Greg Kwedar and Clint Bentley’s Sing Sing is an honest, explorational, open-hearted acting exercise film.

It’s intimate and earnest and straight-dealing and “affecting” if you’re inclined to go there, but for me it felt very, very boring. After an hour’s worth, I mean. I sat there and waited and waited and waited…

Because it’s just about a prison situation. Sing Sing’s Rehabilitation Through The Arts program, which is absolutely a good idea and a good thing, Lord knows. But there’s no story, no story tension, nothing to hold you, nothing that pulls you in. It’s just about watching guys act or try to act. Very good, straight-from-the-heart acting and hats off to Colman Domingo, but all you can do is sit there and be patient as you watch it and go “uh-huh.”

I made it to the end, and all I can say is “thank God I’m not doing time in Sing Sing prison.” Because this film certainly makes you feel as if you’re locked up, I can tell you. Thank God I have a certain amount of discipline and energy and a willingness to work hard and not give in to the usual vices and pitfalls, or else I might have become a criminal of some kind…who knows?

This is a very respectable MINOR FILM. I felt respect and a certain limited affection for the incarcerated characters, but thank God it ended when it did because I was starting to moan and groan a little bit.

The word around the campfire is that Lee Isaac Chung‘s Twisters (which I haven’t seen) is CG jizz whizz, and certainly isn’t as good as Jan De Bont Twister (’96).

All these years I’ve had moderately positive recollections of De Bont’s 28-year-old film but they’ve faded somewhat, so I re-watched it last night. Bing-bang, bop-bop-a-loo-bop….bonnng!!…I clapped, I laughed, I chuckled, I whoo-whoo’ed, I hoo-hahed…yes!

Twister is just a goofball popcorn thrill ride, sure, but it’s much, much better than I’d come to recall. Excellent cinematography (tracking shots!), clever-ass dialogue (Michael Crichton and Anne–Marie Martin wrote it), primitive but thrilling CGI, first-rate performances (HeLen Hunt, Bill Paxton, Jamie Gertz, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Cary Elwes), etc.

I’m sorry but on its own shameless, fuck-all terms Twister really works. Escapist movies were so much better in the ’90s than they are today. Watching it made me feel like a pig in shit. It made me go “maaaahhhh!”

I’m very sorry that Shelley Duvall has left us at age 75.

Duvall’s performances were always fascinating, always unique, always space-casey, always something else.

But her peak period boiled down to just three films — 3 Women (’77), The Shining (’80) and Popeye (ditto). Which meant that the impetus behind her career peak boiled down to her partnerships with two brilliant fellows — Robert Altman (Thieves Like Us, Nashville, 3 Women, Popeye) and Stanley Kubrick (The Shining).

I think her Shining baseball bat scene with Jack Nicholson was her best.

Friend-of-a-friend who’s seen Sing Sing: “A small movie with a big heart.”

This Free Press article about Oakland is horrifying. It’s all about far-left Democrats having totally bought into the George Floyd myth that too much police power is a pox on society and that POCs need to be kid-gloved.

In a nutshell: Wokester insanity chickens coming home to roost.

From “The Fall of Oakland,” a 7.10 Free Press article by Leighton Woodhouse:

I’ve said this over and over: depending on the condition of the print, 70mm showings can look great but only if the film was shot in large format (65mm, VistaVision, Todd AO, Super Panavision 70, Ultra Panavision 70, Camera 65, Dimension 150).

35mm upgraded to 70mm (i.e., The Wild Bunch) is fine as far as it goes but nothing to necessarily shout and scream about.

The bottom line today is that digital projection tends to look just as good as 70mm, and in some cases better (i.e., no print degradation). 70mm can look great, yes, but it’s mostly a marketing brand that film cognoscenti have bought into — a way to “sell” classic movies.

In and of themselves, 70mm showings are no longer the coin of the realm.

A month from now (August 9th) Rialto Pictures will release into theatres a 50th anniversary restored version of Francis Coppola‘s The Conversation (’74).

A press release say “the original negative was accessed for the first time and scanned in 4K”…fine. And that the restoration has been “fully approved” by Coppola.

I’ve seen The Conversation four or five times over the last half century, and at least twice in HD over the last decade or so. I wasn’t aware it needed a restoration. The intrigue is in the sound design, of course. Visually it’s always looked fine — an assured, pro-level, run-of-the-mill 35mm film. Mostly urban (San Francisco) interiors, nothing exceptional. The highlight (hand in hand with the sound design) is the Union Square long-lens surveillance footage, etc.

I can’t imagine what kind of visual boinnngg! this restoration could possibly achieve. The film world certainly hasn’t been crying out for a visual upgrade. Okay, this new version might look slightly better…maybe. If it manages this, fine. All to the good.

“When the red red robin comes bob bob bobbin’ along…along!”

Being a mid-realm teenager (14, 15, 16 and sometimes 17) can feel like a cross between a Eugene O’Neil or Edward Albee stage play and a kind of low-simmering horror film.

It felt that way to me, at least, during my Agony Years.

Most of the time I was dead bored or lost in television shows or a movie I’d recently seen, or I was seething about some suffocating parental restriction or discipline, but during those periods when I actually faced my situation I was engulfed in something that felt like a form of suffocation. As in barely able to breathe.

I can’t speak about the horrors that teenage girls have endured over the last half-century, God help them, but almost all male teenagers go through unpleasant trials and gauntlets and humiliations, sometimes involving sex (or the desperate longing for same or at least a brief taste) and more often involving battling-buck behavior…parking-lot taunting, braggadocio, forced machismo, “I won’t back down but on the other hand it might make sense if I do, even if the other guy gets to preen and strut around,” etc.

Who contributed more significantly to making my teenaged life feel more tortured, more conflicted, more arduous, more upsetting in this or that way? Me, first and foremost. Bob Seger‘s “Against The Wind.” I called the shots and the world pushed back.

But it was also my alleged junior high and high-school chums (i.e., confrontational peers) who gave me shit for being different and odd-angled in my thinking (which I definitely was in a Matt Groening secret-genius sort of way), or my well-meaning but nonetheless bruising parents, which is to say my mostly indifferent, occasionally seething alcoholic dad, who was augmented for the most part by my mom, who was just trying to hold things together.

The answer, of course, is that my parents and high-school frenemies behaved like a kind of team — they worked hand in hand to make my teenaged life feel like a dungeon. It’s commonly understood that teenaged life is always difficult. I don’t want to say “it’s intended to be” — that would be too horrific a diagnosis — but the experience has never been a walk in the park for anyone except for high achievers, brown-nosers, goodie-goodie and Student Council types, and in some instances even these people, these apparent lightweights, are dealing with all kinds of buried convulsions.

True story: There was a straight-arrow guy in my New Jersey junior high school, a bespectacled, conservative-mannered guy who had either run for or been elected Student Council president, and one night he tried to commit suicide. No, not by hanging himself in the bathroom — that would have been too decisive — but by drinking some kind of poison. And he was the kind of guy who sprinkled talcum power in his shiny shoes when he was getting dressed for a prom. (I was there — I saw him sprinkle the stuff.)

I never even fantasized about doing myself in — the thought has never been in me until recently — but I did undergo a kind of long-accumulated rage explosion in my high-school cafeteria once, and it was a doozy.

A “friend” had gotten hold of something I valued — I can’t remember if it was a drawing or a letter to some girl or a movie program from Times Square or a cherished record album — all I remember is that it was something that mattered a lot to me, and this guy (a casual hang buddy whom I regarded from time to time as a half-assed friend of sorts) had thrown it into a garbage receptacle of some kind, and I distinctly recall pulling the article out of the bin, walking over to a cafeteria table where the “friend” and some others were sitting, picking up a wooden chair and throwing it at him and shouting what an asshole he was.

I threw the chair so hard that it bounced off my “friend’s” head or shoulder and grazed a young girl who happened to be walking just behind him. I was disciplined for this, of course. People who can’t hold their tempers will always be called on this by social forces, especially if physical harm (however slight) is part of the lashing-out process, as well they should. The girl who was hit by the chair (most likely a glancing blow) didn’t make anything out of it, thank God.

My “friend” was scowling in the aftermath and telling me what an unhinged jerk I was, etc. My comeback line was something along the lines of “yeah? well, there’s more where that came from, fucker…a lot more.”

It’s been obvious to me that Twisters (Universal, 7.19) is Glen Powell jizz whizz — a cheap, shallow CG action wank. And now a between-the-lines reading of Owen Gleiberman’s Twisters review confirms this.

Excerpt: “There are moments of spectacle that hook you, but [the original] Twister, in its time, was bedazzling because we had never seen anything like it on the big screen before.

“Staring up at the tornadoes in Twisters, I felt like I’d already seen something exactly like them — and that when it comes to footage of actual tornadoes, I’d already seen something more incredible. Twisters, fun as parts of it are, is a movie where [iPhone-captured] reality ultimately takes a lot of the wind out of its gales.”

Posted on 5.8.24: Sometime within the next two or three years Glenn Powell, youngish but no spring chicken, is going to have to star in a movie that isn’t mechanized, prefabricated, power-pumped, big-studio bullshit.

You can’t just spew jizz-whizz all the time. Every now and then it’s really necessary to put some nutrition into the cereal bowl.

“Twister Avoidance Syndrome“, posted four years ago (.6.22.20)

Yesterday evening an HE commenter named “Jimmy Porter” brought up Jan De Bont‘s Twister, and said I reminded him of “Bill ‘The Extreme” Harding, the Tornado whisperer played by Bill Paxton. I never took that film seriously (who did?) and I never felt that Harding was much of a character. Twister is “fun” in pieces. It’s basically a series of FX sequences strung together by a romantic triangle story (Paxton, new flame Jami Gertz, old-but-enduring flame Helen Hunt).

HE to Porter: “Thanks for the Bill Paxton analogy. (I guess.) The instinct guy, feels the tornado energy in his bones, etc. I can’t even recall Cary Elwes’ antagonist character in Twister. I saw it once 24 years ago at a Westwood all-media screening.

Critically pummeled but the second highest-grossing film of ‘96 with $495 million worldwide, Twister was a career peak for headstrong director Jan De Bont, who would gradually flame out with Speed 2: Cruise Control, The Haunting and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider.

I naturally recall Paxton and Helen Hunt and Phillip Seymour Hoffman. And Lois Smith’s grandma character who fed them all steak and gravy and mashed potatoes in one downtime scene.”

I’ve been ducking Twister for 24 years, and now — oddly — I’m suddenly thinking of watching it again.

Key George Clooney passage in his 7.10 N.Y. Times guest essay: “The one battle Joe Biden cannot win is the fight against time. Our party leaders need to stop telling us that 51 million people didn’t see what we just saw. We are not going to win in November with this president. On top of that, we won’t win the House, and we’re going to lose the Senate.

“This isn’t only my opinion; this is the opinion of every senator and congress member and governor that I’ve spoken with in private. Every single one, irrespective of what he or she is saying publicly.”