If I was looking to threaten Tom Cruise with a typed-out note, I wouldn’t have typed it the way it appears in Eyes Wide Shut. My note would have said “stop poking into matters which are not your concern. Don’t mistake gentility and polite phrasings as an indication of temperance or a lack of resolve on our part. Back off immediately or your life will become a raging sea. From this point we will communicate with actions, not words. Trust us, you don’t want to be the recipient of anything further.”
The other night I happened to re-watch this famous scene from Albert Brooks‘ Lost in America. To me it represents the summit of what HE has been hailing for years — the art of no-laugh funny. Anxious vibe, character-driven, but never more than darkly, oddly amusing.
The only conventional laugh line comes when casino manager Gary Marshall takes offense when Brooks alludes to “all the schmucks who come to Las Vegas to see Wayne Newton,” etc.
Brooks and Marshall are treating each other correctly and amiably as far as it goes, but there’s a fascinating tension between the latter, a smart, perceptive, no-nonsense type, and Brooks’ David Howard, a 30something advertising guy who’s recently persuaded his wife (Julie Hagerty) to join him in a drop-out adventure in which they’d live out of their mobile home and become nomads. Except Hagerty has blown their nest egg at roulette, and Brooks is thisclose to melting down, etc.
Why have I posted this? Because Marshall pronounces “Santa Claus” as “Santy Claus”, and I’m wondering where that pronunciation comes from. Maybe nowhere. Perhaps Marshall, a once-powerful signature helmer of mainstream studio relationship comedies, was the first, last and only guy who said “Santy Claus.” He was born in the mid 1930s to an Italian dad and a German, English and Scottish mother. It’s presumably an immigrant-class ethnic thing — no relatively well-off, college-educated, middle-class person has ever said “Santy” Claus. I’m just asking.
Every parent the world over has had this conversation with their kid. This one happened 30 years ago. The topic was a rabbit that Jett (now 33 and 1/2) and Dylan (32) had been chasing around the large front yard of our Cape Cod rental, and had taken refuge in some bushes and shrubbery. Jett was nearly 3 and 1/2; Dylan was three months shy of his second birthday.
Earnest apologies for failing to post a few words of tribute to Oscar-winning Italian helmer Lina Wertmuller, who passed two days ago at age 91. My summary is no different than anyone else’a. I was around for her mid ’70s heyday and I channelled the same things — a strong tide lifts all boats. As we speak I can’t summon a single original Wertmuller thought. I’m just another fanboy.
Wertmuller’s first two Giancarlo Giannini films in the ’70s — The Seduction of Mimi (’72) and Love and Anarchy (’73) — were warm-ups for her historic one-two punch — Swept Away by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August (’74) and especially her crowning achievement, Seven Beauties (’75). It landed Wertmuller a Best Director Oscar nom. And right after that her hot streak was more or less over, never to return. But at least she had one.
A little more than two years ago (’19) Wertmuller was honored with a career tribute Oscar.
Three Wertmuller signatures that always come to mind — (a) the “Oh Yeah” newsreel montage at the beginning of Seven Beauties (wonderful, pure joy), (b) that third-act moment in Swept Away when a purring Mariangela Melato asks the Marxist Giannini to “sodomize me” and Giannini doesn’t know what that means, and (c) those white-framed glasses.
My memories of inflation in the ’70s and ’80s aren’t that vivid for some reason, but I remember Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland — a wonderfully scenic and bucolic little village nestled amid the Bernese Alps. I was there with the boys in 2012 and again in ’13, and man, the prices were sadistic. Every little purchase stung, buying groceries at the local coop was borderline traumatic, and don’t ask about the price of lift and local rail tickets.
This is what it’s like in the U.S. right now — prices have soared and there’s no such thing as a sizable purchase that doesn’t sprout a gray hair. Two months ago The Consumer Price Index rose 6.2% October ’20, its biggest increase in decades. The November increase was something like 6.7%. It hasn’t been this bad since Carter–earlyReagan. We’re all tourists in Switzerland.
In an interactive N.Y. Times Sunday Magazine piece, critic A.O. Scott celebrates 11 actors whom he believes delivered the creme de la creme of 2021 screen performances. Spencer‘s Kristen Stewart, Passing‘s Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga, King Richard‘s Will Smith, The Tragedy of Macbeth‘s Denzel Washington, Drive My Car‘s Hidetoshi Nishijima, et. al.
One presumes that if one of Scott’s favorites somehow couldn’t make himself or herself available for a special N.Y. Times photo session with Ruven Afanador, they were replaced by another favorite. So let’s be liberal and hypothesize that the two finest female performances of the year — Penelope Cruz as a woman with child in Pedro Almodovar‘s Parallel Mothers and RenateReinsve as a young woman of solitude in Joachim Trier‘s TheWorstPersonintheWorld — were on Scott’s initial list but couldn’t fit Afanador into their schedule.
