Month: September 2020

We’re staying in a kind of plain wood, ranch-style motel adjacent to a fake Disneyworld “Old West” town (like the Spahn ranch of the early ‘60s but built for easily impressionable tourists rather than the film industry). The place is a mile from the western rim of the Grand Canyon, site of the dreaded Skywalk (a beacon for Shallow Hal types) as well as where the GC helicopter rides leave from. Tatiana is scheduled for a 45-minute thrill excursion at noon.

There’s nothing to do here but read or surf so we wound up crashing (partly out of boredom) around 10:45 pm or thereabouts. But then (and God help me) I awoke at 2:30 am, and I knew I was stone cold fucked — unable to sleep, unable to turn on a light with which to read Glenn Kenny’s Goodfellas book for fear of waking Tatiana, unable to watch a movie on the MacBook…stuck in a post-midnight, pre-dawn void, sitting on the outdoor porch in relative blackness with only Twitter and WordPress postings for distraction.

After the chopper ride we’re driving back to Flagstaff with plans to catch Tenet at one of the plexes. IMAX would be nice but we’ll see how the access and timing work out…

When Tom Hanks was infected with Covid last March or thereabouts, nobody knew what that meant but the story seemed to convey a faint tinge of “uh-oh.” But not if you thought about it.

Despite their age I knew Tom and wife Rita Wilson would almost certainly pull through due to (a) being rich and in a presumed state of very good to excellent health, (b) not being obese or plagued with a vitamin D shortage, (c) not being smokers or afflicted with any kind of chronic respiratory ailment.

The assumption, in short, is that outside of curious head-scratcher fatalities Covid mostly kills your older, fatter, sicklier and/or more genetically vulnerable types (tough luck of the draw) but not wealthy movie stars and their families.

So when the news popped yesterday about Robert “Rbatz” Pattinson getting infected after three days of shooting The Batman, my reaction was “okay, tough break but whatever.” Basically just another pandemic pothole or time-out. He’ll be fine and Matt Reeves’ film will eventually wrap. I’m nodding out as I write this.

Jeffrey Goldberg‘s 9.3 Atlantic piece about President Trump’s disparagement of war veterans and fallen dead has been flying around for six or seven hours now. Worth reading — a healthy bout of indigestion is 100% guaranteed.

Favorite portion: “When [John] McCain died, in August 2018, Trump told his senior staff, according to three sources with direct knowledge of this event, ‘We’re not going to support that loser’s funeral,’ and he became furious, according to witnesses, when he saw flags lowered to half-staff. ‘What the fuck are we doing that for? Guy was a fucking loser,’ the president told aides.”

Trump denial: “I never called John a loser and swear on whatever, or whoever, I was asked to swear on, that I never called our great fallen soldiers anything other than heroes.”

Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg explains why he used unnamed sources in report about Trump insulting dead soldiers:

"They don’t want to be inundated with angry tweets and all the rest…"https://t.co/s2ESFCOMi0 — from @MikeBrestDC at @dcexaminer pic.twitter.com/IAANsJuIgH

— Daniel Chaitin (@danielchaitin7) September 4, 2020

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Francis Copppla’s The Godfather, Part III (‘90) is the concluding chapter in the three-part Corleone crime family epic, The Godfather (‘72) and The Godfather, Part II (‘74) comprising the first two installments.

This is common knowledge, of course. It’s also understood among semi-literates that “coda” means “concluding passage of a piece or movement.” What, therefore, was the reason for retitling Coppola’s newly re-edited version of the final chapter as Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone?

19 syllables is at least 10 too long. And who needs “coda” in an already overloaded title? HE suggests eliminating (a) “Mario Puzo’s”, (b) “coda” and (c) “The Death of Michael Corleone” and just calling it Godfather III: The Last Reshuffle — 9 syllables!

Coppola’s official statement:

Except this time the victim was armed and holding. Interpretations are welcomed.

Reporting excerpt: “Washington D.C. police have released bodycam footage showing the moment officers shot dead Deon Kay, an 18-year-old black man, after he allegedly brandished a gun during a police chase, sparking further protests across the city. Kay died on Wednesday after he was shot in the chest by a Metropolitan Police officer identified on Thursday as Alexander Alvarez.

“Authorities said Kay was one of two people who fled on Wednesday afternoon when approached by uniformed cops investigating reports of a man with a gun near the 200 block of Orange Street. During the foot pursuit, Kay allegedly pulled out a weapon, prompting an officer to open fire in response, the MPD said in a statement.”

Any film with a Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic rating below 80% obviously has an issue or two. Especially if the aggregate is closer to 70.

I’ve yet to see Julie Taymor‘s The Glorias (Roadside, 9.20), but as far as the inhabiting and reanimation of Gloria Steinem is concerned, I was profoundly impressed by Rose Byrne‘s effort in Mrs. America, so there’s that hurdle.

It’s no surprise that costar Timothy Hutton, who plays Gloria’s travelling-antique-salesman dad, Leo Steinem, and who ran into some difficulty earlier this year, is absent from the trailer.

Excerpt from “From Kant to Kirk: Star Trek‘s Philosophical Arguments,” posted in Newsweek on 7.9.16:

“In their book, ‘Star Trek and Philosophy: The Wrath of Kant’, Jason Eberl and Kevin Decker make it clear that from the very idea of the Federation to the foggy ethics of the Prime Directive, it’s been (a) philosophical quandaries as well as (b) priceless fight scenes that have kept fans hooked for half a century.

“But according to Decker, two schools of thought run through the entire Trek canon, present throughout both ongoing storylines and one-time episodics. ‘Every Star Trek series contains stories representing the ethical struggle between utilitarians like John Stuart Mill (who prioritize the maximization of good) and deontologists like Immanuel Kant (who subordinate the greater good to following the right principles),” he explains.

“The series are very much reflective of their times,” says Eberl. “Because the original series came out when it did, Gene Roddenberry wanted to touch on the social issues of the day in a way that you couldn’t in traditional TV formats. By putting things in a sci-fi context where social issues are couched in the issues of an alien world — the censors weren’t immediately able to say, ‘Oh, he’s talking about the Vietnam War’ or ‘That’s about civil rights or women’s rights or population control.’ These are touchy subjects, and they normally wouldn’t have been allowed to be discussed.”

Two or three years ago it was noted that among the new crop of Academy and SAG members, “representation isn’t an important thing — it’s the only thing.” Aesthetic standards change, social measurements evolve, etc.

Joe Popcorn has spoken on Twitter and Reddit about the Tenet sound mix, and has largely disapproved. Ask anyone who’s seen it. The plotting is complex but at best you can hear half of the expository dialogue, and it’s allegedly maddening. (How could it not be?)

Undeterred, Variety‘s Leo Barraclough has posted one of those “Average Joes may feel frustrated but at the end of the day industry professionals probably know better, or at least are fearful of being candid” articles. The trades are brilliant at this sort of thing.

Sorry to differ with the Berlin Film Festival’s recent decision to adopt gender-neutral performance awards. Ditto Tilda Swinton‘s belief, stated hours ago at the start of the 2020 Venice Film Festival, that getting rid of Best Actor of Best Actress awards is a good thing.

“Humans are so interested in division and compartmentalizing ourselves,” she said. “As we’re really getting to understand now, this is not the way to go — dividing people up and prescribing a path for them, whether gender or race or class.”

Hollywood Elsewhere calls “bullshit” as far as gender differences are concerned. Throughout all creation and with nearly all species of life, nature has insisted upon genderism and all the accompanying differences and distinctions. In the realm of screen acting, there are certain skill sets — basic postures and attitudes and inclinations — that divide male and female thesps. Tilda may dislike this, but they’re built into biology. She can try and Khmer Rouge her way around this, but it’s a no-go.

“It’s just such a waste of life,” Swinton explained. “Life is too short for all of this. I’m really happy to hear that about Berlin and I think it’s pretty much inevitable that everybody will follow. It’s just obvious to me. The whole idea of being fixed in any way, it just makes me claustrophobic.

“It just makes me sad to call yourself definitively heterosexual, definitively homosexual, definitively male, definitively female. It makes me want to go to sleep. So bravo, Berlin.”

Charles Durning‘s 60ish farmer character in Tootsie disagrees — “Bulls are bulls, and roosters don’t try to lay eggs.”

In Long Shot, Seth Rogen dives out of a second-floor window, crashes into a parked car, gets up, groans and runs down the street like it’s next to nothing. In No Time To Die, Daniel Craig, tethered to a rope, leaps off a medieval Italian bridge, falls 80 or 90 feet, slams into a wall, gets up, groans and shakes it off. Roberto Rossellini would have heartily approved.

I despise cyborg action sequences because they remove any sense of vulnerability, which is (profuse apologies for mentioning this) a factor that we all contend with daily.

If there’s one basic law that present-tense action directors despise, it’s the one that says “humans are not T-1000 mechanisms but flesh, blood and bone.”

Bond films respected this basic fact during the first two or three installments, but that was all but out the window by the time of Diamonds Are Forever. And then audiences fell too hard for the T-1000 action aesthetic with the release of James Cameron‘s Terminator 2: Judgment Day (’91).

I for one continue to pine for the physical realism of Steven Soderbergh‘s Haywire (’12), but an overwhelming majority has said “no” to that aesthetic.

Otherwise No Time to Die seems, to paraphrase Ray Liotta in Goodfellas, like “good Bond movie bullshit.”