Year: 2019

Remember the good old days when Oscar-season takedowns weren’t about offending the woke twitter comintern?

Not that Oscar contenders shouldn’t be taken to task (sharply reprimanded but not necessarily killed) if some form of ghastly conduct comes to light, but remember when widely–read opinion pieces were the talk of the town, and which sometimes helped determine the Oscar fate of this or that film or performance?

Like, for example, the late William Goldman‘s controversial hit piece about Martin Scorsese‘s Gangs of New York (“Crashing The Party for Poor Marty”), which ran in Variety on 2.2.03?

Did Goldman kill Gangs at the Oscars? Maybe to some extent, but Gangs mainly killed itself. Scorsese’s brutally violent historical epic was nominated for 10 Oscars, and won exactly none. Reason: Nobody really liked it. Four years later Scorsese’s The Departed won the Best Picture Oscar. Reason: People liked it.’

Green Book has been twittered to death, but where is the definitive William Goldman-esque takedown of A Star Is Born? Oh, how I wish Bill was still among us so he could bang it out. If he was still here and in good health, he’d almost certainly write about (a) the first drop-out moment (i.e., when he stopped believing in Bradley Cooper‘s film), and (b) how it’s probably not the greatest idea since the invention of sound to give the Best Picture Oscar to a remake of a remake of a remake of a remake — i.e., the fifth version of a showbiz saga that dates back 86 years.

Here’s the Goldman vs. Gangs piece:

“I don’t know about the rest of you, but I am sick unto death of feeling guilty about Martin Scorsese.

“Here are the names of five great directors: Charlie Chaplin, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick and Orson Welles. What do they have in common? For all their fame and brilliance, none has won the Oscar for best direction.

“Neither has Scorsese.

“Should the five have won? Absolutely. But it’s not a mortal sin they didn’t. Should Scorsese? You bet. A couple of times. Taxi Driver, obviously. Raging Bull, obviously. But I fell in love with his talent earlier on, with Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.

“This year, more than ever, it’s like there’s a Byzantine plot to get Scorsese the honor. As if the phonier critics all dropped to their knees and looked up at the Hollywood Gods, going in unison, ‘Oh pwease, we twied so hard wif Kundun, we even twied wif Bwing Out the Dead, so pwease pwease wet Marty win this year, he wants it sooooo bad.”

“That he does. The Hollywood parties he is attending must make him want to barf, but there is, glad-handing anyone in the vicinity who is an Academy member who might throw him a vote.

“Miramax, the greatest movie company of the era (and the most brutal — and maybe they have to go together) is so all-out for Scorsese it’s heart-stopping. They do a brilliant job and I honor that — but I will never forgive them for hyping the Oscar to Roberto Benigni, the scummiest award in the Academy’s history. And I suspect Scorsese will win too.

“But he sure doesn’t deserve it, not this year. Because Gangs of New York is a mess.

Read more

I’m delighted with our West Hollywood abode — two cats, great location, hardwood floors, nicely furnished, low rent — but there’s this guy upstairs with a loud voice. He’s one of those friendly smoothie types, and totally in love with his own honky voicebox — actually a combination of a foghorn and a French horn.

The problem is that he bellows in a mild sort of way — his voice volume is always set to at least eight — with occasional high-pitched giggles and tee-hees. Always on the phone, always chuckling and smooth-talking his pallies and always extra-double audible.

My guess is that deep down this guy is some kind of frustrated talk-show host or March of Dimes charity emcee, but I’m telling you that listening to that honking voice for hours on end is awful.

Most people who’ve been decently raised and acquired a little cultivation understand by the time they’re ten or twelve that there are three voice levels in polite society — (a) intimate (low), (b) conversational (medium) and (c) addressing people in a Madrid bullfight stadium without a microphone (the guy upstairs).

Foghorn Leghorn doesn’t know, doesn’t care, can’t be bothered…he just adores that wonderfully lulling sound, that calming vocal-chord vibration, that feeling of being the ostensible “charmer” with the smoothly braying donkey voice. On top of which he has heavy feet — he’s always clomping around, which is another indication of a lack of couth.

Needless to add this guy represents a common plague of the modern age — loud, coarse people who are more or less indifferent to the fact that they might be aurally torturing (or at least afflicting) others nearby. Guys like this are all over. A couple of summers ago I was sitting with Tatyana at an outdoor table at Cafe Camille, and we were rolling our eyes about the sound of four or five Ugly Americans a couple of tables away who couldn’t (wouldn’t) keep their voices down. I got into trouble when I complained about this syndrome in 2010 — my mistake was mentioning that the ethnicity of the bellowers.

Over the last year or so I’ve noted certain apparent similarities between Tatyana Antropova and Vladimir Putin, and I mean that as a compliment. A brilliant organizer-manager (at which she excelled during her peak professional years in Russia), Tatyana is nothing if not bright and shrewd and skilled at divining the ins and outs of the fluctuating American zeitgeist. Commercially, culturally or spiritually, she’s constantly separating the wheat from the chaff — sniffing, exploring, comparing, assessing.

Tatyana is on Twitter, of course, and a fervent Instagram and Facebook player, of course, and while driving around she’s a total WAZE hound (and can’t speak poorly enough of Google Maps). If she was a professional gambler she’d be the Russian Amarillo Slim. Plus she hates the noisy guy upstairs as much as I do, and has excellent taste in clothing and interior design, and over the last couple of years has blended into Los Angeles culture as well as can be expected, and probably better than most other Russian expats.

Tatyana’s command of English is 90% to 95% “there”, and to her credit she’s always asking about this or that noun or verb or slang expression. (She’s obviously way ahead of me in terms of being bilingual and understanding the gist of many European tongues.) But one thing she hasn’t mastered, English-wise, is modifying her strong Russian accent. Which I, selfish to the last, find delightful.

Tatyana is a go-getter, as noted, but her first stabs at pronouncing this and that are sometimes fascinating and always, for me, heartwarming. I love her mispronunciations, and how it sometimes takes two or three minutes of question-and-answer discussions to get to the bottom of things. If I was a better partner I’d be a tougher taskmaster, but I can’t help but be charmed.

The other day it was about “Hahnray BOHNduhl.” I eventually discerned that she was talking about Henri Bendel, the financially struggling women’s accessory chain. The correct pronunciation is “AhnREE BenDELL.” I guarantee that most under-40 American female customers mispronounce it also — 90% of them probably say “Henry BENdul.” The difference between Tatyana and American women is that she’s always correcting herself, always sharpening her game. Most younger American women? Maybe not so much. Because they have nothing to prove.

Tatyana and I attended a special gathering Friday night for Cold War director Pawel Palikowski and star Joanna Kulig. The elegant affair happened at the Brentwood home of producer and hostess supreme Colleen Camp. A sea of faces both familiar and distinguished — Alexander Payne, Michael Mann, Phillip Noyce, Helen Hunt, Dustin Hoffman, David O. Russell, Robert Towne, screenwriter Michael Tolkin, producers Art Linson and Albert Berger. It was great speaking with Kulig (due to give birth to a son in early February) and her husband, documentarian Maciek Bochniak. The evening ended with Kulig singing three songs, accompanied by a skilled, low-key pianist and a stand-up bassist. (I regret that the videos I took were unsteady and poorly angled.) Awesome buffet, desserts to die for. A special thanks to Camp for her gracious hospitality.

Waiting for valet guys outside Colleen Camp home — Friday, 1.11, 10:45 pm.

Have any HE readers recently accepted the Bird Box challenge? Which is to say have they attempted any activities that normally require eyesight while blindfolded? Has anyone tried to play darts, make an omelette, sit on top of a flagpole, walk a tightrope, cross a traffic-heavy boulevard or build a house of cards without using their eyes?

[Click through to full story on HE-plus]

Posted on 12.22.13: We all know Springsteen’s “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out.” Well, here’s an early ’70s occurence called “Gas Pedal Space-Out.”

We were all young and wasted and riding around the wilds of Wilton, Connecticut. Five of us, no direction in mind, maybe 11 pm or midnight. Wilton is exurbia — all shady and winding country roads with woods all over, woods and big lawns and colonial rock walls guarding homes on two and three-acre lots. I was sitting shotgun with two others in front and three in back, and I swear to God the episode is as clear now as if it happened last night.

While engaged in a fairly mesmerizing conversation (are there any other kind when you’re fried on cannabis sativa?) the driver gradually forgot to keep his foot on the gas. The car went slower and slower until it came to a dead stop. And nobody noticed for a good five or ten minutes, of course, until some guy pulled up behind and flashed his lights and honked. If it had been a Wilton patrolman he would have have searched the car and our pockets, and somebody would have been popped for possession.

Two or three years earlier the same driver was motoring across a bridge in Kansas City with four or five friends. Somebody had a recently-bought ounce of something potent. They were all passing a pipe around when someone noticed a cop behind them. Instant paranoia. “Be cool, just be cool,” etc. Then the cop flashed his lights and gave a short blast with the siren, and the person with the bag decided the only thing to do was dump the contents out the window. He poured it out the driver’s side window and, sure enough, the finely-ground pot blew right back into the car, covering everyone and everything.

Here and now. Anyone who was getting high in the ’70s or ’80s has at least a couple of stories like this. I asked this five years ago and I’m asking again in 2019: Has anyone ever experienced a late-night car slowing and then stopping for the above-described reason?

Posted on 5.11.13: I had an issue today with the wonderful people at Superfit, a health club in Berlin Charlottenberg (Wilmersdorferstrasse 54). I wanted to just hit the treadmill and use some of the machinery, but I didn’t think to bring sweats or shorts with me to Europe. So I tried to skirt the fashion norm by paying my 10 euro-per-day fee and using the facilities with my Nike workout shoes and jeans. Yes, I know, of course — jeans don’t pass muster in a workout club. It’s not cool and I get that. They’re totally right. But I was looking for a little leniency.

Call me a cheapskate but I just couldn’t see shelling out 20 or 25 euros for a pair of bathing suit trunks or gray sweatpants so I could pay 10 euros to do two miles on a treadmill for one time. I was being a pain and a bit obstinate, okay, but was it really that crazy to ask for a little slack? As a one-time deal?

Read more

Last night I attended a Green Book screening + after-party on Mt. Olympus Drive. Director-cowriter Peter Farrelly was there; ditto costars Linda Cardellini and Joe Cortese. A pleasant time was had by all.

I was talking to Film Threat‘s Chris Gore about the prevailing climate of woke political terror, which we both despise, and about my being denied a press pass for Sundance ’19 for insufficient woke-itude. In a flash of inspiration Chris told me I needed to create my own Sundance pass with “rejected” stamped across it.

I went right home and sent snaps of my 2016 Sundance press express pass to HE’s own Mark Frenden, the Chicago-based designer who created that HE-stamped American Friend poster I love so much. This morning he sent me my new pass, which I think is dead perfect. This weekend I’ll print it out at Kinko’s. I intend to wear this pass around my neck during my whole forthcoming Park City visit (1.22 to 1.31).

It took her a while after Wednesday’s attempted Green Book takedown, but yesterday Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone posted one of the best bitch-slappings of the lefty woke fascist brigade (i.e., “Woketopia”) that anyone’s ever read. I dare Mark Harris or A.O. Scott or Manohla Dargis or Team Indiewire or Melissa Silverstein or anyone from that snowflake crowd to question or push back upon what Sasha has written here — I double-dare them.

Please read the whole thing but here are some of favorite portions:

Excerpt #1: “The leaders of Woketopia…truly believe that Green Book winning the Oscar is the worst thing that could happen in America.

“‘THEY DESERVE IT!’, they scream. At best, that’s what we get. At worse we get a lot of tongue-clucking and lectures by high-minded folks who are here to set everyone straight about what deserves or doesn’t deserve the Oscar. I’m referring not to black critics, BTW, but to certain white critics who scream the loudest.

Except #2: “This has greatly impacted how the Oscar race is covered, as bloggers scan each project for un-wokeness. Films by and about white males are mostly fair game for any kind of attack, and hopefully will eventually be just completely shunned. One tweet is all it takes to send a wave of hysteria through the hive mind and suddenly that film, too, is problematic. And anyone who likes the film or votes for the film is likewise caught up in that shitstorm.

Except #3: “When I heard about how much Green Book was liked, the first thing I thought was ‘white filmmakers telling a story about race are going to get creamed.’ It didn’t matter how good it was. It’s simply not possible, in today’s climate, for any white person to tell a story about race. White people and specifically white men are considered the enemy unless they arm themselves by becoming Woke Warriors, which many of them have done.”

Read more

What if Joel and Ethan Coen‘s Inside Llewyn Davis hadn’t been released five-plus years ago and instead a couple of months ago? Would it be a more formidable Oscar contender than it was in actuality, when it managed only two nominations (cinematography, sound mixing) and no wins?

Few Coen films have aged better than Llewyn Davis. Every time I re-watch ILD (I’ve seen it at least nine or ten times) it gets a little funnier, a little craftier and more perverse.

Fargo, Miller’s Crossing, No Country For Old Men and Burn After Reading are maxed out — they are what they brilliantly are, preserved in a kind of Coenesque amber. But Llewyn Davis never stops breathing and expanding and rolling its eyes.

It was one of the most critically celebrated and heavily awarded films of ’13, but the Academy slowboats brushed it off. Why? Because in their eyes it was too glum, too downbeat, too grayish-brown, too resigned. Because the misty desaturated color scheme did something to their souls that they just didn’t like.

Suzanne Vega: “I feel that the Coens took a vibrant, crackling, competitive, romantic, communal, crazy, drunken, brawling scene [i.e., early ’60s folk music in Manhattan’s West Village] and crumpled it into a slow brown sad movie.”

For me it’s one of the most consistently amusing Coen flicks ever made. In a downish, contemplating-suicide sort of way. I’d like to watch it again right now. Hell, I want to see a 4K version.

Read more