Month: October 2021

It sounds as if Voir, a forthcoming Netflix doc from the hearts and minds of David Fincher and David Prior, is made for film monks…a spiritual current thing for hardcores. I’m obviously speculating but they’re forcing me to fill in the blanks. “A collection of visual essays [about] the love of cinema” sounds kinda vague.

By the same token I could point to a random grab bag of 10 or 20 essays that I’ve written on Hollywood Elsewhere over the past 17 years and call them “a collection of impressionistic essays about the love of cinema”, and they would be.

I could write, produce and star in a short Netflix documentary about Roger Thornhill‘s R-O-T matchbook in North by Northwest — who thought it up, who made the prop — and how the R-O-T monogram becomes a hugely important plot element in Act Three. I would honestly love to watch, say, a 20-minute doc about that.

“Voir” is French for “see,” which obviously alludes to special sight. Things in a film that are best seen or appreciated in an educated-film-buff, taking-it-all-in sort of way…seen by way of particular perception or insight.

Great, but my tongue doesn’t like saying “voir.” Noir, yes — voir, no. I’m saying it over and over, and my mouth keeps saying “leave me alone.”

I’m thinking of a favorite Stanley Kubrick quote: “The truth of a thing is in the feel of it, not the think of it.” In line with that, if I’m being offered a film buff doc with a French title, I’d probably prefer Ressentir (feel, experience, be affected by) or Toucher (touch, affect, feel, hit, receive, contact) or even Lumiere.

Drew McWeeny (whose former podcast buddy Scott Weinberg did a lot to hurt me with two or three film festivals during the summer of ’18, and who, I feel, is not only a fiendish, foam-at-the-mouth personality but has accumulated the most rancid karma imaginable in this journalistic sphere) has revealed that he’s one of the costars (or co-authors) of Voir, and that he’ll be at next month’s AFIFest screening.

McWeeney: “Voir [is the spelling ALL-CAPS or CAPS optional?] is, simply put, the thing I have been working on for the last few years and the project I am most excited about right now. It is a streaming series for Netflix that is hopefully not like any other show about movies that you’ve seen.

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I’m sick of watching teasers, trailers, endless come-ons and sales pitches for the endlessly delayed fucking Peter Jackson Let It Be doc (which is now a six-hour thing debuting between 11.25 and 11.27 on Disney +) and the Let It Be super-deluxe 5 CD bullshit box set (debuting on 10.15). Sick of it!

Seriously, I feel like I’ve watched it already. Perhaps I have watched it already. I’ve been slipping in and out of consciousness so who knows?

If only there could be a nice, in-depth, two-hour doc about the making of Revolver or Abbey Road or Sgt. Pepper or Rubber Soul…any of those would be glorious and fascinating. But I’ve almost gotten to the point of hating all this Let It Be shit.

HE to Jackson: How many years have you been working on this thing? At least a decade, it feels like. I realize it’s only been three or four years in actuality.

Right after emerging from a ten-minute flight aboard the Blue Origin capsule, 90 year-old Bill Shatner was clearly moved. He had seen the earth from God’s perspective, and experienced, he said, perhaps the most profound moment of his life.

Thought #1: “We say, ‘Oh that’s blue sky.’ And then suddenly you shoot through it and all of a sudden you’re looking into blackness.” Thought #2: “Everyone needs to have the philosophical understanding of what we’re doing to Earth.”

Anyway, the former Captain Kirk — silver-haired, squinty-eyed, hale and hearty and a bit stiff — tried to share a few reflective, meditative thoughts with Amazon honcho Jeff Bezos. But the asshats behind them were making so much noise screaming and popping champagne corks that Bezos was torn — he wanted to hear Shatner’s thoughts but on the other hand there was the cool spray of Dom Perignon and “whooaa-whoo-whoo!” behind him. Yeah!

The asshats were basically celebrating themselves — “We did this! We rose above the earth because Jeff chose us but also because we were good enough to be chosen!” But Shatner had deeper, humbler things on his mind. Think of the Dave Bowman star child looking down upon our blue planet at the end of 2001 A Space Odyssey…that’s Shatner.

Most of us, I suspect, feel nothing but derision and contempt for the others. Imagine emerging from your first visit to the Sistine Chapel and high-fiving your homies and going “whoo-hooo…we saw the Michalengelo!”

Let’s suppose that Hollywood Elsewhere manages to create, say, 500 glossy white matchbooks with the famous R-O-T monogram…exact duplicates of Cary Grant’s North by Northwest matchbook. And better yet, with a handwritten note inside each one that says “they’re on to you — I’m in your room.” If I did this, how much could I charge? $7.50 plus postage? $10?

I’m figuring once it gets around that the Academy Museum is thinking about posthumously indicting Alfred Hitchcock, Ernest Lehman and Cary Grant for attempting a kind of cultural genocide against the Lakota nation, anti-wokesters will want to signal their pro-North by Northwest sympathies by owning a few R-O-T matchbooks. An Us-vs.-Them, band-of-brothers thing.

Extra-perverse idea: Perhaps I could persuade the museum to sell them in their gift store?

Charles Bramesco’s 10.11 Guardian review:

Streeting on 11.30 from KL Studio Classics, Howard Hughes and Josef von Sternberg‘s Jet Pilot has come to Bluray, but I’m not sure anyone should care.

For one thing this Ninotchka-like adventure drama allegedly smells. You have to presume that any film that took seven and a half years between the start of principal photography and the release date has to be problematic.

Jet Pilot allegedly began filming in ’49, finished sometime in ’53 and didn’t open until 10.4.57.

Born on 5.26.07, John Wayne was 42 when shooting began, around 46 when it ended, and 50 when Hughes opened it. Costar Janet Leigh began the process at age 22, and was pushing 30 when it premiered.

HE nonetheless respects Team Kino for including two versions — the original boxy (1.37:1) and a widescreener (1.85:1). Then again why would anyone want to watch anything but the boxy?

Not 195 minutes but 160 — two hours and 40 minutes. According to Wikipedia, at least.

SPOILER: With the exception of Raymond Ablack‘s “Nate”, the smiling, tender-hearted single dad whom Margaret Qualley refuses to sleep with, the male characters in Molly Smith Metzler and Stephanie Lamb‘s Maid (Netflix, now streaming) are bad eggs — abusers, drunks, emotionally brusque, etc.

And yet the series encouraged me to think that perhaps Billy Burke‘s “Hank”, Alex’s shaggy-bearded dad who was mean and boozy when she was small, might prove an exception.

Alex loathes Hank and rebuffs his offers of assistance all through the series, and yet he’s now a staunch AA devotee, and a sponsor of Nick Robinson‘s “Sean”, the wobbly ex-boyfriend and father of Rylea Nevaeh Whittet‘s “Maddy”, whom Alex is raising as a single mom.

In the final episode Alex mans up and asks Hank for help. She needs him to submit custody–hearing testimony about Sean’s abusive treatment of her, Hank having observed an ugly episode first-hand.

This is Hank’s redemption moment, you’re thinking. He knows all about Sean’s drinking problem, and what mean drunks can be like (having been one himself and presumably having counselled other abusers under the AA aegis)…it all fits. Hank will become a stand-up fellow, he’ll save Alex from Sean’s hair-trigger temperament and so on.

And then the moment finally comes and she asks him to protect her, and Hank shrugs and says “I can’t do that.”

Worse, at the very end Alex and Sean’s legal dispute miraculously evaporates when Sean decides not to contest. Because he’s suddenly realized that his alcohol problem will be harmful to Maddy.

He basically flips, in other words, like Meryl Streep‘s “Joanna” character in Kramer vs. Kramer, when she decided at the very last second that she didn’t want to interfere with the loving relationship between Dustin Hoffman and little Justin Henry.

We’re happy, of course, that Alex and Maddy have survived the Sean threat and escaped to Missoula, Montana. And it’s great that Alex wins a scholarship to attend college there. But the way the series throws Hank under the bus is curious and disappointing.

From CNN.com op-ed, dated 10.10.21, by Noah Berlatsky: “When Jonathan Kent, the new Superman, comes out as bisexual in next month’s issue of ‘Superman: Son of Kal-El,’ he won’t be the first queer superhero. But he’ll be one of the most visible.

“As such, Jonathan defies stereotypes about sexuality and masculinity that have shaped the character and the superhero genre for generations.

“In the new storyline — prompted by an aging Clark Kent passing the super-baton to his son — Superman shares a kiss with his friend and ally Jay Nakamura, a computer hacker and activist who admires Superman’s mom, journalist Lois Lane.

“A bisexual Superman is an important step for LGBTQ representation. It’s also a sign of how recognizing that there are options other than heterosexuality can change superhero preconceptions about goodness, masculinity and empowerment.”

Dean Cain on Fox & Friends this morning: “They said it’s a bold new direction, I say they’re bandwagoning. Robin just came out as bi — who’s really shocked about that one? The new Captain America is gay. My daughter in [The CW series] Supergirl, where I played the father, was gay. So I don’t think it’s bold or brave or some crazy new direction. If they had done this 20 years ago, perhaps that would be bold or brave.

“Brave would be having him fighting for the rights of gay people in Iran where they’ll throw you off a building for the offense of being gay,. They’re talking about having him fight climate change and the deportation of refugees, and he’s dating a hacktivist — whatever a hactivist is. Why don’t they have him fight the injustices that created the refugees whose deportation he’s protesting? That would be brave, I’d read that. Or fighting for the rights of women to attend school and have the ability to work and live and boys not to be raped by men under the new warm and fuzzy Taliban — that would be brave.

“There’s real evil in this world today, real corruption and government overreach, plenty of things to fight against. Human trafficking — real and actual slavery going on. It’d be great to tackle those issues.”

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One of my favorite scenes in Olivier Assayas‘ Personal Shopper (’16) is when Kristen Stewart, aboard the Paris-to-London chunnel train, begins to receive vaguely creepy text messages from an unknown party. We’re allowed to consider the possibility that Stewart may be texting with her dead brother — a wonderful thought while it lasts.

The only thing I disliked about this first-rate ghost story, in fact, was Assayas insisting near the end that the mysterious texter was an actual person…no! Personal Shopper was 10 or 15 times more haunting with the brother.

I haven’t seen Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett‘s Scream, but obviously it’s a shameless button-pusher. I can smell it. Sight unseen this 1.14.22 Paramount release isn’t fit to scrape the mud off Stewart’s boots.

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We all understand that Ridley Scott‘s The Last Duel (20th Century, 10.15) is a medieval #MeToo yarn about conflicting recollections of a brutal rape.

Two depictions are shown, one from the perspective of the victim, Jodie Comer‘s Marguerite de Carrouges, and a second from the perspective of the rogue perpetrator, Adam Driver‘s Jacques Le Gris. A third perspective from Marguerite’s husband, Matt Damon‘s Jean de Carrouges, is recited but not visualized.

A pair of 20th Century films offered likely inspiration with similar tales of violation. First and foremost was Akira Kurosawa‘s Rashomon (’50), which focused on four differing versions of the rape of a wife and the murder of her samurai husband. Decidedly inferior was Martin Ritt‘s The Outrage (’64), a Rashomon remake that costarred Paul Newman, Laurence Harvey, Claire Bloom, Edward G. Robinson and William Shatner.

Nobody wants to think about The Outrage now because (a) it has a mediocre reputation (I haven’t seen it in decades, and even that viewing was one too many), (b) it briefly tarnished Rashomon and (c) Newman played a heavily made-up Mexican with a broad Pancho Villa accent…a racist felony that probably requires posthumous cancellation for Ritt and Newman both and a permanent ghost status from the Academy Museum.

Still these films were forerunners of The Last Duel and perhaps warrant a looksee, etc.

There’s a decent-looking Rashomon Bluray from Criterion; The Outrage is only available as a 480p Amazon streamer.

“Cancel culture” is as real as the nose on your face, and speaking of noses mine is bruised and swollen after being slugged repeatedly by the woke terror brigade (“We need safe spaces”) over the last two or three years. I’m saying this not as a grotesque rightie but a sensible left-center moderate and a respectful, longtime fan of John Ladarola‘s “Damage Report” with The Young Turks. Ladarola needs to (a) bite his tongue and (b) apologize to all concerned.