Day: March 17, 2018

What Say Ye About Simon?

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Nobody had much to say about my 3.15 review of Greg Berlanti‘s Love, Simon, but it opened yesterday so what’s the reaction? By any measure an antiseptic, intensely suburban gay teen romance, I described it as (a) “definitely half-decent,” (b) “smartly written” but a little “too tidy, too dream-fantasy, too TV-realm and not laid-back enough.” But at the same time not bad. I mentioned that it’s the first big-screen adaptation of a YA novel (Becky Albertalli‘s “Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda”) that I’ve half-liked, but it still feels a little too YA-ish.

Slight Rainy Day Scuttlebutt

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Two days ago I mentioned the “enticing” possibility of Woody Allen‘s A Rainy Day in New York playing at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival. I remarked that a booking of Allen’s most recent effort “would be a way for festival topper Thierry Fremaux to not only honor a relationship with a still-important filmmaker but declare that Cannes is about cinematic art first and nervous-nelly politics second.”

This morning a friend passed along second-hand dope from a “Cannes insider”, the gist being that (a) A Rainy Day in New York “is being heavily considered,” and (b) the pulse-quickening notion of screening the Woody (which costars Timothee Chalamet, Selena Gomez, Elle Fanning, Jude Law and Diego Luna) is currently “outweighing the ramifications of any bad press” that may result — i.e., the Robespierres chanting that a film by a director who may have molested a seven-year-old adopted daughter 25 years ago shouldn’t be so honored.


(l. to r.) Timothee Chalamet, Selena Gomez, Woody Allen during filming of A Rainy Day in New York.

Fremaux is a longtime Woody loyalist. Since joining Cannes in ’01 he’s been instrumental in booking seven Allen films — Hollywood Ending, Match Point, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, Midnight in Paris, Irrational Man and Cafe Society. Given this history it’s hardly surprising to hear that Fremaux “wanted to book A Rainy Day in New York before it was even shot last fall.”

Another factor favoring a Rainy Day appearance is that Fremaux also wants to play Felix Van Groeningen‘s Beautiful Boy (Amazon, 10.12), a drug-addiction drama costarring Timothee Chalamet and Steve Carell. This plus Rainy Day would theoretically double the Chalamet press coverage…or would it?

With Chalamet having thrown Woody under the bus by announcing that he’s standing with the Robespierres as well as donating his Rainy Day salary to a #TimesUp defense fund, will he attend the Rainy Day Cannes premiere or duck out of town?

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More Strangelove Color

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Two years ago I posted “Strangelove Color Trip,” which consisted of seven color snaps (in the old HE format width of 460 pixels), all taken during filming of Stanley Kubrick‘s Dr. Strangelove in early 1963. This morning I came upon several more; I’ve also re-rendered four or five shots from March ’16 in HE’s current (640 pixel) column width. I let one black-and-white shot slip in (i.e., Kubrick hand-drawing Lolita glasses on a nuclear warhead), but only because I’d never seen it before today.

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Unmasking of “Redcloak”

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A day or two after posting about Tony Zierra‘s Filmworker, the Lon Vitali-Stanley Kubrick documentary that will open in early May, I re-watched it on my Macbook Pro. And what a deep, penetrating, all-knowing, all-encompassing thing it is. A visit to a rarified realm of vision and obsession, of giving your all and getting nowhere near enough sleep, but finally being part of a very special history.

I feel a special kinship with Filmworker and particularly Vitali himself because I am as much of an obsessive at column-writing as Vitali was with the Great Stanley K. all those years (i.e., pre-Shining to post-production on Eyes Wide Shut).

Anyway, the laptop viewing allowed me to capture images of Leon between takes while he was playing the “redcloak” interrogator in Eyes Wide Shut. Ditto a couple of stills of a fictional EWS newspaper story that mentioned “London fashion designer Leon Vitali” having allegedly had an affair with the “beauty queen dead from drug overdose,” etc.


Leon Vitali, relatively recently.

Longtime Stanley Kubrick aide Leon Vitali between takes during filming of Eyes Wide Shut.

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