Postedtwicebefore: I adore this clip from Don Siegel‘s Charley Varrick (’73), in which Walter Matthau‘s titular character tells John Vernon, portraying a mob-connected banker, that he wants to return a pile of ill-gotten mafia money.
Just after 1:03 Vernon conveys something about serendipity with a wonderful economy, using a gently changed expression and a little gesture with his left hand. Arguably the most elegant piece of acting that Vernon ever performed, the gesture seems to say “sometimes there’s God, so quickly!” — a Tennessee Williams line from A Streetcar Named Desire.
In ’85 I was working in publicity and had a chance to speak to Vernon on the set of Hail To The Chief, a TV series about a female U.S. President (Patty Duke) in which Vernon played a hawkish military advisor. I told him I was a huge admirer of this little slice of Varrick, but he didn’t seem to get what I was saying. He just brushed it aside and indicated he wouldn’t mind if I left him alone. I was probably the only guy on the planet who’d ever recognized, much less said to him, that his Charley Varrick hand gesture was some kind of beautiful.
Or he did feel a certain pride but didn’t care to share it with a fan? Whatever. Perhaps he felt insulted by my not praising some meatier part that he once played (the Mal Reese character in Point Blank, his Cuban revolutionary Alfred Hitchcock‘s Topaz, the husband of Sophia Loren in Ettore Scola‘s A Special Day).
Vernon died at age 72 on 2.1.05, following complications from heart surgery.
It’s been estimated that the Titan, the small, deep-sea, Titanic-spotting submersible that went missing early Sunday morning, can sustain the lives of five on-board travelers for 96 hours, or four 24-hour days.
The 23,000-pound Titan began descending around 4 am on Sunday, or roughly 53 hours ago. (It’s now 9 am eastern.) Start to finish Titanic dives last ten hours, including a 2 and 1/2 hour descent to the wreckage some 13,000 feet below.
If the five aren’t rescued by early Thursday morning, an agonizing finale awaits. The clock is ticking — at most rescuers have the remainder of today (Tuesday, 6.20) and all-day Wednesday.
This paragraph, from a N.Y. Timesreport, conveys the bottom line:
I am a bad Sesame Street Cookie Monster person, or at least I was last night.
“Bad” in the sense that when I ordered a cup of Cookie Monster ice cream at Guerriero’s Gelato (476 Pleasant Valley Way, West Orange, NJ 07052), I wasn’t thinking of the teal-colored Sesame Street Muppet character but of a standard cookies-and-cream-type flavor…you know, vanilla ice cream with oreo cookies and whatnot, etc.
The Guerriero flavor menu offered various kinds of different oreo flavors (banana oreo, mint oreo, coffee oreo, samoa cookie) and I just wanted something plain and unexciting, and so, not being a Muppet person, I figured Cookie Monster would be a thicker or richer cookies and cream flavor…right? So I asked for a medium cup with sprinkles.
When I saw the teal-colored dish, I said “what’s that? I don’t want greenish-blue ice cream.”
Right away the principal server — an overweight Zoomer woman of color — began to dig in her heels and look at me like I was wacked. I had made a big mistake by not being a better Sesame Street person, granted, but all I was asking for was a different flavor. Zoomer woman didn’t want to hear it — her basic response was contrarian, and she seemed to be saying (a) you ordered this, (b) no substitutions and (c) no refunds.
When I persisted (at one point I said “I don’t give a shit” — an unwise thing to blurt out in an argument), she threw her hands up, as if to say “I’ve had it with this belligerent dick!” and went to the manager.
The manager came over and asked what the problem was. I explained and disputed a bit more, and then asked for a refund. Zoomer woman was glaring daggers and agitated, and I just wanted to get the hell out of there. Up until that instant I thought this had been a dispute over my ice-cream-flavor cluelessness, but I suddenly realized this had suddenly become a kind of cultural dispute that had something to do with my being an older white mansplainer.
The manager gave me my money back and asked me to leave, and then she tried to calm down Zoomer woman by holding her arm, but Zoomer Woman abruptly yanked her arm away as if to say “are you on his side?…don’t touch me!”
I said to Zoomer Woman, “Hey, you’re doing great there!…arguing with your own manager now! Not to mention your excellent customer relation instincts!” The manager again asked me to leave and I said “sure, no problem.”
I went to a pizza place two doors down, and ten minutes later Zoomer Woman came in with a friend and I said, “Hey, there she is!” She glared more daggers and said “don’t look at me!”
The cops weren’t called and so nobody was arrested, but I was amazed how a relatively minor misunderstanding on my part, one that could’ve been easily solved by “no problem, sir…what flavor would you like instead?”…a relatively minor ice cream thing had, in the space of 20 or 25 seconds, blown up into something else entirely.
The day before (Friday, 6.9) HE commenter “The Multiplex” had reported that “in Disney’s DCP asset list the currently-streaming version of The French Connection is listed as ‘2021 William Friedkin v2.'”
This info, I noted, “is seemingly fortified by a statement from The Criterion Channel, passed along by “The Connection” in another 6.9.23 HE story titled “HE to Friedkin re Censorship Fracas.” CC’s statement said that “according to our licensor [Disney], this is a ‘Director’s Edit‘ of the film.”
I spoke yesterday to a Hollywood veteran, and one of the things I asked him was “why the hell would Friedkin betray the original artistic intent of his own Oscar-winning film by approving the deletion of a nine-second scene that uses the N-word?”
His reply: “Well, he’s entitled to do this, and the original film hasn’t disappeared — it’s available on physical media even if the streaming version is missing the censored footage.”
And then he said something interesting: “I don’t think Friedkin is playing the same close attention to this matter that you are.” I took that to mean that Friedkin may not be paying super-close attention in general.
The industry veteran then suggested that I drop the matter. “But it sets one hell of a precedent,” I replied. “What if it happens again with another important film…another woke censoring issue of some kind? I should drop that also?”
And yet I haven’t heard zip from Friedkin (I wrote him about this a while back) so in classic journalism terms the story has stalled.
I had presumed that Glenn Kenny‘s article on the matter would appear in the N.Y. Times, but my presumption, I gather, is erroneous. Some other outlet will run it this week.
This sparked a thought in my head, however, which was “why the hell wouldn’t the N.Y. Times want to run a story about this?”
The Times movie section may not have been formally pitched on this story, but why, I’m asking myself, would the paper of record blow it off? Could it be because (I’m just wildly speculating) they’ve basically become a woke activist newspaper, and they don’t want to post an article that might faintly imply some kind of vague endorsement of a nine-second scene in which the N-word is used?
The central issue is nonetheless huge and unmissable — should a half-century old classic film, raw and occasionally profane and, yes, punctuated with racist dialogue here and there, be censored in order to fall in line with current woke dictates — which are only a temporary spasm of passing cultural socialism — or should The French Connection be streamed in its original form, as most anti-censorship types would argue, out of respect for the original creative intent that was decided upon in 1971, even if the director has recently capitulated to the wokesters?
It’s one thing to include a preface or intro of some kind to a recently altered film, explaining the reasons for a deleted scene, and quite another thing to just lop off a nine-second sequence without comment or explanation. It’s too big of a deal to try and sneak this through.
The story appears to have boiled down to one about cowardice, I regret to say. A story in which a willful, hard-charging, tough-minded director — a guy I’ve admired all my life — has suddenly, in his mid ‘80s, became a squishy go-alonger and a weak sister…an obedient slave to woke commissar mandate thinking.
That’s a big effing issue with all kinds of precedent-setting implications, and the N.Y. Times doesn’t want to touch it over…what, racial profiling concerns?
At what point can The Woman King, which cost $50M to produce and another significant chunk of change to sell, be considered profitable? Theatrical revenues are, of course, just one aspect of the overall revenue stream these days, and The Woman King hasn’t really opened internationally yet. But right now the worldwide earnings after the second weekend are around $37.5M. Not bad, I guess, but not earthshaking.
The film has nonetheless connected to a decent or moderate degree. Will it end up as a break-even, which is to say earnings of well over $100M (as you do have to add marketing costs)? You tell me.
Right now I would describe The Woman King, all things considered, as a modest, respectable success. That’s fair, no? A friend says that “given its budget and lack of star power, it was never meant to break the bank. But it’s done quite well.” Sure, no arguments, respectable showing.
But this morning I looked at the Woman King audience scores on three aggregate sites — Rotten Tomatoes (99%), Metacritic (2.5%) and IMDB (6.1%). And the evidence seems clear (or strongly indicates) that the Rotten Tomatoes gang has “cooked the books” as far as The Woman King‘s audience score is concerned. With the other two aggregates reporting much lower audience reactions, what are the odds that RT’s 99% score is trustworthy?
Not even Goodfellas, which everyone likes or admires, has managed a 99% audience score.
Florio links to a Twitter dude named @fatherquads, who believes that a faction within RT is indeed posting fake audience numbers.
“The [RT] profile claims to have 99% audience score, and over 2,500 verified reviews,” he tweets. “The only problem is that [the blurbs are] all short, posted soon after one another, and don’t talk much about the content of the movie, rather how much of a YAS SLAY QWEEN Viola Davis is.”
Friendo: “RT is a totally corrupt and despicable entity that I’ve loathed from day one and never pay the slightest attention to. Their data is mostly meaningless (or so obvious that it tells you zilch). ‘Interpreting’ RT tells you nothing. And who cares what demo The Woman King is appealing to? Who cares what action fanboys think? The fact that black women had an action film to call their own is, I would say, a good thing. I mean, why not?”
An article by a veteran Academy member has appeared on The Ankler, and it says something that The Ankler‘s Richard Rushfield, due respect, wouldn’t dare post himself.
As you might expect the piece in question has been written by a guy “who has asked to remain anonymous.” (But of course!) It’s titled “Notes From An Oscar Meeting Gone Wrong“, and the author is a self-admitted white middle-aged male…brrrnnggg!
What the article says, boiled down, is that over the last six or seven years the Academy has not only bent over backwards to address inclusion and equity in the ranks, but has totally lost sight of the fairy-dust factor, which has now all but evaporated.
Yes, the pandemic and streaming did a lot to kill exhibition. But that doesn’t change the fact that over the last seven years (basically since #OscarsSoWhite) the Academy and the industry, hand in hand, have put progressive politics above the creation and celebration of movie magic.
“Wolfe Reminds, History Repeats, posted on 3.22.21: “Generally the making of cinematic art, like canvas art of the ’30s, has been largely called off in favor of serving the industry’s social justice revolution.
Just ask the curators at the Academy Museum (aka “Woke House“) — they’ll tell you all about it.
“The result has been a new form of enlightened propaganda cinema — movies that basically say ‘this is what should be‘ rather than ‘this is what is.’
White Middle-Aged Ankler Male: “To be clear, yes, I am a white male, and I believe in diversity and inclusion. But the way the Academy has gone about trying to meet the moment — both in those aspects and in the fight for relevancy — makes no sense.
“I personally can’t point to the exact moment the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences died for me, only because there are so many to choose from.
“Was it January 15, 2015 when media strategist and lawyer (but not Hollywood filmmaker) April Reign tweeted #OscarsSoWhite after none of the 20 acting nominations that year included people of color?
“Maybe it was June 19, 2016, when the Board of Governors panicked under Twitter pressure and rushed to invite 819 members, fully 20 percent of the then-current members to join — many of whom existing members did not believe were admitted based on merit?
“How about April 17, 2018 when Bill Mechanic, the former head of Fox who co-produced a great Oscar ceremony in 2010 and was nominated as a producer for Best Picture, resigned from the Board of Governors with his letter including this line: “We have settled on numeric answers to the problem of inclusion, barely recognizing that this is the Industry’s problem far, far more than it is the Academy’s. Instead we react to pressure.”
“Or July 21, 2020 when producer Michael Shamberg (Erin Brockovich, The Big Chill) filed suit against the Academy because it did not want to listen to his constructive initiatives to move the organization into the modern era?
“Was it April 25, 2021, when the Academy produced the lowest-rated Oscar ceremony in the history of the awards? True, it was a pandemic event, but the lack of film choices did not require a lack of entertainment value.”
HE comment: The Soderbergh Oscar telecast was the most despairing, spiritually enervated, bad-acid-trip Oscars in Hollywood history. In no small part because Anthony Hopkins had the temerity to to snatch the Best Actor Oscar that the late Chadwick Boseman was supposed to win…Variety‘s Elizabeth Wagmeister was especially upset by this.
“Certainly the Oscars were already on life support by March 27 of this year when Will Smith, snot dripping from his nose, smacked comedian Chris Rock for a stupid joke (he is a comedian, I said) that Smith didn’t like. No one in charge of the Academy was actually in charge. Smith, guilty of assault, was very soon after feted with a standing ovation by those assembled as he won the Best Actor award — for playing an abusive father.”
Last night I ran into an old friend who’s no longer a friend because he’s more or less turned into a wokester fanatic. Yes, the viral insanity has even permeated the exurban, tree-shrouded hamlet where I now hang my hat. I won’t name names but the words between us were (mostly on his end) awful.
It happened inside Wilton’s VillageMarket sometime around dinner hour, and it started when I saw him poking around the exotic cheese section. He was wearing jeans, a T-shirt, a fall jacket, a smallish hat and a black mask. No point in ducking the guy so I walked over and offered a greeting. Small talk followed.
Then I asked what was up with the mask, and stated in moderate but plain terms that the pandemic is over, and then asked how many booster shots he’d had, etc. I told him I’ve had four, and that I succumbed to the Omicron virus late last year. One of the reasons he wears a mask, he said, was to wind up people like me. And then we were off to the races.
He began ranting about the anti-woke assholes who refused to be vaccinated last year, and I agreed, I said, that the anti-vaxxers didn’t help matters at all, especially those who refused to mask up. Then he expanded the topic to include all anti-woke people of whatever persuasion, and I said, “Well, that’s me…I’m an anti-wokester because of the shrill lunatic attitudes of the woke left.”
And then the subject drifted over to my deluded enemies in the #MeToo congregation, which mainly stems from that unfortunate March ’21 episode in which I posted a friend’s Oscar-related opinion about how the horrific Atlanta massage parlor shootings (which the left tried to characterize as a racial hate crime until the facts began to dispute that) might blow favoring winds in the direction of Chloe Zhao.
I took the sentence-long comment down after a brief Twitter flare-up, but the haters were on a rampage and before you knew it I was being blamed for everything including the burning of the Reichstag, even though I’d actually done zip. As in Z-I-P. I had written dead fucking nothing.
Then he looked me in the eye and said I deserved all the rain that had fallen on my head since that episode, and said — this was classic — that I was just as deplorable of a human being as Harvey Weinstein. I gulped. “You can’t be saying that…you can’t be,” I replied. But he was. He’s KingLear with three Millennial daughters, you see, and they’re all wokesters and he feels he owes them his allegiance. So we’d basically entered cuckoo-bird territory.
I’ve known this guy since high school, and have regarded him for decades as one of the best and brightest, a guy whose views and judgments I’ve always felt were wise and on-target…I could have never imagined that this guy, of all people, would look me in the eye and essentially call me a piece of shit who deserved to die.
It was like speaking to Tom Courtenay’s “Strelnikov” character in Dr. Zhivago during that train-car scene with Omar Sharif. It was as if this former friend had been taken over by a woke pod person from Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Decades of trust and affection and mutual respect, and this guy had chucked it all over a moronic woke-vs.-anti-woke, Hatfield vs. McCoys blood feud.
I wrote him a couple of hours later. “You’re aware that 70-plus years ago a hardcore cabal of allegedly patriotic rightwing Americans devoted themselves to punishing people who’d sympathized with Communism in the ‘30s,” I said. “Careers and lives ruined because righties were trying to purify America and cleanse it of Communism.
“Has it occurred to you and your fanatical spawn that you’re trying to do exactly the same thing now? You and your woke Robespierres are looking to cleanse the country of the wily anti-woke pathan. You’re doing the same damn thing, man. And you know what? People hate who you are, and what you’re about. I just can’t believe that you’ve turned into a woke seed pod. It’s scary.”
I whined about this supermarket trauma to a friend, and the friend decided to write Strelnikov and share a few thoughts.
Yesterday a Facebook friend chose to process the Kyle Rittenhouse “not guilty” verdict through a racial lens, using the whole tragic episode as an opportunity to lament racially-stacked decks and dump on the general venality of white people. I replied as follows…
“Agreed — if Rittenhouse had been black, the cops probably would have shot him. Then again why would a black dude want to use a loaded weapon against rampaging white leftists? Speaking as a small business owner, my heart went out to retail storefront owners whose businesses were trashed in May and June 2020 because of George Floyd’s murder.
“The Tulsa race riots — a deplorable, shameful chapter in this country’s history — happened almost a century ago. Most of us understand that our culture has progressed since then. This is a significantly different country than it was even in the ‘60s and ‘70s.
“If you want to be completely condemning and dismissive of white people, you can say ‘nothing has changed…they were largely racist and evil then, and they’re pretty much driven by the same white supremacist attitudes today.’ If you want to insist on that viewpoint today, have at it.
“Trump voters are obviously or largely still living in the past (say, the 1950s) but, the racist Charlottesville marchers of 2017 aside, even they wouldn’t be part of a homicidal race riot today. Either you accept that society has the capacity to adapt and evolve, or you don’t.
“The fact is that wokesters have overplayed their hand over the last four or five years, and the recent defeat of Terry McAuliffe in Virginia is probably a good forecast of what will happen a year from now. Outside of Trump loyalists and QAnon loonies, most people, I believe, are basically sensible and decent and will support sensible liberal policies. But they largely hate the radical wokester left, and I for one understand why.
“Wokesters are the new McCarthy-ites — scolders, social-media blacklisters and reverse racists. Thanks to the militant left and proponents of CRT in grade schools, the term ‘older white American male’ is now an epithet. And now the chickens, trust me, are coming home to roost. Congrats.”
“Nobody and I mean nobody in the history of film criticism has mentioned what I’m about to bring up. It’s about a hidden aspect of Spartacus, although it’s really a question for Howard Fast, who wrote the original 1951 “Spartacus” novel. But Mr. Fast is long gone so let’s just kick it around. It’s about sex and territoriality and rage that would have been unstoppable.
“The issue would have been about the animal anger and resentment that Kirk Douglas‘s Spartacus would have felt over the fact that Jean Simmons‘ Varinia, the love of his life, had been forced to have relations with several of his fellow gladiators, as was the custom during captivity in Lentulus Batiatus‘s gladiator school in Capua. The result would have been heavily strained friendships between Spartacus and his slave-revolt comrades after they’d broken out and become free men.
Tony Curtis, Jean Simmons, Kirk Douglas during filming of Spartacus.
“If Spartacus was anything like Detective James McLeod, whom Douglas portrayed in William Wyler‘s Detective Story (’51), he would have been an intensely jealous guy and no day at the beach. No matter how he intellectually rationalized what had happened — all slave women at Capua were ordered to have weekly sex with gladiators at the direction of Peter Ustinov‘s Batiatus and Charles McGraw‘s Marcellus, the sadistic gladiator boss — he still wouldn’t be able to handle it in his gut.
“Any ex-gladiator who had ‘known’ her would be on Spartacus’ shit list, and he would have given them dirty looks and subliminal attitude and maybe even put them into forward skirmishes with Romans in the hope that they’d get killed.
“Matrimonial relations between Spartacus and Varinia wouldn’t have been very pleasant either. Every time Spartacus looked at her he would see Heironymous Bosch fantasies that would torture him to no end. He would see John Ireland‘s Crixus or Nick Dennis‘s Dionysus or Harold J. Stone‘s David thrusting and groaning like lions.
“Remember when Warren Beatty‘s Ben Siegel said to Annette Bening‘s Virginia Hill, ‘I was just wondering if there was somebody you haven’t fucked?’ That’s how it would be almost all the time between Spartacus and Varinia.
Charlton Heston passed on 4.5.08 at age 84. The poor guy had been grappling with Alzheimer’s Disease for the previous six years or so. In such a condition, departure for realms beyond isn’t the worst option. I posted the following when I heard the news:
(1) I saw Heston speak at a black-tie dinner at the Beverly Wilshire maybe nine or ten years ago. He didn’t carry a cane but he could barely walk — just shuffling along. I considered him a kind of enemy at that point because of his support of the NRA but my heart went out when I saw what lousy shape his legs were in. That brawny muscular guy in the loincloth who played oar-rower #41 in Ben-Hur had become a frail old coot in a toupee. What a rotten thing it is to suffer the infirmities of age.
(2) His best screen moment happened in the last act of The Big Country, when his ranch-hand character in The Big Country decides to abandon a short-lived ethical mutiny against his ruthless employer, played by Charles Bickford, and follow him into Blanco Canyon and an almost-certain gun battle to the death. When the rest of the hands who had briefly sided with Heston catch up and join them, Heston looks at Bickford with utter revulsion, in part because he knows he can’t defeat him but also because he knows that he’s emotionally trapped.
(3) The best story Heston ever told was when Ben-Hur director William Wyler spoke to him in his dressing room after the first or second day of shooting and said, “Chuck, I’ve thought about your performance over the last couple of days and you’re going to have to be better.” Sure, Willie, said Heston — just tell me what you want, what to do. “I can’t say exactly because I don’t know,” said Wyler. “I just know you have to be better.” And then Wyler said “see ya” and left the room. Heston said something about pouring himself one or two stiff ones and taking a long walk.
(4) Heston should have shown more humanity about gun laws in the wake of the Colombine shootings. He and the NRA should have thought more carefully about gun users being tested for a license, and about the proliferation of automatic weapons. If there was such a thing as answering for your sins at the gates of paradise, right about now St. Peter would definitely be asking Heston to join him on a nearby park bench and explain the gun thing.
When Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering‘s four-part Woody Allen hatchet-job doc, Allen vs. Farrow, begins airing on HBO on Sunday, 2.21, and particularly when they show the then-seven-year-old Dylan Farrow‘s taped recitation of what “daddy did”, keep in mind a 9.2.93 Los Angeles Times article by John J. Goldman.
“Lawyers for Woody Allen said Monday that a former nanny who worked for Mia Farrow has testified she was pressured by the actress to support charges that the filmmaker molested their 7-year-old adopted daughter,” the article reads.
“The nanny, Monica Thompson, resigned from the Farrow household on Jan. 25 after being subpoenaed in the bitter custody battle between the actress and Allen. She told Allen’s lawyers in depositions that another baby sitter and one of the couple’s other adopted children told her they had serious doubts about the molestation accusation.
“Authorities in Connecticut are viewing a videotape made by Farrow as part of their investigation, which has included interviews with Allen and Farrow as well as the daughter, named Dylan.
“Farrow’s attorney, Eleanor Alter, issued a statement Monday saying, “It is my understanding…that Ms. Thompson has totally recanted” the statements attributed to her. She noted that Thompson’s salary, upwards of $40,000 a year, was paid by Allen. Thompson could not be reached for comment.
“Thompson said in a deposition that it took the actress two or three days to videotape Dylan making the accusations. At times the youngster appeared not to be interested in the process, the nanny said in sworn affidavits taken by Allen’s attorneys.
“’I know that the tape was made over the course of at least two and perhaps three days,’ Thompson said. ‘I was present when Ms. Farrow made a portion of that tape outdoors. I recall Ms. Farrow saying to Dylan at that time, ‘Dylan, what did daddy do…and what did he do next?’
The appearance of actors in a movie poster should never, ever argue with how they look in the film itself. Violation #1: Julie Christie‘s wig in Shampoo is straight, thick and frosty blonde — her natural poster hair is blonde-brownish and curly. Violation #2: In the film Goldie Hawn‘s blonde hair is worn with bangs — in the poster it’s oddly parted in a slightly off-center fashion. Violation #3: In the poster Warren Beatty‘s hair is noticably shorter than it is in the film.