Do The Right Thing -- Stand Up For Excellence
September 25, 2024
I Would Have Preferred A More Challenging...Okay, A More Insulting Tone
September 25, 2024
Opposite Peas in Polish Travel Pod
September 25, 2024
Bill Maher to Joe Rogan (4.12.22): “We’re both seen as people who are common-sensical, and right now there’s a hunger for that in America, more than anything else. Common sense, away from the extremes.
“People say to me, ‘Don’t you think you’ve gotten more conservative?’ No, I haven’t. The left has gotten goofier so I seem more conservative, maybe. But it’s not me who’s changed. I feel I’m the same guy, but five years ago no one was talking about defunding the police. There was no talk about pregnant men. Looting was still illegal.
“Centrism is such a wishy-washy word, but that’s sort of what it is. I’m always saying to the Democrats, ‘Just don’t be the party of no common sense.’ Avoid that and you will be surprised at the amazing success you will have. As opposed to what’s going to happen, which is that they’re going to get their asses kicked in November.”
One of the most realistic line-readings in TheGodfather happens when James Caan’s Sony Corleone warns the beaten and bloody Carlo (Gianni Russo) to never again brutalize his sister Connie (Talia Shire), Carlo’s wife. What makes it great is that Sonny is so winded from beating up Carlo that he’s forced to take a breath after saying “touch” (beat) and then “…my sister again I’ll kill ya.”
And yet this scene has been blemished for a half-century by a small but memorable error that could have been easily fixed.
Early this morning HE reader Frank Booth, commenting about the Francis Coppola/Robert Harris restoration of the Godfather films, made a good point about an irritant in the original 1972 film — one that’s been bothering me for decades.
He was speaking of the second-act beating scene in which Sonny laughably air-punches Carlo. There’s no missing the mistake because the shot is perfectly positioned to catch it — a nice clean side-angle. And it’s so distinct that it takes you right out of the film. When Booth saw a theatrical screening “it took a minute or so of the Sicilian wedding for the audience to stop giggling,” he says.
And yet despite all the digital refinements and restorations, not to mention that massive re-edit of Parts I and II that resulted in The Godfather Saga in the mid ’70s, Coppola has left that mistake in — minor, yes, but one that slightly interferes with the enjoyment of this film each and every time.
All Coppola would have to do is cut away from the Sonny-Carlo beating for a a second or two and show…whatever, one of the hoods standing nearby, one of the little kids watching the fight, a master shot from a different angle. There must be extra footage lying around. All Coppola would need is 24 to 36 frames.
If you had directed The Godfather, would you want that mistake to remain in the definitive print for centuries to come? I wouldn’t. If George Lucas can make Greedo shoot first, Francis Coppola can fix Sonny’s air punch.
Respect for the late Kathy Lamkin, the NoCountryforOldMen trailer park manager who took no shit from Javier Bardem’s Anton Chigurh. Joel and Ethan Coen wrote and directed this classic scene, of course, but Lamkin's tough steely demeanor made it work. The 74 year old actress, a resident of Pearland, Texas, passed on April 4th.
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Around 5:20 pm on Monday, 4.11, drivers of black, expensive, late-model cars slammed into each other at high speeds near the southwest corner of Fairfax and Willoughby. Look at the decimated auto on the right…totaljunkyard. Who was the bad guy? The one who was speeding, that’s who. Whomever got hurt had presumably been taken to a hospital by the time I got there. Cracked windshield, air bags.
In Senior Year (Netflix, 5.13), Rebel Wilson‘s “Stephanie Conway” awakes from a 20-year coma at age 38 or thereabouts, and decides to return to high school in 2022 to finish her senior year.
You can tell by the lame-ass humor in the trailer (jokes about Madonna vs. Lady Gaga, the relentless Fast and Furious franchise) that the senior creatives were terrified of doing the obvious.
The obvious would have been to create a fish-out-of-water comedy about a woman from 2002 suddenly grappling with woke Stalinism.
Wilson and her colleagues were too scared, in other words, to focus on the horror of Twitter, totalitarian safe spaces, the revolutionary consciousness overhaul brought about by #MeToo, the prohibition of certain terms, the dismissal of nearly all over-40 white males, Variety apologizing to Carey Mulligan for a single sentence in Dennis Harvey‘s review of Promising Young Woman, CRT and equity in schools, trans activists calling the shots (and therefore the triumph of Lia Thomas and the grooming of three-year-olds so they’ll understand the particulars of all the various genders), all people of color regarded as hothouse flowers and given sainthood status, celebrating obesity in underwear ads, etc.
There was a 1989 Cheech and Chong comedy called Rude Awakening — late ’60s hippies hiding in Central America and suddenly returning to the U.S. in the late ’80s and confronted with yuppie culture. Similar.
A year or two from now a large, rectangular, 12-storied, glass-walled building (business + residential) will arise on the south side of the Sunset Strip -- 8850 Sunset Blvd.. Right across from Panini, an Italian pizza take-out place that I've been going to for decades, and bordered by Larabee on the eastern side and San Vicente Blvd. on the west.
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Variety‘s Clayton Davis has never been to Europe much less to the Cannes Film Festival, but that’s about to change next month. Congrats and safe travels.
HE to Davis: Your tickets are already purchased, you’ve said, but I’m hoping that you’ve arranged to schedule a brief stop-over in Paris (which you’ve also never visited) on the way back. After every Cannes Film Festival I’ve attended (my first was in ’92) I’ve always downshifted in Paris, Rome, Prague, Berlin, Barcelona, Lauterbrunnen, London, Ireland, etc. It would be almost sinful, I feel, to ignore this post-Cannes opportunity. But that’s me.
As previously noted I am tingling with excitement about watching Everything Everywhere All At Once. It’s obviously and totally my kind of movie. But before the viewing happens, I have to at least salute the brilliant one-sheet.
Sam Elliott has apparently been told by his agent to walk back his Power of the Dog diss for political reasons. I don’t know for a fact that industry Robespierres have decided that Elliott is anti-progressive or sexist or something in that vein, but many probably have. And as a result they might’ve diminished Elliott’s appeal as an actor-for-hire. Maybe.
Apologizing for a previously expressed opinion is Elliott’s right, of course, but we all know what the shot is here.
Deep down Elliott is almost certainly saying “c’mon, man…I can’t express an opinion that you don’t like because my career will be hurt if I don’t walk it back? And you think…what, that it’s a good thing that incorrect opinions, as you see them, are being squelched in urban blue environments by wokesters? Okay, guys — I get it. You guys are HUAC-style wolves dressed in humanist-diverse clothing, but I’m nonetheless ‘sorry’ for my transgression. And in the meantime, perhaps some of you might to watch Ken Russell‘s The Devils.”
I’m posting this out of respect for Elliott, of course, and partly from my own experience last year.
Ask me for a Kevin Bacon career highlight, and without hesitation my first answer will always be Tremors ('90). "Valentine McKee", Bacon's lively, none-too-bright yokel in cowboy boots and a jean jacket, is his most fully-rounded, emotionally-winning character ever. I re-watched Tremors six or seven years ago and loved it all over again.
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