HE to Friedkin re Censorship Fracas

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Having recently been given a legit email address for French Connection director William Friedkin, I’ve just sent him the following:

“Greetings & salutations from Jeffrey Wells of Hollywood Elsewhere. I hope you’re feeling hale and hearty and doing well.

“Cutting to the chase, herewith are two very important questions about the recently discovered removal offer a brief Act One sequence in streaming versions of The French Connection (Criterion Channel, iTunes, etc) as well as in a DCP shown at Santa Monica’s Aero theatre on 5.12.23.

“The deletion of this sequence was apparently the doing of The Walt Disney Company, although it may not have been. It was apparently motivated by the speaking of a racially ugly and vulgar term by Gene Hackman’s Popeye Doyle character

“One, did you sign off on this deletion? According to an HE comment-threader, Criterion has issued a statement that the currently censored cut of your 1971 film, provided to them by Disney, represents a “Director’s Edit” and was therefore apparently (or at least may have been) approved by you, the auteur behind this Oscar-winning film.

“Is this true? Did you, William Freidkin, request and/or convey approval of this deletion to Disney, the rights holder? Was this your call?

“Or was this censoring decided upon by Disney with your approval or disapproval being a moot point?

“Two, if you DID convey your approval of this edit to the powers-that-be at Disney, could you please explain to me and the tens of millions of fans of this film why you would approve such a thing, nearly 52 years after TFC’s theatrical release?

“And if you DID NOT approve of the censoring of The French Connection, could you please convey your reaction to Disney’s apparent decision to remove the sequence in question?

“Thank you and cheers to you and your wife.”

Diseased and Despicable

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HE reader responses to yesterday’s “Odious Hit Piece” indicate that my side (i.e., sensible centrists with a leftward tilt) has really lost the culture war, at least among the elite/urban/media-wise hipster types who comment on HE.

To take in the comments, you’d think that the sensible HE view of the world (a.k.a. Bill Maher, Sasha Stone, Bari Weiss…liberal-centrist, in staunch favor of debate, skeptical of dogged presentism in entertainment and the trans issue, not in terms of tolerance but in terms of whether 12-year-olds should be making these kinds of life decisions)…you’d think that sensible types are a totally marginalized minority.

That’s not true, of course. If anything, most voters in a presidential election — even those who wind up voting for the Democrat — skew to the right of myself and others in my camp. By this yardstick HE is staunchly liberal.

The idea that some poll that says that people under 40 are approving of woke values, and that’s that…Jesus fucking Christ, all that poll measures is the idea of wokeness when it’s presented as “having progressive values about fairness and tolerance.” By that definition, I’m as woke as any Millennial or Zoomer out there.

But that’s not what wokeness means. And it’s why the Republicans are going to be making bales of hay out of this in ’24. Many decent people hate the progressive left.

Hudson Hid All His Life

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Stephen Kijak‘s Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed will debut this weekend at the Tribeca Film Festival — three screenings altogether, the first being on Sunday, 6.11. It begins streaming on Max on 6.28.

I ask again — what is there to say about Hudson that hasn’t already been said many times, over under sideways down?

What’s The Idea?

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Yorgos Lanthimos‘ Poor Things (Searchlight, 9.8) is a kind of Bride of Frankenstein story.

Boilerplate: A young woman, Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), is a corpse brought back to life by scientist Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe). Baxter had her brain swapped with that of an unborn fetus, resulting in her having an infant’s mind. While designed to be Baxter’s companion, her sexual appetite causes her to pursue other men, including Max McCandless (Ramy Youssef) and a foppish lawyer named Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), with whom she elopes and embarks on a hedonistic odyssey around Europe, Northern Africa and Central Asia. Freed from the prejudices of her times, Bella demands equality and liberation.

Poor Things costars Christopher Abbott, Margaret Qualley, Kathryn Hunter and Suzy Bemba.

Filming began in Hungary in August 2021.

Fate Unfulfilled

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SPOILERS WITHIN: Celine Song‘s Past Lives (A24) is a very subtle, oh-so-very-gently expressed love story — a story about things unsaid and certainly not acted upon.

The action between the lovers, Nora and Hae Sung (played as adults by Greta Lee and Teo Yoo), happens in three stages.

One, a primal and very nourishing attraction they feel as 10-year-old children in Seoul, only to be separated when Nora’s parents move the family to Toronto. Two, aspiring playwright Nora and aspiring engineer Hae Sung Skype-chatting at age 20 but never arranging to meet. And three, both still wanting to see each other after a separation of 20 years and with Hae Sung having flown to New York to visit the now-married Nora, both conveying volumes of feeling with their eyes but doing zip to try to make this long-simmering romance finally kick into gear.

You can feel the “In Yun” every step of the way, but Nora and Hae Sung are so polite and constrained and well-behaved, and are certainly mindful of the feelings of poor Arthur (John Magaro), Nora’s bearded husband with the rag-mop haircut and obviously the odd man out in this situation.

All through the second and third acts you want the lovers to somehow break through and say something and risk emotional exposure or even erupt in some messy way, but they don’t, they won’t and they never will.

You’re silently pleading with both to “please risk it….please don’t allow yourselves to become Anthony Hopkins at the end of The Remains of the Day…even if it’s just a big hug and a long kiss at the airport as Hae Sung is about to fly back to Seoul…a little catharsis, please!”

Catharsis finally happens at the very last minute, but more in the way of Anthony Quinn’s Zampano character at the very end of La Strada.

Past Lives, in short, is all about subtext, impossible distances, zero physical contact, impossible social constraints and quietly pleading, gently leaking expressions.

A couple of hours after seeing Song’s film I told a friend that it’s “a woman’s version of a Wong Kar Wai film about soul-crossed lovers who never get aroused much less climax, and without the Chris Doyle lensing.”

I understand why people might admire or even adore Past Lives. I certainly understand why almost every critic (except for Alison Wilmore) has done handstands, and why the Sundance crowd flipped for it last January.

I respect it, but it doesn’t quite do the thing.

The late Sydney Pollack used to say that the most affecting love stories are ones that don’t end happily. Example #1 is the final scene in Pollack’s The Way We Were. There’s no denying that it works — you can’t help but feel it.

The ending of Past Lives is poignant and affecting, but it leaves you hungry and somewhat disappointed. I know, that’s the point but still. It certainly doesn’t envelop and hold you the way Pollack’s closing scene did. It just doesn’t.

Is it a Best Picture contender? It’s a very respectable little film, but it doesn’t really ring the bell. It’s too disciplined, too schematic, too committed to not letting anyone even flirt with the possibility of emotional release (except for the Zampano moment at the very end). It’s a movie about sad, bittersweet denial…no, no, no, no, can’t, can’t, can’t, can’t, shouldn’t, shouldn’t, shouldn’t, shouldn’t.

An actively insane opinion:

“Blade Runner”Air…Soot and Ash With Faint Grayish-Orange Tint

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Reports about the Canadian forest fire smoke turning the air in the tristate area (New York City Connecticut, New Jersey) into a region that vaguely resembles Blade Runner 2 and is blanketed with air quality that’s worse than the most polluted Indian cities…okay, they haven’t been inaccurate.

But if you’re from Los Angeles, which has long grappled with occasionally dense smog (especially in the ‘70s and ‘80s) and infrequent forest fire smoke, it didn’t seem like that big of a deal.

That’s what I was telling a friend…”this is just a typical bad-smog day in Los Angeles with a little Malibu fire overlay…no one’s idea of healthy, but ya gotta roll with it…flush it out…man up.”

The sun is smaller with a muddy-orange hue and yes, there’s an eerie atmospheric visual thing going on, and no, I wouldn’t recommend jogging or long hikes until it all starts to blow away on Sunday.

But overall HE has been much more fascinated than spooked. “I don’t trust air that I can’t see” is too blustery, too Lee Marvin or Robert Conrad but I have, as a rule, eaten this shit up and shrugged it off for decades. You should try breathing Hanoi air on a shitty day. Tough guys only.

40 years of living in Los Angeles has taught me that truly sparkling, blue-sky days are relatively rare. Having hiked in Switzerland and Colorado and Vermont and Mill Valley, I know what radiantly clear air feels and smells like. And I will breathe it again.

Monday, 10:50 am: Healthy skies.

Son of “If A Relationship Hurts and Eventually Draws Blood, It’s Wonderful”

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Originally posted on 4.22.16: Yesterday that pithy Woody Allen line from Cafe Society — “Life is a comedy written by a sadistic comedy writer” — was ricocheting all over the twitterverse.

My first reaction was that shorter is better — “Life is a comedy written by a sadist.”

My second was that Allen’s line alludes to what I believe is the central sickening irony in romantic relationships, which is that the only way to last with someone is to not be 100%, head-over-heels, cunnilingus-two-or-three-times-per-day in love with them.

If you’re happily, contentedly, earnestly in love as far as it goes — if you’re settled, semi-complacent and comfortable with an attractive lady of good character but not down on your knees in love with her, things might work out.

But if the wonder and rapture of going to bed with this or that object of erotic deliverance is a prevailing current in your relationship, sooner or later she’s going to start assessing your feelings as neurotic and identifying them as a weakness, and she’ll soon after develop a distaste for it and gradually cut you loose. So the likelihood of getting dropped or jettisoned is unfortunately quite high.

You can’t be crazy in love — you have to be confidently, peacefully, sincerely, half-solemnly and moderately in love. Then and only then can things work out…maybe.

Posted on 10.28.13 after a breakup: “One of life’s darker ironies is that the relationships that I know could last forever are always the ones that I can walk away from without too much concern because I’m less smitten than she is.

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Odious Hit Piece

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Earlier today I was urged to read The New Yorker‘s craven attack this week on FAIR (Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism) and Bari Weiss, titled “Is It Possible to Be Both Moderate and Anti-Woke?”

HE to author Emma Green: It’s not only possible, but an actual story about the lives of many people these days…sensible liberals grappling with progressive nutterism on a day-by-day, blow-by-blow basis.

Friendo #1: “New Yorker editor David Remnick is all in on the woke agenda, and because he has the power and the intelligence to know better, he’s kind of a bad guy. As in ‘get outta here, man…you’re bad news!’

“In the FAIR/Bari Weiss piece, The New Yorker is trying to characterize the sensibles — not rabid right-wingers, but liberal/moderates who reject wokeness — into some tiny fringe group of stragglers, like the Japanese soldiers who were still fighting World War II after it ended.

“In fact, I would characterize the people who reject wokeness as 80% to 90% of liberal/moderate adults nationwide. Nobody and I mean nobody likes this shit.

“Green’s New Yorker story is flat-out propaganda posing as journalism.”

Friendo #2: “Ww’re living through a kind of Weimar Germany time. Do the hard-left wackos really think it won’t lead to an even worse backlash on the right?

“The piece is so unfair to Weiss. For Remnick and Green to call her site, The Free Press, which she’s worked so hard to keep as neutral as possible, just another ‘far right’ site is really disgusting. I hate the gaslighting. These problems exist. They are real. No one would have even known about the French Connection censorship thing had one of Jeff’s readers not noticed.

“They’re going back and changing words of books, and suddenly we’re just like China [during the Great Cultural Revolution]. But don’t worry — it’s all okay because it helps the wokesters feel like they’re better people. Well, that’s what it did in China too!

“I miss the old left.”

Friendo #1: “The right is banning books (which I despise), but the left is banning ideas (which I despise even more). Both sides are cults. That’s a lose-lose situation.