Jeffrey Wells Gavin Newsom will be obliged and in fact required to destroy the White House’s elephantine, obscenely disproportionate Trump ballroom and recreate the original East Wing as it existed since the original 1902 construction or the 1942 expansion…take your pick. I’m serious. As a symbolic rejection and erasure of arrogant, malignant, Mussolini–like Trumpism.
I’m sorry that Daisy Ridley’s career has fallen off. I’m sorry, I mean, that she’s apparently been reduced to accepting paycheck roles in second-tier popcorn fare (zombie flicks, a subpar Star Wars spinoff or two, romcoms, minor biopics).
My first reaction to this Bury The Dead poster was “could this be karma payback for admitting ten years ago that she wasn’t up to speed on Cary Grant?”
I want Ridley to find her way out of the thicket. My heart goes out.
So MUBI subscribers should unsubscribe because MUBI France is respectfully acknowledging Brigitte Bardot’s passing or….what, is streaming one or two of her films? Lefty fanatics like Rolo Tomassi…sorry…fanatics like Rolo Tony make me want to vomit.
When you get right down to it I’ve seen only five Brigitte Bardot films (And God Created Woman, The Night Heaven Fell, A Very Private Affair, Contempt, Viva Maria). On top of which throughout my life I’ve failed to catch what Bardot herself said was her only truly good one — Henri-George Clouzot’s La Verite (’60).
Bardot’s death at age 91 settles it — I’ll stream La Verite (aka Truth) this evening.
You could argue that Bardot’s grandest achievement was splashing into the sexually tepid waters of the straightlaced ‘50s and heating things up by way of brazen, unapologetic nudity and infinite intimations of erotic delight…starting with her break-out performance in And God Created Woman (‘56) and for a good 12 to 15 years after, Bardot inspired hundreds of millions of stiffies among men living grim lives of quiet desperation.
Sex, sex, sex, nudity, nudity, nudity, barefoot barefoot barefoot, pear-shaped ass pear-shaped ass pear-shaped ass…teasing erotica, playfully defiant manner…damp tongue, luscious lips and heavily mascara’ed eyes.
Bardot certainly went her own way, and didn’t shrink from saying what she damn well thought and felt. Passion was her guiding light. From her mid teens through her early ‘40s it was mostly dudes who lit her fire, and then, starting in the early to mid ‘70s, the welfare and protection of pets and animals became her primal cause.
The older Bardot got the less liberal or even tolerant she seemed. When she hit her 70s and 80s her racial views weren’t that far from Alain Delon’s, and in the late 20teens she made it clear she was no friend of the #MeToo movement.
Physically she was primarily known for her pouty expressions and blonde tousled hair (although she was born a brunette). Behaviorally she admitted to being a habitual infidel, time and again. She admitted not long ago to having “done” over a hundred guys in her lifetime…energetic and frisky, yes, but almost par for the course by the standards of the ’70s and ’80s.
Bardot posted this sign next to a country path that leads to her surfside St. Tropez compound:
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“Since it was announced that the Safdie brothers, the lads behind Uncut Gems and Good Time, would be splitting up, the one question on everyone’s mind has been ‘so which brother has the sauce?’ Having seen Benny’s The Smashing Machine and Josh’s Marty Supreme, the answer, I’m afraid, is painfully obvious” — from Karsten Rundquist‘s “Is Marty Supreme The Movie of the Year?”
….but Herman J. Mankiewicz‘s use of “rosebud” in Citizen Kane‘s wasn’t a reference to Marion Davies‘ “vagina” (as Gus says at 1:45) but her clitoris. That’s a nickname that William Randolph Hearst allegedly used for it. Yes, it was also the name of Charles Foster Kane‘s boyhood sled.
Last night, inspired by the idea of visiting the Holy Land, I enjoyed my third viewing of Hany Abu–Assad’s suspenseful, decidedly un-Christian Omar (2013), which began filming in Nazareth Nablus in late 2012.
My first viewing was during the 2013 Cannes Film Festival; I caught it a second time at the Palm Springs Film Festival in January 2014.
Posted on 1.15.14: I was so taken with my first viewing of Hany Abu-Assad‘s Omar, a Palestinian-produced thriller about betrayal and double-agenting in the West Bank, that I caught it again last night at the Palm Springs Film Festival.
It’s a taut, urgent, highly realistic thriller that squeezes its characters and viewers like a vise.
Omar is among the Academy’s short-listed Best Foreign Language Feature contenders, and with my personal favorites, Asghar Farhadi‘s The Past and Yuval Adler‘s Bethlehem (which is quite similar to Abu-Assad’s film) out of the running, I guess I’m an Omar guy at this stage.
I’m a serious admirer of the two leads, Adam Bakri, who plays the titular character, a Palestinian youth whose decision to take part in an assassination with two friends seals his fare, and Waleed Zuaiter, an Israeli agent who presses Omar into his service as an informer.
Bakri and Zuaiter did a q & an after last night’s screening.
Bakri, probably 21 or 22, is making his feature film debut with Omar. He’s currently living stateside (either LA or NY). He was wearing a really handsome military-styled dark blue jacket, and so I asked him where he got it. Zara at the Grove, he said, so maybe he’s living here.
From Jay Weissberg‘s Variety review, filed during the 2013 Cannes Film Festival: “As he did with Paradise Now, Abu-Assad refuses to demonize characters for their poor choices. Only too aware of the crushing toll of the Occupation on Palestinians, he shows men (the film is male-centric) making tragic, often self-destructive decisions as a result of an inescapable environment of degradation and violence.
“With Omar he’s finessed the profile, depicting how the weaknesses that make us human, especially love, can lead, in such a place, to acts of betrayal. It’s as if he’s taken thematic elements from Westerns and film noir, using the fight for dignity and an atmosphere of doubt to explain rather than excuse heinous actions. Viewers with a firm moral compass, who see killing as an act always to be condemned, won’t need Omar to tell them what’s right and wrong.”
Late yesterday afternoon at the Jacob Burns Center in Pleasantville, two successive showings of Marty Supreme were sold out. At the AMC Westport today (Thursday, 12.25) three showings of Marty Supreme are currently sold out, according to the AMC app. And a 6 pm showing at the AMC Sono is nearly sold out.
HE to Bill McCuddy: This is what happens when a film is “tanking.”
HE to Amazon censors who’ve reportedly eliminated the “Pottersville” sequence in It’s A Wonderful Life: Guys, you’re definitely on to something. Now you need to wipe out the Ghost-of-Christmas-Future sequence in Alistair Sim‘s A Christmas Carol (aka Scrooge). Go for it!
Season’s thanks & greetings to “HK Phooey” and “Glen Runciter Plays The Hits”…seriously.
Fair question: How does being beaten and bruised by an African Silverback woke gorilla goon squad translate into the “burning of bridges” (or vice versa)? Would it be fair to characterize a victim of China’s Great Cultural Revolution in the ‘60s and early ‘70s in such a way? Sui generis, pure as the driven snow.
