I understand and accept the fact that I, a somewhat older, been-around-the-block-a-few-times white guy, am more or less representative of a certain kind of odious, old-schoolish, Italian suede lace-up elitism, aging-fartaholic delusions and repressive evil in the world of 2022, and that if I had any grace or humility I would hang my head and acknowledge that my general way of seeing things is kinda sorta bad…basically an over-and-done-with ethos and even destructive in some ways…just ask Bob “bolt of lightning” Strauss.

And so there’s only one decent thing to do, and that’s to acknowledge the inherent saintliness or at least the moral-ethical superiority of all non-WASPy types and let nature takes its cleansing and benevolent course.

From Sasha Stone‘s “The Day the Movies Died…Again,” posted on 11.27.22:

“The micro-managing of Hollywood by activists is” — stop if anyone has heard this before — “killing its product.

“It’s making them feel like anything that features a strong male hero is somehow ‘bad’ because hetero men, usually white, must always be the enemy. I watched Barbarian, which I loved, but of course that movie’s message could only be: white men bad. It is almost always the case now — only the villains can be white and everyone else is saintly. Does no one think there is something weird about that or are they just too afraid to say so because they’ll be called a racist?

“They believe this ideology is universally shared, but it isn’t. It is the status quo among an insulated group, but doesn’t represent what the majority in this country thinks or wants.

“I’ve been writing about this for a while now and it’s not easy to talk about. Most people just don’t want to confront what has happened to the film industry, even if almost everyone knows that something dramatic changed — and that something has turned people off. Even if the movies themselves don’t have activist-driven content, the Hollywood brand means that’s what they’re going to anticipate – so they’ll avoid it and wait for streaming.”

Cue “Castor Troy, Jr.“, “Lean Pantaloon” and “jjhunsecker“: “Whoa, wait a minute….where exactly is the hard, incontrovertible proof that this so-called micro-managing of Hollywood by activists is an actual thing? And who the hell is this Out of Frame guy? What the hell does he know?

“We three know one thing, and that’s that Sasha and Jeff and this fucking Out of Frame guy need to prove their thesis chapter and verse to us because, you know, we’re free souls and with free minds, and we’re highly skeptical.”

During a just-posted Club Random chat with Dave Rubin, Bill Maher discussed his dislike of Stephen Colbert and vice versa. But he doesn’t totally trash him and leaves the door slightly ajar.

Maher: “Colbert and I are not friends. He doesn’t like me and I don’t like him, and we don’t deny it.”
Rubin: “But he’s nothing. He’s just giving the machine what it wants all the time while you…”
Maher: “That is well said. Giving the machine what it wants. I wish I had thought of that phraseology. That’s exactly right. [But] maybe we’ll become friends one day…who knows? I’ve had that happen before. You get off on the wrong foot [with someone, but then it cools down or gradually turns a corner]. He’s the very opposite of me…a married Catholic,” etc.

I’m not suggesting this is Jack Benny vs. Fred Allen or that anyone needs to care in the slightest, but when did this contretemps first pop through? Or is it just some animal dislike thing (i.e., Charles Laughton vs, Laurence Oliver)?

Earlier this afternoon I read an 11.25 review of Todd Field‘s Tar by WBGO’s Harlan Jacobson. Definitely worth reading or listening to.

Final portion: “Tar is a lineal descendant of Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel (’30), with Marlene Dietrich’s Lola dangling a heel in a cabaret to undo Emil Janning’s Professor Rath, wrecking the old world with a flick of an ash.

“Add a queer spin nearly 40 years later and you’ll find Tár in 1973’s The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant, another German milestone. Director Rainer Werner Fassbinder had the cheek to tell the story of a dissolute lesbian fashion designer (Margit Carstensen) who turns her back on her S&M lover-factotum when she becomes fatally attracted to a vanilla young thing (Hanna Schygulla).

“Even at 2 hours and 37 minutes, some critics say, Tár still fails in its duty to be passionate about music or life, which is not what the film is about. That’s another film. As it happens Tar is passionate about music, if doubtful about the life inside it.

“But this is the year of the two-and-a-half-hour film — they’re everywhere. And Tár had me on the edge of my seat for all of it, as if it was named War, not Tár.”

Variety‘s Rebecca Rubin is reporting that Disney’s Strange World, an animated, family-friendly feature that opened on 11.23, is expected to lose $100 million in its theatrical run — a total wipeout.

In paragraph #3 Rubin calls Strange World‘s opening weekend tally “one of Disney’s worst in modern times.”

She also mentions possible reasons for the film’s wretched performance — pandemic concerns, so-so reviews, minimal buzz. But Rubin doesn’t even allude to a possibility that certain homophobic parents might have felt a tiny bit antsy about a main character — Jaboukie Young-White‘s “Ethan Clade”, the 16 year-old son of Jake Gyllenhaal‘s “Searcher Clade” — being gay.

It was suggested last June that the under-performing of Disney’s Lightyear may have been at least partly due to parental pushback again a no-big-deal lesbian kiss scene. It is suspected that parents in flyover regions are generally squeamish about Disney animated features feeding liberal, comme ci comme ca, “whatever floats your boat” propaganda to family audiences.

Rubin does mention that the gay son was a factor in Disney not submitting Strange World to regions in the Middle East, Malaysia and Indonesia.

Rubin: “Films with LGBTQ references have been regularly targeted by censors in those territories, and Disney wasn’t willing to cut out parts of the movie to comply with their guidelines.”

So why didn’t Rubin at least mention the possibility that homophobic parents in this country might have decided against taking their kids to Strange World because of Ethan’s sexual persuasion?

I’ll tell you what I suspect. I suspect that Variety‘s editors felt that acknowledging the existence of homophobia in some regions of this country could, in Variety‘s apparent view, be construed as some kind of vague or tacit acceptance of homophobia as a problematic marketing issue.

“No…no, you’re not. You’re not going to hang these men.”

No film released in ’22 contained scenes as strong as these two….scenes that rivet and resonate and settle into your bones….family discord that drills right down.

Nothing comparable was delivered by Top Gun: Maverick or The Fabelmans or Everything Everywhere All At Once. Nothing in Elvis, The Banshees of Inisherin, The Whale, The Woman King, Wakanda Forever or Nope comes even close. Nothing in White Noise, Decision to Leave, Women Talking, Bros, Blonde, Till, The Good Nurse, Babylon, Glass Onion…not on Red River‘s level.

She Said and The Menu are first-rate efforts. Happening was/is pretty great as an abortion period piece. All Quiet on the Western Front was intensely powerful in its own way. Ditto Bardo, which operates in its own meditative dream realm.

…there’s no way it was as funny as all that, certainly to go by Marlon Brando and Edmond O’Brien’s half-giddy, half-terrified expressions. Will you look at these guys? Five’ll get you ten Georges Danton wore the same expression just before the guillotine dropped. Please, for God’s sake…turn it down.

Anyone who would wear a walking shoe with this kind of design should be fined and perhaps even prosecuted.

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…and I’m not sure I want to. But it sure seemed like a huge deal on the evening of 4.28.32…Grauman’s Chinese, Hollywood Boulevard, Los Angeles. Look at those Day of the Locust crowds pushing against the ropes and the security guys.

Ignite’s beautifully fine-tuned 4K Invaders From Mars Bluray was supposed to be released last September, but it’s apparently still sitting at a Sony DADC warehouse in Stenovice, Czech Republic**.

Here’s the official explanation.

Basic business law: If you want something delivered on time, you need to grease the palms of the guys in charge. Payoffs, bribes, graft…whatever works.

When will the much-anticipated Invaders disc reach U.S. shores? Before Christmas or will we have to wait until ’23?

** Dobranská 545, 332 09 Štěnovice, Czechia.

Whatever happened to the Peck’s bad boy of North by Northwest? The earplug kid, I mean. Who was this little Southern California jackass and what was his basic malfunction? And what happened to the production associate who should have spotted this bad business during repeated takes?

The kid’s place in history is secure. NXNW was shot in ‘58, and he appears to be nine or ten. If he’s still with us the little fucker with the obstinate (or playfully sociopathic?) attitude and the Brylcreamed hair is in his early ‘70s now. Once you’ve seen that green plaid shirt and those nail-bitten adolescent fingers plugging those Jerry Mathers-type ears…there’s no un-seeing any of it.

Does anyone know his name? Or how his life turned out? Did he work his way into a good profession or achieve some measure of financial security or whatever? Did he get married and have kids? Did he wind up serving in Vietnam or participating in anti-war demonstrations in the late ‘60s? Given his mischievous inclinations the kid almost certainly grew up into a leftist. This was no obedient rule-follower. Maybe he became a writer or a politician or a Wall Street guy…who knows?

The plugged-ear kid is right in there with all the various dialogue-speaking characters invented by screenwriter Ernest Lehman…right in there with Glen Cove police sergeant “Emile Clinger” (John Beradino) and the older “good woman” with the CIA whose humanistic concern for the fate of Roger Thornhill is casually and patronizingly dismissed by Leo G. Carroll’s “professor” and with the unseen midtown Manhattan cab driver who dryiy and confidently states his ability to lose the pursuing followers (“Yes, I can”) only to fail to do so. Or the hot blonde (Patricia Cutts) in the Rapid City hospital room (“Stop!”)

“Kid Ears” is as much of an iconic NXNW presence as anyone else…as memorable as the Madison Ave. building custodian (Tommy Farrell‘s “Eddie”) who’s “not talkin’” to his wife, or the Plaza Hotel itself or “Victor” (Harry Seymour), the bald-headed Oak Bar maitre d, or “Elsie” the Plaza maid (Maudie Prickett), or the suspicious and somewhat surly overweight detective (Tol Avery) on the 20th Century Limited who questions Eva Marie Saint, or the slender, reedy-voiced farmer (Malcolm Atterbury) who chats with Cary Grant at Prairie Stop Highway 41, or the cultured hotel concierge at Chicago’s Ambassador East (can’t find his name) or “Sergeant Flamm” (Patrick McVey), the fleshy beat cop who co-arrests Grant at the Michigan Ave. auction only to drop him off at Midway Airport…

Earplug kid doesn’t speak, of course, and is the only discordant note in the entire film…the only accident that wasn’t corrected. He’s probably the only NXNW veteran besides 98 year-old Eva Marie Saint and maybe one other who isn’t dead as we speak. Or maybe he too has passed on. Either way he certainly belongs to the ages.

What discipline was handed out to the guilty party who failed to notice this Leave It To Beaver-aged troublemaker…who failed to spot this potentially disruptive behavior in front of those costly VistaVision cameras? Hitchcock’s continuity person or the 1st assistant director or whomever — somebody was responsible, and someone must have spotted him. My guess is that Hitchcock may have been told about the kid after Grant, Saint, James Mason and Martin Landau had satisfactorily performed the scene on an MGM Culver City sound stage, but he blithely ignored the potential for narrative interruption, figuring no one would notice (and nobody did until NXNW appeared on DVD, which allowed for easy freeze-frame capture).