Month: April 2014

Projections that Disney-Marvel’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier will earn as much as $90 million this weekend are not about (a) the renewed strength of the Marvel brand or (b) an indication that the summer season is now beginning in April. Okay, these are part of the picture but the big-hit vibe is mainly due to crackling wildfire awareness that it’s an exceptionally well-crafted, highly satisfying popcorn pic. Because it is.

Don’t listen to the pundits who are trying to spin this off as some kind of trend or marketing-hook story. Some reporters would rather stab themselves in the chest with a pencil than admit that most hits become hits for the simplest of reasons — i.e., because the word is out that they deliver the goods. When a film is really the shit, people can smell it. That’s all that’s going on here. Nothing more.

“The new Captain America flick is good enough to win the admiration and allegiance of a comic-book-movie hater like myself,” I wrote a few days ago. “This is one sharp, well-written (by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely), rock-solid, mega-efficient, super-expensive something or other, and with a certain humanist empathy that seeps through from time to time. It’s going to be a huge hit.”

David Letterman announced last night that he’ll be riding off into the sunset sometime next year. If he leaves after 2.1.15 Letterman will have been hosting a talk show for 33 years straight (not counting the hiatus between the end of his Late Night with David Letterman NBC show and the 1993 start of CBS’s Late Show with David Letterman). Letterman has obviously enjoyed doing the show. He thinks he’ll be happy not doing it, but if he doesn’t engage himself in some kind of engrossing, satisfying work he’ll wind up feeling empty and antsy and possibly even miserable. Nobody who enjoys doing what they do should ever retire. Truly creative people stop under one circumstance and one circumstance only.

Let history record that in the year 2014 a pair of social-discord films with nearly identical numerical titles — ’71 and 1971 — were screened at major film festivals. Yann Demange‘s ’71, which I saw a few weeks ago at the Berlin Film Festival, is a Belfast-set thriller about a British soldier running and hiding for his life. 1971, showing at this month’s 2014 Tribeca Film Festival, is a doc about a group of protesters who stole hundreds of FBI documents that proved J. Edgar Hoover‘s agency was systematically targeting and harassing New Left activists.

With Mad Men in the air — last night’s premiere, the 4.13 debut of season #7 — now’s a pretty good time to recall a brief encounter with the legendary David Ogilvy, the Godfather of all Mad Men and the poet laureate of ’50s and ’60s smooth-as-silk advertising. It happened in June of ’76 at Chateau Touffou, a medieval French mansion Ogilvy had purchased in 1966. He had once been married to the sister of the mother of my girlfriend at the time, Sophie Black (a descendant of the Cabot family, later to become a fairly renowned poet), and so during our European travels Sophie arranged a drop-by. Ogilvy was about 65 at the time. He was a wise, learned, blue-blood type with a capacity for snooty bon mots (he described his castle as being located “in the South Dakota of France“) but was quite friendly and gentle and polite. We got along pretty well. I told him my father had been a J. Walter Thompson exec back in the ’60s. Chateau Touffou’s garden had the most luscious, apple-sized strawberries I’ve ever seen or tasted in my life. There was also an underground jail (a leftover from the middle ages) with tiny little cells…horrid. Our co-host was Ogilvy’s wife of three years, Herta Lans, as kind and gracious as they come. A delightful interlude. Ogilvy died in July 1999.

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So you’re a 17 year-old blonde from Scotland, visiting New York City with your parents. You’re smokin’ and you know it. You’ve had guys grinning and leering at you all your life. It’s been a drag in some respects but this is your cross to bear. But you know that however successful you may be in whatever profession you choose, you’re assured of a comfortable, probably flush and perhaps even a Kardashian lifestyle if you play your cards right. So you run into the 35 year-old James Franco, a.k.a. “Alien.” He’s obviously attracted (like every other guy you’ve met since you were seven years old) and he starts suggesting a meeting and whatnot. You’ve seen Spring Breakers. You know what he wants.

Lucy Clode, resident of Scotland, internationally famed for duplicity and untrustworthiness.

So what do you do? Burn him! Tell your dingleberry-brain friends! Spread the news! Embarass the shit out of him! Make the bastard fuck pay!

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I was immersed in traffic late yesterday afternoon when I heard about longtime Entertainment Weekly critic Owen Gleiberman getting the axe. I pulled over and sent him a standard but earnestly felt “so sorry but chin up!” email. Owen is a friend and good fellow with whom I’ve conversed at film festivals and parties for the last couple of decades. A superb, hugely entertaining writer and a major, major Film Catholic. Nobody knows or worships the realm more than he. With his highly attuned awareness levels Owen had to know this was coming, of course. Like a squirrel dealing with the approach of winter, he’s surely been making contingency plans for some time.

It’s old news but the occasion calls for a recap. Cultured, super-brainy film disciples like Owen aren’t respected or valued like they used to be, certainly not by the hoi polloi. For the last several years it’s been less and less about informed, insightful opinions from ivory tower elites and more and more about the social media conversation on Twitter and comment threads and whatnot. Plus I’ve had this idea for a while now that Entertainment Weekly is mainly read by lightweights, or more particularly by the moths who are attracted to celebrity jizz for its own sake with a particular focus on Kardashian Coke bottles who are famous for being famous.

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I’ve gotten used to presumptions about Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu‘s Birdman, Bennett Miller‘s Foxcatcher, David Cronenberg‘s Maps to the Stars, Tommy Lee Jones‘ The Homesman, the Dardennes brothers‘ Two Days, One Night, Michel Hazanavicius‘ The Search and Fatih Akin‘s The Cut playing at next month’s Cannes Film Festival. Now I’m warming to the idea of Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Inherent Vice (which has now been mentioned twice in Cannes projection pieces, most recently by Variety‘s Peter Debruge). Give me a week or two and I’ll be (a) completely invested in Vice‘s possible booking and (b) profoundly depressed if it doesn’t turn up.

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Mad Men‘s season #7 is occuring in 1969, and once again Don Draper‘s hair style hasn’t changed a bit since the very beginning (i.e., 1961 or thereabouts). Let me make something clear: every single American male who had any give-and-take dealings with the upheavals of the ’60s grew his hair out to some degree between ’61 and ’69. At least slightly. Even the Draper types (neurotic, alcohol issues, plugged-up) at least grew their sideburns a bit and allowed their hair to lengthen a tad. The 1960s witnessed the most dramatic hair changes of the 20th Century, and as such were metaphors for guys easing up on their machismo posturings. The pressure to loosen up and “conform” was considerable. And yet Matthew Weiner steadfastly refuses to let Draper grow his sideburns just a bit. I’ve been tolerating this crap ever since the show went through 1965 (i.e., the first year that button-down business guys began to see their barber less often) but now it’s getting weird.

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ScarJo as an ass-kicking Neo Nikita super-lethal Terminator fantasy hottie, bringing pain into the lives of so many bad guys you’ll lose count. Wiki synopsis: “In a world run by the Taiwanese mob, drug-mule Lucy (Scarlett Johansson) inadvertently absorbs a super-drug goes into her system, changing her into a metahuman [who] can absorb knowledge instantaneously, is able to move objects with her mind and can’t feel pain and other discomforts.” In other words, another Luc Besson exercise in Euro-styled jizz whizz, but possibly a cut above. The trailer indicates solid style and pizazz. Here’s hoping. The Universal release opens on 8.8.14.

There’s nothing special about this film of a 1963 Dr. Strangelove product reel except for one thing: it’s narrated by a guy who sounds like he grew up in the Bronx alongside Jake La Motta. The old-school, mostly Jewish and Italian Bronx, I mean. A voice that could have belonged to a Bronx cab driver or the owner of a Bronx bakery, dry cleaners or luncheonette. “Wait, hold on…you don’t have anything smaller than a twenty? I won’t have any change left.”

Watch and listen closely, and you’ll notice that almost all the scenes, much of the dialogue and some camera angles are not the refined versions used in the finished film.

There have been many stage and film adaptations of Tennessee Williams‘ The Glass Menagerie (’44), which is generally regarded as Williams’ second best play after A Streetcar Named Desire. But there’s one Menagerie you probably haven’t seen unless you’re an avid TCM watcher: the somewhat comical, poorly received 1950 Warner Bros. version starring Jane Wyman, Kirk Douglas, Gertrude Lawrence and Arthur Kennedy, under the direction of Irving Rapper (Now, Voyager, The Brave One). Williams reportedly hated it (particularly the forced happy ending), and many critics at the time gave it a thumbs-down. I saw it as a teenager so my recollections probably aren’t reliable, but I remember Douglas’s Gentleman Caller performance exuding a really caring vibe. A few commenters on the TCM page are major admirers. And even if it isn’t the greatest Williams adaptation why is it totally un-buyable and un-rentable? (It never even came out on VHS.) Lawrence’s performance was apparently a problem but Douglas, Wyman and Kennedy were all youthful comers when it was filmed. How bad could it be? The Warner Archives guys should at least be making it available as a streamer. It’s obviously the kind of film that TCM Classic Film Festival (4.10 through 4.14) should be showing — buried for decades, loved by the sentimentalists, etc.

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In a 4.2 Indiewire piece called “Can Atheist Audiences Enjoy Darren Aronofsky’s Noah?,” the brilliant James Rocchi explains his resistance to a theological mindset as follows: “I am not a believer in any religious tradition or idea of God; in fact, I dislike the term ‘atheist’ specifically because like, say, ‘Marvel Cinematic Universe,’ it’s a term that gives way too much unquestioned weight to one side of the argument. People who recognize that, for one example, dragons could not exist and have not existed don’t have to be labeled an ‘adragonist’; they’re just called ‘reasonable.'”

(l.) Indiewire contributor James Rocchi; (r.) Noah star Russell Crowe.

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