It’s been two and a half months since Brendan Fraser, 52, finished his work on Darren Aronofsky‘s The Whale. Fraser was presumably asked to bulk up as he was playing a 600-pound depressive.

If I were Fraser I would have begun crash-dieting like a motherfucker as soon the film wrapped in order to look reasonably proportioned when the film opens. I would also fly to Prague and get my hair fixed. All right, I’ll admit it — I’m posting this because I was distracted by the term “glorious fat phoenix.”

Note to jackals and wokesters: I’m not using this term to express any personal thoughts about corpulence. I simply saw the item on Twitter. If you want to cancel anyone, cancel Lance St. Laurent — I’m just an innocent bystander.

I’ve watched three episodes of Hacks, the HBO Max relationship comedy series about a Las Vegas-based, boomer-aged standup comic named Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) who’s been told that her career will be in trouble if she doesn’t punch up her act, and so she reluctantly hires a 25-year-old, down-on-her-luck comedy writer named Hannah Ainbinder (Ava Daniels) in hopes of doing so.

Right away I was hooked and pleased by the sharp dialogue (the writers are Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs and Jen Statsky) and the fact that when Vance and Ainbinder start trading barbs (it doesn’t take long) Hacks is genuinely funny, or at least chuckle-worthy. And that was very welcome.

I was afraid, you see, that Hacks might play like Late Night, the 2019 Amazon comedy that used the same basic set-up — a crusty, boomer-aged talk-show host named Katherine Newbury (Emma Thompson) whose ratings have been sinking, and thereby pressured into hiring a young comedy writer named Molly Patel (Mindy Kaling), but mainly because she’s a woman of color.

Hacks is at least occasionally funny; Late Night, which bombed with the public after being embraced by the Sundance cool kidz, didn’t make me crack a smile. And for a good reason: Kaling’s Molly didn’t talk, think or behave like a comedy writer.

All good writers wield swords. They think in terms of cutting, mostly unkind observations about whatever. We all understand that jokes which “land” and actually make people laugh are always zingy and sometimes flirt with cruelty. A certain pointed irreverence is essential.

Molly’s bottom line was that she seemed to value being respected and treated courteously by Katherine and her comedy-writer colleagues above everything else, and that she’d rather swallow her tongue than wound the feelings of her fellow writers (all white guys) or anyone else for that matter. She was basically a p.c. Miss Manners type — more woke than joke.

Ainbinder is no stranger to wokester sensibilities (it comes with being in your mid 20s) but she’s not afraid to slice and dice when angered or otherwise aroused, and right away I was saying “okay, she’s a writer…she gets barbed humor…wounded and recognizable…the shoe fits.”

That’s all I’m saying for now — Hacks works because it’s funny, and because there’s no trouble believing that the two main characters are actual people. Everyone gets wounded or punctured or side-swiped in this series. Life is pain.

The opening of Quentin Tarantino‘s Jackie Brown is a tracking shot of the titular character (Pam Grier) on a moving treadmill inside LAX. Right away you’re noticing how stiff she is — no noticable reaction to her surroundings. Grier’s almost entirely frozen features (she blinks three or four times but otherwise doesn’t move a muscle) suggest the soul of a mannequin.

Right away everyone noticed a close resemblance to the famous opening-credit tracking shot from Mike Nichols‘ The Graduate — a view of Dustin Hoffman‘s Benjamin Braddock on a similar LAX treadmill. Every so often the immobile Hoffman reacts to this or that — the overhead lighting, a person walking nearby, a p.a. announcement — but mostly he just stands there like a robot. The idea was to suggest that Braddock was anxious and intimidated and fearful — afraid to move one way or the other.

In short, there was a point to be derived from Hoffman’s treadmill behavior. But what was the point of Grier doing it? I could never figure that out.

Jackie Brown is not a submerged or intimidated type — she’s a reasonably crafty, mentally alert, alive-on-the-planet-earth flight attendant (Cabo Airlines) who’s just arrived from some destination (presumably Cabo San Lucas). A follow-up shot shows her running to a gate in what appears to be the same terminal, where she’s expected to check people in for a flight. She makes it in time and performs her duties.

The first time I saw Jackie Brown I was immediately muttering “what the hell is this? Why is Grier doing a Dustin Hoffman? What’s the connection?” I still don’t know.

M*A*S*H (’70) is easily the coolest, funniest and most financially successful Robert Altman film ever made, not to mention the inspiration for a hugely successful TV series that ran for 11 years. I therefore found it surprising, at first, that out of 20 Altman films The Guardian‘s Ryan Gilbey had ranked M*A*S*H in 19th place. My actual reactions were “how…why…what the fuck?”

Then it hit me: Gilbey is on the youngish side, presumably born in the early to mid ’80s, and probably receptive to this or that wokester concern. (Three years ago Gilbey wrote that “it is difficult to see how the unquestioning reverence of directors can continue in this new climate of hyperawareness, where the constant drip-feed of discrediting stories proves once and for all that time’s up” — i.e., fuck Polanski, Allen and Bertolucci.) This led to a suspicion that Gilbey had probably downgraded M*A*S*H because of the cruel and abrasive way that Sally Kellerman’s uptight “Hot Lips Houlihan” is treated by M*A*S*H‘s Elliott Gould, Donald Sutherland, Tom Skerrit and the rest of the gang.

In short, this celebrated 1970 film has apparently fallen afoul of the #MeToo brigade and its allies.

I’m presuming that the outdoor shower humiliation sequence is regarded as particularly egregious. But the basic idea behind giving “Hot Lips” a hard time (along with her uptight boyfriend, Major Frank Burns, played by Robert Duvall) is that she’s an officious prig and “a regular Amy clown,” as Sutherland calls her in one scene.

“Hot Lips” (her actual name is Margaret) isn’t humiliated because she’s a woman or because Gould, Sutherland and the rest enjoy humiliating their betters or anything in that vein — she’s punished for being a rigid bureaucratic asshole — an officer more concerned with protocol and appearances than with behaving like a human being and somehow weathering the horrors of war, bloodshed and daily death. She walks around with a high regard for military tradition, and with a broomstick up her butt.

Roger Ebert, 51 years ago: “If the surgeons didn’t have to face the daily list of maimed and mutilated bodies, none of the rest of their lives would make any sense. When they are matter-of-factly cruel to ‘Hot Lips’ Hoolihan, we cannot quite separate that from the matter-of-fact way they’ve got to put wounded bodies back together again. ‘Hot Lips,’ who is all Army professionalism and objectivity, is less human because the suffering doesn’t reach her.”

In her 1.24.70 New Yorker review, Pauline Kael described “Hot Lips” as “a pompous fool.”

Kael also called M*A*S*H “the best American war comedy since sound came in, and the sanest American movie of recent years.” Pretty much everyone was in agreement back then.

M*A*S*H was set in 1951 Korea but was obviously played by actors rooted in the late ’60s. Gould and Sutherland’s hairstyles alone would never be tolerated in any 20th Century American military culture, and one of the first overheard lines (spoken by a M*A*S*H nurse) is that something-or-other is “a real drag.”

The mood of M*A*S*H was a revelation and a soother, and 1970 audiences fell head-over-heels. These irreverent surgeons were “hip Galahads,” as Kael put it, and “always on the side of decency and sanity.” Did they behave in a somewhat sexist manner, according to the standards of 2021? Yeah, but they weren’t jerks or dumb hounds — what mattered to them was getting through the Korean War their own way, and sometimes that included having it off with a willing nurse or downing of one or two martinis with fresh olives. Being smart fellows, they were simply accustomed to outsmarting the fools.

Ryan Gilbey is obviously not obliged to agree with Ebert, Kael and the multitudes who went wild over M*A*S*H back in the day, and he’s perfectly entitled to dismiss it because of behavior that doesn’t seem to pass muster by #MeToo standards. But posting this opinion makes him seem a little stiff-necked.

Most of Pauline Kael’s review:

“M*A*S*H is a marvellously unstable comedy — a tough, funny, and sophisticated burlesque of military attitudes that is at the same time a tale of chivalry. It’s a sick joke, but it’s also generous and romantic – an erratic episodic film, full of the pleasures of the unexpected. I think it’s the closest an American movie has come to the kind of constantly surprising mixture in Shoot the Piano Player, though M*A*S*H moves so fast that it’s over before you have time to think of comparisons. While it’s going on, you’re busy listening to some of the best overlapping comic dialogue ever recorded. The picture has so much spirit that you keep laughing – and without discomfort, because all the targets” — including “Hoi Lips” — “should be laughed at.

Friendo chimes in….

Please note Joe Pesci‘s exaggerated expression of alarm at :20 mark. It would’ve been extra-great if Pesci had flashed the same expression when Sharon Stone went down on him in Casino.

With Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up presumably headed for Telluride ’21 (as one of four Netflix titles expected to make an appearance), early research-screening reactions are worth noting.

Wikipedia says it’s mainly about two low-level astronomers (Jennifer Lawrence, Leonardo DiCaprio) who embark on a giant media tour to warn mankind of an approaching asteroid that will destroy Earth.

A thespian who’s seen McKay’s film has told World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy that it’s basically a “climate change satire” with a lot of the same meta-editing McKay brought to his last two films (The Big Short, Vice). The viewer further asserts that DiCaprio, Meryl Streep and Mark Rylance (as a Bill Gates/Warren Buffet-type) seem like the mostly likely recipients of Oscar buzz. He/she adds that Lawrence’s character is “a little too thinly written.”

The version that was recently screened allegedly ran 2 hours and 30 minutes, and is said to be very “Brecht-ian” with another viewer saying Paddy Chayefsky’s shadow “looms all over it.”

Another L.A. test screening will happen in a few days.

The Guardian‘s Ryan Gilbey has ranked Robert Altman’s 20 best films, but Gilbey’s favorites and priorities….my God!

Gilbey has M.A.S.H. ranked at #19 (and in this instance below the completely negligible The Perfect Couple) and The Player — Altman’s hugely popular 1992 comeback film — at #14. In the tenth-place slot, the legendary California Split is ranked below Come Back to the Five & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (?!?!) and also below the troubled, cocaine–ish Popeye, which is ranked seventh. Gibney has Nashville ranked second, which is unfortunate given the almost universal recognition (except on the part of Larry Karaszewski and the like) that Nashville is snide and misanthropic…it really, really doesn’t hold up any more.

From “Robert Altman Is Dead“, posted on 11.21.06:

“Altman was a beautiful ornery man, occasionally touched by genius. That’s how genius is — it visits, whispers, flutters down and lights you up…and then it’s gone. And you can’t even show the world that it’s touched you unless you’re lucky as well. Altman was lucky and imbued enough to have things really work out maybe six or seven times in his life, and that’s pretty impressive.

“I’m talking the usual litany, of course: The Long Goodbye, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, The Player, M.A.S.H., California Split, Thieves Like Us, Tanner on HBO, Gosford Park…what is that, eight? A Prairie Home Companion was warm and very spirited…an engaging mood piece (I loved Garrison Keillor‘s presence and Meryl Streep‘s singing), but not quite pantheon-level.

“I used to get a real kick out of Altman’s ornery-ness. He was always friendly, but he never smiled unless he really meant it. He tended to scowl and he didn’t suffer fools.

“He sure as shit didn’t tolerate any of my bullshit when I first started to talk to him in early ’92, when early screenings of The Player were happening and I was trying to spread the word that Altman was back in a big way. When I asked to do a second Entertainment Weekly interview with him prior to the opening of The Player in April ’92, he thought I was being inefficient and taking too long and flat-out said so: “What are you, writing a book here?”

“A month or two later we were both at the Cannes Film Festival, and I was trying to get quotes for an EW piece about celebrity reactions to the Rodney King riots that had just happened in Los Angeles. I asked Altman for a quote at a black-tie party on the beach, and he scowled again. ‘This subject is too important to comment about for Entertainment Weekly,’ he said, and then turned his back.

“You can’t hear me, Bob, and if you were here you wouldn’t give a shit anyway, but I’ve been telling people that line for the last several years and getting a good laugh from it every time.”

Altman was lucky enough to tap into a five-year period when he made M*A*S*H (’70), McCabe & Mrs. Miller (’71), The Long Goodbye (which was barely paid attention to when it opened in ’73), Thieves Like Us (’74), California Split (’74) and Nashville (’75), which made a big splash at the time with the Pauline Kael review and all.

Terrence Rafferty once wrote that the early to mid ’70s worked well for Altman because “the conditions were right for Altman’s loose-jointed, intuitive, risk-courting approach to making movies, and the planets over Hollywood haven’t aligned themselves in that way since…the wondrous opportunity those years afforded adventurous filmmakers like him was that studio executives, for once in their ignoble history, actually knew that they had no idea what they were doing.”

[Starting at :44 mark] “This is a problem not just with Hollywood, but with Los Angeles, which is inexorably connected to show business. [Show business] is the reason why a large percentage of people move there, and this massively affects the politics of the place, and not just politics but also social discussions. It’s the way that people communicate [in Los Angeles], but it’s also an incredibly disingenuous way of communicating. In which you want to say the things that people are gonna want to hear, and that way they’re going to cast you.”

And he goes on from there, and it gets better and better in a Nathaniel West meets 21st Century desperation way…what a hell-hole this town can be.

It was obvious many weeks ago that Patrick Hughes‘ The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard is crapola. I was reminded of this fact a couple of weeks ago when I suffered through the ear-pounding trailer on the big screen. The names “Ryan Reynolds” and “Samuel L. Jackson” have long struck fear in the hearts of discerning moviegoers, and mine in particular. The weekenders who went to see and perhaps even half-enjoyed this critically dismissed sequel (24% RT) are, no offense, peons — unburdened by even a semblance of taste. (Did LexG enjoy it?) The $70 million comedy thriller was #1 across in the nation’s theatres over the weekend — $11.6 million earned from 3331 screens, or an average of $348 per screen. It’s earned $17,024,340 overall.