18 months before Covid shut down movie theatres I posted one of my melancholy “woe is us” pieces, titled “How Degraded Thou Art.” I have to fly in a few hours so there’s no time to settle in and write a big essay. But right now most of us feel pretty good about Covid fading away (despite Kimmel and Colbert‘s infection) and exhibition gradually coming back to life….right?

But once the old patterns settle in and we all get back to normal, it’ll probably be 2018 all over again…right? Or has something changed?

Some kind of technical glitch prevented comments on this essay in November 2018 so here goes again…

Late November is a good time to catch films in cinemas, of course, but otherwise the megaplex experience is generally a must-to-avoid, or at the very least a touch-and-go thing. Mainstream movies have been declining for many decades, and always because of stupid audiences.

In the early ’50s Manny Fatber wrote an influential essay called “Blame the Audience,” although if you consider what was playing in Manhattan in the late summer of 1953 it’s hard to understand what he was on about.

In 1964, Pauline Kael asked “Are the Movies Going to Pieces?” in The Atlantic Monthly, claiming that “the younger generation’s embrace of crudely made films and the intelligentsia’s fondness for intentionally confusing ones was responsible for Hollywood’s decline.”

On 1.21.72, right in the middle of the grandest, funkiest and most fabled era of auteurist glory, Dick Cavett asked four directors — Robert Altman, Mel Brooks, Peter Bogdanovich and Frank Capra — if Hollywood was dead. He didn’t mean L.A.-centric filmmaking but the big-studio system that reigned from the ’20s through the ’50s. He was also observing that corporations and corporate-think had taken over from old-school moguls like Harry Cohn, Daryl F. Zanuck and Louis B. Mayer.

On 6.23.80 Kael published her famous New Yorker broadside — “Why Are Movies So Bad or, The Numbers” — about the increasing corporate influence upon Hollywood filmmaking culture.

I first began to sense the onset of megaplex theme-park cinema and the general loss of the spiritual in the early ’90s…a general feeling of alienation from the concept of theatres-as-churches and a gradual slide into the swamp.

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Friendo (alluding to below quotes) to HE: “Are you happy, Jeff?”

HE to friendo: “One, I’m not a rightie — I’m a fair-minded, center-left moderate. Two, Edroso is mostly right. There’s a lot of cruelty out there amongst righties, but if there EVER was a time in U.S.history to despise the extreme left, it’s RIGHT FUCKING NOW. (When I say “extreme left,” I don’t mean run-of-the-mill feminists, lefties, LGBTQs and whatnot. I mean the crazies, as in George Romero‘s crazies.) Three, Wheeler and Hodgetwins have a point.”

Friendo (alluding to below quotes) to HE: “Like Pete Seeger asked, which side are you on? And as David Mamet said, it’s fuck or walk. Given how much scorched earth Ben Shapiro and company are gleefully plotting, you think their stepping on the necks of the pronoun police is worth the trade off? Because THIS is what’s actually happening.”

HE to friendo: “I’m sorry but the pronoun police could use a little slapping around.”

Paul McCartney‘s tour began our or five days ago in Spokane. He can’t do that Helter Skelter wail like he used to, but whadaya want from the guy? The McCartney cameo in Dunkirk is what got me.

“Bertolucci In The Lap of God,” posted on 11.26.18: The passing of Bernardo Bertolucci…good God. The dying of such a man must be shouted, screamed…Bertolucci is dead! Bernardo Bertolucci of Rome lives no more!

There were five distinct Bertolucci eras or episodes — (1) early, earthy, scruffy (The Grim Reaper, Before The Revolution), (2) Glowing, Sensual, Perverse Perfection (The Conformist, The Spider’s Stratagem, Last Tango in Paris, 1900), (3) The First Stumblings (La Luna, Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man), (4) Return to Glorious Form (The Last Emperor, The Sheltering Sky) and (5) The Long, Gradual, Modestly Respectable Downfall (Little Buddha, Stealing Beauty, Besieged, The Dreamers, Me and You).

For 90% of his followers, Bertolucci’s lasting glory stems from episodes #2 and #4 — the other three don’t count. If he had only made The Conformist, Last Tango in Paris, The Last Emperor and The Sheltering Sky, his world-class reputation would be assured.

Bertolucci talked like a Communist in the ’60s and early ’70s but from the mid ’70s on he loved going first class. He was a delirious sensualist, a colorist, a composer, a wearer of the finest clothing, a pageantist, and always a maestro of tracking shots. He and Vittorio Storaro, hand in hand, joined at the hip…brothers of the softest light and the most magical of colors (particularly amber).

If there’s one term or phrase that sums up Bertolucci’s spiritual or directorial signature, it would be “exquisitely composed decadent luxury.”

Remember that elegant party in 1900 when a huge white horse is led into a living room full of rich swells sipping champagne, and the owner tells everyone that the horse is named Cocaine? That was Bertolucci. He was every element in that scene…the guests, the horse, the cocaine, and certainly the audacity of leading a magnificent four-legged animal into a beautifully decorated living room and saying quite calmly “say hello to my gentle friend…for he is you and you are he and we are all together.”

Bertolucci was an absolute God between the releases of The Conformist, which opened stateside on 10.22.70, and Last Tango in Paris, which opened on 2.7.73. Two and a half years of being the absolute Zeus of filmmakers, and everyone on the planet was bowing down.

@iterationoflife Or we riot… idk I’m just spitballing. #roevwade #supremecourt #roevwadeoverturned #leakeddraft ♬ original sound – Roxie

Yesterday HE’s own Sasha Stone was the star of a Newsweek article titled “Johnny Depp, Amber Heard and the Dangers of Cancel Culture,” posted by Carly Mayberry:

The subject was the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard trial, but Stone offered “a broader perspective on cancel culture’s complexity and far-reaching effects.”

Mayberry: “‘We’re living through a big cultural backlash…you can feel it happening,’ Stone said.

“The political left, which in Stone’s view has long controlled so much of our culture, is sticking to a playbook that no longer works, she said.

“‘Where the pendulum couldn’t have swung more left [between 2017 and mid-to-late ’21], it’s now starting to swing right,’ Stone said. ‘Basically, people are starting to [stand] up to the power elite and tell them what they — the little people, the renters, the common texting serfs of our society — are interested in listening to and watching by their own calculations instead of being told what they have to listen to and watch.”

HE admission about previous paragraph: I have posted an HE-modified version of Stone’s original Mayberry quote. Stone’s original was differently worded but I’m saying it better, trust me. The meaning is exactly the same.

Back to Mayberry: “Stone, who doesn’t consider herself liberal or conservative, said that with people like Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and podcaster Joe Rogan, the tide has turned. Musk, who purchased Twitter last week for $44 billion, has criticized the platform’s lack of political neutrality and its censorship and said he plans to change that.

“Rogan, who has long been a target of cancel culture for allegedly spreading COVID-19 misinformation and using racial slurs during his popular podcast, said he has seen an increase of 2 million Spotify subscribers amid his controversial statements and averages 11 million per podcast, according to Poynter.

“‘What mattered with cancel culture was that people lost their livelihood,’ Stone said. [Note: Stone is partly referring to woke Robespierres and other scurrying rodents having made things financially difficult for Hollywood Elsewhere in terms of award-season ads.] ‘They [the establishment] need to be able to be confident enough that they don’t need to fire Johnny Depp or to drop Joe Rogan, and that’s happening.’

“Stone added, ‘I really do think, partly due to Musk, just being enough of a presence to cause people to rethink has changed things. Will people still try to cancel people? Yes, but the worst is over.'”

HE comment: It is my sincere hope and belief that the worst has only just begun as far as the film industry’s woke terrorists are concerned. HE won’t rest until cancel culture fanatics are on the run and hiding in shadowy places and insisting, in the manner of Jean-Louis Trintignant‘s protagonist during the finale of The Conformist, that while CRT and #MeToo and LGBTQ agendas represent a necessary and glorious cultural awakening, they were never for murdering people’s careers while accusing others of same.”

Who suspected until last week’s big Cinemacon screening that Top Gun: Maverick would turn out to be a heart movie? That it may (according to The Ankler’s Jeff Sneider) leave Joe and Jane Popcorn on the verge of choking up? Who had an inkling?

Straight from Lady Gaga: “When I wrote this song for Top Gun: Maverick, I didn’t even realize the multiple layers it spanned across the film’s heart, my own psyche, and the nature of the world we’ve been living in.”

First HE reaction to song title: “Wouldn’t holding someone’s hand get in the way if you’re doing loop-dee-loops from inside the cockpit of an F-18?”

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The dopiest-looking shirt design (will you look at those pointless, giant-sized droopy collars?) mine eyes have beheld since, literally, the late ‘70s, only these are worse.

We all knew it was inevitable, and now, according to an exclusive Politico report, the 1973 Roe v. Wade pro-abortion ruling has officially been trashed as the Supremes have voted against it. The decision was conveyed in a leaked letter draft by Justice Samuel Alito.

(a) Wild horses couldn’t stop me from seeing this! But is this a self-destructive burn injury or plastic surgery? or (b) Are you kidding me?

From “Elon Musk Tweeted My Cartoon,” a 5.2 opinion piece by Colin Wright. The subhead reads “Commentators on the left set about debunking my ‘lived experience’ with charts and abstractions.”

One glance and I said to myself “please, please make a feature out of this….better yet a 10-episode Hulu series. I’m serious — I would watch anything about teens taunting poor hapless winos with cruel sexual exhibitionism…I would watch it in a New York minute. Powerful metaphor. The brand is Fuxley.

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