"Bertolucci In The Lap of God," posted on 11.26.18: The passing of Bernardo Bertolucci...good God. The dying of such a man must be shouted, screamed...Bertolucci is dead! Bernardo Bertolucci of Rome lives no more!
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Last night I watched two and a half episodes of The Offer, the Paramount + series about the making of The Godfather. The early reviews had been mostly negative, so I was semi-intrigued by the fact that it seemed fairly competent. Michael Tolkin‘s script struck me as above average. Alas, I began to lose interest during episode #2, and then I started to impatiently fast forward. I was hoping that the Marlon Brando videotape audition sequence would turn up in episode #3, but nope.
And yet — AND YET! — I quickly fell for Matthew Goode‘s portrayal of Robert “The Kid Stays in the Picture” Evans. Having been a moderately close journalist “friend” of Evans in ’95 and ’96 and having spent a lot of time at his French Chateau home on Woodland, I knew the guy pretty well and right away I was nodding appreciatively at Goode’s performance. He nails the murmuring voice, the improvisational smoothitude, the wit, the street cunning.
The last time I was genuinely turned on by a famous-person-impersonation performance was Corey Stoll as Ernest Hemingway in Woody Allen‘s Midnight in Paris (’11).
Why did I lose interest early on? Simple — seething guineas aren’t very interesting.
The New York Italian-American community was pissed and paranoid about Mario Puzo‘s best-selling 1969 novel being made into what they presumed would be a run-of-the-mill gangster film, and for whatever reason nobody (not Evans, not Francis Coppola, not producer Albert Ruddy) was able to sell them on the possibility that The Godfather might become the greatest Italian-American epic ever made, and that it would romanticize Italian-American culture more than anything — a movie that would be much more about family and culture than crime.
The history is the history, but listening over and over to Giovanni Ribisi‘s Joe Colombo, Frank John Hughes‘ Frank Sinatra, Danny Nucci‘s Mario Biaggi and Anthony Skordi‘s Carlo Gambino bitch and moan about “what a disastuh this fuckin’ film will be”….Jesus, guys, give it a rest.
Having hated Dan Fogler for years, I was a wee bit surprised that I liked his performance as Francis Coppola. I was also more or less okay with Miles “don’t be a pervert, man” Teller‘s performance as Ruddy.
Posted on 2.10.09: “On an August morning in 1978,” the story goes, “French director Claude Lelouch mounted a gyro-stabilized camera to the bumper of a Ferrari 275 GTB and had a friend, a professional Formula 1 racer, drive at breakneck speed through the heart of Paris.
“The film was limited for technical reasons to 10 minutes. The driver barrel-assed all the way from Porte Dauphine (the city’s western edge, adjacent to the Bois de Bologne) to the Basilica Sacre Coeur in Montmartre.
“On an August morning in 1978,” the story goes, “French director Claude Lelouch mounted a gyro-stabilized camera to the bumper of a Ferrari 275 GTB and had a friend, a professional Formula 1 racer, drive at breakneck speed through the heart of Paris.a
“No streets were closed, for Lelouch was unable to obtain a permit. The driver completed the course in about 9 minutes, reaching nearly 140 mph (or was it kph?) in some stretches. The footage reveals him running a red lights or two, nearly hitting real pedestrians, and driving the wrong way up several one-way streets.
“Upon showing the film in public for the first time, Lelouch was arrested. He has never revealed the identity of the driver, and the film went underground until a DVD release a few years ago.”
It's my earnest belief that the best things in life...the things that we tend to regard as the best things in life, I should say...are things that happen on their own...randomly, curiously, suddenly, quietly, oddly and sometimes even annoyingly. But they always drop in.
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A year or two from now a large, rectangular, 12-storied, glass-walled building (business + residential) will arise on the south side of the Sunset Strip -- 8850 Sunset Blvd.. Right across from Panini, an Italian pizza take-out place that I've been going to for decades, and bordered by Larabee on the eastern side and San Vicente Blvd. on the west.
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Variety‘s Clayton Davis has never been to Europe much less to the Cannes Film Festival, but that’s about to change next month. Congrats and safe travels.
HE to Davis: Your tickets are already purchased, you’ve said, but I’m hoping that you’ve arranged to schedule a brief stop-over in Paris (which you’ve also never visited) on the way back. After every Cannes Film Festival I’ve attended (my first was in ’92) I’ve always downshifted in Paris, Rome, Prague, Berlin, Barcelona, Lauterbrunnen, London, Ireland, etc. It would be almost sinful, I feel, to ignore this post-Cannes opportunity. But that’s me.
Yeah, I know…Mort who?
It’s been asserted for years by people seemingly in the know that the actual composer of the famously eerie Invaders From Mars score is not Raoul Kraushar, as I’ve stated a few times on HE, but longtime Republic Pictures composer Mort Glickman.
Reporting has it that Kraushar was a Hans Zimmer-like operator and compiler who would hire guys to ghost-write scores, which Kraushar would then take credit for.
I’ve been persuaded that the claims about Glickman may have merit. Okay, that they’re probably legit.
I am therefore apologizing if in fact (as it appears) I have passed along bad intel. Kraushar was apparently not the Invaders From Mars composer, and I apologize for previously failing to report that Glickman, a stocky, bespectacled guy who looked like a 1950s grocery-store clerk and could have played a behind-the-counter colleague of Ernest Borgnine‘s in Marty…Glickman was the maestro!
Three people have made the case — (1) David Schecter, co-producer of Monstrous Movie Music, a “series of re-recordings which feature a wealth of classic music from many of everyone’s favorite science fiction, horror and fantasy films”, (2) Janne Wass in a 2016 article for scifist.wordpress.com, and (3) William H. Rosar, author of a 1986 CinemaScore article titled “The Music for Invaders From Mars.”
Rosar excerpt: “Credited to Raoul Kraushaar, a Paris-born composer who was educated in the United States and began working in films in 1928 as a musical assistant and later music director, the music for Invaders From Mars has frequently been singled out as one of the best 1950s science fiction film scores, its eerie choral arrangements and bleak acapella ‘conjuring up visions of a dying Martian landscape or the wailing of frightened minds in hell,’ as one reviewer wrote.
“Recently, however, it has come to light through several reliable sources that Kraushar may not have scored Invaders From Mars at all, but instead only conducted it, the score having been written instead by Mort Glickman, a contracted ghost writer.”
The first heads-up came from Schecter, who wrote the following in a 3.31.22 HE comment thread about the restored, soon-to-premiere Invaders From Mars:
“Raoul Kraushaar couldn’t compose his way out of a paper bag. I work in the film music industry and am considered one of the experts in classic sci-fi and horror music. I even spoke to Raoul, who was very good at ‘skirting the issue.’ Kraushaar was notorious for using ghost-writers, and I knew some of the composers who wrote for him, including Bert Shefter (who wrote with Paul Sawtell).
“And all the composers back then knew that Kraushaar wasn’t a composer — he was a ‘compiler.’ It was legal to use ghost-writers, but that doesn’t mean people shouldn’t know the real story.
11:30 am update: I’ve just been informed from a knowledgeable source that the 4K Godfather has been tastefully de-grained and DNR’ed! Which nobody has reported so far. And that the slightly blown-out (i.e., white-ish, sun-bleached) look of the outdoor wedding celebration has been modified so it looks less blown-out. And that the rich 1940s-era celluloid colors (those wonderful reds, ambers and taxicab yellows) have been turned down a little bit. So -- no one has said this anywhere -- the new 4K Godfather doesn’t really look like Gordon Willis’s original version. Not really. The 2008 restoration is a faithful capturing and enhancing of the original, but the newbie is doing its own thing. That’s not a put-down -- it’s just a different bird. Or, as Larry Karaszewski said last night, “stunning.”
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Several months ago I watched the first episode of The Last Movie Stars (HBO Max, 7.21), a six-part Ethan Hawke documentary about Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward that seemed, based on episode #1, to be a celebration piece — a doc that says what a wonderful, cooler-than-cool, super-glorious relationship they had.
I posted my understanding of the doc series around 10 days ago.
Paul and Joanne first met in ’53 or thereabouts, got married in 1958 and stayed together for 50 years, parted only by Paul’s death in ’08.
Hawke’s admiration for Newman-Woodward is upfront and unfettered, and his fascination with the transformative acting world of New York in the 1950s is fully conveyed. But this seems to basically be a valentine doc, and having dug into Shawn Levy‘s “Paul Newman: A Life” (’09), a very thoroughly researched and written biography…I shouldn’t say more but Hawke’s basic approach seems to have been very admiring.
I’ve since been told that this isn’t the case. I’m told that Hawke doesn’t mention the name of a journalist, Nancy Bacon, with whom Newman had an affair in ’68 and ’69, but that the affair is definitely mentioned. It’s also acknowledged that Newman was a functioning alcoholic, and that the booze was a real problem for a while. Woodward even kicked Newman out of their Westport home at one point, or so the story goes.
So I’ll be marathoning it starting tomorrow.
Newman made around 12 films in the 1950s, and none of them really hit the mark. No, not even Robert Wise‘s Somebody Up There Likes Me (’56). Because Newman was playing someone else, which isn’t his metier. Newman had to play Paul Newman-ish characters, and that didn’t really start until he lucked into Eddie Felson in Robert Rossen‘s The Hustler (’61). Between The Hustler and The Road to Perdition (’02), Newman starred in roughly 40 films, and ten of them were really good. Okay, 16 if you want to be liberal about it.
Creme de la creme: The Hustler (’61), Hud (’63), Cool Hand Luke (’67), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (’69), The Sting (’73), Slap Shot (’77), Fort Apache, The Bronx (’81), The Verdict (’82), The Color of Money (’86) and The Road to Perdition (’02) / 10.
Good to Pretty Good: Sweet Bird of Youth (’62), Harper (’66), Sometimes a Great Notion (’70), The Mackintosh Man (73), The Towering Inferno (’74), Nobody’s Fool (’94) / 6.
Four first-rate films in the ’60s, two in the ’70s, three in the ’80s and one in the aughts.
Woodward’s career peaked between the late ’50s and late ’60s. Her best were A Kiss Before Dying (’57), The Three Faces of Eve (’57), The Long, Hot Summer (’57), The Fugitive Kind (’60), Paris Blues (’61), The Stripper (’63), Rachel, Rachel (’68), The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (’72), Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams (’73), The Glass Menagerie (’87) and Mr. and Mrs. Bridge (’90) / 11.
Newman took a crack at writing his autobiography, we’re told, but the project stalled or went stale in his head, and he wound up burning all the taped audio interviews. But the tapes had first been transcribed, and we get to hear certain portions from these. Several hotshot actors voice the various players. George Clooney does Newman, and Laura Linney reads Woodward’s tapes.
Broadcast News opened in December 1987 -- call it 35 years ago. Back when William Hurt...the masterful Hurt!...was nearing the end of his glorious groove phase.
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This YouTube short was posted around ten days ago. (It was shot somewhere in the San Diego region.) If this isn't a defining portrait of pathetic self-absorption in 2022 America, nothing is. This video should be converted to 4K and played on bus-stop video screens and in fact played on super-sized screens in all the major tourist areas worldwide -- Times Square, Piccadilly, Sacre Coeur region of Paris, Shibuya in Tokyo, etc.
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Two fellows of serious character and accomplishment have sent opinions and projections about the Oscar situation right now. They’re both director-screenwriters. HE to commentariat: Don’t start throwing names around — just read what they wrote. Here we go…
Fellow #1: “From my vantage no one gives a fuck about the Oscars anymore. They don’t mean a thing. I could hardly bring myself to vote, try alone watch [the nominees[.
“It’s not just they suck, which they do, especially in comparison to the television (streaming) we’re getting here and from around the world, but also how political everything has become. Movies are not an art form anymore. [In the minds of the comintern] they’re now a vehicle to change society, which is not the Academy’s mandate. It may be one of film’s functions, but no one made the Academy in charge of societal development.
“They screwed the pooch when they didn’t let Kevin Hart host it so the LGBT community wouldn’t be upset. He was a major film star. They were supposed to protect him, and not gay people — they have a group for that. They’re not supposed to protect women’s rights or black people. They’re all covered.
“The Academy’s task is to protect filmmakers and the art of movies. But they’ve cheapened the hell out of it. Everyone that wins now has an asterisk next to their name. I don’t care how many women win this year. None of them will feel as good about it if the Academy hadn’t dragged their purses through the mud on the way to the show.”
Fellow #2: “CODA will not win. No way. Too much of a trifle. But I do think it’ll be the dad for supporting actor.
“I don’t think The Power or the Dog wins either. That movie is an odd slog. I have yet to talk to anybody who has seen it and actually likes it. And nobody is buying Benedict [Cumberbatch]. I guess there will be a kneejerk vote for Campion.
“Oddly, I think Best Picture may go to West Side Story. I just sense the town would love to see that happen. It would make us all happy. Five years ago Spielberg would’ve won for Best Director. Power of the Dog equals Roma and WSS equals Green Book.”
HE to Fellow #2: Then why didn’t West Side Story win SAG’s ensemble award?
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