Day: July 16, 2021

How many dozens of times will McCartney 3,2,1 show us footage of these music industry legends — singer-songwriter Paul McCartney, 79, and hip-hop producer Rick Rubin, 58 — listening to isolated-track playbacks of Beatles songs from the ’60s and early ’70s, and particularly of McCartney lip-synching along and having fun with each tune?

I’ve just been watching teasers and trailers and I’m sick of it already.

And I have to say this even if it doesn’t sound nice. I’ll hang with Macca anyhow and any way, but I don’t like the idea of spending several hours listening to old songs with a guy who looks like a cross between Moondoggy and a balding Santa Claus. Rubin has friendly eyes but the beard is way too big and bushy…later.

Hollywood Elsewhere extends its thanks to the young and the careless…the unvaccinated sociopaths…thanks, guys, for ushering in the Delta variant tenfold over the past four or five weeks…thank you thank you thank you.

I’d begun to feel really wonderful about not wearing masks indoors. But now, thanks to All The Fine Young Ayeholes of L.A. County, we all have to put them back on starting tomorrow night.

Dr. Sam Torbati, medical director of the emergency department of Cedars-Sinai: “All of a sudden in the past couple weeks, we’ve seen a seven-fold increase in the number of people coming to the emergency room with COVID-related issues. Right now we’re seeing more young assholes infected because they’re more active and proportionally less-vaccinated because, you know, they’re stupid and arrogant…they’re not wearing face masks and aren’t protected so they’re going to get infected.”

Shawn Robbins, chief analyst at Box Office Pro to Variety: “It’s too soon to tell if renewed mask mandates in localized areas will discourage much activity. There’s still a pent-up desire to get back to normality. With many people having had a taste of that so far this summer, it would be challenging to expect such encouraging trends to reverse significantly as long as vaccines continue proving to be effective against known variants.”

Last night I had my second taste of Summer of Soul (Searchlight, 7.2). I had seen it theatrically in late June and had a nice, easy time with it. It’s a very warm and affecting film — a piece of New York-area cultural history I hadn’t sampled before, and was glad to have finally done so.

Shot during the mid-to-late summer of ’69 at the Harlem Cultural Festival, the doc is half…make that two-thirds about music and a third about revolutionary-cultural uplift. Changes were in the air; terra firma was shifting. ’69 was the year, remember, when average African Americans began self-identifying as “black”. And the footage is magnificent. You can almost feel the heat, smell the New York air, grass and trees, the cooked food, the cigar and cigarette smoke and the faint scent of flat, room-temperature beer.

Most of the film — directed by Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, shot a half-century ago by Shawn Peters, brilliantly edited by Joshua L. Pearson — is focused on the great songs and performances, and is what you might call (for lack of a better term) honky–friendly. Nobody says anything about the legacy of inherently evil whiteys or The 1619 Project or CRT…a blessing! Then it becomes more political and more Black-attuned about the serious consciousness elevations that were happening everywhere in all corners, and then it whips back into a more-or-less pure musical mode at the end.

Last night’s viewing was on Hulu, and it was just as pleasurable as the first time. Stevie Wonder on the drums, Mahalia Jackson uncorked, Nina Simone (I immediately flashed back to Liz Garbus‘s What Happened, Miss Simone?), The 5th Dimension (at age 26 Marilyn McCoo was arguably the dishiest 20th Century pop star who’d ever performed… pure strawberry shortcake), The Staple Singers, Gladys Knight & the Pips, and the orgasmic, thundering, X-factored Sly and the Family Stone — the only group who performed at the Harlem Cultural Festival who looked and posed and performed in a hippie-ish manner…the only organic, live-wire reflection of what had been happening in music and on campuses and in the cities since ’66 or thereabouts.

Festivalgoers are interviewed about their reactions to the 7.20.69 Moon landing, and the all-but-universal reaction was “that’s very nice but we could use some of that money down here in Harlem, because a lot of people are poor and hurtin’.”

Nobody mentions the Woodstock Music and Arts Fair or compares it to the Harlem Cultural Festival (i.e., “the black Woodstock”). It just was what it was on its own terms.

And nobody mentions the hour-long specials of the concerts that were broadcast by WNEW Metromedia (Channel 5) on Saturday evenings throughout June, July and August — 10:30 to 11:30 pm.

For what it’s worth, a critic friend who’s been around and knows the score says that Sean Baker‘s Red Rocket (A24) is his pick for the best in the Cannes competition.

Will it win the Palme d’Or? Or one of the major awards at least? I know nothing but if Spike Lee‘s jury is determined to choose a “woke” winner…okay, I won’t go there.

Let’s just say that the likeliest Palme d’Or winners appear to be Red Rocket, Ryusuke Hamaguchi‘s Drive My Car, Asghar Farhadi‘s A Hero or Wes Anderson‘s The French Dispatch.

The general consensus seems to be that Paul Verhoeven‘s Benedetta and Leos Carax‘s Annette are noteworthy but too eccentric.

Jordan Ruimy: “Based on Spike’s reactions after screenings I’m thinking the frontrunners are Lungui, A Hero or Casablanca Beats.”

16 years ago I came upon a fascinating passage in the third paragraph in Wikipedia’s Raymond Massey page. It said that sometime in the early 1920s Abraham Lincoln’s son, Robert Todd Lincoln (1843-1926), “heard Massey perform and was struck by the close similarity of Massey’s speaking voice to that of his father.”

I quoted this passage in a 2.25.06 HE post that mentioned the possible casting of Liam Neeson as Lincoln in a then-forthcoming biopic, which was first reported in early ’05. (Yes, the same Steven Spielberg-directed, Tony Kushner-authored biopic that Daniel Day Lewis wound up starring in seven years later.)

Alas, this passage is no longer in Massey’s Wikibio, which obviously suggests that the sourcing was deemed suspicious or questionable and therefore deleted. Too bad.

But let’s imagine that there was credible reason to believe that Massey did sound something like Lincoln, and that a documentarian had decided to make a Lincoln doc based solely on his letters, and that the filmmaker had decided, a la Morgan Neville and Anthony Bourdain, to digitally reconstitute and re-assemble Massey’s voice for the doc’s many narrative passages.

If, once again, historians had located persuasive testimony that Lincoln’s voice resembled Massey’s or vice versa, I would be delighted and fascinated to watch this theoretical Lincoln documentary. On a certain level it would probably seem amazing or astonishing to hear “Massey” do Lincoln. And yet the same “deepfake” or A.I. voicing technology that Mark Harris, Roger Friedman, David Friend and others have bemoaned in the case of Neville’s Roadrunner would be responsible for this.

It’s all a matter of perspective and what people are ethically accustomed to.

Incidentally: In August ’07 I mentioned an idea for “a weird-thoughtful comedy from director Mike Binder about Lincoln being somehow brought back to life by an electric charge of some kind or another, and grappling with life in 2007. I’m not kidding, and I think it’s an excellent concept. But what would you call it? Remancipator?

“My first thought was ‘cool…Abe’s back’ but then I thought a bit more about this. A great legend of the 19th Century comes face to face with the mind-blowing and the tragic aspects of what this country has become is…not funny. A man from a world of sabers, horse and buggies, hoop skirts and top hats encountering obese people and SUVs everywhere, McMansions, global warming, George Bush, celebrity meltdowns, junk food, etc.? That’s a kind of horror film.

“But the more I thought about it, the funnier it became. A fish-out-of-water piece with all kinds of strange cultural undercurrents. Lincoln driving a car, visiting Banana Republic, taking a Pilates class, dealing with an iPhone, etc. He can’t meet a nice bank teller and fall in love like Malcolm McDowell‘s H.G. Wells did in Time After Time? What would be do with himself? Become a politician? An art dealer? A horse breeder?

From the comment thread about last night’s “Bourdain Deepfake Isn’t A Problem“:

PartTimeHero: “Jesus Christ…people are actually upset about this? They were Anthony Bourdain‘s own verified words. Let’s not get too ‘woke’ on documentary filmmakers or you are going to have to accept the equal and opposite: that a documentary in theory is not far off from the makers of Jersey Shore or Survivor cobbling together their own storylines from footage.”

Mr. F.: “All they had to do was say it wasn’t an actual recording of Bourdain and they would have been fine. I just don’t understand the need to make it “his” voice. It’s the aural equivalent of putting a deepfake into a documentary, yet I suspect that would cross a line for you.”

Jeffrey Wells to Mr. F.: “Putting a visual deepfake into a documentary? Yes, that would be unacceptable. But there’s nothing wrong with what Neville did. Nothing whatsoever. I agree that he should have copped to it in the closing credits.”

Mr. F. to Jeffrey Wells: “But it’s exactly the same thing. Say you want to include a scene in a documentary that the subject has described in a book, interview, whatever — but there was never a video recording. You have the technology to shoot an actor doing what the subject says they did, then deepfake the footage to put the subject’s face on the actor’s body. While one is a visual recreation and the other an audio recreation: they are the same thing.”

Jeffrey Wells to Mr. F.: “Wrong. The key situation facing Neville was how to best aurally represent what Bourdain had written.

“Documentarians never resort to just showing passages that have been written — they ALWAYS have somebody read them. So the question was should Neville have (a) hired an actor to imitate Bourdain, or (b) read the passages himself (like Scorsese did in his Dylan doc) or (c) digitally replicate Bourdain’s voice?

“The key thing was representing Bourdain’s thoughts accurately and scrupulously. HOW they were read is a secondary issue. I have no problem with a deepfake Bourdain voice reading them, and why should you? Nobody’s lying or misrepresenting. It was simply a matter of what kind of voice would read Bourdain’s thoughts — the voice of an imitator, the voice of a neutral party (like Neville’s) or the simulated voice of Bourdain.

“If a Bourdain-imitating actor had read the passages in question, nobody would have said boo.

“Yes, there should have been a closing credit acknowledgment of this strategy, but otherwise it was obviously no biggie.”