Month: April 2022

Something To Remember

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…when Baz Luhrmann‘s Elvis opens on 6.24.22, and particulary (for me) when it has its big premiere in Cannes in a very few weeks….from Pauline Kael‘s review of This Is Elvis:

“There an authentic mystery about Elvis: when we see footage from his early Hollywood movies, he’s only a kid of twenty-one or -two, yet he has the zonked eyes of his later years and he seems to be alive only from the waist down. He walks through his starring roles with his face somnolent and masked; you don’t have a clue what he’s thinking. (He was a terrible actor — he must have understood that he would never amount to diddly in these crum-bum movies, and been resentful and bored.)

“At twenty-three he was inducted in the Army, and the newsreel footage of him being given a G.I. haircut and during the two years of his service (1958 to 1960) shows him more open-faced than at any other time. The sneering, Greek-statue look he had in his movies disappears; he’s leaner and his smile is boyish. But as soon as he’s out of the Army and resumes his movie career, the surly overripeness is back.

“The mixture in Elvis — part artist, part exhibitionist, part good ole boy, part romantic kid, part unknown — could have only fused in pop culture, and it didn’t fuse for long.”

Dead-Tree Clippings

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We all clean house every so often, but (and I know this is familiar to every older person in this racket) it’s very emotionally difficult to toss or put aside articles from 25 and 30 years ago. You think back to the blood, sweat and tears that went into each one, and the feeling swells. A little eye moisture. We all have to refresh and let the past go, but it hurts so much.

Go Meta, Go Broke

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Director–writer: “If you check the blacklist, as well as talk to agents and writers around town, there were a whole slew of meta comedies written for stars to play themselves, and those have since been scuttled or shifted to streaming, perhaps after Unbearable Weight tanked.

“There was one written for Mickey Rourke to play himself and there are a half dozen of these meta pieces. A few spec scripts were penned for Liam Neeson to spoof his image, now on the backburner after Lionsgate failed to open yet another comedy. The marketing over there is the worst.”

Only The Timid

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HE to Barbara Broccoli: Yes, it will take a long time to bring a dead man back to life. Unless, of course, the next two or three Bond films will be prequels. Then it’ll be fine. Set in the early ‘60s, let’s say.

Sidenote: Does anyone believe that Broccoli, a timid, finger-to-the-wind franchise caretaker if there ever was one, would even flirt with committing to a prequel realm?

Back to message: Wait, hold on…killing Daniel Craig’s 007 in No Time to Die was more of a metaphorical gesture to feminist #MeToo cadres than an actual dramatic death, you say? And with that gesture now part of movie history you feel free to reanimate “James Bond” except make him (or her) trans or gay or an agent of color? Is that what you have in mind?

Don’t Cancel Mickey Rourke

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HE to Robespierre Woke Comintern: Please consider HE’s solemn, bended-knee plea that the international woke terror brigade not cancel or otherwise severely punish Mickey Rourke for having earlier this month praised director Roman Polanski from the set of The Palace, which may (rushed as it sounds) debut at the ‘22 Venice Film Festival.

HE Meets “The Offer”

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Last night I watched two and a half episodes of The Offer, the Paramount + series about the making of The Godfather. The early reviews had been mostly negative, so I was semi-intrigued by the fact that it seemed fairly competent. Michael Tolkin‘s script struck me as above average. Alas, I began to lose interest during episode #2, and then I started to impatiently fast forward. I was hoping that the Marlon Brando videotape audition sequence would turn up in episode #3, but nope.

And yet — AND YET! — I quickly fell for Matthew Goode‘s portrayal of Robert “The Kid Stays in the Picture” Evans. Having been a moderately close journalist “friend” of Evans in ’95 and ’96 and having spent a lot of time at his French Chateau home on Woodland, I knew the guy pretty well and right away I was nodding appreciatively at Goode’s performance. He nails the murmuring voice, the improvisational smoothitude, the wit, the street cunning.

The last time I was genuinely turned on by a famous-person-impersonation performance was Corey Stoll as Ernest Hemingway in Woody Allen‘s Midnight in Paris (’11).

Why did I lose interest early on? Simple — seething guineas aren’t very interesting.

The New York Italian-American community was pissed and paranoid about Mario Puzo‘s best-selling 1969 novel being made into what they presumed would be a run-of-the-mill gangster film, and for whatever reason nobody (not Evans, not Francis Coppola, not producer Albert Ruddy) was able to sell them on the possibility that The Godfather might become the greatest Italian-American epic ever made, and that it would romanticize Italian-American culture more than anything — a movie that would be much more about family and culture than crime.

The history is the history, but listening over and over to Giovanni Ribisi‘s Joe Colombo, Frank John Hughes‘ Frank Sinatra, Danny Nucci‘s Mario Biaggi and Anthony Skordi‘s Carlo Gambino bitch and moan about “what a disastuh this fuckin’ film will be”….Jesus, guys, give it a rest.

Having hated Dan Fogler for years, I was a wee bit surprised that I liked his performance as Francis Coppola. I was also more or less okay with Miles “don’t be a pervert, man” Teller‘s performance as Ruddy.

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Try It Again

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Thousands of copies of Roget’s Thesaurus fell off a truck yesterday on a New York-area boulevard. Random witnesses were taken aback, stunned, startled, aghast, stupefied, gobsmacked, thrown for a loop, bewildered, shocked, rattled, dazed, surprised, dumbfounded, blown away, flabbergasted, confounded, astonished, etc.

First-Rate, Polanski-Like

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Posted on 1.22.22: Set in present-day Bucharest and costarring Maika Monroe (It Follows), Karl Glusman and Burn Gorman, Chloe Okuno and Zack Ford‘s Watcher (IFC Midnight, 6.3) is unquestionably scary and unnerving.

In my view it stops short of elevated horror — it’s more of a low-key, Roman Polanski-level thriller in the vein of Repulsion and The Tenant. First-rate chills and creeps nonetheless.

The Scream-level morons may respond in their usual way, but Watcher is as good as it gets with this kind of palette and approach.