Due respect to poor Alex Pretti’s memory and to all his friends, co-workers and family members, but I don’t believe this.

Like 97% of everything on YouTube. including supposedly raw video, it’s almost certainly fake as far as Pretti’s death is concerned.

Pretti was dead on the street so why would anyone transport his body to the hospital where he worked? So they could stage this sad tribute? And where did the flag come from? Was it just…what, lying around?

And why “Taps” on the soundtrack? Was there a live bugler there? Pretti wasn’t a fallen soldier — he was just a decent, morally driven activist who was murdered by ICE thugs.

Partly because he tried to protect a woman who’d been shoved, and partly because he was unwise enough to wear a handgun during a volatile confrontation with macho rightwing street goons.

Never wrestle with these guys…ever. Whatever’s going on, just mildly submit in order to live and march and spread your gospel another day.

Robert Eggers had smarthouse authority in spades when he made The Witch and The Lighthouse in the mid to late teens.

But he gave up that ghost in order to brand himself as a re-maker of boilerplate franchise properties…gothic retreads that emphasized a certain oozy, grotesque, ultra-violent mythology -— The Northman, Nosferatu, Werwulf and (may God forbid and protect us) A Christmas Carol.

2008 seems like such a long time ago, which of course it is/was. An entirely different world. And yes, I miss the electric presence of J.C. Chandor…of course I do.

Cassian Elwes: “Right after I left WMA in ‘08 I made a deal to work out of a management company called untitled. They had an executive called Laura Rister whose job it was to help their clients with projects. I asked what her favorite unmade script was, and she said Zach Quinto had a great one called Margin Call. I read and loved it.

“I asked to speak to the writer/director, J.C. Chandor. He’d been trying to get this made as his first film. Eight years of trying while taking random editing jobs. Nothing. I also loved his producer Neal Dodson for doggedly hanging in there.

“I called J.C and told him I’d make it happen and that we’d be shooting within 6-8 weeks. I later found out he took the call on a park bench because he’d promised his wife he was going to stop chasing this dream and get a job. We were shooting eight weeks later.

“We sent the movie to Sundance but it took some cajoling on my part to get them even to play it, albeit in the second half. We had to show it privately in Park City the first weekend to get the buyers to see it. Because there was no real audience other than buyers, only IFC and Roadside were interested. We went with Roadside because they said they might go day-and-date as opposed to IFC, who said they definitely would.

“In August Roadside told us they were going day-and-date, which up until that point was the way indies were dumping films they didn’t think would do business. In September two things occurred — the reviews were fantastic and Occupy Wall Street happened. Journalists were saying ‘see this film if you want to understand what’s going on’. The movie was a big hit for a day and date film.

“The cool part of the Sundance screenings was that J.C. met Bob Redford in Park City and asked if he could send him a script. Redford said he was the first filmmaker at the festival to ever ask him. The script was All Is Lost. It was very short because there was no dialogue and mostly storyboards. Bob said yes and was nominated for an Academy Award later for his performance. That’s the beauty of this festival. Anything can happen.”

“Never Forget Margin Call“, HE-posted on 4.13.20.

Read more

Los Angeles–residing attorney friend: “Having seen it again, I believe Marty Supreme goes seriously awry with the fate-of-the-dog scenes. (Abel Ferrara’s gangster pays to get him back but what happens exactly?) Somehow all is forgiven at the end because Marty cries in the maternity ward. His character is an agent of chaos. If different choices had been made in place of this subplot, it could have been a much better film.”

HE to attorney: The chaos is the juice and the ju-ju. Either you get the Marty scheme or you don’t. The dog is fine.

Attorney to HE: “Two people apparently dead from gunfire. Not to mention the inferno at the gas station. And the dog has no master anymore. These are important parts of my analysis.”

IndieWire‘s Jim Hemphill, posted on 1.19.26: “On Saturday (1.17), the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles presented the world premiere of a new 4K restoration of George Stevens‘ The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), one of the most ambitious and experimental of all Hollywood epics.

“Director Martin Scorsese, whose Film Foundation was instrumental in restoring the film (and whose The Last Temptation of Christ is the only biblical epic that rivals Stevens’ film in its audacity and complexity), provided a video introduction in which he celebrated Stevens’ masterpiece as the summation of his work.”

“Masterpiece”? Stevens film is arguably the shallowest, phoniest, most oddly constipated saga-of-Christ film ever made. Let there be no doubt that Scorsese’s low-budgeted The Last Temptation of Christ (’88) is the richest, finest and trippiest of the bunch…the ending is truly magnificent. Pier Paolo Pasolini‘s The Gospel According to St. Matthew is a close second.

Methinks Scorsese primarily fell for the idea of restoring The Greatest Story Ever Told because it was lusciously shot in Ultra Panavison 70, which has an aspect ratio of 2.76:1.

Production-wise Stevens’ film was a a flat-out fiasco, and in viewing terms is truly painful to sit through. I will never, ever see it again. It feels inauthentic and sound-stagey…a pricey, corporatized big-Hollywood presentation with everyone wearing the same white flowing robes and with bizarre American Southwestern backdrops (Nevada, Colorado, Utah) standing in for ancient Judea.

Max Von Sydow‘s Nordic, blue-eyed Jesus wore a far-too-short, much-too-tidy wig, and somehow managed to appear even less authentically Judean than King of Kings‘ Jeffrey Hunter.

And the non-stop cavalcade of Hollywood faces! Dorothy McGuire as the Virgin Mary, Charlton Heston as John the Baptist, Claude Rains as Herod the Great, José Ferrer as Herod Antipas, Telly Savalas as Pontius Pilate, Martin Landau as Caiaphas, David McCallum as Judas Iscariot, Donald Pleasence as “The Dark Hermit”, Roddy McDowall as Matthew, Van Heflin as “Bar Amand”, Sal Mineo as “Uriah”, Ed Wynn as “Old Aram”, and Sidney Poitier as Simon of Cyrene…Jesus.

Plus Michael Ansara, Carroll Baker, Ina Balin, Robert Blake, Pat Boone (!!!), Victor Buono, John Considine, Richard Conte, Jamie Farr, David Hedison, Angela Lansbury, Robert Loggia, John Lupton, Janet Margolin, Nehemiah Persoff, Marian Seldes, Paul Stewart, Harold J. Stone and Shelley Winters.

John Wayne was cast as a Roman Centurion for the crucifixion sscene on Calvary. Invented story: Wayne couldn’t quite deliver his only spoken line in the film, “Truly this man was the Son of God”, with sufficient feeling. Stevens: “Can you give it a little more awe, Duke?” Wayne: “Aww, truly this man was the Son of God.”

No question mark because “Who Are You” is a statement of spiritual-sociological fact — you / we / all of us are The Who.

Or we were, at least, when Who’s Next popped on 8.18.78. My early impoverished-desperation-and-existential-anxiety NYC period had begun in the spring of ’78, when I moved into my cockroach-infested Sullivan Street apartment (my color TV was was a 28-incher, if that) while working at the Spring Street Bar and Grill.

Over the last four or five days I’ve gotten completely buried in this 37-year-old album. One of the seven discs contains Glyn Johns‘ original mix, which was rejected by John Entwistle because it didn’t have enough bottom.

Read more

If I were strolling around Paris and happened to notice Jeremy Irons sipping red wine at Les Deux Magots, which he and wife Sinead Cusack were actually doing a day or two ago, I wouldn’t say a word. I would discreetly glance in their direction and move on, although I would probably wonder why Irons was even there, given the presence of rube tourists and the general absence of coolness.

But if I’d been waved at and somehow invited to sit down and chat (bizarre as that sounds), at some point during the conversation I would lean over and suggest to Irons that his most penetrating screen moment, in my humble but long-held opinion, is a non-verbal one.

I’m speaking of a silent passage in Louis Malle‘s Damage (’92) that I described three-plus years ago. [See directly below.] Excerpt: “Irons’ wealthy politician, having just arrived home, makes himself a drink and strolls into the living room. He takes a sip and looks around, and the expression on his face says everything — unfulfilled, unchallenged, drained.”

With Imprint’s 2023 Bluray of Damage now out of stock and even unpurchasable from the usual scalpers and with no apparent HD streaming options, it can be stated that Irons’ two greatest filmed performances — Dr. Stephen Fleming in Damage and Jerry, a sly literary agent and a marital cheat, in David Jones and Harold Pinter‘s Betrayal (’83) — are un-purchasable, un-rentable and unviewable in 1080p high-def, much less 4K. Which is ridiculous. A film that can only seen in standard 480p is all but extinct — a fossil.

Read more

In two words, undramatic and restful.

A very slightly condensed opening of Owen Gleiberman‘s Variety review of Olivia Wilde‘s The Invite:

“When you catch a film about two couples who get together for a dinner party, there are certain expectations.

“You expect that the dialogue, for a while, is going to be light, funny, brittle, caustic. You expect that as the evening wears on, the masks of civility will come off, revealing something more painful and maybe brutal under the surface. You expect that there might be serious flirtation (between the people who aren’t partners), and that the whole thing will wind up structured as a kind of truth game. And you expect that by the end, there will be wreckage…but maybe, in that destruction, a kind of healing.

“The Invite, directed by Wilde from a script by Will McCormack and Rashida Jones and starring Wilde and Seth Rogen as a grousing, long-married San Francisco couple who have their upstairs neighbors over to dinner, is a movie that lives up to every one of those expectations. Yet it does so in a way that’s so original, so brimming with surprise, so fresh and up-to-the-minute in its perceptions of how relationships work (or don’t), that you watch it in a state of rapt immersion and delight.”

Yesterday THR critic David Rooney called Gregg Araki‘s I Want Your Sex “a blast.”

I for one am highly suspicious of Rooney’s review for three reasons. One, he’s often generous to a fault. Two, I stopped trusting Rooney when he raved about The Secret Agent, a “good” but somewhat scattered and underwhelming film, during last May’s Cannes Film Festival. And three, I Want Your Sex was turned down last year by the Cannes and Venice film festivals. What does that tell you?

As Araki’s film has recently premiered at Sundance, it is fair to repeat HE’s fundamental opposition to watching Cooper Hoffman simulating the performance of sexual acts. The problem isn’t Hoffman alone. Nobody wants to see any freckly-faced, doughy-bod, tiny-eyed ginger guy with his shirt or, God forbid, his pants off.

There’s a reason why John Wayne, Paul Newman, Clark Gable, Cary Grant, Gary Cooper and Errol Flynn used to get the girl but Walter Brennan, Andy Devine, Wallace Ford, Edgar Buchanan, Donald Meek, Ernest Borgnine and Rupert Grint didn’t.

In response to this rule-of-thumb Paddy Chayefsky wrote Marty, a teleplay (and then a movie version of same) about a homely Brooklyn butcher (a guy roughly in Cooper Hoffman’s league) who had such bad luck with girls that he was on the verge of giving up.

It was sad but 1955 audiences understood the poor guy’s predicament because the actor who played Marty was Ernest Borgnine.

Things are different these days. Now it’s “whoa, Marty the Butcher totally deserves to not only find love but experience great, Last Tango-level sex in his lonely-ass life, and here’s hoping he finds both, and — this is even better — that Delbert Mann will allow us to share in Marty’s orgasmic satisfactions.”

…when even slightly provoked. As today’s shooting victim — a 37 year-old intensive care nurse named Alex Jeffrey Pretti — apparently did by being legally armed. Except he was disarmed right before being shot multiple times.

Dangerous hombres, those ICE guys. Hair-trigger psychos. Public enemies.

Five or six (more?) ICE guys all over Pretti, pepper-spraying and punching his ass and then pinning him down, and then they shoot him full of holes?

Read more