I saw Maria Schrader and Rebecca Lenkiewicz‘s She Said (Universal, 11.18) last night at Alice Tully Hall, and I knew almost immediately I was in good hands…that it had the same kind of subdued but polished, upscale smarty-pants chops that qualified She Said as a close relation of Spotlight and All The President’s Men…a real-world, just-the-facts journalism drama, lean and mean and no Hollywood bullshit.

It’s based on Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s same-titled, best-selling 2019 book…a book that began with their explosive 10.5.17 Times story, and which helped launch the #MeToo movement. Kantor and Twohey’s explosive reporting about the odious, business-as-usual sexual harassments and all-around malignance of Harvey Weinstein rocked the media and showbiz worlds, and there’s never any sense that the film is anything but a re-telling of what actually happened, how it all went down…the unembroidered nitty gritty.

And that was the basis of the trust, enjoyment and respect that I felt all during the two hour-plus length.

The story is basically “everyone’s afraid to talk on the record about what they know” — the same thing over and over and over, but that’s what happened. You know, of course, that the dam will eventually break but you have to be patient and tough it out with Kantor and Twohey, both of whom have families and are coping with the usual big-city tensions. But they’re exacting and persistent and they play their cards carefully, and things finally begin to pan out.

“Highly approvable,” I texted a friend. “Very well done. Very specific and realistic. Believable, adult, well-handled, fact-driven, studious. Plus excellent acting from everyone from the top down.”

Zoe Kazan and Carey Mulligan are absolutely spot-on as Kantor and Twohey — there’s no disbelieving anything they say or do. And the entire supporting cast is perfect — Patricia Clarkson (Times editor Rebecca Corbett), Andre Braugher (former Times exec editor Dean Baquet), Jennifer Ehle, Samantha Morton, Peter Friedman, an unseen Mike Houston as Harvey Weinstein, Ashley Judd as herself and Saturday Night Live’s James Austin Johnson providing the voice of Donald Trump, who is heard telling Twohey early on that “you’re a terrible person.”

Not to mention the excellent string-quartet score by Nicholas Britell, and the first-rate cinematography by Natasha Braier.

And yet the film kind of flattens out in the final third, and it’s hard to explain how or why. It seems to stop building and gathering force on some level, and the ending…well, it’s fine but I was left with a feeling of very slight disappointment. Now that I’ve had a few hours to think it over I still say that She Said is utterly first rate, even though I would have to say that it’s a notch below Spotlight and maybe two or three notches below All The President’s Men. But still a very respectable, high-grade thing.

What’s missing? Why is She Said, good as it is, subordinate to Spotlight and ATPM?

All I can figure is that there are relatively few standout scenes (although there are a few). Plus it exudes a slight “preaching to the choir” quality. Maybe it’s because I felt more primally stirred by the efforts of a team of Boston journalists to uncover a network of child molestation under the aegis fo the Catholic Church. (A church covering up child molestation does seem more evil than sexual harassment at the hands of a single predator.) Maybe it’s because All The President’s Men is s more absorbing than She Said by way of better writing and scenes that pop out and put the hook in.

But I don’t want to to get caught up in comparing ATPM and She Said. Well, maybe I could do that, come to think…

Yesterday I devoted a few sentences to the legend of Glenn Ford, who was quite the compulsive hound in his prime. That’s what it says, at least, in his son Peter‘s biography, “Glenn Ford: A Life.”

The discussion became a bit heated when HE commenter “johnlsullivan” shared a dim view of Ford’s shenanigans. “Ford was also the only husband of the 4-years-older, tap-dancing legend Eleanor Powell from 1943 (when her career was winding down) to 1959. Can’t imagine what her life must have been like, retired from musicals and married to an asshat who cheats every time he walks out the door.”

HE to Sullivan: “Did I say Ford was a ‘compulsive philanderer’? I said that in his ‘40s to early ‘60s heyday he was ‘Mr. Bone.’ There’s a difference.”

Sullivan to HE: “Uh, if he was married almost the entire time, that by definition makes him ‘a compulsive philanderer.'”

HE to Sullivan: “A philanderer is someone who routinely cheats on a spouse — he/she is first and foremost defined by the marriage and the cheating. Philandering isn’t so much about what he’s doing as what he’s failing to do.

“Glenn Ford seems to have been less defined by cheating (as in ‘I can’t do this’ or ‘I’m just not the marrying kind’) and more defined or led along by the siren songs of eros and rapture. He was Ulysses strapped to the main mast, and the sirens were singing and he was powerless to resist.

“It’s my suspicion that Ford’s urgent and sizable schongola told him what to do, almost as if he had no choice in the matter.

“Ford’s staff of manhood to Ford the actor and husband: “Look, you may be married to Eleanor and a father to Peter, but a glorious, truly breathtaking, never-ending banquet of drop-dead beautiful, alluring, deliciously naked, fascinating, enticingly perfumed, devastating women are out there for the relatively easy sampling and seducing. And I’m telling you that you don’t have an actual choice. You might think you do, but you don’t.

“It’s the ’40s and ’50s and ’60s, after all…you can get away with stuff that would literally get you killed in the post-#MeToo era. Just be polite and gracious and deferential and you’ll be fine. Be kind and considerate and nurturing to Eleanor and Peter…take care of them, be a good provider and father and care-giver. Once you have that covered, you’re free to pick as much fruit from the trees as you can.”

“Trust me when I say that when you’re on your deathbed at age 90, what you’ll regret the most won’t be the things you did as much as the things you didn’t do.”

Sullivan to HE: “It’s not adultery if you’re well-endowed.”

Trump will respond this way, I mean. If and when he ever testifies, he’ll lie or dummy up. Standard operating procedure.

“…not necessarily on the business side but certainly [in terms of] the art.” — Martin Scorsese speaking last night at the 60th New York Film Festival.

Marty didn’t point the finger of blame, but if he had who would have been the recipient? You know who. We all know who.

Not any one group of filmmakers or producers or distributors, but the under-40 couch potatoes…Millennials, Zoomers…the easy-streaming content generation. The ones most responsible for the abandoning and closing of movie theatres. Be honest…who else can be blamed as squarely?

Powerful words on the state of cinema by Martin Scorsese at his and @thenyff’s 60th! #nyff60 @FilmLinc pic.twitter.com/T37HcNMQDl

— Ellen Houlihan (@elliehoulie) October 13, 2022

Glenn Ford is one of those classic-studio-era movie stars whom nobody seems to care much for today. Even I don’t care much for the guy.

My favorite Ford films are not So Ends Our Night, Gilda, The Big Heat, Teahouse of the August Moon or The Blackboard Jungle. My favorites are actually Cowboy, Cimarron and especially Experiment In Terror.

Ford’s career peaked in the ’40s and ’50s; he seemed to fall off a cliff in the mid ’60s. He died at age 90 on 8.30.06.

What I honestly didn’t know until an hour ago was that off-screen Ford’s life was, to borrow a Quentin Tarantino-ism, largely about dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick.

According to “Glenn Ford: A Life,” a 2001 bio by his son Peter, the allegedly well-endowed Ford put the high hard one to no fewer than 146 actresses during his heyday, and that’s not counting the little side affairs that are never written about.

The biggest extra-marital love of Ford’s life was Rita Hayworth; their off-and-on, 40-year affair began during the filming of Gilda and lasted until the ’80s.

Ford also “knew” Maria Schell, Geraldine Brooks, Stella Stevens, Gloria Grahame, Gene Tierney, Eva Gabor, Judy Garland, Connie Stevens, Suzanne Pleshette, Rhonda Fleming, Roberta Collins, Hope Lange, Susie Lund, Terry Moore, Angie Dickinson, Debbie Reynolds, Jill St. John, Brigitte Bardot, Loretta Young and Barbara Stanwyck.

He allegedly had a one-nighter with Marilyn Monroe in ’62, and did a duh-doo-ron-ron with Joan Crawford in the early 1940s. Ford’s affair with stripper and cult actress Liz Renay was mentioned in her 1991 book “My First 2,000 Men.”

Early in his review of Todd Field‘s Tar, New Yorker critic Richard Brody reveals a clear, nonsensical bias against the anti-wokester crowd (i.e., people like me).

He does so by using the expression “so-called” twice in a single sentence: “Tar is a regressive film,” he writes, “that takes bitter aim at so-called cancel culture and lampoons so-called identity politics.”

In short, Brody’s use of “so-called” means he’s highly suspicious of even the existence of wokeism and cancel culture, which of course completely invalidates his review of Tar.

A good portion of Field’s film deals with wokester investigations of improper sexual behavior on the part of Lydia Tar (Cate Blanchett), and so Brody being highly skeptical of even the presence of woke terror is like a critic reviewing a James Bond film while holding a view that there are no such things as guns.

Tar, says Brody, “presents Lydia as an artist who fails to separate her private life from her professional one, who allows her sexual desires and personal relationships to influence her artistic judgment — which is, in turn, confirmed and even improved under that influence.

“[Tar] presents the efforts to expand the world of classical music to become more inclusive, by way of commissioning and presenting new music by a wider range of composers, as somewhere between a self-sacrificing gesture of charity and utterly pointless. It mocks the concept of the blind audition (intended to prevent gatekeeping conductors, musicians, and administrators from making decisions on the basis of appearance). It sneers at the presumption of an orchestra to self-govern (which the one that Lydia unmistakably conducts in the film, the Berlin Philharmonic, does in real life). It derisively portrays a young American conducting student named Max (Zethphan Smith-Gneist), who identifies as ‘a bipoc pangender person,’ and who says that he can’t take Bach seriously because he was a misogynist. The film looks at any social station and way of life besides the money-padded and the pristinely luxurious as cruddy, filthy, pathetic.”

The slightly puzzling fact is that Tar doesn’t portray Lydia as a pure victim (although she is certainly pounced upon and destroyed by woke-deferring officials within the Berlin and New York orchestras) but also as a catalyst. So Tar is simultaneously saying the wokesters are beasts of prey but also that Lydia made her own bed.

Brody: “The film seems to want it both ways: it sustains Lydia’s perspective regarding music, her professional relationships, and her daily aesthetic, while carefully cultivating ambiguity regarding what Lydia is charged with, in order to wag a finger at characters who rush to judgment on the basis of what’s shown (or, what isn’t).

“By eliminating the accusations, Field shows which narrative he finds significant enough to put onscreen. By filtering Lydia’s cinematic subjectivity to include disturbing dreams but not disturbing memories, he shows what aspect of her character truly interests him. By allowing her past to be defined by her résumé, he shows that he, too, is wowed by it and has little interest in seeing past it.”

Like the film, Brody himself seems to want it both ways.

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Nine months ago The New York Times‘ Isabella Grullón Paz reported that a rumor about school-age furries using litter boxes in a Midland, Michigan, elementary school was apparently bullshit, at least according to Midland Public Schools superintendent Michael Sharrow.

I don’t know if this is the same rumor that Joe Rogan mentioned yesterday…or not. Further investigation is required.

Joe Rogan tells Tulsi Gabbard about a teacher he knows who said her school was forced to install a litter box for a student who identifies as a cat. pic.twitter.com/jqU4T1V9Nl

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) October 12, 2022

Austin Stoker, the star of John Carpenter‘s Rio Bravo-ish action thriller Assault on Precinct 13, passed last Friday (10.7) on his 92nd birthday. HE has long admired Stoker’s performance as Lt. Ethan Bishop, the steely, fair-minded L.A. cop in charge of an about-to-be-abandoned police station in some hellish South Central region of Los Angeles.

Stoker was around 45 when Assault was shot — he looked a good ten years younger.

I first saw John Carpenter’s Howard Hawks-inspired film at the Museum of Modern Art in ’78 or ’79. I’ve re-watched it at least nine or ten times since.

In my book Stoker and costars Darwin Joston (who played the allegedly fearsome but essentially honorable Napoleon Wilson) and Laurie Zimmer (who played a brave Hawksian woman named Leigh) were a much more compelling trio than John Wayne, Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson in Rio Bravo.

In a 10.11 interview with A.V. Club‘s William Hughes, legendary horror helmer John Carpenter allows readers see the proverbial man behind the curtain, and that man, it turns out, is a lot more into video games than keeping up with must-see films.

And therefore — here’s a real forehead-smacker — Carpenter doesn’t even know what elevated horror is, for heaven’s sake.

C’mon, bruh…being 74 (which is oldish but not that old) doesn’t give you license to just live in your own little world and ignore the here-and-now. You have to watch what other directors are doing, and maybe let some of what they’re doing and saying…maybe let a little bit of that in.

Hughes: Shifting gears slightly: Are you familiar with the phrase ‘elevated horror’?

Carpenter: I don’t know what that means. I mean, I can guess what it means, but I don’t really know.

Hughes: People usually use it to refer to A24’s movies…horror that’s very heavy on the metaphorical. Hereditary, Midsommar, movies like that.

Carpenter: I have no idea what you’re talking about.

Will you listen to this Pauline Kael interview with Woody Allen, which happened in early 1974? They’re mainly talking about Sleeper (12.17.73), Allen’s most recent film at the time, and Kael is offering sincere praise here and there but she’s also telling Allen, politely, what she feels is lacking in his films or about aspects of his films that don’t quite work for her

Does Allen stiffen or bristle or get a tad defensive? No, he’s totally fine with this (or pretending to be fine with it), half-agreeing or breaking into a discussion of some point she’s made or just listening.

Can you imagine any big-time critic or columnist conducting such an interview with a major filmmaker today? Saying nice things but also sharing discreet criticisms from time to time? It would never, ever happen.

Allen later told Roger Ebert that he admired Kael, but that during their interview “she had everything but judgment.”

Everyone presumably understands by now that Gina Prince-Bythewood‘s The Woman King lies about the slave-trading history of Dahomey and particularly that of the Agojie, the all-female warrior unit that protected Dahomey during the 18th and 19th Centuries.

Here’s the concise truth of it, laid out in an 10.5 Project Syndicate essay titled “Women, Life, Freedom and the Left.” The author is Slovenian philosopher and scholar Slavoj Žižek:

“The Woman King is an historical epic about the Agojie, an all-female warrior unit that protected the West African kingdom of Dahomey from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries.

“It stars Viola Davis as the fictional General Nanisca. She is subordinated only to King Ghezo (John Boyega), a real-life figure who ruled Dahomey from 1818 to 1859, and who engaged in the Atlantic slave trade until the end of his reign.

“In the film, the Agojie’s enemies include slave traders led by the fictional Santo Ferreira (Hero Fiennes Tiffin), a character loosely inspired by Francisco Félix de Sousa, a Brazilian slave trader who actually helped Ghezo gain power.

“Dahomey was a kingdom that conquered other African states and sold their people into the slave trade. While Nanisca is depicted protesting to King Ghezio against the slave trade, the real Agojie served him.

“The Woman King thus promotes a form of feminism favored by the Western liberal middle class.

“Like today’s #MeToo feminists, the Amazon warriors from Dahomey will ruthlessly condemn all forms of binary logic, patriarchy, and traces of racism in everyday language; but they will be very careful not to disturb the deeper forms of exploitation that underpin modern global capitalism and the persistence of racism.

“This stance involves downplaying two basic facts about slavery. First, white slave traders barely had to set foot on African soil, because privileged Africans (like the kingdom of Dahomey) furnished them with an ample supply of fresh slaves.”

I don’t see John Fetterman‘s stroke issue (i.e., using closed-captioning) as a campaign problem, although obviously it’s become one. Recent Pennsylvania Senate race polls had Fetterman, the Democratic candidate, ahead but now he’s neck-and-neck with the Republican candidate, Mehmet Oz. I tend to see Fetterman’s temporary disability (which I presume is temporary) as a character-building thing, or somewhat analogous to FDR’s disability. I think it’s cruel to attack Fetterman over a medical issue. The idea of Oz winning is appalling.