Month: February 2018

Kindest Eyes

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I’m about to admit something that will make me sound clueless, but here goes. I’ve always liked the actor who played the big, bald, thorn-fingered genie in Michael Powell, Alexander Korda and William Cameron Menzies‘ The Thief of Bagdad (’40). And I’ve always liked the guy who played the dignified, well-mannered assistant to Ronald Colman‘s Michael Lightcap in George Stevens‘ The Talk of the Town (’42). But until this morning I never realized they were one and the same guy — Rex Ingram.


Rex Ingram as Tilney, the assistant to Ronald Colman’s Michael Lightcap in George Stevens’ The Talk of the Town.

In The Thief of Bagdad.

I was thinking about Ingram yesterday when I realized he’d played a preacher in The Green Pastures, which Armond White mentioned in his review of Black Panther.

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One More Time

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I posted this almost exactly a year ago: In no particular order, off the top of my head — the 28 Best Picture winners that have aged the best, still hold up, not necessarily the best of their respective years but entirely respectable: Spotlight (’15), Birdman (’14), 12 Years A Slave (’13), The Hurt Locker (’09), No Country For Old Men (’07), The Departed (’06), Schindler’s List (’93), The Silence of the Lambs (’91), Platoon (’86), Terms of Endearment (’83), Ordinary People (’80), Annie Hall (’77), The Godfather, Part II (’74), The Godfather (’72), The French Connection (’71), Patton (’70), Midnight Cowboy (’69), A Man For All Seasons (’66), Lawrence of Arabia (’62), The Apartment (’60), The Bridge on the River Kwai (’57), On The Waterfront (’54), From Here To Eternity (’53), All About Eve (’50), All The King’s Men (’49), The Best Years of Our Lives (’46), Casablanca (’43) and Moonlight (’16).

Lucky Beefalos

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A little more than five years ago I wrote a piece called “Gazelles & Beefalos,” which was about odd couplings between beefy, wildebeest-sized guys and slender, attractive hotties. I happened to notice such a couple while eating at West Hollywood’s Astroburger, and I was going “what’s going on here?”

I’m mentioning this because there’s a line in Red Sparrow that applies to this dichotomy. Mary Louise Parker, playing an alcoholic with Washington connections who’s making a sale of secrets to the Russian baddies, says something to the effect of “Russian women are always so hot-looking but the Russian guys often look like toads,” or something close to that.

And the beefalos and gazelles observation is still valid. I saw another disparate couple like this (i.e., clearly together in a hetero sense) on the A train a couple of years ago in Brooklyn, and I just couldn’t believe it. She was almost Cindy Crawford and he was Meat Loaf.

In Red Sparrow, Smoking Lamp Is Lit

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I forgot to mention in yesterday’s Red Sparrow review that there’s an awful lot of smoking going on, which is more than a little weird in this day and age. Jennifer Lawrence‘s character, an ex-Bolshoi ballerina, smokes in three or four scenes, and Jeremy Irons‘ Russian intelligence character is always puffing away, which is odd for a guy in his late ’60s. A couple of other characters (including the devious “uncle” played by Matthias Schoenaerts?) also smoke. The question is why when almost no one smokes these days except for contrarians, teenagers, party people and life’s chronic losers — riffraff, low-lifes, bums, scuzzballs. A half-century ago smoking was semi-cool but today it’s either a sign of weakness or malevolence. Which is why Paolo Sorrentino had Jude Law‘s pontiff smoke in The Young Pope.

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“Feelings In Humans Never Change”

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“Women like romcoms precisely because men do change. I’m not saying men act the way they do primarily because of movies, but they have been getting this message for a long time, that this is what women want. And it is what women want. But only from the men they want it from! Problem is, we don’t know which one we are.

“Tom Cruise barges uninvited into the home of the woman he’s hired and had sex with and says, ‘I’m not letting you get rid of me…how about that?’ Adorable. But if it was Ted Cruz, not so much.

“Love Actually is somehow a lot of people’s favorite movie, but if it was made today, it would have to be called Inappropriate Actually. It’s nothing but men hitting on their underlings…”

Soul-Numbing Pfeiffer

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I’m no fan of Andrew Dosunmu‘s Where Is Kyra? (Great Point Media/Paladin, 4.6). After catching it 13 months ago during Sundance ’17, I called it “more or less a bust…a funereal quicksand piece about an unemployed middle-aged woman (Michelle Pfeiffer) in a terrible financial jam, and about a relationship she has with a fellow down-and-outer (Keifer Sutherland). It’s grade-A within its own realm — a carefully calibrated, well-acted gloomhead flick that feels like it’s happening inside a coffin or crypt. This is Dosunmu’s deliberate strategy, of course, but the end-of-the-road, my-life-is-over vibe is primarily manifested by the inky, mineshaft palette of dp Bradford Young — HE’s least favorite cinematographer by a country mile.”

Will Get Out Go Home Empty-Handed?

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Never in Oscar history has a director-writer written an Oscar-winning original screenplay (as a solo writer) that has also won Best Picture…never.

Reworded: If the director-writer of a Best Picture contender is the sole author of a Best Original Screenplay nominee and that screenplay goes on to win an Oscar, the film will almost certainly not win Best Picture.

That, at least, is what 89 years of Oscar history tells us. Yes, the screenplay for Annie Hall won Best Original Screenplay, but that was co-authored by Woody Allen and Marshall Brickman. Spotlight won for Best Original Screenplay also, but again, it was co-authored. Any exceptions?

The solo-authored nominees for Best Original Screenplay are Greta Gerwig‘s Lady Bird, Jordan Peele‘s Get Out and Martin McDonagh‘s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. (The Big Sick and The Shape of Water were co-authored.) So if Martin McDonagh wins the Oscar, you can pretty much count on Three Billboards not winning for Best Picture.


Three Billboards director-writer Martin McDonagh.

I’m not sure if Three Billboards or Get Out will win Best Original Screenplay. Is anyone? An Oscar-handicapping friend believes that McDonagh has it in the bag, and that Get Out, which he regards as little more than a racially-themed knockoff of an Ira Levin Stepford Wives deal, will go home empty-handed. If this happens, the “woke” crowd will be staggering around in a state of shock.

We all know that The Shape of Water will win the Best Picture Oscar, and that Guillermo del Toro will take the prize for Best Director. Fine with me, go with God, everyone loves Guillermo, etc.

But if you apply the Howard Hawks rule of film excellence (three great scenes and no bad ones), there’s no getting around the fact that 70% of Michael Shannon‘s scenes are “bad ones” — darkly obsessive, fiendishly sadistic, unfocused. My favorite scene, which I’ll gladly call a great one, is the black-and-white, 1930s-style dance number between Sally Hawkins and gill-man. And the underwater lovemaking scene with Sally in a red dress — another goodie. But what’s the third?

Both Lady Bird and Get Out have no below-the-line nominations. For a Best Pic winner with no BTL nominations, you’d have to go back 37 years to a Best Picture winner, Ordinary People, with that handicap. On top of which neither Lady Bird nor Get Out are up for Best Film Editing and again, you need to go back 38 years for that winner.

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Me Want Fucky Sucky, Part II

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Karen McDougal, Stephanie Clifford aka Stormy Daniels, Alana Evans, Jessica Drake, Summer Zervos…I’m starting to get confused. Let’s just focus on Ronan Farrow’s New Yorker piece about Donald Trump’s thing with McDougal (or vice versa), which lasted from June 2006 to April 2007. The proof was an eight-page handwritten “document” that McDouglas wrote about her relationship with Trump, and which was fed to Farrow by John Crawford, a friend of McDougal’s. But that handwriting! I got a headache just from reading a few lines.

Excerpt: “’I was so nervous! I was into his intelligence + charm. Such a polite man. We talked for a couple hours – then, it was ‘ON’! We got naked + had sex.’ As McDougal was getting dressed to leave, Trump did something that surprised her. ‘He offered me money,’ she wrote. ‘I looked at him (+ felt sad) + said, ‘No thanks — I’m not ‘that girl.’ I slept w/you because I like you — NOT for money’ — He told me ‘you are special.’ ”

Nice Work, Guys

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The cyberverse offers ample opportunities for wackos to post thoughts about how diseased they are, and there doesn’t seem to be any debate that Parkland shooter Nikolas Cruz did just that. Using his own name, Cruz said last September on a YouTube comment thread that he was going to become “a professional school shooter.” Some guy from a Southern state (i.e., not Florida) tipped the FBI through some kind of hotline but the FBI somehow flubbed it. Brilliant.

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