It hit me yesterday that Josie Rourke, who made her bigtime feature directing debut with Mary, Queen of Scots, has been absent from the flush realm since Mary opened in late '18. There are reasons for that, of course. One is that people like me felt novocained to death, Mary being an overbearing exercise in woke presentism.
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Posted on 6.15.18: I was crashing with a married couple, Frank and Karen, in a smallish Boston apartment in the general vicinity of Symphony Hall and Hemenway Street. They had a linebacker-sized friend named Eddie who lived nearby and was also hanging out a lot. Mainly the four of us sat around in the evenings and got high. I distinctly remember not rolling joints as much as tapping the tobacco out of filtered cigarettes and then-filling the cigarette with what I recall was low-grade pot. Moderately potent, lots of stems and seeds.
One night around 10 pm or so we decided we needed a straw for sucking in hash smoke. A tiny chunk of hash placed on the burning embers of a cigarette, etc. No, I don’t remember why we didn’t just use rolled-up dollar bills. Probably because it would’ve been unsanitary.
I recall that it was fairly cold out and that we were probably broke or close to it, and so going to a market and buying a pack of straws was out. So I decided to start knocking on doors and asking Frank and Karen’s neighbors if they had a straw to spare. It wasn’t just the vaguely strange notion of a long-haired guy in jeans and boots with bloodshot eyes looking to bum a straw from strangers, but that it was too late to knock on doors and bum anything from anyone.
…weighing in on the forthcoming interracial London stage production of Romeo and Juliet…Tom Holland and Frances Amewudah–Rivers, etc.
Canyon Coyote posted the following last night, and this, ladies and gents, is what “woke terror” is all about:
(1) If you are in the industry in any capacity, you know that you can’t really speak openly or honestly about your feelings if they aren’t absolutely progressive full tilt. This is tripled if you are a middle-of-the-road creative or technician white guy in the middle of a recession. It also applies if you aren’t a rich successful person with fuck-you money to a lesser extent.
(2) Why do you think every critic sounds exactly the same and has a lot of the same moralistic talking points? If I called Barbie misandrist on Facebook, 20 progressive friends would dunk on me and 50 others would share the take as if I wore a MAGA hat and had just shot a gay black trans woman on Park Avenue in Trump’s name. There is also no reason to have an Israel-Palestine take right now because people are equally worked up. Even if something isn’t political why go public with a hard or critical take on a film when you may be interviewed for or employed by someone who made it? You think in this economy I’d be willing to lose out on producing The Bachelor just because I think the new Bachelorette is lame?
(3) If you are a normal working person in any kind of a sales or public capacity, having the wrong take could literally cost you your job if it’s seen by the right people at the wrong time. People are politically and socially enraged and might literally avoid hiring a doctor or attorney if said doctor or attorney feels the wrong way about any hot-button issue.
(4) If you have middle-of-the-road safe progressive takes on entertainment you can speak your mind, but if you are slightly contrarian at the wrong time, it honestly might crush you at an inopportune moment. I work in reality and have worked in offices where people gossip, and let me tell you in the freelance world having non mainstream takes can literally mean not getting asked back on the next season. You can think I’m delusional or a neckbeard but I’m absolutely telling the truth. For what it’s worth I’m in decent to good shape, and am happily married with a kid.
(5) I’m not Brad Pitt but I’m better looking than Tobey Maguire so I’m hardly a basement dweller, but I know talking about why I dislike Barbie under my real name would get me blackballed with the half-dozen female EPs I’m friends with on social media. Barbie is just a random example but I wouldn’t even make my above comments in the current climate because some POC might decide that anyone thinking that the new Romeo and Juliet actress isn’t beautiful is racist. I went after Will Smith pretty hard when he assaulted Chris Rock and had two friends DM that I was borderline racist and should respect that Smith was struggling and let it go cause it’s not my place to have an opinion on the actions of a black man.
(6) I guarantee there are folks here that would have lost their damn minds in 2004 if Seth Rogen were cast as Romeo opposite Natalie Portman. Those exact same people are pretending to be fine with this new Romeo and Juliet casting as if it’s not weird. Anyone But You works because they are both equally hot. It would not have worked with Josh Gad in the Glen Powell role. Sometimes I think people are just losing their minds in order to be morally righteous. Just wild nonsense.
(7) Like why can’t we all just have takes anymore without someone being insanely offended as if their world was destroyed? Racism = Bad. Questioning a romantic pairing based on looks in a love story is absolutely normal human behavior!
John Cena‘s recent nude moment on the Oscar stage reminided me of something I’ve never mentioned and had almost forgotten about.
I’ve written before about having servied four days in L.A. County Jail, for the crime of having failed to pay 27 parking tickets. It happened sometime in the late spring or early summer of ’74, and it was during the initial processing (when they create your identity card, make you take a shower and give you the orange jumpsuit and your bedding) that I noticed that the Oscar streaker guy, Robert Opel, was also being processed.
Opel’s photo had been in the papers; he’d also been interviewed by local TV news shows so the recognition was instant. Did I go over and strike up a conversation? Nope — wimped out. But it was him, all right.
Opel was born in 1939 in East Orange, New Jersey. After graduating from a Pittsburgh-area college he allegedly worked as a speechwriter for California Governor Ronald Reagan.
Opel was teaching for the Los Angeles Unified School District at the time of the Oscar streaking incident, and was canned because of that.
Opel was mostly gay with a little bi action on the side. After moving from L.A. to San Francisco during the mid ’70s, he opened Fey-Way Studios, a gallery of gay male art, at 1287 Howard Street. The gallery helped bring such erotic gay artists as Tom of Finland and Robert Mapplethorpe to national attention. But in the mid ’79 he was in a relationship with Camille O’Grady.
At age 39 Opel was shot to death at his San Francisco studio — it happened on July 7, 1979. His killer was Maurice Keenan, a thief who is still doing time for the crime.
There’s a documentary about Opel on YouTube. It’s called Uncle Bob, directed by Opel’s nephew and namesake.
On 9.24.22, or roughly 19 months ago, I tapped out a longish piece about a traumatic encounter with an old pally inside Wilton’s Village Market.
Although I’d regarded this guy as a great friend and an excellent human being for decades, he’d alarmingly turned into a wokester fanatic sometime in ’20 or ’21 or thereabouts. Goaded by his three Millennial-aged daughters, he’d decided I was suddenly allied with society’s bad guys and that I’d more or less become some kind of suppressive, anti-feminist, Harvey Weinstein-like figure.
I’ve seen red over a few things in my time, but my mind turned into molten lava when the Chance Brown condemnation came down. How fucking dare you?
I didn’t mention his name in the Village Market piece, but referred to him as “Strelnikov” as his chilly ranting reminded me of Tom Courtenay‘s communist enforcer in David Lean‘s Doctor Zhivago (’65).
His actual name was Chance Browne, a cartoonist (“Hi and Lois“) and musician and an all-around good fellow until the Great Awokening turned his head around.
I’m revealing Chance’s identity because (deep breath) he died last Friday afternoon from pancreatic cancer. His family requested radio silence at first, but Chance’s sister broke the news on Facebook a day or two later, and I’m figuring “okay, olly olly in come free.”
Here’s what I posted a day after his passing:
“The greatly talented, often joyful and widely beloved CHANCE BROWNE has left the earth and has merged with the infinite. He is now at one with legendary astronaut Dave Bowman at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, gazing down upon our blue planet with a certain childlike amazement.
“Chance passed yesterday afternoon (Friday, March 1st) around 1 pm. Taken down by pancreatic cancer, which he had only recently discovered.
“My heart is broken but what else can I or anyone else say? This is obviously a different deal than the passing of John Lennon (43 years and 2 months ago), and yet it feels emotionally similar in a certain way. To me at least. This sounds kinda silly but I thought Chance would just keep on Chance-ing forever. I really did. I thought he’d just keep going. I really thought we all had an eternal lease on life.
“I am shocked and thrown by this terrible waffle-iron…this feeling of having been clobbered on the side of my face or my head or whatever. I haven’t felt this shocked and thrown by the passing of a good and gentle soul in such a long time. But it’s happened. We may as well grim up and face it and join hands and ask ourselves who we are now and who we used to be, and where we’ve been and where we’re all going. We’re all getting there, no exceptions. Chance has simply left a bit earlier. He’ll almost certainly be waiting.”
Chance found out that he was more or less doomed a month and a half ago. On the afternoon of 1.17.24 he messaged a mutual friend, Mike Connors, as follows: “I have bad news, my brother. I just got diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer (!). I’m starting chemo tomorrow. I feel like dice must feel when they get shook up and thrown down the table. I may last another six months to a year or more with chemo. I love you and I’m sorry to leave the party too soon. I’ve got some time so we’ll talk.”
Alas, this never happened. This message was their last exchange.
Untimely passing cartoon, roughed out by Chance 11 or 12 years ago:
Dry absurdist humor, yokel accents, hamfisted characterization, broad deadpan line-readings, heavy lesbian breathing and — this is the fatal stab — at least one “aaaaggghhhh!!” moment.
It seems clear that Drive-Away Dolls (Focus Features, 2.23) is Raising Arizona 2, and that means a very, very difficult time for Hollywood Elsewhere.
“Origins of the Aaaaggghhh!“, posted on 7.13.23:
I don’t know how many comedies or half-comedies have resorted to a certain overworked bit, but many dozens have done so.
I’m talking about two or three or four characters realizing that something awful or calamitous or mortifying has just happened, and their uniform response is to scream “aaaaagggghhhhhh!”
If I’ve seen this once I’ve seen it 80 or 90 times, maybe more. And I’ve never laughed, not once.
If a bearded wizard were to come up and say “if you want, I can erase every last ‘aaaagggghhhhhh!’ scene that’s ever been used” I would say “yes…please!”
Question: Four or five decades ago some director invented an “aaaaggggghhhhh!” scene. It must have gotten a huge laugh the first two or three times or people wouldn’t still be drawing from that well.
So what film was the first? Was Bob Clark the responsible party?
I got started on this because there are at least two “aaaggghhh!” moments in Barbie apparently, at least according to a couple of trailers I’ve seen.
Has there ever been a real-life situation in which a famous person didn’t die in their home (and I mean a nice homey-home with a warm fire going in the fireplace and pets lying on their bed) and wasn’t surrounded by family members?
I’m asking because each and every time a celebrity death is announced we’re always told that the passage-into-infinity hasn’t happened in a hospital and that the deceased was absolutely surrounded by family and loved ones.
Don’t most people die in hospitals, and often in the wee hours when family members are home sleeping?
Not once has a celebrity passed while family and friends were out to dinner or otherwise and only a professional caregiver was there…right? Do I have that right?
“We’re born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we’re not alone.” — Orson Welles.
Very few of us are going to die as pleasantly as we’d like to. Death usually happens under circumstances we can’t foresee, much less plan for, and sooner than we’d like. And the likelihood that you’re going to die while lying comfortably in bed between recently-washed sheets is almost nil. The odds are that your final throes are going to either be painful or traumatic or grotesque, and possibly a combination of all three.
By the way: There used to be a stand-alone site called Cinemorgue, which featured listings and descriptions of thousands of death scenes that are alphabetized by the names of actors and actresses.
Cataloguing endless death was apparently too much work for someone, and so Cinemorgue became Cinemorgue Wiki, which allowed readers to submit their additions and corrections directly.
I’d forgotten how many times Elke Sommer was gruesomely killed on-screen. Two skiiing accidents, shot three times (machine gunned in 1969’s The Wrecking Crew, the Dean Martin-Matt Helm movie), blown up, and bludgeoned to death.
Almost all movie deaths, it seems, are brutal, bloody, sudden, ghastly, traumatic and otherwise unpeaceful. Nod-off deaths — like Sir Cedric Hardwicke ‘s passing in The Ten Commandments — have been few and far between over the last 40 years. Is real-life death ever smooth and easy? Only if you do yourself in with pills.
From Sasha Stone‘s “Oscars 2024: Oppenheimer Takes the Lead as Outrage Rises Over Gerwig“, posted earlier today but cut down to size here or, you know, partly Jeffrey Wells-icized:
“The Oscars have a branding problem. One, for the last six or seven years the awards have been used as a propaganda delivery device for sensitive lefty values (most white folks are bad, almost all POCs are wonderful, brainwashing school kids is good, LGBTQ trans-pregnant-men values are absolutely glorious). And two, the Oscars are now under the “inclusivity mandate” that was implemented this year. Most films had already wokified themselves but now that it’s official, it’s olly olly in come free.
“Boiled down: We all have the evil seed inside us, and the only way to rid us of it is to mandate that we vote a certain way — we have to like certain movies, read certain books and accept the changes the industry made to cover their own ass so they wouldn’t be called racists. Example #1: The critical opinions of Bob Strauss.
“The climate of fear we’ve all been living through since ’18 or thereabouts goes almost entirely unaddressed by people who cover film. They (we) just pretend like it wasn’t happening, that people weren’t losing their jobs, that every word uttered has to be carefully monitored so as not to commit a thought-crime.
“One of the reasons our country is divided is that Hollywood abandoned most of the country to chase sensitive-lefty, Barbra Streisand-approved utopia. And the people who cover awards and the industry aren’t saying boo. They never have and never will. ‘Just keep your head down, make the best of it,’ they say.
“But you can’t solve a problem you can’t even name. If you’re relying on the most high-profile outlets to talk about the truth, you’re wasting your time. They won’t. They can’t. All they can do is what most of us are supposed to do, write from within the walls of the royal court and forget about the masses beyond the castle walls. At least until heads roll.”
I've tried to watch The Only Game in Town ('70) a couple of times, but I can't get through it.
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I remain semi-mystified why the fix has been in on Justine Triet‘s Anatony of a Fall. It won the Palme d’Or in Cannes last May, the momentum kept building after the early fall fall festivals, and now it’s swept the European Film Awards in Berlin, taking Best European Film, Director, Screenplay and actress for Sandra Hüller.
It’s an approvable film within its own realm, but it’s not earth-shattering. It’s been overpraised from the get-go. Sometimes you can just tell that critics and industry voices decided to give a certain film is getting a pass because it exudes the right kind of social bonafides, and that’s that. A strong feminist imprimatur.
Take this line from an Anatomy of a Fall review by Film Yap‘s Nate Richards (posted on 10.26). The subhead calls Justine Triet’s murder investigation drama “one of the most gripping and memorable movies that you’ll see this year”…that’s a 100% decisive nope.
Anatomy of a Fall is a thorough, exacting and meticulous (read: exhausting) “what really happened?” exercise by way of a courtoom procedural, and is certainly smart and interesting as far as it goes but let’s not get carried away…please.
Sandra Huller is excellent as a bisexual writer accused of murdering her angry, pain-in-the-ass French husband (Samuel Theis), but the film goes on for 152 minutes, and the cloying kid playing Huhler’s half-blind son (Milo Machado-Graner) lays it on too thick, and the loud and relentless playing of an instrumental cover of 50 Cent’s “P.I.M.P.” drove me fucking nuts. The more I heard it, the more angry I felt…”Why is Triet making me listen to this over-loud track over and over?”
Another highly dubious declaration from Richards: “What makes Anatomy of a Fall so compelling is that Triet and Arthur Harari’s script has you constantly battle with yourself over whether or not you believe in Sandra’s innocence.” Not so! No battle! I was never even faintly persuaded that Huller might be a murderer…not for a minute.
Sasha Stone and I recorded the latest Oscar Poker on Sunday, 11.26, around 1:30 pm. Here’s a link.
Incidentally: Hollywood Elsewhere continues to take exception to the strange absence of Black Flies, which Open Road has obviously yanked from its previously-slated late November release date.
An assaultive, high-velocity, rough and tumble capturing of the lives of Emergency Medical Technicians in Brooklyn, Black Flies may not be a great, earth-changing film but it’s certainly a respectable one while being a close relation of Martin Scorsese‘s Bringing Out The Dead (’99). We discussed this situation towards the end of the podcast.
Again, the link to the latest.
Posted six and a half years ago — 6.17.17:
“There were brawls. I had guys die. You know, the show would end and someone’s still sitting there and then you realize they’re never getting up. I had a projectionist die one time in the booth. I heard the crowd booing, and then the movie’s off the screen. This is when there were carbon arc projectors, so a lot of times these projectionists would just fall asleep or they’d be screwing somebody up there and they’d forget to change the carbon arc.
“So I go up there…and the guy’s dead on the floor. I called the cops, and then I thought — this is how sick you’d get after being in New York for a few years in those days. I thought, ‘This is my big chance to actually shame a New York audience.’ So I went into this theater and I looked at them, and I said, ‘I’m very sorry for the inconvenience [but] the projectionist has passed away. We have someone going up there now, and your film will be on shortly.’ And they booed me!” — Savages author Don Winslow recalling a Times Square movie-theatre gig in the ’80s, reported by Bilge Ebiri in the Village Voice.
True story #2 (i.e., my own): I worked as a Brooklyn theatre manager sometime in ’79 or early ’80. I honestly forget the name of the theatre, but it was a midsize house that played mainstream films. I remember telling the guy who’d hired me that I’d been a licensed projectionist in Connecticut and that I’d worked at the Carnegie Hall and Bleecker Street Cinemas under Sid Geffen, which was true.
So I got the gig, but I became bored with the job very quickly. On top of which I was never all that reliable about keeping track of ticket sales and whatnot. I wasn’t skimming — I just wasn’t an efficient mathematical type. And then I decided to play Warren Zevon‘s Excitable Boy over the theatrical sound system before the show began. And I didn’t play it quietly — I had the sound levels up to at least 7 or 8. I was eventually canned, of course. The story of my life from the time I was 17 to the launch of Hollywood Elsewhere in August ’04 was “and then I got fired.”
True story #3: I once led a small rebellion inside the old Regency Theatre (1987 Broadway, New York, NY 10023). It happened in the late ’70s. It was during a weekend showing of North by Northwest. Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint were on the train from New York to Chicago, and then the projectionist skipped a reel and suddenly Grant was in the cornfield dodging bullets from the biplane. Or something like that.
I was up in a flash and running upstairs to the booth. I knocked sharply on the door…’Yo, hello?’ (rap, rap, rap). Two more guys came up to join me, and then a third and a fourth. No response from inside so another guy stepped up and knocked on the door with me. The projectionist came out, saw the angry crowd and freaked. He was like The French Connection‘s Marcel Bozzuffi when he was cornered by that MTA official on the speeding subway car…’Get back!…get back!’ We told “Marcel” about his error (he obviously hadn’t been watching the screen). He eventually calmed down and fixed the problem.
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