Originally posted on 8.12.18: If there’s one thing film twitter wants you to abandon, it’s your comfort zone. Be brave, step over the fence and experience the exotic, uncertain, challenging realms that exist outside of your little piddly backyard. Of course! Hollywood Elsewhere agrees that people who refuse to step outside of their c.z. are missing so much and absorbing so little in the way of life-giving nutrients or eye-opening realizations. I’ve been in rooms with people who don’t want to see what they don’t want to see, and it’s not pretty. The wrong kind of vibe.

On the other hand I’ve always defined “comfort zone” in a different way.

To me a comfort movie is one that presents three basic things. One, semi-recognizable human behavior (i.e., bearing at least some resemblance to that which you’ve observed in your own life, including your own something-to-be-desired, occasionally less-than-noble reactions to this or that challenge). Two, some kind of half-believable story in which various behaviors are subjected to various forms of emotional or psychological stress and strain. (This should naturally include presentations of inner human psychology, of course, as most people tend to hide what they’re really thinking or scheming to attain.) And three, action that adheres to the universal laws of physics — i.e., rules that each and every life form has been forced to submit to since the beginning of time.

The physics thing basically means that I can enjoy or at least roll with superhero fantasy popcorn fare, but on the other hand these films have a way of delivering a form of profound irritation and even depression if you watch enough of them.

There are, in short, many ways of telling stories that (a) contain recognizable human behavior, (b) engaging stories and (c) adhere to basic laws of gravity, inertia and molecular density. I’m talking about tens of thousands of square miles of human territory, and movies that include Her, Solaris, Boyhood, Betrayal, Children of Men, Leviathan, Thelma and Louise, Superbad, Cold War, Across 110th Street, Shoot the Piano Player, Them!, A Separation, The Silence, Se7en, Holy Motors, Silver Linings Playbook, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, Hold That Ghost, The Miracle Worker, The Wolf Man, Ikiru, Crossfire, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Duck Soup, Moonlighting, What’s Up, Tiger Lily?, the better screwball comedies of the ’30s, The Blob, First Reformed, Ichi the Killer, The Equalizer 2, Adaptation, Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days, Punch Drunk Love, Out Of the Past, Danton, Some Like It Hot, The Big Sky and God knows how many hundreds or thousands of others.

But if a movie presents human behavior that I regard as completely unrecognizable or nonsensical, that insists on ignoring the way things are out there (or “in” there), I tune out. And if you don’t like that, tough.

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Martin McDonagh‘s The Banshees of Inisherin opens today. All shrewd-minded, able-bodied Hollywood Elsewhere contributors need to see it tonight, tomorrow or Saturday and make their reactions known.

In a “reading the Oscar tea leaves” piece, IndieWire‘s Anne Thompson speculated that “the stealth candidate from wily Searchlight is Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin, which could build support from the speciality-leaning and international side of the Academy.”

Translation: In a pig’s eye.

Jordan Ruimy: “Banshees is brilliant, acerbic and tinged with melancholia, but it might be a tad too artfully vague for Oscar voters tastes.

“I’ll be more than happy if my assumption turns out to be wrong and McDonagh wins the top prize, but if you’ve seen Banshees then you know exactly what I’m talking about. It’s a bitter film about how bitter life is.”

HE: “A film about eccentric oddballs, incomprehensible Irish nihilism and bloody fat finger stumps is NOT going to connect with a plurality of Academy voters. Forget it.”

Northeastern Hotshot Critic: “I’m with you on this.”

Walter Hill is not crazy. He’s not eccentric. He turned 80 last January, and he’s Walter “you’d better believe it” Hill, and this is how he put it:

If I could magically transform Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, Part One into a film that I would be genuinely interested in seeing as opposed to one that I’m vaguely or robotically inclined to see out of a sense of habit or historical duty, I would make it into a film about assassinating Vladimir Putin. But an extra-clever, light-fingered hit that’s so fleet and stealthy that no one even realizes it’s a hit.

Okay, his security guys might strongly suspect that Ethan and the team were behind it, but they can’t prove anything. The ice-picking of Putin pulled off with the same efficiency that Paul Newman and Robert Redford and the gang used to fleece Robert Shaw in The Sting. I would love to see that movie.

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One opens on 7.14.23. Dead Reckoning Part Two pops on 6.28.24.

…who claims to have been “violently ill.” Even if you’ve become stricken with some awful stomach virus that results in uncontrollable vomiting, say, I don’t trust that term. It sounds too rehearsed or cooked up. Like something you might say after a facetime phone chat with your publicist.

The sickest I’ve ever been happened in Marrakech in the summer of ’76. It came after eating a dish of Couscous at a rooftop restaurant. I awoke around 1 ayem, weak and whimpering. I spent the next twelve hours “making love to the toilet,” as my girlfriend of the time put it.

But there was nothing “violent” about it. It was more about laying down and surrendering to the void. Around 3 or 4 am I said to myself, “Okay, this might be it…I might die. But at least when I depart this awful nausea will stop, and I can merge with the infinite in peace.”

Posted from Santa Barbara on 1.18.20:

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HE approves of Roger Durling‘s Virtuoso choices for the 2023 Santa Barbara Film Festival (2.8 thru 2.18).

Elvis‘s Austin Butler! Banshee’s of Inisherin‘s Kerry Condon! Armageddon Time‘s Jeremy Strong! Tar‘s Nina Hoss! Till‘s Danielle Deadwyler!

Durling has also invited The Inspection‘s Jeremy Pope to share the limelight.

During has also tapped Stephanie Hsu and Ke Huy Quan from Everything Everywhere All at Once. I can’t fathom how Durling, a true Renaissance man, could possibly love Everything Everywhere as much as he seems to. I’m figuring it’s a token salute to the film’s popularity among Zellennials plus the Asian-American DEI factor. I refuse to believe that Roger actually likes and admires this punishing, wafer-thin film about the multiverse…no!

The Virtuoso evening will be moderated, as usual, by TCM host and Entertainment Weekly awards correspondent Dave Karger. It’ll happen on Wednesday, 2.15.23.

HE has been faithfully attending and reporting on the SBIFF since…oh, ’04 or thereabouts. Will I be able to attend three months hence? I’d love to but we’ll see.

Saturday night, sometime after 1 am, decades ago. We’d been passing the hash pipe around, and Swamp Fire, a 1946 Buster Crabbe-meets-Johnny Wiesmuller film, was on the box. About as bad as a C-grade programmer gets, but we were goofing on it.

Right around the one-hour mark, or eight minutes before it ended, the swamp fire finally happened. Flames filled the screen. And somebody at the station broadcasting the film (WOR or WNEW or WPIX) decided to have some fun. The words SWAMP FIRE began flashing on the screen, as if to say “it’s finally happening…the swamp fire has begun!” We couldn’t stop laughing, and soon concluded that the graveyard-shift station guy flashing the title was either bored to tears or was getting ripped with a friend…one or the other.

The screenwriter of Swamp Fire was Daniel Mainwaring, author of “Build My Gallows High” (novel) and the film adaptation, Out of the Past. It’s been claimed that the writer who wrote the most flavorful Out of the Past dialogue was the uncredited Frank Fenton.

Posted on 9.10.22:

It’s not a rumor — some tiddly-wink at HBO Max has removed Warren Beatty‘s cigar from the McCabe and Mrs. Miller promotional art on the HBO Max menu. Ditto Paul Newman‘s cigar from HBO Max’s promotional art for The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean.

I’m presuming that someone figured that it’s wrong to promote smoking of any kind so the cigar was zotzed. HE is calling this an advertising form of woke “presentism.” What’s next? Digitally erasing Robert Mitchum‘s cigarettes in Out of the Past?

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In a 3.21.14 piece called “Don’t Forget What’s Happening,” I wrote that “fanboy flicks are a profitable malignancy. They are well on the way to kicking real, adult-level movies out of mainstream cinemas and into VOD, streaming and other home viewing options altogether.”

That’s exactly what happened over the next eight years. Except now the plague has two heads — fanboy shit plus streaming content that numbs the soul.

“Super-amped fanboy flicks are the latest manifestation of the corporate influences which Pauline Kael lamented in 1980. They are flagships of a trend that are coming closer and closer to suffocating a mainstream movie culture that used to at least occasionally be about mirroring or capturing who we were (our values, needs, hopes) and how we lived. Every now and then theatres were the equivalent of community churches (i.e, places for inner communion and contemplation), but fanboy flicks are turning them into the spiritual equivalent of roller rinks and amusement parks.

“Fanboy flicks are a metaphor for the overall devolution of art and culture, not just in this country but all across Europe and Asia. They are injections of corporate heroin and Hollywood is the dealer. They are not pathways into our common histories and values and deep-down places. They are things we shoot into our minds and souls, but they are obviously inorganic. They’re not herbal tea or pot or peyote. They aren’t even Valium or Xanax. They’re Demerol.”