Here’s Armond White’s full review of An Officer and a Spy, but I love his use of the term “dismissible embarassments” in the first sentence.

We all have stand-out, less-than-becoming physical traits of one kind or another. Myself included.

Way back when a girlfriend joked that I had “bird legs”…not my thighs as much as my calves. She wasn’t wrong. They’re also called stork legs. I was born with them…couldn’t do much about that. Still can’t.

You know who else had bird legs and didn’t feel good about it, and didn’t want to wear swimming trunks before movie cameras out of shame? Paul Newman. He admitted this once in an interview about The Drowning Pool (‘75), for which he was obliged to wade into a large Louisiana lake (or the Gulf of Mexico) during an Act Two scene.

The late Israeli actress Dalia Lavi clearly had bird legs.

So for myself, Newman and Lavi, a common trait was acknowledged.

In one of my 2024 Poor Things riffs I wrote that Emma Stone had “large, slender, shovel-like feet.” Was I blaming her for this? Of course not —just observing a physical fact. No biggie. Join the Greta Garbo club.

It’s a universal rule that actors and actresses and foot close-ups are a must-to-avoid. Directors never go there. Nobody wants to be tagged for having funny-looking or less-than-attractive feet, which applies 98% of the time. Man-peds…no!

If anyone ever comes up and says, “You’re no one to talk…you have bird legs, for God’s sake!”, my response will be “yup…guilty.”

Comment thread from “When Priggish Moral Standards Were At An All-Time High“, originally posted on 8.11.24:

The Rotten Tomatoes verdict on Scarlet Johansson‘s Eleanor The Great (Sony Picures Classics, 9.26) is “okay, it feels fairly conventional as a ‘what a tangled web we weave when we practice to deceive’ story, and it certainly could’ve been better, but it’s at least worth the price for June Squibb‘s lead performance. Not a winnning success, but not a failure either.”

I’m sick to death of movies that portray this or that white guy as the proverbial villain — deplorable or weak or impossibly selfish or, you know, some kind of primal seed of evil. I’m sick of this shit…sick of it, sick of it, sick of it.

If the 32 year-old Martin Scorsese, livid about the MPAA’s demand to cut much or most of the Taxi Driver shoot-out finale, had somehow stolen the original work print and thereby preserved the original look of this climactic sequence…if Scorsese had manned up and done this, he would’ve found himself in a heap of legal trouble but would nonetheless have behaved like a dude of resolve and consequence.

In Rebecca Miller‘s forthcoming Mr. Scorsese (Apple TV+, 10.17) the now 82-year-old director tells the story of this traumatic episode. He definitely intended to steal the work print, he says. He also bought a gun and was thinking of waving it around or something.

Scorsese should have somehow gotten hold of that Taxi Driver work print and sent it to a lab and copied it. At least that. His failure to preserve the original color scheme of that shoot-out scene was nothing short of an artistic tragedy. It remains a stain upon his legacy to this day.

“Son of Brown Blood,” posted on 8.22.20:

On 3.11.11 I ran a piece called “Taxi Driver‘s Brown Blood“. It was about (a) Grover Crisp and Martin Scorsese‘s Bluray restoration of Taxi Driver (4.5.11). and more particularly (b) a technical question asked of Crisp by The Digital Bits‘ Bill Hunt.

Hunt asked about the brownish, sepia-tone tinting of the climactic shoot-out scene, which had been imposed upon Scorsese by the MPAA ratings board. Scorsese had always intended this scene to be presented with a more-or-less natural color scheme, in harmony with the rest of the film. Hunt to Crisp: “Why didn’t you and Scorsese restore the originally shot, more colorful shoot-out scene?”

“There are a couple of answers to this,” Crisp replied. “One, which we discussed, was the goal of presenting the film as it was released, which is the version everyone basically knows. This comes up every now and then, but the director feels it best to leave the film as it is. That decision is fine with me.”

HE response: “There can be no legitimate claim of Taxi Driver having been restored without the original natural color (or at least a simulation of same) put back in. The film was shot with more or less natural colors, was intended to be shown this way, and — with the exception of the shoot-out scene — has been shown this way since it first opened in ’75.

“There’s nothing noble or sacred about the look of that final sequence. The fact that it was sepia-toned to get a more acceptable MPAA rating is, I feel, a stain upon the film’s legacy.”

Crisp explained that even if Scorsese wanted to present the natural color version, the original Taxi Driver negative is gone and there’s no way to “pump” the color back in.

Steven Gaydos 2011 comment: “Jeff’s right that it’s a shame a filmmaker had to alter his film in order for it to be seen in wide release, but according to my in-house expert (Monte Hellman, who oversaw the digital restoration/release of his 1971 film Two Lane Blacktop), if the negative is gone, as Crisp clearly says it is, then ‘you can put the color in but it will never look right, and certainly won’t look anything like the original footage.'”

And that was that.

But two or three years later I came upon this image of the wounded Travis Bickle, and damned if it doesn’t look like the original probably did before the MPAA stepped in.

I wondered right away where it came from, and I asked myself “if someone could satisfactorily manipulate a single frame from that shoot-out sequence to make it look right and natural, why couldn’t someone manage the same trick for the whole sequence?”

Who knows how Josh “wackadoodle” Safdie‘s Marty Supreme will play as a feature? Trailers never lay their cards on the table. They always lie.

But the trailer is certainly telling us that Marty Supreme isn’t a ping-pong competition movie, but a film about the power of positive thinking…confidence, swagger, self-promotion. There’s one little snippet of a ping-pong game — the rest is about Timothee Chalamet‘s Marty Reisman seducing or otherwise selling himself to women, businessmen, everyone.

I’m especially looking forward to the supporting performance by Shark Tank‘s Kevin O’Leary.

The only “uh-oh” element is in the final clip…a massively obese guy (a Josh Gad lookaike) saying that the tangerine-colored ball is “an original [ping-pong] ball for an original guy. It’s the Marty Supreme ball, not the Marty normal ball.”

The problem is that by the standards of the late ’40s to mid ’50s, which is when table tennis maestro Marty Reisman was peaking, fat guys weren’t the size of circus tents. They looked like Jackie Gleason or Andy Devine or Oliver Hardy for the most part, and not like Jabba the frickin’ Hut…350-pound sumo wrestler types were pretty much confined to travelling circus side shows.

Some kind of real-world hacked ticket from a seemingly deranged gremlin posing as a Trenitalia rep arrived last night in my inbox:

But if you read Anthony D’Alessandro’s 10.12 Deadline story…ahh, feck it, too complicated and overqualified. Just give us a nice, simple, black vs. white story about bureaucratic cowardice without mucking things up with a torrent of ninny-nanny particulars.

I’m a semi-fan of The Studio, but missed the “Cinemacon” episode, primarily because I was in Cannes when it aired on 5.14.25. And then I forgot about it or something.

I finally watched it a half-hour ago…excellent! The tonal atmosphere of hyper-aggressive farce is energized by the flickings of shroom psychedelia.

Posted on 2.17.25: “The second Boston Tea Party (the one on 15 Lansdowne Street, just off Kenmore Square and across from Fenway Park) was in business only a year and a half — July 1969 to December 1970. But man, what a hallowed place, what a holy temple of purification.

I attended several ear-pounding, spirit-lifting sets inside that fabled venue, but my most vivid memory isn’t musical — it’s my LSD freakout episode…a psychedelic meltdown that led to my forsaking hallucinogens forever and eventually renouncing marijuana. Yes, even that.

I was living with a crew of upper-middle-class drug dealers…friends from Wilton who were moving huge amounts of weed, heavy amounts of LSD inside clear plastic bags, and Vietnamese heroin. We lived in a large basement apartment at 467 Commonwealth Ave., and we all felt happy and churning and generally delighted with everything. Plus we were fastidious and flush and wore Brooks Brothers shirts….we had it all down.

On New Years’ Eve (’69 into ’70) we all attended a Boston Tea Party featuring the Grateful Dead and The Proposition, a Cambridge-based improv comedy group that featured Jane Curtin.

Except before walking over we all passed around a kind of rubber-lined goatskin container of Kool-Aid, which had been liberally spiked with LSD. Too liberally. It was soon apparent that the Kool-Aid was way more potent than anticipated, and roughly an hour into the Proposition set I began to feel increasingly anxious and creeped out, and then full-on paranoid.

I remember several details about the Curtin/Proposition performance as my psyche devolved into pudding. Curtin and and some schlumpy-looking guy played young married tourists from the Midwest who were experiencing Boston’s counter-culture scene for the first time, and feeling disoriented and a bit frightened.

Later in the set a comedy bit struck some kind of cosmic wowser chord, prompting a none-too-bright audience member to exclaim out loud, “Whoa, that’s heavy!” In response to which a Proposition performer looked at the guy and said “yeah, wow, man…too many tabs!”

That was me — too many ground-up tabs in the Kool-Aid had led me me into a place of, like, quaking disorientation. As in “uh-oh….uh-oh.” I began to feel as if I was standing next to a manhole-sized opening, and I knew that if I somehow fell into that hole I would lose my mind and never know sanity again.

Hunter S. Thompson knew this all too well. He called it “the fear.”

Vanity Fair critic Richard Lawson has suffered a bullet in the back of the head, Goodfellas or Sopranos-style. Ditto VF contributors David Canfield and Anthony Breznican…zotzed, cut loose…”oh, no!”…kerflop on the linoleum floor.

It’s all part of a strategic revamp by VF editorial director Mark Guiducci to TikTok-icize VF content by cutting film reviews, trade stories, and in-depth industry-centric whateverism.

Guiducci basically wants to lighten things up or, if you will, dumb things down by catering to the jizz-whizz ADD mentality of Zoomers and younger Millennials, or something like that.

HE is sorry about Lawson, Canfield and Breznican taking it in the neck like this. I’ve been there. I know what it feels like. It hurts.

You’d think it would be no big deal to pay a tourist fee and fill out a tourist form, but HE’s Venice hosts are withholding the links until…who knows?…later this week or next week. Here’s the Castello place.

Everything is arranged and in-place. I leave 11 days hence — Saturday, 8.23

The only peripheral dingle-dangle are those HE comment-thread twats who’ve complained that since I crowd-funded the air fare, the rent and the festival fee that I shouldn’t fly to Milan and train to Venice….they judged this to be impure, louche, cavalier, not spartan enough. I have a paying job and chose to travel this route because it seemed like the right spiritual thing to do…period.