Criterion’s 4K digital restoration of Body Heat, supervised by editor Carol Littleton and approved by director Lawrence Kasdan, pops on 5.19.26.
If they’ve tealed this thing, there will be hell to pay…that’s all I’m going to say. Body Heat is all sweaty colors…hazy sunlight, amber-lighted bars and street lights.
William Hurt‘s Ned Racine seems to be making it with an Elizabeth Short/Black Dahlia version of Kathleen Turner‘s Maddy Walker…severed in half, I mean.
Hurt never so much as looks at a gun in Kasdan’s film, much less picks one up.
The first reservation window begins on Friday, 5.8, at 9 am (Paris time), or 3 am in New York and 12 midnight in Los Angeles. Repeating: the keyboard ordeal starts in the wee hours tomorrow night…to bed by midnight, and then wake up 2 hours and 45 minutes later and punch in what you want to see. And then crash again.
So who directed this captivating black and white video, which is only a couple of weeks old? The author-artist is Siba, a 20something based in Germany, and the track, “Dounana”, is full of righteous rage…identity, erasure, resistance. Basically an “eff Israel and eff Natanyahu” thing. Eff the Israeli missiles, eff injustice…shame on the silence. I love the growling, moaning, horror-house guitar.
In The Beloved (the original Spanish title is El Ser Querido), Javier Bardem plays a demanding, judgmental film director with a daughter who doesn’t like him much.
Bardem doesn’t, however, play a raging, sputtering beast. He plays, in fact, “nothing less and nothing more than a flawed human,” according to Variety‘s Daniel D’Addario.
“Bardem’s character, who insists on everyone else’s professionalism, has an utterly unprofessional breakdown while filming under the baking sun,” D’addario writes.
Bardem: “That takes us directly to the toxic masculinity of his generation and his age — which is my age, which is my culture, which is Spain.”
20th Century Spanish dudes who were raised under Franco, says Bardem, “were educated in a culture that was giving us all we wanted, and we took for granted that we are way more powerful and more in control — we are the driving force, as men. That is absolutely wrong in every sense.”
Wrong in every sense? If guys don’t assert themselves in the face of social bludgeoning and generally try to keep their feet in the gas, they’ll be trampled. Their rivals will open them up like a can of beans.
Interviews aside, almost nothing I see online is fully trustable…nothing. My default presumption is that almost everything I see (and I mean 85% or 90% of it) has been AI-tweaked or AI-composited to some extent. Or completely. Almost everything out there, in short, is an AI cartoon. Raw reality is very close to being a thing of the past. In this context, I almost feel a measure of affection for the Zapruder film. I certainly miss funny calamity videos like this one:
10:30 am update: Farewell to TBS, TCM and CNN pioneer Ted Turner. Dead at 87. Say what you will about Turner, there was nothing artificial about him.
You can tell right away that Matt Johnson‘s Tony (A24, August), an Anthony Bourdain biopic, will assuredly satisfy. Dominic Sessa (The Holdovers) doesn’t look anything like the young Bourdain, and I don’t care because aside from Sessa’s acting chops he clearly has an X-factor thing going on. It’s also obvious that Antonio Banderas‘s performance as Ciro, a restaurant owner and chef who hires Bourdain, will be a pleasurable stand-out.
The New York Sun is an online, mildly conservative-minded newspaper that also publishes a print edition. I bought a copy inside Grand Central Station a couple of months ago, and really loved turning the pages on my Westport-bound train. It reminded me of reading the Int’l Herald Tribune in Paris cafes bright and early, which I loved doing in the aughts. (The Trib‘s print edition stopped publishing on 10.14.13.)
I haven’t written a piece for print since the mid ’90s, so when editor Tom Teodorczuk asked for a pair of Cannes Film Festival articles (a “Cannes Then & Now” thang plus a wrap-up), I said sure.
The preview piece, which runs longish (25 or so paragraphs), will be online Friday. It’ll be stepped on, of course, but that’s part of the give-and-take. The print edition will appear next week. I’ll be in Cannes, of course, so I’m looking around for an hombre who can buy a couple of copies on my behalf.
In short, Team Lively folded their case. After 18 months of aggressive press statements and social media back-and-forth from both sides, the Lively guys suddenly saw no upside in arguing the NYC court case that was going to begin later this month.
So they basically said “fuck it…Blake and especially Ryan Reynolds can’t do this any more and so we’re pulling the plug…nothing good for Blake can come from a trial, and particularly the tough grilling that would have come from Baldoni’s attorneys…tough questions and difficult answers that would have been reported and read by everyone.”
However Lively might have answered, the aftermath would have only underlined or intensified Blake’s mean-girl rep and the “everyone hates her…she’s radioactive” industry narrative.
In response to this Baldoni’s surprised attorneys presumably said “really?…uhm, okay, sure, fine. But we’re not coughing up a dime.”
That’s right — nobody paid anyone anything. Not a single Lively or Baldoni dollar was forked over to anyone from the opposing side. The party in a legal dispute who says to the other party “let’s make this go away”…that person is the loser in the matter.
If this isn’t a case of just desserts as far as Lively’s situation is concerned, I don’t know what would be. The joint statement about the settlement doesn’t contain an apology from Baldoni. No dough, no Baldoni mea culpa….nothing.
After months of feeling poked and annoyed by teasers and snippets of Chris Nolan‘s The Odyssey (Universal, 7.17), a full-sized, reasonably engaging trailer finally emerged yesterday.
I kept muttering to myself “where’s the cyclops?….where’s the cyclops?…where’s the cyclops?” The fucker can barely be seen, but it’s obvious he has a shaved head. Was the cyclops born bald or afflicted with a Mike Nichols-like disease? Or did he have to do a straight-razor head-shave every two or three days?
If only Nolan hadn’t chickened out of allowing a big Odyssey premiere to happen at the Cannes Film Festival (which starts next week), but then Nolan always chickens out when it comes to the Cote d’Azur. He’s an excellent filmmaker, but also (no offense) a bit of a pussy. Who makes a film about the WWII-era creation of the atom bomb without showing the bomb’s devastating impact upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
After going dark for a full two days (from the crack of dawn on Sunday, May 3rd, to the early-morning wee hours of Tuesday, May 5th), HE has finally returned to the land of the living and the read.
Since launching in August 2004 HE has endured occasional technical glitches and been out of service for…oh, two or three hours from time to time. But never in my 22 years of online column-filing — 28 years if you count my Mr. Showbiz, Reel.com “Showbiz Confidential” and Movie Poop Shoot chapters — had the column been down for a full day, much less two….Jesus. It felt eerie, strange. I was alone, adrift…voiceless.
For two days I whined and begged and pleaded for help from the Liquid Web / Nexcess guys, who were overwhelmed given the huge scale of the corruption. While I managed to speak to two intelligent and lucid fellows (one based in Amsterdam, the other in Uzbekistan), I didn’t find my deliverer — a brilliant Amsterdam-based techie named Sharon K.– until yesterday afternoon. Sharon began a “rooted restoration” of HE and worked all through the New York night. The nightmare finally came to an end around….oh, 2 or 3 in the morning.
HE to A24 rep, send yesterday: “I’m very, VERY keen on seeing Olivia Wilde’s The Invite in Cannes. I’m dead certain there will at least a couple of market screenings. It’s too hot to keep away from European distributors, not to mention champing-at-the-bit European critics. All I want to do is see it there. I’ll be happy to wait for the commercial release to review it. Could you please assist? Thanks.”
