Day: September 23, 2015

In the speculative spitball realm Cate Blanchett is running against herself in the Best Actress category. The Weinstein Co. is pushing her touching Carol performance for Best Actress consideration, and in their usual favored-nations way Sony Pictures Classics is advocating her nomination in the same category for her gutsy, steely turn in James Vanderbilt‘s Truth. Blanchett may be nominated for one of these but winning the Oscar again after her 2013 Blue Jasmine victory is unlikely. The only way to win a second time is to top the previous performance, and if you ask me her Truth performance definitely outshines her work in Carol, and even, I feel, the acting she delivered under the direction of Woody Allen. Her work in Truth is blistering, ballsier; the role is more realistically tragic. I made a similar statement 15 years ago when Steven Soderbergh‘s direction of Traffic and Erin Brockovich were deemed equally award-worthy. I posted a “letter to the Academy” piece on Reel.com that insisted his work on Traffic was far superior, and that’s what he finally wound up taking the Best Directing Oscar for. It would be gracious if the Weinsteiners were to decide to focus on Rooney Mara‘s expected Best Supporting Actress nomination for her performance as Blanchett’s lover and let the Blanchett thing go. They won’t do that, of course. Award-season strategizing is not a game of croquet; it’s more like rugby. But the proof is in the pudding and Blanchett’s Mary Mapes, trust me, is quite the thing.

All hail the late Yogi Berra — one of the greatest baseball players and most noteworthy philosophers of the 20th Century, and a real-deal American legend. I’m not much for eulogies of baseball champs as I’ve been to fewer than ten games in my entire life, but boy, did I love what Berra was or seemed to be — a guy who looked a bit like a monkey from a mezzzanine-level seat but had the spark of something-or-other, something that felt grand and hearty and poetic — he stood for persistence, leg muscles, hard work, a sense of humor, Yoohoo soft drink and Miller High Life. And he had a gift for dugout eloquence second to none. Short, strong, muscular, great smile, great attitude…and he lived in Montclair, New Jersey. What a guy.

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What if Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster and Laurence Olivier costarred in a first-rate historical war satire at the peak of their respective popularity and power in 1959, and nobody cared all that much when it opened and nobody at all (except for guys like me) gives a damn about it today? 20 months ago I posted a piece about how it was impossible to watch The Devil’s Disciple, a respectable, vigorously acted adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s 1897 play about the Revolutionary War, outside of an annual July 4th airing by TCM. I reported that the black-and-white drama, directed by Guy Hamilton (Goldfinger, Thunderball), wasn’t on DVD or Bluray, and that you couldn’t stream it on Netflix, Hulu or Vudu. But now, lo and behold, a Bluray version from Kino will street on 11.24.15.

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In my book any 1950s film captured in VistaVision and rendered in Bluray and/or high-def streaming is worth seeing, even if the movie itself is mediocre. One mark of a serious cinephile is the ability to ignore script or acting flaws and just zero in on the cinematography, which in this instance is fairly ripe and robust. It is therefore permissible to have an interest in a Bluray of Hal Kanter‘s Loving You (’57), which was shot in VistaVision by the great Charles Lang — an Oscar nominee for his lensing of Sabrina, Separate Tables, Some Like It Hot and One-Eyed Jacks.

There is, of course, no such thing as a really good Elvis Presley film, but the first three — Love Me Tender, Loving You and King Creole — are at least tolerable, and the semi-autobiographical Loving You, the only color film in this trio, is the only one in which Presley performs a few straight-up ’50s rock tunes. Paramount may have leased the rights to Warner Home Video or not, but for some reason there’s no Bluray or high-def streaming version of Loving You for sale or on the horizon– only an out-of-print Lionsgate DVD from 2003, which collectors are selling for $70 bucks and higher. Forget it.

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Hand-crafted leather wristbands are for long-of-tooth rock musicians like Keith Richards — venerated, old-school guys who want to exude a certain still-at-it studliness. Maybe younger guys wear them also — what do I know? –but I’m pretty sure that no one wears them except for performing musicians, and I don’t mean guys who play for the Los Angeles Philharmonic. I once saw a photo of Jean Genet wearing something like this. I wore one for a few months back in the late ’70s, but I threw it away when a girlfriend or my mother said it looked too leather bar-ish or whatever. In any event a vague Keith Richards mood overcame me last night when I was browsing around the Will leather goods store in Venice, and now I’ve got this thing around my right wrist. It’s not too thick, has a nice weave — I don’t see the problem.

It took Sony Pictures Classics an awfully long time to release their Truth trailer, but here it finally is, a little more than three weeks before the 10.16 opening. Concise, nicely cut, pro-level — more of a grade-school introduction to Rathergate than a summary of the flinty, well-modulated, hard-hitting flick I saw in Toronto, but it’s certainly good enough for openers. Note: I would have posted this a couple of hours earlier but I had one of those James Stewart-meets-Carlotta Valdez-in-Vertigo wee hour wakeups (bolt upright, eyes glaring) at 3:30 am. I eventually crashed again and re-awoke at 9 am.