…if a gifted, pro-level artist could paint or compose a serious “Meryl Streep and all her significant roles” group portrait — not a cut-and-paste job like this thing but one in all of these Meryl incarnations are freshly considered and re-angled (i.e., not dependent on marketing materials).
The other day James Mangold told Collider‘s Steve “Frosty” Weintraub that his endlessly delayed Bob Dylan biopic will begin shooting five months hence, or sometime in August. Star Timothee Chalamet, primed and pumped, will do his own singing.
Imaginary hypothetical: Imagine that you’re Bob Dylan, and that you have final approval over who directs this film, which has been referred to as Going Electric and A Complete Unknown but ought to be be called Ghost of Electricity. You’ve been told there are five practical choices, given scheduling issues and whatnot — (1) Ridley Scott (this is theoretical), (2) Control‘s Anton Corbijn, (3) Alejandro G. Iñárritu, (4) Robert Eggers and Mangold, whose artistic vistas currently include Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, a forthcoming Stars Wars origin film and an all-new Swamp Thing flick.
Dylan pauses, exhales, furrows his brow and says “definitely the Swamp Thing guy.”
.@mang0ld tells us his @bobdylan biopic with #TimothéeChalamet starts filming in August and Chalamet will do his own singing in the film. #StarWarsCelebration pic.twitter.com/yVluBMTeJz
— Collider (@Collider) April 7, 2023
Seven words spoken by Swedish model Gunilla Knutsson during the initial Noxzema “Stripper” ad (:21 to :25) were culture-shaking. That five seconds of film arguably constituted the most erotic moment ever experienced by 20th Century broadcast TV viewers. Many, many moments of titillation had happened before and certainly have since, but even today it’s damn near impossible to watch this ad and not feel…uhm, something or other. It wasn’t just the words, of course, but that breathy Swedish accent.
Knuttson, age 77, is still with us.
Imagine what today’s Maple Street Monsters would say and do if, etc.
I’ve never once posted a Tucker Carlson clip on this site (okay, maybe once before), but I’m posting this one because of what happened to Riley Gaines last night on the San Francisco State University campus. It was horrific and Orwellian. I’m sorry but the views of both Carlson and Gaines on the overall matter of transgender bio-males competing in bio-women’s sports (i.e., Lia Thomas) strike me as sane and sensible.
It also seems hypocritical for the mainstream liberal media to decry Republicans expelling Justin Jones and Justin J. Pearson from the Tennessee State Legislature, an act of officious brutality that HE deplores for having been way too punitive and out of proportion, and at the same time ignore what happened to Gaines. Please tell me where was the sense or sanity in transgender foam-at-the-mouthers terrorizing and physically assaulting Gaines, whom I don’t agree with in many respects but who didn’t deserve to be threatened and slapped around.
We strongly condemn the violence perpetrated against @iwf spokeswoman @Riley_Gaines_ on @SFSU campus. Riley was violently accosted, ambushed, and physically assaulted during a speech on sex discrimination women face in their own single-sex sports category. pic.twitter.com/uhND8UY2jX
— Independent Women's Forum (@IWF) April 7, 2023
I can’t unsee this Psycho set photo, and particularly John Gavin’s man-toes and especially those hush-puppy slip-ons. I’m sorry but the man’s stock has just dropped a few points, and I mean eternally.
BTW: This was shot during filming of the Phoenix hotel room scene, and Janet Leigh’s satin or silk bathrobe is the same one that “Marion Crane” wore just prior to taking a shower in cabin #1 at the Bates Motel.
I’ve watched and re-watched The Big Country since it hit Bluray in 2011, and especially since the much improved KL Studio Classic version was released in ‘18. I know this film cold, every scene and line and Technirama shot, every bridge and stanza in Jerome Moross’s score, etc.
But until last night, I hadn’t noticed a very glaring element in the final shot, the one in which Gregory Peck, Jean Simmons and Alfonso Bedoya ride down a rugged mountain trail and into a large valley below.
Throughout the entire film the dominant outdoor color (aside from the sky) is pale straw…the landscape is seemingly under-watered and parched as far as the camera can see, the dry prairie grass covering the plains and hills in every direction.
And then in the final shot and for the first time in the film, the entire valley is covered in green.
Was this a visual metaphor that director William Wyler decided upon, signifying health and ample water and a happy ending as far as human nature allowed? Or had nature simply shifted gears or seasons by sprouting fresh grass toward the end of principal photography?
I know that I can’t recall another outdoor film, western or not, in which an entire eye-filling landscape changes its mind so completely at the very last moment.
Imagine being so clueless, so bottom-of-the-barrel and perverse in your movie brain that when somebody asks “favorite Gene Hackman film?”, you actually respond “Superman”!
In no particular order: Crimson Tide, The Firm, Hoosiers, Night Moves, All Night Long, Downhill Racer, The French Connection (Friedkin & Frankenheimer), The Conversation, Bonnie and Clyde, Another Woman, Young Frankenstein, Mississippi Burning.
…but wearing a chickenshit mask?
All my professional life I’ve regarded Amy Taubin as a first-rate, tart-tongued Manhattan film critic and essayist. So it came as a mild surprise to read the other day that (a) she was once a fledgling, semi-noteworthy actress/filmmaker, such that (b) casting director Lynn Stalmaster included her among a list of possibles to play Elaine Robinson in The Graduate.
I’ve just read Adriane Quinlan’s 4.7 “Curbed” piece about Paul Schrader’s life these days at The Coterie, a pricey (at least $15K monthly) luxury high-rise for interesting (read: fairly loaded) seniors. It’s called “Paul Schrader’s Very Paul Schrader Days in Assisted Living.”
This is a dry, well-written observational that almost reminded me at times of Didion’s “Play It As It Lays.” But unlike his well-tended wife Marybeth, Paul doesn’t seem to be living “in” assisted living, or at least not according to my limited understanding of that term.
Living in The Coterie is easy and luxurious, sure, but with Paul churning out screenplays, planning to shoot a kind of Ivan Ilyich-type drama with Richard Gere later this year and thinking about visiting a Manhattan dive bar in order to counter-balance a feeling of too much sterility and perhaps keep in touch with the hurlyburly to some degree, he seems to be living in a fashion that’s more adjacent to assisted living (out of necessity for his wife) than “in” it.
I’m hearing that Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (6.30.23) is “another Top Gun: Maverick in that it’s a love letter to a bygone moviegoing experience.”
Director James Mangold, I’m told, is “very deft in mining the same turf as Rocky Balboa, depicting an aged actor and character taking a valedictory lap. Harrison Ford brings the goods, but it’s Phoebe Waller Bridge who truly ups the game, playing her part like a young Diana Rigg. Audiences will love her character and performance. The film will pack theaters.”
Fine, I said, but I don’t trust Mangold AT ALL. The trailer tells me they’re recycling old jokes and old bits. It looks like a slick franchise tribute and that’s all.
Reply: “Once again, Phoebe Waller Bridge is the key to the film. She gives it heart and soul and wit.
“Contrasting the proverbial disgruntled and grumpy older Ford against hippies in the 60s is what works. He’s an old man yelling at clouds and kids to get off his lawn, but he’s the only one that perceives the dangers of the assimilated enemies working for the American government at NASA.
“Mads Mikkelsen‘s villain is a former Nazi scientist like a Werner von Braun, now working for NASA. Basically a sardonic and philosophical Doctor Strangelove type. Mikkelsen uses a little Peter Lorre-styled menace laced with sinister humor.”
