My first viewing of Wim Wenders‘ The American Friend was at the 1977 New York Film Festival, or sometime in late September of that year. Simultaneously bleak and haunting, a moody European noir, wry and cool and even sexy at times, it connects you with every existential dark-night-of-the-soul phase you’ve ever tasted first-hand in your actual life.

The late, great Bruno Ganz (with whom I felt an instant rapport during an ’04 Downfall junket interview) and Dennis Hopper gave the most iconic performance of their careers, and Robby Muller‘s chilling but wonderfully eerie cinematography…forget about it. And composed, of course, in HE’s all-time favorite aspect ratio of 1.66:1.

Several hours ago I discovered that a certain someone in our home (possibly myself) had accidentally turned on the Sony 4K’s Motion Flow viewing option, which we all understand is a huge aesthetic no-no. I realized this as I began watching The American Friend last night, not off my cherished Criterion Bluray but via HBOMax streaming.

Now the tough part: The motion-flowing of Muller’s cinematography (i.e., frame interpolation or black frame insertion) made it look extra-delicious. Sharper, cleaner, more luscious and immediate with those vaguely video-like (but mostly film-like) textures — I couldn’t get over how my love for this ace-level classic seemed to have been completely renewed.

I’m a bad person, I’m a bad person, I’m a bad person, etc.

HE to self: “This isn’t what Muller and Wenders prepared and approved. It’s a gussied-up distortion so how could you even think that it looks good on some level, whatever that level might be? Ask David Fear or Eric Kohn or any scholastically correct film critic in the country, and they’ll condemn motion smoothing to a man.”

Let me be clear that conceptually HE condemns motion-smoothing without the slightest equivocation. It’s not how films should be seen.

Except, that is, for the awkward fact that I half-loved watching the smoothed-out Friend. Not in a historical, politically attuned, get-with the program sense, but on a deep down, kid-in-a-candy-store level. God forgive me, God help me, beat me with sticks, etc.

There’s nothing quite as awful as ignoring a deadline or telling yourself it’s nothing to really worry about. Because it always is. And yet you can’t seem to get going…putting it off, putting it off. It’s a terrible place to be stuck in…a crippling psychological condition. The guilty, nose-to-the-grindstone part of you is panicking more and more, and the lazy part is saying “yeah, I know we have to do this but I wanna wait just a little bit longer.”

Before seeing David Cronenberg‘s Crash (’96) I’d never heard the term symphorophilia, an alleged condition in which sexual arousal results from staging or watching a tragedy, such as a fire or a traffic accident.

In the 24 years since I first laid eyes on this cold, strange, perverse film (and I’ve only seen it once) I’ve never once spoken or written or even joked about the term because no one in the real recognizable world is a symphorophiliac. Because it’s a ridiculous fucking affliction…make that absurd.

And yet Cronenberg’s Crash (which was made when James Spader was slender and had wavy blonde hair) is commonly regarded as a far more interesting and artistically accomplished effort that the other Crash — i.e., the one directed by Paul Haggis, and a winner of three Academy Awards including Best Picture.

A Criterion Bluray version pops on 12.1.20, or about ten days hence.

It’s been announced that Donald Trump, Jr. has been infected with coronavirus. He’s actually been isolating since Monday so they waited four days to announce. Several Trump staffers and allies have contracted the virus including President Trump, and yet — here’s the thing — none have seemed to suffer all that much.

Orange Plague, Melania Trump, Mark Meadows, Hope Hicks, Stephen Miller, Kayleigh McEnany (who presided over a press briefing earlier today), Kellyanne Conway, Ronna McDaniel, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and several other Trump allies have gotten sick, and nobody seems to have been profoundly affected or even inconvenienced a great deal. How many days was Trump out of the loop? Six or seven, if that?

Even Christie, presumed to be especially vulnerable due to obesity, was in a hospital two or three weeks and is now out of the woods. My thought was “Jesus, even Christie skates? I thought overweight people were supposed to have cause for serious concern.”

For all of these righties getting Covid has apparently been like getting a winter flu. A day or two in bed, a few days in isolation and they’re out on the town.

Remember when Covid infections were regarded as a four-alarm health risk or even a possible death sentence? That’s not what’s happening these days, or at least not to those who aren’t elderly or obese, who don’t smoke or have respiratory issues or suffer from Vitamin D deficiencies.

Sen. Chuck Grassley, 87, caught it two or three days ago. Best wishes for a full recovery, but a little voice is telling me that he’ll also emerge unscathed.

Incidentally: A somewhat elderly Connecticut-based friend was infected about three or four weeks ago, and now she’s being told that she’s no longer infectious and more or less recovered. Except her sense of taste and smell are still impaired.

The only famous person who’s been reported as being in some kind of trouble due to Covid infection is Harvey Weinstein.

The 1960 Inger Stevens Twilight Zone version is far more haunting than the 1986 Rutger Hauer-Thomas C. Howell vehicle.

Two problems with the Stevens episode: (1) She’s supposed to be driving across the country but she all does is drive around 1960-era Thousand Oaks and Agoura Hills, and (2) How does a dead woman interact with live people and make phone calls and whatnot?

But you know what works for the Twilight Zone episode in a sad, forlorn way? The spectre of an early death was invisibly hovering over the 26 year-old Stevens when this episode was shot. She only had about ten years to live — she passed on 4.30.70 of an apparent barbituate overdose.

Roughly 17 months ago Terrence Malick began shooting The Last Planet, which is some kind of Jesus movie. The cast includes Géza Rohrig as Christ, Matthias Schoenaerts as Saint Peter, and Mark Rylance as four versions of Satan. It was announced today (11.20) that the title has been changed to The Way of the Wind.

Let me explain something: The Way of the Wind is a nothing title. It’s about as meaningful as Whistle Down The Wind, The Other Side of The Wind, The Wind, Who Has Seen the Wind?, the 1967 Association song “Windy” and Sterling Hayden‘s final line in Bernardo Bertolucci‘s 1900 — “I’ve always loved the wind.”

If Malick sticks to his usual post-production timetable, The Way of the Wind should be released by sometime between late ’21 and mid ’22.

There’s been a general dismissal of The Prom‘s closing musical number, “Wear Your Crown”, and especially of Meryl Streep‘s rap interlude (1.54 to 2:11) — “”And if somebody starts in with new drama, just go high like Michelle Obama.”

It seems unfair to dump on Streep, who’s just going with the flow and giving her usual all. What’s apparently wrong with or certainly grating about The Prom is the film itself, which is starting to feel like a Cats-level enterprise — an overflowing glass of sugary, sticky, socially enlightened energy fizz…overbearingly pushed, pizazzed…lemme outta here.

We all want Emma Nolan (Jo Ellen Pellman) to take her girlfriend Alyssa (Ariana DeBose) to their high-school prom in Indiana…do it! Live and let live! But the underwhelming pro-progressive vote in the 11.3 election told us that people are sick of elite wokester scoldings and instructions about how to think and behave. Thank you, enlightened Broadwayites, for flying in from The Big Apple to celebrate Emma and Alyssa and to straighten out the local anti-LGBTQ bigots….thank you for saying all the right things in such a treacly and overbearing fashion.

People hate this shit (or at least I do), and are in no mood to be entertained to death by Streep, James Corden, Nicole Kidman, Keegan-Michael Key and Andrew Rannells. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of people in Indiana voted for Trump as a way of saying “fuck the celebrative, hectoring, instructive attitudes behind musicals like The Prom!”

Everyone remembers Adrien Lyne‘s Unfaithful…right? Another Manhattan infidelity drama, somewhat in the vein of Fatal Attraction and highlighted by Diane Lane‘s affecting performance as a married suburbanite having a hot affair.

The story, written by Alvin Sargent and William Broyles, Jr. and based on Claude Chabrol‘s La Femme Infidel, was about Lane cheating on mild-mannered husband Richard Gere. The hot boyfriend was played by Oliver Martinez, a young-Gere lookalike.

I happened upon a couple of YouTube clips, and the first thing that came to mind was the much-reported uncertainty and equivocating that Lyne went through over Unfaithful‘s ending. Gere kills Martinez in a fit of rage, you see, and Lyne (or the 20th Century Fox suits) wanted everything to be morally right and owned up to.

The ending implies that after much hemming and hawing Gere has decided to tell the cops that he killed the boyfriend. Which I found hugely unsatisfying.

I don’t think anyone wanted this ending. The audience, I sensed, wanted to give him a pass for bashing Martinez over the head. He could feel badly about it, of course, but the only thing people really wanted was for Gere to SKATE — to walk away and live with it. The principle was that a husband killing his wife’s boyfriend is not a good thing, obviously, but that it’s semi-forgivable. Or at least understandable.

All I know is that as the closing credits rolled I was muttering “that‘s how it ends?”

Yesterday a N.Y. Times interview with Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn, written by Ashley Spencer, appeared. I was somewhat interested in Kurt’s thoughts about guns or rightwing issues of any kind, or about Trump perhaps. (Five years ago there was a slight hoohah about a spirited discussion Kurt and I had during a Hateful Eight interview.) But there was nothing.

My main interest, honestly, was how this long-lasting couple (they’ve been together since ’83) are holding up appearance-wise. That’s all I’m going to say.

In late ’81 or early ’82 Russell and I happened to attend the same private Manhattan party. It was thrown by a female PMK publicist of some standing. Everybody was buzzed and having a raucous old time, and there seemed to be a certain spark or current between Russell and the publicist. Maybe. None of my business.

In any event I left at a reasonable hour. The next morning I decided to call the publicist and thank her for inviting me. Bad idea, as it turned out, because I’d called around 9:30 am, which was too early. The publicist answered, barely. She didn’t say “hello?” when she picked up — she said “hrmmph.” That told me to hang up right away as I didn’t want to be the bad guy who woke her up. I was calling from a pay phone at Grand Central so she never knew.

Michael Cimino‘s Heaven’s Gate had its disastrous New York premiere on 11.19.80, at the Cinema 1 on Third Avenue. A climatic moment in history, and I was there — a witness, a survivor, taking the pulse, mulling the significance. Was the legendary Larry Karaszewski there also? Maybe. Then again he was 19, about to turn 20, and as far as I know still living in South Bend, Indiana. So maybe not.

Posted on 8.13.12: “I was there, man. I was in that audience [at the Cinema 1], and in all my years of watching films I have never felt such a sucking sensation in a room…a feeling of almost total inertia from the oxygen having been all but vacuumed out by a filmmaker with a ridiculous and over-indulged sense of his own vision and grandeur, and by a resultant approach to filmmaking that felt to me like some kind of pretentious waking nightmare.

“I could feel it in one of the earliest scenes, when John Hurt is addressing his graduating Harvard classmates in a cocky, impudent, self-amused fashion and Joseph Cotten (as a character called ‘Reverend Doctor’) is shown to be irked and offended by the snide and brazen tone of Hurt’s remarks, and right away I was saying to myself, ‘What is this? I can’t understand half of what Hurt is on about and I don’t give a damn why Cotten is bothered. If this is indicative of what this film will be like for the next three hours then Cimino is fucked and so am I because I have to sit here and watch it.’

From “Trump tries to subvert the election, inviting Michigan G.O.P. lawmakers to the White House,” posted earlier today in N.Y Times: “After failing repeatedly in court to overturn election results, President Trump is taking the extraordinary step of reaching out directly to Republican state legislators as he tries to subvert the Electoral College process, inviting Michigan lawmakers to meet with him at the White House on Friday.

“Mr. Trump contacted the Republican majority leader in the Michigan State Senate to issue the invitation, according to a person briefed on the invitation. It is not clear how many Michigan lawmakers will be making the trip to Washington, nor precisely what Mr. Trump plans to say to [them]. The president has made few public appearances since the election and his daily schedule often has no events on it, despite the worsening coronavirus pandemic.

“The White House invitation to Republican lawmakers in a battleground state is the latest — and the most brazen — salvo in a scattershot campaign-after-the-campaign waged by Mr. Trump and his allies to cast doubt on President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s decisive victory.”

This is absolute insanity.

It’s one thing for Trump to use his presidency to undermine our trust in elections, but to have the GOP coddling and enabling him is abhorrent.

They should wear this shame forever – this is beyond embarrassing. https://t.co/xT6xULQNtw

— Josh Jordan (@NumbersMuncher) November 19, 2020