Month: August 2021

Posted on 2 1/2 years ago on HE Plus: In Long Shot, Charlize Theron played a 40ish Secretary of State planning a run for the White House, and Seth Rogen plays a political journalist whom Theron hires to be her speechwriter, in part because she babysat him when she was in her teens. The premise got me thinking about a babysitter episode of my own, when I was nine or ten…

It was a warmish spring night in Westfield, New Jersey. My parents went to a party or something, and so they hired a babysitter. “What for?” I asked. “I’m just gonna hang out and watch TV,” etc. But they wanted someone older to watch my younger sister (five or six at the time) and brother (four).

I changed my mind when the babysitter arrived. Cute and curvy, ponytail, 16 or 17 years old, creamy sweater. I wasn’t making an ass of myself by drooling and ogling, but I was certainly pleased that I’d have her company for the next three or four hours.

An hour after my parents left a couple of guys came over — the babysitter’s boyfriend and some friend of his. I was initially disappointed as I wanted the babysitter all to myself. But her boyfriend, kind of a rebel type, smiled and shook my hand and talked me like an equal so I was, well, placated. I’d never spoken to an older teenager before — these guys were 17 or 18, somewhere in there.

An hour later the babysitter started to get down with the boyfriend, in a mildly flirty-touchy way. He was sitting in my father’s living room armchair and she was kind of sitting between his legs, her back to him and his arms around her midsection. I wasn’t exactly staring but I’d glance their way from time to time, and I could see his hands (or at least his fingers) were under her sweater.

I had never been in the presence of any kind of adult sexuality of any kind before that moment. I was all but purring with arousal.

Then suddenly my parents came home. The boyfriend and his friend didn’t run for it — they just stood up and walked out. I forget what my mother’s reaction was but my father was pissed — holding his temper, paying off the babysitter, offering to give her a lift home in a testy tone of voice. Everyone knew she’d never return, having violated the basic trust. But man, what a night.

Over the last few years progressive Hollywood has been doing everything it can to “Black up” Academy membership and by extension the Oscar Awards, and obviously that’s been happening, result-wise and nomination-wise, in the acting categories. But in the broader Best Picture category most voters will tend to support movies that tap into some kind of common cultural current…subjects and stories that reflect the “all” of human experience.

Specific social-agenda movies (going all the way back to I Am A Prisoner From a Chain Gang, They Won’t Forget, The Ox-Bow Incident and Gentleman’s Agreement) are almost always honored and respected, but snagging the big trophy is another equation.

We all understand that the Oscars are no longer the Oscars — they’ve become the Progressive Left Coast Tony Awards, addressing and reflecting the myopic industry culture and the general fear of wokesters on Twitter, etc. Which is why Joe and Jane Popcorn (not to mention Millennials and especially Zoomers) feel estranged if not divested, to put it mildly. Last April’s Steven Soderbergh Oscar show, a calamity by any yardstick, all but drove a stake through the brand.

Earlier today Sasha Stone and I spitballed the most likely 2022 Best Picture contenders, and there are only two one or two Black contenders that might have a shot — Reinaldo Marcus Green‘s King Richard (Warner Bros., 11.19 — obviously a Best Actor nomination waiting to happen for Will Smith) and Denzel Washington‘s A Journal for Jordan (Sony, 12.10).

The rest of the likelies are all white-centric, so even if the word goes out that King Richard and A Journal for Jordan have to be nominated to ensure at least a semi-significant Black presence, you’re still taking eight white films vs. two reflecting the POC experience.

The ten likeliest Best Picture contenders, from a pure-gut, finger-to-the-wind, eliminate-the-negatives perspective:

(1) Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Soggy Bottom (PTA films have never been Oscar-friendly as a rule, but SB is set in the ’70s and has something to do with the industry, or at least with Jon Peters) (UA Releasing, 11.26)

(2) Adam McKay‘s Don’t Look Up (satire about planetary destruction careening toward earth and the limitless human capacity for denial) (Netflix, mid to late fall)

(3) Clint Eastwood‘s Cry Macho (Warner Bros., 9.17)

(4) Ridley Scott‘s House of Gucci (11.24, UA Releasing)

(5) Ridley Scott‘s The Last Duel (20th Century, 10.15)

(6) Reinaldo Marcus Green‘s King Richard (Warner Bros., 11.19)

(7) Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner‘s West Side Story (20th Century, 12.10)

(8) Michael Showalter‘s The Eyes of Tammy Faye (Searchlight, 9.17)

(9) Aaron Sorkin‘s Being The Ricardos (Amazon, late 2021)

(10) Denzel Washington‘s A Journal for Jordan (Sony, 12.10).

Probably won’t make the cut for this and that reason (17): Dune, The French Dispatch, Nightmare Alley, In The Heights, No Time to Die, Passing, The Power of the Dog, Respect, Tick Tick Boom, The Tragedy of Macbeth, Pig, The Card Counter, Belfast, C’mon, C’mon, CODA, Cyrano, Stillwater.

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Hollywood Elsewhere sympathizes with the disappointment expressed by Patricia Gucci, author of “In The Name of Gucci“, over the casting os Al Pacino as Aldo Gucci in Ridley Scott‘s House of Gucci (11.24, UA Releasing).

Aldo, who died five years before the 1995 events depicted in the film, was a handsome, elegantly dressed, silver-haired smoothie. (In his middle-aged to 70ish prime, I mean.) No offense, but it can be fairly noted that gnomish Pacino isn’t much of a physical match for the late Gucci executive at this stage in his life. Pacino was cast for his name and box-office-magnet factor, not for his resemblance to Aldo.

The Gucci family is naturally hoping that Scott’s film will depict them as glamorous and attractive, etc. I understand their frustration.

If Scott was somehow motivated to direct a film based on my own exciting, up-and-down life and decided to cast, say, Rob Schneider, I would be very, very upset. I would be outraged. Ditto if he were to cast Will Ferrell or John C. Reilly…the list goes on. The only person who could play the young version of me would be Chris Walken as he appeared in The Dogs of War and Next Stop, Greenwich Village. The only person who could play the current version would be me.

Venom: Let There Be Carnage (Sony, 9.24) has been directed by Andy Serkis, who has never (and will never) bring subtlety or exceptional finesse to anything. His creative instincts are almost always about pouring it on. (One exception: Serkis’s performance as serial killer Ian Brady in Tom Hooper‘s Longford.) Carnage stars Tom Hardy (bend-over paycheck gig) with Michelle Williams (good God), Naomie Harris (Jesus), Reid Scott, Stephen Graham and Woody Harrelson.

Not over the fact that this 30th Anniversary Bob Dylan Concert Celebration happened 29 years ago (10.16.92) at Madison Square Garden, or the fact that it was probably the greatest boomer-rocker ensemble performance of all time, or the fact that I betrayed myself by not flying back to New York and somehow snagging a pair of tickets.

But over the glorious fact that there were no wokesters back then, and the Millennials who were destined to bring the terror to American culture (the worst era of witch-burning horror since the early ’50s) were toddlers back then…they couldn’t know and of course we didn’t know either, and everything seemed…well, not untroubled (life’s a constant vale of troubles) but at least the Monsters Wouldn’t Arrive on Maple Street for at least another 25 or 26 years or so and all was relatively “well”, so to speak.

George H.W. Bush was in the White House, Bill Clinton hadn’t been elected yet, Jett and Dylan were 4 and 2 years old respectively, I was driving a spiffy, semi-newish black 240SX Nissan and writing for Entertainment Weekly and the L.A. Times Sunday “Calendar” section and even the N.Y. Times, and my first trip to the Cannes Film Festival had happened five months earlier.

In my just-posted Pig review I asked if HE Patreon subscribers recall a recent (7.27) riff about “how the most interesting films focus on invisible things.” For elaboration’s sake, I’m going to violate the Patreon sanctity and re-post part of that article:

“Most of us are attuned only to life’s tangibles — food, shelter, warmth, money, clothing, pets, guns, cars, shoes, homes, furniture, trees, hills, mountains, oceans, swimming pools, sailboats. Things we can see, touch, smell, eat, wear, boast about and dive into.

“But others, fortunately, are also mindful and in some cases stirred or motivated by invisible things — thoughts, feelings, spirits, ghosts, dreams, intuitions, morality, melancholy, premonitions, memories.

“Any filmmaker can focus on the tangibles. Most of them do, in fact. Movies that are strictly about tangibles are ‘mulch’ movies, a term that I defined earlier this month. Mulch is the source of our shared Hollywood ennui…the muck at the bottom of the dried-up lake…the disease that keeps on infecting…the gas that fills the room.

“Except for a smattering of elite, award-season stand-alones (or festival movies) and select forthcoming streamers like HBO’s Scenes From A Marriage (Bergman remake), Hollywood makes almost nothing but mulch these days. The streaming + re-emerging feature realm is flooded with mulch…empty, inane, meaningless, spirit-less, jizz-whiz “content” crapola that nobody wants to see or cares about, but they’re made anyway because the zone-outs and knuckle-draggers need stuff to watch.

“But only serious directors are able to convey or dramatize the presence of invisible things. The finest films are actually concerned with a mixture of tangible things, which is natural and inevitable in any corner of life, but are driven by the invisibles.”

The reason that critics love Michael Sarnoski‘s Pig (Neon, 7.16) is because it’s saying something about the undercurrent of civilized American life in the year 2021. It’s saying two things actually. Thing #1 is “something fundamental and spiritual is missing in our lives.” Thing #2 is “the reason that fundamental thing is missing is because we’ve exiled it…we’ve shown it the door and shouted ‘get out of our house!…you’re not stylish enough!'”

Pig stars the burly, bearded, bruised and overweight Nicolas Cage, and costars Alex Wolff and Adam Arkin. It’s about a former bigtime Portland chef (Cage’s Rob Feld) who’s quit the restaurant business to become a reclusive-hermit truffle forager in the forest. The plot is about Feld’s pet pig being kidnapped and Feld trying to get it back.

It has soul, Pig does. It conveys a reverence for the unseen. (Remember my recent riff about how the most interesting films focus on invisible things? This is one of those films.) Pig is slow and obstinate in some ways, but it believes in the holiness of earth and nature and fine food and wine, and it’s saying that the urban sophisticated realm that most of us live in is…lacking. “Not real” in certain important ways. Lacking in a holy mystical current, lacking in the solemn fundamentals.

But just because Pig is snail-paced and under-written and filmed in shadows and subdued blue-ish light doesn’t mean it’s a great film. I think it’s definitely an interesting and in some ways a valuable film with the eternal things on its mind, etc. But I didn’t “love” it. I was down with it, but the funereal pace bothered me after the 55 or 60-minute mark. I actually decided to take a break at the one-hour mark because I knew it would maintain this same shuffling gait to the end.

I also got tired of looking at Cage’s bloody, beat-up, swollen face. Okay, his performance has a certain ruined integrity. Beaten up by intruders and left with dried sticky blood on his face and forehead throughout 85% of the film. Long gray ratty hair. No hot water, no shower, no change of socks…a sad forest hermit roaming around Portland as he tries to get to the bottom of things.

But Feld is no dummy, and we’re asked to believe that this 50ish truffle whisperer, who spends most of the film speaking to this and that person involved in the Portland restaurant business, wouldn’t clean himself up before making the rounds. He’s clearly not an idiot, and yet Feld is so caught up in the purity thing that he doesn’t clean the fucking dried blood off his face? You know what that is? That’s filmmaker hubris. Sarnoski is saying “Feld is too much of a truffle samurai to even think of cleaning himself up…he’s too angry, too enraged, too possessed to bother about appearances.” That’s movie bullshit.

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Hands down, the most transporting version of Harry Warren and Al Dubin‘s “I Only Have Eyes For You” was recorded in late 1958 by The Flamingos. What makes it work is the reverb plus the background singers doing the old two-part-harmony “sha-bop sha-bop“. But for years and years I thought they were singing “kah-LUCK-kah-luck.”

The reason I was a kah-LUCK-kah-lucker for so long is a brief scene in Billy Wilder‘s The Apartment (’60). Consolidated Life of New York executive Al Kirkeby (David Lewis) is ushering his office girlfriend Sylvia (Joan Shawlee) into the Upper West Side apartment building of C.C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon) for an assignation, and as she climbs the stairs of Baxter’s brownstone Sheila is singing “kah-LUCK-kah-luck.” Sheila’s improv stuck in my mind.

The Apartment was shot in the fall of ’59 — “I Only Have Eyes For You” was released in April ’59, and was pretty much the definitive romantic song of the moment.

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