Day: October 14, 2022

My She Said screening would begin at 6 pm, so I decided to catch a 4:05 pm train from Westport to Grand Central. But I was rushed and crazy as I left the Wilton condo, and it wasn’t until the train arrived (around 5:22 pm) that I realized I’d forgotten my large, elephant-hide wallet.

No dough or plastic or even a subway card, and I had about 37 minutes to get to Alice Tully Hall (B’way and 66th). Plus it was raining fairly heavily so the odds of grabbing a cab (which I figured I could pay for with my Apple wallet app on the phone) were slim.

My first instinct was to jump the turnstile entrance to the Times Square shuttle. I tried twice and failed. I was loaded down with my leather bomber jacket, a wool scarf, trusty cowboy hat and leather shoulder bag with a computer inside, and I just couldn’t climb over…I could have done it 15 or 20 years ago but I’m not the gymnastic fellow I used to be.

So I walked upstairs and opened the umbrella and started humping it on foot. I had about 28 or 29 minutes left. It was totally dark with flooding everywhere and heavy foot traffic, and nobody was in a hurry except me.

I turned up Fifth Avenue and then crossed over to Avenue of the Americas, and between the heavy puddles and the overall slickness and the struggle of speed-walking while hyperventilating, I slipped and nearly fell four times. I was wearing an older pair of brown suede boots without much traction on the soles, and all you have to do is walk on those metal subway gratings and it’s easy to lose your footing in a rainstorm.

Lotsa cabs but all occupied. Damp, chilly, soggy-ass hat.

I finally made it to 59th Street and started walking west, and suddenly an open cab appeared. “Do you accept Apple pay?” I asked. The driver said yes but the cab’s pair code was seven digits and my digital bank card only had six. (Don’t ask.)

I tried to load Curb, a cab-paying app, but frenzy, nerves and frustration got in the way.

We were suddenly in front of Alice Tully Hall and the driver wouldn’t let me out until things were straight. “What about Zelle?” he asked. I hate fucking Zelle and told him so. “What about Pay Pal?” I asked. He said he didn’t have it but then changed his mind. I PayPalled him $17 and showed him the iPhone receipt.

Soaked and depleted, I finally made it into the theatre around 6:09 pm. I missed the opening scene in which the young version of Jennifer Ehle‘s character is running down a British street with tears in her eyes, but I was just sitting down as Carey Mulligan‘s Megan Twohey was questioning Donald Trump.

I managed to successfully load Curb after the film, and it wasn’t raining as hard so I got a cab and made it back to Grand Central without too much difficulty.

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Throw these two into a dank, dirty, medieval cell and toss the key into a nearby pond.

10.14 Update from BBC.com’s Ians Young: “One of Vincent Van Gogh’s famous Sunflowers paintings has been cleaned and is back on display, after climate activists threw tins of what appeared to be tomato soup over it.

“London’s National Gallery confirmed it is now back in place, about six hours after the soup incident.”

Climate protesters from "Just Stop Oil" destroyed Vincent Van Gogh's famous 1888 painting of sunflowers at the National Gallery in London. pic.twitter.com/KF4ZNBmtLd

— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) October 14, 2022

Ironic or crude as this may sound, the only thing that’s really missing from Maria Schrader‘s ultra-scrupulous She Said is that it doesn’t fake it enough. Or at all.

It doesn’t throw in those extra elements of intrigue and flash and flavor that entertaining films sometimes do. It adheres to the facts so closely (and to its immense credit, I should add) that it’s more of a muted, highly studious docudrama than a film that’s out to grab you or make you chuckle or give you that deep-down satisfied feeling.

Just about every scene in She Said is gripping or absorbing in some modest way, but unlike All The President’s Men, it doesn’t have an abundance of scenes that tickle or surprise or get you high.

And while ATPM had a pair of glamorous movie stars in the two lead roles (Robert Redford, Dustin Hoffman) and otherwise cast several seasoned actors in supporting parts (Jason Robards, Jack Warden, Jane Alexander, Martin Balsam, Lindsay Crouse, Ned Beatty), She Said goes with a cast of respected, first-rate actors (Carey Mulligan, Zoe Kazan in the lead roles) who, Kazan and Mulligan aside, aren’t highly recognizable, much less marquee names.

When you think of the scenes or bits that really work and get your blood rushing in All The President’s Men, the list boils down to 15:

(1) The extreme closeup of typewriter keys loudly slamming into white paper, followed by the shot of President Nixon’s helicopter arriving at the U.S, Capitol;

(2) The Watergate break-in and subsequent arrest;

(3) The amusing court arraignment coonversation between Robert Redford‘s Bob Woodward and Nicolas Coster‘s “Markham”, and particularly Markham telling Woodward “I’m not here”;

(4) Woodward’s oil-and-water relationship with Dustin Hoffman‘s Carl Bernstein, illustrated by this and that bit (such as Bernstein surreptitiously rewriting Woodward’s copy).

(5) Woodward’s three or four parking-garage meetings with Hal Holbrook‘s “Deep Throat”;

(6) Jason Robards‘ Ben Bradlee giving Bernstein a look when Bernstein insists that the White House investigating Teddy Kennedy thing is a “goddam important story,” and later telling Woodstein to “get some” luck;

(7) Bernstein tricking his way into the office of Miami district attorney Martin Dardis (Ned Beatty) and obtaining incriminating info about CREEP Midwest finance chairman Kenneth Dahlberg;

(8) That long scene in which Woodward reaches Dahlberg on the phone (“My neighbor’s wife has just been kidnapped!”) and discovers that Dahlberg passed along a $25K check to CREEP finance chairman Maurice Stans;

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I saw Maria Schrader and Rebecca Lenkiewicz‘s She Said (Universal, 11.18) last night at Alice Tully Hall, and I knew almost immediately I was in good hands…that it had the same kind of subdued but polished, upscale smarty-pants chops that qualified She Said as a close relation of Spotlight and All The President’s Men…a real-world, just-the-facts journalism drama, lean and mean and no Hollywood bullshit.

It’s based on Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s same-titled, best-selling 2019 book…a book that began with their explosive 10.5.17 Times story, and which helped launch the #MeToo movement. Kantor and Twohey’s explosive reporting about the odious, business-as-usual sexual harassments and all-around malignance of Harvey Weinstein rocked the media and showbiz worlds, and there’s never any sense that the film is anything but a re-telling of what actually happened, how it all went down…the unembroidered nitty gritty.

And that was the basis of the trust, enjoyment and respect that I felt all during the two hour-plus length.

The story is basically “everyone’s afraid to talk on the record about what they know” — the same thing over and over and over, but that’s what happened. You know, of course, that the dam will eventually break but you have to be patient and tough it out with Kantor and Twohey, both of whom have families and are coping with the usual big-city tensions. But they’re exacting and persistent and they play their cards carefully, and things finally begin to pan out.

“Highly approvable,” I texted a friend. “Very well done. Very specific and realistic. Believable, adult, well-handled, fact-driven, studious. Plus excellent acting from everyone from the top down.”

Zoe Kazan and Carey Mulligan are absolutely spot-on as Kantor and Twohey — there’s no disbelieving anything they say or do. And the entire supporting cast is perfect — Patricia Clarkson (Times editor Rebecca Corbett), Andre Braugher (former Times exec editor Dean Baquet), Jennifer Ehle, Samantha Morton, Peter Friedman, an unseen Mike Houston as Harvey Weinstein, Ashley Judd as herself and Saturday Night Live’s James Austin Johnson providing the voice of Donald Trump, who is heard telling Twohey early on that “you’re a terrible person.”

Not to mention the excellent string-quartet score by Nicholas Britell, and the first-rate cinematography by Natasha Braier.

And yet the film kind of flattens out in the final third, and it’s hard to explain how or why. It seems to stop building and gathering force on some level, and the ending…well, it’s fine but I was left with a feeling of very slight disappointment. Now that I’ve had a few hours to think it over I still say that She Said is utterly first rate, even though I would have to say that it’s a notch below Spotlight and maybe two or three notches below All The President’s Men. But still a very respectable, high-grade thing.

What’s missing? Why is She Said, good as it is, subordinate to Spotlight and ATPM?

All I can figure is that there are relatively few standout scenes (although there are a few). Plus it exudes a slight “preaching to the choir” quality. Maybe it’s because I felt more primally stirred by the efforts of a team of Boston journalists to uncover a network of child molestation under the aegis fo the Catholic Church. (A church covering up child molestation does seem more evil than sexual harassment at the hands of a single predator.) Maybe it’s because All The President’s Men is s more absorbing than She Said by way of better writing and scenes that pop out and put the hook in.

But I don’t want to to get caught up in comparing ATPM and She Said. Well, maybe I could do that, come to think…

Yesterday I devoted a few sentences to the legend of Glenn Ford, who was quite the compulsive hound in his prime. That’s what it says, at least, in his son Peter‘s biography, “Glenn Ford: A Life.”

The discussion became a bit heated when HE commenter “johnlsullivan” shared a dim view of Ford’s shenanigans. “Ford was also the only husband of the 4-years-older, tap-dancing legend Eleanor Powell from 1943 (when her career was winding down) to 1959. Can’t imagine what her life must have been like, retired from musicals and married to an asshat who cheats every time he walks out the door.”

HE to Sullivan: “Did I say Ford was a ‘compulsive philanderer’? I said that in his ‘40s to early ‘60s heyday he was ‘Mr. Bone.’ There’s a difference.”

Sullivan to HE: “Uh, if he was married almost the entire time, that by definition makes him ‘a compulsive philanderer.'”

HE to Sullivan: “A philanderer is someone who routinely cheats on a spouse — he/she is first and foremost defined by the marriage and the cheating. Philandering isn’t so much about what he’s doing as what he’s failing to do.

“Glenn Ford seems to have been less defined by cheating (as in ‘I can’t do this’ or ‘I’m just not the marrying kind’) and more defined or led along by the siren songs of eros and rapture. He was Ulysses strapped to the main mast, and the sirens were singing and he was powerless to resist.

“It’s my suspicion that Ford’s urgent and sizable schongola told him what to do, almost as if he had no choice in the matter.

“Ford’s staff of manhood to Ford the actor and husband: “Look, you may be married to Eleanor and a father to Peter, but a glorious, truly breathtaking, never-ending banquet of drop-dead beautiful, alluring, deliciously naked, fascinating, enticingly perfumed, devastating women are out there for the relatively easy sampling and seducing. And I’m telling you that you don’t have an actual choice. You might think you do, but you don’t.

“It’s the ’40s and ’50s and ’60s, after all…you can get away with stuff that would literally get you killed in the post-#MeToo era. Just be polite and gracious and deferential and you’ll be fine. Be kind and considerate and nurturing to Eleanor and Peter…take care of them, be a good provider and father and care-giver. Once you have that covered, you’re free to pick as much fruit from the trees as you can.”

“Trust me when I say that when you’re on your deathbed at age 90, what you’ll regret the most won’t be the things you did as much as the things you didn’t do.”

Sullivan to HE: “It’s not adultery if you’re well-endowed.”