What Kind of Nerd Mongrel Would Even Think Such A Thing…?

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…much less say it?

It is absolutely accepted doctrine the whole world over that The Empire Strikes Back (’80…45 years old next month!) is far and away the best Star Wars film ever made…the best that ever will be made.

Partly because it plays like a fly-by-night episodic…no real “beginning” (it just drops onto the ice planet of Hoth and kickstarts itself) and certainly without a satisfying “ending”…it leaves you hanging with the young, immature, pint-sized hero in a robe, pajamas and slippers while recovering from a recent hand amputation plus the dominant macho-muscular hero encased in carbon freeze…it just slams on the brakes.

The best thing Empire has to say at the end is “well, at least the heroes aren’t dead!”

And partly because it delivers the best third-act plot twist in the history of genre cinema….

But mostly (and I’ve said this four or five times) because it’s the only escapist, teen-friendly space action fantasy that behaves like a film noir…the only Star Wars film in which the good guys are constantly losing at every turn…running for cover, barely escaping, the bad guys in hot pursuit and pretty much maintaining an upper hand start to finish.

Name another action classic in which the heroes constantly get their asses kicked, and don’t even manage a small win at the end.

Grandson of Good Kicks

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[Originally posted on 12.9.21] There’s a famous bit in The Empire Strikes Back (’80) when the Millennium Falcon won’t turn over and so Han Solo twice slams a console with his fist and wham…it’s working again.

There’s a scene in The Bridge on the River Kwai (’57) when William Holden angrily kicks a non-functioning two-way radio, and suddenly it’s working again.

There’s a scene in The Hot Rock (’72) in which a police precinct captain (William Redfield) is told by a subordinate that a phone isn’t working, and he asks “well, did you jiggle it? Did you…you know, fiddle around with it?”

There’s a scene in The Longest Day (’62) where Capt. Colin Maud (Kenneth More) walks up to a stalled vehicle during the D-Day invasion and says, “My old grandmother used to say, ‘Anything mechanical, give it a good bash.'” He hits the vehicle and it starts right up.

And don’t forget that moment in Armageddon (’98) when Peter Stormare said “this is how we fix things in Russia!” and then whacked an engine with a wrench.

In 2010 my last and final Windows laptop (I had more or less become a Mac person two years earlier) stopped working in some fashion — it was acting all gummy and sluggish — and so I decided to bitch-slap it a couple of times. Instead of suddenly springing to life, the laptop more or less died. Violence, I realized with a start, was not the answer. Times and technology had changed.

I resolved at that moment to never try and William Holden or Harrison Ford or Peter Stormare or Kenneth More or William Redfield my way out of a technical problem again.

Smug Wokery = Not Enough Knowledge

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“American culture is black American culture…it just gets filtered out and watered down and whitewashed until they can give credit to a white guy. Jazz, country, rock ‘n’ roll, rap…all black American creations.” — posted on TikTok by “Royal Pomegranate“, a Beverly Center nail beautician. (And don’t put her down because she works in a vanity-driven industry!)

HE to Royal Pomegranate: Black American culture has always comprised a vital if painful slice of the American pie. The heart and soul stuff mixed with the social shit end of the stick…centuries of this. But thank the Lord for all the TikTok Zoomer ayeholes who’ve done so much to set things right!

Five years ago I was challenged to explain my views about the 1619 Project. The date was 7.30.20, and here’s part of what I wrote:

“Over the last 400-plus years many factors have fed into or contributed to the vast patchwork of American culture. Factors that drove the expansion and gradual strengthening and shaping of this country, I mean, and particularly the spirit and character of it.

“And they would be immigration, the industrial revolution and the cruel exploitations and excesses of the wealthy elites, the delusion of religion, Native Americans vs. anti-Native American racism and genocide, breadbasket farming, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick C. Douglas, the vast networks of railroads, selfishness & self-interest, factories, construction, the two world wars of the 20th Century, scientific innovation, native musical forms including jazz, blues (obviously African-American art forms) and rock, American literature, theatre and Hollywood movies, sweat shops, 20th Century urban architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright, major-league baseball, Babe Ruth & Lou Gehrig…

“Not to mention family-based communities and the Protestant work ethic, fashion, gardening, native cuisine and the influences of European, Mexican, Asian and African cultures, hot dogs, the shipping industry, hard work and innovation, the garment industry, John Steinbeck, George Gershwin, Paul Robeson, Louis Armstrong, JFK, MLK, Stanley Kubrick, Chet Baker, John Coltrane, Marilyn Monroe, Amelia Earhart, Malcom X, Taylor Swift, Charlie Parker, Elizabeth Warren, Katharine Hepburn, Aretha Franklin, Jean Arthur, Eleanor Roosevelt, Carol Lombard, Shirley Chisholm, Marlon Brando, Woody Allen, barber shops and manual lawnmowers, the auto industry, prohibition & gangsters, the Great Depression and the anti-Communism and anti-Socialism that eventually sprang from that…

“Not to mention status-quo-challenging comedians like Richard Pryor, Lenny Bruce and Steve Allen (“schmock schmock!”), popular music (Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra and the Beatles), TV, great American universities, great historians, great journalism (including National Lampoon and Spy magazine), beat poetry, hippies, the anti-Vietnam War movement, pot and psychedelia, cocaine, quaaludes and Studio 54, 20th & 21st Century tech innovations, gay culture, comic books, stage musicals, Steve Jobs, etc.

“Don’t tell me that slavery and racism is and always has been this country’s central definer. The 1619 Project’s revisionist zealotry rubs me the wrong way in more ways than I’d care to elaborate upon.”

@royalpomegranatePolitical thoughts never leave me alone. Unless I’m doing nails so someone book with me♬ original sound – Royal Pomegranate

More Sinners lunacy…

@meggymcthicc If you don’t like Sinners you’re wrong #sinners #filmtok #movies #moviereview #ryancoogler #michaelbjordan #ytpeople #haileesteinfeld ♬ original sound – meggymcthicc

Real IMAX Projection Is Rare…Still

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I’ll be catching Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning in Cannes on Wednesday, 5.14…16 days hence**. I’ve just watched the M:I meets IMAX short featurette, but I’m from Missouri. As with Fallout, I’m presuming that MI:8 only detours into IMAX for two or three segments…right?

I would love it if THE WHOLE THING could be shown in proper IMAX (huge boxy screen, 1.43:1), but I’m guessing it won’t be.

I’ve asked a good source how many scenes were shot in IMAX, and whether or not they’ll be projected in 1.43:1 or at least something with much more height than the aspect ratio typically provided by 1.85 or 2.39. I’ve also asked what percentage of the total film was shot in the usual digital whatever?

Cruise latest squeeze is Ana de Armas, 36. They’ve allegedly been happening since last February.

The Los Angeles and NYC all-media screenings of M:I-8 are happening two days before the Cannes screening — Monday, 5.12 at 7pm. All SOCIAL MEDIA REACTIONS are embargoed until MONDAY, MAY 12TH at 10:00 PM Pacific / TUESDAY, MAY 13TH at 1:00 AM Eastern.

Continuing Saga of Corporate Influence Over News

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“[60 Minutes exec producer] Bill Owens resigned Tuesday. It was hard on him and hard on us, but he did it for us and you. Our parent company, Paramount, is trying to complete a merger. The Trump administration must approve it [and so] Paramount began to supervise our [60 Minutes] content in new ways. Bill felt that he has lost the independence that honest journalism requires.” — Scott Pelley during the closing minute of last night’s 60 Minutes show.

What Pelley said wasn’t all that different from Al Pacino‘s Lowell Bergman argument inside Don Hewitt‘s office in The Insider (’99)..remember? A planned CBS merger with Westinghouse, the maneuverings of attorney Helen Caperelli and the concept of tortious interference apparently influencing the honesty of the Jeffrey Wigand / Brown & Williamson story. Don Hewitt: “Are you suggesting that she and Eric are influenced by money?” Lowell Bergman: “No, no, of course they’re not influenced by money. They work for free. And you are a volunteer executive producer.”

Or, for that matter, Howard Beale‘s rant about in the influence of CCA over the news division of UBS, the United Broadcasting System.

“This company is now in the hands of CCA, the Communication Corporation of America. And there’s a new chairman of the board, a man called Frank Hackett, sitting on the 20th floor. And when the 12th largest company in the world controls the most awesome goddam propaganda force in the whole godless world, who knows what shit will be peddled as truth on this network?” — Peter Finch‘s Howard Beale in Network (’76).

Monday Morning Aftermath

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“Nobody in this corner is the least bit confused or thrown over Sinners. I’m not even occasionally scratching my head over the cultural currents that Ryan Coogler’s film has seemingly stirred. I know exactly and precisely what this super-expensive excursion into early 1930s rural Mississippi Blackitude is (an unabashedly heterosexual Samuel Z. Arkoff popcorn horror film with cunnilingus detours and transportational music sequences) and what it’s tapped into over the last two weeks. Rarely has an exploitation flick connected in such a primal, across-the-board way.” — HE comment-thread retort below yesterday’s “Has Sinners Become An Online Political–Cultural Moment?”

Does Anyone Remember “Nobody Walks”?

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HE’s review of an all-but-forgotten film was posted on 1.22.12. The best thing about it is LexG’s comment:

“23 YEAR OLD ARTIST comes to LA for sound advice… What the fuck world does this happen in? I was 23 when I moved to LA with a suitcase full of TERRIBLE Tarantino ripoff screenplays, and I had to live in a Glendale DAYS INN for like six weeks while I got a job that would have direct deposit and insurance and benefits.

“What hot 23 year old chick is an ARTIST from NEW YORK CITY at 23 23 23, then comes OUT HERE and lives with rich people in SILVER LAKE?…I didn’t even know where the fuck SILVER LAKE was until about 2003…. When you come here you have to get a 30k desk job for a decade or two before you can work on your ART. ART. ART. ART.

“Who are these white arty people in LA anyway? Most white people I know work in transcription or dubbing tapes at some post house…they aren’t making SHORT FILMS AND DOCUMENTARIES for a living, and they don’t live in HOUSES — they live in ONE BEDROOMS in Valley Village. BLABABYABABAY BLAH FUCK IT ALL.”

Has anyone streamed this recently? And if so, what were your reactions?

HE review: Ry Russo-Young‘s Nobody Walks just finished screening at the Eccles, and my sense during the q & a was that relatively few audience members got much from it. Ray Pride has called it “a tactile, tensile, bittersweet bruise…a terrific Teorema riff”…naah. I couldn’t see how it meant much. Cute little girl with a pixie haircut fucks this guy and then this guy and that guy…uhhm, wow…okay, uhm, yeah.

Olivia Thirlby plays Martine, a 23 year-old Manhattan artist who comes to Los Angeles to get some technical help on the sound design of a black-and-white art film about insects (or partially about insects). She’s not only getting this help from sound guy Peter (John Krasinski) but also staying at his home along with his therapist wife (Rosemarie DeWitt) and their two kids.

And then (this is straight from the hilarious press notes) “like a bolt of lightning, her arrival sparks a surge of energy that awakens suppressed impulses in everyone and forces them to confront their own fears and desires.” Fuck, fuck, fuckity-fuck, fuck, fuck, etc.

I didn’t “hate” it but I never felt aroused or intrigued or anything like that. I just sat there and watched and waited and ho-hummed.

Okay, I responded to the sex scenes. Somewhat. But they were just sex scenes. There was nothing going on underneath other than “uhhm, you’re, like, kinda hot…wow…I’m kinda feeling…uhmm…uhmm…wanna fuck?” and then wham.

Nobody Walks “is a rather fluttery, aimless, meandering domestic drama about unruly, haphazard erotic attraction,” I tweeted just after it ended.

The best performances are from DeWitt and Justin Kirk as an amorous patient. I can’t say I found Thirlby’s performance all that interesting and/or attractive. Her mallspeak accent — “Umm…I…umm, yeah…do you, like, wanna…? Ummm” — was a bit of a problem. I was also put off by her boyish, oddly half-sexual and yet desexualized 1964 Paul McCartney soup-bowl haircut.

And I was persistently annoyed by Fall On Your Sword‘s overbearing soundtrack. Their music is all fluttery, oodly-doodly, boopity-boop, xylophone hipster-band shit.