(a) Mr. Conservative: Goldwater on Goldwater producers C.C. Goldwater (l.) and Tani Cohen during brief q & a session — Saturday, 6.24.06, 4:10 pm; (b) Mr. Conservative director Julie Anderson — Saturday, 6.24.06, 4:08 pm; (c) poster in Crest lobby.
I always respected the late Barry Goldwater, the conservative Arizona Senator and 1964 Republican Presidential candidate, for being more candid than most politicians and especially for sticking to his philosophical guns at all times. But after seeing Julie Anderson ‘s Mr. Conservative: Goldwater on Goldwater, an L.A. Film Festival selection that’ll have its nationwide debut on HBO on 9.18, I’ve come to realize he was a man of even greater substance than I knew.
The movie, produced by C.C. Goldwater (the senator’s granddaughter) and Tani Cohen , is an engaging, wholly successful attempt to remind the public who Goldwater really was in terms of core beliefs and personal integrity. The basic message is that by today’s standards, and particularly over the last 25 or 30 years of his life, Goldwater sounded more and more like a liberal. And from my leftie perspective, that’s reassuring.
I somehow never realized until today that Goldwater literally despised Richard Nixon. We’re told that when former Nixon’s White House counsel John Dean, a friend of Goldwater’s son Barry Jr., came to Goldwater for advice prior to testifying in front of the Senate Watergate Committee in April 1973, Goldwater told him “that sunovabitch was always a liar so go ahead and nail him.”
There’s an anecdote about Goldwater being denied a chance to play golf at a certain country club back in the ’50s because of his Jewish name, and that he replied, “Well, I’m only half-Jewish from my father’s side so what if I play nine holes?”
There’s the acknowledgement of Goldwater being the father of the modern conservative political movement, but also reminders that he started to become more and more libertarian after Ronald Reagan‘s election. He believed that abortion and sexual persuasion were private matters and that the government had no right to say anything about them. He said in the late ’80s that religious right types were “a bunch of kooks.”
A few years later he urged Republicans to lay off President Clinton over the Whitewater scandal, and he also criticized the military’s ban on gays.
“You don’t have to be straight to be in the military,” he reportedly said. “You just have to be able to shoot straight.”
Barry, Jr., says in the film that his dad gave him two points of advice about his then-penchant for hound-dogging: “One, keep it out of town. And two, if you don’t get lucky by midnight, go home and get a good night’s sleep.”
Barry Goldwater was probably one of the purest guys to ever succeed in big-time politics, and this film reminds you what a rare and exotic and truly noble bird he was.
“The voice and spirit” behind Kevin Smith‘s Clerks II “are as brash and unmistakable as ever,” says Caryn James in the N.Y. Times , although she includes a tough assessment earlier in the piece: “In the six films Mr. Smith has made since, his gifts have become clearer: he is terrific at irreverence, as in the Clerks movies and the underrated Dogma; he can be awful at emotional sincerity, as in Jersey Girl and the weaker parts of Chasing Amy.”
I still say August 18th is too long a wait for Snakes on a Plane to finally show up in theatres. It’ll do pretty dynamic business, I expect, but it should be opening during one of the weak weekends in July. My son Jett is leaving for college only a few days after August 18th, and thousands of other freshmen, I presume, are looking at same or similar schedules. Won’t this interfere with the usual word-of-mouth cycles and possible repeat business?
Those estimates of Click reaching the mid ’40s may turn out to be optimistic. I’m hearing $39 million and change for the weekend, and that doesn’t factor in any Friday-to-Saturday dropoff due to the possibility that some out there might agree with Wall Street Journal critic Joe Morgenstern and tell their friends that this latest Adam Sandler comedy is “an abomination.” Cars is looking at $30 million for the weekend with an estimated Sunday night cume of $155 mill. Jared Hess’s Nacho Libre is down 55% from last Friday’s opening and looking at a $12.5 million weekend haul. It might wind up with $60 to $70 million by the end of the run, compared to $44,540,956 earned by Napoleon Dynamite.
Jean Luc Godard‘s “influence is immeasurable, yet his popular reputation stems from only a small fraction of his output,” remarks a Sunday (6.25) N.Y. Times piece by Nathan Lee. “From 1960 to 1967 [Godard] became immensely famous for a series of radical entertainments that fused youth-quake insouciance and jazzy improvisation to genre deconstruction and high-culture formalism. They were genre movies with a twist: pseudo gangster films (Breathless), thrillers (Le Petit Soldat), war movies (Les Carabiniers) musicals (A Woman Is a Woman), science fiction (Alphaville). He is the original meta-movie maestro, the first director as D.J. He is also an accomplished film critic, and has always maintained that writing and directing are two sides of the same coin. But when the familiar reference points to Hollywood vanished in the 1970’s, as he became more occupied with Marxism and avant-garde video, people stopped paying attention.” I remember a story Andrew Sarris told me in the late ’70s about the moment he informed Richard Roud and other Manhattan-based Godard acolytes that he had gotten “off the boat.” I’ve been a Godard dilletante all my life — there for the classic entires (my all-time favorite is Weekend) and spotty on his more recent stuff (In Praise of Love, Our Music). And yet I’m unquestionably into seeing, for the first time, Masculine Feminine at the L.A. Film Festival next Thursday, 6.29.
Bring me the head of the Phillip K. Dick android. When you find it, I mean. Gotta be somewhere.
Critic Joe Leydon on Al Gore and An Inconvenient Truth — exceptionally well-written.
