Standing room access is filling up, but the super-pricey white floor seats are maybe 30% filled, if that. Okay, 35%. The sound is imprecise, echoing and bouncing all over the place, like artillery shelling outside of Damascus…a joke. The video screens for the opening act, TheGloriousSons, look like twin postage stamps from section 430. And the John Gotti-level criminals running the SoFi parking lot are charging $80 per car.
I’ve seen the Rolling Stones twice — once in Madison Square Garden, once in Paris (“Les Rolling Stones aux Abbatoir”), and the MSG show was okay — big but visually and aurally palatable. I’m telling you that so far the SoFi stadium viewing experience (70K seating vs. 20K in MSG) feels like a ripoff — all about fuck-the-chumps greed. The players on the stage look like fleas on my cat.
8:45pmupdate: The joint is pretty much filled. Video screens are much bigger for the Stones. Sound seems of a higher quality. “Street Fighting Man”,”All Down The Line”…”be my little baby for a while.” Energy spike…”19th Nervous Breakdown”, “Tumbling Dice,” “Beast of Burden.” The new drummer is really good, but he’s wearing too much bling. Okay, I feel better now. Mick Jagger’s smile is more than about happiness. It’s about warmth, ecstasy.
Imagine being known as a distinctive stamp choreographer with his own unmissable style…a leap-and-somersault-and-stomp thing that said “Michael Kidd” first and foremost but also “not gay.”
Posted on 12.26.07: “Three things about Michael Kidd, the award-winning choreographer (Guys and Dolls and Can-Can on stage, The Band Wagon and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers in films) who died Sunday night at his home in Los Angeles.
“One, he was straight. Two, he talked like a New York cab driver or newsstand vendor. And three, he gave a snappy, lived-in performance as a choreographer hired to finesse a stage show for a Santa Rosa teenage beauty pageant in Michael Richie‘s Smile (’75).”
This Tender Bar trailer is a much better thing than the film itself. Better timing, better editing, more emotion. It basically coasts along on the strength of Paul Simon‘s ‘Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard’, even though it has nothing to do with the film. It’s a mood cocktail that kind of lifts you up and pulls you along.
And now you can see what I meant in my review about young Daniel Ranieri playing a young version of Tye Sheridan. Stop blowing smoke as there’s NO WAY IN HELL this kid grows up to be Sheridan. You can’t be a dark-eyed Lebanese at age ten and suddenly transform into the biological son of a middle-class German paleface couple (Lily Rabe, Max Martini) when you hit 18. Come down to earth and stop trying to wrestle audiences into woke submission.
Last night I watched John Farrow: Hollywood’s Man in the Shadows, a 96-minute doc about the prolific, under-rated Australian-born director. Farrow made scores of better-than-decent, lower-budgeted films (The Big Clock, Five Came Back, Calcutta, His Kind of Woman, Hondo). A skilled and dependable craftsman, he directed no drop-dead masterpieces but was great with long takes.
Married for 20-odd years to Maureen O’Sullivan while constantly catting around, the Roman Catholic Farrow sired seven children, including Mia Farrow.
Co-directors Claude Gonzalez and Frans Vandenburg have delivered a respectable effort, often edifying if less than fully satisfying, for reasons I’ll try to explain.
The sage talking heads include Australian directors Phillip Noyce, Bruce Beresford and Philippe Mora, plus film critics Todd McCarthy, David Thomson, David Stratton, Margaret Pomeranz, Imogen Sara Smith and Farran Smith Nehme. Hollywood biographer Charles Higham and Farrow’s wry look-alike son, John Charles Farrow, also participate.
I’m not a serious Farrow devotee but I respect his assurance and sense of polish and control, and his extra-long takes are Scorsese– or Coppola-level.
I’m as much of a fan of The Big Clock as the next guy. Vincent Price’s performance in His Kind of Woman is one of my all-time camp favorites of the ’40s, and Five Came Back (’39), a crashed-in-the-jungle survival story with Lucille Ball, is a keeper. I’m trying to recall if I saw Farrow’s 1956 remake, Back From Eternity. And the 3-D, John Wayne-starring Hondo is pretty good.
I understand why producer Mike Todd fired Farrow off the direction of Around the World in 80 Days (i.e., Todd wanted a less headstrong director, someone he could push around) but why exactly did Farrow lose the King of Kings gig? The filmmakers couldn’t explore that?
Farrow losing two high-paying 1950s prestige gigs in the space of five years is odd. It alludes to an imperious, uncooperative manner.
Was Farrow’s 1963 heart attack a genetic thing? Was it due to alcohol abuse? Farrow was only 58 when he passed — a relatively early departure for a man who wasn’t overweight.
How many years ago was this doc shot? The answer seems to be “not recently.” Three, four years ago for the most part? More?
The elephant in the room, of course, is the absence of Mia Farrow and Ronan Farrow, and especially Mia.
I gather she didn’t participate due to negative feelings about her philandering, possibly emotionally abusive dad, and Ronan undoubtedly passed out of deference to his mom, but really? Mia refuses to sit for an interview because her Catholic father cheated on her mom with “dozens” of women during the heyday of the ‘40s and ‘50s, and she doesn’t want to endorse or seem blasé about that? In the context of her own checkered sexual history, Mia is hardly in a position to judge or throw stones. Very odd. Sexual indulgence and even perversity is seemingly baked into the Farrow clan’s DNA.
