Sex, nude scenes, great wealth, naked ambition — Daniel Petrie and Harold Robbins‘ The Betsy (’78) is one of the most hilariously offensive groaners in the sub-genre of hothouse soap opera.
But early on there’s a great little scene in which aging auto tycoon Loren Hardeman Sr. (Laurence Olivier) is hiring race-car driver Angelo Perino (Tommy Lee Jones) to build “a groundbreaking fuel-efficient car.” Toward the end Oliver/Hardeman’s enthusiasm gets the better of him — “All right, now build me a car! Wheeee!”
The 71-year-old Olivier also has a brief scene in which he’s ravaging one of the housemaids…bip, bip, bip, bip.
I understand, I think, why The Menu (Searchlight, 11.18) hasn’t sold all that many tickets over the last couple of days. I saw it Friday, and immediately warmed to the cold, pared-to-the-bone discipline aspect. It’s basically Michael Haneke‘s Funny Games transposed to the realm of high-end gourmet dining.
It’s essentially about contempt for the one-percenters — a contempt especially felt by creatively gifted types. As well as a general all-round contempt that some of us have deep-down for ourselves.
I would actually call The Menu dry-ice cold rather than just boilerplate ice-cube cold.
The Menu‘s Wiki page calls it “an American black comedy thriller.” That’s misleading. It’s a dry, pitch-black chamber piece — archly-written and performed with a chilly, darkly ironic attitude — but it’s certainly not comedic. It’s about 12 financially flush diners squirming over the distinct prospect of possibly being killed in some horrible way, and if you find this kind of squirming comedic there’s really and truly something wrong with you.
“We’re Gonna Die,” posted on 8.11.22: “Obviously The Menu is a black social satire. The focus is on the repulsion that some gifted artists feel for consumers, including the rich elite. The idea, apparently, is that Ralph Fiennes‘ Slowik, the celebrity chef behind an exclusive restaurant called Hawthorne, is a sociopath. He’s probably a variation of Leslie Banks‘ “Count Zaroff” in The Most Dangerous Game (’32).”
The fact that Adam McKay and Will Ferrell produced The Menu (along with Betsy Koch)…this fact should tell you something. None-too-brights have interpreted this to mean that The Menu is a kind of comedy. In fact it’s a misanthropic fuck-you satire.
Original screenwriter Will Tracy “came up with the idea of the story while visiting Bergen, Norway, when he took a boat to a fancy restaurant on a nearby private island and realized they were stuck (or trapped) on the island until the meal was done.”
I’ve assembled this list with fullrespect and totalaffection, but here are the nineScorsesefilms that have left me feeling at least somewhat gloomy, faintly angry, unsatisfied, vaguely bored, brought down and under-nourished (and not necessarily in this order):
Hugo, Silence, BringingOutTheDead, Kundun, The AgeofInnocence, The Aviator, Shutter Island, CapeFear and New York New York (“an honest failure”).
My intuition is that the Harry Styles-Olivia Wilde relationship, which began during filming of Don’tWorryDarling in October of ‘20, was strongest in the early stages (like all relationships) but faltered when various pressures and complications began to weigh heavily. (Not to mention the ten-year agedifference.) My sense was that the current had all but petered out by the time of Darling’s debut at the ‘22 Venice Film Festival. A two-year relationship means there was genuine spirit and substance. No harm, no foul.
So Robert Richardson‘s lensing of Emancipation (Apple, 12.2) is basically black-and-white with very soft hints of watercolor green. Was Antoine Fuqua‘s period drama shot in full digital color and then desaturated down to near monochrome?
It’s been patently obvious for several years (i.e., early ’17) that President Donald Trump was a criminal, anti-Democratic sociopath and bully boss grifter. The Biden administration has been in power for nearly two years, and Attorney General Merrick Garland has only just announced that potential prosecutions of Trump and his criminal colleagues will henceforth be seriously examined by Jack Smith, a special prosecutor.
People have been calling Garland a wimp and a foot dragger for many months now, and if you ask me for more than sufficient cause. Bring on the new Archibald Cox slash Leon Jaworski!
N.Y. Times‘ Michael Schmidt: “Special counsels were created to put distance between the politics of the moment and the investigative work of the Justice Department. Under the regulations for special counsels, the Justice Department will have to tell Congress about any major investigative moves that the special counsel wanted to take that were overruled by senior department officials. Also, the special counsel can be fired only for cause — essentially, for not doing their job.”
The opening scene of Damien Chazelle‘s Babylon (Paramount, 12.23) is set in a hilly section of Bel Air circa 1926. Except it doesn’t look right. For 80 or 90 years Bel Air has been a flush and fragrant oasis for the super-wealthy, but in the mid ’20s, according to Babylon, it was fairly dry and barren and desert-like — no trees, no bushes, no grass and definitely no golf course. Almost Lawrence of Bel Air.
I’m no historian but this Palm Desert version of Bel Air struck me as slightly untrustworthy. So I did a little researching last night and found a slightly greener atmosphere. In fact Bel Air of the mid ’20s was starting to come into itself. Photos from that era show the beginnings of paved roads, smallish trees and shrubbery, yucca plants, a few mansions, a reservoir, the east and west gates and a little shade here and there.
Steve McQueen: The Man & Le Mans, GabrielClarke & JohnMcKenna’s 2015 doc, states very plainly that LeMans (‘71), the semi-legendary race-track pic, was the film that broke McQueen’s spirit as well as his legend to a significant extent, and that things were never quite the same after it.
In my mind McQueen had a great 14-year run from ‘60/‘62 (The Magnificent Seven, Hell Is For Heroes) to his last quality spurt (Junior Bonner, The Getaway and The Towering Inferno) that ended in ‘74. Call it 14 years. Okay, 15 or 16 if you count Wanted Dead or Alive.
But his Godly McQueen aura, that quietly measured and invincible thing that peaked with Bullitt, that Zen-like, supercool man-of-few-words + awesome motorcycle and Mustang-driving era was shorter — The Great Escape (’63) to LeMans (‘17) or roughly an eight-year stretch. That’s all it was — eight years.
[Originally posted on 10.15.04] Three of us — myself, a friend and an acquaintance i didn’t like — came close to dying in a drunken car crash — a wipe-out that almost happened but didn’t thanks to Chevy engineering.
It happened around 1 am in rural Wisconsin, and I’ll never forget that godawful horrifying feeling as I waited for the car we were in — a 1958 Chevrolet Impala convertible — to either flip over or slam into a tree or hit another car like a torpedo, since we were sliding sideways down the road at 70 or 80 mph.
It happened just outside Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. Bill Butler was driving, Mike Dwyer was riding shotgun, and I was in the back seat. We were coming from a beer joint called the Brat Hut (or possibly the Beer Hut). We’d jointly consumed several pitchers and were fairly stinko. We were five or six miles out of town and heading south towards Markesan, where we had jobs (plus room and board) at the Del Monte Bean and Pea plant. To either side of us were flat, wide-open fields and country darkness.
Butler, a serious asshole back then, was going faster and faster. I looked at the speedometer and saw he was doing 90, 95, 100. I was about to say something when the road started to curve to the right, and then a lot more. Butler was driving way too fast to handle it and I was sure we were fucked, especially with nobody wearing seat belts and the top down and all.
But thanks to those magnificent Chevrolet engineers, Butler’s Impala didn’t roll over two or three times or slam into a tree or whatever. It just spun out from the rear and slid sideways about 200 feet or so. Sideways! I remember hitting the back seat in panic and looking up at the stars and hearing the sound of screeching tires and saying to myself, “You’re dead.”
The three of us just sat there after the car came to a halt. There was a huge cloud of burnt-rubber smoke hanging above and behind us. I remember somebody finally saying “wow.” (Dwyer, I think.) My heart began beating again after a few seconds.
I realize I’m a little late getting in touch with my emotions, but if Butler is reading this, I want him to know I’m really furious about this. Butler almost took away my becoming a journalist and loving my kids and going to Europe and everything else, and all because he had some idiotic anger issues and tended to dare-devil it after the ninth or tenth beer.
Maybe some 17 year-old kid with issues similar to Butler’s will read this and think twice the next time he’s out with friends and starting to tromp on the gas.
