Day: July 21, 2021

The photo is great for the rain-soaked streets, of course. And interesting because you can’t see the woman’s face, but there’s no missing her distinctive umbrella and overcoat with bunched-up sleeves, and the fact that she’s on the tall side. And her distinctive cab-beckoning technique — not with a general wave but two fingers. A woman of class and subtlety.

Richard Quine‘s My Sister Eileen, an allegedly misbegotten musical that I’ve never wanted to see and almost certainly never will see, opened at the Victoria on 9.22.55. Charles Laughton‘s The Night of the Hunter, a poster for which can be viewed in the distance off to the right, opened at the Mayfair one week later — 9.29.55.

Neither film was a box-office success so it can be assumed that this photo was taken soon after the Hunter opening; probably sometime in early to mid-October. Although back then even box-office stinkers would remain in first-run theatres for somewhat longer periods.

If my estimate is correct, James Dean had died only a week or two before this shot was taken — 9.30.55. Elia Kazan‘s East of Eden, Dean’s big breakout film, had opened at the Astor theatre around seven months earlier, on 3.19.55. Dean’s second film, Rebel Without a Cause, would open two or three weeks hence — 10.27.55.

Criterion’s reportedly handsome new Bluray of Jacques Deray‘s Le Piscine (’69) popped yesterday. All the would-be elites who follow Criterion’s lead have bought into the legend of this Gallic noir. The disc contains a new restored 4K digital transfer, a 2019 documentary about the film by Agnès Vincent-Deray, featuring costars Alain Delon and Jane Birkin, screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, and novelist Jean-Emmanuel Conil; archival footage featuring Delon, Birkin and costar Romy Schneider; an alternate ending; and an essay by film critic Jessica Kiang.

I’m just reminding HE regulars that I watched La Piscine about six years ago and found it rather off-putting. Noirs obviously aren’t about radiating warmth and emotional assurance, but La Piscine is extremely cold; a good portion of the second half radiates outright cruelty. The plot and the tone are as malevolent as this kind of thing gets. And in at least one respect it’s fairly deranged.

Delon’s Jean Paul dumps Schneider’s Marianne somewhere around the two-thirds mark, and it just doesn’t calculate a guy who looks like Delon would jettison one of most beautiful women in the world. Schneider was 30 when La Piscine was made in September 1968, and was dead 13 and 2/3 years later, at age 43.

I’ve said this a few times before, but the fact of the matter is that Luca Guadagnino’s A Bigger Splash (`16), a fairly exacting remake of La Piscine, is a hell of a lot richer and certainly more engaging than Deray’s original. The ’69 film is superficially attractive but a turn-off in most respects; A Bigger Splash is an absolute turn-on.

From my 4.11.16 review: “Luca Guadagnino‘s A Bigger Splash is a Mediterranean hothouse noir — a not-especially-sordid sex and betrayal story that builds so slowly and languidly it feels like there’s nothing going on except for the vibe, and honestly? It’s so lulling and flavorful and swoony and sun-baked that you just give in to it. The undercurrent is…well, gently mesmerizing, and that was enough for me. I felt like I was savoring a brief vacation. I’m not saying the dramatic ingredients are secondary, but they almost are.

“The title comes from a David Hockney painting, and that in itself should tell you where Guadagnino is coming from. A Bigger Splash is about island vibes and coolness and louche attitudes and to some extent the splendor of the druggy days, and particularly the legend of the Rolling Stones.

“In my mind the island of Pantelleria, which is halfway between Tunisia and the southwest coast of Sicily, isn’t just the setting but a kind of lead character. It colors and tonalizes and blows little mood gusts.

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I was settling into Gunpowder Milkshake on Netflix…”my God, this is heaven…amazing!…why doesn’t Netflix make more like this?” No, seriously, it made me sick to my stomach. So I turned it off and began to watch Arthur Penn‘s Night Moves (’75), not intending to watch it all through (it was after 11) but I watched about 45 or 50 minutes.

Night Moves runs only runs 99 minutes but always feels like two hours, and yet it’s always engrossing. As noirs go it’s colder than most. It’s a demimonde film about a community of friendly, cynical people who work in the lower end of the film industry and don’t care all that much about anything. It basically says that everyone’s guilty or corrupt or thoughtless…that everything’s rancid and foul. But Gene Hackman‘s Harry Moseby lends a certain humanity.

Anyway there’s a night scene early on in which Moseby, an ex-football player turned private investigator, happens to drive by the Magnolia Theatre (4403 W. Magnolia, Burbank…not far from Warner Bros. studio) with Eric Rohmer‘s My Night at Maud’s on the marquee. A bit earlier his wife, played by Susan George, tells Harry she’ll be catching this very Rohmer film with a gay friend and asks Harry if he’d like to join**.

So he pulls over and waits for the show to end. Never mind about what happens — I was suddenly swooning over the marquee and the quiet street and the idea of little independent movie theatres…a small single-screen theatre showing an arty French film on a weeknight in a quiet little neighorhood in the San Fernando Valley. And I was thinking “Jesus, I really wish I’d driven out there earlier this evening and caught the same 7 pm show.”

** Moseby responds with the famous line “I saw a Rohmer film once…it was kinda like watching paint dry.” This line was quoted in Rohmer’s N.Y. Times obituary.

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I know that look on Leonardo DiCaprio’s face — as Ernest Burkhart, the bad-guy nephew of Robert DeNiro’s William Hale character in Martin Scorsese and Eric Roth’s Killers of the Flower Moon, he’s projecting a lowbrow dumbfuck attitude, a little hostile and guarded, probably not enough brain cells, etc.

Born in 1874, Hale wasn’t that old in the mid 1920s, of course — about 50 or thereabouts. DeNiro looks great-grandpa-ish but we’ll let that slide. (Leo will hit the big five-oh in November ‘24 — three years and change.)

Meanwhile Jesse Plemons, as FBI good guy Tom White, has a haircut and a head shape not unlike that of Lou Costello or, if you will, a basketball. He’s walking with a crutch on his left side.

Photos shot by Owen Hutchison.

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Since returning from Cannes and presumably having concluded, along with everyone else, that the Toronto Film Festival has descended to (temporary) second-tier status, World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy has been trying, along with everyone else, to sagely spitball the Venice, Telluride and New York Film Festival rosters.

I have to say that I’m feeling a wee bit gloomy about the likely Telluride roster, given that two films that I was really hoping-against-logic to see there — Clint Eastwood‘s Cry Macho (Warner Bros., 9.17) and Andrew Dominik‘s Blonde (Netflix), which began shooting in August ’19 — won’t be there for sure, although the latter may turn up in Venice or Toronto.

I was also hoping to see the Sopranos prequel, David Chase and Alan Taylor‘s The Many Saints of Newark (Warner Bros, 10.1), in Telluride, but who knows?

I’m also hearing (although I don’t know this for a fact) that Adam McKay‘s Don’t Look Up (Netflix) will bypass Telluride. That’s a drag. And forget Guillermo del Toro‘s Nightmare Alley playing there also, I’m told.

There’s also the question of Joel Coen‘s The Tragedy of Macbeth (A24/Apple), which, I’m told, has been seen and gently passed on by at least one important award-season player. That, to me, means nothing because everyone will want to see it anyway because Coen + William Shakespeare + Denzel Washington + Frances McDormand is too highly charged of a combo. Slated for a theatrical fourth-quarter release by A24 followed by Apple streaming, it will seem curious if The Tragedy of Macbeth bypasses the festivals and just “opens,” as it were.

Right now the Telluride keepers (per Ruimy and others) appears to be Paul Schrader‘s The Card Counter, Reinaldo Marcus Green‘s King Richard, Pablo Larrain‘s Spencer (I regret having to repeat that Kristen Stewart is too short to play Diana Spencer), Mike Mills‘ C’mon C’mon, Jane Campion‘s The Power of Dog, Pedro Almodovar‘s Madres Paralelas, Lin Manuel-Miranda‘s Tick, Tick…Boom! (saga of Rent maestro Jonathan Larson), Denis Villeneuve‘s Dune, Wes Anderson‘s The French Dispatch and Maggie Gyllenhaal‘s The Lost Daughter.

Not to mention Todd Haynes’ The Velvet Underground, Celine Sciamma’s Petite Maman, Will Sharpe’s The Electrical Life of Louis Wain, Michael Pearce’s Encounter and Ken Burns’ multi-part Muhammad Ali documentary.

Toronto keepers include Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho, Michael Showalter’s The Eyes of Tammy Faye and Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast. Blonde may also play there, apparently, in the wake of a Venice debut.

Ruimy’s Venice projections include Blonde, Madres Paraleles, The Power of the Dog, Triangle of Sadness, The Card Counter, Last Night in Soho, The Hand of God, Spencer”, Driftwood, The Lost Daughter, Official Competition, Freaks Out, Veneciafrenia, Lost Illusions and Henrico’s Farm.

Having seen a new Dune trailer plus a generic-sounding IMAX sizzle reel, Forbes Scott Mendelson has posted a 7.21.21 “what will happen to Dune when it opens?” article, and the general feeling is one of “uh-oh.”

The article has two stand-out proclamations, both alarmist. The first is the headline’s mention of the money-losing John Carter…that in itself is cause for shrieking. Ding-ding-ding-ding-ding-ding-ding-ding…parched desert milieu! big ugly monsters!…ding-ding-ding-ding-ding-ding-ding-ding-ding-ding! The second alarm-bell is a Mendelson statement that “the marketing folks at Warner Bros. have their work cut out for them” in order to spare Dune from a Carter-like fate.

“And that second trailer, mostly culled from the first ten minutes, was oddly less narratively coherent than the initial teaser,” Mendelson explains. “More so than the first teaser, the second trailer” — expected to pop early next month — “seems to be selling the mere idea of ‘Hey look, we made a mega-budget, all-star Dune movie!’ as its primary hook.”

Helpful Mendelson suggestion: “[The second trailer contains] hints of a ‘prince of privilege switches sides and aligns himself with the oppressed’ plot. That primal story that has resonated in everything from Exodus to Avatar. If there is a third trailer (perhaps timed to the film’s Venice Festival launch or to No Time to Die in late September), I’d suggest leaning hard into that angle. Hell, even if they have to lie a little bit, I’d play up the notion that Timothee Chalamet and Zendaya are dueling protagonists whose destinies eventually intermingle.”

…but they’re always swamped with so many expressions of rapt adoration and slavish praise, like water gushing out of a firehouse, drenching everyone in attendance…a feeling of drowning, of not being able to breathe…give it a rest! It’s left to the recipients to turn it down and somehow make it feel real, but by the time they’re before a mike and sharing whatever you’re too drained and exhausted to care. The only tribute events that I can stand are roasts, except they’re exhausting and draining in different ways.

The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts has announced its 44th lifetime achievement award winners, to be handed out on 12.5.21: Motown founder Berry Gordy, opera star Justino Díaz (who?), singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell, entertainer Bette Midler and Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels.

Gordy, Midler and Michaels are legendary, of course, but Mitchell is the only kissed-by-genius, Pablo Picasso– or Frank Sinatra– or Billie Holiday- or Isodora Duncan-level artist among them.

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