…since the late ’70s. Definitely catchy — you could even say throttling — in a flashy, one-hit-wonder way. The opening guitar-and-bongos prelude (the first 51 seconds) is the best part. I saw Dirk Hamilton and the band play a set at the Bitter End sometime around ’79 or ’80, and it was clear he was dealing with a serious case of stage fright. He quit music for two or three years but then came back to it, and is still plugging along.
Day: July 2, 2022
Professor Tribe: Garland Will Indict Trump
“Unless Donald Trump is held accountable, I would say that our democracy is in grave danger. [Attorney General Merrick] Garland has said he’ll go to the top if that’s where the evidence points, and that’s certainly where it’s pointing now, and there are indications, certainly from the searches and seizures of both John Eastman and of others…strong evidence that the Justice Department is not stopping with the foot soldiers…it’s going to the generals, and the biggest general of all is Donald Trump…I do think the odds are that he will be indicted.”
I Wouldn’t Live in Dubai With A Gun At My Back
Best wishes to the just-married Lindsay Lohan and Bader Shammas. The couple has been living in Shammas’ home city of Dubai, where he works as an assistant vp at Credit Suisse, for a couple of years.
I’ve never been to Dubai, but I’ve always understood it to be a kind of flamboyant wealth-porn city…high-rises, high temps, beaches, super-malls and devoid of anything that I would value culturally. Paris, Barcelona, London, Rome, Munich, Prague, Bern, Zurich…anywhere but effing Dubai, please.
Plus we all understand that Middle Eastern men and particularly those raised in the UAE are not exactly known for honoring 21st Century feminist values. They’re generally known, in fact, for being somewhat medieval-minded….be honest.
Same Moral Dilemma, Different Outcomes
If you’re a fan of Sidney Lumet‘s Prince of the City (and what Lumet admirer isn’t?) and you haven’t seen Find Me Guilty (’06), which many have ignored or dismissed as a commercial failure, you need to buckle down and rent it.
I know that Find Me Guilty never seems to come up much in discussions of Lumet’s career, and yet it’s absolutely one of Lumet’s finest and is certainly one of the greatest films ever made by a director who’s over 80. (Lumet’s Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead, released in ’07, also belongs on that list.)
I haven’t re-watched Guilty since it opened 16 years ago, but I’ll be revisiting tonight.
Guilty is a marvel of old-fashioned (i.e., ’80s-style) craftsmanship — Lumet’s superb direction, T.J. Mancini and Robert McCrea’s’s finely structured screenplay and skillfully pared-down dialogue, and Vin Diesel’s inescapably charming, sincerely felt performance that briefly put him back on the road map. It was the last first-rate performance he ever gave.
In my book Find Me Guilty was Lumet’s best film since Q & A (1990), and before that Prince of the City (1981). It’s a tight, no-nonsense court drama that’s not about legal maneuvers or discovering evidence or doing right by the system and justice being served, but mob family values.
It’s not without its amusements and gag lines from time to time, but Guilty is a fairly serious, rooted-in-reality court procedural about wise-guy morality, or the urban mythology about same..
There’s more time spent in a courtoom in this thing than in Lumet’s The Verdict, and for good reason: Find Me Guilty is about the longest-lasting federal criminal prosecution in history. From March ’87 to August ’88, 20 members of the New Jersey-based Lucchese crime family, each represented by his own lawyer, were brought to trial in Newark, New Jersey, on some 76 charges (dope smuggling, gambling, squeezing small businesses…the usual mob stuff).
The mob family values can be summed up by the words “don’t rat,” “don’t roll” and “family is everything.”
I’m talking about the values of a group of bad guys (i.e., men who live outside the law and occasionally enforce their ethical standards by whacking each other) who ostensibly care for and someitmes “take care of” each other, and about one particular bad guy — Diesel’s Jackie DiNorscio — who stood up for certain things over the course of this trial…loyalty, friendship, togetherness…even if the reality of Italian crime ethics, going by everything I’ve heard, is that everyone rats out everyone else sooner or later and a lot of these guys are just full-out sociopaths, or are viewed this way by the majority. And yet Guilty isn’t an invented story.
What’s really striking is that Find Me Guilty delivers pretty much the precise opposite moral message of Prince of the City, which is about the emotional torment that a corrupt cop puts himself through when he decides to tell the absolute truth and rat out his equally corrupt cop friends, and ends up despised and lonely and broken.
Guilty is about a wise guy who refuses to rat out his wise-guy friends, even when most of them shun him and treat him like a leper because of his court behavior, but who nonetheless holds to his own moral ethical course.
Has there ever been a major-league filmmaker besides Lumet who has made two films about the same culture — the New York-area criminal underworld — with both (a) based on a completely true story about courts and prosecutors and defendants, (b) both grappling with almost the exact same moral-ethical issue, and yet (c) coming to almost the exact opposite conclusions about ratting out your friends?
Millennial Describes 40-Year-Old Self As Over The Hill In Terms of Social Media
Jesse Cipollone, owner of a popular Wilton hot-dog eatery called Dog Daze cafe. has told Wilton Patch that he’s not much of a social media hound, having just celebrated his fourth decade and all.
The man was born in ‘82 (the year of E.T., Gandhi, The Thing and The Verdict) and he’s already in love with being a past-his-prime, “internet who?” Gabby Hayes guy?
Let history record that Cipollone was the first Millennial (1981 to 1997) to self-identify this way. All my life I’ve thought of Millennials as internet whiz kids. I’ve never met one who isn’t.
Google has Dog Daze (713 Danbury Road, Wilton, CT) in 62nd place on its list of the 100 best hot-dog joints in the U.S.
The seller of Google’s #1-rated hot dog cuisine in the entire country is Billy’s hot–dog cart, a Manhattan business which operates on Central Park West between the upper 80s and 90s.
I’m not finding the actual Google list, but the top 15 are all (or mostly) located in the New York area. What about Pink’s?
The tastiest hot dogs I’ve ever had are the spicy ones sold in Toronto. The dogs are sliced up to allow for fuller flavor.
Turkel’s Trio
Joe Turkel (1927-2022) burned his way into the acting legend annals three times, and is the only actor of note to be hired by Stanley Kubrick three times.
His finest and most incendiary performance, hands down, was as the anxious and cynical Private Pierre Arnaud in Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (‘57).
Early on Arnaud frets not so much about dying but the painful manner of death he might suffer (bayonet, machine gun). He’s later knocked unconscious after a fist fight with Ralph Meeker’s Corporal Phillipe Paris, and is pinched awake just before his daybreak execution. French bullets!
Turkel’s eerily stoic turn as Lloyd, the ghostly bartender, in The Shining (‘80) is the performance that most people recall.
Turkel was also vivid as Dr. Eldon Tyrell, the inventor of Rutger Hauer ‘s replicant “Roy”, in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (‘82), and he spoke a line that served as a poignant epitaph for the life of a large-living cyborg — “The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long, and you have burned so very brightly, Roy.”
He also played “Tiny” in Kubrick’s The Killing (‘56).
At age 48 or 49 Turkel didn’t make a huge impression as a member of the San Pablo crew in Robert Wise’s The Sand Pebbles (‘66), but there he was in a first-rate allegory about the Vietnam War.
Turkel was an excellent actor with a face that conveyed a certain inner steel and turbulence, and he was graced with a deep, slightly Brooklyn-accented voice. But for some reason he didn’t work very much after Blade Runner, at least as far as his Wiki bio indicates.
Turkel wrote an autobiography titled “The Misery of Success,” due for publishing later this year.
Two weeks shy of his 95th birthday, Turkel passed on 6.27 at Santa Monica’s St. John’s hospital.