Oliver Stone to Variety‘s Christopher Vourlias in a 6.19 interview from Cluj-Napoca, Romania, which hosts the annual Transilvania Film Festival (6.9 thru 6.18):

“I saw John Wick 4 on the plane. Talk about volume. I think the film is disgusting beyond belief. Disgusting. I don’t know what people are thinking. [Keanu Reeves] kills…what, three, four hundred people in the fucking movie?

“As a combat veteran, I gotta tell you [that] not one of [the killings] is believable. I realize it’s a movie, but it’s [more of] a video game. How many cars can crash? How many stunts can you do? What’s the difference between Fast and Furious and some other film? It’s just one thing after another. Whether it’s some super-human Marvel character or just a human being like John Wick, it doesn’t make any difference. It’s not believable.”

“Insane Diseased Pornoviolent Fantasia,” HE-posted on 3.25.23:

Pauline Kael‘s review of 2001: A Space Odyssey is so far removed from what almost everyone is convinced of….so far from the exalted rep that this 1968 film has enjoyed for decades — the general consensus that it’s not only masterful but cosmically spellbinding and even, on a certain level, a black no-laugh comedy — Kael was so far afield from this view it’s fascinating to read from an anthropological perspective. How could she have missed the import of this film so completely?

“2001 is a movie that might have been made by the hero of Blow-Up, and it’s fun to think about Kubrick really doing every dumb thing he wanted to do, building enormous science fiction sets and equipment, never even bothering to figure out what he was going to do with them. Fellini, too, had gotten carried away with the Erector Set approach to movie-making, but his big science-fiction construction, exposed to view at the end of 8 and 1/2, was abandoned. Kubrick never really made his movie either but he doesn’t seem to know it.

“Some people like the American International Pictures stuff because it’s rather idiotic and maybe some people love 2001 just because Kubrick did all that stupid stuff, acted out a kind of super sci-fi nut’s fantasy. In some ways it’s the biggest amateur movie of them all, complete even to the amateur-movie obligatory scene—the director’s little daughter (in curls) telling daddy what kind of present she wants.

“The secondary title of Dr. Strangelove, which we took to be satiric, How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb, was not, it now appears, altogether satiric for Kubrick. 2001 celebrates the invention of tools of death, as an evolutionary route to a higher order of non-human life. Kubrick literally learned to stop worrying and love the bomb; he’s become his own butt — the Herman Kahn of extraterrestrial games theory.

“The ponderous blurry appeal of the picture may be that it takes its stoned audience out of this world to a consoling vision of a graceful world of space, controlled by superior godlike minds, where the hero is reborn as an angelic baby. It has the dreamy somewhere-over-the-rainbow appeal of a new vision of heaven. 2001 is a celebration of cop-out. It says man is just a tiny nothing on the stairway to paradise, something better is coming, and it’s all out of your hands anyway. There’s an intelligence out there in space controlling your destiny from ape to angel, so just follow the slab. Drop up.

“It’s a bad, bad sign when a movie director begins to think of himself as a myth-maker, and this limp myth of a grand plan that justifies slaughter and ends with resurrection has been around before. Kubrick’s story line — accounting for evolution by an extraterrestrial intelligence — is probably the most gloriously redundant plot of all time. And although his intentions may have been different, 2001 celebrates the end of man; those beautiful mushroom clouds at the end of Strangelove were no accident.

“In 2001: A Space Odyssey, death and life are all the same: no point is made in the movie of Gary Lockwood’s death — the moment isn’t even defined — and the hero doesn’t discover that the hibernating scientists have become corpses. That’s unimportant in a movie about the beauties of resurrection. Trip off to join the cosmic intelligence and come back a better mind. And as the trip in the movie is the usual psychedelic light shows the audience doesn’t even have to worry about getting to Jupiter. They can go to heaven in Cinerama.”

“It’s very difficult to do comedy because if they don’t laugh when they should laugh, you are there with egg on your face, and that’s sad. In a serious picture you don’t hear them being bored, but in a comedy you can hear them not laughing. You tried so hard and the guy did the pratfall, but nothing — and you wish you were dead.” — Billy Wilder.

I really wanted to have a great bawdy old time with No Hard Feelings (Sony, 6.23), a casually coarse sex comedy about an “inappropriate age gap” relationship between Maddie (Jennifer Lawrence), a 32 year-old Montauk bartender in a financial hole, and Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman), an introverted 19-year-old who’s about to become a Princeton freshman.

Percy’s helicopter parents (Matthew Broderick, Laura Benanti) are concerned about his lack of outgoingness plus the fact that he’s still a virgin, so they place an ad in Craigslist that says “looking for a 20something woman who can pull our son out of his shell” — the implication being that they want this woman to sexually initiate the lad and generally prepare him for the social pressures of college.

They’re slightly concerned about Maddie being (a) 13 years older than Percy and (b) something of a low-rent townie, but they figure a woman who’s been around and has some mileage will handle him with care, etc.

So the premise isn’t bad and right off the top you can see that the laughs will come out of the somewhat impatient, blunt-spoken Maddie feeling increasingly frustrated and even irate as her attempts to seduce the reticent, romantic-minded Percy lead nowhere. You can also see from the get-go that Maddie and Percy will soon get past the sexual initiation and performance stuff and start relating to each other as vulnerable humans, etc.

To his credit, director and co-screenwriter Gene Stupnitsky balances the lewd and rude material with moments of introspection and truth-telling.

The problem is that as willing as I was to laugh and cut loose, too many of the jokes and gags simply don’t “land” or have been clumsily set up. The movie clearly wanted to do the thing that I wanted it to do, but it too often lurches and stumbles and doesn’t quite get there. It’s not that the jokes never connect — the crowd I was with responded with a fair number of yaw-haws — but Stupnitsky and Lawrence are going for bull’s-eyes (naturally) and the arrow rarely hits dead center.

Wilder knew what he was talking about — comedy is really quite hard. It has to work just so or it doesn’t work. Under-sell and it doesn’t connect — if the director-writer pushes too hard it can miss the mark to an even greater degree.

All I can tell you is that time and again during last night’s sneak preview of No Hard Feelings the funny stuff kept missing — sometimes to a very slight degree (and was therefore half-successful or at least smirk-worthy), and at other times it missed entirely. There are maybe two or three jokes that actually work, but the rest kind of fizzle or fall short in some way.

I loved that Lawrence was back with a truly spirited performance — a force-of-personality act in the vein of her Tiffany character in Silver Linings Playbook — but at the same time I felt shattered that the film wasn’t funnier. I was sitting there going “wow, this isn’t coming off…what a shame because I want it to…I’d love to join in the merriment but the movie won’t let me.”

I was especially invested in this prospective enjoyment because the woke bluenoses had already ganged up on No Hard Feelings, based on the trailer. Movie.com’s Archie Fenn complained about “the central elements of grooming and sexual harassment” being odious and worthy of condemnation, etc.

Well, guess what, Archie — No Hard Feelings traumatizes no one. 19 year-olds aren’t children and are old enough to figure out whether they want to drop trou or not, and…okay, I won’t spill the beans but there’s nothing in this film that will give the wokesters much concern.

I’ll post some more specific complaints later this week.

You Were Never Lovelier (released on 11.19.42) was the second of two Fred Astaire-Rita Hayworth collaborations; the first was You’ll Never Get Rich (9.25.41).

It’s been said that Hayworth was Astaire’s all-time favorite dance partner. Yes, more so than Ginger Rogers, Cyd Charisse and Barrie Chase.

Those creamy amber-beige tones are fake, of course, but they remind me of early-era Technicolor. The color in William Wellman‘s Nothing Sacred (’37) looks like this in the outdoor scenes.

Why would average parents trust Disney these days? Disney used to be family-friendly — now they’re Chinese communists pushing radical gender ideology. They’ve become the woke brain police, waving Mao’s little red book.

There aren’t many first-rate films that start with the letter J, or the first letter of my first name. John Wick, Jurassic, Jumanji, Jack Frost, Jason Goes to Hell, Jack, Judas and the Black Messiah, Jarhead, Jackass: The Movie, Justice league, Jingle All the Way, Jennifer’s Body…forget it.

As far as I can discern there are only ten worth mentioning, and in this order: (1) Jerry Maguire, (2) Jackie Brown, (3) Judgment at Nuremberg, (4) Jaws, (5) Juggernaut, (6) Joker, (7) Jack Reacher, (8) Jesus of Nazareth, (9) Johnny Guitar and (10) JFK. Okay, 11 if you add Jeremiah Johnson.

If you’re primarily a fan of Brian Cox in Succession and not much else, hold on to your hat. Once upon a time and strange as it may sound today, Cox was actually 39 years old, and he blazed a Hannibal Lecter trail that no one who saw Manhunter (‘86) will ever forget.