Day: September 9, 2014

That review I ran yesterday of Bill Pohlad‘s Love and Mercy reminded me of a brief encounter I had with Brian Wilson in ’74.

I was living in an upstairs one-bedroom apartment at 648 14th Street in Santa Monica, doing nothing, working as a tree surgeon…my lost period. (I began my adventure in movie journalism the following year.) Right below me lived a guy named Eddie Roach and his wife Tricia. At the time he was working with the Beach Boys as a kind of staff or “touring” photographer. Dennis Wilson fell by two or three times and hung out a bit, and one time I was part of a small group that played touch football with him at a local high-school field. Dennis mocked me that day for being a bad hiker, which I was.

Anyway it was a cloudy Saturday or Sundayafternoon and I was lounging in my living room when I began to hear someone tooling around on Eddie’s piano. It sounded like the beginnings of a song. It began with a thumping, rolling boogie lead-in, complex and grabby, and then the spirited vocal: “Back home boogie, bong-dee-bong boogie…yay-ee-yay…back home boogie, bong-dee-bong”…and then he stopped. One of the chords wasn’t quite right so he played a couple of variations over and over, and then he began again: “”Back home boogie, bong-dee-bong boogie yay-ee-yay!” and so on. Then another mistake and another correction. Then he stopped again and started laughing like a ten year-old drunk on beer: “Hah-hah, heh-heh, heh-hay!” and then right back into the song without losing a beat. It was great stuff. Who is this guy?

Read more

In my 9.3 Telluride review I described The Imitation Game as being about (a) “the personal, bureaucratic and old-school morality issues that interfered with and ultimately shut down the beautiful mind of Enigma code-breaker Alan Turing” and (b) “a sad but fascinating tale about the lonely fate of an eccentric, exceptional genius-hero, and how 1940s and ’50s Britain gave him grief every step of the way.”

I didn’t say this at the time but The Imitation Game feels somewhat tedious in this respect. It’s almost entirely about how Turing’s superiors and co-workers didn’t care for his personality. In scene after scene we watch his Bletchley Park colleagues express irritation and disdain about his aloof, superior manner and general lack of social skills. It reminds us of a lesson that we all have to learn and swallow early on, which is that you must be pleasantly sociable with people you work with (or hang or go to school with) because they’ll make your life hell if you’re not.

The sentiments of Turing’s co-workers are basically as follows: “Most people come to realize by the age of 10 or thereabouts that extra-smart, extra-perceptive people lack a certain normality. They tend to be flaky and eccentric and inwardly directed and not very good with telling jokes and schmoozing and flirting and general shoptalk. We, however, are different. We at Bletchley Park do not recognize that brilliant types need to be cut a little slack, and we certainly don’t recognize this in Mr. Turing’s case.

Read more

For a fairly long time Muhammad Ali, 72, has been in declining health due to Parkinson’s disease and other ailments. A guy who was so physically dazzling with such a lithe and beautiful mind turned into a withered, slow-moving old man who has trouble speaking. Aging can be torture. I remember when he showed up at the Spirit Awards in ’98 or thereabouts and everyone cheered him with “Ali Boom Ba Yay!” I own a DVD of Ali’s greatest fights, and when I want to go to bed with a smile I always watch his 1974 Zaire championship bout with George Foreman. Works every time. I’m catching a screening of I Am Ali a few days after I return to Los Angeles.

Read more

This morning I saw the two Al Pacino films playing at the Toronto Film Festival — David Gordon Green‘s Manglehorn and Barry Levinson‘s The Humbling. And once again Jean-Luc Godard‘s remark about how “every fictional film is a documentary of its actors” came into play. I mainly wanted to see how Pacino, who was 73 when they were shot last year, is coming along. He seems alert and together as far as it goes, but I wish he could just return to being those guys that he was in Heat (i.e., Vincent Hanna) or The Insider (i.e., Lowell Bergman). The Humbling and Manglehorn are meditations about the perils of being an aging, fickle-ego type who’s long since given up on being a good family man or a go-alonger of any kind. Both are saying “if you’ve come this far without a loyal wife or girlfriend or a family to hang with over the holidays then fuck it…just play it like you always have. Enjoy and fulfill as best you can. Otherwise life is short and then you die.”

I liked The Humbling a bit more than Manglehorn because (a) Pacino’s famous-actor character is richer than his Texas Manglehorn locksmith, (b) if it’s a choice between a lonely, low-profile, barely-getting-by septugenarian and a well-known one who drives a nice car and still gets laid every so often, I’m with the latter, (c) HE’s own Greta Gerwig costars as a less-than-ardent lesbian, (d) the fact that Pacino lives in a nicer house in The Humbling (Levinson’s own home in Redding, Connecticut) means that any of the shit that happens is easier to tolerate or process and there’s nothing like nice digs to take the edge off, and (e) The Humbling has a whimsical “life can taste like a fucked bowl of soup but what can you do?” sense of humor. The film is based on a 2009 book by Phillip Roth, and to me that meant…I don’t want to go there.

Read more

But I manage to miss stuff regardless. Choices, priorities, stamina, etc. “You don’t beat this festival” — Burt Reynolds in Deliverance. One person, two computers, two cameras, one Red Bull brain, one pair of hands and legs, one pair of lungs…can’t do it all. I missed yesterday afternoon’s big showing of Jennifer Aniston‘s Cake; my next shot is a p & i screening this morning at 10:30 am. Update: Saw about three-quarters of Cake…very good Aniston but who cares about pain management? A bit meh. This morning, to repeat, also includes Manglehorn and The Humbling. A little writing time this afternoon and then we’ll see what develops.

Taken during last night’s rooftop party for Sony Pictures Classic’s Whiplash. I got there, savored the view, took shots. No Damien Chazelle (director) or Miles Teller so I ran over to the next event…sorry.

Mark Hartley, director of Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films, and producer Brett Ratner during last night’s dinner at Barberian’s Steak House. I saw Hartley’s hilarious, fast-paced film in Los Angeles but the embargo didn’t go up until yesterday.