Month: January 2022

From Jeff Giles‘ “When Neon Owned the Night — glitz, grit and the vintage glow of urban America,” posted on 5.10.19:

“Before evolution hit a snag, and we reverted to slouching and staring at our phones, human beings walked with their eyes up, looking at things. In the countryside, people contemplated church steeples, maple trees, clouds. In cities, they gaped at neon — and it was everything.

“In 1898, the Scottish chemist William Ramsay was collaborating with an English colleague, Morris Travers, when he discovered an inert gas, naming it ‘neon’ after the Greek word for ‘new.’ He went on to win a Nobel Prize for his work, though it did not occur to him to use his discovery to sell theater tickets or beer.

“It was the French inventor Georges Claude who sensed a new industry in the offing. Mr. Claude unveiled a neon light at the Paris Motor Show in December 1910, and went on to create all manner of signs for clients.

“By the 1930s, New York was ablaze with color, and Times Square was an enormous flame toward which countless moths fluttered.

“‘Visitors, too, arrive in New York to witness the nightly Vesuvius-like eruption of light,’ Richard F. Shepard wrote in the N.Y. Times in 1987. ‘They may patronize the theaters, movie houses, restaurants and bars, or they may not, being content merely to walk between 42nd and 47th Streets taking in the brilliant show only a tilt of the head above them.'”

The below was shot by N.Y. Times photographer Sam Falk and published 12.11.48:

This bare-bones “Drive My Car” track, recorded on 10.13.65, was just posted on YouTube (1.14.22). McCartney’s bass track is heaven.

Due respect but the Toronto Film Critics Association (and I do mean this respectfully) have very little sense of their own identity or vision, at least seemingly…they’re just joiners, followers, Kool-Aid drinkers…”we’re on board too!…please include us!” Imagine at this stage of the game just toppling over like a bowling pin for Drive My Car after all the other elite snooties have done the same…imagine!

Four days ago I declared that Kristen Stewart‘s Best Actress campaign is all but finished after being excluded from the 2022 SAG Award nominations. A couple of hours later I asked “What Took KStew Down?”

The latest thing, suggested by Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman, is that KStew is now an underdog, and may slip into Best Actress contention on the basis of people feeling sorry for her.

I’ve been a KStew admirer for a good 15 years, give or take. Her greatest, most culturally resonant performance is in Personal Shopper. (Olivier Asssyas!) But right now Stewart is almost certainly toast as a Best Actress Oscar nominee. “I don’t give a shit” did that, I suspect. Plus (I hadn’t considered this at first) there may be a hint of homophobia out there (not very much but a little bit).

The bottom line is that Spencer is a fairly ridiculous film. That AWFUL moment when Diana stumbles into the cafe and says “excuse me but I have to get somewhere….where am I?” Even as a metaphor for something or other, eating the sauce-covered pearl at the dinner table was appalling, and that drop-in-the-bucket Sally Hawkins moment (“By the way, speaking as a servant I love you”) was ghastly. Plus Stewart over-whispered her dialogue. Plus…I can’t continue.

Spencer simply isn’t likable or enjoyable (except during the final music sequence). It was AGONY to sit through. I wanted to throw fruit at the screen. Worse, I was surrounded by an adoring, cheering Telluride audience inside the Galaxy theatre. Torture.

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I’m not cheering the deaths of tens of thousands of unvaccinated idiots who’ve willfully put themselves in harm’s way. At the same time I can’t honestly say that I’m sorry they’ve gone to heaven (or possibly, if God was a judgmental Old Testament hard-ass, to hell). No offense but I regard these no-longer-with-us folks as dead weeds. The grassy lawn is better for their absence. They were too dumb to survive, and nature has had its way.

For those who may not have read yesterday’s comment thread for “Four Moments When Culture Turned”:

The things that happened in this country between late 1963 (or very early ‘64) and late ‘68 constituted a massive cultural transformation.

Within a mere five years this country experienced (a) a complete altering of traditional male thinking, behavior and appearance (long hair, more inward-looking, a lessening or diluting of traditionally aggressive attitudes**) + (b) increasingly unmodified or unbridled sexual behavior & liberation + (c) a significant trend toward the abandonment of puerile top-40 music and the introduction of poetic, socially reflective rock music lyrics with complex, avant-garde musicianship + (d) the all-but-total collapse of traditional religious authority as pot, mescaline, LSD & transcendental meditation redefined American spiritual life + (e) anti-Vietnam War consciousness and massive street demonstrations + (f) notions of convulsive political revolution or at least primal changes in terms of the shattering of political norms.

Before 11.22.63 this country was basically still thinking and behaving according to the ethos & norms of the relatively sedate 1950s — but soon after the country all but completely went off the cliff on every front, and everything exploding within this comparatively brief chapter, or by the fall of ‘68.

Not that the convulsions didn’t continue into the early to mid ‘70s, but those five years, glorious and turbulent and fundamentally transformative as they were, are what ushered in Richard Nixon, the “Southern strategy”, lawnorder and the whole cultural counter-reaction. Joe Sixpack and Susie Homemaker were scared shitless.

Nothing that happened in the ‘70s, ‘80s or ‘90s was as jolting or mind-blowing or primal (“Something’s happening’ here, what it is ain’t exactly clear”) as what happened during those 60 months. Which isn’t a long time in the grand scheme of things.

** The complete altering of female behavior happened a lot more in the ‘70s and beyond.

Two years ago I posted a nice monochrome snap of a Times Square wraparound billboard for Robert Siodmak and Mark Hellinger‘s The Killers (’46). The odd thing was that The Killers, which opened in late August, wasn’t showing at the Mayfair but at the legendary Winter Garden theatre. United Artists had briefly turned the decades-old venue into a movie palace between ’45 and ’46.

Last night I happened upon a somewhat blurry if richly colored snap of the same Mayfair Killers billboard along with a shot of the RKO Palace marquee, which had recently opened Orson Welles‘ The Stranger, a Nazi-hunting drama that costarred Welles, Edward G. Robinson and Loretta Young. It opened on 7.11.46.

Decent color snaps of 40s-era Times Square marquees are very hard to come by.

For years and years Variety‘s Steven Gaydos was an HE friendo, but over the last two or three he’s become…well, a tad judgmental. Okay, more than a tad. Okay, he’s become a woke scold. Which goes hand in hand with being a politically adaptable fellow working for a woke trade, and knowing which way the winds are blowing and who’s buttering which side of his bread, etc.

All to say that Gaydos recently tweeted about “sharing notes” with “recent” viewers of The Power of the Dog, “most of them young,” and that these young ‘uns, like Gaydos, feel that Jane Campion‘s 1920s cattle-ranch saga is “an upper.”

Repeating: Some youngish weirdos are telling Gaydos that the most melancholy gay western of the 21st Century and easily the draggiest downer of the 2021 Best Picture race…they’re saying it put a smile on their faces and made them giggle and skip down the sidewalk like schoolkids….whee!

We all understand that Dog is brilliantly composed in its own deliberate, unhurried fashion, but that’s not what Gaydos is talking about. He’s saying that Campion’s screenplay, which is based on Thomas Savage’s 1967 novel, made his little Millennial pallies feel good.

They were turned on, in other words, by the story of a pretty young gay guy named Peter Gordon (Kodi Smith McPhee) who gradually gets around to murdering Phil Burbank (Benedict Cumberbatch), an ugly, stinky, foul-tempered closet case. Phil has made life miserable for Peter’s mom, Rose (Kirsten Dunst), an alcoholic who’s come into unfortunate contact with Phil due to having married his chubby, ginger-haired brother, George (Jesse Plemons). And so Peter does what he feels he needs to do, for his mom’s sake.

And so that’s the thing — good young gay guy (delicate, soft-spoken, makes tiny paper flowers) kills the bad older gay guy by poisoning him with anthrax. And Gaydos’ young chums are going “whoo-whoo!…Phil is fucking dead, all right! Hey, let’s get on Facebook or Twitter and tell that Variety guy how cool we think this is!!”

There’s no question that Phil Burbank is a mean, snarly asshole, and that his death is, at the end of the day, no great loss to the planet earth, but the world is full of miserable people in denial about something or other (including their sexuality), and it’s not as if Phil had murdered anyone or tortured a dog to death or molested a child. He’s just a cruel dickhead who’s making his brother’s new wife very unhappy and turning her into a drunkard. Does he deserve to die for this? Campion clearly thinks he does, and Gaydos’ young pally-wallies are overjoyed by his killing.

What movie-villain deaths turned you on the most?

I’m sorry about the death of Diva helmer Jean-Jacques_Beineix, who was 75. And I can’t quite believe it opened in France 41 years ago (March ’81) and in the States 13 months later. Rave reviews led to Diva becoming the hottest big-city film anywhere (did it even play in rural areas?). I remember with absolute clarity that it was essential to see Diva as soon as possible after it caught on. Color, design, black humor, wonderful Parisian atmosphere. One of the images that has lingered over the decades is the stressed interior of the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord (37 bis, boulevard de la Chappelle, 18th arrondissement, near Gare du Nord).

If you wanted to be casual and indifferent you could say Tiffany Haddish likes to party — that’s one way of looking at it. The other way, of course, is that she has an alcohol problem. She was popped this morning in Peachtree City, an Atlanta suburb, for DUI (asleep at the wheel). Three years ago she was apparently drunk during a performance in Miami and forgetting her own jokes.

I’ve been there. It’s not the end of the world. It’s just a matter of recognizing that you’re a slave to booze and then walking away from it, if you’re able to do that. I did one or two AA meetings, couldn’t take the religious aspects and just cold-turkeyed all on my own. There’s nothin’ to it but to do it. Ya gotta have heart.