Here’s an edited version of a Reddit reaction to Robert Eggers‘ The Northman (Focus Features, 4.22). It comes out of a recent research screening in Dallas.

Excerpt #1: “I was extremely impressed with it. There’s a lot of brutal action and violence, and it overall had a very authentic Norse feel to it. It is a revenge tale slash Viking epic. I’d place it right above The Witch and just below The Lighthouse.”

Excerpt #2: “Honestly, this was Alexander Skaarsgard’s movie. [Note: Skarsgard plays Amleth, a Nordic prince whose allegedly truthful saga was used by William Shakespeare to create Hamlet.] AS is truly a beast [in this] and has given his most impressive performance yet.”

Excerpt #3: “As Queen Gudrun, Nicole Kidman was great also. Anya Taylor-Joy does give a [distinctive] performance, and she’s in one of my favorite scenes of the movie. Bjork plays a somewhat pivotal role [i.e., ‘Slav witch’], but only has one scene — lasts about five minutes.”

HE interjects: What about Ethan Hawke and Willem Dafoe?

Excerpt #4: “Jarin Blaschke‘s cinematography is stellar. Most of the lighting seemed to be from natural light sources. They said the color grading was still in progress. One or two scenes were in black and white, plus a lot blues, greens, greys, dark shadows. A few VFX shots that were pretty damn great and even a bit trippy at times.”

Excerpt #5: “More accessible than The Green Knight, The Lighthouse or The Witch. It’s basically a revenge/avenge tale and also probably like a lot of Viking legends out there, but the story was so well told. I thought the pacing was actually quite tight — there weren’t really any scenes I would trim or take out. I wish I could’ve understood certain bits of dialogue a bit better. Bjork’s scene is all whispers so it was hard to make out what she was saying but all in all it was pretty epic, pretty dark, very intense.”

I’m not saying the fearsome Hurricane Ida isn’t a very serious threat to life and property, but it’s now 2:30 pm New Orleans time and I’m glad to report that things don’t…obviously I know nothing but right now it seems as if the news outlets have oversold it to some extent…emphasis on the “s” word. I wish I was there right now just to experience the drama and discomfort. I hope no lives are ultimately lost, that no one will be hurt, that the “hit” won’t be as bad as forecasted.

Ed Asner (aka “Lou Grant“) has passed at age 91. He was an excellent, no-bullshit actor and a proud liberal activist. I never spoke to him and I don’t even know someone who knew or dealt with him slightly, but Asner was a real-deal humanist-activist liberal, which is to say he almost certainly didn’t hold with the illiberal wokesters, and if he did hold with those monsters, please don’t tell me about it.

Condolences for friends, fans, colleagues, etc. Asner was a gifted adult actor — diligent, focused, thoughtful and smart as a whip all the way down the line. He lived a good, honorable life, and now he sleeps. His voice performance in Up was the fourth or fifth thing I thought of when I heard the news, if that.

World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy has posted a reaction to Matt Reeves‘ The Batman (Warner Bros., 3.4.22).

And if (I say “if”) it indeed turns out to be a “very scary” genre horror film, great. Reeves’ version needed to do something else, go cuckoo-ass, jump the rails — it couldn’t just follow in the glum-dirge tradition of the Affleck imprint.

At the same time you can’t trust fanboys who’ve seen something early, especially when it’s a big brand thing. They’re too pleased with themselves for simply managing to see it. They’re emotionally unstable to a certain extent. You have to take what they say with grain of salt. They’re suddenly imagining themselves as Reeves’ collaborators, to a certain degree. They’re giving him friendly “notes.”

“Very graphic, very dark, very scary,” says Ruimy’s fanboy. And yet the first thing out of his mouth is not to praise RBatz (i.e., Robert Pattinson‘s lead performance) but to enthuse about Paul Dano‘s Riddler performance — “fucking crazy, so fucking scary, I loved every second.”

But his favorite character by far, he says, is Zoe Kravitz‘s Catwoman. “There’s a scene at the end that literally had everyone SCREAMING, everyone gasped…like it was a big NO WAY for everyone…the biggest mike drop.”

Somewhere in the middle he says that Pattinson’s Batman voice is “perfect,” whatever the hell that means.

Against my better judgment I’m off to submit to fucking Candyman, and if it turns out to be half as unsubtle as some have told me it is, or if I should be shot by a policeman whils strolling through the Grove or if, God forbid, I’m struck by a bolt of lightning, then I’m going to blame some of the people on this thread. And that I do not forgive.

Friendo re Strauss: “Yeah, that’s pretty spot-on. Frankly, the film’s POV — the black characters have been victimized, and a number of corrupt/evil whites get comeuppance — feels like an iteration of classic liberal Hollywood. It’s not a chip-on-the-shoulder ‘take that, whitey!’ movie.”

HE to friendo: “I’m so terrified of sitting through anything that uses a sledgehasmmer.”

Friendo to HE: “It ain’t Ozu. But it is an interesting, curiously ambitious slasher film that plays with the tropes of the post-George Floyd world in a genuinely engaging (if at times overly programmatic) way. I was held by it. And it’s just 90 minutes! It’s nothing to be scared of.”

…in which the habit of moviegoing is at its lowest ebb ever, and certainly nowhere near the semi-regular thing it used to be even in the ’90s and early aughts, and amongst those few intrepid souls who still occasionally flirt with the idea of seeing a film in a theatre, the vast majority don’t have clue #1 who this guy is or what film it’s from or anything. And if you lament this state of affairs (as I am now), you’ll be dismissed as a grumpy, out-of-it asshole who has lost touch with 2021 film culture, if you want to call what’s happening in theatres and in the streaming world “film culture,” and that you’re living inside some cranky membrane.

Which is absolutely not me. Because I for one can’t wait to get ripped and see Dune!

HE to Joseph McBride, author of “Billy Wilder: Dancing on the Edge” (Columbia University Press, 9.24):

“I just wanted to tell you, Joe, how much fun your Wilder book is. I was expecting the usual sequential, chapter-by-chapter approach, and I got that from your very thorough recounting of his youth in Germany. (And you went to Germany for some first-hand digging — respect!)

“But once the Hollywood adventure begins, you start weaving in and out. You don’t abandon a steady, linear, through-line approach, but you don’t exactly stick to it either. The narrative starts hopping around, and I loved that! In your journey with Billy Wilder you become Billy Pilgrim, unstuck in time.

“And I love, love, LOVE that possibly accurate story about the waitress being paid to have it off with the square and virginal Charles Lindbergh in that Long Island hotel on the night before his flight, and then, at the end of the film, the same waitress being part of the crowd during Lindy’s triumphant victory parade in Manhattan, and he doesn’t see her waving! What a great ending! I love the young vanity mirror woman who is actually in the film, but the waitress story would have been ten times better.

“I agree about Gary Cooper’s hesitant (wussy?) manner as he got older, and that he was way too old to pay Audrey Hepburn‘s lover in Love in the Afternoon. But what about that Wilder quote that “I got Coop the week he suddenly got old.” Cary Grant would have been a much better fit. Coop looked like he was at least 65 if not 70 in that film.

“I’m still reading, but I’m hoping for fresh anecdotes and stories about the making of One Two Three. In my estimation the amazing velocity and chutzpah in the last half of that 1961 film represents one of Cagney’s greatest performances by far, right up there with Public Enemy and George M. Cohan and Cody Jarrett. Plus I loved the strident, back-and-forth, give-and-take energy between Cagney and Horst Buccholz…what was it exactly that HB said or did to piss Cagney off so much?

“I’m presuming that at one point you’ll offer thoughts about how and why Wilder succumbed to ‘50s conventionality by deciding to become a proficient ‘house director’ between ‘53 and ‘58. He just went along with the flow of things, took this and that job, tried to be Lubitsch in this or that way, etc. But the fact is that after the making and release of 1953’s Stalag 17 and before the writing and shooting of Some Like It Hot in ‘58, Billy Wilder took a four and a half-year breather from the burden of being ‘Billy Wilder.’ For lack of a better or fairer term, he became Paycheck Billy. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”

I’ve cracked the Dune code. I’ve figured it out. I finally know what it is. Dune is a “mood piece” that puts you into “a trance”, but it would help if you get really effing ripped before seeing the damn thing. Toke up, suck it down, bring your own brownies and gummies.

I began to sense this when a friend who recently saw it said he was a fan of “epically scaled movies, even flawed ones or those that are hard to follow [as Dune] has a number of distinct characters weaving in and out.” What Dune viewers need to do, in other words, is get themselves into a place in which “flaws” don’t especially matter and “following the action” isn’t all that vital. (Whuht?)

You just have submit to Dune, go with it, and see past ALL THAT FUCKING SAND. And you have to see it on a big screen — no watching Dune on iPads or laptops. You have to go big or nothing. You are little, microscopic …not even a granule of sand. Dune is the whole effing desert and it will fill your soul with wonder.

Then I talked to another guy who’s seen Dune and claims he “went into something of a trance and was mesmerized from beginning to end. Seeing it a big screen was fabulous, and I might well see it again sometime just for the immersive pleasure.” In other words, Dune tripped this guy out. Imagine if he’d dropped two Bliss gummies a half-hour before sitting down.

Third person: “Dune‘s not bad. It just makes no sense. But that’s okay — it’s a mood piece. Good to see if you’re really stoned.”

At first 2001: A Space Odyssey failed to “make sense” or add up for certain snooty people (i.e., critics, rationalists). It was derided for being a “shaggy God story”. And then what happened? Younger people started going to it ripped or even tripping, and suddenly the spaciness of it became the all of it. 2001 became a cult stoner movie, and then the marketing guys finally caught on and they changed their slogan to “the ultimate trip.”

This, I’m sensing more and more, is what Dune is or could be. If you meet it halfway by being ripped out of your gourd, you can climb onto its back like a huge sand worm and ride the whirlwind. The next time Warner Bros. has an on-the-lot screening, they need to forego the wine and cheese and pass out edibles instead.

Late last night the U.S. military announced that it had drone-struck an ISIS-K planner behind the recent suicide bombing near Kabul Airport, thereby turning him instant hamburger. BBC.com: “A Reaper drone, launched from the Middle East, struck the militant while he was in a car with another ISIS member, killing them both, an official told Reuters news agency.”

Capt Bill Urban of Central Command: “The unmanned airstrike occurred in the Nangarhar province of Afghanistan. Initial indications are that we killed the target. We know of no civilian casualties.”

Most of your ISIS-K fanatics are believed to be in hiding in this province, which lies east of Kabul.

This may have been a surgically precise response and the ISIS-K target may well have well been the Osama bin Laden behind the suicide bombing, but as many as 169 people, including 13 U.S. troops, were killed in Thursday’s attack. To my way of thinking that means at least 169 ISIS-K guys had to die, and preferably double that. Two doesn’t get it.

Incidentally: Apparently Donald Trump wasn’t mistaking ISIS-K for “ISIS-X”, as he called it. He was imagining or speculating that ISIS-X would be the next iteration after ISIS_K has had its heyday.