Joe Biden had already wished everyone a “happy, happy Easter” and had also said “all right” (as in “okay, that’s enough of that shit”). So it’s not like he forgot to wave. Maybe he was saying to himself “look, I’m here, I wished everyone well, I smiled, I applauded the easter bunny, I was careful not to mention anything religious …why do I have to fucking wave on top of everything else?”

Recorded last night at 7:15 pm, just before the TCM Classic Film Festival showing of Invaders From Mars.

Plus they’re all bunched up around the ankle and touching the ground/floor. Ethan Hawke’s HE stock just dropped a few points.

I attended two screenings yesterday at the TCM Classic Film Festival — Heaven Can Wait (‘78) and Invaders From Mars (‘53). The announced policy was “masks on unless you’re eating popcorn.”

Somewhere in Time opened on 10.3.80, but was filmed in the spring of ’79 or 18 months earlier. This synchs with Jane Seymour‘s account of her on-set affair with costar Christopher Reeve.

In late 2017 Seymour confided some of the details to the Herald Sun: “[Chris] was a wonderful man. We fell madly in love while we were doing the movie. We were both single, but kept it very hidden.”

Reeve and Seymour broke it off when Reeve’s ex-girlfriend, Gae Exton, revealed she was pregnant with a child — Matthew Exton Reeve, as it turned out, born on 12.20.79

“That was the beginning of the end of an amazing relationship,” Seymour said. “Chris and I were close friends until the day he died [in 2004].

Exton gave birth to a second child, Alexandra Exton Reeve, in December 1983.

HE-posted on 7.31.17: I haven’t written about Jeannot Szwarc‘s Somewhere in Time for 13 years, or since the sad passing of Christopher Reeve on 10.10.04. I’ve said before that Reeve gave one of his better performances in it.

I’ve never called Somewhere In Time a great or even especially good film, but it did develop a cult following about a decade after it opened, and it has — or more accurately had — one of the most beautifully executed single-shot closing sequences in a romantic film that I’ve ever seen, and one that almost certainly influenced the dream-death finale in James Cameron‘s Titanic.

I’m speaking of a longish, ambitiously choreographed, deeply moving tracking shot that’s meant to show the viewer what Reeve’s character, Richard Collier, is experiencing on his passage from life into death. I saw it at a long-lead Manhattan screening of Somewhere in Time 37 years ago, but no one has seen it since. 

That’s because some psychopathic or at the very least criminal-minded Universal exec (or execs) had the sequence cut down and re-edited with dissolves. The version I saw allegedly no longer exists. All that remains today is the abridged version.

The sequence was a single-take extravaganza accomplished with a combination crane and dolly. It happened as Collier is dying on a bed in a Mackinac Island Grand Hotel room. His spirit (i.e., the camera) rises up and above his body, and then turns and floats out the hotel-room window and into a long, brightly-lighted hallway and gradually into the waiting embrace of Collier’s yesteryear lover, Elise McKenna (Jane Seymour).

A completely fair assessment: “Democrats, for all their flaws, still see democracy as the essence of America. They see America and democracy as inextricably linked. They believe that one without the other is unthinkable. Republicans? Thinkable. Very, very thinkable.”

In a twinkling of an eye (i.e., the last four or five days) Bill Murray, 71, has undergone a sudden industry devaluation. I’m not saying he can’t do any more Wes Anderson films but otherwise he seems to be suddenly “over.” As in more or less unemployable.

Unless, that is, Murray submits to behavioral rehab or goes on a major Apology Tour or something in that realm. I for one can’t imagine that Murray would swallow any humble pills. Old leopards can’t change their spots.

Murray is certainly the latest swaggering, boomer-aged hotshot actor to have behaved questionably (i.e., stupidly) in the vicinity of Millennial women on a film set, and thereby jeopardized his career.

Murray: “Hey, guys…I’m Bill freakin’ Murray and I’m just futzing around…or, you know, picking on a younger co-worker. Or experiencing a goofy mood swing. Or a dark one. But it’s cool, no sweat…been doing this for over 40 years.”

Millennial Co–workers: “Do you know why you’re a cautionary tale, Bill? Because you haven’t read the writing on the wall. We run the show now, not you. You will mind your on-set behavior, respect our rules and jump through our hoops or we will destroy your life…got it? Let this be a warning to all of the older assholes in this town…adapt or die.”

This is nothing less than generational cultural warfare.

The last time I briefly spoke with Murray was nine years ago (early May 2013) on the set of George Clooney’s The Monuments Men. He was “on” and funny and a kick — I was saying to myself “this is so cool…Murray is performing and cutting loose and it’s just me and the unit publicist enjoying the show.”

So Aziz Ansari’s Being Mortal is dead because Murray invaded someone’s safe space or pulled somebody else’s pigtail? What about “enough of this crap…everyone back to work?

This Beat The Devil ad ran in the N.Y. Times in mid February 1964. In ‘79 I was the managing editor the Thousand Eyes Cinema Guide, a TV Guide-styled monthly magazine that focused exclusively on Manhattan repertory cinemas, so I knew that realm pretty well but I’d never heard of the 5th Avenue Cinema, which had given up the ghost in September ‘74.

In his New Yorker review of The Northman, Anthony Lane notes that “the period detail is unstinting,” adding that “scholars of Old Norse who were unconvinced by Tony Curtis’s miniskirt, banded with chevrons, in The Vikings (1958), will be reassured by Eggers’s dedication.”

But for the rest of us, The Northman is not reassuring in terms of emotional involvement. You just don’t give a damn about anyone except for Anya Taylor Joy‘s “Olga”, except she’s kept on a short leash.

Hence this view of Eggers from a producer who’s seen The Northman: “In another era, Eggers would be a landscape painter, but never a portrait painter — unwilling or unable to capture the soul of his subject, and only the technical details of their environment. He might paint one of those massive battlefield canvases where hundreds of warriors gouge each other’s vital organs out, but end up as stick figures of glory against a barren emotional terrain.”

Though clunky and unsubtle, Richard Fleischer‘s The Vikings does not present a barren emotional terrain. Obviously inauthentic by today’s standards, it gives you emotional material to chew on.

[Posted two or three times]: “One thing that still works in The Vikings‘ favor is the film’s refusal to dramatically amplify the fact that Kirk Douglas‘s Einar and Tony Curtis‘s Eric, mortal enemies throughout the film, are in fact brothers, having both been sired by Ernest Borgnine‘s Ragnar.

“Ten minutes from the conclusion Janet Leigh‘s Princess Morgana begs Douglas to consider this fraternity, and he angrily brushes her off. But when his sword is raised above a defenseless Curtis at the very end, Douglas hesitates. And then Curtis stabs Douglas in the stomach with a shard of a broken sword, and Douglas is finished.

“The way he leans back, screams ‘Odin!’ and then rolls over dead is pretty hammy, but that earlier moment of hesitation is spellbinding — one of the most touching pieces of acting Douglas ever delivered.

“I’m not trying to build The Vikings up beyond what it was — a primitive sex-and-swordfight film for Eisenhower-era Eloi. But it did invest in that submerged through-line of ‘brothers not realizing they’re brothers while despising each other’, and the subtlety does pay off.” — originally posted on 3.27.06, on the occasion of Richard Fleischer‘s passing.