Day: January 6, 2017

In a pinch I could maybe, possibly have sex with a warm, oven-heated apple pie (or a pumpkin or pecan pie), but never, ever would I get down with a piece of mushy fruit. Because of the possibility of stinging pain caused by citrusy, acidic juices…hello?

For some reason this doesn’t stop Elio, a 17 year-old twink type from a wealthy Italian family, in Andre Aciman‘s “Call Me By Your Name“, a 2007 gay romance novel that is well respected by critics and celebrated in gay circles. And so Elio fucks a cut-open peach. Moreover, after Elio is “finished” with it, he gives the peach to Oliver, his object of off-and-on romantic obsession, and Oliver wolfs it down, slurpy juices and all. Or something like that.

Call Me By Your Name costars Armie Hammer, Timothee Chalamet.

Armie Hammer, Call Me By Your Name director Luca Guadagnino.

This is one reason, at least, why Luca Guadagnino‘s film adaptation of Aciman’s book, which costars Armie Hammer as Oliver and Timothee Chalamet as Elio, is currently a hot topic of conversation.

Call Me By Your Name will premiere a little more than two weeks hence at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival.

The film is said to be Brokeback Mountain-ish — sexually frank but at the same time a refined, emotionally affecting period drama set in Italy. Maybe a little Luchino Visconti-ish, maybe a touch of Pier Paolo Pasolini…who knows? The screenplay is coauthored by Guadagnino (who directed last year’s A Bigger Splash and who also has a remake of Suspiria in the pipeline), James Ivory and Walter Fasano.

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The jacket art for the new British Panic In The Streets Bluray (Signal One, 4.17) is not only 18 times better than the cover art for the domestic version (which popped on 3.26.13), but good enough to buy as a framed poster if I could find it somewhere. And yet I’ve never cared for the film itself. (I tried watching it last year and gradually went “meh” and turned it off.) This triggered an idea about inspired poster art being better than the film it’s selling. There are hundreds of examples, surely, but please submit titles along with the poster art in question. And while we’re at it, name some films that are indisputably great but were never promoted with a decent visual concept.

I had never seen this TFH piece until an hour ago, and it told me something I’d never heard or read about. Which is that an early version of 2001: A Space Odyssey with Alex North’s score was tested in Times Square’s Astor theatre, and that it didn’t play all that well. Which inspired a despondent Stanley Kubrick to walk up to a Sam Goody‘s and buy albums of classical and experimental music in order to choose musical tracks to replace North’s score with. Presumably John Landis researched this tale before taping, but does this story square with what the HE readership has read?

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Apology: Late this morning I accidentally zotzed this post without realizing it. Comments about the previous iteration can be found under “Communion With Walter Chalmers.”

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The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg has posted about La La Land‘s likely home court advantage in terms of Oscar noms and awards. Feinberg wrote this article as a kind of thumbs-up, back-pat gesture to Team La La, but it actually implies that Damian Chazelle‘s well-admired musical is a bit of a banality. Which I don’t feel is true — I’m saying that Feinberg’s piece kinda suggests this.

Feinberg’s supposition is that residents of Los Angeles (i.e., where most Academy and guild members live) “get” La La Land as a familiar tale happening on home turf, and that as long as a movie in question presents a mostly positive, upbeat, alpha-vibey representation of Los Angeles and movie culture in particular (as La La Land does), the odds favor a win or two.

But the very finest Los Angeles-set films, of course, have never been alpha-vibey. They’ve all been about crime, smog, corruption, fallen angels, moral ambiguity and existential drift.

A few of the best in this realm are John Boorman‘s Point Blank, Robert Altman‘s The Long Goodbye, Robert Aldrich‘s Kiss Me Deadly and The Big Knife, Joel and Ethan Coen‘s The Big Lebowski, Frank Perry‘s Play It As It Lays, Martin Ritt‘s No Down Payment, Howard Hawks‘ The Big Sleep, Billy Wilder‘s Double Indemnity, Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Boogie Nights and Magnolia, Richard Fleischer‘s The New Centurions, Joel Schumacher‘s Falling Down, William Wellman and George Cukor‘s versions of A Star Is Born and John Schlesinger‘s The Day of the Locust. Others?

Feinberg mentions a few downbeat but highly regarded L.A-set films that received no Best Picture nominations — Easy Rider (drug dealing), The Player (glib concepts, shallow manipulations, an impulsive murder of a screenwriter), Mulholland Drive (dreamscape horrors, mental afllictions, hot lezzy sex scene), Training Day (LAPD corruption), Nightcrawler (cutthroat video paparazzi) and Straight Outta Compton (racial tensions).

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I haven’t seen either of these films on a really big, well-lighted screen…ever? Absorbing the classic 1960 John Sturges western will help to flush out memories of Antoine Fuqua’s remake, and as for Bullitt….well, I need to light a small candle for poor Robert Vaughn, who passed just after the election of Donald Trump, as well as Walter Chalmers — a name that will live in my head until my dying day and probably beyond that.

Trump’s response to Arnold Schwarzenegger and the legacy of Abraham Lincoln: “Even though Arnold Schwarzenegger‘s piss-poor Apprentice ratings make him look like a serious loser and not, frankly, someone I’d want to be associated all that much if at all (DJT only hangs with winners and/or billionaires), his respect for President Lincoln and particularly his idea about friendship and affection is fantastic…really really fantastic. I’m thinking in particular of my wonderful, wonderful friendship with Kanye West, who’s a great American.

“I’m not sure what ‘mystic chords of memory’ actually means but I like the sound of it. You know me — if a little bit of that A. Lincoln schwing can rub off on DJT, I’m all for it. I’m also for honoring and preserving Mr. Lincoln’s union. Reviving and rebirthing it, I mean, in a literal demographic sense. For alt-right values are surely American values — the better angels of our nature! Winning!”