Hollywood Elsewhere couldn’t attend the Santa Barbara Film Festival’s opening night screening of Emilio Estevez‘s The Public, but I’ll be there later today. Within a couple of hours. Probably. I think.
Peter O’Toole portrayed Henry II of England twice, first in Becket (’64) and again in The Lion in Winter (’68). I own the Becket Bluray and have seen it nine or ten times, but I’ve sat through The Lion in Winter exactly once. Studiocanal’s Bluray restoration of Anthony Harvey‘s film popped in Europe in October 2016. Kino is releasing the same Bluray as a “50th anniversary celebration” on 3.13.18.
Sebastian Lelio‘s Disobedience (Bleecker, 4.27) was one of my more satisfying viewings at last September’s Toronto Film Festival. It’s a classy, heartfelt hot-lesbo thing. That makes it sound a bit tawdry, I realize, but that’s the hook and the filmmakers knew that going in.
Ronit (Rachel Weisz) is a British-born Jew living a louche life in Manhattan. She returns to England when her Rabbi father passes away, and gradually reconnects with Esti (Rachel McAdams), a former lover who’s now married to an Orthodox Rabbi (Allesandro Nivola). Needless to add, Ronit and Esti get into it again.
I regret to say that my only Toronto-based comment about Disobedience was that it’s “so well-made and full of feeling that I’m not even going to use the phrase ‘hot lesbo action,’ although it does have that.”
When Abraham Lincoln passed away on 4.15.65, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton famously said, “Now he belongs to the ages.” Since that moment any allusion to “the ages” has had a special apartness, a ring of dignity and reverence. Until two months ago, that is, when Vanity Fair‘s Yohana Desta called Get Out “a film for the ages.” Universal marketers seized on that quote PDQ and put it on a big fat billboard near the corner of Highland and Franklin. There’s no disputing Desta’s observation that Jordan Peele‘s horror-thriller “captured the zeitgeist,” but if the ghost of Edwin Stanton was somehow listening, he’d most likely be thinking “hmmmm.”
Fire and Fury author Michael Wolff was beaten up badly during a Morning Joe segment this morning. It was over an inference, first mentioned on Real Time with Bill Maher, that President Trump may have had a sexual relationship with a woman in his administration. Wolff told Maher that the woman’s identity is indicated by “reading between the lines” in a section near the end of the book. Nobody knows anything, but as far as I can tell Wolff never hinted that the party in question might be U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley. Nonetheless, Haley has strongly denied the alleged inference, and Wolff got hammered this morning on Morning Joe (and was interrogated yesterday on TheSkimm) for vaguely or indirectly floating this notion. The bottom line, as one of the Skimm co-hosts said, is that this is the wrong thing to hint about during “a watershed moment for women, especially in the workplace.” Correct — Wolff should have let well enough alone.