Month: June 2022

And in a way, I’ve been there. I accidentally hit a dog nine years ago in Spain. The boys and I were driving south on a dirt road in the dark, and a cat and a dog ran in front of us. I slowed down but didn’t quite stop, and the dog ran off, obviously in pain and crying. It was awful. It would be 50 times worse to hit a young boy, of course, but slamming any living thing is horrible. I’ll never forget that moment.

Posted by TheWrap‘s Steve Pond on 9.11.21: “A dark and dirty morality play where nobody’s very concerned with morals, John Michael McDonagh’s The Forgiven takes some extremely questionable behavior and makes it as intriguing as it is off-putting. There’s a lot of despicable stuff going on in this efficiently nasty drama from the Irish writer-director of The Guard and Cavalry, but in the hands of McDonagh, Ralph Fiennes and Jessica Chastain, you may actually find yourself caring for these people more than they care for themselves.”

Jordan Ruimy: “Do you think this Alec Baldwin-Woody Allen interview is a good idea?”

HE: “Because Baldwin is a bit tainted along with Allen? One, as a Rust producer Baldwin may be vaguely or indirectly responsible for the accident, but he didn’t even pull the trigger, he said. That’s his stated position. Two, Baldwin interviewed Allen two years ago. Three, the Allen-Dylan thing will have to be touched upon once more, of course, but Woody has thoroughly covered the episode in question in “Apropos of Nothing.” There’s nothing new to say. Four, Baldwin’s only way of addressing the Allen-Dylan thing with any kind of fresh perspective is to ask about Allen v. Farrow (’21) and whether Allen wants to repeat his opinion. In a statement to The Hollywood Reporter, Allen said that Allen v. Farrow filmmakers Amy Ziering and Kirby Dick “had no interest in the truth”. He further accused Ziering-Dick of “collaborating with the Farrows and their enablers,” and only giving Allen and Previn a “matter of days” to respond to allegations about the case.

The Allen interview happens on Tuesday, 6.28 at 10:30 am.

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A curious conversation on Facebook Messenger…sorry.

Jeff [last name redacted]: “Watched The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance with the kids last night. It didn’t hold up much. However, I was singing the ‘end credits’ Gene Pitney song during the whole film, and then when we got to the end…no song. I looked it up and realized that I had originally seen the film on TV in the 70s and the song was not in the actual film, but some guy at the TV station must have overlaid it on to the end credits. Curious if you’ve ever heard of this weird TV artifact?”

HE: “’Some guy at the TV station’ couldn’t have overlaid or inserted the Gene Pitney song onto the end credits because there is no end credits sequence in Liberty Valance. It just ends with a final static shot of the moving train (25 mph!) that James Stewart and Vera Miles are riding on and then ‘The End.’ Maybe the TV station guy played the song over a black background or an artificial freeze frame.”

Jeff: “My memory is a bit foggy so I don’t know. I do know my brother and I sang the song for a month after we saw it, so the song and the film are inextricably entwined for us. Maybe John Ford had a sudden worry that the film would seem too light with a pop song bringing it home. Thanks for your two cents.”

HE: “What I told you isn’t my ‘two cents’ — it’s fact. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance doesn’t have an end-credits sequence. And it’s a stupid song anyway. It celebrates the awesome six-shooter bravery of the man who stood up to the evil Liberty Valance face to face and shot him dead. Stewart’s Ransom Stoddard character isn’t celebrated, but there’s a line that says “when the final showdown came at last, a law book was no good.”

Jeff: “A song doesn’t have to be smart to be catchy. I suppose the idea is that they were both somehow brave or noble. Stewart for standing up to Valance and Wayne for letting Stewart live, knowing that Vera Miles preferred him.”

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First and foremost, Ben Shapiro needs to fire his sound mixer — the first four or five minutes of this Matt Taibbi interview show is smothered in loud music. But that aside, there’s an interesting discussion of the wokester left’s “our way or the highway” attitude around the 36:30 mark.

Ben Shapiro: “[There’s a whole side of the aisle that] claims there is a false subjectivity…that there should not be another idea and whatever we say goes, and if you controvert that narrative then you are immediately barred from the club.”

Matt Taibbi: “Yeah, and that’s just a losing argument with most audiences. People implicitly distrust anyone who doesn’t want you to listen to someone else’s argument. That used to be something that attracted me to liberalism…this idea that ‘I don’t care what this person says, I believe what I believe, you can listen to them if you want but [either way] it doesn’t bother me….right? Well, that’s not the attitude any more. The [current] attitude is, we have to do everything we can to stamp out [conservative] disinformation. [This way of thinking and behaving] has a tendency to inspire audiences to swing in the opposite direction.

“This censoriousness, this idea of stamping out the other side completely…in the hope that you’ll be the last opinion standing…that’s a losing strategy, i think, and it’s incredible that it’s been adopted.”

Based on pure nutso speculation, Greta Gerwig‘s Barbie is going to be either Logan’s Run or Village of the Damned. Or a blend of the two. That’s what I’m sniffing in the air. I’m just putting this out there. I know nothing.

If I’m even a little bit intrigued by a film after a first viewing, there’s a slight chance I’ll watch it again. If I’m a bit more than mildly intrigued, I’ll almost certainly watch it twice. And if I’m flat-out intrigued or turned on even, there’s a decent chance I’ll see it three times or more.

I was okay with Elvis (certainly the final third in Las Vegas portion), but honestly? Right now I don’t have the slightest interest in seeing it again. It was too annoying and exhausting. Okay, I might catch it again when it goes to streaming…

Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman has already seen it twice, and he’s written a fascinating side-eyed take (“Why Isn’t Elvis A Home Run?“). You don’t have to read it if you don’t want to. But I did.

Posted on 9.23.15: In my book any 1950s film captured in VistaVision and rendered in Bluray and/or high-def streaming is worth seeing, even if the movie itself is mediocre.

And: One mark of a serious cinephile is the ability to ignore script or acting flaws and just zero in on the cinematography, which in this instance is fairly ripe and detailed and eye-poppy.

It is therefore permissible to have an interest in a Bluray or at least a 1080p or 4K streamer of Hal Kanter‘s Loving You (’57), which was shot in VistaVision by the great Charles Lang — an Oscar nominee for his lensing of Sabrina, Separate Tables, Some Like It Hot and One-Eyed Jacks.

There is, of course, no such thing as a really good Elvis Presley film, but the first three — Love Me Tender, Loving You and King Creole — are at least tolerable. The semi-autobiographical Loving You, the only color film in this trio, is the only one in which Presley performs a few straight-up ’50s rock tunes.

Paramount may have leased the rights to Warner Home Video or not, but for some reason there’s no Bluray or high-def streaming version of Loving You for sale or on the horizon– only an out-of-print Lionsgate DVD from 2003, which collectors are selling for $70 bucks and higher. Forget it.

Variety‘s Chris Willman to Colonel Tom Parker biographer Alanna Nash: “What’s your overall feeling on the movie’s truth-ometer? Are the liberties worth it for creating an artistic picture? Does it veer off in ways that seem unnecessary?”

Nash: “The timeline…well, what timeline? It’s all a Baz Luhrmann fever dream. The past, present and future are all shook up like a ’50s milkshake and served with a thousand straws!

“Other than the tremendous pains Baz has taken to make this story seem ‘woke’, the liberties are essentially fair — except to Parker. In making him such an antagonist, they have robbed him of his many accomplishments with his client.

“Luhrmann has really framed this through a present-day lens. Elvis had just as many white influences and announced as early as seventh grade that he was going to sing at the Grand Ole Opry. Remember, he entered a talent contest as a child singing ‘Old Shep’ — warbling about dead dogs is about as country as it gets. An early hero in Tupelo was a hillbilly singer named Mississippi Slim.

“But living in a ‘colored’ neighborhood, as [Elvis] did, he certainly heard early r & b, jump-blues and swing tunes pulsating through the walls at the nearby juke joints, and he loved it, as he did both Black and white gospel. Still, the odds were heavily in favor that he’d be a country singer and his stint on the Louisiana Hayride seemed to point him in that direction.”

My first reaction to those hysterical screaming girls in Elvis…to those hormonal howls and wails in the Louisiana Hayride concert sequence, was “Baz is overcranking it again…he always does this…can’t help himself.”

But today I took a look at some ’50s footage of women watching Presley perform, and Luhrmann didn’t exaggerate all that much. The reality is that ’50s women responded on a level of 7.5 or 8 or perhaps even 9, and Luhrmann’s women took it to level 10 or 11. But they’re not that far apart.

And the sullen reactions of the guys in the audience in Elvis are spot-on…they hate him for turning the women on, but they also feel envious. The exact same thing happened in the mid ’50s.

The following are from Loving You (’57), Presley’s second film and his first in color:

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