Month: October 2021

Juggling Boyfriends

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I’m not saying all high-school girls are fickle and flighty, but a lot of them are. Or they were, at least, when I was an awkward, insecure WASP schlemiel.

I’ve mentioned this once or twice before, but in my senior year I had it bad for a luminous Irish blonde named Sally Jo Quinn. Short, slender, magnificent blue eyes, straight blonde hair, smallish feet, slender hands with chewed nails. No dad at home; just her single mom who worked as an administrative something-or-other at the high school. I can’t recall if the parents had divorced or if the father had died or what.

Anyway Sally had several concurrent boyfriends. I was fourth in line, I gradually learned. (Or was I fifth?) The others included a football jock (since deceased), a wealthy man’s son from Ridgefield (dead from drug overdose) and a local cop in his mid to late 20s. I was strictly backup. Scraps, leftovers. For someone already beset with low self-esteem, this situation fit perfectly.

Flash forward to the mid ’80s, when I had a brief thing with an extremely dishy lady who was dealing with an unstable ex. So unstable, in fact, that when I visited her one night he called up and came over and rang the bell (she told me to ignore him) and then started pacing back and forth on the front lawn, calling out to her and talking to himself and generally creating a neighborhood spectacle.

Girls sometimes choose badly, some guys can’t handle rejection, and sometimes you have to put up your dukes.

It did occur to me as this psychodrama was unfolding, of course, that anyone with a looney-tunes ex might be a little screwy themselves, or might be a little dishonest or manipulative or flaky. You are who you go out with.

This ex-boyfriend episode wasn’t enough to put me off (she was beautiful and curvaceous and breathtaking in bed), but it did give me pause. I know that if she’d had two ex-boyfriends knocking on the door I would have said “wow, this is really weird” and “something isn’t right.” And if she’d had three guys pleading for forgiveness and restitution I would have said “okay, she obviously likes guys fighting for her affections” and taken a hike.

Divine Edgar

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Director-writer pally: “What’s interesting is that despite the forehead-slapping quality of Last Night in Soho…what’s interesting is how the whole industry and especially every young exec…they’re all still lined up to work with Edgar Wright.”

HE to director-writer pally: “They don’t care how shitty his films are? Okay, the first two thirds of Baby Driver works, but have you seen Last Night in Soho? Once you get past the concept and the 1966 time-trip design, it’s really awful. Stupid, crude, ham-fisted, tedious, repetitive.”

Director-writer pally: “Edgar is a really nice, engaging, genteel person and every comedy executive, especially in TV and streaming, hold him in messianic esteem. He’s Teflon — even Scott Pilgrim tanking didn’t harm his rep, and is now viewed as some sort of classic. The mantra from his fans is ‘he’s one of us.’

HE to director-writer pally: “Yes, Wright is very likable and personable, very easy to chat with, a good bullshitter. I’ve listened to Edgar in interviews. He talks a good game.

“Unfortunately, his movies (the first two-thirds of Baby Driver aside) are awful to sit through. So things like taste, clever plotting, refinement, dialogue that makes sense, cinematic coherence, directorial finesse…none of that stuff matters to these guys, you’re saying? Because Scott Pilgrim vs. The World s one of the worst films I’ve ever seen IN MY LIFE.”

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Strange Purgatory

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In my book, Frank Perry’s Play It As It Lays (‘72) is easily the most accomplished, mesmerizing and zeitgeist–capturing film he ever made. Hands down, no question. So did Criterion Channel programmers include this dark-heart-of-Hollywood film when they decided to pay tribute to the Perry canon? Of course not.

One significant reason is because this Universal release has apparently never been HD-scanned, and definitely never released to home video. To this day you can’t stream a quality-level 1080p. PIAIL It surfaced on the Sundance channel many years ago, and you can still watch a 480p version on YouTube, but that’s all. So bizarre.

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Boiled Down

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[HE comment on yesterday’s “What The Hell?” piece about West Side Story’s American flag poster]

“West Side Story — the ‘57 musical, the ‘61 Oscar-winner, the forthcoming Steven Spielberg movie — is about conflict between feuding families in a very particular Manhattan neighborhood within a particular 20th Century chapter. It’s not a generic red, white & blue thing or a U.S. of A. thing but a 1950s urban thing writ large.

“The original Eisenhower-era stage musical converted the tribal battle between Romeo and Juliet’s Montagues and Capulets in 16th Century Verona into a resentful white trash vs. Puerto Rican immigrants animosity in New York City’s upper west side slums — a fair and apt analogy.

“Was all of 16th Century Italy consumed by warring families thrusting swords and daggers? No, but the apparent idea behind using the U.S. flag in the poster for Spielberg’s film is to suggest that WSS represents some kind of vast American saga about warring tribes being at each other’s throats, not merely in a poor section of 1950s NYC but right effing now…a tragedy about 21st Century America (reds vs. blues, heartland bumblefucks vs. urban wokesters, define it however you like).

“I’m not at all convinced that the tragic saga of Romeo and Juliet can or should support that kind of broad social metaphor. The flag is a reach — a bridge too far.”

One Dwayne Johnson Question

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Why is it that “The Rock” is so steadfastly opposed to appearing in good films, or even half-decent ones? As far as I can tell he’s never even tried to costar in a quality-level enterprise…not once.

Does Chris Heath’s Vanity Fair profile piece answer this question? Does it even allude to it? Of course not.

Oz Embassy Noyce Dinner in Paris

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Snapped during a glammy dinner in honor of Australia’s Phillip Noyce, the current recipient of a ten-day tribute by the Cinematheque Francaise.

Attendees included Noyce, wife Vuyo Dyasi, daughter Ayanda, dp Svetlana Cvetko plus Jason Clarke, Joel Edgerton and Gillian Bird, Australian Ambassador to France. The Australian embassy is located at 4 Rue Jean Rey, 75015 Paris, France.

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Oswald Trained at Secret CIA Camp?

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This morning the Miami Herald‘s Nora Gamez Torres reported a story passed along almost 40 years ago by Ricardo Morales, a former CIA worker and anti-Castro militant and FBI informant. One of Morales’ sons claimed on Spanish-language radio that his father, a sniper instructor in the early 1960s in secret camps where Cuban exiles and others trained to invade Cuba, “realized in the hours after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas in 1963 that the accused killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, had been one of his sniper trainees.”

Question #1: When and where did this alleged sniper training of Oswald by Morales take place? As Oswald didn’t return from Russia until 6.1.61, it couldn’t have happened before the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961. Question #2: Who was the CIA liason who arranged for Morales to be included in a training program? And again, when and where would this have happened? If the Morales story is true, it suggests that Oswald may have had actual ties with the CIA, and that they almost certainly arranged to give him sniper training for a particular reasons.

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Tendency to Run Long

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Robert Wise‘s Oscar-winning West Side Story (’61) ran 152 minutes. Is there anyone who believes that Steven Spielberg’s forthcoming version will run any less than 160 minutes?

Put another way: If Spielberg’s version runs shorter than Wise’s, I’ll be fucking flabbergasted.

Jordan Ruimy is reporting that a research screening of Ridley Scott‘s House of Gucci ran 165 minutes. Adam McKay‘s Don’t Look Up will run 145 minutes. Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Licorice Pizza will run 128 minutes, per AMC. Guillermo del Toro‘s Nightmare Alley will run 139 minutes.

What The Hell…?

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I understood why Saving Private Ryan began with a closeup of a billowing, wind-flapping, desaturated U.S. flag. But what do the stars and stripes have do with Tony and Maria‘s love story in Steven Spielberg‘s West Side Story? Seriously, what is this?

Has Spielberg shifted the locale to Brooklyn’s Fort Hamilton? Is Tony a U.S. Army recruiter? Do Tony and Maria initially bond over their patriotic love of our country? Will West Side Story begin with the singing of “The Star Spangled Banner”? Will there be a 21-gun salute on the night of the big premiere?

The last time I checked West Side Story was not about the U.S. of A. or any uniquely American issue or theme. It’s a story about tribalism, racism, prejudice, territoriality and the glorious madness of hormonal love.

Arthur Brooke‘s “The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet“, set in Verona, was published in 1562. William Shakespeare‘s English-language version, also set in northern Italy, was written between 1591 and 1595. Until now no one has ever claimed that it’s a particularly American-type story.

Please explain why the red white and blue is mixed up in this…seriously, I’m lost.

The best I can come up with (and I’m just spitballing here) is that Spielberg and the Disney marketers are telling us that the above-mentioned bad stuff (racism, etc.) has a particular resonance with United States culture right now and that the citizenry needs to pay particular attention. We have to “woke” ourselves up to the problem and address it with progressive measures.

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