, incandescent spirit of John Lennon, and how all of that was obliterated in a matter of minutes on the evening of 12.8.80…words fail.
James Dean died in a head-on car crash exactly 70 years ago — 9.30.55. Broken neck, crushed chest, damn near instantly. Hollywood Elsewhere has twice visited the California death site (the intersection of route 46 and route 41, near Cholame). The first time was in early ’98, right around the Monica Lewinsky scandal. I took this photo, obviously with a mildly shitty camera:
Posted 20 and 1/2 years ago — 2.17.05: I’ve visited the Dean death site a couple of times, standing right next to the spot where Dean’s spirit left his body. I’ve taken it all in and felt vague stirrings of what I’ve told myself is probably some kind of historical after-vibe.
Every time I re-watch a Dean flick I’m still seriously impressed by those amazingly delicate chops of his, and how he managed to deliver that aching vulnerable thing with just the right amount of finesse.
But does Dean mean all that much to GenXers and GenYers? How many under-35s have seen and really enjoyed East of Eden or Rebel Without a Cause? These are great works (nobody cares much about Giant, a slow-moving, relatively dull film), but does the Dean legend/mystique pack that much of a punch these days?
Warner Home Video will release a brand-new Dean DVD package on 5.31.05 — remastered, double-disc, extra-heavy presentations of East of Eden, Rebel Without a Cause and Giant, plus a new documentary, James Dean: Forever Young, with previously unseen footage of Dean’s TV work. The doc will debut at the ’05 Cannes Film Festival, along with screenings of the three features, which have all been digitally restored.
Plus they’re organizing “Dean Fest,” a big three-day media festival happening in Dean’s home towns of Fairmont and Marion, Indiana (he was born in Marion, raised during his teen years in Fairmont by his aunt and uncle) from June 3rd to 5th.
I don’t know how worshipping at the altar of Dean’s memory is supposed to amount to three meaningful days for anyone of any age, but I guess the Warner folks will try and make that dog hunt.
Why am I writing about this now? Because Warner Home Video threw a press event yesterday morning at the Grove to announce the Dean bandwagon, and I had nothing else to do. All right, I was vaguely interested.
They got Pete Hammond to be the master of ceremonies. A parade of corporate suits took turns at the mike, blah-blahing about Dean’s rebel spirit and lasting influence. Some pals and colleagues of Dean’s from the old days shared some recollections. Martin Sheen (who played Dean in a TV movie about 25 years ago) showed up also, paying tribute to Dean’s profound effect upon actors, etc.
There was no trace of Dean’s old pal Dennis Hopper, though. There should have been.
I was told the whole presentation would last a little more than an hour. I stayed for the first 90 minutes, at which point the screen presentations had completed and Hammond had introduced and interviewed six or seven of Dean’s former friends, co-workers and/or associates.
If Dean had lived he’d be 74 today — Clint Eastwood’s age. But I don’t think it was in the cards for Dean to reach a ripe old age.
Photographer Phil Stern, easily the morning’s most caustic and honest speaker, said Dean was reckless about driving and was probably nursing some kind of urge to self-destruct.
Stern recalled that one day in early ’55 he was driving west on Sunset Blvd. near the corner of Crescent Heights Blvd., and that he nearly slammed into Dean after the latter ran a red light.
“Dean was very prescient because he structured his career in such a way that he passed away, which I believe was inevitable, in a way that precluded the possibility of people seeing him as a pot-bellied bald man,” Stern remarked.
There was something odd about friends and contemporaries of a guy known as the most influential troubled teenager in movie history…the proverbial `50s youth with a turned-up hood…there was something disorienting about Dean’s contemporaries looking so old and crochety and bent over.
Corey Allen, 70, the actor who played Buzz in Rebel Without a Cause (i.e., the one Dean had a knife fight with, and who went over the cliff in the car) was white haired and bearded and carrying a cane and apparently suffering from Parkinson’s, or something like that. He seemed okay attitude-wise.
You came out of this corporate presentation knowing two things: time sure as shit marches on, and getting old is a sonuvabitch.
As long as I’m breathing I’ll always love Leonard Rosenman’s scores for both East of Eden (especially the overture and main title pieces) and Rebel Without a Cause.
But there was something seriously odious about all these bottom-line corporate suit types paying tribute to Dean’s earning potential as a brand name, but not necessarily (or at least, not believably) paying tribute to who he actually was.
There’s a line in Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters in which Max von Sydow’s grumpy artist character says that if Jesus Christ were to come back to earth and see what is going on today in his name, “he would never stop throwing up.”
I was wondering what Dean would have thought of Tuesday morning’s presentation. I like to think he would have been amused in some way, shape or form. I was also imagining his ghost sitting in the seats yesterday and throwing ectoplasmic spitballs.
The Ankler‘s Richard Rushfield (10.1.): “This morning Jane Fonda — legendary actress, producer, activist and Oscar-winner — announced the re-launch of The Committee for the First Amendment, a group once led by her father, Henry Fonda, among other A-list Golden Age stars, including Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.”
“The Committee’s reformation was announced with the release of a statement signed by over 550 artists” — Bill Maher included! — “and members of the Hollywood community.”
The reformed Committee is, of course, a pushback against Donald Trump‘s autocratic bully-boy regime, and especially, one presumes, his recent quashing (through surrogates) of his late-night talk-show critics, Stephen Colbert and (for a few days) Jimmy Kimmel. Who’s next?
The Committee’s banner ad reads as follows:
And yet Fonda’s committee did a little quashing of its own last year when THR‘s Rebecca Keegan posted that Sasha Stone hit piece — an article that seemed to pretty much torpedo Stone’s award-season ad income, although she’s since bounced back to some extent.
Here’s what Stone posted this morning in response to Rushfield’s piece:
It probaby wasn’t Fonda herself who said “get rid of Sasha Stone!” But it might have been Robin Morgan, co-founder of the Women’s Media Center.
Who remembers The Razor’s Edge, that strange, wackazoid, out-of-mind adaptation of Somerset Maugham’s 1944 novel?
41 years have passed since my first and only viewing. Directed and co-written by John Byrum, this Columbia release is probably the worst Bill Murray movie ever made, and was certainly the most ill-conceived.
From Janet Maslin’s 10.19.84 review: “As he prepares to tell his fiancee that he wants to postpone their wedding and is not yet ready to settle down, Bill Murray’s Larry Darrell says ‘let’s talk.’ Murray then adds ‘seal talk’ as he’s playing the scene in a swimming pool. And then he begins to arf.
“If The Razor’s Edge is Mr. Murray’s first ‘serious’ movie, he can hardly be accused of bringing an excess of seriousness to its central role.
“Nor does he exactly play Larry Darrell, the Chicagoan ‘dreamer of a beautiful dream’ who journeys to Paris and the Far East in search of enlightenment, for the laughs that are his trademark. Certainly Mr. Murray brings his familiar off-handed, wise-guy manner to the tale, as well as a complete indifference to the post-World War I time frame; his performance is both jokey and anachronistic, and the Parisian setting is little more than an excuse for him to show up in a beret.
“These touches might seem more jarring in a consistent and convincing version of Maugham’s novel. As it is, this Razor’s Edge is itself so disjointed that Mr. Murray, for all his wisecracking inappropriateness, is all that holds it together.”
It’s hard to describe what I’m feeling about Scott Cooper‘s Deliver Me From Nowhere (20th Century, 10.24), but I’m not sensing much in the way of social tremors or gravitational pull.
The reactions since the big Telluride debut and the recent NYFF screenings have been generally admiring, but almost in a half-rote, semi-muted sort of way. I don’t know what’s missing exactly, but something is.
The only element I’m especially interested in is Jeremy Strong‘s performance as Jon Landau, Springsteen’s manager from way back.
.
There’s a difference, of course, between a film becoming a “success” vs. a “success d’estime.”
A cinematic success is one that not only pleases the Movie Godz but attracts and perhaps even excites your entertainment-seeking, less-than-progressive types, and which at least breaks even financially…a film that connects with both the mineral-water, chamomile tea-sipping cultural elites and the under-educated, soft-drink-slurping, popcorn-eating sloths.
A success d’estime tends to connect with the former, and less so the latter. A 9.30 Ankler column by “Prestige Junkie’s”‘s Katey Rich doesn’t admit this. Calling OBAA a flat-out “success” is cheerleader spin.
As far as it goes, HE remains a sincere fan of One Battle After Another. Pic deserves between four and five gold stars for craft alone, but there’s only so much love this suburban New Jersey guy can give to a woke action flick that dismisses white establishment males as racist and predatory and pretty much incapable of social compassion.
I’m genuinely glad and enthused that Paul Thomas Anderson‘s film, which should have cost $40 or $50 million to produce, tops, but wound up costing $140M-plus due to massive salaries and whatnot…I’m glad it’s been greeted with gushing critical enthusiasm thus far, and it’s a foregone conclusion, of course, that it’ll be Oscar-nominated in several categories.
But it won’t, I suspect, win the Best Picture Oscar. For one thing, Academy voters don’t like celebrating big-budget shortfallers.
Will the 55-year-old PTA (whom I first met in early ’97 when he dropped by for an interview following a HotShot Movies screening of Hard Eight) snag a Best Director Oscar? As a kind of career-tribute, gold-watch gesture, I mean. And as a way of symbolically dismissing Trump and the MAGA millions. Maybe, maybe not.
The key factor is that OBAA is not and never will be a commercial “hit”. If you add in marketing costs it’ll need to reap…what, half a billion just to break even? PTA’s There Will Be Blood was his highest earner at $77M. OBAA will surpass that, I’m presuming, but it won’t come near $500M. Hell, the theatrical take probably won’t make much more than $100M. Am I wrong?
How is One Battle After Another performing in Charlie Kirk country? That’s what I’d like to know. How it is playing outside the urban liberal-media bubble?
Yesterday Deadline‘s Anthony D’Alessandro, leaning on data from Entelligence, reported that “the overall percentage of admissions attending One Battle After Another were 72% in blue-county cinemas and 27% in red-county ones.” He explains that EntTelligence “determines blue and red zones by how each county voted in the 2024 presidential election.”
D’Alessandro: “53% of the nation’s movie theaters are located in blue counties and yield 66.8% of overall movie ticket sales and 63.6% of cinema attendance.”
Late at night on 4.18.75, the 40-year-old Paul Revere, a silversmith and a proud member of the Sons of Liberty, leapt on his trusty steed to warn the citizens of Charleston and Lexington about the imminent arrival of British troops in Massachusetts. But his repeated cry wasn’t “the redcoats are coming!”– it was “the regulars are coming!”
How many Millennials and Zoomers can accurately recite any of the basic historical bullet points of the American Revolution? Answer: Probably close to zero.
Remember when Ken Burns‘ The Civil War, a resonant, authoritative, nearly twelve-hour PBS series, was an absolute must-watch in every region of the country? It premiered almost exactly 35 years ago, on 9.23.90.
It was narrated by the great David McCullough, used beyond-classic photographs by Matthew Brady and was enlivened by a long cavalcade of savory insights from the late (albeit not woke enough) Shelby Foote.
Now comes Burns’ The American Revolution, a six-part, twelve-hour documentary. It will debut on PBS on 11.16.25. I wouldn’t miss these six episodes for the world, but tens of millions of deadheads won’t even give them a glance.
Now that HE’s TTS (text-to-voice) capability has been installed, HE regulars might want to listen to a High Noon vs. Rio Bravo essay that I posted a little more than 18 years ago. (You’ll need to click through to the piece to activate the listening bar.)
I’ve chosen the voice of a male Englishman, but it’s just a placeholder. I’m not especially happy with this guy because he’s just a genteel robotic voice — he doesn’t seem to understand what he’s saying or, for that matter, the English language itself.
So I’m currently searching around for a TTS software platform that can deliver voices that do seem to understand the import of what they’re reading, and which know a little something about when to pause and which words to emphasize and what parentheses mean, etc. (Hume is one option — Revoicer is another.) My ideal voices would be (a) mid ’60s Lee Marvin, (b) early ’60s Richard Burton or (c) my own.
So let’s go back to July 2007…George Bush is president, Iraq is a mess, the arrival of woke terror is at least a decade away, the pandemic won’t begin for another 13 years, the greatest movie year of the 21st century is half over, and people are beginning to talk seriously about a certain Illinois senator with a funny-sounding name who’s running for president.
Talk to any impassioned, ahead-of-the-curve film snob about classic westerns, and he/she will probably tell you that Howard Hawks‘ Rio Bravo (1959) is a much better, more substantial film than Fred Zinneman‘s High Noon (1952). More deeply felt, they’ll say. Better shoot-em-up swagger, tastier performances, more likable, more old-west iconic.
Many people I know feel this way. And now director Peter Bogdanovich is saying it again in a New York Observer piece — Rio Bravo is even better than you thought, High Noon doesn’t hold up as well, etc.
Something snapped when I read Peter’s article this afternoon. Goddamn it, the Rio Bravo cult has gone on long enough! Bogdanovich calls it “a life-affirming, raucous, profound masterpiece”…okay. But I’m going to respond politely and call that a reach. I’ve long admired admire Hawks’ movies and the whole Hawks ethos as much as the next guy, but it’s time to curtail this here and now.
High Noon may seem a bit stodgy or conventional to some and perhaps not as excitingly cinematic to the elites, but by any semblance of a classic understanding of what constitues high-quality cinema, it’s a far greater film than Rio Bravo.
It’s not about the Old West, obviously — it’s a metaphor movie about the Hollywood climate in the early ’50s — but it walks and talks like a western, and is angry, blunt, honed and unequivocal to that end. It’s about the very worst in people, and the best in a single, anxious, far-from-perfect man.
I’m not speaking so much about Gary Cooper‘s Will Kane as High Noon‘s screenwriter-producer Carl Foreman, who was being eyeballed by the Hollywood right for alleged Communist ties when he wrote it, and receiving a very tough lesson in human nature in the process. He wound up writing a crap-free movie that talks tough, cuts no slack and speaks with a single voice.
You know from the get-go that High Noon is going to say something hard and fundamental about who and what we are. It’s not going to poke along some dusty trail and go yippie-ki-yay and twirl a six-gun. It’s going to look you in the eye and say what’s what, and not just about the political and moral climate in some small western town that Gary Cooper‘s Willl Kane is the sheriff of.
Rio Bravo and High Noon are both about a lawman facing up to bad guys who will kill him if he doesn’t arrest or kill them first. The similarities pretty much end there.
High Noon is about facing very tough odds alone, and how you can’t finally trust anyone but yourself because most of your “friends” and neighbors will equivocate or desert you when the going gets tough.
Rio Bravo is about standing up to evil with your flawed but loyal pallies and nourishing their souls in the bargain — about doing what you can to help them become better men. This basically translates into everyone pitching in to help an alcoholic (Dean Martin) get straight and reclaim his self-respect.
High Noon doesn’t need help. It’s about solitude, values…four o’clock in the morning courage.
We’d all like to have loyal supportive friends by our side, but honestly, which represents the more realistic view of human nature? The more admirable?
The first 10 or 12 minutes of Rio Bravo, I freely admit, are terrific in the way Hawks introduces character and mood and a complex situation without dialogue. Let it be clearly understood there is nothing quite like this in all of High Noon. I also love the way John Wayne rifle-butts a guy early on and then goes, “Aww, I didn’t hurt him.”
But once the Duke and Walter Brennan, Martin, Ricky Nelson and Angie Dickinson settle into their routines and the easy-going pace of the thing, Rio Bravo becomes, at best, a somewhat entertaining sit-around-and-talk-and-occasionally-shoot-a-bad-guy movie.
More than anything else, Rio Bravo just ambles along. Wayne and the guys hang out in the jailhouse and talk things over. Wayne walks up to the hotel to bark at (i.e., hit on) Dickinson. It tries to sell you on the idea of the big, hulking, 51 year-old Wayne being a suitable romantic match for Dickinson, who was willow slender and maybe 27 at the time but looking more like 22 or 23.
Plus the villains have no bite or flavor — they’re shooting gallery ducks played by run-of-the-mill TV actors. Most of Rio Bravo is lit too brightly. And it seems too colorfully decorated, like some old west tourist town. It has a dippy “downtime” singing sequence that was thrown in to give Nelson and Martin, big singers at the time, a chance to show their stuff. Then comes the big shootout at the end, which is certainly okay but nothing legendary.
Does Rio Bravo have a sequence that equals the gripping metronomic ticking-clock montage near the end of High Noon? No. Is the dialogue in Rio Bravo up to the better passages in Zinneman’s film? No. (There’s nothing close to the scene between Cooper and Lon Chaney, Jr., or the brief one between Cooper and Katy Jurado.) Is there a moment in Rio Bravo that comes close to Cooper throwing his tin star into the dust at the end? No. Is there a “yes!” payoff moment in Rio Bravo that’s as good as the one in High Noon when Grace Kelly, playing a Quaker who abhors violence, drills one of the bad guys in the back? No.
Floyd Crosby‘s High Noon photography is choice and precise and gets the job done. It doesn’t exactly call attention to itself, but it’s continually striking and well-framed. To me, the black-and-white images have always seemed grittier and less Hollywood “pretty” than Russell Harlan‘s lensing in Rio Bravo, which I would file under “pleasing and acceptable but no great shakes.”
Dimitri Tomkin wrote the scores for both High Noon and Rio Bravo, but they don’t exist in the same realm. The Bravo score is settled and kindly, a sleepy, end-of-the-day campfire score. High Noon‘s is strong, pronounced, “dramatic” — so clear and unified it’s like a character in itself. And I’ve never gotten over the way the rhythm in that Tex Ritter song, “Do Not Forsake Me O My Darling,” sounds like a heartbeat.
Bogdanovich writes that Rio Bravo didn’t win any Oscars or get much critical respect, but “it was far more popular with audiences than High Noon.” He’s right about this. The IMDB says Rio Bravo earned $5,750,000 in the U.S. when it came out in ’59, and that High Noon brought in $3,750,000 in 1952 dollars. Big effin’ deal. High Noon whipsRio Bravo‘s ass in every other respect.
That said, there’s an intriguing Hawks assessment by French director Jean-Luc Godard in the Bogdanovich piece. Godard doesn’t argue that Rio Bravo is pretty much what I’ve described above, but says it’s still a better film than High Noon because — I love Jean-Luc Godard — the exceptionally good things in Rio Bravo can be ignored, and therefore may be unnoticable to a good-sized portion of the audience.
“The great filmmakers always tie themselves down by complying with the rules of the game,” Godard states. “Take, for example, the films of Howard Hawks, and in particular Rio Bravo. That is a work of extraordinary psychological insight and aesthetic perception, but Hawks has made his film so that the insight can pass unnoticed without disturbing the audience that has come to see a Western like all others. Hawks is the greater because he has succeeded in fitting all he holds most dear into a well-worn subject.”
