I’ve begun to read Sam Wasson’s “The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and The Last Years of Hollywood.” It’s the story of how four semi-legendary fellows in the prime of their lives — director Roman Polanski, Jack Nicholson, screenwriter Robert Towne, producer Robert Evans — lucked into one of the most charmed collaborations ever, aided by an especially fertile time in Hollywood. It produced one of the finest ‘70s films and arguably the greatest dark-underbelly-of-Los Angeles noir ever made.

I’ve only read three or four chapters, but man, it’s delicious. Wasson’s writing is so choice, so lean and clean, so wise and sharp and cultivated to a fare-thee-well. But I have to say that I’m having trouble remembering the title. Probably because it doesn’t sound right. What constitutes a “big” goodbye (or for that matter a small one)? Goodbyes can be sad, long, drawn-out, tearful, sudden, etc. But I’ve never once contemplated the idea of a big one.

mooth,

As Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson noted yesterday, the 2020 Independent Spirit Awards “are really indie” this year. Translation: Joe and Jane Popcorn tend to pay scant attention to the day-before-the-Oscars Spirit Awards, but this year they’re really not going to care all that much.

As usual, Hollywood Elsewhere will be attending the Santa Monica Surfside Show under the Big White Tent, but my enthusiasm will be mitigated by the fact that the only Spirit Award nominee that really and truly knocked me out was A24 and Robert Eggers‘ The Lighthouse (and particularly Jarin Blaschke‘s black and white cinematography).

I’m also a serious fan of two other A24 nominees, Waves and The Farewell. And of course of Marriage Story, which will likely win the Best Picture trophy.

I also feel mixed about attending an event that will have a high percentage of Khmer Rouge wokester militants, as well as (I’m presuming) a fair amount of Pete Buttigieg dissers. But you have to try and get along or at least, you know, sidestep potential conflicts.

Here are some of Thompson’s predictions along with occasional HE comments:

BEST PICTURE / Will Win: Marriage Story / Spoiler: Uncut Gems / HE comment: Which of these two films is likely to linger more in the memory 10 or 20 years hence? Obviously Uncut Gems, despite the fact that it’s a deeply infuriating film to sit through, Adam Sandler‘s admirable performance aside.

BEST DIRECTOR / Will Win: Josh and Benny Safdie (Uncut Gems) / Spoiler: Alma Har’el (Honey Boy) / HE comment: The Safdies are frenzy junkies, fools for velocity, and definitely not that deep. Average popcorn inhalers felt the same about Uncut Gems as I did — it was a grueling endurance test. And I saw it twice. When a certain party got plugged at the very end, I said to myself “thank God.” Sandler’s performance was better than the film.

BEST MALE LEAD / Will Win: Adam Sandler (Uncut Gems) / Spoiler: Robert Pattinson (aka “RBatz”) (The Lighthouse) / HE comment: Agreed and approved.

BEST FEMALE LEAD / Will Win: Renée Zellweger (Judy) / Spoiler: Alfre Woodard (Clemency) / HE comment: Agreed and approved.

BEST SUPPORTING MALE / Will Win: Willem Dafoe (The Lighthouse) / Spoiler: Shia LaBeouf (Honey Boy) / HE comment: Dafoe‘s salty dog bluster is brilliant. One of my absolute favorite ‘19 performances.

BEST SUPPORTING FEMALE / Will Win: Jennifer Lopez (Hustlers) / HE comment: Those in the indie community who felt that Lopez’s failure to lasso an Oscar nomination was an unfair shafting will stand behind her today. My opinion is that her Hustlers performance was definitely decent but calm down.

Poor Orson Bean wasn’t struck and killed last night by “a car” in a Venice neighborhood. He was struck by two cars — one that “clipped” him and a second that finished him off **. (It’s called teamwork.)

The upside is that Bean lived a full life and enjoyed a vibrant career for the most part. An actor-comedian who arguably peaked in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s (he was a regular on Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman and its spin-off Fernwood 2Nite), Bean’s signature performance (IMHO) was as the spirited if deluded Dr. Lester in Spike Jonze‘s Being John Malkovich (’99).

** Bean was walking near Venice Boulevard and Shell Avenue. “The car coming westbound did not see him and clipped him and he went down,” said Los Angeles Police Department Captain Brian Wendling. “A second vehicle was coming up, was distracted by people trying to slow him down and then looked up and then a second traffic collision occurred and that one was fatal.”

Bannon to Maher: “You’ve had three years to solve this problem, and now you’re divided.”

For the second time Republicans and Russia are going to “play” the Bernie bruhs like violins, and when Bernie captures the Democratic nomination (which appears likely)…well, most of us understand what will happen.

Bernie voters “had a bellyful of Clinton” in ’16, and so a significant percentage wound up sitting on their hands and/or voting for Trump, etc.

HE lament: The nightmare that we’re currently entangled in just keeps getting worse…growing and spreading like cancer.

Bernie can’t win.

Politically and culturally the N.Y. Times has lately become even more “Woke Central” than Indiewire, particularly, it seems, in recent coverage of the Oscars and the film industry.

They’ve been agitating for woke advancement and urging powerful white people to recognize that, more than anything else, whiteness represents an essentially evil and corrupt mindset as well as a soiled and heinous history (The 1619 Project) and is therefore burdened in the eyes of God and history with completely appropriate guilt — a stain that can never be washed out but can at least be atoned for by white people hanging their heads in shame and perhaps even hiding their faces from public view for the foreseeable future.

There can only be one way forward, and that is to keep the doors open to all gifted and worthy people of color (African American, Latino, Asian) while continuing to guilt-trip white people over under sideways down. Forget proportionality in terms of the industry workforce or general population demographics. The bottom line is that whiteness is believed to be deeply flawed and corrupt, particularly in the matter of older white males, and that the term “older white male” has become, in fact, an epithet. For some time now. Obviously.

And if you say anything other than “what’s happening today is obviously a necessary and approvable thing in terms of redressing the sins and injustices of the past”, you are not only an intransigent racist but part of the problem and therefore a prime candidate for possible cancellation. And so the smart move is to simply shut up.

Just to be on the safe side, Hollywood Elsewhere is taking this opportunity to reiterate its strong support of keeping doors open to all non-Anglo movers and shakers, and to reiterate my belief in the constant channelling of appropriate shame about my white heritage, and to never forget the ugly things that white people have been responsible for in decades and centuries past. I know I sound facetious to some extent, but at the same time I’m being 100% sincere — anyone who would deny the dark legacy of paleface rule in this country is living under a rock.

At the same time this is why Trump is going to win next November. Because a certain under-educated portion of 60.7% of the U.S. population doesn’t want to be guilt-tripped and finger-wagged over and over. They’re angry about the p.c. Torquemadas, and they’d rather live under an ugly rightwing monster who will leave them alone (i.e., won’t lambast them for their endemic failings) than deal with constant accusations and shaming and outrage-venting from the progressive left.

Ask any Average Joe to choose a present-day political analogy for “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” the old Twilight Zone episode. Seven or eight out of ten will point to wokesters.

The fact that Little Women has crested $100 million domestic and $64 million internationally shows that the right female-angled film can connect. This is especially noteworthy given that Greta Gerwig‘s historical film is infused with contemporary attitudes about female independence, empowerment and wokeness.

Alas, Cathy Yan and Margot Robbie’s Birds of Prey, which also draws upon these currents, is a shortfaller. Variety is reporting that it’s performing “well below forecasts, with about $34 million at 4,236 North American sites” or about $10 to $20 million short of the $45 million to $55 million it was projected to earn domestically. (Warner Bros. had been projecting a conservative $45 million.) Birds earned $4 million last night.

For what it’s worth the 8:30 pm Grove screening that I attended last night had about 15 or 20 people. The well-reviewed Birds of Prey cost a reported $80 million to make.

23 year-old Gladys Presley was a slender young thang when Elvis Presley was born in 1935. She’d put on a few pounds (but not too many) by the time he was 10, but had become quite chubby by the mid ’50s, when she was in her early 40s. (Elvis followed suit, calorically speaking, when he hit the same age.) In 1958 the poor woman died of heart failure (i.e., clogged arteries) at age 46, lasting four years longer than her illustrious son.

I’m mentioning this because Baz Luhrman has cast the svelte Maggie Gyllenhaal to play Gladys in his ’50s rock biopic, Elvis. Which means Gyllenhaal will have to (a) wear a fat suit with fat prosthetics or (b) pull a Christian Bale and pack on the pounds with bowls of pasta and ice cream every night.

That or the movie could just pretend that Gladys wasn’t overweight. Baz can obviously do whatever he wants.

The forthcoming Warner Bros. biopic will star Austin Butler (i.e., Tex Watson in Once Upon A Time in Hollywood) and Tom Hanks as Presley’s demonic manager, Colonel Tom Parker. Principal photography will begin this spring.

Elvis Presley, 21, and his 44 year-old mother Gladys in 1956.

Gladys, Elvis and Vernon in 1937 or thereabouts.

Interior Trump dialogue: “That motherfucker is out…get him out! Nobody fucks with me like this. Cut him off at the knees.”

Congressman to Vindman: “You realize that when you came forward, you were putting yourself up against the President of the United States?” Vindman: “My father worried about my speaking out. He deeply worried about it. [But] This is America. The country I’ve served and defended. And that all my brothers have served. And here, right matters.”

N.Y. Times: The White House on Friday dismissed Lt. Col. Alexander S. Vindman, whose testimony in the House impeachment hearings infuriated President Trump and his allies, escorting him out of the complex just days after the Senate trial ended in acquittal, his lawyer said.

“’There is no question in the mind of any American why this man’s job is over, why this country now has one less soldier serving it at the White House,’ David Pressman, the lawyer, said in a statement. ‘Lt. Col. Vindman was asked to leave for telling the truth. His honor, his commitment to right, frightened the powerful.'”

It’s 1991 and Robert Harris‘s initial restored version of Spartacus is starting to be screened for press and industry types. Imagine a 37 year-old F.X. Feeney sitting in the 10th row at a certain Academy screening (which I happened to attend myself), and then imagine a voice coming into Feeney’s head as he sits and waits for Alex North’s overture to begin:

“I want you to receive this news calmly — please don’t freak — but you and Kirk Douglas will move onto the next realm within 24 hours of each other. You will live a very full life, F.X., and you certainly won’t die young or middle-aged, but when the moment happens people will be speaking about the passing of Douglas and Feeney in the same breath. Don’t let the fact that Douglas [born in 1916] is now 75 throw you. He’s a very hearty fellow. You’ll both be around for decades to come. On top of which, as you well know, quality is far more valuable than quantity.”

If the Academy had a heart as big as Feeney’s, he would be included in Sunday’s “death reel” segment on the Oscar telecast.

From David Frum‘s “Bernie Can’t Win,” posted on The Atlantic site on 1.27.20:

I was understandably wary of Birds of Prey the other day. I was influenced by the trailer and Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman declaring that it “isn’t pretending, for a single moment, to cast a spell of poetic awe” but is nonetheless “a compellingly novel popcorn jamboree.” I deduced that Cathy Yan‘s film would be about “enraged fuck-all nihilism and, in a certain social-undercurrent way, anti-brute-male revenge porn…savage winks and ten times the necessary emphasis!”

So much for imprecise, second-hand observations. Last night I caught Birds of Prey at the Grove, and it ain’t half bad for what it is.

It’s not my cup but any fair-minderd cineaste would have to agree that it’s a bracingly vigorous, high-style, toxic-male-busting romp.

Here’s how I put it this morning to a critic friend (but understand that the following contains a mild spoiler about the ending, which, trust me, is no big deal in the greater scheme):

HE to critic pally: “I wasn’t caught up or deeply moved or anything, but Yan shows real vigor and pizazz as far as this kind of cartwheeling, slam-bam, extended-DC-universe material allows. Very nimble and enterprising choreography and camera work. Lots of visual invention and verve.

“It’s basically formulaic junk, of course, but I dearly loved that each and every male bad-guy character is dispatched with a few savage blows. Whomped and whoofed and slammed on the pavement. Or thrown from a car. Or shot. Or kicked in the face.

“Does Margot Robbie‘s Harley Quinn appear to be big or swift or musclebound enough to knock these guys over like so many bowling pins? Of course not! Do her fighting sisters — Mary Elizabeth Winstead‘s Huntress, Jurnee Smollett-Bell‘s Black Canary, Rosie Perez‘s Renee Montoya (a cop) and Ella Jay Basco‘s Cassandra Cain — possess some kind of special superhero combat aptitude a la Bruce Lee on steroids? Well, yeah, sort of…if you wanna believe that. But I love the bullshit!

Important point: Birds of Prey lies, of course, by declaring that it’s about “The Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn.” Because it’s really about the bonding of five tough-chick desperadoes into a kind of D.C. Amazon Justice League. Or, in Quentin Tarantino-ese, “Fox Force Five.”

This teamwork aesthetic finally manifests at the 90-minute mark when Harley says to the other four “we’ll be better off facing this situation together.” Whoo-hoo! Social metaphor!

But then (an∂ here comes the spoiler) the movie completely reverses itself in the last four or five minutes by having Harley and Cassandra Cain (short, round-faced, maybe 12 or 13 years old) abandon their sisters and rumble off in their yellow Jaguar. Meaning that the D.C. Amazon Justice League of five (which was a thing for maybe 12 or 13 minutes) has been reduced to Fox Force Three.

What a betrayal of feminist “stand tall together and watch each other’s back”! It takes 90 minutes for these five desperadoes to join forces, and then Harley flips the bird and goes off on her own 13 minutes later. C’mon!

WATCH: As tensions rise in the 2020 race, @SRuhle sat down w/ @PeteButtigieg who says “the bulk of credit for the achievements of the Obama administration belong with President Obama” in an interview that airs tomorrow at 9am ET on MSNBC. pic.twitter.com/N5OyLHYblz

— MSNBC Public Relations (@MSNBCPR) February 6, 2020