In the early aughts Albert Brooks delivered an entertaining speech to some industry gathering of some kind (I seem to recall it occuring in Santa Monica). I somehow got hold of an audio tape of Brooks’ remarks, and transcribed some of them. And one of the stand-out portions, for me, was when he talked about watching Bob Hope on TV as a kid in the 1950s, and how his father would get really excited when an upcoming Hope appearance loomed, but when Hope did his act “you never laughed,” Brooks recalled.

I can’t say I ever found Hope’s movies (or most of them) all that funny either. I’d occasionally chuckle at one of his stand-up routines on the tube, but I rarely cracked a smile at his films. He wasn’t in the business of selling humor as much as attitude — basically the attitude of a smart, selfish, cowardly opportunist with an eye for the ladies and a perhaps a slight willingness to pocked illicit dough on the side. That was his persona.

And that’s why my favorite Hope film might be Beau James (’57), a more or less straight drama about New York City major Jimmy Walker.

Among the Hope “comedies”, there’s one I saw a long time ago that struck me as moderately funny — a silly WWII-era romcom called Caught in the Draft (’41). Don’t hold me to this as I haven’t seen it in decades, but it might be funny. One of the mildly amusing things is the name of Hope’s character — Don Bolton. (How can a movie about a guy with that name not be good for a chuckle or two? Don Bolton!) Sometimes it’s the inauspicious little sausage comedies that seem best in retrospect.

Directed by David Butler and written by Wilkie C. Mahoney and Harry Tugend, Caught in the Draft costars Dorothy Lamour, Lynne Overman, Eddie Bracken, Clarence Kolb and Paul Hurst. I’ve just discovered that Kino Lorber has a Bluray version for sale.

“…for a very important date!”

I’ve occasionally driven aggressively, and always because I’ve been late for a serious appointment of some kind. Luckily I’m a good enough driver to have never even come close to risking an accident. Okay, maybe I came close.

But there are limits to crazy driving. Even if my life depended on not being late to a meeting, there’s no way I’d drive between 84 and 87 miles per hour in a 45 mph zone. That’s just nuts. I could imagine driving, say, 15 or 20 mph over the speed limit but twice that?

Tiger Woods was nonetheless doing exactly that (i.e., flying down the road at 85 mph) in the region of Pacific Palisades on 2.23.21, and in so doing crashed his SUV and broke a few bones in his lower right leg, resulting in “open fractures” — meaning that bones had pierced his skin a la Burt Reynolds in Deliverance.

Source: A 4.7.21 N.Y. Times story by Kevin Draper.

HE commenter “freeek”: “In other news, the trailer for Taylor Sheridan‘s Those Who Wish Me Dead (Warner Bros./HBO Max, 5.14) is out and it’s awesome.”

HE reply: Actually, it’s an aggressively produced, go-for-broke action exploitation flick…shot and edited in such a slam-bang, visually searing, Bruce Willis-in-the-’90s way that the trailer will inspire certain viewers to say “it’s awesome!” But it’s obviously loaded with jet fuel and cranked WAY TOO HIGH (black-attired bad guys firing automatic weapons at a woman and a kid in the middle of firestorm?), and if you believe that a beautiful, super-rich, fashion-magazine icon slash Brad Pitt-ballbuster with her own personal pedicurist can be (or ever could be) a Montana firefighter…well, that’s up to you.

I took one look and said “no way.” Maleficent women with those ravishing eyes and cheekbones and that “stop the presses!” kind of facial symmetry…women that beautiful and slender and financially loaded are legally prohibited from serving as Montana firefighters. (The Montana state legislature passed the law back in the late ’90s, I think.) And even if the “Angie-level women can’t be Montana firefighters” law wasn’t on the books, she’d never get past the first interview. The human resources official would say, “And a woman with your looks and wealth and living with all those kids in Cecil B. DeMille‘s Los Feliz mansion and throwing all those lawyers at Brad Pitt like incendiary grenades…how exactly did you come to decide that Montana firefighting was your destiny? Because I’ll be honest — I don’t get it.”

You KNOW that she can’t be a firefighter, and that only in movies like this do demonic assassins…ahh, forget it. And yet you say “awesome!” And that kid! Didn’t I just say yesterday that we’re sick of kids in prominent roles and that they need to sit in the back seat and just watch and listen?

It would appear that Gia Coppola‘s Mainstream (IFC Films, 5.7.21) is dead meat, having been murdered last September by Venice Film Festival critics.

What gets me about the trailer is that 40-year-old Jason Schwartzman, who played the precocious 15-year-old Max Fischer in Wes Anderson‘s Rushmore (’98), is playing the older, wiser, sensible college professor while Andrew Garfield, 37, is playing the young, egoistic, wild-ass social media guy, and he’s less than three years younger than Schwartzman.

Actors inhabit what they can inhabit and sell what they can sell, but it feels vaguely odd that Schwartzman is suddenly the middle-aged guy.

I hated Steven Spielberg‘s A.I. when I first saw it nearly 20 years ago, and…uhm, that was the last time. But I don’t need to replenish the hate. For years the A.I. remnants have become more and more fragmentary and insignificant, and I’ve been cool with that. All through the Bush, Obama and Trump administrations, it’s been like “A.I. who?”

But sometime earlier today Nick “Action Man” Clement, a man who’s rarely met a film he hasn’t liked, ran a positive looking-back riff about this “robot version of Pinocchio” (a description favored by Stanley Kubrick when he was thinking about directing it in the ’80s), and suddenly a switch flipped and I saw red.

“Enough With The Kids,” posted on 3.25.09:

I don’t like movies about kids. Not any more. Exceptions will happen, of course, but I don’t give a damn about coming-of-age movies or learning-a-tough-lesson movies or movies about young kids going through an adventure that changes their life and/or has a profound impact. Really, throw all of that shit out.

I’ll tell you one reason why I’m not the only one thinking this. The Great Recession has been scaring the hell out of people, and with everyone getting down to brass tacks and doing what they can to survive parents are realizing that they haven’t done their kids any favors by funding a cut-off, over-indulged fantasy realm for them to live in. That’s what the Wall Street pirates have been doing in a sense since Bush came in and look what happened.

Kids need to grow up and grim up and learn the basic survival skills and disciplines. So enough with the Spielberg-aping films that portray a child’s world as a magical-fantastical kingdom in and of itself that adults might be able to learn something from.

I loved E.T. at first blush, but the last time I saw it I had a moderately hard time. There’s no filmmaker who’s more sentimental, manipulative and emotionally cloying than Spielberg when it comes to under-age characters, and that doesn’t age well.

It’s taken years to realize this, but I think my profound dislike of kid films initially came from the one-two punch of Spielberg’s Hook (’91) and George Lucas‘s The Phantom Menace (’99). (Jake Lloyd‘s performance as Anakin Skywalker was surely one of the most agonizing ever delivered in motion picture history.) Those two left me doubled-over, and then along came Spielberg’s A.I. and I was really done with kids playing lead roles. A ten-year process, that.

Yesterday a certain “friendo “and I decided to launch Hollywood Anonymous — a Substack composed of anonymously written reportage about what Hollywood life is actually like these days in terms of production, distribution, casting, financing, publicity, Hollywood-angled journalism, fleeting social alliances, ferreting out the insufficiently woke and so on.

The kind of “this is how things really are these days” articles that people aren’t allowed to write at publications anymore. No names attached, of course. No hints, no allusions, no nothin’.

“In this, a time of glorious and necessary change, progressive revolutionary terror and threatened wokelisting (i.e., cancellation), the only way that anxious human truths and honest sagas can be fully and unapologetically shared is anonymously, hence this site…”

In addition to the HE paywall thing (the particulars of which I’m still scratching my head over), it’ll be my task to persuade certain parties to submit essays about anything and everything, as long as it has something to do with how this town currently runs. We’ll try and launch within a few weeks, and then we’ll see how it goes.

Initially posted on 10.12.08: Herewith a story of a wild train-trip drama during my first trip to Prague, which happened a month after the 1992 L.A. Rodney King Riots and six months before the election of Bill Clinton.

I had attended my first Cannes Film Festival that year (reporting for Entertainment Weekly) and would later visit Cortina d’Ampezzo and the outdoor sets of Cliffhanger for a Sylvester Stallone profile for the New York Times.

I took a train from Nice to Genova, Italy, and then switched to another heading for Prague. But a half-hour into the trip I realized the train was headed for Berlin and not Prague — I’d read the sign wrong. So I got off in Leipzig around 10 pm in order to catch a 2:45 am Leipzig-to-Prague sleeper. I was feeling whipped and unclean so I booked a hotel room to use it for three hours, long enough for a shower and a 90-minute nap.

I was back at the Leipzig bahnhof by 2:15 am. I bought a bunk on the Prague train and crashed in a sleeping compartment as soon as the train pulled out. Somebody had told me to be careful about sleeping-car thievery so I put my wallet (which had about $50 in Italian lira plus American Express traveller’s checks) under my pillow.

Right around dawn, or roughly 2 and 1/2 hours after we left Leipzig, I was awakened by sounds of shouting and agitation. Young women’s voices, one of them shrieking. The first thing I noticed after my head cleared was my wallet sitting on the floor — empty, cleaned out. We’d all been hit.

I got up, ran out and began talking with a group of British high-school girls who were travelling to Prague with a couple of male instructors. More people came up to us, alarmed, anxious. A team of thieves, we quickly deduced, had crept into several sleeping compartments (which didn’t lock from the inside) in the dark, one after another, and taken all they could carry. And the poor British girls had been carrying nothing but cash.

But how long ago?, we asked each other. The train was moving so the baddies must still be on board, right? We started running from car to car, looking for help.

Then more shouting. The thieves, we were told, had been hunted down and were now huddled in one of the first-class compartments, protecting themselves from enraged victims who had chased and were now surrounding them, locking them in, taking them prisoner. Everyone in our group began running in that direction. Vigilante justice! Everyone enraged, determined, acting and thinking as one.

We came upon a beefy, pink-faced German train conductor and pounced on him, demanding in a mixture of English, German and Esperanto that he call the authorities and have them meet the train at the next stop so the thieves could be arrested. But the conductor, a lifelong veteran of East German socialism, was terrified at the idea of taking the initiative. I speak no German, but it was obvious from his squealing voice — the guy literally resembled Porky Pig — that he didn’t want to go up against a team of possibly armed thugs. Leave me alone!

Four days ago Tatiana mentioned something that sounded like “lion”…something that had arrested her attention and that she might want to watch or read or listen to. Tatiana doesn’t always pronounce the full title of a movie or song or TV show so I had to be careful. I always get yelled at if I misunderstand her so right away I was concerned. Actually I was sweating bullets. If I was Tatiana’s employee at a Russian marketing firm she would probably fire me in less than 72 hours, and certainly within a week.

I suspected she might not have said the word “lion” but possibly “lyin'”…so great was my terror that I dared not speculate. Maybe, I told myself, she’d heard Roy Orbison‘s “Cryin'” and wanted to add it to her iPhone music library.

I summoned all my courage and asked her to clarify, and this time she used the word “Ryan.” Great, I told myself — we’re getting somewhere! I calculated that she probably wasn’t alluding to Rian Johnson or Ryan Reynolds or Robert Ryan or Ryan O’Neal….which Ryan? Then she said something about watching “Ryan” later that evening. I won’t bore you with further particulars but she finally communicated (or Jeff the Stupid Oaf finally understood) that she needed to watch Saving Private Ryan for her film class. So we did.

The following day I posted “Fragging Corporal Upham.”

Last evening Tatiana was taking part in a Zoom discussion of Steven Spielberg’s 1998 war film with her instructor and fellow students, most in their early 20s. Early on a young African-American woman had a question or more precisely a complaint: why did the film not include any African-American soldiers, even in the background? She said she’d understand an all-white cast if Ryan had been made in 1945 or thereabouts, but it’s only 22 and 1/2 years old so she didn’t get Spielberg’s attitude.

The instructor acknowledged her concern and decided against mentioning that aside from troops of color being sent in as replacements during the Battle of the Bulge, U.S. troops were largely segregated during WWII, certainly when it came to infantry combat troops. He knew that wouldn’t fly.

What the student meant was, “I don’t care about the actual WWII history and segregationist policies…what I don’t understand is why Steven Spielberg didn’t cast Saving Private Ryan according to the common practice of presentism — i.e., ‘uncritical adherence to present-day attitudes, especially the tendency to interpret past events in terms of modern values and concepts'”?

In other words, we’re all accustomed to the presentism of Bridgerton, Jodie Turner Smith playing Anne Boleyn and African and Asian actors filling costarring roles in Mary, Queen of Scots. So why wasn’t the socially concerned Spielberg on this train back in the late ’90s?

Reconsider the Temple of Concordia, the well-preserved main attraction in the Valley of the Temples, a series of Greek-era Doric structures and scattered remnants just south of Agrigento, Sicily. Built between 440 and 430 B.C., it’s the largest and best-preserved Doric temple in Sicily and one of the best-preserved Greek temples period.

The park was closed before we arrived at 8:30 pm so we drove onto the grounds of a swanky hotel located only a couple of hundred yards below the above-named structure, pretending we were guests, in order to get a bit closer. Snapped on Tuesday, 5.25.10 at 8:55 pm.

Southern Journo Pally: “I had zero interest in this until reading your reaction and several reviews which made it sound gloriously wacky. Which it is. A barely comprehensible plot, good direction and editing, amazing FX, plenty of intentional laughs. So over-the-top, it’s utterly enjoyable.

“I also enjoyed a bunch of solid actors spending a good deal of their screen time looking at a blue screen and registering awe, fright, confusion, etc. Demian Bichir made a good, ridiculous villain, but poor Kyle Chandler was totally wasted (I’m sure that paycheck made up for his nothing part.

“Anyway, I’m recommending it to my friends. They won’t believe I saw it, let alone liked it, but…”

Just for clarity’s sake, I was told the other day that mask-wearing wasn’t really happening in early to mid-March of 2020, and that it didn’t become an established thing until mid-April (and in some areas later than that). Maybe so, but here’s photographic proof that HE was totally masked up as of 3.12.20 — “Each Dawn I Die” and “Logan’s Run“, both posted in Austin. On 3.22.20 I posted about deciding to buy a stylish mask (Jasper Johns American flag or black with white polka dots). You know that certain apparels and behaviors are well embedded when things get to the fashion-sense stage.

The Serpent = eight hours of my life that I’ll never get back. Yesterday I moaned and groaned about the lukemia-like effect of watching this limited BBC One / Netflix series about notorious serial killer Charles Sobhraj.

But I might not have watched it at all if a certain “friendo”, whom I’ve known for years and whose taste in feature films is roughly at par with my own, hadn’t urged me to do so.

Yesterday “Mister Quiqley, Jr.” wrote that “this is a growing problem I’ve seen, and by now we’ve all been likely burned by it — the ‘friend with great taste in films who recommends bad TV’ dilemma. Or, to coin an acronym, FWGTIFWRBTV.”

In other news, HE is just as intrigued with “letterkenny” as everyone else, but what IS “letterkenny”? Who mentioned it first and for what reason? From what context did it arrive?