Day: February 19, 2006

The BAFTA Awards bestowed one very cool award Saturday night: Their Best Film not in the English language honor went to De Battre Mon Coeur S’est Arrete (The Beat that My Heart Skipped (Pascal Caucheteux/ Jacques Audiard). Otherwise their choices were either nationalistically self-serving or way too Hollywood: Best Film — Brokeback Mountain; Alexander Korda award for outstanding British film of the year (bullshit!) — Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit; Carl Foreman award for special achievement by a British Director, writer or producer in their first feature film — Joe Wright (director, Pride & Prejudice;
David Lean Award for Achievement in Direction — Brokeback Mountain‘s Ang Lee; Best Original Screenplay — Crash (Paul Haggis/Bobby Moresco); Best Adapted Screenplay — Brokeback Mountain (Larry Mcmurtry/Diana Ossana)….I can’t do this any more.

Poor Richard Bright (pot-bellied button-man Al Neri to Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone) was run over by a bus on Columbus Avenue and killed. He was a Texas con artist who stole a black briefcase full of cash from Ali McGraw in The Getaway, and then was elbowed in the face three times by Steve McQueen. I’ll never forget his portrayal of a gay guy who was left by Tom Berenger in Looking for Mr. Goodbar, and wailed as Berenger walked away, “Doohhnnn’t go!” He was “Burt” to Harry Dean Stanton’s “Curt” in Rancho Deluxe. He was one of the goons waiting for Laurence Olivier at Kennedy airport in Marathon Man who chuckled when Olivier looked at the Americans going to and fro in the terminal and said, “They always thought God was on their side…now, I think, they are not so sure.” And we all remember that moment when Pacino hugged John Cazale at the end of The Godfather, Part II, and the ice-cold look he gave Bright at that moment.

A guy wrote me and said he was “baffled by [my] fascination with the silly Film Snobs book. Leone really is a greater director than Fellini, so what’s the problem?” And I answered back, “Leone… endless closeups, closeups, closeups….middle-aged guys with lined, leathery faces staring hard at other guys with lined, leathery faces at the train depot, and somebody finally shoots. He’s a stylist, not an artist..not even in the same realm as early ’50s to early ’60s Fellini.”

It felt for a while like I was the only one carrying the ball for Fox Home Video’s DVD of Lamont Johnson’s The Last American Hero — now Glenn Erickson (a.k.a., DVD Savant) has stepped up to the plate. “This unpretentious and uncluttered mini-epic about moonshining and stock car racing in the rural south accomplishes an impressive feat,” he says. “It’s intelligent enough to make viewers forget the idiocy of good-ole-boy action comedies like Smokey and the Bandit and The Dukes of Hazzard.” The way I put it was, “There was only one high-velocity ’70s redneck film that was any good, and it wasn’t even a redneck film.”

Visiting Jett in San Francisco today, tomorrow and Tuesday. The Wi-Fi at the Tropicana hotel (south of Market, near the Castro) supposedly works. Here’s hoping.

I happened to come upon this color shot of Lee Harvey Oswald (snapped on 11.23.63) on The Smoking Gun earlier today, and it hit me that every photo I’ve seen of the guy my entire life has been in black and white…until today. And I now think Oliver Stone should have gotten somebody besides Gary Oldman to play him in JFK.

Former Salon critic Charles Taylor (a major film critic who warrants absolute respect, despite the fact that he likes Mission to Mars) and Jeremiah Kipp talk frankly about movies and the political currents that led to Taylor’s dismissal from Salon in early ’05. The piece appears on Matt Zoller Seitz‘s The House Next Door blog.