Day: December 30, 2021

…and looking to the fine marketing people at Columbia for guidance. Thinking it over, kicking it around. I would first and foremost have to sneak in a large bottle of Moet Chandon champagne and at least four or five plastic cups…that’s a given. Right off the top Nicholas and Alexandra is a no-go; ditto Happy Birthday, Wanda June and Richard Brooks‘ Dollars. For me it boils down to either Roman Polanski‘s Macbeth or Peter Bogdanovich‘s The Last Picture Show. [Thanks to Larry “Jerry Garcia” Karaszewski for the screen grab.]

Honest admission: I’ve somehow never seen Joseph Losey‘s The Go-Between.

A sudden surge of Robert Evans nostalgia just hit me, like a ghost tapping me on the shoulder but more like a flutter or passing breeze of some kind…maybe it was Kid Notorious himself.

Evans died a little more than two years ago. I’m almost teary-eyed as we speak, thinking back to those crazy times of the mid to late ’90s when I was his brief and temporary pallie, so to speak.

“I’d rather be remembered than rich.” — Evans in a 1977 interview.

There’s something terribly somber and sobering in the idea of the once-churning Evans dynamo being silent and still, above and beyond the fact of a life having run its course and come to a natural end.

I don’t like finality as a rule. I prefer the idea of fluidity, of a beating pulse and the constant search for action and opportunity and fresh air. I don’t like it when a store closes and is all emptied out and boarded up with “for lease” signs pasted on the windows. Keep it going, sweep the floors, stock the shelves, pay the bills. All things must pass, of course, but not now…later.

The last time Evans and I saw each other was over dinner at the Palm in ’02, sometime around the release of Nanette Burstein and Brett Morgen‘s The Kid Stays in the Picture. Evans covered the meal, but they never brought him a check. I didn’t ask and he didn’t explain. Some kind of gratis deal he had with management — Evans arrives, orders, eats, leaves a generous tip and leaves.

In the published view of director Peter Bogdanovich, Evans “was good Hollywood, not bad Hollywood.”

When Evans broke in as a producer in the mid ’60s “he brought a fresh kind of attitude to the movies,” Bogdanovich says. “He had very good taste and he produced movies of his own that were damn good.

“He was a movie fan too. It’s rare to have executives that really like movies. Not all executives are like that. He was really enthusiastic, and he encouraged talent. I loved Bob. He was friendly and amiable and charming.”

In a 10.28 tribute piece Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman wrote that “you can see why they thought Evans would be a movie star in the late ’50s. Evans was gleamingly handsome, yet he always had a touch of the geek about him. With his toothy grin and beautiful slick coif, he looked like a cross between Tom Cruise and the young Donald Trump, and as his career as an actor fizzled, the role of producer became the perfect fit for him. He was born not to tell a story but to sell it.”

Bogdanovich agrees: “Bob was the last of a breed. He connected to the Hollywood of the ’50s. They made fun of him because he was an actor who became a studio head. But why not? He played the part very well.”

But Gleiberman and Bogdanovich disagree about Evans’ vision of a genetically Italian Godfather.

Read more

Five and 1/3 years ago I was persuaded to buy Eureka Entertainment’s Region 2 Bluray of Robert Aldrich‘s The Flight of the Phoenix (’65).

DVD Beaver’s Gary Tooze wrote that the Eureka Bluray “looks magnificent,” certainly compared to the unexceptional DVD from 13 years ago. “This 1080p looks fabulous — richer colors, far superior contrast and some impressive detail on the film’s many close-ups…our highest recommendation!”

This despite an opinion that I posted on 5.22.16 that Joseph Biroc‘s cinematography for the Aldrich film, while professionally handled as far as it went, never seemed distinctive enough to warrant any special excitement, and certainly didn’t seem to be prime Bluray material.

Quote: “I’ve seen it two or three times on cable, and as best I can recall it just looks sufficient…it’s nothing more than a professionally shot, decently framed desert-locale thing…I certainly don’t remember any mesmerizing visuals.”

And now Criterion wants cinefiles to shell out $31.96 for their own “2K digitally restored” Flight of the Phoenix Bluray? In a pig’s eye.

“‘When Douglas Sirk retired from American filmmaking and returned to Europe at the end of the 1950s, his reputation was that of a director who simply churned out glossy Hollywood weepies. But after a major critical reappraisal, spurred by the critics of Cahiers du Cinema, the German-born filmmaker was reclaimed as an auteur with a varied body of work, an eye for visual stylization, and a sophisticated understanding of Brechtian artifice, not to mention one of cinema’s greatest ironists.’

“So read a portion of a Film Society of Lincoln Center announcement about “Imitations of Life: The Films of Douglas Sirk” (1.23.15 thru 1.6.16), a comprehensive retrospective that “tracks Sirk’s artistry from his early German films through to his early Hollywood forays into multiple genres and on to the now-canonical works of his late career.”

“Respectful Sirk Takedown,” posted on 2.22.10: “The German-born Douglas Sirk has long been considered a world-class, pantheon-level filmmaker. That’s because the film dweebs have been telling us for years that the dreadfully banal soap-opera acting, grandiose emotionalism and conservative suburban milieus in his films are all of an operatic pitch-perfect piece and are meant as ironic social criticism. (Or something like that.)

“The dweebs are playing an old snob game. They’re basically saying that you have to be a serious cineaste to recognize Sirk’s genius, and that if you don’t recognize it then you need to think things through because you’re just not as perceptive as you need to be.

There’s no winning against this mindset, which is somewhere between a schoolyard bully move and an intellectual con. The dweebs (and I’m talking about a very small and cloistered group of big-city critics) have put one over on us. And I’m suggesting, due respect, that the time has come to push back on Sirk and to consider him once again as the Guiding Light-level director that some (myself included) believe that he always was.

Sirk was mostly dismissed by critics of the ’50s and early ’60s for making films that were no more and no less than what they seemed to be — i.e., emotionally dreary, visually lush melodramas about repressed women suffering greatly through crises of the heart as they struggled to maintain tidy, ultra-proper appearances.

In his praise of Written on the Wind, Roger Ebert wrote that “to appreciate [this film] probably takes more sophistication than to understand one of Ingmar Bergman‘s masterpieces, because Bergman’s themes are visible and underlined, while with Sirk the style conceals the message.”

Aaaah, the old concealment game! John Ford used to do this also, but you can watch Ford’s films, or at least savor what’s good about them (despite the Irish sentimentality). If Ebert’s comment isn’t Orwellian film-dweeb speak, I don’t know what would be.

Criterion’s Written on the Wind Bluray pops on 2.1.22.

Almost all big-time gangsters go down in flames sooner or later — imprisoned, expelled from the U.S., blown away like Tony Montana or Tony Soprano, found stuffed inside a garbage can.

Gangsters rarely live to be old and gray-haired and surrounded by grandchildren. Okay, Vito Corleone did but that was fictional. Meyer Lansky made it to age 80 (cancer took him out) but he only had $57K in the bank at the end. Pablo Escobar was shot to death in the end, but he lasted as a kingpin for 17, 18 years — an exception to the rule.

If I was running Gangster Financial Services, my basic pitch would be this: “Sooner or later you’re going to have to lam it. You need to face the fact that you’re probably looking at five or six years at the top, perhaps as many as seven or eight, nine or ten at the outside. But sooner or later the law will indict you or rivals will have you killed.

“Smart gangsters understand that they need to start planning their escape early on. They need to start putting money away and building low-key homes in Vietnam or Eastern Europe or Belize or Paris or Rome and having false passports and identity cards made and arrangements with good plastic surgeons, so when it’s time to go on the run, they do so on their own terms, and in relative comfort.

“We at Gangster Financial Services understand the game and how it works. Let us help you and your family plan for the inevitable, while you still can and before it’s too late. Oh, and by the way? No private zoos while you’re flush and at the top. Only idiots have Bengal Tigers and giraffes living on their property.”

In a 12.29 scold piece, HuffPost’s Candice Frederick has described Licorice Pizza and Red Rocket as two of 2021’s “most lauded comedies.”

Rocket has been “lauded,” all right, but there isn’t a single solitary moment that qualifies as even faintly amusing, let alone comedic. The adjectives that correctly apply to Sean Baker’s film are (a) skanky, (b) icky, (c) bottom of the barrel and (d) appalling. It doesn’t make you laugh — it makes you want to take a shower.

Licorice Pizza is certainly an agreeable ‘70s hang as far as it goes, and it occasionally amuses in a vague sort of way, but “comedic” it’s not. At best it’s an in-and-outer…a dry attitude meanderer…even the Jon Peters waterbed sequence is somehow spotty and never quite lands.