We’ve all expressed superhero fatigue rants over the last decade or so, and we’ve all come to them at different stages in our moviewatching lives. For me the fatigue virus became a thing somewhere around ’13 or ’14, or five or six years after Iron Man dropped in ’08. (One of my favorite superhero fatigue headlines from this period was “Pollute My Soul.”) So there’s nothing all that bracingly new in this 8.2.22 rant from Penguinz0, but it radiates a certain honest authority, a drained and depleted feeling that I believe.

Excerpt: “It’s more of a soreness from being FACE-FUCKED by superheroes for so long now…Marvel just unveiled like 6000 new shows and movies on the horizon, and I’ve been asked my opinion about all of them, and it’s just exhausting..it’s like being asked to rate every single individual noodle in a bowl of spaghetti.

“Every time Marvel or DC drops a new trailer I always draw the same conclusion….the same generic formula that they’ve been following for a decade now…all superhero movies have the same bones these days…they follow very similar structure…every character making jokes and quipping with one another…I’m not leaving happy these days, I’m leaving bored…a million new characters thrown into the megamix…it really seems that every show from Marvel follows the exact same formula, and so I forget that I watch them…I have fun in the moment, and then it’s immediately erased from my memory.”

HE comment: I’ve been saying this for decades — that a measure of a see-worthy film is one that sticks to the ribs and lingers in the soul. If it doesn’t do that it’s shit — period, finito, end of discussion. Which is why even though I hated Blade Runner 2014, I could’t honestly call it a bad movie. Because it stayed with me.

“America used to be a global leader in brainless entertainment, particularly featuring explosions, boobs, and weightlifters, but since Trump’s election Hollywood’s been in a funk and spent years trying to bury its baser instincts and reinvent itself as Highbrow and Caring. This resulted in a thousand iterations of self-serious films straining to make the miserable entertaining (Bill Maher’s take on the perfect modern Oscar hopeful was The Immigrant Who Shat in a Coffee Can).

“Of all the negative by-products of Trump’s election, one of the most subtly destructive was alienating America from the one thing we’ve consistently done well, the lowest common denominator. For no good reason, politics has made a big chunk of the country wary of Cheez Whiz, mud wrestling, commercials about pickup trucks carrying other pickup trucks up mountains of boulders, and a hundred other mindless awesome things in our blood.

“This country sucks at highbrow, we’re great at stupid, and since there’s nothing more stupid than stupid highbrow, we’ve spent the last half-decade exporting the most embarrassing conceivable content on a grand scale. This has just made everybody, left and right, more uptight and pissed at each other. When we get back to embracing shark panics, Hang in There Baby office posters, and weightlifters/models blowing each other out of the sky with billion-dollar weapons, my guess is we’ll all start feeling better. Thank you, Tom Cruise, you lunatic. You’ve helped the healing begin.” — from Matt Taibbi‘s latest Substack essay.

Friendo who told me to watch FX/Hulu’s The Bear: “Did you watch it? Whadja think?”
HE: “Yeah, I watched it. The first episode, I mean. Too much chaos, too much shouting, too much clatter and I don’t like Jeremy Allen White. Fuck that guy. If the entire crew had been killed by a terrorist bomb I wouldn’t have blinked an eye. And all for some fucking Chicago sandwiches.”

“These are the guys who think all complaints about identity politics, political correctness, and cancel culture are just the dying gasp of reactionary old men, which is why they lie awake at night praying to god that they never get canceled. These are the guys who put their pronouns in their bios in hopes that doing so might get them a little pussy. These are the guys who will harangue you about how white dudes do this and white dudes do that, speaking to you from their blameless white dude mouths in their righteous white dude faces. These are the guys who look at the discourse about white supremacy and patriarchy and see market opportunity.” — from Freddie deBoer’s “The Good White Man Roster — a database of progressive white men who are thirsty for credit” (6.13.22).

I can imagine a husband and wife breaking up over sharply diverging views on certain films, but why would they get married in the first place if they strongly disagree about the look and sound and soul of great cinema? I could never feel close to someone who disdains Zero Dark Thirty or I Confess or Manchester by the Sea or The Battle of Algiers. You can always smell where a person is coming from or how deep their passions are when it comes to film. It’s not rocket science.

Back in the early ’80s I squired a promising new girlfriend to a Manhattan repertory theatre screening of From Here To Eternity, and she loved it. That in itself convinced me she was quality material. Plus she was beautiful and the sex was so good that I cried, but we didn’t last that long…two, three months. Go figure.

Sometime in the late aughts a once-adored ex-girlfriend, a longtime male friend and I were watching L.M. Kit Carson‘s “Direction Man” short. You can’t watch this thing and not at least chuckle, and the ex just sat there like a piece of granite, stone-faced. I snuck a glance at her while we watched, and I muttered to myself “God, what’s happened to her?”

There was a fascinating woman (a former film and TV actress) I was seeing in ’15 or thereabouts, and I recall how difficult it was to convince her to watch Paths of Glory. I mean it was fucking hard, grueling work. What did that say about her, I wondered? She was not only ignorant of one of the greatest films ever, but had to be wrestled into seeing it.

Little-remembered fact: Elvis Presley BEGAN shooting Love Me Tender on 8.22.56 and the film OPENED in theatres on 11.15.56 — 11 weeks later. Out of fear, one presumes, that Presley might be a flash in the pan — strike when the iron is hot.

Love Me Tender was previewed, however, sometime in early to mid October, so the actual answer-print turnaround was probably closer to eight or nine weeks. Wiki page: “Test screenings of the film resulted in people being upset at the death of Presley’s character. Attempting to reach a compromise between the death and pleasing his fans, Presley filmed an extra scene and recorded an extra verse to the title track to be played over the end credits.”

Correct me if I’m wrong, but this makes Love Me Tender the new Big Daddy of Fast Hollywood Turnarounds.

Otto Preminger‘s Anatomy of a Murder (’59), which began shooting on 3.23.59 and had its first preview on 6.18.59, is now in second place — a span of 12 and 1/2 weeks between the start of principal and the first-ever public showing. Love Me Tender beats Anatomy by a week and a half.

In third place is Oliver Stone‘s W., which filmed between 5.12.08 and 7.11.08 — two months or eight weeks. The film opened on 10.17.08, or 13 weeks after the finish of principal photography.

Almost as fast was Floyd Mutrux‘s American Hot Wax (’78), a biopic of rock ‘n’ roll disk jockey and promoter Alan Freed. I interviewed Mutrux at a Manhattan junket a couple of weeks prior to the 3.17.78 opening, and as I recall the Paramount-produced film had wrapped as recently as the previous December…something like that.

The filming of Lorene Scafaria‘s Hustlers took 29 days, having begun on 3.22.19 and finished on 4.22 or thereabouts. It opened four months later at the 2019 Toronto Film Festival.

Any other quickie turnarounds that I’m forgetting?

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I don’t know how old this Joe Rogan clip is, but if I was running Starbucks, I would immediately circulate a company-wide advisory that under no circumstance will ANY Starbucks employee suggest to ANY customer that the terms “wife” or “husband” are somehow incorrect or inadvisable and that the term “partner” (which is primarily a gay relationship term) is preferable. Failing to respect this rule, I would emphasize, is a firing offense.

Batgirl Erasure Update: Variety’s Adam B. Vary and Brent Lang are reporting that Warner Bros. scrapped The Batgirl not just because they didn’t like it, but because it made sense from a tax write-down perspective. Apparently the tax returns will allow them to make their budget back if they don’t release it.

Earlier: Even more perplexing than Searchlight dumping Being Mortal, the Aziz Ansari–Bill Murray–Keke Palmer film, is Warner Bros. deciding to disappear The Batgirl ($90M) altogether — no theatrical or HBO MAX, The common denominator may be that neither studio likes what they’ve seen. Perhaps on WB’s side this gives them an established mandate for dumping The Flash?

That’s it…Noah Baumbach’s White Noise is all but finished as a Best Picture winner, and the proof…okay, the suspicion is due to the enthusiastic, fair-minded Eugene Hernandez having selected it as the opening night film for the 60th New York Film Festival. Or so says David Poland, at least.

Writing on the wall, game possibly over, history of the Baumbach brand, etc.

Hernandez has done well, of course. White Noise is a good prestige-level score for the NYFF.

This Mystery Scoop “Smilin’ Abe” video is a year old, but I’ve only just discovered it. All my life the nation’s 16th President has been this sad-eyed, weary-looking monochrome fellow with a creased face and in need of a comb. Now he’s not only in believable color, but slightly grinning and twinkle-eyed and attuned to the mood in the room. Clearly a feature film (or at least a short) will be made within five or ten years in which the actual Lincoln speaks, moves, reacts, converses. This is really fascinating.