A significant wrinkle has been added to the Nashville school shooter situation. The wrinkle is that the 28 year old shooter, Audrey Hale, was a biological female identifying as a transgender male. Aiden Hale was the transgender name.
Day: March 27, 2023
How Long Will Bragg Drag This Out?
Pull the trigger already…Jesus. Update: Wednesday at the earliest.
Cannes Pad
For many years Ann Hornaday and I shared a beautiful, third-floor, Napoleonic-era duplex in the old part of Cannes (7 rue Jean Mero). Seven weeks hence I’ll be crashing in a new place that’s way the hell over on the other side of town — 15 Rue Jean Cresp, 06400 Cannes, France. Less convenient because it’s a 25-minute walk to the Palais, but there’s some kind of bus service and rent-a-bikes so let’s see what happens.
When They Were Kings
Sydney Pollack and Robert Redford collaborated on seven commendable films over a 24-year period — This Property Is Condemned (’66), Jeremiah Johnson (’72), The Way We Were (’73), Three Days of the Condor (’75), The Electric Horseman (’79), Out of Africa (’85), Havana (’90).
There’s no question that the top three and the hottest streak happened between ’71 and ’75 — a four-year period that gave birth to Jeremiah Johnson, The Way We Were and Three Days of the Condor. Which of these are the best? It’s a close tie between Condor and TWWW. I’ve always leaned towards Condor because I can’t stand Bradford Dillman‘s WASPy character…literally chalk on a blackboard whenever he appears.
In these seven films Redford is “always the same character,” Pollack told Charlie Rose in ’93. “To me he’s a throwback to the actors I was nuts about when I was growing up and going to movies. A real classical, traditional, old-fashioned movie star who was very, very redolent of some kind of American essence, if you will. Very much a part of the American landscape. Heroic in a kind of understated way.
“And I was really fascinated with [the realization[ that all of the characters he played in these films are the same character. He’s gotten older and older and older and gone to different places…sometimes he’s out west, sometimes he’s in Africa, sometimes in New York, sometimes in Cuba…but he’s the same character.
“Number one, he’s a man who doesn’t want to give up any of himself in order to have a relationship…which costs him severely [as] he’s always alone, ultimately. And number two, he doesn’t want to live in a society in which he has to subjugate his own individual needs for the purposes of some collective authority. So he’s usually on the edge of an uncivilized airier territory. It’s why he’s a mountain man…it’s why he’s in Africa. A guy who believes it’s possibly to have relationships but doesn’t really understand what he has to personally give up…an individualist in the sort of real, generic, basic sense of the word.”
The Don Logan Bolt and the Buzz
The special joys of what the HE lifestyle used to be on a year-round basis for nearly 20 years…”it’s not about the money…it’s the charge, it’s the bolt, it’s the buzz, it’s the sheer fuck-off’edness of it all…am I right?”…this kind of bracing, half-mad, snorting, surging life…the laughs and encounters, the luscious flavors and intrigues, the traveling and the airports at dawn and the cavernous European train stations, the occasional set visits, cool parties, subway intrigues, Academy screenings, small screenings, all-media screenings, press junkets, visiting the homes of friends near and far, noisy restaurants, walking the crowded streets of Rome, London, Paris and Hanoi, writing in crowded cafes, hitting the occasional bar with a pally or two, the aroma of exotic places and the hundreds upon hundreds of little things that just happen as part of the general hurly-burly…”
Female (28) School Shooter
Seven are dead from a mass shooting at the Covenant School, an elementary school on the outskirts of Nashville. The cops are saying that the shooter was a female in her teens, armed with two assault-style rifles and a handgun. Three students and three faculty members are dead along with the shooter. When the officers got to the second level of the school, they saw a female shooter, apparently in her teens, and they drilled her right quick.
98% of mass shooters have been men, according to The Violence Project.
If This Recent Freeway Accident…
…had been featured in John Wick: Chapter Four, I would have suspended my disdain and said “okay, not bad, impressive…especially the part with the
Romantic Foolishness on Horseback
In a 7.27.12 N.Y. Times essay, director Alex Cox (Repo Man) went to bat for Kirk Douglas and Dalton Trumbo‘s Lonely Are The Brave (’62).
“It’s hard to imagine a film as radical or pessimistic [as this one] being made today,” he wrote. “Douglas’s lead character Jack Burns refuses to carry ID or listen to reason. He disrespects the power company by cutting its barbed-wire fences; the county jail, by breaking out; the sheriff, whose manhunt he eludes; the military-industrial complex, whose helicopter he shoots down; and us, the viewers, who — when the lights go up or the DVD ends — return to a life played mainly by the rules.
“Remarkably for a low-budget western, Lonely Are the Brave poses uneasy questions about the idea, and value, of heroism,” Cox concluded.
All my life I’ve been telling people that Lonely Are The Brave is one of Douglas’s finest films, and that it certainly contains one of his best performances. I told Douglas this when I interviewed him 41 years ago in Laredo, Texas, and he agreed without hesitation. I actually first said this to him a month or so earlier during a press meet-and=greet at Elaine’s, which Bobby Zarem had arranged.
I respect Lonely Are The Brave for what it does right. I love the plainness and simplicity of it. I love Walter Matthau‘s performance as the sheriff who gets what Jack Burns (or the Burns metaphor) is basically about, and who sympathizes with him. I love widescreen black-and-white photography by Philip Lathrop (Experiment in Terror, Days of Wine and Roses, Point Blank). And early on there’s a very well-handled scene between Burns and an ex-girlfriend, played by Gena Rowlands.
But Burns is too much for me these days. He’s such a romantic fool, a stubborn nine year-old, a middle-aged guy who never thinks farther than the next job, the next pretty girl in a bar, the next shot of rye, the well-being of his horse. He’s basically just swaggering around and saying “fuck it…I’m just not one of those guys who thinks practically about anything…fact is, I’m a romantic construct…a metaphor for the last sentimental cowboy battling the encroachments of civilization.”
I still like Lonely Are The Brave, mind. But not as much as I used to.
How Many Days Does It Take?
…to fully examine who was primarily at fault in a ski-slope collision that happened seven years ago (2.26.16)? Alleged victim Terry Sanderson, now 76, waited almost three years to sue Gwyneth Paltrow for $3.1 million, claiming she wham-slammed into him on a Deer Valley ski slope, breaking four ribs and knocking him cold before “bolting” down the hill.
We all want Gwynneth to lose this case…please.