Month: October 2022

Hugs and condolences to fans, friends and colleagues of Sacheen Littlefeather, the proxy who famously rejected Marlon Brando’s Best Actor Oscar at the 1973 Oscar ceremony — the brooding actor’s response to the film industry’s historically demeaning depictions of Native Americans.

The cancer-afflicted Native American activist passed yesterday (10.2) at age 75. She departed only 15 days after a special Academy tribute on 9.17 that offered apologies for the dismissive treatment Littlefeather received in the wake of her 49-year-old Oscar appearance.

 

…how pronounced are the reactions? Nobody is mild about it — it’s a hate-or-worship thing.

For a gripping account of the ghastly 1955 murder of 14 year-old Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi, and the despicable perversion of justice that followed, Stanley Nelson and Marcia A. Smith‘s The Murder of Emmett Till, a 2003 American Experience doc, is your best bet.

Having just seen and been moved by Chinonye Chukwu‘s Till (UA Releasing, 10.14), I’m actually planning to rewatch the PBS doc.

Partly (and I don’t mean this in a naysaying sense) because Till is not a tightly focused, chapter-and-verse procedural about the tragic facts, and that’s what I, a shameless just-the-facts type, more or less wanted the whole time.

Which is not to say Till is a problem film — it’s not. It’s just that it’s strictly focused on the agonizing ordeal of Emmett’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley (Danielle Deadwyler), and about the dignity and resolve that this half-broken woman summoned in order to bring about a form of justice for her son.

Not legal justice, of course — not in the Jim Crow south of the mid ’50s. But the justice of history and all the facts being known.

Co-written by Michael Reilly, Keith Beauchamp and Chukwu, Till recounts the basics of Emmett’s Chicago life (sharing a home with Mamie, his colorful personality and natty clothing) before his visit to Money in late August of ’55, and how his expression of hormonal arousal (a wolf whistle) directed at Carolyn Bryant, a married 21 year-old storekeep, led to his killing by her husband and half-brother because he’d violated a sexual racial barrier.

The heart of the film is how Mamie dealt with this horrible occurence, and particularly her decision to reveal her son’s mutilated, bloated, bashed-in head to the world by opening the casket lid during his Chicago funeral. This was followed by her Mississippi testimony at the trial of his killers.

Till’s murder is aurally suggested but mercifully not shown.

Till is sad and penetrating and well acted up and down, but award-season-wise it’s mainly an acting showcase vehicle for the gifted Deadwyler, who will obviously be nominated for a Best Actress Oscar. She channels three simultaneous currents — devotion, devastation, steel.

Till is deeply appalling and sadly factual. But it’s not a satisfying story because the actual story itself was unsatisfying. Not only were the bad guys not convicted but they even pocketed a fat fee when they admitted to killing Emmett in a Look magazine article.

If you want the kind of emotional satisfaction that results when the bad guys pay for their foul deeds, re-watch the fictional Mississippi Burning. But if you want to submit to a wowser, soul-deep lead performance, see Till.

Friendo: “Watched Greatest Beer Run Ever, and found it merely okay. The problem is not the actors but the whole concept. Not sure how ‘true’ the actual story is…I mean did the real Chickie get some kind of hard lessons in Vietnam?

“I’d imagined this to be some kind of MASH-style satire but it was deadly earnest and I’m sorry but you’re right about one thing — the scope of this film exceeded Peter Farrelly’s grasp. Russell Crowe is actually very good and I liked Zac Efron but the film is too long and its history-lesson preaching is outdated, obvious, and too broad to stick. A barely passable time-waster but nothing to write home about.”

HE to Friendo: As I understand it the real Chickie gradually became skeptical about the Vietnam War, but he didn’t return home an abruptly changed man. His beer-run adventure was the beginning of his consciousness-raising, but not the all of it.

Last May the understanding was that Apple + had chickened out of releasing Antoine Fuqua and Will Smith’s Emancipation, the fear being that Smith’s Oscar slap incident would overshadow the film, at least in terms of award-season recognition.

But yesterday’s THR report about yesterday’s screening in Washington, D.C. strongly indicates that the Apple team has changed its collective mind. Sounds good to most of us! Bring it on, boys.

Delaying this film for a year wouldn’t have made a damn bit of difference, damage-control-wise.

In a 10.1 Air Mail piece about Italy’s newly elected Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni (“They’re With Her”), George Pendel laments three warning signs — “conspiracy theories about immigration” (whatever that means), Meloni’s “perpetual use of anti-Semitic dog whistles” (obviously odious if true) and “her screeds against political correctness” (what’s wrong with that?…more power!).

The best thing about the article, however unfair or malicious it might be, is Harry Greb’s illustration of Meloni as the evil queen in Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937).

A part of me  genuinely sympathizes with Jordan Peterson’s tearful empathy for incels, and I therefore agree to some extent with Megyn Kelly’s “screw you” dismissal of Don’t Worry Darling‘s Olivia Wilde along with, to some extent, Matt Walsh‘s impressions of all of this, but we have to face facts about incels. 

Various understandings of who and what they are may be flawed, but there’s a certain common ground.  My understanding (take this with a grain) is that incels are lonely guys who are both (a) unattractive to women and who (b) haven’t made a great effort to be attractive to women. 

This is mainly (or at least partly) because they’ve given up.  They tend to live in their own realm (not a lot of socializing) and spend an inordinate amount of time at home with their computers.  They exist, of course, but they clearly don’t want to to be “in the game.”  And they don’t seem to want to take hints about how to fix this.

By all appearances incels don’t eat healthily, they don’t work out (i.e., are overweight) , they’re probably medicating too much (alcohol) and they tend to groom and dress horribly — the usual beardface thing, contemptible flannel shirts, baggy shorts, ugly T-shirts, lace-up sneakers with black socks (or no socks), backwards baseball caps and all the rest of that awful garb.  And their absorption in online forums and superhero realms verges on the neurotic, if not the diseased.

If I was a reasonably attractive straight woman I would run in the opposite direction and I wouldn’t stop running until I ran out of breath, and then I’d hail an Uber or a Lyft to put even more distance between me and these fucking guys.  

With a less desirable genetic inheritance and an even more punishing upbringing and minus the deliverance of movies and journalism, I could have been an incel.  I’m not indifferent to their plight.  But c’mon, man…God helps those who help themselves.

Don’t Worry, Darling, by the way, plummeted 75%  this weekend.  That means people really don’t like it.  And it’s not the craft levels — it’s a reasonably well made film and that’s obviously on Wilde.  The problem is with the third act, which leaves you with nothing and jettisons the whole “social focus on the ’50s” and the granddaughter’s inheritance from Martin Ritt’s No Down Payment. 

Don’t Worry Darling has earned $33 million so far.

 

Paul Schrader’s The Master Gardener, the final chapter in his “lonely haunted man with a certain history writing his thoughts in longhand while sitting at a clutter-free desk” trilogy, is a “Southern fable,” as Schrader put it earlier today.

It’s actually a redemption-seeking love story. Redemption by way of acceptance, submission, renunciation, devotion and violence.

The only truly difficult part for me was Joel Edgerton’s “Hitler youth” haircut — absolutely no one looks good with one of these godawful things. They smell of fear and repression and a form of cowardice and self-loathing.

I’ll leave it there and tap out an HE review sometime tomorrow as it’s 8:34 pm and I’m standing in line for a 9 pm viewing of Triangle of Sadness (which I saw in Cannes last May) at Avery Fisher Hall.

[Originally posted on 3.31.11] I’d always wanted to see Fred Zinnemann‘s A Hatful of Rain on a big wide screen (rather a small television set, which is what I saw it on when I was 15) because it’s in black-and-white Scope — my favorite format. So I caught it last night at the Aero, and briefly spoke with star Don Murray (who’s looking very fit and vibrant at age 82) and listened to a q & a with Murray and costar Eva Marie Saint.

Released in 1957 and set mostly in a small, lower Manhattan apartment, A Hatful of Rain is an on-the-nose melodrama about middle-class drug addiction.

Murray plays Johnny Pope, a married Korean War veteran in his late 20s with a heroin habit that keeps him out at all hours. His brother Polo (Anthony Franciosa) has helped him score for months out of misplaced sympathy, and in the process has blown $2500 that had been loaned by their father (Lloyd Nolan), who’s just come up from Florida to visit. And Pope’s wife Celia (Saint) suspects that he’s having an affair, and is in fact relieved when she finally discovers that he hasn’t been unfaithful in a sexual sense.

The main problem I had with A Hatful of Rain (which is a great-sounding title without thinking about what it might mean) is that it’s not actually about drug addiction as much as 1950s middle-class denial — about the inability of Average Joes like Johnny and Polo to own up to shameful situations and deal with them straight-on.

The ’50s were about everyone trying to live up to a nice white-bread homogenous ideal, about “everything’s okay” and conforming to the norm and not rocking the boat, and boy, is this movie ever about that!

And so for at least 95 minutes of A Hatful of Rain‘s 109-minute running time, all that happens is denial and lying, denial and lying, and more denial and lying. No habit, no horse, no desperation…”everything is fine, pop…really.”

The guilt-wracked Murray and Franciosa can’t tell Saint or Nolan what’s actually going on despite abundant indications that something’s way off, and it becomes very, very exasperating after an hour of this. You’re muttering to yourself, “C’mon, guys…lying about being a junkie all the time is much, much worse than facing up to it, no matter how ashamed you might be.” And you have to sit through another 35 to 40 minutes of endless dodging and fibbing and covering up before it all comes out in the wash.

And Franciosa is constantly over-acting, and I mean in a way that says, “I am an actor playing a character and I am going to pretend like hell that I’m feeling all the heavy stuff that I’m dealing with because an audience needs to understand and consider all this.” He’s giving it everything he has and then some, and it’s definitely one of the more painful performances I’ve had to sit through in a long while.

It’s partly Zinnemann’s fault, of course — he could have told Franciosa to use a little subtlety and economy, but he didn’t. But on-the-nose emoting was par for the course in the 1950s for all but a very few (i.e., Brando, Dean, Clift). Henry Silva plays “mother,” Murray’s drug dealer, and William Hickey plays Silva’s twitchy-scumbag pally or assistant or whatever.

And yet Michael V. Gazzo‘s script, adapted from his B’way play, is reasonably realistic and well-honed for what it is. It has believable dialogue and behavior that seems palatable and recognizable. And it has a clean and decisive ending. (I’m presuming everyone knows that Gazzo played Frankie Pantangeli in The Godfather, Part II.)

But the Aero’s projection, unfortunately, was a little soft. Or the print was a dupe. Either way it looked okay but not all that terrific. I kept saying to myself, “This is going to look so much better when and if it comes out on Bluray.”

Update: An HD version of A Hatful of Rain is now streamable on Amazon.

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HE’s big office romance…I’m sorry, I meant to say the emotionally devastating extra-marital affair that I fell into during my time as an in-office freelancer at People magazine and which continued until her husband found out a couple of years later…it was almost the emotional death of me. (The actual span was between early ’98 and the early fall of ’00…call it 32 months.) No relationship had ever brought so much heartache, hurt or frustration. Graham Greene and Tom Stoppard had nothing on us. I was a man of almost constant sorrow. I was so upset by one of our arguments that one afternoon I made a reckless left turn on Pico Blvd. and got slammed by a speeding BMW, and for weeks I told myself it wasn’t really my fault — it was the married girlfriend’s. Definitely a form of insanity.

Bones and All director Luca Guadagnino speaking at the Zurich Film festival, as reported by Variety‘s Marta Balaga: “The idea the U.S. wants to give to the world has a lot to do with the imagery they create about themselves. We have been sold this imagery like dope. I tried to go [to the States] and do what the great foreign filmmakers of the 1930 and 40s did. They immersed themselves into it.”

Guadagnino said he “doesn’t believe in looking for chemistry between the performers, calling it ‘American stupidity…it’s so ridiculous. The only chemistry has to be in the mind of a director towards his actors.”

Teasing his upcoming tennis movie “Challengers” and “An Even Bigger Splash,” now clocking in at over three hours, Guadagnino wondered if his characters are always driven by passion, not reason.

“I like Election by Alexander Payne. [Tracy Flick] is stubborn and knows what she wants, which is fantastic, but I don’t know if I could make a movie like that or be with a character like that.”

Luca’s next two films are Challengers, a Boston-shot tennis flick with Zendaya, Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor, and An Even Bigger Splash, which Balaga says is “now clocking in at over three hours.”

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A friends says this five-year-old video made Jordan Peterson “famous.” I had never seen it until just now. Comment #1: “The fact that [Peterson] gives them these trans women the time of day and patiently listening before giving a thoughtful response, when at the same time he is being repetitively and aggressively misquoted, his words and intent misrepresented, and just overall berated, is so damn impressive to me. He has incredible self control.” Comment #2: “It’s like you just can’t win with these people. No matter how civil or respectful you try to be to them they will always find something to be offended by.” Comment #3: “This [8.16.21] video was intended to demonize Peterson. It did the exact opposite. His thoughts are now universally appreciated [while] the person who recorded this video and posted it…their greatest contribution was that the video backfired.”