A day or two ago Variety‘s Chris Willmanattended a Sharon Tate triple feature at the New Beverly — Valley of the Dolls (awful), Fearless Vampire Killers (lesser Polanski but tolerable) and The Wrecking Crew (flat-out stinkeroonie).
Willman: “I enjoyed The Wrecking Crew maybe a little less than the audience at the Bruin in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood but what a doll.” What did Willman actually mean when he said he “enjoyed it a little less,” etc.? We can only guess, of course, but my presumption is that Willman hated it so much that at the halfway point he suddenly bolted into the New Beverly bathroom and threw up.
The fact that poor Sharon Tate died in a ghastly and horrific way doesn’t automatically mean that the films she made in the late ’60s were any good.
From Scott Feinberg’s intro to his “THR Awards Chatter” podcast with Shia (Honey Boy) Lebeouf: “I had just told the 33-year-old that Alma Har’el‘s Honey Boy — a film that he wrote about his traumatic upbringing as a child actor, and in which he plays his abusive father — not only impressed me, but left me feeling guilty for making dismissive assumptions about him in recent years as he repeatedly wound up in the headlines for all of the wrong reasons.
Lebeouf: “I think context is really important, and I think what Honey Boy does is it contextualizes who I was publicly, and kind of plays on it. And I’m grateful it’s effective.”
“Honey Boy, which premiered in January at Sundance, has played the fall film fest circuit and will be released by Amazon on Nov. 8. It is one of two LaBeouf projects currently garnering widespread acclaim. The other is Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz’s The Peanut Butter Falcon, a $6.2 million indie that premiered in March at SXSW, was released by Roadside Attractions on Aug. 23 and has grossed $20 million in the U.S., making it the top platform release of the year so far.
“It was while working on Peanut Butter Falcon that LaBeouf hit a personal low point that led to the beginnings of Honey Boy. Collectively, they represent one of the great comebacks in Hollywood.
All hail Hildur Guðnadóttir‘s cello-ish Joker score, which seems to seep into and finally inhabit Arthur Fleck’s tortured psyche. A classically trained cellist, the 37-year-old Guðnadóttir is an Icelandic musician and composer. She’s played and recorded with several bands I’ve never heard of, including Pan Sonic, Throbbing Gristle, Múm and Stórsveit Nix Noltes.
#Joker composer Hildur Guðnadóttir talks about the journey of the film, which is led by the cello, and how it reflects Arthur's mindset pic.twitter.com/4phD1ZCMKc
Catholicism and the Pope are concepts that millions still cling to worldwide. Because they offer a feeling of steadiness and security in a tumbling, tumultuous world. Included among the faithful, one presumes, are thousands of movie-worshipping Catholics, and so Fernando Meirelles and Anthony McCarten‘s The Two Popes (Netflix, 11.27) is, not surprisingly, faring well as a potential Best Picture nominee. The fact that it won the Audience Award at the 2019 Middleburg Film Festival is an indication of this.
I have nothing but respect and admiration for the film, and particularly for McCarten’s script (which is based on McCarten’s 2017 play, The Pope). In my humble opinion McCarten should definitely be nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay. And it seems increasingly likely that Jonathan Pryce‘s performance as the future Pope Francis (aka Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio) will be Best Actor-nominated as well.
But honestly? I still feel emotionally removed from The Two Popes (as I wrote in my 9.1.19 Telluride review). Because I don’t feel any sort of kinship, much less a profound one, with the Catholic Church. I never have and I never will.
I don’t believe in holiness. I don’t believe in the Vatican carnival. I don’t believe in robes. I don’t believe in red shoes. I believe in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel frescoes and in Charlton Heston‘s performance in The Agony and the Ecstasy, but I haven’t the slightest belief in those Vatican City guard uniforms or the mitre or the scepter of any of the theatrical trappings. I believe in humanity and simplicity. I’m not exactly saying that I believe in Pope Lenny more than Pope Francis, but in a way I kind of do. Almost.
I don’t believe in the Bible…not really. I certainly don’t believe in celibacy for priests, and I despise the thousands of priests who’ve molested children worldwide and the countless bishops and cardinals who’ve protected them from the consequences. I believe that women should definitely be admitted into the priesthood. And while I understand and respect the fact that millions believe in the Catholic mission and its hierarchy, I myself don’t. Catholicism is more against things than for them.
Fernando Meirelles‘ The Two Popes is an interesting, mildly appealing two-hander as far as it goes. I had serious trouble with the refrigator temps as I watched, but I probably would have felt…well, somewhere between faintly underwhelmed and respectfully attentive even under the best of conditions.
It’s a wise, intelligent, non-preachy examination of conservative vs progressive mindsets (focused on an imagined, drawn-out discussion between Anthony Hopkins‘ Pope Benedict and Jonathan Pryce‘s Pope Francis a few years back) in a rapidly convulsing world, and I could tell from the get-go that Anthony McCarten‘s script is choicely phrased and nicely honed. But I couldn’t feel much arousal. I sat, listened and pondered, but nothing ignited. Well, not much.
Possibly on some level because I’ve never felt the slightest rapport with the Catholic church, and because for the last 20 or 30 years I’ve thought of it in Spotlight terms, for the most part.
I love that Pope Francis (formerly or fundamentally Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio of Argentina) is a humanist and a humanitarian with simple tastes, and I was delighted when he jerked his hand away when Donald Trump tried to initiate a touchy-flicky thing a couple of years ago. And I’m certainly down with any film in which two senior religious heavyweights discuss the Beatles, “Eleanor Rigby” and Abbey Road, etc.
“I’d rather be remembered than rich.” — the late Robert Evans in a 1977 interview.
There’s something terribly somber and sobering in the idea of the churning Evans dynamo being silent and still, above and beyond the fact of a life having run its course and come to a natural end. I don’t like finality as a rule. I prefer the idea of fluidity, of a beating pulse and the constant search for action and opportunity. I don’t like it when a store closes and is all emptied out and boarded up with “for lease” signs pasted on the windows. Keep it going, sweep the floors, stock the shelves, pay the bills. All things must pass, of course, but not now…later.
The last time Evans and I saw each other was over dinner at the Palm in ’02, sometime around the release of Nanette Burstein and Brett Morgen‘s The Kid Stays in the Picture. Evans covered the meal, but they never brought him a check. I didn’t ask and he didn’t explain. Some kind of gratis deal he had with management — Evans arrives, orders, eats, leaves a generous tip and leaves.
In the published view of director Peter Bogdanovich, Evans “was good Hollywood, not bad Hollywood.”
When Evans broke in as a producer in the mid ’60s “he brought a fresh kind of attitude to the movies,” Bogdanovich says. “He had very good taste and he produced movies of his own that were damn good.
“He was a movie fan too. It’s rare to have executives that really like movies. Not all executives are like that. He was really enthusiastic, and he encouraged talent. I loved Bob. He was friendly and amiable and charming.”
In a 10.28 tribute pieceVariety‘s Owen Gleiberman wrote that “you can see why they thought Evans would be a movie star in the late ’50s. Evans was gleamingly handsome, yet he always had a touch of the geek about him. With his toothy grin and beautiful slick coif, he looked like a cross between Tom Cruise and the young Donald Trump, and as his career as an actor fizzled, the role of producer became the perfect fit for him. He was born not to tell a story but to sell it.”
Bogdanovich agrees: “Bob was the last of a breed. He connected to the Hollywood of the ’50s. They made fun of him because he was an actor who became a studio head. But why not? He played the part very well.”
But Glieberman and Bogdanovich disagree about Evans’ vision of a genetically Italian Godfather.
“The Godfather was the most important film of the decade, and it wouldn’t have been made the way it was without Robert Evans,” Gleiberman notes. “In hiring Francis Ford Coppola to direct, Evans grasped that the then-moribund gangster genre needed a major helping of ethnic authenticity; as much as that, he saw that it needed to be epic. The result was a new benchmark in operatic Hollywood realism.”
“Oh, yeah?” Bogdanovich more or less replies. “Evans offered me The Godfather right after The Last Picture Show. [But] I just wasn’t interested in doing a mob picture.” Not to mention the fact that Bogdanovich’s Serbian-Austrian heritage wasn’t exactly an ideal perspective for understanding and conveying the saga of the Corleone crime family.
What this means, of course, is that Evans only gradually came to understand that The Godfather had to be directed by a guy who understood Italian culture — the music, food, expressions, traditions, flavorings. Evans was’t a perfect genius but when the right idea came to him, he knew it.
“The evil that men do lives after them…the good is oft interred with their bones.” Not in Evans’ case. He was never my idea of even a half-evil guy, but he had his flawed aspects. But nobody’s talking about that stuff now. Only the good, only the glorious. That’s what friends are for.
