Month: July 2015

Here’s another drag-ass situation on top of the 92Y Coppola posting. On 7.10 John Turturro sat for a master class at the Jerusalem Film Festival. Two days later CinemaScope‘s Yair Raveh posted a video of Turturro riffing (with Israeli filmmaker Avi Nesher) about getting started and his relationships with Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, the Coen Brothers, Michael Cimino, Nanni Moretti, etc. And then Raveh waited seven days to send me the 7.12 video — a full week! The Jerusalem Film Festival ends/ended tonight.

I don’t care how many Francis Coppola interviews you’ve seen or listened to over the years. This series of clips of a 6.9 92nd Street Y discussion between Coppola and Columbia film professor Annette Insdorf (the people in charge of posting these interviews always seem to drag ass) is wonderfully entertaining and illuminating. In late ’81 I cold-called Coppola when he was staying at the Sherry Netherland, and for whatever reason (possibly because I was fearlessly loquacious due to having dropped a quaalude) he stayed on the phone with me for well over an hour. I published the interview in a two-part q & a format in The Film Journal, which I was managing editor of from late 1980 to the early summer of ’83.

Two and half years ago I was bitten by the Judy Greer bug, particularly by her smallish but poignant performance in Alexander Payne‘s The Descendants — a supporting turn that definitely warranted an Oscar nomination. Since then she’s worked a lot, written a book, scored nicely as Lily Tomlin‘s girlfriend in Grandma, played inconsequential roles in a pair of 2015 blockbusters — Jurassic World and Ant-Man — and landed a rich ongoing role in FX’s Married. The Week‘s Scott Meslow has joined the team by saying, quite appropriately, that this isn’t enough. Greer needs to snag a super-role or two…something legendary, zeitgeisty. He concludes with a Greer pitch: “Judy plays Judy, a ferociously skilled actress who keeps getting cast in bland, forgettable bit parts: a nagging mother, a gossipy sister, a long-suffering wife. Fed up with an industry that refuses to give her a decent role, she breaks out on her own and starts a Hollywood studio. Or a detective agency. Or maybe a vampire bites her. Whatever. Just grab the best script you have lying around right now — as long as it features a real role for a talented actress. She’s good for it.”

“Warner Bros. wanted two major stars, so I went to Jack Nicholson to play Ed [i.e., Jon Voight‘s role]. He agreed to do it and asked, ‘Who will you get to play Lewis [i.e., Burt Reynold‘s role]?’ I said, ‘I don’t really know yet.’ He said, ‘What about Brando?’ So I went to see Marlon Brando, spent the day with him. Finally, he said he’d do it. I asked, ‘Who’s your agent?’ He said, ‘I don’t have an agent.’ I said, ‘Well, what’s your price?’ And he said, ‘I’ll take the same as you pay Jack.’ I went back to Nicholson’s agent and said, ‘What do you want for Jack?’ He said, ‘Half a million.” [Except] Nicholson had never got more than $75,000.

“So I [informed] Warner Bros. studio head Ted Ashley. ‘Brando? Oh, God. He doesn’t mean anything anymore — he’s box-office poison,’ he said. Well, I thought Nicholson and Brando would work very well together. Ashley asked, ‘What does Jack want?’ I said, ‘Well, he wants half a million. ‘Half a million?” Ashley almost went through the roof. Then he kind of calmed down and said maybe they would pay him that money because everyone in town wanted Nicholson. He said, ‘What does Brando want?’ ‘I agreed to pay him the same as Jack.’ Ashley then exploded, ‘I’d be laughed out of this town if I paid half a million for Brando.”

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The following is a true story. I was starting something with an L.A. woman in the early aughts. I was intrigued as far as it went, but then she eventually conveyed what the situation was. She was seeing two guys at the time, and I was basically being auditioned as a back-up in case one of them didn’t pan out. She was serious. There were two pitchers on the mound (alternating innings?) and I was being told that if I wanted to I could start warming up in the bullpen just in case. I told her I didn’t care for this arrangement, and her response was to basically “you’re throwing away an opportunity here.” I might step into a situation if a woman is seeing another guy — maybe, depending — but not two.

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Almost everyone has experienced at least one movie breakup moment. Even if the decider didn’t act on it right away. You know what I’m talking about. Any time you fall heavily for a film you always want to see it two or three times, at least, and so you take the hot lady of the moment to see it and she doesn’t get it — she’s either mezzo-mezzo or distracted and hates it or whatever. And right away you know.

You might continue to see each other and have some really good times, but that sinking feeling tells you it’s never going to pan out, not really, because she wasn’t wise or seasoned or deep enough to get that film. Because rejecting exquisite films is a blade of grass that tells you a lot about a person. Not everything but a lot.

I would never break up with a woman if she didn’t like Pier Paolo Pasolini‘s Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom. That’s a highly respectable film but very tough to watch, and I would never think less of someone who actively hates it. Ditto Repulsion, My Darling Clementine, Repo Man….the list goes on. But I once secretly decided to part company with a dazzling blonde who used to gasp and scream in bed when she said she didn’t like David Fincher‘s The Social Network.

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“Though Trainwreck is a robust comedy, ranging from genial to zingy to uproarious, it’s essentially a romantic melodrama of self-abasement, self-deception and self-discovery. Its subject is the proximity of pleasure and pain, of self-affirmation and self-doubt. Its resolution involves love, which, in Apatow’s view, is no renunciation or simplification, but just another mode of difficulty, a kind of fulfillment that emerges from characters who are already formed and who merely put themselves and each other to new tests.

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A couple of days ago I bought the recently released Masters of Cinema Paper Moon Bluray. Some of it is too grainy, too halo’ed…bothersome. But it still has Tatum O’Neal‘s Oscar-winning performance as Addie Pray. Like so many younger characters in so many parent-child movies made since Paper Moon, she’s much shrewder and in some ways even more mature than Ryan O’Neal‘s Mose. The best Bible-selling clip is after the jump. In fact, the scene with the widow and her five or six daughters is probably the best in the film.

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Aubrey Morris, who played Mr. Deltoid in Stanley Kubrick‘s A Clockwork Orange, has passed at age 89. He had only two scenes in that 1971 classic — warning Malcolm McDowell‘s Alex to stay out of trouble in that needling, smarmy voice of his with many of his sentences ending in “yes,” and then informing “little” Alex during a police station grilling that the cat lady had died and that he’d therefore become a murderer.  I don’t recall any of Morris’s other performances, not a one. Whatever he said or did in If It’s Tuesday, It Must be Belgium, I’m drawing a blank. Nor do I remember him in The Wicker Man. Kubrick used to say to his actors, “Realistic is good, but interesting is better.” Morris is remembered and respected today because he followed this advice.

Friendly memo to Boston Herald critic Jim Verniere: What’s with the deliberately slowed-down reading of the copy? No offense but it sounds spazzy. Best quote: “Trainwreck could be this generation’s When Aaron Met Amy.”

Underwhelming and in many ways tedious, Woody Allen‘s Irrational Man (Sony Pictures Classics, opening today) is Match Point‘s slower, less engaging brother. One of the things I’ll always savor about Match Point is how perfect the last ten minutes are — they amount to one of his all-time best endings. And one of the things I’ll never forget about Irrational Man is how unsatisfying the finale feels. Leaden, dispiriting — it makes you feel bitter and abandoned.

After catching it at last May’s Cannes Film Festival I noted that “the most striking thing about it is Joaquin Phoenix‘s pot belly. I fully recognized the familiar, dissolute, older-guy malaise that his college professor character is suffering from during the first 40 minutes or so (which the gut is supposed to be a metaphor for, I presume), but nothing Phoenix says or does during the entire film has a chance against that mound of pudding hanging over his belt. It’s stand-back huge. He looks pregnant.

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“I judge comedy harder than probably any other genre. To keep me consistently laughing takes a lot of hard work, and a lot of comedies nowadays don’t like to try all that hard, throwing stuff to the wind they aren’t terribly committed to and hoping it sticks. So when a comedy with a focused, specific voice comes along that has me laughing from start to finish, I am a happy guy. Addicted to Fresno, from director Jamie Babbit and writer Karey Dornetto, managed to do that. It’s not a comedic masterpiece. I don’t want to overstate it. But it certainly is a funny 90 minutes that gives costars Judy Greer and Natasha Lyonne a lot of things to play with.” — from Mike Shutt‘s Rope of Silicon review, posted from SXSW on 3.18.15.