Jeff and Sasha barely touched upon the wonderful world of cinema, save for reminding each other that Mission Impossible 7 opens on Tuesday, and that a full-blast trailer for Ridley Scott’s Napoleon will be attached to the feature. Topics were mostly of social-cultural nature, and that’s fine. The Jonah Hill texting drama, the continuing box-office collapse of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, the N.Y. Times addresses the French Connection censorship saga, the failure of Joy Ride to connect with a decent-sized audience. Again, the link.

…at a commercial plex. This has never happened before.

Five weeks after the Great French Connection Censorship Intrigue was first reported by yours truly (and which resulted in many articles worldwide along with no fewer than six HE articles between 6.3 and 6.20), The New York Times Magazine has boldly jumped into the fray with an article titled “What’s Lost When Censors Tamper With Classic Films.”

Three aspects are worth noting.

(a) The Times almost certainly dodged this story for several weeks out of squeamishness over the use of the N-word, which is what the censoring of a certain Act One scene in William Friedkin‘s 1971 Oscar-winner (i.e., Gene Hackman‘s Popeye Doyle using the epithet in a discussion with Roy Scheider‘s Cloudy in a police station foyer) was all about.

So when they finally posted a story about it, they had story editor Niela Orr, a youngish woman of color, write it. That gives them a certain political protection.

(b) In describing the scene, Orr uses the actual six-letter N-word — something that no one else writing about this story would ever do. Because she can.

(c) The one mystifying and unfulfilled element in this story is the absence of statements from either director William Friedkin or copyright owner Disney about who ordered the cut.

Was the scene edited at Friedkin’s request, as all available evidence clearly indicates? Orr shrugs her shoulders and wonders like the rest of us. If she reached out to Friedkin and Disney, she isn’t saying.

“We can only guess at the precise reasoning behind this particular change to The French Connection,” Orr writes. “Is it Disney, treating adult audiences like the children it’s used to serving? Or did Friedkin, who once modified the color of the film, approve the change?”

For whatever reason Orr doesn’t mention a couple of pertinent facts. A visually confirmed, easily verifiable report that “in Disney’s DCP asset list it says that the currently-streaming version of The French Connection is identified as ‘2021 William Friedkin v2.’” Plus a statement from The Criterion Channel, passed along in “a 6.9.23 HE story,” that “according to our licensor [Disney], this is a ‘Director’s Edit‘ of the film.”

Friendo: I don’t like Tiktok. I don’t know this guy or why I should care. Even assuming he’s right. He seems potentially dangerous
HE: Of course he’s right! Are you kidding me?
Friendo: People are too angry.
HE: It depends what you’re angry about.

Watch on TikTok

HE sez: This guy was justifiably enraged that the doctor in question, a follower of radical wokester protocol, was, by asking his nine-year-old son about gender identity, encouraging the kid to begin an inner dialogue about who or what he might actually be deep down.

By asking for an answer to this question, he felt that they were “planting a seed” in the poor kid’s head by way of psychological subterfuge. Kids are very malleable and influencable, of course, and he strongly objects to this nine-year-old being dropped into “this shit,” as he puts it.

Look at Zoomers — 15% or 20% identify as trans or gender fluid or gender ambiguous on some level. They’re saying this, of course, because they want to be cool (or certainly not UNcool) and they want to merge with the social flow of their peers for safety’s sake.

The guy, in short, is an Average Joe traditionalist, and if you ask me Average Joe traditionalism is an okay thing. It’s not the only mindset by which to process and respond to the sometimes bizarre nature of social standards in 2023, but it’s certainly a legitimate one.

Especially when you consider that doctors only began to ask average nine-year-old boys about their gender preference…what, a couple of years ago or three? And that nine year old boys were NEVER asked about their gender preference before ‘20 or ‘21, and in fact weren’t asked the same by family doctors and physicians during the entire immigrant history of this country (and were almost certainly never asked this by caregivers in Native American communities prior to the mid 1600s) and were never asked this by caregivers and physicians for HUNDREDS and in fact THOUSANDS of years in various European, Middle-Eastern, African, Aboriginal and Asian cultures around the globe.

Okay, this Average Joe dad is angry and alarmed, and there are some of us who don’t relate to his manner of speaking & would prefer that he state his objections to gender questioning in a more measured and thoughtful and college-campus-y way, but this rattled fellow DOES have many THOUSANDS of years of tradition in his side of the ledger. You have to give him that.

To put it bluntly, kids have been taught and guided and disciplined in a certain general way through the millennia, and then along came trans theology and activism TWO or THREE YEARS AGO. And this guy is saying, quite reasonably, “what’s up with this?” and more precisely “WHAT THE LIVING FUCK IS GOING ON HERE, MAN?”

Is there a single die-hard Star Wars fanboy who doesn’t want Kathleen “diversity is really important to us” Kennedy fired and banished to the ice planet of Hoth for the rest of her natural days? Right now the pile-on fervor has never been stronger, particularly in the wake of the box-office disappointment of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.

Six days ago (7.2) Variety’s Owen Gleiberman posted his favorable review of Sound of Freedom.

In paragraph #2 Gleiberman wrote that the film “could be seen as adjacent to the alt-right paranoia [over the imagined perversity of liberal pedophiles] that was originally stoked by 4chan and QAnon.”

Here’s the actual excerpt:

Two days ago (7.6) Charles Bramesco posted his grumpy, mostly negative review in the Guardian.

The Bramesco piece didn’t use the term “QAnon adjacent,” but the headline did. Not a felony but deserving of mention.

According to The Guardian‘s Charlotte Edwardes, and more specifically Oppenheimer star Cillian Murphy, director Chris Nolan doesn’t have a telephone, an email address or a computer: “He’s the most analogue individual you could possibly encounter,” Murphy says.

About Oppenheimer itself, Murphy calls it “an extraordinary piece of work…very provocative and powerful…it feels sometimes like a biopic, sometimes like a thriller, sometimes like a horror. It’s going to knock people out…what [Nolan] does with film, it fucks you up a little bit.”

A journalist friendo knows a sketchy someone who’s claiming it’s “a bit dull.” (The source, I’m told, is not to be trusted.) Another journalist knows someone who saw Oppenheimer a few weeks ago, and this fellow has described it as “slightly pretentious but with a knockout 30-minute finale.”

On 3.21.23 I posted a warning…actually a feeling of anxiety and trepidation about Nolan’s sound mixing of Oppenheimer. Please God (or please Chris) — allow me to understand the dialogue in this upcoming film. Please don’t drive me crazy with the fucking mix…please. There is no one in the cinematic universe who would be more overjoyed than myself if the dialogue turns out to be audience-friendly.

The Empire Strikes Back climax with a Nolan sound mix:

An excellent exploration of the Nolan sound aesthetic going back to The Dark Knight: