“Like 1917 before it, and like the better films that continue to inspire a concentratedly grisly mode of war picture (the epochal Russian film Come and See is explicitly referenced at least once, as is the more recent, and more problematic, The Painted Bird), All Quiet on the Western Front is state-of-the-art in shoving your nose in realistic-seeming carnage and possibly inducing hearing damage in laying on the ear-splitting aural experience of a firefight.

“The in-the-trenches tracking shots that Stanley Kubrick crafted for Paths of Glory (a movie that culminated in a point that actually made sense, unlike this muddle) are now steady hand-held digital panoramas of exposed viscera and agonized writhing. Filmmakers have arguably lost the plot, turning ‘war is hell’ into a ‘can you top this?’ competition.” — from Glenn Kenny’s 10.14 review.

Netflix will begin streaming Edward Berger‘s All Quiet on the Western Front on 10.28.22.

But without street gangs or guns, and probably without a violent ending. Hanks’ Otto to new neighbor: “Ever notice how every once in a while you come across someone you shouldn’t be fucking with? That’s me”….not.
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Sony will release A Man Called Otto on 12.25. Produced by Hanks, Gary Goetzman and Rita Wilson, and directed by Marc Forster. Based on a 2015 Swedish film A Man Called Ove, directed by Hannes Holm. Shot earlier this year in Pittsburgh.

I for one really admired Antoine Fuqua and Denzel Washington‘s The Equalizer 2 (’16), and I have no problem with them making another one. We’re all cool, I’m presuming, with The Equalizer 3 currently filming on the Amalfi Coast — Atrani, Ravello, Minori. Bring it on, bruh.

There’s nothing wrong with being a respected, Sam Fuller-ish or Robert Aldrich-y hack who does genre films and efficiently at that**.

But it’s fair, surely, to ask if this might reflect upon the presumed prestige factor that some are attaching to Fuqua’s allegedly Oscar-calibre Emancipation (possibly “Fuqua’s best” according to Variety‘s Clayton Davis)? Runaway slave saga on one hand, whupass on the other…what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

** Although I hated, hated, HATED Fuqua’s The Magnificent Seven.

If only failed or otherwise repudiated chiefs of state could be ejected this swiftly in the U.S. Here’s a N.Y. Times recap.

…and you’re almost late. The line stretches east on 57th Street and around the block to Sixth Avenue and down. I made it in but barely. Not cool, man! The film is The Good Nurse (Netflix, 10.19 theatrical, 10.26 streaming), which is good, I’ve been told.

It is my conviction that there are no awful discourses on Hollywood Elsewhere. Okay, now and then but mostly never. Even when the wokesters are repeating their broken-record bullshit (or, alternately, pleading with me to post only about movies and leave cultural politics out of it), there is always the eloquent, brilliantly phrased filmklassik ready to jump in at short notice.

It was around dusk and peaceful in the ancient section of Rome on 6.2.17. My Macbook Pro was sitting on a small round table on a narrow cobblestoned street. I was using the wifi from a cafe called Barnum Roma (Via del Pellegrino, 87, 00186 Roma, Italy), and for a moment I stopped and stood up and took a slow-pan video, and as God is my witness it was one of the happiest moments of my life.

It doesn’t matter how long my Barnum Roma time lasted (an hour or so) — what matters is how serene and in-the-pocket I felt when I was standing there. It still gets me off just to watch this.

I’ll always be a fan of Al Pacino‘s big speech at the end of The Devil’s Advocate, but Keanu Reeves makes a re-watch so difficult. He’s stuck with all the clunky lines, of course, but the yelling, the anger and denial and pulling out the gun with that dumb glare on his face….everything he says and does is truly terrible.

This tediously moralistic Taylor Hackford film is 25 years old now, and if you ask me Pacino’s John Milton was at least partly based upon Donald Trump. (The producers rented Trump’s apartment for a scene, I’ve read.) The screenwriters were Jonathan Lemkin and Tony Gilroy, but the maestro behind Pacino’s big soliloquy was Gilroy, or so I’ve always understood.

So the dressing that flavored and annointed the salad that Olivia Wilde prepared for Harry Styles as their Don’t Worry Darling affair was just getting underway two years ago…the salad dressing was Nora Ephron‘s from “Heartburn“: “2 tablespoons of Grey Poupon mustard mixed with two tablespoons of good red wine vinegar. Then, whisking constantly, add six tablespoons of olive oil.”

There’s nothing like the rapture of a mad love affair as it’s just turning into something, but it never lasts, of course. The intensity dial always drops from 9 or 10 into a 6 or 7, and the lovers, if they’re good, have no choice but to find (or create) a day-to-day groove that may be nurturing and good for their souls and so on. But the sex always settles down.

HE to friendo: “Wilde lied about the timeline of the Styles affair, of course. She and Suidekis has fallen out of love, or she had at least. It happens. Harry Styles is cuter and sexier thsn Sudeikis, and Wilde went for it. I’m presuming that she and Styles are probably winding as a couple as we speak. She’s too old for him — it probably can’t last. Not with a big pop star.”

Friendo to HE: “Yeah, I saw them walking together in a recent photo and thought ‘that’s way too much baggage for him.'”