Month: January 2022

“Where is the special prosecutor making life a living hell for Bannon, Miller, Gosart, Boebert, Jordan, McCarthy and Trump? Where is the President who is protecting and defending the Constitution of the United States…where is the President who knows they are not about to change their minds because you govern well? Where is the president who will fire his wooden statue we call Merrick Garland? Where is the attorney general giving not a boilerplate speech but indictments? Where is the President who is not sleepwalking and hiding behind naive cliches about bipartisanship when the other side is trying to kill all of us?”

Real leadership from @POTUS in his 1/6 anniversary speech at this hour would be to call on Congress to pass the bill invoking the Insurrection provisions of the 14th Amendment to ban Trump, Gosar, Brooks, Boebert, Cruz and the other traitors from ever again holding public office. pic.twitter.com/xIt17Ony3D

— Keith Olbermann (@KeithOlbermann) January 6, 2022

For a solid 11 years or so Sidney Poitier was hugely iconic, and from his own standpoint as a man of color in a socially burdensome way. But he carried that weight and then some…carried it like a man of supreme confidence…a man of spirit and solemnity and immaculate serenity, or at least so it seemed to millions who watched and absorbed and reflected upon the meaning and metaphor of it all.

Vibe- and substance-wise, Poitier projected something extra-special and in some ways radiant — the aura of a fine, noble superstar of the late ‘50s and especially the ‘60s (primarily between The Defiant Ones and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner)…possessed by refinement, dignity and a certain immaculate centered-ness, fortified by good looks and a beautiful Bahamian speaking voice, supplanted with occasional flashes of humor and always with a constant hum of self-ownership, steady and resolute.

With the advent of political militancy and Black power in the late ‘60s Poitier came to be regarded in some quarters as a bit too sedate and stolid, too much of an “approved by the white establishment” Black man. All peak phases and periods of vitality come to an end, of course — a natural and inevitable thing — but Poitier’s cultural imprint and representational metaphor was massive and even Collossus-like during the late Eisenhower, Kennedy and LBJ eras.

He couldn’t have figured in the realm of Spike Lee and Do The Right Thing, his time of peak potency having passed two decades earlier, but in his own time and era he was Sidney effing Poitier, and that importance and resonance can never be diminished or forgotten.

In the same way that Aldous Huxley’s death on 11.22.63 was all but ignored, the timing of the passing of respected film critic Mike Wilmington, concurrent with the death of Peter Bogdanovich and immediately followed by the loss of the great Sidney Poitier, is somewhat similar. But not if I can help it.

I’m very sorry about the loss of one of the bright and burning fellows of my profession…a wordsmith who really cared.

I regarded Mike as a favored acquaintance and a good egg, although our rapport had diminished during the 20teens due to his Parkinson’s illness and increasingly raspy voice. A major critic for the Chicago Tribune and, prior to that, the L.A. Times, Mike’s film passion was ardent and well-fueled. We hung out during my one and only visit to Chicago in 2011 or thereabouts, and I remember Mike’s vivid praise for an immortal Bob Dylan line — “the ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face.“

From recent David Remnick New Yorker piece…

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Posted on 8.10.15: As mentioned I caught two Peter Bogdanovich movies last night — one a nimble, old-fashioned Bogdanovich-directed screwball comedy and the other a documentary that doesn’t feel well-ordered or smooth enough.

But despite its faults, the doc — One Day Since Yesterday: Peter Bogdanovich and the Lost American Film — is far more affecting. Because it’s a story about promise, loss and tragedy, and particularly how life can sometimes knock your lights out at the drop of a hat. And the way it’s been made doesn’t get in the way of that.

(l. to.r) They All Laughed costars John Ritter, Dorothy Stratten, director Peter Bogdanovich during filming in the spring of 1980.

In his late ’60s-to-early ’70s directing heyday (Targets, Directed by John Ford, The Last Picture Show, What’s Up Doc, Paper Moon), Bogdanovich had the world at his feet. Plus a cocky swagger thing going on. Every time you saw him on TV (he visited the Dick Cavett Show two or three times if not more) Bogdanovich always seemed dryly amused, a bit smirky…the gifted bon vivant.

But since the tragedy of They All Laughed (’81) and more particularly the gruesome murder of poor Dorothy Stratten, the film’s 20 year-old costar for whom Bogdanovich had fallen head over heels, followed by his financially disastrous decision to buy They All Laughed from an unenthusiastic 20th Century Fox in order to save it from being shelved, some essential spark began to slowly drain out of him. Or so it seemed.

Bogdanovich essentially risked all to validate They All Laughed because he needed as much of the world as possible to know what an inspired choice he’d made in hiring Stratten and how good she could be. He did this as a tribute to her memory and what they had together. Understandable but unwise. Bogdanovich admits this in the doc.

Bogdanovich rebounded with Mask (’85), of course, but then he got into a major fight with Universal over their decision to not use some Bruce Springsteen songs, which led to Bogdanovich filing a $19 million lawsuit against the studio. In so doing he fortified a rep as an imperious guy who wouldn’t collaborate and could almost be counted on to be a pain in the ass.

Bogdanovich has kept his hand in over the last 25 years with the passable-to-underwhelming Texasville, Noises Off, The Thing Called Love and The Cat’s Meow (among other films), with his Sopranos supporting role as a fellow New Jersey psychiatrist and paternal pal of Dr. Jennifer Melfi’s, a respected four-hour Tom Petty doc (’07) and more recently with She’s Funny That Way (which opens on 8.21), but he hasn’t really hasn’t had “the touch” (or what feels like the touch to me and some others) for nearly 35 years now.

It’s a hard thing to acknowledge but sadly true. Andrew Sarris used to say that artists have just so much psychic essence, and when the bottle is empty there’s nothing they can do about it and except recycle and reshuffle and hope for the best.

I know that it seems as if They All Laughed was the last real high point as well as the beginning of a big downturn. I also know that since the ’90s Bogdanovich has more and more come to resemble a droopy basset hound in dark-framed glasses — an artist eclipsed by grief, haunted, all tapped out. Let’s not even get into his decision to begin a discreet paternal relationship with Dorothy’s younger sister, Louise, when she was 14, and then marry her in ’88 when she was 20 and he was 49. Don’t go there. Just leave it alone. They divorced in ’01.

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If you really love the great movies (stunners, spirit-shakers, heart-melters, grand-slammers), it naturally follows that mediocre or flat-out bad movies (like The Matrix: Resurrections) are going to inspire dislike, disdain and in some cases revulsion. If you’re a true cinema believer, that is.

Put differently, if you’re even a little bit serious about the transportational power of movies, you can’t watch a piece of shit and shrug your shoulders. Which isn’t to say there aren’t dozens of shoulder-shruggers out there. Nothing lights their fire, and nothing darkens their brow. They’re easy, adaptable…Swiss-style critics.

There are two defining traits of a Rotten Tomatoes shoulder-shrugger. One is “milquetoast — the kind of critic whose blood runs mild and in whose mouth butter would never melt.” The other is “politician — the kind of critic who always raises a damp finger to the wind before venturing an opinion.” Back in the early ’90s there was a Sony production executive who was described by a certain director-writer I knew as “a man with your opinions.”

This is a reasonably accurate description of those fine and principled people who speculate about possible Oscar contenders for Gold Derby — milquetoast politicians who step lightly and cautiously and have no souls. I could name names but these folks know who they are.

“The former President who lies about this election, and the mob that attacked this Capitol could not be further away from the core of American values. They want to rule, or they will ruin. Their lies have not abated. We are in a battle for the soul of America.”

Attorney General Merrick Garland said one thing last night (“patience, patience…we’re gradually getting there…maybe”) and today President Joe Biden said something else. He didn’t precisely and explicitly say “Donald Trump is a liar and a sociopath and a would-be tyrant who is out to destroy Democracy”, but he pretty much did say that.

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Peter Bogdanovich, a hot-streak director for six years (Targets, Directed by John Ford, The Last Picture Show, What’s Up Doc, Paper Moon) and one of the most ardent and super-knowledgable film scholars and Hardcore Film Catholics of all time, has left the earth.

He was 82 years old, almost exactly 82 and 1/2. I’m very sorry and saddened. Hugs and condolences to all who are mourning right now. Peter had his issues and resentments and tragic flaws even, but he was “one of us,” so to speak. This hurts. Tears are welling.

It’s not just Bogdanovich the man who has passed away, but Bogdanovich the spirit warrior…a sardonic pillar of his community…a devotional film nerd and a former hotshot director, a high priest in robes and an intimate interpreter of the greatest cinematic era of the 20th Century (mid 1930s to late 1970s).

Was Bogdanovich a friend? No, but I mildly knew him. Interviews, social encounters, nights on the town, “hey, Peter,” etc. I loved his blunt candor and sage understandings of the great classic-era directors and how their films were constructed and what they were fundamentally about. (The only time Peter got it wrong was in a 2007 New York Observer piece in which he insisted that Rio Bravo was better than High Noon.) I loved his imitations of Cary Grant, John Ford and other Hollywood luminaries. I half-loved the “droopy basset hound with glasses” thing that he grew into about 15 years ago, give or take. And I loved his Elliot Kupferberg character, the psychiatrist and confidante of Lorraine Bracco‘s Jennifer Melfi, for 15 episodes of The Sopranos.

I’ve written a lot about Peter over the years, and an hour ago I was thinking about re-posting three or four articles that meet my standards of “especially well written and well remembered”. Wimp and candy-ass that I am, I’m a little bit afraid of doing so because of the haters who would launch missiles and accuse me of Bob Clark-ing Bogdanovich. I’m thinking it over as we speak.

The second thing I’d say would be “if you’re relatively healthy or at least not obese or a cigarette smoker, Omicron isn’t anyone’s idea of agony. It’s three or four days of exhaustion and sniffles and achey muscles…basically a serious bout with a cold. I just went through it. I wouldn’t call it a walk in the park — I was definitely under the weather — but it wasn’t that bad.”

At some point the mind isn’t as whip-sharp as it used to be…nothing wrong with a video-screen karaoke prompter. Recorded 30 years ago (’91 actually) for MTV Unplugged. For whatever reason I’d never watched this until today.

Over the last 15 days, three industry advocates in the award-season conversation — Hollywood Elsewhere’s Jeffrey Wells, Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman and Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone — have endorsed the idea of Spider-Man: No Way Home being Best Picture nominated.

I was first out of the gate on 12.20.21, Gleiberman followed 11 days later later (12.31.21) and Stone followed Gleiberman three days after his post. Gleiberman is the heaviest hitter among us, agreed, and his Variety think-piece essays are confined to a weekly format.

1. “If The Academy Has Any Interest…” / 12.20.21 / Note: This is probably when I got Omicron — during a 12.16 viewing at the AMC Grove.

2. “Why The Academy Should Nominate ‘Spider-Man for Best Picture,” Variety’s Owen Gleiberman, 12.31.21 / https://variety.com/2021/film/columns/spider-man-no-way-home-oscars-analysis-best-picture-1235145184/

3. “Yes, Spider-Man Should Be Nominated — It’s a No-Brainer,” posted on 1.3.22 / https://www.awardsdaily.com/2022/01/01/yes-spider-man-should-be-nominated-for-best-picture-its-a-no-brainer/

Others have since picked up on this notion (in some cases disputing it, especially among the advocates of hothouse-flower nominees) but WE STARTED IT! Just saying!