Day: April 29, 2022

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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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.

…happens in supermarket aisles. Second only to showers. My third most productive meditations happen while driving.

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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.

Greta Gerwig‘s currently filming Barbie, based on a script by Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, is almost certainly not going to be a John Waters film. There would be nowhere to go if she did that. Gerwig is too crafty and edgy and invested in #MeToo consciousness to make a simple-minded, empty-headed flick about Barbie and Ken wallowing in Nothingville.

As far as I can determine there’s only one way for Gerwig to go story-wise, and that’s to make a Barbie variation of The Truman Show. Put another way, Gerwig and Baumbach’s film will most likely be Barbie and Ken Become Woke.

Margot Robbie is Barbie; Ryan Gosling is Ken.

It goes without saying that in Act One Ken will leave Barbie because he’s gay. (Ken has been totally gay since the ’60s.) Barbie herself could decide to go lezzy. Or it could be a 1950s period thing in which Ken and Barbie get married and buy a Southern California tract home and become one of those miserable couples in Martin Ritt‘s No Down Payment (’57). Or it could be set in the ’60s with Barbie becoming a member of the Baader-Meinhof Gang.

Excerpt from Margot Robbie 2021 interview: “Barbie comes with a lot of baggage, and a lot of nostalgic connections. But with that comes a lot of exciting ways to attack it. People generally hear ‘Barbie’ and think, ‘I know what that movie is going to be,’ and then they hear that Greta Gerwig is writing and directing it, and they’re like, ‘Oh, well, maybe I don’t.’”

Warner Bros. will release Barbie on 7.21.23.

The Wiki page for Susquehanna Polling & Research says that the company “specializes in polling services for Republican candidates,” among other concerns. That doesn’t necessarily mean they cook data to please their clients, but there is a question about a seeming lack of neutrality.

That said, a recent SP&R poll strongly indicates that Democratic candidates are going to be slaughtered like lambs next November.

It also makes clear that Average Joes & Janes support Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis‘s “don’t try to indoctrinate young kids (third-graders and younger) with teachings about gender fluidity, non-straight sexual behaviors and trans ideology” bill — otherwise known as the “don’t say gay” bill.

This is why Democrats are going to die next fall. Step outside the urban progressive Twitter bubble and it’s a whole different world out there. The same people who voted for Glenn Youngkin in Virginia are standing with DeSantis now. Same thing with those San Francisco voters (Asians in particular) who voted to eject those moronic woke school board members.

How stupid can the Democrats (and the Biden White House in particular) be? It’s almost like they’re taking out ads that say “please…please don’t vote for us!”

The relentless cigarette-smoking in Drive My Car is what finally wilted my spirit and led me to say “okay, that’s enough of that” during the last half-hour. The awful sensation of cigarette smoke and chemistry-set nicotine poisoning my lungs became too much to bear.

Behold, a just-discovered image for Drive My Car that makes my point. Thank you.

“Worry is interest paid in advance on a debt that never comes due.”

For years I thought this line had originated with David Mamet’s The Spanish Prisoner (‘97). It’s heard during Act One (the section filmed in Islamorada on the Florida keys) and spoken by the late Ricky Jay.

I was mostly wrong. The sentence construction is Mamet’s but the origin of the line appears to reach back to either Mark Twain or English author-priest William Inge. Will Rogers offered his own version.

Worry is a waste of time, agreed, but guilt, a close cousin, serves a noble function. In Broadway Danny Rose (‘84) Woody Allen’s titular figure explains to Mia Farrow’s brusque mafia girlfriend character that guilt “is good…it steers us away from immoral choices and closer to God.” Farrow: “Do you believe in God?” Allen: “No, but I feel guilty about it.”