Year: 2014

I’ve been wanting to re-experience Bennett Miller‘s Foxcatcher for the sake of compassion if nothing else. Give it another go, a fair shake, etc. I wasn’t the biggest fan out of Cannes but I’ve been telling myself it might kick up or play better the second time. But I missed all the invitationals amd I haven’t gotten myself down to a nearby theatre since it opened last weekend. But now I’m 100% committed to seeing it again with bells on and no excuses. Mainly because National Review critic Armond White has written a brutal pan of Miller’s film because he doesn’t like the film’s political metaphor, which is basically about the perversity of the patriotic one-percenters as represented by Steve Carell‘s John DuPont.

If White is this pissed off about Foxcatcher, I must have missed something when I first saw it in Cannes. One way or another I need to see it again and bend over backwards and give it whatever love I can find, if for no other reason than to stand against Harmin’ Armond and bond with a fellow liberal.

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Mike Binder and Kevin Costner‘s Black and White (Relativity, 12.3), which I’ve been a huge fan of all along, has run smack into the bland ambitions of Paramount Pictures, Seth Rogen, Kevin Hart and director Nicholas Stoller, and has been forced to change its title to Black or White, which really doesn’t fit the film. But Paramount has snagged the rights to Black and White (as well as Black & White, which would have served as a half-decent alternative title for the Binder-Costner) and that’s that.

Stoller’s period comedy, based on a script by Rodney Rothman, will costar Rogen and Hart as the first-ever duo of separate-race cops working together in an LAPD squad car in the late 1940s. If it gets made, that is. The film hasn’t been given a formal go-ahead but Stoller sounded confident when he talked about it with Collider‘s Steve Weintraub earlier this year.

The irony is that during the Collider interview Stoller didn’t sound all that thrilled about Black and White, and in fact seemed more enthusiastic about calling it Jazz Cops, which actually is a better title. Stoller explained to Weintraub that Rogen and Hart’s characters have to “infiltrate the jazz scene to bust jazz musicians for weed.”

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Joan Tarshis initially told me about her Bill Cosby encounters 14 or 15 years ago, but she didn’t want to go public. But seven years ago Hollywood Interrupted‘s Mark Ebner posted a fairly damning, well-sourced piece about Cosby’s booty bandit compulsions for everyone to reflect upon…and the story just laid there. Ebner wrote at the time that People magazine “recently buried a rare investigative piece (12.18.07) featuring shocking interviews with three women claiming that Cosby ‘earned their trust, then sexually assaulted them,’ but — because the story was hidden in all the fluff that drives celebrity magazine sales — Cosby-as-serial sexual abuser is still essentially a non-story.” Obviously no longer.

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HE crashed this morning due to a huge traffic surge from the Joan Tarshis/Bill Cosby story that I posted yesterday afternoon. The tech guys at Liquid Web didn’t spot the problem, but it was obvious to me. I had to increase my memory and storage capacity to the tune of an extra $75 monthly. The Wrap, Variety, Hollywood Reporter, N.Y. Daily News…they all jumped on it. I’ve always thought that HE had plenty of memory, more than enough. Maybe I do now. It took a while for the Liquid Web guys to physically install the extra capacity. Apologies for my lack of foresight.

Let’s imagine that Disney and Working Title execs get together soon and decide they need to erase Jack Black‘s “Cosby sweater” line in High Fidelity as far as all future DVDs, Blurays and digital downloads are concerned. To remove the taint. Which means they’d have to hire Black to re-dub the line. But with what? How can Black describe the sweater humorously without alluding to the un-person? Strictly hypothetical. A stupid idea, of course, but you know how corporations get when icky stuff surfaces and “threatens the brand.”

Bennett Miller‘s Foxcatcher opened limited this weekend. Responses from HE readers are hereby sought. Here’s a re-post of my Foxcatcher review out of Cannes: “Speaking as a devoted admirer of Bennett Miller‘s Capote and Moneyball, it gives me no pleasure to admit that I feel less enthusiastic about Foxcatcher.

“There’s no doubt that Foxcatcher is strong and precise and clean, especially as crime dramas tend to go. And I respect the fact that it contains undercurrents that stay with you, and I certainly respect and admire what Miller has done in his usual deft and subtle way. But the obviously intelligent Foxcatcher is a relentlessly bleak trip that, accomplished as it is, isn’t especially likable or enjoyable. Okay, I ‘liked’ it or…you know, I didn’t ‘dislike’ it because it’s so well-made and refined, etc. But it’s basically a grim study of a dark tale about victims and affluent malevolence and corrupting wealth, and about fate surrounding the characters like tentacles and sucking them down the drain.

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I’m sorry I missed Liv Ullmann‘s Miss Julie at the Toronto Film Festival, but I’m even more sorry that I can’t watch the trailers for this mixed-response film without wondering what’s up with poor Samantha Morton. She’s only 37, and over the last four or five years her head, neck and body have seriously ballooned. An unkind remark, you may say, but do you think Average Joe audiences are going to ignore this fact? Her appearance has significantly changed. Certainly since she was in Anton Corbijn‘s Control. Colin Farrell plays Jean, the fiance of Morton’s Christine, in this adaption of August Strindberg’s 1888 play. You look at Morton and then Jessica Chastain, and you can’t help but partially sympathize. Miss Julie may (I say “may”) open in the U.S. sometime in December.

Sexual assault accusations have been raining down on Bill Cosby over the last week or two, above and beyond a 2006 out-of-court payoff to alleged victim Andrea Constand. 13 women have reportedly accused the comedian of intimate transgressions of one kind or another. Last Thursday the Washington Post published a piece by alleged Cosby victim Barbara Bowman. In response to which Cosby cancelled an appearance on Late Night with David Letterman and refused to discuss the issue with NPR’s Scott Simon in an audio interview posted on 11.15.

I’m recapping the basics because an old friend, former actress, music industry publicist and journalist Joan Tarshis, has decided to share her own, heretofore private story about her unfortunate encounter with Cosby back in 1969. She had opportunities to spill to the tabloids a few years back but she didn’t want to go that route. The flood of recent Cosby coverage has changed her mind. She got in touch this morning and sent me the following:

“I was 19 years old in autumn of 1969. I had flown to Los Angeles from New York to work on a monologue with Godfrey Cambridge. Two women I was staying with were friends of Bill Cosby, and they took me to have lunch with him in his cottage at Universal Studios, where he was shooting The Bill Cosby Show. He was always generous with his food and drinks, though he never drank alcohol. But he always topped my Bloody Mary’s with beer, which he called a ‘redeye.’

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Two days ago I riffed about the relative lack of calming shade and big towering trees in the Los Angeles area. Another thing we’re short of is rain, of course, and particularly torrential downpours, which I love standing in the middle of as long as I’m under an umbrella or shelter of some kind. I experienced an awesome cloudburst last year at this time (on 11.19.13) in Vietnam, in a forested area outside of Hue. The sound alone was fantastic. How many of these have I sampled since moving to Los Angeles in ’83? Damn few. I remember another really good one in Paris about 11 years ago. Rivers were raging in the gutters of narrow cobblestoned streets.

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Last night I finally watched Marshall Curry‘s Point and Shoot, which won the Best Documentary prize at last April’s Tribeca Film Festival. It’s a handsomely captured, smoothly edited doc about the Middle-Eastern adventures of Matthew VanDyke, an enterprising, financially fortified, highly educated guy who went on a manly motorcycle journey of self-discovery throughout Northern Africa and the Middle East between 2007 and 2009. His most significant stopover during that trip was in Libya, where he made friends and discovered special feelings of kinship for that country’s culture. VanDyke went back to the States but returned to Libya in 2011 to join the fight against Muammar Gaddafi.

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I’m a big fan of the word “finality,” which I never seem to hear in everyday conversation. I’m an even bigger fan of movies that use it. I’m thinking of exactly two that have. In Peter Ustinov‘s Billy Budd (’62), able seaman Melvyn Douglas is asked by a naval officer why he’s using the past tense in referring to Claggart (Robert Ryan), the ship’s master-at-arms, and the grim-faced Douglas says, “I look around and sense finality here.” In Don Siegel‘s Charley Varrick (’73), Joe Don Baker chuckles after Sheree North hands him Walter Matthau‘s business card. “Charley Varrick, Last of the Independents,” he reads. “I like that. Has a ring of finality.”

10 bonus points to anyone who can name another significant film that has used the word, 25 bonus points if they can post the exact quote, and 50 bonus points if they can honestly cop to having used the term in conversation.

Cruddy reviews (27% Rotten Tomatoes, 35% Metacritic) and infantile, submental, nose-picking humor (which of course is precisely the point) is no impediment to box-office success these days. The Farrelly Brothers’ Dumb and Dumber To, or the reuniting of Jim Carrey‘s Lloyd and Jeff Daniels‘ Harry, will end up with roughly $38 million for the weekend.

I was planning to attend the all-media but the AFI Fest interfered, so perhaps those who’ve seen it will answer a question. Did Carrey and Daniels being a bit older get in the way of the humor to any degree? In a 9.25.13 piece called “Long of Tooth,” I noted that “dumbasses in their 30s vs. dumbasses in their 50s are different equations…you can fall into dumb-shit situations when you’re youngish but guys with creases on their faces are supposed to be craftier and less susceptible.”

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