From “U.S. Military Ramps Up to Clear Strait of Hormuz“, reported by N.Y. Times Eric Schmitt:
The U.S.S. Tripoli, an amphibious assault ship designed and built as a dedicated helicopter carrier (up to 20 helicopters) and carrying up to 1800 marines, is a few days away from a prime operational position near the Strait of Hormuz.
Chuck Norris, 86, passed yesterday (Thursday, 3.19) in Hawaii. Respect, regrets and condolences to his mostly conservative-minded fans (including Mike Huckabee), colleagues and loved ones, but I have to deliver my thoughts honestly…straight from the shoulder.
An arch-conservative and an Orange County Christian, Norris certainly became a brand in the Reagan years, and he held his own, commercially and culturally, throughout the ’90s, aughts and teens.
But in the realm of iconic big-screen tough guys of the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s Norris wasn’t in the class of Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger, much less Clint Eastwood. He was in the class of Jason Statham, or more precisely Statham, who ascended in the aughts and became big in the 20teens, aspired to be Norris-like.
Like Norris, Staham has made his bones as the star of a string of mostly forgettable, formulaic action programmers, and yet he surpassed Norris 18 years ago when he finally made one good film — Roger Donaldson‘s The Bank Job (’08). Norris, alas, never made a Bank Job-level film…not one. Everything he starred in was B-grade junk…crap, crap, crap….Lone Wolf McQuade, Missing in Action, Code of Silence, Invasion U.S.A., The Delta Force. Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus loved the guy, and I worked in Cannon publicity in ’87 and ’88 so don’t tell me.
If Norris had made one half-decent hardboiled film…something with the edge and restraint of like John Flynn‘s The Outfit, say…I would have some respect for him. But he was always a Walmart guy.
I love Martin McDonagh‘s Wild Horse Nine….John Malkovich vs. Sam Rockwell vs. Steve Buscemi. Obviously funny as fuck.
Not to mention Mariana di Girolamo, Ailín Salas, Tom Waits and Parker Posey.
“How ’bout you shove it up your flabby little ass…how ’bout that?”
Trailers always deceive, of course, but this Searchlight release feels like a blessing. It wrapped just shy of a year ago but won’t open until 11.6…a seven and a half month wait. Why? The trailer screams “infectious misanthropic summer comedy” but they’re holding it until the peak of award season. Obviously they think they have something. I’m foreseeing a Venice Film Festival premiere.
The only thing that worries me is the fact that McDonaugh’s The Banshees of Inisherin was so laden with dark, dead-weight metaphor that it made zero sense. It was insane. The fiddle-playing Brendan Gleeson is so sick of Colin Farrell that he starts chopping his fingers off…sure thing. The village idiot with a bee-stung nose proposes marriage to Kerry Condon…right.
A Behanding in Spokane didn’t make any sense either. Funny though.
Why didn’t McDonagh give a supporting role to Chris Walken?
Except Timothee Chalamet was mostly correct.
Everyone respects the elite, elevated art forms of ballet and opera, but the vast majority of average Joes and Janes out there have never attended a performance of ballet or opera. Ever. Partly because they don’t care, but also because they can’t afford the tickets.
I attended two or three operas in the mid ’70s, and in ’76 I attended a ballet performance at the old Paris Opera. I’m very glad this happened, but I haven’t returned since.
Chalamet didn’t say “a stupid thing” — he conveyed a needlessly blunt, seemingly uncaring viewpoint. A tactical error, but he didn’t lie.
Chalamet: “I don’t want to be working in ballet or opera, or, you know, things where it’s like, ‘Hey, keep this thing alive, even though it’s like, no one cares about this anymore’. All respect to the ballet and opera people out there. I just lost 14 cents in viewership.”
@denofgeektv #JamieLeeCurtis has been there. The actress shared her thoughts on #TimothéeChalamet’s recent comments that “no one cares” about ballet or opera, explaining that in today’s world, it’s going to happen and he can use it as a learning experience. Tap the link in bio to read more. #sxsw #sxsw2026 #jamieleecurtisedit ♬ original sound – Den Of Geek
Obviously the openly gay Kristen Stewart was motivated to play closeted astronaut Sally Ride in The Challenger, a locked-down Amazon miniseries, because of their shared LGBTQ experience and perspective.
Does Variety’s Joe Otterson allude to this aspect? Of course not.
Ride was a heroic figure during the official investigation of the January 1986 Challenger disaster as she covertly slipped info about the O-rings being the principal cause. Ride’s long-term relationship with Tam O’Shaughnessy was finally revealed after Ride’s death in 2012.
And that question is “how did the movie in question make you feel?”
Film critics almost never answer this, certainly not honestly. What they do is dance around and dilly-dally, and at the very most hint at a kind of dry, conclusive razmatazz. But I always answer it. Most of my reviews, in fact, address this question head-on.
Hence my 3.12 review of Project Hail Mary, in which I confessed that (a) the Lord-Miller-Gosling pic sent me into “a vague depression pit” as “an ‘oh, no’ feeling began to take hold” due to “a slight comprehension struggle”, (b) “I didn’t hate it but vague discomfort certainly flooded my system” and (c) “I wound up feeling sorta kinda nothing.”
I realize that most critics have given PHM ecstatic thumbs-up responses, and that most HE regulars are going to call me a pisshead for saying what I’ve said. Fine. I don’t care. I know what I know. Including how it feels to have lead weights strapped to my ankles, and to plummet into black heaving seas with no hope of salvation.
Variety reported earlier today about Val Kilmer‘s AI-fortified return to commercial cinema in As Deep As The Grave, a film directed and written by Coerte Voorhees. The piece stirred a recolllection of an article I wrote for Empire magazine back in ’92, called “Reanimator”.
Excerpted from “Bring Back The Dead,” initially HE-posted on 10.15.06:
Some day down the road emerging digital technologies will one day be able to bring back actors from the grave and put them in new movies in a highly believable fashion.
One computer graphics guy I spoke to for the piece said this could be a reality within 15 or 20 years. And I remember how Army Archerd wrote something in his Variety column not long after that seemed to comment on the piece, and how he faintly pooh-poohed the possibilities.
Well, here we are 14 years later and a Santa Monica-based company called Image Metrics, according to a fairly thrilling article by N.Y. Times reporter Sharon Waxman, has just about gotten there.
The cyber duplications of human faces that Image Metrics has lately been composing “seem to possess something more subtle, more ineffable, something that seems to go beneath the skin,” writes Waxman. “And it’s more than a little bit creepy. And if you look at the video on the Times website that accompanies Waxman’s piece (which includes footage of Waxman herself being turned into Shrek), you’ll probably agree.
Image Metrics chairman Andy Wood says he likes to call the process “soul transference,” the key process being that “we can have one human being drive another human character…we can directly mimic the performance of a human being on a model.”
“You look and you wonder: Is it the eyes? Is it the wrinkles around the eyes? Or is it the tiny movements around the mouth?” Waxman asks. “Something. Whatever it is, it could usher in radical change in the making of entertainment. A tool to reinvigorate the movies. Or the path to a Franken-movie monster.”
At the very least, this technology will probably one day lead to a situation in which producers and studios will have a certain advantage over difficult or problematic actors, although I’m sure attorneys for actors worldwide are going to be scrambling henceforth to make sure their clients’ organic value will not be challenged or diminished in any way.
Refinements and improvements will inevitably kick in over the coming years, but Image Metrics is pretty much able right now to reconstitute any dead actor and recast him/her in a new movie opposite live actors. There are many other applications for Image Metrics technology besides bringing back the dead, but this has always held a special fascination for yours truly.
Imagine a 33 year-old Cary Grant (i.e., the one who starred in The Awful Truth) starring opposite Rachel McAdams in a new comedy. Or James Dean back from the dead in a new drama directed by Chris Nolan.
“We could put Marilyn Monroe alongside Jack Nicholson, or Jack Black, or Jack White,” Wood reiterates. “If we want John Wayne to act alongside Angelina Jolie, we can do that.”
On 7.11.18 I posted a riff called “High Tower Drive.” I re-posted on 7.6.22. This is the third time.
“I slept and dreamed that life was beauty / I woke and found that life was duty.” — Ellen Sturgis Hooper, from a book of poems called “The Dial,”
In ’06 or thereabouts I misattributed that line to David Mamet, who had used it for a Hill Street Blues episode called “Wasted Weekend.” I repeated the error in a 7.11.18 riff called “High Tower Drive.” So now we have it straight.
I first heard this line during the original broadcast of this episode on 1.13.87. The guy who said the line was Dennis Franz‘s Norman Buntz, and I’ve never forgotten it.
I was watching Steven Bochco‘s fabled series on a 21″ cable-connected color TV. I was living in a cool little pre-war studio on High Tower Drive, a few hundred yards from the Hollywood Bowl and just down the street from Elliott Gould‘s deco-moderne, elevator-accessible Long Goodbye apartment.
Reanimator‘s Jeffrey Coombs lived in the same complex.
I was working for Cannon Films publicity at the time, writing press kits. My future wife Maggie and I had either just returned from Paris or were planning a trip there. We got married the following October, and Jett came along the following June.
Criterion’s 4K Bluray of John Boorman‘s Point Blank (’67) pops on 4.21.26. I love the extras (which include commentary from Boorman and Steven Soderbergh, an interview with critic Mark Harris, and a “New Reflections on Point Blank” essay by Jim Jarmusch), but I despise Jay Shaw‘s jacket art.
Point Blank‘s color scheme is sublimated to an affected, phoney-baloney artist’s impression of old-school cinema. Or a vague impression of Point Blank by someone who’s never seen it.
A “painted” black-and-white image of Marvin sits on the right (the flesh tone simulates the painted monochrome look of yesteryear theatre lobby stills), and — this is the chief offense — four color-saturated, vertically-cropped images of a stressed and wincing Marvin are on the left.
If you know anything about Marvin’s “Walker” character, you know he’s totally stoned-faced…perhaps the least emotionally expressive tough hombre in film history. Except for a brief flashback showing Walker grinning while flirting with his future wife, Sharon Acker‘s Lynne Walker, Marvin never gives up his feelings…even when fighting or dodging bullets he’s all robotic frost and veneer…no apparent stress or uncertainty or struggle of any kind.
Shaw’s decision to use a still of Marvin getting feral and gritting his teeth in some kind of violent altercation is therefore a total misrepresentation…a fucking lie.
Being a total fool for handsomely mastered 1080p versions of silvery black-and-white films of the ’40s, I’ve been saying for years that I’d love to get my hands on a Hold That Ghost Bluray. I think Ghost, a punchy horror comedy released in August 1941, is the greatest Abbott & Costello film of all time…Bud and Lou as Chuck and Ferdie, directed by Arthur Lubin, costarring Joan Davis and Richard Carlson, and featuring a fat, moustachioed gangster character named Moose Matson!
The problem was that back in ’21 a hi-def Ghost wasn’t selling or renting as an individual unit. You had to shell out $105 for an Abbott & Costello Complete Universal Collection box set. And that wouldn’t do.
But now the Universal home video guys have finally eased up and mastered a stand-alone Hold That Ghost Bluray, and 4K UHD one at that. It pops on 4.28.26.
