Month: August 2022

Last night I finally watched Claire Denis‘s Both Sides of the Blade (Avec amour et acharnement).

Written by Denis and Christine Angot, it’s basically about a marriage between a long-of-tooth Parisian couple — Juliette Binoche‘s “Sara” and Vincent Lindon‘s “Jean” — coming apart at the seams because of wifey’s decision to start fucking an ex-boyfriend (Gregoire Colin‘s “Francois”).

It’s Jean’s fault, in a way, for going into an athletic-talent-spotting business with Francois. Jean knows Francois and Sara’s romantic history, but as an ex-con he’s looking to build his life up again with a sport-related enterprise.

Anyway, Jean smells the Sara-Francois vibe before long, Sara lies to Jean with absolute conviction, and eventually it all blows the hell up.

The weird part is that Francois is significantly younger (Colin was born in ’75) than Sara, who looks late 50ish (as Binoche is). And Jean is in his early ’60s (as Lindon is). If you ask me Binoche and Lindon are only a few years away from being too old for this shit.

Plus we realize toward the end that Francois is selfish and a bit coarse (during his first assignation with Sara he suddenly wants anal without lube or foreplay). This tells us that Sara is foolish — a bad judge of character — on top of being a lying infidel.

There’s also a pointless, credibility-straining subplot about Jean having an alienated black son named Marcus (Issa Perica), which I completely ignored. One, the Marcus subplot was obviously inserted to satisfy the woke thing. And two, Jean and Marcus don’t resemble each other in the slightest. Complete bullshit.

Both Sides of the Blade isn’t half bad, but all it leaves you with is “dudes, don’t marry a conniving liar.”

Is there a reason why the Wikipedia and IMDB pages for Greg Mottola‘s Confess, Fletch (Paramount, 9.16) refuse to mention that the film was at least partly shot in Rome? That’s the only aspect that has me going.

I was watching the trailer and going “uhm-hmm, yeah, okay” when all of a sudden there was Jon Hamm sitting at an outdoor cafe in either Piazza Navona or Campo de Fiori. Bingo!

The youngest guy in the principal cast (Roy Wood, Jr.) is 44 years old — that tells you something. Hamm’s GenX costars include Marcia Gay Harden, Kyle MacLachlan, Roy Wood, Jr. and John Slattery.

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Originally posted on 12.14.20 (five weeks after Biden’s election, three weeks before attack on U.S. Capitol): I never knew any Vinnie Barbarino or Tony Manero “borough” types in the mid ’70s, but I’d known a few Italian-American guys during my painful upbringing in Westfield, New Jersey. They proudly called themselves “guineas”, wore pegged pants and pointy black leather lace-ups, radiated pugnacious vibes and seemed to live in their own angry little world.

And I knew that the bridge-and-tunnel chumps who came into Manhattan on weekends in the late ’70s, the ones who were too thick to realize that their chances of getting into Studio 54 were completely nil…those razor-cut slash polyester goons who radiated sartorial cluelessness in so many ways, and thereby indicating a certain myopic mindset…I knew these guys.

And so I believed Nik Cohn‘s “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night,” the 6.7.76 New York cover story that soon became the basis for Robert Stigwood and John Badham‘s Saturday Night Fever, which became a huge hit and cultural earth-shaker after opening on 12.14.77.

I loved the 2001 Odyssey dance sequences as much as the next guy, but I wasn’t a fan of the film itself, largely because I found John Travolta‘s Tony Manero an impossible asshole — chilly, closed off.

Yes, I know — that was who and what he was, being based on the “Vincent” character Cohn had written about and so on. But where was it written that I had to like Manero’s company?

I bought a ticket to see Badham’s film at Westport’s Post Cinema just before Christmas of ’77. I wanted to have an interesting and perhaps an eye-opening time, but almost immediately I was saying to myself “I have to hang out with this asshole?” On top of which FUCK DISCO…that was one of my foundational beliefs at the time.

What a shock, therefore, to discover 20 years later that Cohn had basically “piped” the New York cover story. He’d done a little research in Bay Ridge and poked around and talked to a few locals, but had more or less made it up.

And yet Cohn’s article felt genuine. I totally recognized (or felt that I recognized) his observations about a certain strata of young, under-educated Italian-American guys in their late teens and early 20s and their dead-end jobs and whatnot…it seemed to convey certain basic impressions of borough guys of that era. I bought it and so did Hollywood, Stigwood, Badham, Travolta and, down the road, tens of millions of fans of the film.

It just went to show that fiction could masquerade as honest reportage and vice versa. I re-read Cohn’s piece last night after watching the Bee Gees doc, and I had a good time with it. Even knowing about Cohn having admitted the truth in ’96, I bought it all the same. Good writing is good writing.

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I’ve just discovered Mo, a week-old Netflix comedy series about a pot-bellied, never-say-die Palestinian refugee without a passport or citizenship papers (standup comic Mohammed Amer) and trying to get traction in the Houston area.

Loosely based on Amer’s rough-and-tumble experience in this country, the series is co-written by Amer and Ramy Youssef (Hulu’s Ramy). It’s a fast-paced, character-rich, highly regarded show with fleet dialogue and a humanistic streak.

Who turned me on to Mo? Veteran hotshot comedian Bill Dawes, a supremely impudent, Irish-American, Bill Burr-like actor-comedian who costars in Mo (starting in episode #5).

Onstage Dawes constantly pokes the woke Stalinist bear. A brash, witty, good-looking, unapologetic, unabashedly heterosexual, tired-of-all-this-shit funny guy…one of the comics who don’t share the Hannah Gadsby aesthetic, or who certainly occupy the opposite end of the spectrum with agreeable servings of spunk, verve and fearlessness.

Dawes to HE Netflix readers: Push the LOVE THIS button so we’ll get renewed for season #2.

Note: I’m personally too stupid to figure how to find much less push this fucking button, but I’m sure most HE readers will be able to ace it.

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The reason nobody’s paying much attention to this mornings’s Artemis ! moon launch, apart from the just-announced scrubbing of today’s lift-off? It’s all robotic — live astronauts (including the first woman and first person of color) won’t land on the moon until 2026, or so the projections suggest.

The purpose of tpday’s flight is/was basically to test things out, or to send the ship into space and toward the moon without anything going horribly wrong.

Led by NASA, Artemis is a partnership with the European Space Agency (ESA), Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA).

If successful (and there have been plenty of delays), the Artemis program will return humans to the Moon for the first time since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. As Artemis is far more divers=e and progressive-minded than classic NASA was, the odds of a Moon-based astronaut swatting golf balls (as Alan Shepard did in February ’71) is unlikely.

So who’s read it and what’s the verdict?

It is presumed that producer Sid Ganis will attend the 2022 Telluride Film Festival, and what would this elite Rocky Mountain festival be without him? But take what Sid may or may not say next weekend with a grain of salt. Just saying.

If Sid happens to choose a favorite Telluride film and if he happens to pass along his enthusiasm to Deadline‘s Pete Hammond, just remember what he said last year about Kenneth Branagh‘s Belfast. Branagh remembers, I can tell you, because Ganis calling it “one of the best films I’ve ever seen” almost surely torpedoed its chances as a Best Picture contender.

Because a significant percentage of Academy members went to see Belfast, expecting something phenomenal if not earthshaking, and they emerged two hours later muttering to themselves, “I don’t get it…Sid said this was one of the best ever…it’s okay in spots and the blonde kid was cute and we all like Van Morrison, but really?”

From “Matter of Personal Honor,” posted on 9.6.21:

Pretty much all of your sharper, tougher Telluride critics have problems with Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast. And yet the more obliging middle-of-the-road types (critics, columnists and industry folk alike) have oddly fallen for it.

You can’t grab people by the lapels and order them to have a sense of taste about such matters. If someone likes Belfast or finds it Oscar-worthy, okay — shrug and throw your hands up. But when someone says Belfast is “one of the best films [they’ve] ever seen,” all kinds of crazy reactions come to mind. Because it’s fair, I believe, to compare Belfast’s family dynamic with that of Fred Savage and The Wonder Years, as IndieWire’s David Ehrlich did today.

Either you’re the type who can tolerate or, God forbid, embrace cloying emotionalism, or you aren’t..

From a 9.5 Deadline column by Pete Hammond:

But in the other hand, they’re at least showing some initiative and going for the positive-minded gusto. I can’t participate as Saturday, 9.3 is right smack dab in the middle of the Telluride Film Festival.

In an 11.17.19 email to Rian Johnson, HE passes along reaction to to Knives Out: “It’s actually fairly sharp and clever and funny. The most efficiently assembled, nimble-footed Rian Johnson film ever. Amusingly acted & tightly written. Slick & crafty…nice!

“Daniel Craig is in good shape, but he looks too old to be playing 007. And yet he is.

“The teasing and misdirection moves are very well handled. I had a much better time with it than anticipated.

“Yes, I think it does have a shot at Best Screenplay laurels.

“I’d heard earlier that Chris Evans is the bad guy, but it was still a bit surprising when I realized this was the actual shot.

“Ana de Armas is fine, but seemed to mostly concentrate on looking innocent, pretty, doe-eyed and fetching.

“And yet I HATED the cut of her pants cuffs, riding three or four inches above the sneaker line! Only hipster assholes wear pants that are cut like that — are you telling me that a Paraguayan woman who lives on a modest salary with her family in a grubby, smallish apartment is going to wear HIGH-CUFF HIPSTER PANTS?”

Johnson reply: “So happy you dug it, man. There goes our shot at a BEST PANTS nom!”