Day: June 3, 2017

Respecting Privacy vs. Journalistic Wimp?

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Last night Tatyana and I dropped by Pierluigi (Piazza de’ Ricci, 144, 00186 Roma), a pricey, world-class eatery that attracts elite natives and travellers. We had no reservation but were graciously seated right away, and as I unfolded my napkin I realized we were 30 inches from Michelle Williams and novelist Jonathan Safran Foer, who’ve been going out for a couple of years.

Right away I started calculating what my next move should be, if any.


Michelle Williams, Jonathan Safran Foer.

A go-getter movie journalist of the first order would have definitely said hello, chatted them up for 45 to 60 seconds and asked Michelle (a) how The Greatest Showman is shaping up and (b) what’s up with the Janis Joplin biopic that, unless I’ve missed something, she’s supposed to begin shooting fairly soon.

Has this Amazon-funded project gone south? I was asking myself this because Michelle doesn’t look like Joplin right now. Like, at all. Her tennis-ball-length hair is snow white (just like Kristen Stewart‘s) and she’s also rail-thin. If she were going to play The Jop anytime soon wouldn’t you think she’d be a tiny bit fuller and fleshier (Joplin wasn’t heavy but she drank a lot and was no health-club Nazi) and rocking a longish ’60s do?

But I also feel that couples who are simply together in a four-star restaurant in a beautiful city like Rome should be left alone. Or at least part of me believes this. They were just eating and chatting and love-birding. Toward the end of their light meal they were holding hands. The bottom line is that I wimped out and said nothing. On one hand I feel funny about this, but on the other I feel good.

Texts to Tatyana about 90 seconds after we sat down: “Don’t turn around.” “Don’t react.” “You remember Manchester By The Sea?” “Don’t look” “To your left.” “Michelle Williams.” “A sideways glance is okay — just don’t turn in your seat.”

Id vs. Conscience

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From Ryan Lizza‘s New Yorker piece, “How Climate Change Saved Steve Bannon’s Job,” dated 6.2:

“Just as [Steve] Bannon seemed to reach a low point in his relationship with Trump, [Jared] Kushner’s role in the Russia probe emerged as the most important piece of White House intrigue. Kushner, though he didn’t have the title, was the Trump campaign’s de-facto campaign manager. He was at Trump’s side through the eras of Roger Stone, Carter Page and Paul Manafort. And more important, as we learned last Friday, Kushner was working closely with Flynn, during the transition, on his dealings with the Russians, and he has attracted a similar level of interest from the F.B.I.

“The second change since Bannon’s low point was that a decision on whether to withdraw from the Paris climate accord finally needed to be made. It was the most important fight pitting Bannon against Jared and Ivanka yet. And it played to all of Bannon’s strengths. The first Trump adviser described Kushner and Ivanka as ‘more or less Trump’s conscience,’ and as ‘more pragmatic, a little less ideological,’ or perhaps ‘multi-ideological.’ Bannon, he said, ‘speaks to Trump’s id.’

“A third Trump adviser, more closely aligned with the Bannon faction, was less charitable. ‘I think Jared and Ivanka are concerned with being accepted in the right places, they care about what the beautiful people think,’ he said. ‘They care about being well received in the Upper West Side cocktail parties. They view Steve as a man with dirty fingernails, with some weird, crazy, extremist philosophy they don’t think is in the best interest of the President.

“With all respect to them, they don’t understand how Trump got elected. They don’t understand the forces behind it, they don’t understand the dynamics of the situation, and they certainly don’t understand his appeal and the people who voted for him ** — they can’t understand it.” He added, “They would like the President to be more like George Bush: one-dimensional, predictable, neocon, mainstream.”

** rural and rust-belt dumbshits, marginally educated if that, Fox News-watching, the dregs of 21st Century society.

Land of Opportunity

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Kenneth Branagh‘s Murder on the Orient Express is, of course, set aboard an elegant, first-class train chugging through Europe but also, like the original Agatha Christie thriller, in the early 1930s. Among the elite, well-heeled travellers is an African American doctor (i.e., “Dr. Arbuthnot”), played by Hamilton Tony Award-winner Leslie Odom Jr.. This is a completely accurate and representative bit of casting for the time period, of course. I can’t imagine why Alfred Hitchcock didn’t include a black physician character when he cast The Lady Vanishes (’38). As I understand it early ’30s Europe was teeming with wealthy, refined, richly educated black dudes.

Seriously: Just as Hamilton reimagined America’s 18th Century founders and architects as non-white and non-European, Branagh has decided to reimagine the Christie realm, at least in this one respect.

Dead Zones

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Amir Bar Lev‘s Long Strange Trip, which I’ve tried to persuade everyone to see, is now streamable as a six-part series via Amazon. From 4.13 riff: “Long Strange Trip is more about what happened within — creatively among the band members, managers and hangers-on, and particularly among the Deadhead throngs in the ’80s — than any kind of rote, surface-y rundown of their performing and recording history (this happened, that happened). Act One (’65 to ’71 or thereabouts) is a good, comprehensive mid-to-late-’60s history lesson — efficient, amusing, well-honed. But Act Two (or the last two hours) really brings it home. This is where the heart is, what turned the light on — the thing that told me what Amir Bar Lev is really up to.”

 

Pit Stops

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A couple of months ago there was an odd kerfuffle about the armpits of Wonder Woman‘s Gal Gadot having been shaved. Feminists actually felt it was some kind of betrayal or undermining of the Wonder Woman metaphor. But when have hairy armpits of any heroic movie figure ever been shown? 50-plus years ago some rolled their eyes over Jeffrey Hunter’s armpits having been shaved for his performance as Yeshua in Nicholas Ray‘s King of Kings.

 

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Brazilian VHS Mud

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Until this morning I’d literally never heard of Running Out Of Luck, a 1987 Julien Temple film starring Mick Jagger, Rae Dawn Chong (as a”slave girl”), Dennis Hopper, Jerry Hall and Jim Broadbent. Co-written by Temple and Jagger; music by Jagger and Luis Jardim. (Jagger’s “Lucky At Love” had popped a couple of years earlier.) The fact that you can’t stream it or watch on DVD — it’s only on VHS — tells you how good it is. But this clip is fairly decent.

Historic Earnings, Fairly Sturdy Film

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I apologize for not catching Wonder Woman yesterday. I was all set to attend a 4:30 pm showing at the Savoy multiplex (Via Bergamo, 25, 00198) but the day fell apart when I was called on the carpet for (a) having exhibited bad taste in the choice of a former girlfriend and (b) more specifically because I foolishly failed to delete photos of same from one of my laptops. I’ll try again today. But in the meantime, now that a fair portion of HE community has seen Wonder Woman, the consensus is that it’s….what, pretty good but not great? That’s what I’m getting from over here.