Top to bottom: (a) Myself and Jett at my parents’ home in Southbury, Connecticut, 20 or 21 years ago; (b) My first film column, written weekly for the short-lived Fairfield County Morning News; (c) a passable-for-a-kid-but-don’t-give-up-your-day-job sketch of Peter O’Toole in Becket, and (d) snapped in Boston during the good old druggie days.
The first time I ever stood next to a dead guy was around 12:30 or 1 am on Westport Road, on my way back from a night of revelry at the Player’s Tavern. A kid of 18 or 19 had crashed his motorcycle and apparently broken his neck. I got there before the cops did. My first thought was to feel his pulse, but I wimped out at the last second. Plus I couldn’t call 911 as there were no cell phones. So I just stared. He might have been breathing his last but he sure didn’t look it with his eyes open and all. He looked like a deer that had been hit by a car.
In the decades since I haven’t come upon any young dead guys anywhere. Not in the cities, not in the desert…nowhere. My understanding is that apart from drunk-driving fatalities most young people who buy it outdoors do so in combat. So it feels a little arbitrary and arty to look at all these dead kids in Aaron Salazar‘s Still Life, an eight-minute short.
How come they’re all in their 20s? Where are the overweight middle-aged corpses? How about a dead grandma in a toppled-over wheelchair, killed by a latter-day Richard Widmark? And what killed all these kids? I’m presuming that Salazar is saying “death is always still and final and absolute.” Which it is, of course, but in the matter of teens and twentysomethings it’s fairly unusual unless you’re a Yakuza soldier or a hopeless alcoholic or druggie or involved in the Mexican drug trade or fighting the Russians in Ukraine.
Still Life from Grandma Honey Films on Vimeo.
Among several suggestions for reviving or restoring the Oscar brand, THR‘s Scott Feinberg is re-proposing the Best Achievement in Popular Film Oscar, which was announced and then killed in the late summer of 2018.
Feinberg suggestion #6: “The board of governors should henceforth be tasked with bestowing a special achievement Oscar each year — to be presented on the Oscars telecast — to a commercially successful film that also displays artistic merit and is a credit to the industry. This would be different from, and therefore would not ‘devalue,’ the competitive Oscar, and would certainly not preclude its recipient from competing for competitive awards. While this special Oscar would most logically go to the film’s director and its principal producer, the film’s stars should be encouraged to accept alongside him or her (which would certainly not hurt TV ratings, either).
“Recent films which could have been honored in this way include 2017’s Wonder Woman (director Patty Jenkins and producer Zack Snyder could have been accompanied by stars Gal Gadot and Chris Pine), the first modern female-led superhero film; 2019’s Avengers: Endgame (directors Anthony Russo and Joseph Russo and producer Kevin Feige could have been accompanied by the actors who played the Avengers), the culmination of a remarkable 11 years of the Marvel Cinematic Universe; and 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home (director Jon Watts and producer Feige could have been accompanied by the three actors who have played the title character), a milestone in a 20-year-old franchise which helped to sustain the film industry through the aftermath of 9/11 and COVID.
“Revive Popcorn Oscar Concept,” posted on 4.26.21: “There’s really no choice any more. The Best Achievement in Popular Film Oscar idea, killed in its infancy by the snooties, doesn’t need to be revived — it needs to be implemented. Really. Another Steven Soderbergh-styled Oscar telecast in ’22 and it’s over. Hell, the brand is on life-support now.
Once again: “On 9.10.18 Bloomberg’s Virginia Postrel posted a solution to the Best Picture Oscar problem. Her idea was simply that there are two film industries — one for ticket buyers who tend to prefer mass appeal or FX-driven popcorn flicks, and another for Academy members who prefer to honor movies that are actually good in some kind of profound, refined or zeitgeist-reflecting way.
“It’s been understood for years that the vast majority of moviegoers are agnostic regarding the faith of cinema. What faith, you ask? Good point. Postrel’s article isn’t even three years old, and the pandemic has made it seem like an idea from another era. But embracing the Popcorn Oscars (maybe even encompassing the top five categories) would at least represent an attempt to face reality.
Serious question: If you were a senior Apple TV+ exec, would you advocate pushing full speed ahead for the late ‘22 release of Antoine Fuqua and Will Smith’s Emancipation, an historical chase thriller about a real-life slave named Gordon who had been whipped severely before fleeing a Louisiana plantation?
Or would you step back and furrow your brow and go “hmmm”? Or would you sell it off?
If it was my call, I would say “fuck it…release that sucker and let the chips fall. Smith is flawed, sure, but who isn’t? The press will jump all over him, but how many times can he say ‘I’m deeply ashamed that I did a brutish, asinine thing”? Walk on, stand tall, turn the page and keep saying ‘this is about Gordon, not Will Smith.'”
From Andrew Wallenstein‘s “What It Takes To Break Will Smith Out of Movie Jail“:
In the minds of 97% of film lovers, Nehemiah Persoff is remembered for one and only one role — the bald-headed “Little Bonaparte” in Some Like It Hot.
Yes, he played the cab driver who drove Rod Steiger to his doom in On The Waterfront, but that didn’t count because Persoff didn’t say anything — he just glared.
Persoff was also in a ton of other films and TV shows, but at the end of the day there is only Little Bonaparte and more particularly his answer to Pat O’Brien‘s “what happened here?” at the end of the banquet scene.
Bonaparte: “There was somethin’ in that cake that didn’t agree with them.”
Persoff died today at age 102. Respect and condolences.
