Yesterday (Thursday, 6.15) I wrote that as much as I’ve long admired Treat Williams‘ lead performance as Danny Ciello, a morally conflicted detective of Italian-American descent, in Sidney Lumet‘s Prince of the City (’81), what Williams does in this landmark film is “more about pushing than being.”
In her “5001 Nights At The Movies” review excerpt book, Pauline Kael says the following:
“Treat Williams has a very closed face — the kind of opaque face that is like a brick wall in front of the camera. And that may be why Williams, as a New York City police officer who agrees to be wired and to obtain evidence about corruption in his unit, plays each scene as an acting exercise — going through so much teary, spiritual agony that you want to throw something at him.
“[Williams] acts all over the place yet the movie — 2 hours and 47 minutes of pseudo-documentary seriousness — is so poorly structured that you keep wondering what’s going on and why he has agreed to inform on his friends. Things don’t begin to come together until you’re headed into the third hour, when the cross suspended from Williams’ neck lights up, like a balloon over his head, announcing ‘Penance! Absolution!’
“There’s one remarkable performance (it’s mostly in the last section): Jerry Orbach, as the tough-minded cop Gus Levy, acts with such sureness and economy that while Williams is flailing about Orbach magnetizes the camera.
“Directed by Sidney Lumet, the film has a super-realistic overall gloom, and the people are so ‘ethnic’ and yell so much that you begin to long for the sight of a cool blonde in bright sunshine.”
I disagree with Kael about Prince in a fundamental way. It’s completely committed to the hardcore process of internal investigations and the unloading of personal guilt, and especially to Ciello grappling with the double-edged morality of exposing corruption while simultaneously (and rather mystifyingly) bringing more and more ruin and torment into the lives of his friends..slowly and gradually.
It’s half-amazing and half-baffling the way the film keeps going and going with scene after scene of district attorneys and prosecutors sifting through tapes, transcripts and testimony…it’s spellbinding in a ballsy sort of way…a way that perhaps no other cops-and-bad-guys film has ever quite equalled.
Like I said a couple of days ago Prince of the City convinced me that no feeling of moral cleansing or purification justifies what Ciello (i.e., Robert Leuci in real life) did to his SIU partners.
But Kael has a point about Williams’ performance.
Speaking a day or two ago at the Annecy Animation Festival, Guillermo del Toro said the following:
HE-posted on 6.20.16: “On a certain level I believe that family-friendly corporate animation is almost demonic in that it has a subversive agenda. It delivers family narcotic highs when your kids are young, but it acts as a kind of childhood sedative that leads to placated thinking and zombie lifestyles.
“Corporate animation is mainly about injecting and reenforcing blandly positive, middle-class consumerist attitudes and values. Watch corporate animation as a kid, live your tweener and teenaged life in malls, sign a college loan that will keep you in a kind of jail for half your life, and eternally invest and submit to American McMansionism — an Orwellian system if there ever was one.
“Childhood was a huge gulag existence when I was a kid, and Disney mythology was a key aspect of that. Comforting but phony emotion dreams do you no good as a 7 year-old — you’ll just have to unlearn them when you get older. And my parents played right along. Everything they did and said to shelter me from things they felt I was too young for constituted a huge minus in the end. It took me years to unlearn the lessons and impressions they passed along in the name of parental compassion.
Take the domestic robot nightmare vibes from Olivia Wilde‘s Don’t Worry Darling and remove the dark undertow stuff and paint it all pink, and you’ve got Barbie. Or so it seems.
Posted on 5.26.23: “I’ve never forgotten LexG saying [in 2013] that he liked The Wolf of Wall Street ‘for the wrong reasons” — i.e., he’d had so much fun with the party-boy behavior that the moral message barely registered.’
“The latest trailer for Greta Gerwig‘s Barbie seems to be following suit. On one hand it’s clearly a satire of girly-girl shallowness and empty Coke-bottle personalities and pretty-in-pink aesthetics, but on the other hand many who will pay to see it (are we allowed to say that younger women are apparently the target audience?) will be adoring the abundant plastic materialism and smiley-face attitudes that the film is telling its audience to maybe think twice about.
“Trust me, there will be millions who will love Barbie ‘for the wrong reasons.'”
Three months ago Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg announced that he had terminal pancreatic cancer and not much time left, and today he passed. He lived a brave and persistent life, and always with a high degree of articulation. Anyone who lived through 92 relatively fruitful and focused years, as he did, has much to be thankful for.
I am a bad Sesame Street Cookie Monster person, or at least I was last night.
“Bad” in the sense that when I ordered a cup of Cookie Monster ice cream at Guerriero’s Gelato (476 Pleasant Valley Way, West Orange, NJ 07052), I wasn’t thinking of the teal-colored Sesame Street Muppet character but of a standard cookies-and-cream-type flavor…you know, vanilla ice cream with oreo cookies and whatnot, etc.
The Guerriero flavor menu offered various kinds of different oreo flavors (banana oreo, mint oreo, coffee oreo, samoa cookie) and I just wanted something plain and unexciting, and so, not being a Muppet person, I figured Cookie Monster would be a thicker or richer cookies and cream flavor…right? So I asked for a medium cup with sprinkles.
When I saw the teal-colored dish, I said “what’s that? I don’t want greenish-blue ice cream.”
Right away the principal server — an overweight Zoomer woman of color — began to dig in her heels and look at me like I was wacked. I had made a big mistake by not being a better Sesame Street person, granted, but all I was asking for was a different flavor. Zoomer woman didn’t want to hear it — her basic response was contrarian, and she seemed to be saying (a) you ordered this, (b) no substitutions and (c) no refunds.
When I persisted (at one point I said “I don’t give a shit” — an unwise thing to blurt out in an argument), she threw her hands up, as if to say “I’ve had it with this belligerent dick!” and went to the manager.
The manager came over and asked what the problem was. I explained and disputed a bit more, and then asked for a refund. Zoomer woman was glaring daggers and agitated, and I just wanted to get the hell out of there. Up until that instant I thought this had been a dispute over my ice-cream-flavor cluelessness, but I suddenly realized this had suddenly become a kind of cultural dispute that had something to do with my being an older white mansplainer.
The manager gave me my money back and asked me to leave, and then she tried to calm down Zoomer woman by holding her arm, but Zoomer Woman abruptly yanked her arm away as if to say “are you on his side?…don’t touch me!”
I said to Zoomer Woman, “Hey, you’re doing great there!…arguing with your own manager now! Not to mention your excellent customer relation instincts!” The manager again asked me to leave and I said “sure, no problem.”
I went to a pizza place two doors down, and ten minutes later Zoomer Woman came in with a friend and I said, “Hey, there she is!” She glared more daggers and said “don’t look at me!”
The cops weren’t called and so nobody was arrested, but I was amazed how a relatively minor misunderstanding on my part, one that could’ve been easily solved by “no problem, sir…what flavor would you like instead?”…a relatively minor ice cream thing had, in the space of 20 or 25 seconds, blown up into something else entirely.
Following up on a Puck exclusive from Matthew Belloni, Variety‘s Rebecca Rubin has reviewed the turbulent IMAX situation — not so much a conflict as a show of temperament and agitation — between Tom Cruise‘s Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One (Paramount, 7.12) and Chris Nolan‘s Oppenheimer (Universal, 7.21).
Cruise is allegedly irate about IMAX execs having contracted with Nolan and Universal to play Oppenheimer and only Oppenheimer on all of the North American IMAX theatres for three full weeks, or from Friday, 7.21 through Thursday, 8.17.
The Cruise-Paramount tentpoler (aka MI:7) will be first out of the gate, of course, but will be presented on IMAX screens for only nine (9) days, or between Wednesday, 7.12 and Thursday evening, 7.20.
The next morning (Friday, 7.21) MI:7 gets the heave-ho and Oppenheimer steps into the booth.
There are only 401 North American IMAX screens, and only 30 of these are capable of projecting hardcore 70mm IMAX.
What could Cruise be saying to IMAX execs that would make any sense? A contract is a contract, right? Could he be saying “you guys know that Dead Reckoning Part One is going to be much, much more popular with Joe and Jane Popcorn than fucking Oppenheimer, which appears to be a high-falutin’ moral drama aimed at intellectual dweebs, and in black-and-white yet …a movie about the development of the atom bomb, which happened over 70 years ago and means very little to Millennials and GenZ.
“You know we’re going to be a much hotter ticket, so why don’t you guys just man up and tell Universal and Nolan that you’d rather play Dead Reckoning for obvious reasons?”
Even if Cruise was to say something along these lines (which would be nuts in and of itself), IMAX execs wouldn’t have a choice. Their commitment to play Oppenheimer is almost certainly iron-clad.
If I was in Cruise’s shoes I would push Paramount to commit to an emergency IMAX-only release for Dead Reckoning a week or two earlier, starting, say, on Wednesday, 6.28 or at least on Wednesday, July 5th. Imagine the want-to-see factor if MI:7 was playing only on IMAX screens for one or two weeks prior to the general release on 7.12. Crowds would be breaking down doors.
Let’s not forget that Dead Reckoning has been in the works for two and three-quarter years, and has been finished and ready to show for a good year or so, and perhaps a bit longer than that.
MI:7 filming began on 9.6.20, went through a COVID shutdown and finished a year later during September 2021.
Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning, Part One was initially set to open on 7.23.21. It was then bumped to 11.19.21, and then bumped again to 5.27.22, and then again to 9.30.22 — four release dates set and cancelled. The current 7.12.23 release was announced on 4.27.23.
