[During Barry Lyndon filming in ‘73] “If this is so awesome, and it obviously is…I almost can’t believe I’m actually starring in a Stanley Kubrick film…I mean, this obviously puts my career into a whole ‘nother realm…but if this is so awesome, why do I have this odd queasy little tickly feeling that after this film opens, my career heyday will be over and I’ll never get back to the salad days ever again?”
Give Joe and Jane what they want to see, and they’ll come out for it. Lionsgate to Michael-bound moviegoers: Bring your friends and neighbors so we can top $90 million…c’mon, people!”
Filed by THR’s Pamela McClintock at 6 pm this evening (4.24.26):
I just had an instant gut dislike for the show, sight unseen. But now, thanks to Maureen Callahan‘s rant, I want to…uh, wade into season 3. Just to see if it’s as appalling as she says.
Except their fingers are longer, thinner and more delicate. Carlo Rimbaldi alien fingers, covered by dark-brown elephant skin.
Oh, and Josh O’Connor‘s jug ears? An admired, first-rate actor, O’Connor radiates a kind of scowling nerd vibe — an interesting, extremely pale, not-all-that-handsome face with small beady eyes, and that’s fine. But the ears are too much.
I didn’t invent the term “jug ears.” The fact that O’Connor has a whopper-sized pair is incontestable. If I had been in O’Connor’s shoes a decade or so ago I would have had them pinned, and there’s nothing terrible about that. Clark Gable had his ears pinned back in the 1920s.
Before today I’d never even seen portions of It, the frothy 1927 comedy that catapulted Clara Bow into superstardom. It feels a bit musty and is certainly stocked with rube-level humor, but I enjoyed the spirited, screw-it-all attitude.
I was especially taken with the 26 year-old Gary Cooper, who plays a newspaper reporter. Coop doesn’t mouth so much as a single line of subtitled dialogue. Released in January of ’27, It was a silent film, of course. The Jazz Singer didn’t open until October of that year.
Blue-chip restoration guru Robert Harris is currently putting the finishing touches on an It restoration, and this spiffed-up, 99-year-old classic (“the first Hollywood romcom”) will screen sometime in late May or early June at the Bedford Playhouse.
“There seems to be no pattern, no purpose to her life. She swings from one emotion to another, but she gains nothing, stores up nothing for the future. She lives entirely in the present, not even for today, but in the moment. Clara is the total nonconformist. What she wants she gets, if she can. What she desires to do, she does. She has a big heart, a remarkable brain, and the most utter contempt for the world in general. Time doesn’t exist for her, except that she thinks it will stop tomorrow. She has real courage, because she lives boldly. Who are we, after all, to say she is wrong?” — Adela Rogers St. John on Clara Bow.
“You remarkable pig. You can thank whatever pig God you pray to that you haven’t quite turned me into a murderer.”
Ten days hence (5.3.26) a 70mm print of the 1962, Marlon Brando-starring Mutiny on the Bounty will screen at Hollywood’s Egyptian under the aegis of the TCM Classic Film Festival.
I don’t know for a fact that the 70mm Mutiny print is freshly created, but doesn’t it seem likely? Films that show at the TCM Fest always present an upgraded, grade-A appearance, and what are the odds that WB or TCM would project a 70mm Mutiny print that’s been lying around since the Kennedy administration? Wouldn’t a print this old have gone pink by now?
Tradition tells us that older films playing in some kind of enhanced, rejuvenated form at this long-running Hollywood festival usually turn up on Bluray and HD streaming down the road. Bumped, I mean. The ’62 Mutiny, shot in Ultra Panavsion 70**, was first released on Bluray 15 years ago — 11.8.11. It doesn’t look half bad but was scanned from 35mm elements, or so I’ve long understood. A new 4K Bluray that harvests 70mm elements would look much, much better.
Put on your logic cap and ask yourself this: why would Warner Bros. spend $200K*** to create a new 70mm print of a 64-year-old film if they weren’t planning to eventually create a new 4K UHD Bluray, sourced from a scan of the 70mm elements? $200K is an awful to spend on a 70mm print of an old film that would only screen once.
** Ultra Panavision 70 delivers an aspect ratio of 2.76:1.
*** I’m told by a trusted source that striking a fresh 70mm print of this respected-but-not-widely-beloved film from the original negative would cost this amount.
Woke Hollywood has no argument with any movie making big money, but Micheal is, from a certain avoidance perspective, an ethically barren, morally gutted film — a massive exercise in denial that basically says “forget about all that gnarly kid-diddling stuff…just have fun with the music and dancing and adoration of the fans.”
Like I’ve already said a couple of times, I can enjoy Michael for the cool sections by simply locking the child-perv stuff into a steel lockbox and dropping it into the trunk of my car in the parking lot. And that’s how most of American will respond to this, trust me.
But not the Academy. The woke scolds will tell each other that it can’t be nominated for anything because of the bad optics.
Jaafar Jackson for Best Actor? I don’t think so as his casting was obviously an inside family job. He delivers a grade-A impersonation, true, and he looks fine but he’s not really pretty enough. He doesn’t have the Real MCoy’s soulful cow eyes, and without Michael makeup he looks like Pauly Shore.
At the end of the day nominating Jaafar would be, in effect, a roundabout endorsement of Michael‘s audacious perversity. I don’t think the Academy will want to applaud this.
Friendo: “I’ve seen more than one tweet comparing this to a biopic about Hitler that leaves out the fact that he was a Nazi.”
Graham King and Antoine Fuqua’s Michael is a fitfully enjoyable if terminally mild jukebox biopic — flush, glossy, tidy and sanitized into an all-but-bloodless, family-friendly state of flatline ho-hum. Except all those great Jackson songs from the ‘80s aren’t ho-hum, so there’s that.
The flashy musical performance sequences (all the hits except “Black or White“!) are generically pulse-quickening and “fun” as far as that goes. I really felt the foot-tapping mojo during the creation-of-Thriller sequences.
Yes, Jaafar Jackson (son of Jermaine) delivers a triple grade-A impersonation of uncle Michael in his prime. And yet throughout the film I was unable to shake the obvious fact that Jaafar, while pleasant-looking with symmetrical features, is nowhere near as pretty as Michael. The producers should have found a look-alike Jackson impersonator-actor who can moonwalk like a champ…the world’s full of them.
And yes, John Logan’s script dutifully delivers (repetitively) an abusive, old-fashioned villain in the person of Michael’s ogre-ish, hard-driving dad, Joseph Jackson (Colman Domingo under pounds of face-altering makeup)…an authoritarian prick who’s cut from the exact same cloth as Will Smith’s Richard Williams in King Richard.
The only dramatically satisfying sequence in the whole film is when Joseph (aka Joe) receives a termination fax from Michael’s recently hired attorney, John Branca, a one-sentence message stating that Joe is no longer Michael’s manager. Yes! But that’s it. Nothing else happens in Michael to match this single sweet moment.
But then Joe won’t go away. He keeps hanging around and pushing for the Victory tour blah blah. Will you get outta here, man? We’re sick of your ass. You’re bad news!
Dramatically Michael is close to the level of Spidey and His Amazing Friends, if Spidey had a cruel, physically abusive dad. On a side-by-side basis Michael makes Disney’s The Adventures of Spin & Marty, the ‘50s TV series that was enfolded into The Mickey Mouse Club, seem as dramatically formidable as Eugene O’Neill‘s Long Day’s Journey Into Night.
And yet (I’m repeating myself) it’s been handsomely, forcefully, urgently produced and is undeniably “watchable” if you put away your Kate Erbland-approved ethical compass. The crowd of morally vacant degenerates I saw it with last night were clearly delighted, I can tell you. Many were happily hanging out in the theatre and in the lobby afterwards, chit-chatting and coo-cooing the high moments. If people don’t like a film they immediately head for the parking garage.
Friendo to HE: “Was your audience mostly white?” HE to friendo: “Mixed suburban types. Hispanics, light-skinned POCs, Wonderbreads, white Leave It To Beaver families. No hardcore hip-hop street homeys with skullcaps.”
One final observation: Michael dies when the hair-burning accident happens and he goes into recovery at the Brotman Medical Center. The movie just stalls and stops whatever it’s been doing since the opening credits, and it’s like “what’s happening?…the fire has gone out.” The film keeps going for another 25 or 30 minutes but it feels rote and robot-like. Hell, the Brotman hospital bed-and-bandage recovery footage is like “what is this?”
Jarmusch doesn’t mention the teal desecration of John Boorman‘s 1967 classic, but then how could he? The Criterion guys probably sat him down and said “Jim? You can’t even allude to the concept of teal tinting or teal vandalism, much less say the actual word. We’re sorry but we’re going to need your signature on this form, Jim. We’re just being careful.”
There’s a real art to taking interview transcripts and making regular-guy gab sound like clean, well-shaped, high-end prose…prose that reminds you, no exaggeration, of the lean, elegant, unpretentious simplicity of Ernest Hemingway and the well-honed sentence stylings of Norman Mailer‘s “The Executioner’s Song” (’79), which was described as Hemingwayesque when it first popped in ’79.
This is what former Gannett film critic, novelist and documentarian Marshall Fine has managed to do, ghost-editing-wise, with an autobiography about Rochester radio legend Alan Levin, better known as Brother Wease. The book is called “At Ease With Brother Wease,” which not only isn’t on Amazon but (wait for it) has no direct-purchase URL. But the word-, sentence- and paragraph-sculpting is just wonderful.
Fine: “I can’t imagine that there’s much of a market for [this book] outside of upstate New York, but Wease has a pretty good story to tell. Essentially about a Rochester ne’er-do-well who volunteered for Vietnam, came back to sell drugs and promote rock concerts, and wound up becoming Rochester’s top-rated morning radio guy for 40 years.”
David Field was the United Artists exec whom Michael Cimino completely ignored (i.e., walked right by him, not saying a word) during the Montana filming of Heaven’s Gate. Field and co-production chief Steven Bach tried and failed to control the disastrous overspending that doomed this infamous 1980 western.
Field on “L’affaire Huppert” — a sharp casting dispute between Cimino, who wanted Isabelle Huppert in Gate‘s lead female role, and Field and Bach. The two UA producers had come to a verbal agreement with Cimino that if they felt that her accent was too thick and that she wouldn’t work out, he would agree to find someone else. So they flew to Paris to hear her read dialogue. After listening to Huppert struggle with the English language, Field and Bach decided she was really wrong for the part. A hard decline.
Field: “A couple of days after we said said no, the phone rang and it was Cimino, and he said ‘I’ve been thinking about [your decision] and it’s still Isabelle Huppert.’ And I said ‘you know, this is a problem now because it’s no longer about isabelle Huppert. This is now about your word. You and I had an arrangement which now doesn’t mean anything. Cimino said ‘what’s your point?’ I said ‘my point is that I’ll give you 48 hours to tell me you didn’t mean this phone call, or I’m going to do my level best to make sure we never make this movie.’ He told me go fuck myself and hung up.
“[Transamerica honcho] Andy Albeck asked me what my problem with the movie was, and I said that my problem with the movie is (a) I no longer know what Cimino’s word means and (b) I don’t know what the movie could cost. I don’t know anything any more, I said, because of what just happened.”
Watch and listen to Field’s remarks in Final Cut: The Making and Unmaking of Heaven’s Gate (’04):
