Madonna looks great for a 63 year-old. She looks great for a 33 year-old. Having been there and done that in my home town of Prague, I’m all for good tasteful “work”. But most of us would agree, I think, that it’s important to resemble the person you were 15 or 20 years ago. I’d better watch my step — this is the same kind of observation that Owen Gleiberman shared about Rene Zellweger five years ago.
I felt lulled and charmed by Lisa Hurwitz‘s The Automat, which I caught at last September’s Telluride Film Festival. It’s just a memory-lane trip, but smartly assembled and a very pleasant watch.
It’s an easy thing, it turns out, to rekindle the lore of those fine, professionally prepared food dishes and exceptionally good cups of coffee (not to mention slices of pie and cake) at popular prices, accessible through those little window slots that you’d drop coins into.
Call it a slightly melancholy saga about a great, enterprising idea that had its day — a franchise business that caught on, thrived, peaked between the ’30s and ’60s, and then started to go away in the ’70s and ’80s.
Managed by the Horn and Hardart company but located only in New York (40 locations!) and Philadelphia, automats were also great hang-outs for office workers, students, book readers, job seekers, workers on the go, poetry writers and the financially pressed.
Remember Dustin Hoffman sharing a fond Automat recollection with Justin Henry in Kramer vs. Kramer? Hollywood’s best Automat recall can be savored in Delbert Mann‘s That Touch of Mink (’62), a bizarre sex comedy about the priggish Doris Day struggling (at age 39!) to avoid having unwed sex with Cary Grant. There’s an Act One scene in which Day’s best friend (Audrey Meadows) slips her free food through the automat windows. There’s also a beautiful evening shot that captures one of the franchise’s midtown facades with that luscious red neon lettering.
The Automat is now playing at Manhattan’s Film Forum, and at three Laemmle theatres locally including West L.A.’s The Royal (which hasn’t been “royal” for quite a few years).
I wonder if these two murder scenes — one utterly brutal and ruthless, another an emotional impulse that abruptly spills over — have ever been compared side by side? In fact they belong together as temperamental opposites.
HAL’s killing of Frank Poole is one of the spookiest and most chilling murder scenes in movie history (hat tip to the recently departed Douglas Trumbull!). It’s all the more provocative and unnerving in the way Kubrick doesn’t show HAL attacking (or even making contact with) Frank and instead starts suddenly jump-cutting into the HAL eye, suggesting the killing of Frank the way Hitchcock suggested the stabbing of Marion Crane without showing Norman Bates‘ knife actually doing anything. And then to show the oxygen-deprived Poole desperately struggling as his body tumbles through space while the pod follows suit on its own crazy trajectory, hurtling and somersaulting into the abyss.
Whereas Matt Fowler‘s shooting of Richard Strout in Todd Field‘s In The Bedroom…well, what other audience emotion can there be except “finally!”? All killings are cold in one way or another, but this is surely one of the most understandable, just a natural and necessary thing…shoot that malevolent cousin of Tom Cruise….and again! And again! Thank you. If any character in a 21st Century movie “needed killing,” as the old western cliche goes, it was Richard Strout. Perhaps you wouldn’t want to congratulate the grief-stricken Fowler for putting three bullets into this creep, but you certainly want to reach out and say “we understand, Tom…of course we do.”
As we all know, Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling was cancelled a couple of years ago by the trans community. Her sin was having said that biologically-natural women (i.e., women born with female genitalia and raised as a female) have a certain gravity or authority over trans women — “”If sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased,” Rowling wrote. “I know and love trans people, but erasing the concept of sex removes the ability of many to meaningfully discuss their lives.”
Trashed as a TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) who had “attacked” the trans community, Rowling was trans-hated before David Chappelle took her place last year.
Three days ago “T. Greer” tweeted these images from a N.Y. Times video ad being displayed in the Washington, D.C. metro — imagine the deranged chutzpah of the Times advertising team to actually come up with this ad. [HE to readership: This is not a joke — this is a real ad.]
From “Somehow, Trump Is a Tough Act to Follow,” a Gail Colins-Bret Stephens chat (2.21.22) (“The Conversation”):
Gail Collins: “On the domestic front, for all my paranoia about Covid, I’ve been remembering when I was a kid and everybody was terrified of polio. First-graders hearing stories from their parents about all the children who died or were disabled for life. Then the terrible, terrible time when AIDS seemed to be a potential death sentence for so many in the gay community. And when it comes to many less dire illnesses, science also found new cures, or at least effective ways to control them.”
Bret Stephens: “Very true. But here’s what’s depressing: When the Salk vaccine came out, nearly everyone celebrated and got vaccinated, and polio all but disappeared from the developed world. When scientists developed antiretrovirals to manage H.I.V., people living with the virus embraced the new medication as the lifesaver it is. Yet here we are with a vaccine that can save you from dying or going to the hospital with Covid, and tens of millions of people refuse to help themselves by taking it. Which goes to prove that no pandemic is deadlier than stupidity.”
Are today’s comedians allowed to punch down at the none-too-hips? (The most unhip in this sketch being Bill Murray‘s lounge crooner.) You certainly can’t punch down at women or ethnic groups of any stripe. So the people you can make fun of are…?
BILL MURRAY is trending so here is singing 'Star Wars' on SNL in 1978. #BillMurray pic.twitter.com/YJzXZBA7sO
— All The Right Movies (@ATRightMovies) February 21, 2022
Here’s a portion of a hand-written “aerogramme” that I wrote to my parents on 5.3.76. I was living with girlfriend Sophie Black (now a renowned poet and Columbia University prof) in a small studio at 9 rue Gregoire du Tours. I was only three and a half years old at the time.
…if a semblance of All In The Family could return as a present-tense social-issues Hulu series, except Archie could be…well, a bit like myself…sensible liberal older guy, perhaps an editor & founder of an online publication or web business of some kind, grappling with the pressures of HR woke terror in the workplace, clashing with Millennial or Zoomer daughter and BIPOC son-in-law who are living with him while they save for a house…basically Hollywood Elsewhere meets Norman Lear…except Archie Wells wouldn’t be as smug or under-educated as Carroll O’Connor was…it could write itself.
If you wanted to self-delude you could tell yourself that this flash-and-dance number from Dexter Fletcher‘s Rocketman is mostly uncut — a single dazzling shot. It certainly seems that way from the 1:10 mark (once Taron Egerton appears from an opening in the fence) until he retreats into the pub and joins his bandmates around the 3:40 mark. 150 seconds!
It’s more likely three or four shots seamlessly blended together, but at least an energetic effort was made to persuade otherwise.
Any way you slice it this is easily the best sequence in the entire film.
While living in the bucolic bedroom community of Westfield, New Jersey, my father led a “Citizens for Kennedy” campaign — basically an appeal to independents and Republicans who had doubts about Richard Milhous Nixon‘s sweaty upper lip.
As it turned out Nixon won Union County (to which Westfield belonged) but JFK won New Jersey, albeit by a nosehair — 49.96% (1,385,415 votes) vs. 49.16% (1,363,324).
I kept the original bumper sticker and eventually duplicated it (peel-off sticker surface and all) at Kinko’s on Westwood Blvd. It was on the rear bumper of my black Nissan 240SX (which I bought in ’93) for many years, and it’s now pasted on the left side of the rumblehog.
I’ve said time and again that my current mode of liberalism is JFK-styled — i.e., sensible left moderate. If the former Massachusetts senator had the heaven-bequeathed ability to survey the cultural-political state of the USA in 2022, he’d be fuming over what the wokesters have done to the Democratic party brand.
The general image quality is obviously far superior in the 1.75:1 Criterion Bluray image, but consider the additional amount of shiny floor, not to mention the reflections within same, at the bottom of the 1.37:1 MPI Home Video image. I own Criterion’s A Hard Day’s Night Bluray, but chopping off the tops and bottoms of perfectly good visual content (otherwise known as “cleavering”) is a terrible practice among home-video distributors.
