Day: May 19, 2020

A Simple Instinct

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How many of us have dreamt of finding a huge amount of cash in a bag or suitcase somewhere? With no papers or ID or anything to indicate whose money it is…no clues at all.

Please read this short N.Y. Post story and tell me if you agree with what was done when roughly $1 million in untracable bills (and with no security cam footage being taken) was found on a rural road in Virginia’s Caroline County.

The same approximate thing happened to me when I driving for Checker Cab in Boston in ’72 or thereabouts. Somewhere near Mass General a young woman who’d flagged me down climbed into the back and excitedly announced that a wallet was lying on the floor. With cash in it. It came to a little over $400 ** but with no cards, photos or identifying paper of any kind. Not a single scrap of vague information to go by. So we split it 50/50, and it was glorious because there was no basis for feeling guilty. Manna from heaven.

** In ’72 $400 was worth roughly $2,453.48 in 2020 dollars.

Boiled Down

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Former Today host Matt Lauer has posted a Mediaite essay about Ronan Farrow‘s passing along a rape allegation in “Catch and Kill” and more particularly about Ben Smith’s anti-Farrow N.Y. Times piece (5.17), “Is Ronan Farrow Too Good to Be True?”

Lauer (whom I’m not especially comfortable quoting) has posted his essay for roughly the same reason that Robert Kennedy announced his Presidential candidacy in the wake of Eugene McCarthy‘s surprise showing in the ’68 New Hampshire primary — because perceptions have changed and right now the winds are relatively calm from Lauer’s POV.

Lauer isn’t denying he was a manipulative, predatory hound during his Today heyday, but he does state the following: “On October 9, 2019, I was falsely accused of rape. The allegation came from Brooke Nevils, the same woman whose complaint resulted in my termination at NBC. It was made public as part of the promotional rollout for a new book by Ronan Farrow. This accusation was one of the worst and most consequential things to ever happen in my life. It was devastating for my family, and outrageously it was used to sell books.

“At no time did Brooke Nevils ever use the words ‘assault’ or ‘rape’ in regards to any accusation against me while filing her complaint with NBC in November of 2017.”

Don’t Even THINK About It

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When a baseball game is delayed due to weather, the implication is that ticket holders should hang around as the wait will be relatively brief. But if a game is postponed, it means collect your stuff and head for the parking lot. Delay and postpone are technically synonymous, but the former means a presumably brief stall while a postponement sounds like someone has either thrown in the towel or is seriously thinking about it. Hence the title of this post.

HE to Academy: In this, the spring of our solitude and COVID discontent, the coming Oscar season is something we really need to celebrate and put our hearts into, now more than any other time in the Academy’s 93-year history. Especially with things starting to open up a bit and with the recent ruling that streaming-only films are Oscar-eligible.

We all need to adapt and stand up and gather round and support each other as best we can under the circumstances. It is our absolute responsibility to the industry and to ourselves to celebrate and champion and promote the hell out of the best movies being released by whatever means, now and forever, under any circumstances but especially in this, our time of industry need.

I am saying this because of a completely unacceptable Variety story by Marc Malkin that claims that “the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is considering postponing the big night, according to multiple sources.”

Postponed until when? Delaying for a couple months, maybe, but otherwise no, no, no, no…NO! That is totally out of the question.

Malkin: “The sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, say definitive plans are far from being concrete at this juncture. The telecast is currently set for Feb. 28, 2021, on ABC.

“’It’s likely they’ll be postponed,’ one of the sources familiar with the matter told Variety.”

Malkin: “However, that person cautioned that the details, including potential new dates, have not been fully discussed or formally proposed yet. Another source says the date is currently unchanged at ABC.

“When new temporary rule changes for Oscar eligibility were announced in April because of COVID-19, Academy president David Rubin told Variety it was too soon to know how the 2021 Oscar telecast could change in the wake of the pandemic.

“’It’s impossible to know what the landscape will be,’ he said. ‘We know we want to celebrate film but we do not know exactly what form it will take.'”

HE to Academy: If and when COVID seriously inferferes until, say, mid-fall, one option would be to extend the 2020 Academy year until 1.31.21 or even 2.28.21. And then hold the Oscars in April, like they used to do in the early ’60s. Just this one year.

Malkin: “It’s unclear if postponing the Oscars will also mean that the Academy will allow films released after the year-end deadline to qualify for the 2021 Oscars.”

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Scott Had His Own Eye

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A little more than 16 years ago (i.e., sometime in early April 2004) I interviewed Man on Fire director Tony Scott inside a Four Seasons hotel room. I’d been knocked flat by Man on Fire, and could’ve easily besieged Scott with questions for a couple of hours, but I only had the usual 15 minutes.

As we discussed this or that I was suddenly struck by how cool his hiking boots looked. Smooth brownish tan deerskin with red laces…excellent! I had to ask where he’d got them. I don’t remember his exact reply but it was some familiar outlet — a Bloomingdale’s or an A16. “I’m struck because I’m a hiking boot nut and they don’t look like anything I’ve ever seen,” I remarked. “I found them in the women’s section,” Scott replied. His feet were small enough and he obviously didn’t care.

“Wow”, I said to myself, “this is how serious directors think. Scott doesn’t care if an article in question was made for women or men…he just cares if it looks right.”

I was also charmed because, I realized, Scott shared my attitude about apparel. Or vice versa, I should say. Totally X-factor, indifferent to the norm.

A good part of the HE readership would bristle at the idea of wearing a shoe or T-shirt or scarf or windbreaker made for women. But I never have. I was savaged by commenters a decade or so ago when I bought a pair of canary-yellow laceless sneakers. “Wear a man’s shoe!” the commenters grumbled. “I’m wearing what I like,” I replied. This is the difference between guys who are enslaved to the code of muscularity and machismo vs. those who are free-thinkers.

Partly because of our shared shoe sensibility, I was extra-devastated when Scott committed suicide in August 2012.

Remember Landing at LaGuardia?

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Back in the old days of commercial aviation (i.e. three months ago and earlier), civilians used to fly whenever and wherever. I used to fly to New York City, London, Paris, Nice, Prague, Key West, Honolulu, Hanoi…you name it. Big Apple-wise I always flew into JFK or Newark, but this final approach to LaGuardia is quite beautiful. East across Queens and over uptown Manhattan, following the Hudson River south, curving about the Battery (you can see the WTC pools next to Freedom Tower) and forth to Midtown and east across Queens (observe the remnants of the ’64 World’s Fair as well as good old Shea Stadium) to LGA…magnificent. I really miss flying. (The below video was shot three-plus years ago, but who cares?)

Take The Money and Run

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After filming in early ’18, Sony, Aaron Schneider and Tom Hanks‘ Greyhound, a CG-propelled WWII action thriller, was looking like a possible problem. Schneider fiddled and faddled in post for well over a year, and then came the COVID concerns. Sony’s initial plan was to release it on 3.22.20, then 5.8.20, and finally 6.12.20. Today TheWrap‘s Brian Welk reported that rather than sweat a streaming release, Sony has decided to sell the film to Apple TV for $70 million.

Sony honcho: “Let’s at least be frank with each other in the privacy of the conference room — our confidence in Greyhound isn’t what it could be.”
Sony marketing team: “Arguably it has problems, but we need to give it the old college try. The glass is half full, not half empty.”
Apple TV management (on speaker phone): “We’ll give you $70 million for it.”
Sony honcho: “Sold!”

From “CG Action in the North Atlantic,” posted on 3.5.20: “Remember the mostly organic realism of Saving Private Ryan (’98)? Well, you can forget that aesthetic as far as Aaron Schneider‘s Greyhound (Sony, 6.12) is concerned. Yeah, it’s another Tom Hanks ‘dad’ movie (stolid guy, old-fashioned values, facing adversity and tough odds, grace under pressure) but if you ignore the interior shots, the Greyhound trailer looks like a damn CG cartoon.

“The phrase that’s coming to mind is ‘Call of the Wild on the North Atlantic’ — another digitally created, steroid-injected World War II film a la Roland Emmerich‘s Midway.

“Remember Mark Robson‘s The Bridges at Toko-Ri (’54)? Or Humphrey Bogart‘s Action on the North Atlantic? Or Cary Grant‘s Destination Tokyo? They were all mostly or partially shot on sound stages and ‘faked’ to a significant degree, but they nonetheless conveyed a certain tactile reality — a feeling that is plainly lacking in Aaron Schneider’s video-game fantasy, at least as presented in this trailer.

“Remember The Enemy Below? Or Otto Preminger‘s In Harm’s Way? Or Sink The Bismarck? Or Alfred Hitchcock‘s Lifeboat, which was shot entirely in a studio tank? These and other films presented at least a semblance of reality on the high seas during World War II. Real ships, real submarines, real salt water, real waves — not a Sony Playstation recreation.

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“Die Hard” In A Puerto Rican Hurricane

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A tough, sassy hombre with ties to law enforcement (Mel Gibson by way of Bruce Willis) tries to thwart a team of thieves in a high-rise while a hurricane rages outside. The thieves are led by a flamboyant sociopath (David Zaya, inspired by Alan Rickman‘s “Hans Gruber”). A lawman (Emile Hirsch by way of Reginald VelJohnson) helps the renegade within the bounds of the law while a near-and-dear family member (Kate Bosworth, continuing a tradition begun by Bonnie Bedelia) frets big-time. And the pressure mounts.

Puerto Rican activists are pissed, of course, because the idea of thievery by high-end native criminals is a racist trope, and only foam-at-the-mouth gringos like Gibson and director Michael Polish (remember the Polish brothers?) would cook up such a fantasy.

It’s not clear if these same voices were the ones complaining about Steven Spielberg‘s West Side Story, and particularly the song “America” in which some Puerto Rican immigrants say they prefer Manhattan to their native land…a “lie” that only racist dogs like Stephen Sondheim would perpetrate.

Boilerplate: Gibson and Bosworth portray a father and daughter, the former refusing hurricane evacuation orders and the latter an MD who wants him to leave. Hirsch plays a local cop named Cardillo (goddamn it…Hirsch is of “German, Jewish, English and Scots-Irish ancestry“!), who steps in to help Bosworth persuade Gibson to skedaddle. Gibson, a retired cop, becomes involved in Cardillo’s mission to prevent Zaya’s gang from heisting a hidden $55 million.

Force of Nature (Lionsgate) opens direct-to-video on 6.30.