From Anthony Lane‘s New Yorker review of The Card Counter. Illustration by Karolis Strautniekas.
9:33 pm: Four ticket-buyers (myself, some guy and two women) are the only souls in theatre #3 at the AMC Marina Dine-In, for a 9:30 pm showing of The Eyes of Tammy Faye.
9:48 pm: Here’s hoping Michael Showalter‘s biopic begins before 10 pm.
Guillermo del Toro‘s Nightmare Alley is quite an eyeful — magnificent cinematography by Dan Lausten (Mimic, Crimson Peak, The Shape of Water) and knockout production design by Tamara Deverell. But like I said the other day, the lead should’ve been a younger guy — somebody in their early 30s, like Tyrone Power was in the mid 1940s when he starred in the original Nightmare Alley. Seedy and middle-aged Bradley Cooper…well, it’s certainly a different way to go. He kinda looks like a Grapes of Wrath hobo.
I’ve watched High Sierra two or three times, and it always brings me down. The deck is stacked against poor Roy Earle (Humphrey Bogart), who’s a relatively decent guy when the pressure’s off. Except the pressure’s always on, and he doesn’t know how to survive except by robbery and whatnot, and it’s obvious that sooner or later someone’ll rat him out or the cops will close in.
Roy is a loser, a dead man, doomed — not a chance in hell, and I prefer to watch films about guys who have at least a fighting chance of making it through, which is to say guys who are smart or quick enough to at least guess what’s coming around the corner.
Unfortunately Roy, a decent fellow on his own terms and in his own space, isn’t crafty or clever enough. Plus I’ve never liked his gray hair, and it’s always bothered me that he isn’t perceptive enough to realize that Joan Leslie is kind of a dumb bunny and that she has no romantic interest in him anyway. It takes Roy forever to realize Ida Lupino is a better girl all around.
When it comes to Raoul Walsh crime flicks, I’m a bigger fan of White Heat. Cody Jarrett might be crazy and cruel, but he’s smarter and more big-time than Roy. Roy is obviously a better human being than Cody, obviously. I realize that. I’m sorry for Roy, but I’ve seen White Heat 10 or 12 times and could watch it again right now.
If I were Prince Harry, which is to say flush and abundant, I would have gotten micro hair-plug treatments a long time ago. He’s obviously loaded enough to have the very best-quality work done, and without going to HE’s clinic in Prague. I’ve had two treatments in that fair city, and I know what they can accomplish and what they don’t accomplish, and I’m telling you that no one has to rock the Glenn Kenny look unless they want to. As long as they can afford $2K and change per visit.
For his Oppenheimer biopic deal with Universal, Chris Nolan said he needed $100 million plus (a) a $100 million marketing budget, (b) total creative control, (c) 20 percent of first-dollar gross, (d) a blackout period during which Universal would not release another movie three weeks before or three weeks after his release, and (e) a 100-day theatrical window.
A little more than two years ago N.Y. Times contributor Nicole Sperling posted an article about a conflict between Netflix and exhibitors over playdates for Martin Scorsese‘s The Irishman.
In the piece former 20th Century Fox distribution exec Chris Aronson stated that “more than 95 percent of movies stop earning their keep in theaters at the 42-day mark.”
In an 8.21.19 HE story about the story, I wrote the following: “Exhibitors fear that [Netflix’s] proposed 21-day window will persuade ticket-buyers to bypass The Irishman in theatres, as they would only have to wait three weeks to see it at home.
“90% of The Irishman‘s theatrical revenue will come from educated, review-reading, 35-and-over types who will want to immerse themselves in Scorsese’s wiseguy epic (it allegedly runs around three hours) and be part of the conversation, and most of these transactions will happen during the first three weeks, four at the outside.
“A portion of the under-35 megaplex mongrels may attend out of curiosity, but the bulk of the business will come from Scorsese loyalists and cultivated cineastes.
“So if Netflix wanted to be accommodating, they would agree to wait 45 days to stream — half of the window that exhibitors want. My hunch is that the deal with AMC and Cineplex will result in a 30-day delay. Somewhere between 30 and 45 == that’s where the peace lies.”
I’m astonished to read that Nolan believes that his Oppenhiemer-builds-the-atomic-bomb movie will be generating even modest theatrical revenue beyond the 42-day mark. Most movies that aren’t wowser-holy-shit blockbusters are usually “over and done” between the 14- and 21-day mark, 30 days at the outside.
7:10: “I gave up tweeting a lot…sometimes but why?…anything I would want to say on Twitter, I can’t say on Twitter…I’d be killed. I can say ‘good morning’ and the first ten responses would be, ‘Well, I guess with your white privilege it’s a good morning!…”
9:59: “The three most important words in a relationship are not ‘I love you’ but ‘let it go.'”
13:17: [Norm McDoanald‘s death] No one knew him well. [But] a guy who was never afraid to be too subtle for most people. He did the jokes he wanted to do. I love that. [And] I love that I found out he died after he died. Because to me, show business, we’re here for [the audience]… you’re not here for us.”
“Sometimes, the audience loves that. I’ve never been in that camp. I am not here to burden you. I am here to lighten your burden. So the fact that I didn’t know about this, nobody knew about this…good one, Norm!”
N.Y. Times:
Yesterday I bought a small bottle of English Leather, which I haven’t splashed on my upper regions in quite a while, possibly decades. The reason was that I’d just watched a 13 year-old YouTube clip of MSNBC’s Chris Matthews going on about the older-guy sex appeal of then former Senator Fred Thompson, at the time a contender for the Republican Presidential nomination.
“I’m lookin’ at this guy and tryin’ to figure out the new order of things, and what works for women and what doesn’t. Does this guy have some sort of ‘it’ thing goin’ on that I should notice?…do you think there’s a sex appeal with this guy?…a sort of mature, older man…you know. He looks sort of seasoned and in charge of himself…can you smell the English Leather on this guy, the Aqua Velva….this sort of mature man’s shaving cream, after shave…a little bit of cigar smoke or whatever?”
I still replenish my supply of Aqua Velva, but they don’t carry it any more in CVS or Pavilions — you have to buy it online.
Two comments about the North by Northwest Plaza hotel room scene between Cary Grant and Jesse Royce Landis. One about gratitude, and the second about great surprise.
Comment #1 is that a certain one-two exchange between these two makes me laugh or chuckle or smile every time. I know it’s coming, I know it by heart and it gets me without fail.
Emerging from the bathroom, a deadpan, vaguely disgusted Roger Thornhill (Grant) makes the following announcement: “Bulletin…Kaplan has dandruff.” And Thornhill’s mother (Landis) replies, “In that case I think we should leave.”
Mother and child, both appalled by dandruff. That in itself is funny, but I get an extra kick out of Landis’s droll delivery, and by the fact that I, Jeffrey Wells, am also repelled by dry scalp snowflakes, and I’ve derived a feeling of comfort from two movie stars sharing the same feeling of repulsion, not just with me but with hundreds of thousands if not millions of movie buffs**. We’re all in this together, guys!
Comment #2 is that until today (and I’m laying this right on the table without apologies) I’d never realized that when Thornhill/Grant says “bulletin,” he’s facetiously playing the part of a TV announcer and announcing important “news” about Kaplan’s scalp. Because all my life I’ve thought that when he says “bulletin” it’s because he found a dandruff treatment product called Bulletin in the bathroom, and that was how he’d realized Kaplan has this problem.
Have I ever done a Google search for “Bulletin dandruff treatment” over the last 25 years? No, and that’s on me.
** How many people alive in the year 2021 are ardent fans of this 1959 Hitchcock film? A lot fewer than there were back in the waning days of the Eisenhower administration, I’ll bet. A voice is telling me that a certain percentage of Millennials have heard about it and may have even watched it once or twice. (Jett and Dylan had watched it by the time they were six or seven.) But Zoomers? Probably not so much.
