Day: March 12, 2015

Last Monday I went back again to the Hollywood DMV office on Cole, this time to get my regular Class C driver’s license. I had flunked the motorcycle driver’s written test for the sixth time three days earlier, and I just couldn’t stand the feeling of failure any longer. I hadn’t felt that badly about myself since I was flunking history and science exams in high school. (I’ll try to get the motorcycle license again after I return from Europe next June.) Anyway I was waiting for my number to be called when a guy who looked a lot like Richard Benjamin walked in. He seemed older than I expected (wanted?) him to look and a wee bit haggard, but it was Benjamin, all right. I checked his Wiki bio and realized he’s now 76.

The last time I had spoken with Benjamin was during a 1982 New York press event for My Favorite Year, which was the first film Benjamin directed and which is still arguably his best ever. During our chat I remember telling him that I liked his performance in Paul Sylbert‘s The Steagle (’71), which was kind of a wipe-out but which had, at the time at least, a certain cult following. 

Benjamin walked right in front of me on his way to the DMV bathroom, and on the way back I was seized by a very slight impulse to say “Yo! The Steagle!” but I suppressed it, thank God. A voice told me this wasn’t the right moment. The DMV is not for socializing. It’s for sitting around and filling out forms and feeling grim.

Benjamin had a hot run as a leading actor between ’69 and ’75 — Goodbye, Columbus (’69), Catch-22 (’70), Diary of a Mad Housewife (’70), The Marriage of a Young Stockbroker (’71), The Steagle, Portnoy’s Complaint (’72 — the peak), The Last of Sheila (’73), Westworld (’73) and The Sunshine Boys (’75). During this time Benjamin was the proverbial “interesting guy” or more particularly one of the main “Jew Wave” guys along with Dustin Hoffman, Elliot Gould and George Segal before the Italian-Americans moved in.  Donald Sutherland was also on a roll back then.

If I was Alex Gibney and I was filming this interview footage with Bob Belleville, former director of engineering at MacIntosh from 1982 to ’85 under Steve Jobs, I would stopped and said “cut” after he started to weep a little bit. I then would have said to him, “Look, I feel the same things about people and experiences from the past, things that I loved…we all do. But from a dramatic point of view it’s much better to muffle or suppress emotion. You can let it leak out a bit but only a bit. Okay? It’s very human of you to feel what you’re feeling and I totally respect your history with Jobs, but I need you to read this again without the whimpering. Fair enough?” I wouldn’t tell Belleville what I’m really thinking, which is that whimpering sounds awful. I hate it when people start to cry while trying to talk. Do one or the other, but not both. Suppression is the thing. Walter Cronkite as he officially announced the death of JFK at 2:38 pm Eastern…that’s what I’m talking about.

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I’ve spoken with several name-brand comedians in my time, and I’ve never felt the slightest trace of silly, goofy, slap-happy vibes from any of them. From each and every one I detected caution, guardedness and a general sense of gloom. (Especially from Billy Crystal.) One would presume, therefore, that Kevin Pollak’s Misery Loves Comedy, a doc about what comedians are really like deep down and whether they’re all in fact depressives, might be…well, at least somewhat interesting in this regard. Unusual. Revelatory. Not the usual joking around but perhaps some musings and reflections that, say, the ghost of Fyodor Dostoyevsky might relate to.

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I’m not of the opinion that Jaume Collet-Serra‘s Run All Night (Warner Bros., 3.13) is second-rate crap — it is second-rate crap. Just as I knew that Collet-Serra’s Non-Stop was a second-rate airborne thriller, and that Scott Frank‘s A Walk Among The Tombstones was and is pretty close to gold-standard urban noir. Each of these films stars Liam “back to being a paycheck whore” Neeson, and you can bet that Neeson recognizes, along with most discriminating movie fans, that Frank’s film is far superior to the other two. I toughed it out during last night’s Grove screening until almost the very end, and then I said “fuck this” and got up and walked into a nearby book store. I had to. I was feeling icky and soiled and exhausted.

I hate the darting-and-swooping videogame CG shots that Collet-Sera uses to roam around New York City with, and I despise his atrocious disregard for action logic, particularly during an idiotic, flim-flammy, speeding-bumper-car scene in Brooklyn that totally alienated me. I also hate the faithless, Philistine way Collet-Saura directs fight scenes, particularly how he never actually shows anyone getting punched (he always cuts away a half-second before the moment of impact) and the way his guys always groan each and every time they get slugged. (Will you take a punch like a man just once?) There wasn’t anywhere near as much action in J.C. Chandor‘s A Most Violent Year, but when it happened you believed each and every frame of it. It was glorious for that.

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A work-in-progress version of Judd Apatow‘s Trainwreck (Universal, 7.17) will screen at South by Southwest late Sunday afternoon. And if a tweet posted this morning by The Hollywood Reporter‘s Seth Abramovitch is any indication, spiritually deep people with wonderfully wise and enlightened perceptions are going to lob hate grenades in my direction all over again. The “leave poor Amy Schumer alone and die, you rancid asshole” thing has been going on for 30 days now — an eternity in today’s ADD realm. I tried saying I’m sorry for the piece that posted on 2.11 but the haters wouldn’t have it. I said Schumer is obviously a first-class talent who deserves more respect than what I gave her, and the haters said “oh, yeah? Well, you’re demonic and fuck you!” I wrote that I could have played this one with a little more delicacy and diplomacy, and I might as well have poured kerosene on the fire.

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