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In a sharply worded response to Owen Gleiberman‘s 10.19 Variety piece that disputes the notion that One Battle After Another celebrates radical militant lefty agitation, Breitbart.com’s John Nolte states a fair, neutral-minded observation about Leonardo DiCaprio‘s Bob Ferguson, the film’s grungy, bathrobe-wearing, start-to-finish protagonist.

Nolte observes that Leo doesn’t do anything — not one fucking thing — to affect the fate of his kidnapped daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti)

Nolte: “What [Gleiberman] doesn’t tell you is that DiCaprio’s Bob is a moron. Why? Because One Battle After Another only portrays white people as either useless idiots or evil racists. Director Anderson is so exacting with this agenda that every single member of the military (ICE) is white.

“What’s more, unlike Perfida, DiCaprio’s Bob has no redemption arc. When we meet him, he’s a child-like beta male to Perfidia’s oh-so competent girlboss. When we leave him, he’s looking at his new iPhone like a confused chimpanzee. From A to Z, Bob is so useless, you could literally remove his character from the movie and the plot would remain exactly the same (but blessedly shorter). Because he’s white, Anderson will not allow Bob to shape or move any of the action, even though he’s supposed to be our protagonist.

“The only competent and decent people in Battle are racial minorities — especially all the girlboss black women.”

Here’s an actual discussion that happened an hour or two ago between HE and a very adamant friendo…

Friendo: “Leo is the hero of the goddamn movie! And he undergoes a Hero’s Journey that is so classic, it’s practically Old Hollywood. He rescues his daughter from an army of government killers, and redeems himself in the process.”

HE: “He actually doesn’t rescue her. She rescues herself by shooting the Chistmas Adventurers assassin on that hilly desert road. And then Leo arrives and talks her out of shooting HIM when he says, ‘Willa…it’s okay…I’m your dad.’”

Friendo: “If Bob had not embarked on that journey, Willa would be dead. That’s called rescuing.”

HE: “I saw the movie twice. Leo really, really doesn’t rescue her.  He just arrives after she’s killed the Christmas assassin, and then pleads with her and says ‘let’s go home, baby’ or whatever.  He makes a lot of clumsy, anxious, stumbling-around moves during the film, but he does ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to resolve things or save the day.”

Friendo: “But doesn’t his BEING there at the climax count as a rescue? I get that PTA didn’t want to make a glorified Charles Bronson movie. He has gone to the ends of the earth for Willa, out of his devoted dad-hood.”

HE: “Yeah, he’s done a good devoted-dad thing.  But Leo hasn’t actually solved anything or made things safer. He hasn’t stopped the bad guys. He’s done nothing decisive or crucial. He doesn’t even have a big climactic moment with Sean Penn at the very end…nothing.”

Will someone explain what’s so friggin’ Oscar-y about Geeta Gandbhir‘s The Perfect Neighbor (Netflix), which premiered 9 or 10 months ago at wokey-woke Sundance?

It’s a very compelling, skillfully edited police-bodycam-footage doc of a boilerplate racial-animus-in-a-neighborhood killing. Hate-driven, agitated-by-noisy-kids Karen (who probably drinks) pulls a gun, loses control, plugs her POC neighbor in the chest…par for the course in Ocala, a boondocky burgh in northern central Florida …a downmarket tabloid American town.

An unfortunately commonplace occurence these days, but on the other hand (a) what’s the big deal?, (b) what else is new? and (c) so what?

What about a Netflix doc about Iryna Zarutska, the innocent young Ukranian blonde who was recently stabbed to death by that mentally unstable black dude, Decarlos Brown, in the Charlotte area?

Or about that 2023 NY subway episode in which Daniel Penny restrained the mentally unstable Jordan Neely and inadvertently choked him to death?

No way, Jose. One, no documentarian operating within the iiberal Hollywood filmmaking bubble would dare make a doc about either incident. And two, neither Sundance nor Netflix would ever screen either one, mainly because of content that would inevitably reflect negatively on DOCs (dudes of color).

I’m obviously not defending that seemingly scabrous Ocala woman who shot her neighbor point blank. But docs about real-life killings have to cast frowning judgment upon paleface aggressors.

I must admit that I was impressed by Zohran Mamdani‘s razor-quick mind and general debating skills the other night. He’s obviously going to be the next NYC mayor, but his seemingly pro-Muslim, anti-cop, anti-Jewish agenda…I guess I shouldn’t say stuff like this. Give the guy a chance, right?

But his mayoral administration will probably be, I’m guessing, a little bit like London Breed‘s term as San Francisco mayor (2018 to 2025), and you know how that fucking turned out.

Mamdani wants to make bus service free for hard-working plebes struggling to make ends meet…fine. But you know who’s going to become a permanent fixture on those buses, right? Bums. Smelly, drooling bums.

This Indecent Proposal scene was written by Amy Holden Jones, who was around 40 when this not-all-that-great Paramount film was released. But Robert Redford‘s subway car recollection is a wee bit devastating. Because I’ve been there myself.

I’ve lost count of how many brief eyeball romances I’ve had with women on the NYC subway, or on the Boston MTA or the Paris Metro. When I was young or youngish, I mean. Each and every one was at least a little bit heartbreaking.

Loss hurts, and that includes lost opportunity. “Of all words by thought or pen, none so said as ‘it might have been.'”

In the immediate wake of poor Diane Keaton‘s death it would’ve been bad form to share my completely honest view of her interpretation of Louise Bryant in Warren Beatty‘s Reds, but I guess I can share it now.

My view is that Bryant is irritating — during the first hour she’s always seething and pouting — because she’s angry about not being talented enough to measure up to Jack Reed.

A friend said that her resentments weren’t really period-accurate — that Keaton/Bryant’s anger was primarily fed by the fires of 1970s feminism. I agreed but added that early feminism and the suffragette movement and free love were certainly starting to bloom in the early teens — it wasn’t as if there was nothing resembling ’70s feminism going on before World War I.

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For six long years I’ve been waiting for the demise of Taika Waititi, or, you know, for his streak to run out of gas. At least that.

And now, to go by the Critical Drinker, it finally has. I’ve been secretly hoping for the Waititi torch to go out since sitting and suffering through JoJo Rabbit, which I called “a stylistic wank-off and about a quarter-inch deep” in September 2019.

Only now can it be told: In my 9.25.19 JoJo Rabbit review I reported that “there was a seasoned industry guy sitting behind me who couldn’t stop laughing, and heartily at that. At one point I half turned in my seat as if to say ‘what the fuck?’, but I didn’t turn all the way around.” That industry guy was no one else but Jeff Sneider.

Eureka! Late last night I watched the first three episodes of Rebecca Miller’s Mr. Scorsese, and I felt so roused and super-engaged I didn’t even notice that episode #3 (which ends with the rightwing hate that greeted The Last Temptation of Christ in ‘88) ended just after 2 am.

We’re all fully familiar with the frenzied, 60-year, up-and-down-but-mostly-up saga of the career of Martin Scorsese, of course, but there’s something primal and alive and almost cleansing in the fissures and textures of Miller’s five-hour doc.

Why did it hold me so? Because it didn’t just feel like Scorsese’s story but my own. At every juncture I was “there” in real time, communing with each and every film — emotionally, instinctually, aesthetically — and I mean going all the way back to Boxcar Bertha, which wasn’t much (after seeing it John Cassavetes gave Scorsese a fatherly hug and said “you’ve just spent a year of your life making a piece of shit”) but at least had one good sex scene.

In a phrase Mr. Scorsese is really great stuff. First-rate, up close and searingly personal. It reminds you that Scorsese led a very anxious and shadowed and haunted life for at least his first half-century on the planet. No bowl of cherries, no walk in the park.

I’m thinking now of an on–camera Paul Schrader quote about how Travis Bickle, the proverbial Underground Man, was speaking to “no one” in the early ‘70s…the isolation was all but total back then.  Now almost the same kind of guy is online, and he is legion…the solo Underground Man thing has become an online community…the “Internet Man”.

Please re-read Pauline Kael’s 2.9.76 New Yorker review of Taxi Driver.

Friendo: “The persistent sneers of dismissal that now frequently greet Pauline’s name are one more sign that 2025 film culture has lost its marbles.”

Consider a brief fencing match between HE commenter JHR (J.R. Ewing with an inserted middle initial) and The Living, Breathing Embodiment of Hollywood Elsewhere in this morning’s “Accepting But Mystified” thread, the subject being a friendly, gracious, middle-aged Connecticut woman having never even HEARD of Anora:

HE: “Anora-wise, there are many concentric circles of passion and interest and engagement. The innermost circle is being an Anora devotee who’s seen it two or three times and can even quote dialogue from it. The outermost ring is, at the very least, having heard of its existence and/or its multi-Oscar triumph. To have not even HEARD of 2024’s Best Picture winner is to have no pulse — you are a flatliner.

“John Huston once famously said that all you need is a healthy sense of curiosity in order to live a well-educated life.”

JHR: “None of my friends (seniors, late 60s, retired college+ educated professionals with $) had ever heard of Anora when I pitched it to them, nor do they have any knowledge of the Oscars results.

“I had lunch with seven of them yesterday, I asked if anyone had been watching the MLB playoffs, and none of them had. They pay little attention to sports except for our big time college football team just down the road where most of us attended college.”

HE: “Seven of your senior chums got together for lunch? Seven? Isn’t that a bit crowded? A group of four is more like it, no? Seven is too conversationally competitive.

“Then again why not go bigger? Why not 10 or 12 having lunch at the same coffin-sized table? Hell, make it twenty! Twenty friends sharing a big luxurious lunch together. Think of all the shouting and guffawing…think of all the shrieking, raucous laughter and the tee-hee giggling!”

JHR: “What do my friends do with their leisure time? They read books, they have hobbies like golf, and they travel a lot — Europe, etc. Lifestyles most people would envy. I do all the above, too, but I am the only movie fan in my crowd, and I think that [Anora ignorance] is more common than you may understand, particularly when it comes to Oscar films.

“I can count on three fingers the number of my friends who are current on movies like me, out of a broader circle of about 40 lifelong friends.”

HE: “’40 friends’? That’s too many. Five’ll get you ten 30 or 35 of those 40 are fair-weather types.”

HE: “To live a life without a semi-active or semi-vibrant sense of curiosity is not living. Have your friends ever heard of Socrates? He was a Greek philosopher…oh, wait, have they ever heard of ancient Greece?

“In any event Socrates once wrote that ‘an unexamined life is not worth living.’ Maybe that’s too historical. Let’s try this…have your friends ever heard the expression ‘the lights are on but nobody’s home?’ Have they ever listened to the 1965 Zombies song ‘She’s Not There‘?”

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Kathryn Bigelow and Noah Oppenheim‘s A House of Dynamite (Netflix), which opened theatrically last Friday (10.10) on select screens, will begin streaming on on Friday, 10.24, or ten days hence.

Has anyone taken the plunge? How about sharing some reactions? I reviewed it out of the Venice Film Festival on 9.3, or nearly six weeks ago

Remember the good old JFK days when it took a little while to attack the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons? If a rogue order to bomb the Russkis had been given by an unstable SAC base commander in the early ’60s, say, nuclear bombs would then be delivered by Air Force guys flying big-ass B-52s, and with “one geographical factor in common — they are all two hours from their targets inside Russia.”

President Merkin Muffley has two hours to try and stop this bonkers attack and thereby prevent the Doomsday Machine from going off? Man, that’s a really luxurious time frame to work with, certainly compared to the lousy 25 minutes that top-level strategists and officials (White House, government, military) have in Kathryn Bigelow‘s A House of Dynamite (Netflix, 10.10).

A bum 25 minutes to, like, do something about a North Korean or Chinese or possibly even a Russian nuclear missile heading toward the great city of Chicago? C’mon! Some people need 25 minutes just to take a dump and then wash their hands, brush their teeth and spray the bathroom with Febreze.

First of all, isn’t 25 minutes a bit too short, as in not enough dramatic breathing room? Wouldn’t it be schematically preferable if the missile’s travel time took 40 minutes instead? More time to think, consider options, fire back at Pyongyang, freak out, call loved ones, generate an immediate warning to Chicago-area smartphones, etc.

A 6.22.18 Business Insider report estimated that a nuke travelling from Pyongyang to Chicago might take 39 minutes and 30 seconds. Has that Armageddon clock really been cut by 50% over the last seven years?

The fact that Dynamite lasts 112 minutes may suggest to some that the essential suspense kicks in for only 25 or so, once, or roughly one-fifth of the running time….wrong.

Bigelow and screenwriter Noah Oppenheim‘s strategy is to wade into three versions of the same 20-minute countdown — different locales, different key characters, all wearing the usual clenched, super-grim expressions.

Now that I’m re-running the film in my head, I’m not precisely recalling how those three 25-minute sections add up to 112. I’d really like to watch it again with a stopwatch.

If Bigelow went with three 40-minute sequences, more situational stuff could happen. Little things, big things, eccentric whatevers. 20 minutes is just too crammed, man. Especially for the people of Chicago.

Unless I missed something (and it’s quite possible that I did), none of the Dynamite decision-makers give serious thought to the idea of instant-messaging the entire Chicago populace (not to mention the people of Illinois, Wisconsin and Indiana) and saying something like “hey, guys…not much time for anything, but you need to immediately find some local school with old-fashioned classrooms so you can can all put your heads under the desks…seriously, you have 25 minutes to confess your sins or fuck your boyfriend or girlfriend one last time or go to church and pray to the one and only God or order your favorite spicy hot dog or Subway salami andwich or tell your kids that you adore them or, you know, pop an Oxy or inject yourself with Vietnamese heroin.”

One of the basic Dynamite messages, by the way, is that this country’s “iron dome” defense system doesn’t work all that well, especially when the task is “htting a bullet with a bullet.”

Fair question #1: “Yeah, okay, it’s a tough nut to crack but if you can’t lick this technological challenge, then what good are you, Jimmy Dick?”

Fair question #2: If you were Oppenheim and creating A House of Dynamite on your Macbook Pro, would your instinct be to show Chicago being melted to death and/or blown into little shards with a super-gigantic mushroom cloud reaching so many miles high that even Cary Grant‘s Roger Thornill could see it from that Prairie Stop Highway 41 cornfield, which was….what, in southern Illinois or western Indiana?

Or would you figure “naaah, it’s more effective to hold back and prompt the audience to imagine the carnage instead?”

Cheers and congrats to all the Dynamite players, first and foremost Rebecca Ferguson (generally the coolest and most composed), followed by Idris Elba (irked and perplexed U.S. President), Gabriel Basso (second most disciplined), Jared Harris (unstable James Forrestal-like Defense Secretary), Tracy Letts (the General Buck Turgidson of this scenario, only older and without the laughs and no pistol-hot girlfriend), Anthony Ramos (hardcore team leader who vomits when push comes to shove), Moses Ingram, Jonah Hauer-King, Greta Lee (North Korean expert) and the great Jason Clarke

A House of Dynamite is not my idea of a game-changer in any kind of stylistic visual sense. It’s basically just a highly effective throttle-ride, very nicely shot by regular Bigelow dp Barry Ackroyd, and razor-cut like a motherfucker by Kirk Baxter.

What’s the default term? “A super-tense, nail-bitten thriller that Joe and Jane Popcorn will have a high old time with”…something like that But it won’t deliver the same charge on a 65-inch HD screen. It was great seeing it on the huge screen at the Sala Darsena. Everyone should be so lucky or priveleged.

You can tell from the get-go that Sam Raimi and Damian Shannon‘s script for Send Help, a #MeToo feminist revenge drama, is on the pulpy and simplistic side.

To go by the trailer for this Raimi-directed film, sexist yuppie dickhead Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien) has been sketched with one basic color, making him into an acidic boor and a snothead. Obviously he’s going to suffer at the hands of co-worker Linda Little (Rachel McAdams), who quickly gains the upper hand after they make it to shore after their private plane crashes into the Pacific.

This morning a friend noted the obvious similarity to Lina Wertmuller‘s Swept Away, but Hollywood’s wokezoid mentality would never permit any sort of surprising or transformative relationship to develop between the two. (Imagine McAdams turning over on her stomach and purring “sodomize me” to O’Brien…right.)

This is clearly…okay, seemingly a boilerplate film for unsophisticated women — a “make the male asshole suffer for his sins” flick.

The friend then wondered if Send Help might be “Misery on a South Seas island” with McAdams as Kathy Bates and O’Brien as James Caan.

In my view, Raimi’s first fully mature and dramatically effective film was A Simple Plan (’98), a moralistic midwestern noir. He followed this up with For The Love of the Game (’99), a not-as-good sports drama that was nonetheless reasonably decent, and then came The Gift (’00).

But with the dawn of the 21st Century Raimi never even tried to operate in the naturalistic realm again. To be frank about it, Raimi pretty much committed creative suicide by selling his soul to the Marvel empire…Spider-Man (’02), Spider-Man 2 (’04), Spider-Man 3 (’07), Drag Me to Hell (09), the vaguely shitty Oz the Great and Powerful and, most recently, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (’22).

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…is buying into a fairly silly or pretentious idea.

What exciting movies do to young, impressionable types is often a combination of three things. One, they turn on a light bulb. Two, they light a fuse and, if the impressionable youth is lucky, ignite a spiritual chain reaction. And three, they inject you with one of those “aha!” or “eureka!” realizations (i.e., “wow, really good films can reach deep inside and amount to much, much more than just entertainment”).

Okay, I’ll share a “changed my life” reaction to a film. The explosive, cannon–like sound of the six-shooters in Shane, which I saw on a sub-run, years-later basis at some kiddie matinee when I was nine or ten. I had never heard that kind of primal roar from any machine or device or living thing before. It shook my soul in a way that never quite left my system or even faded.

Model Veronica Webb in Hofler’s book: