Will Joe and Kamala man up, stand up and tell the destruction junkies, store-looters and BLM-ers that small businesses shouldn’t be torched because the bulls shot Jacob Blake seven times in the back? Of course not. They’re not allowed to. They can only voice support. Stop systemic racism by destroying the stores of small-time, hard-working merchants!

I’m being gently pressured to come up with some choice quotes to be used for HE merchandise — mugs, iPhone cases, COVID masks, bumper stickers. (And no T-shirts.) “Boxy is beautiful,” “Don’t tell me,” that line of country. If anyone has any suggestions…my brain has stalled.

I’m not sure I saw Guy Hamilton‘s The Mirror Crack’d back in’80, but I probably attended the all-media. I wouldn’t watch it now with a knife at my back. Most of the cast looks trapped. They like the money but deep down they hate themselves, and yet they can’t escape it so they have to put their best foot forward.

Kim Novak and Tony Curtis look relatively content but everyone else seems miserable. Look at poor Edward Fox — he looks like he wants to kill himself. By today’s measure Rock Hudson looked at least 65 — he was actually 55.

Elizabeth Taylor‘s face had a puffy, boozy look, but at least she’d modified her appearance compared to that infamous Ron Galella “fat Liz” photo, snapped outside Studio 54 on 5.21.79. But she looked terrific in ’88 after following her own diet regimen (“Elizabeth Takes Off”).

Shooting happened in Kent between 5.12.80 and 7.18.80. The Mirror Crack’d opened on 12.19.80.

From Vincent Canby’s 12.18.80 review: “Who did it? If you haven’t figured that out by the time the second murder happens, you should be sent to bed without your warm milk.”

The Kino Lorber Bluray pops on Tuesday, September 1st.

Whenever I hear about something odd that falls outside my own experience, I try and think of a film that depicted same. Yesterday’s oddball thing (8.24) was Aram Roston’s Reuters story about the seven-year sexual arrangement between Jerry Falwell Jr., his wife Becki Falwell and “pool boy” Giancarlo Granda.

The arrangement began when Ganda was 20. He told Roston that for years he had sex with Becki while Jerry, former head of Liberty University and a staunch supporter of Orange Plague, looked on from the corner.

Right away I flashed on a scene from Paul Schrader‘s American Gigolo (’80). Richard Gere‘s Julian Kaye drives out to Palm Springs to attend to the wife of a wealthy financier named Rheiman (Tom Stewart). Rheiman asks Julian to have rough sex with his wife Judy (Patricia Carr) while he watches.

(l.) Judy Rheiman (Patricia Carr) and Julian Kaye (Richard Gere) during an ominous bedroom scene in American Gigolo (’80).

Standing in the corner just like Falwell allegedly did, the financier barks out orders….”slap that bitch!” or something equally repellent. Julian, sitting on the bed with Judy under a sheet, turns and gives this 50something creep a look that says “Jesus, man, who are you?”

Roston: “Granda says that he met Jerry and Becki Falwell while working as a pool attendant at the Fontainebleau Miami Beach hotel in March 2012. Starting that month and continuing into 2018, Granda told Reuters that the relationship involved him having sex with Becki while Jerry looked on.

“Granda showed Reuters emails, text messages and other evidence that he says demonstrate the sexual nature of his relationship with the couple, who have been married since 1987.

“’Becki and I developed an intimate relationship and Jerry enjoyed watching from the corner of the room,’ Granda said in an interview. Now 29, he described the liaisons as frequent — ‘multiple times per year’ — and said the encounters took place at hotels in Miami and New York, and at the Falwells’ home in Virginia.”

Let me guess…it turns out that 14 year-old Enola Holmes (Millie Bobby Brown) isn’t just a chip off the old block but in some ways smarter than her significantly older brothers Sherlock (Henry Cavill) and Mycroft (Sam Claflin).

It would appear that Enola Holmes (Netflix, 9.23) is a blending of Barry Levinson‘s Young Sherlock Holmes (’85) and Guy Ritchie‘s Sherlock Holmes (’09) but through a 21st Century female prism, and with the usual injections of arch attitude and ironic popcorn fantasy.

Based on Nancy Springer‘s Enola Holmes Mysteries, and directed by Harry Bradbeer (Fleabag, Killing Eve). Costarring Helena Bonham Carter, Fiona Shaw, Adeel Akhtar, Frances de la Tour, Louis Partridge and Susie Wokoma.

I posted my first Ammonite riff (“Here We Go Again“) on 2.19.20….pre-COVID masks.

Observation #1: A close relation of Celine Sciamma‘s Portrait of a Lady on Fire, once again set near a beachy coastline in the distant past (Dorset in the 1840s), and once again about a lesbian love affair between tightly-corseted, socially restricted women who wear their hair in buns.

Observation #2: A bit of a May-December romance with 43 year-old Winslet (now 44) as the real-life fossil-searcher and paleontologist Mary Anning, who was born in 1799 and died in 1847. 26 year-old Saoirse Ronan (25 during filming) plays geologist Charlotte Murchison, whose husband, Roderick Impey Murchison, paid Anning to take care of her for a brief period.

Except the 1840s romance that allegedly occured wasn’t a May-December thing. Murchison was actually 11 years older than Anning, having been born on April 18, 1788. She was therefore in her early 50s and not, as the film has it, in her mid 20s. Furthermore Roderick Murchison wasn’t, as the film indicates, some kind of patronizing sexist twit who regarded his wife as a fragile emotional invalid who needed looking after. The Murchisons were actually partners in their geological studies; they travelled all over Europe together.

Charlotte Murchison lived to age 80; poor Mary Anning passed from breast cancer at age 47 or 48.

Ammonites are the extinct relatives of sea creatures that lived during the Jurassic and Cretaceous eras.

Ammonite will play at the Toronto Film Festival (so to speak) on 9.11.20.

Liz Garbus and Lisa Cortes‘ All In: The Fight for Democracy, a 102-minute Amazon Prime doc about voter suppression and how it affected the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial race between Democrat Stacey Abrams and Republican Brian Kemp, will debut on 9.18.20.

16 days earlier the Garbus-Cortes doc will have a special world premiere screening at the West Wind Solano Twin Drive-In (1611 Solano Way) in Concord. The event is co-sponsored by Mill Valley Film Festival honcho Mark Fishkin and Telluride Film Festival exec director Julie Huntsinger.

Team Hollywood Elsewhere would be delighted to attend but we’ll be in Arizona…sorry.

In November 2018 Democratic gubernatorial Stacey Abrams lost to Republican gubernatorial candidate (and ardent Trump supporter) Brian Kemp, by a margin of roughly 54,000 votes — 1,978,408 for Kemp vs. 1,923,685 for Abrams. It is widely agreed that Kemp, Georgia’s Secretary of State since 2010, had basically cheated his way to victory by way of voter suppression.

On a single day in late July 2017 Kemp had removed 560,000 Georgians from the voter rolls — voters who’d been flagged because they’d skipped one too many elections. Abrams would later call the purge the “use-it-or-lose-it scheme.”

On 8.11.18, the New York Times posted an article by Carol Anderson titled “Brian Kemp, Enemy of Democracy“, which explored Kemp’s unscrupulous voter suppression efforts. “Hackable polling machines, voter roll purges, refusing to register voters until after an election, the use of investigations to intimidate groups registering minorities to vote — Mr. Kemp knows it all,” Anderson wrote.

The best kind of movie gunfire is almost more felt than heard. Half sonic blast, half rib-punch. One of the best sounding handguns I’ve ever heard in an action film was fired by Tom Cruise in that back-alley scene in Collateral when he blew away two thieves (starting at 1:12 on the clip below). The sound was extra-effective because my first viewing was at the Arclight, and those cranked-up woofer speakers…man!

I’ve noted two or three times that the guh-BACH-ohwl gunshots in John Sturges‘ The Magnificent Seven represent the other end of the spectrum, as they’re totally without that special rumble-roar. Marlon Brando’s gunshots in a saloon shoot-out in One Eyed Jacks represent a slight improvement. But the cannon-like gunshots in George Stevens‘ Shane (’53) are still the best in my book. When Alan Ladd shoots the hell out of a little white rock on the Starrett property and later when he plugs Jack Palance and Emile Meyer in the big finale.

In a perfect world the rights owners of The Magnificent Seven would pay for a Shane-like redesign of the gunshots. The improvement would be wonderful.

HE comment posted on 8.25.20, sometime around 6:30 am: “How telling that Jimmy Porter feels the urge to rub in the fact that The King of Staten Island didn’t fully connect with people who wanted and expected a semblance of the usual usual. KOSI reps an exotic realm in more ways than one, acknowledged, but it walks and talks in a completely honest and straightforward way. It has the courage to be funny on its own terms. You have to ‘let it in’ and accept Judd Apatow and Pete Davidson’s idea (revelation?) that Staten Island really is, from a certain perspective, this strange, half-forsaken, outback culture (part blue-collar, part stoner, in some ways hermetic) that even New Jerseyans look down upon. For a sizable sector (i.e., the Jimmy Porters of the world) KOSI was a zone apart and an attitude too far. I almost felt that way at first, but then it winnowed its way in.”

From “The Staten Island Funnies,” posted on 6.8.20: You know you’re in good hands when a film you’ve clicked with seems to be more on-point the second time. Last week I got an even better kick out of The King of Staten Island and enjoyed the performances all the more, not to mention the exotic atmosphere and how it all fits together in a reasonably neat and satisfying way. And without a single ounce of fat.

For my money The King of Staten Island is easily as good as Judd Apatow‘s Funny People (although a bit more despairing and downmarket) and at times as emotionally poignant as Trainwreck but braver, in a sense.

It’s significant that the film doesn’t hop on the ferry and visit lower Manhattan until the very last scene. Because the KOSI version of Staten Island is really a zone apart — thousands of miles from Brooklyn and Manhattan. Scott’s stoner bros (including “fat Kanye”) are so low-rent and devolved they pretty much border on the vegetative.

But I admired the commitment to this realm. The comedy hasn’t been sitcommed or punched up, or at least not in the usual ways. It feels real and grounded, and yet, per standard practice when it comes to Apatow’s brand, carefully honed and sculpted as far as the unrefined voices of the various characters are concerned. I loved that the film doesn’t feel slick or overly “presented”.

Hollywood Elsewhere is on the hunt for PDFs of the following screenplays. I’m sure there are many, many others that I should be seeking out. Boldface obviously signifies special interest:

12 O’Clock Boys by Barry Jenkins and Sherman Payne
24/7 by Sarah Rothschild
Analog by Ryan J. Condal
Annette by Ron Mael, Russell Mael
Appetite by J.T. Petty
A Quiet Place 2 by John Krasinski
Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar by Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo
Cherry by Jessica Goldberg
Cinderella by Kay Cannon

Del & Charna by Rich Talarico and Alex Fendrich
Don’t Look Up by Adam Mckay
Dream Horse by Neil McKay
Emancipation by William N. Collage
The Empty Man by David Prior
Escape Room 2 by Will Honley
Everybody’s Talking About Jamie by Dan Gillespie and Tom Macrae
Everything Everywhere All At Once by Dan Kwan, Daniel Scheinert
Faster Higher Further by Charles Randolph’

The Force by David Mamet
The French Dispatch by Wes Anderson
The Fugitive by Brian Tucker
Ghostbusters Afterlife by Jason Reitman and Gil Kenan
Girl Named Sue by Lisa Cole and Mark Monroe
Godzilla vs Kong by Max Borenstein
Halloween Kills by David Gordon Green and Danny McBride
The Harder They Fall by Samuel and Boaz Yakin
Happiest Season by Clea Duvall, Mary Holland
The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard by Tom O’Connor
Honest Thief by Steve Allrich, Mark Williams
A House in the Sky by Sara Corbett