Month: October 2020

Son of Lurie-Frankenheimer-Kilmer

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[Previously posted on 2.9.18] So let’s imagine Rod Lurie conferring with the ailing John Frankenheimer sometime in early or mid ’02, except Lurie isn’t Lurie — he’s me. Speaking with my attitude, my philosophy, my sense of things.

Let’s also include the fact that Hollywood Elsewhere harbors no ill feelings about the legendary Val Kilmer. I helped report that “Psycho Kilmer” Entertainment Weekly article that ran in mid ’96, but I had a nice chat with him at a party he threw at his home back in ’04 or thereabouts. I ran into a friendly Kilmer again in the fall of ’11 while having lunch with Descendants costar Judy Greer.

Anyway….

Frankenheimer: I want you to promise me one thing, Rod. I may not be around much longer, but I want to know that you’ll never, ever work with that prick. Please.

Lurie: Uh-huh.

Frankenheimer: Will you promise me this?

Lurie: No Kilmer?

Frankenheimer: I want your word.

Lurie: For what…the rest of my life?

Frankenheimer: We’re friends and I want you to promise me this.

Lurie: Look, John, I love you like a father and I’m sorry for what you went through, but you can’t…

Frankenheimer: What?

Lurie: You know as well as anyone that we all…

Frankenheimer: Rod…

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Some Senate Righties May Stand Up…

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..if Trump holds to his more or less announced, scorched-earth, damn-the-Constitution plan to brush aside or override the election results if he thinks fraudulent balloting is part of the reason for his loss.

Another Reason To Vote Joe

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From a Yascha Mounk Atlantic article with a subtitle that reads “if you hate wokeness, you should vote for Joe Biden.”

“A number of influential commentators who firmly opposed Donald Trump in 2016 recently announced their intention to vote for him in 2020. Nearly all of them, including James Lindsay, Danielle Pletka and Ben Shapiro, blamed illiberalism on the left. As Shapiro said on his popular show, he is planning to vote for Trump because ‘Democrats have lost their fucking minds.’

“Concerns about illiberal tendencies on the left are not made up out of thin air. Many Democratic politicians have not been as full-throated in their opposition to left-wing political violence as they should be. Parts of the left now seek far-reaching censorship in social media, advocate for employees to be fired for expressing conservative opinions, and are openly hostile to free speech. The likely future mayor of Portland, Oregon, has appeared to glorify mass murderers such as Che Guevara and Mao Zedong on the campaign trail.

“But the fact is that Trump presents a much greater danger to key constitutional values, and does more than anyone else to lend apparent credibility to extreme forms of protest as well as an unremittingly negative appraisal of America. Voting for Trump to stem the rising tide of illiberalism is about as pure an example of cutting off your nose to spite your face as political life can afford.”

Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Wrong Pills”

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I am a typical “owl”. I find it incredibly difficult to fall asleep before midnight and even harder to wake up.

I usually wake up slowly, between eight and nine. I just lie there for five or six minutes. Then I stumble out to the kitchen to turn on the coffee maker. 99% of me is still asleep. Back to bed again. Three minutes later, a plaintive signal from the kitchen tells me the coffee is ready.

I take three or four sips right in the kitchen, and consciousness begins to activate. Back to bed, another sip or two. Open mail, news, messages. More coffee while trying to recall what day of the week it is, what my obligations are, and so on.

Half a cup of coffee means that 25% of me is awake. Finishing the cup brings me to 50%.

While I’m in the shower, strong black tea is brewed. A huge mug. Milk, honey. Drink, get dressed, down to the garage.

Do you think I am finally cheerful and vigorous? Oh, no! 20% to 30% of me is still asleep. I open the roof of my Beetle (for oxygen), pull into traffic. Only fifteen minutes later am I completely attuned and alive. Sometimes I refuel on coffee on the way.

This is my morning routine, each and every day. But today something went totally wrong.

I recently bought a multi-vitamin, which I always do the spring and fall. I also bought some organic sleeping pills. Both are in the shape of yummy bears. The sleeping pellets didn’t work properly after the first try. Their exposure time was supposed to start after 45 minutes, but for me that moment never came. So I put them aside in the kitchen, possibly to try again down the road. The multi-vitamins were placed on my bedside table.

Click here for the rest of the column at tatiana-pravda.com.

Nobody Is a Bigger Fool…

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…for black-and-white widescreen cinematography than myself. Serious widescreen, I mean — 2.39:1.

Off the top of my head the most mouth-watering monochrome scope flicks are Woody Allen‘s Manhattan (dp Gordon Willis), Martin Ritt‘s Hud (dp James Wong Howe), Robert Rossen‘s The Hustler (dp Eugene Schüfftan), Jack Cardiff‘s Sons and Lovers (dp Freddie Francis), Jack Clayton‘s The Innocents (also Francis), Daryl F. Zanuck‘s The Longest Day (dps Jean Bourgoin, Walter Wottitz) and David Lynch‘s The Elephant Man (Francis again).

Eric Messerschmidt‘s black-and-white capturings in the Mank trailer look perfectly luscious. Monochrome dessert with whipped cream and a cherry on top. But for a period film already praised for casting an ultra-scrupulous eye upon the minutiae of 1940s Hollywood life, I’ve been wondering why Fincher and Messerschmidt chose to shoot Mank in an ultra-wide aspect ratio when 1.37 was the compositional norm back then.

Nobody except The Big Trail‘s Raoul Walsh and dps Lucien Andriot and Arthur Edeson had shot anything in black-and-white widescreen back then, and certainly nobody was thinking or dreaming in such terms, so why is a super-exacting film like Mank upsetting the apple cart of our common visual perception of that era?

I wouldn’t call this a huge concern of mine, but I’m wondering what the thinking might have been. My guess is that Fincher and Messerschmidt did some tests and decided that despite the historical incongruity, they’d simply fallen too heavily in love with widescreen scope to let it go.

Beautiful Inventions

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Fact-based dramas are presumed or expected to be mostly real. Liberties are always taken, of course, and now and then a scene or two will be invented out of whole cloth. What matters, of course, is whether or not the inventions are emotionally satisfying. If a scene works, all is forgiven.

Off the top I can think of two such scenes that hit it out of the park. One, the “Carl Bernstein fakes out Martin Dardis‘s icy-mannered secretary” scene in All The President’s Men, which was completely invented and co-written by Nora Ephron and Bernstein himself. And two, the pens scene in Ron Howard‘s A Beautiful Mind. Even the allegedly venerated ritual of Princeton mathematics professors presenting pens to a respected colleague was completely fabricated.

Can anyone think of others? I’m not talking about lying docudramas. That’s standard Hollywood procedure. I’m talking about made-up scenes that really deliver the goods, and are even regarded in some quarters as the high point of a film in question.

I Worship This Guy

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Although I have to say I felt truly crestfallen when I heard Dave Chapelle say the following to David Letterman [listen below]: “I believe that God is in control….no matter what I worry about…I trust that this creation has a purpose….something perfect exists…we have to believe in something, otherwise why would you continue?”

HE reply: “God is in control”? Tell that to the millions who were marched into showers and gassed with Zyklon-B. Why did they continue despite many of them smelling or at least sensing their fate around the corner? Because they had no option but to live and strive and keep trying despite the odds. Because continuing is mandatory.

Stinkaroonie

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Last night’s SNL wasn’t just unfunny — it was in-and-out unwatchable. I briefly turned into Joe Biden as I said to the screen, “C’mon, man…this isn’t working!” Okay, the Village People thing was moderately okay. Conceptually the “Madam Vivela” fortune teller skit was pretty good — I wanted it to work but the dialogue never landed. The African tourism skit was basically Ulrich Seidl’s Paradise: Love — not funny in 2012, not funny last night. The Bachelor skit was awful. Adele’s opening monologue was a struggle (why would she say she doesn’t know American politics because she’s British?) but her singing was great.

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Agreed

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“[The last Presidential] debate was so frustrating to watch. Did anyone else yell lines at the screen that they wish Biden had said? When Trump said he’s been good for the stock market, I was like ‘Joe, [during the Obama years] the stock market went up four times higher than Trump’s stock market. You have the ball. You’re standing above the rim. Why will you not dunk it?'”

One, Joe has never been a dazzling debater, and he never will be. Two, Joe might’ve dunked it if he was 60 or 70 or even 75. But he’s 78. Three, people seize up when the pressure is on — it happens. And four, Pete Buttigieg would’ve dunk-slammed it like a star, but a certain demographic within the Democratic Party shut him down. And here we are.