The enthusiastically received Elvis is in its third day of national release (if you count the Thursday previews), and it’s time for some reactions from HE regulars.
Kindly, bending-over-backwards, vaguely worded assessments (“It’s not perfect but I love Presley’s pop-chart hits, and there’s no understanding the movie without letting those songs into your soul-stream”) are not welcome. Please lay it out straight.
I’ve barely written about Elvis myself, except for that 5.26 post-screening riff that I tapped out in Cannes after catching Baz Luhrmann‘s film in the Salles Agnes Varda.
We all knew it was coming, and yet somehow it feels a lot worse now that it’s official.
The overturning of Roe v. Wade is a scourge — a cruel, hideous imposition upon all women, right now and for the foreseeable future. Don’t even talk about what will happen in bumblefuck territories over the coming weeks, months and possibly years — removing the right of women (poor women especially) to choose their own biological fates and futures is draconian, deplorable and fairly close to medieval.
I’ve been thinking about this decision for most of the day, and particularly during my journey back from Berkshires. The likely real-world impact is sinking into my head in stages, and the air seems to get a bit colder each time.
As emotionally conflicted as I am about mid-to-late-term abortion (I went through a Jack Nicholson-like change of heart** when the news of Sutton’s arrival was shared), the right of a woman to choose one way or the other is absolute.
I’m certainly consumed with loathing for the six Supreme Court justices who struck down this fair, necessary and former law of the land, and especially the three Trumpies — Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, all of whom blatantly misrepresented their views on Roe during their confirmation hearings and concurrent discussions with legislators.
Putting it mildly, Lawrence O’Donnell’s reaction [above] to the trashing of Roe v. Wade closely reflects my own, and almost certainly the reactions of at least two-thirds if not three-quarters of the country.
Key quote: “The current Supreme Court is not a product of democracy. It is a product of minority rule…a product of the corruption of constitutional processes by Senate Republicans, who refused to even allow for a vote on President Obama‘s final choice for a Supreme Court justice” — i.e., Attorney General Merrick Garland, who has so far shown himself to be a wimp in the matter of a possible federal prosecution of Donald Trump.
“The Republican justices on the Supreme Court share a dangerous Trumpian characteristic — they are incapable of embarassment.”
Despite a chorus of “uh-oh’s” from industry wise guys, Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis is not — repeat, not — a box-office shortfaller. It’s not Top Gun: Maverick but for a longish ADD biopic aimed at oldsters, it’s doing fairly well with a projected weekend tally of $31 million and change.
The second weekend, of course, will tell the real tale. But until then.,.
“We all know what a haunted house looks like: Victorian, Gothic. The Addams Family pile, the Bates residence in Psycho. Mansard roofs, looming gables, bullseye windows, porches, verandas.
“The renowned art historian Sarah Burns of Indiana University has made an exhaustive study of how this late 19th century style became ‘the prime sinister locus’ of American culture, chiefly gathered in the marvellous essay Better for ‘Haunts: Victorian Houses and the Modern Imagination.’
“Late-Victorian architecture was anathematised in the 1920s as a way of passing moral judgement on the tawdriness and excess of the Gilded Age. This was, in turn, a way of condemning the flashiness and superficial opulence of the pre-Crash 1920s.
“When artists such as Edward Hopper and Charles Burchfield painted houses as empty and sinister, they were indirectly passing judgement on the corruption of the day.” — from “It’s Coming From Inside the House,” an Architects Journal articles by Will Miles, 8.21.15.
Video taken this morning inside Mount Washington House in Hillsdale, New York.
Every two or three years I’ll re-watch Alexander Payne‘s Sideways, mainly to savor Paul Giamatti‘s exquisite performance as morose Miles, a failed novelist and wine aficionado who falls in love during a week-long hiatus in Santa Barbara wine country.
So I re-watched it again last night, and there’s absolutely no question that Giamatti’s conflicted and deflated fellow wasn’t just the best lead male performance of ’04, but possibly the 21st Century’s finest and certainly one of the most penetrating of the last 70 or 75 years.
In my mind Miles Raymond is right up there with Willy Loman as one of filmdom’s most poignant expressions of middle-aged ennui, only funnier and only flecked with a tragic arc as opposed to being defined by one.
Sideways was appropriately nominated for Best Picture Oscar that year, competing against The Aviator, Million Dollar Baby, Finding Neverland and Ray. But Giamatti wasn’t even nominated for Best Actor. He won SAG’s 2004 Best Actor award, but the Best Actor nominees turned out to be Jamie Foxx (Ray — the ultimate victor), Don Cheadle (Hotel Rwanda), Johnny Depp (Finding Neverland), Leonardo DiCaprio (The Aviator) and Clint Eastwood (Million Dollar Baby).
Due respect to Cheadle and director Terry George, but 17 and 1/2 years later I can’t recall a single scene from Hotel Rwanda. All I can remember is that everyone (myself included) said it was worthy.
Nor can I recall a single vivid scene from Finding Neverland….not one. In The Aviator, DiCaprio’s Howard Hughes struck me as overly strained and actor-ish — he was 15 times better in The Wolf of Wall Street.
The thinking in early ’05 was that Giamatti didn’t “work the room” hard enough. Jamie Foxx charmed the pants off of each and every Academy member he met that season, but Giamatti, like Miles himself, was a bit too sullen and withdrawn.
But what a joke it was and still is that the Academy basically said, “Yes, we recognize that Giamatti gave a great, half-funny and half-sad performance, but we just couldn’t nominate him…don’t ask us why…okay, we didn’t nominate him because we’re too shallow.”
