Month: October 2019

Set in a Scottish highland regiment sometime after World War II, Tunes of Glory (’60) is about a brutal battle of esteem between the retiring commander, Major Jock Sinclair (Alec Guinness). and his replacement, one Lieutenant Colonel Basil Barrow (John Mills). Right away the macho Sinclair, whom everyone in the regiment likes and respects, mounts a steady campaign of disdain and belittling against Barrow, whom everyone comes to regard as prissy, stiff and constipated. The war ends with a bullet and blood on the floor, and a ton of residual guilt.

Guinness and Mills were at their absolute peak. James Kennaway‘s screenplay, sharp and well-honed, was Oscar-nominated.

Wiki excerpt: “Guinness wanted to play Barrow, and John Mills wanted to play Sinclair. It took a meeting between Guinness, Mills and director Ronald Neame to straighten out why each was best suited for the role they had been offered. However, in his autobiography, Mills claimed that he brought the script to Guinness, and between them they decided who should play which role. At the end of the dat Guinness believed this performance to be among his best.”

Paul Revere and Raiders frontman Mark Lindsay, Quentin Tarantino at downtown Grammy Museum promotion for the Once Upon A Time in Hollywood soundtrack album. Besides myself attendees included Variety‘s Chris Willman and Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone.

Earlier this week Tatyana and I attended a special screening of Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite at San Vicente Bungalows. The esteemed South Korean director (who’s a fairly big guy, taller and heavier than myself) was the guest of honor at the after-party. Thanks to Colleen Camp and Phillip Noyce for the invite.

Leaving Bong Joon-ho/Parasite event.

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There are some who are still saying Trump will most likely win in ’20, mainly because they’re convinced that the pragmatic humanity of schoolmarm Elizabeth Warren is no match for this grotesque alpha-male sociopath on a debate stage. I’ve been scared all along of how well she’d do if Typewriter Joe were to fall by the wayside. (Bernie‘s heart attack has pretty much ended his candidacy — face it.) Warren is a smart, tough, determined, hard-charging change agent…anti-corporate, good with specifics, not corrupted, an actual human being. How could your pot-bellied, gun-owning hinterland slowboat prefer the Manhattan crime family boss who has no scruples, no temperance, no decency?

From Michael Moore’s Facebook rant about Joker, which posted early this morning: “The fear and outcry over Joker is a ruse. It’s a distraction so that we don’t look at the real violence tearing up our fellow human beings. 30 million Americans who don’t have health insurance is an act of violence. Millions of abused women and children living in fear is an act of violence. Cramming 59 students like worthless sardines into classrooms in Detroit is an act of violence.

“As the news media stands by for the next mass shooting, you and your neighbors and co-workers have already been shot numerous times, shot straight through all of your hearts and hopes and dreams. Your pension is long gone. You’re in debt for the next 30 years because you committed the crime of wanting an education. You have actually thought about not having children because you don’t have the heart to bring them onto a dying planet where they are given a 20-year death-by-climate-change sentence at birth.

“The violence in Joker? Stop! Most of the violence in the movie is perpetrated on the Joker himself, a person in need of help, someone trying to survive on the margins of a greedy society. His crime is that he can’t get help. His crime is that he is the butt of a joke played on HIM by the rich and famous. When the Joker decides he can no longer take it, you will feel awful. Not because of the (minimal) blood on the screen, but because deep down, you [will be] cheering him on.

“And if you’re honest when that happens, you will thank this movie for connecting you to a new desire — not to run to the nearest exit to save your own ass but rather to stand and fight and focus your attention on the nonviolent power you hold in your hands every single day.

“Thank you Joaquin Phoenix, Todd Phillips, Warner Bros. and all who made this important movie for this important time. I loved this film’s multiple homages to Taxi Driver, Network, The French Connection, Dog Day Afternoon. How long has it been since we’ve seen a movie aspire to the level of Stanley Kubrick? Go see this film. Take your teens. Take your resolve.”

Reported today by AP’s Jay Reeves: “A young man who was loudly cheering and applauding on-screen murders sent some people heading toward exits in a crowded theater near Manhattan’s Times Square on Friday night. Other patrons yelled at the man, who spit on them as they left early, said Nathanael Hood, who was in the AMC Empire 25.

“’I was scared. I’m sure a lot of other people were,’ Hood said in an interview conducted by private messages.

“’About halfway through when Joker started killing people and monologuing about how society is evil, [this ayehole] started clapping really loudly and incessantly for a good minute. People started yelling for him to shut up, but he kept clapping and cheering like mad,’ Hood said.

“The man started clapping and cheering again ‘really loudly’ during a climatic gunfight, he said, and got ‘belligerent’ when people told him to quit. Finally security came and got him. He was still being interrogated outside the theater when we came out. Plenty of police were around the theater, ‘ said Hood.

I intended to review or at least riff on Noah Hawley‘s Lucy in the Sky (Fox Searchlight, 10.4) after seeing it earlier this week. But I couldn’t get it up. I began to check my watch around the 40-minute mark, and after a while I faced the fact that I was shrouded in boredom. Which was partly due to the fact that half the time I couldn’t understand what Natalie Portman, as the high-strung, love-struck astronaut Lucy Cola, was saying.

Cola is based upon notorious ex-astronaut Lisa Nowak, who flipped out when her fellow astronaut lover William Oefelein, whom the married-with-children Nowak had been seeing for a couple of years, took up with the younger Colleen Shipman. The screenplay (by Hawley, Brian C. Brown and Elliott DiGuiseppi) is an attempt to enoble Nowak’s bizarre saga as something more than the result of jealousy and a manic personality — it tries to explain her apartness and disorientation as a spiritual result of having been on a prolonged space mission.

“I just feel a little off,” Portman/Cola says at one point. “You go up there, you see the whole universe. And everything here looks so small.”

I’m sorry but there’s just no caring for what she’s going through. I wanted to leave before the one-hour mark. “What does this have to do with me,” I was asking myself. “She’d rather be floating hundreds of miles above earth…okay. But why do I have to deal with her issues? I got enough aggravation. And is it really that hard to speak clearly so that hearing-impaired idiots like myself can understand what she’s saying?

But I love Portman’s current hair styling, or at least as she appeared the other night on Jimmy Fallon. And I was thinking to myself that if Lucy Cola’s hair looked this good (as opposed to her awful Dorothy Hamill soupbowl) I would have felt more sympathy for Lucy Cola’s plight. I’m sorry but these things matter.

Your flight finally lands in Los Angeles, and you’re feeling the usual relief mixed with lethargy as you wait for your luggage. But at least a taxi or an Uber ride won’t be hard to snag, you tell yourself, and the pick-up location is only a short walk. Except starting later this month, the pickup location (an outdoor lot called LAX-it) will be a long walk, and the only way to get there if you’re not in a long-walk mood will be to hop on a shuttle bus.

In other words, the process of escaping LAX congestion after you land will soon take an extra 20 or 30 minutes, minimum. Thank you very much, genius bureaucrats, for making that tedious airport even more of a traffic prison than it already is.

Hollywood Elsewhere last attended the Middleburg Film Festival in 2015 — i.e, the Spotlight year. I’m happy to announce that I’ll be returning for this year’s festival between Thursday, 10.17 and Sunday, 10.20, and that Tatyana will join.

An LAX-to-Dulles red eye on Wednesday night (no sleep to speak of), and then a three-and-a-half-day stay at the five-star Salamander Inn. We expect to catch nine or ten films, minimum. And then a two-and-a-half day roam-around in the nation’s capital, and then a flight back to Los Angeles on Tuesday evening, 10.22.

The Middleburg slate is lively, necessary, and all-encompassing. The Irishman, Ford v, Ferrari, The Cave, The Capote Tapes, Clemency, Terrence Malick‘s A Hidden Life, Honey Boy, JoJo Rabbit, Just Mercy, Knives Out, Marriage Story, Motherless Brooklyn, Parasite, The Traitor, The Truth, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, The Report, Varda by Agnes, Waves plus panel discussions plus leisurely nature strolls and some roam-around time in historic Middleburg.

Tatyana and I would be delighted to pay $135 each for a clop-clop horse ride along a nice woodsy trail. Whether we’ll actually do that is another matter.

After last weekend’s Joker premiere screening I heard a couple of predictions that at least a portion of the Joe and Jane Popcorn community might find it too unsettling, too severe, too fuck-all. Because it doesn’t deliver the usual safe spaces and comfort zones, and by the finale seems to more or less endorse the idea of mass anarchic rebellion in the streets. It leaves you with no one to care for or identify with except loony Arthur Fleck. Obviously not your dad’s D.C. movie.

HE to comment-thread gang who saw it last night or earlier today: What was the after-aroma in the room as everyone was filing out? Too heavy-creepy? A mad, daring bull’s-eye? Somewhere in between? The drag-assers at CinemaScore haven’t posted a grade yet.

Last night’s $13 million take apparently means a $90 million tally by Sunday evening. Nobody cares about the carpings by wokester critics. Joker is an essential activity for the next 60 hours.

Sam Mendes‘ 1917, one of three presumed Best Picture heavy-hitters yet to be screened (along with Greta Gerwig‘s Little Women and Clint Eastwood‘s Richard Jewell), will probably have its big peek-out during AFI Fest 2019 (11.14 to 11.21).