Just a slight reminder about Disney’s woke-feminist Snow White (’24), which everyone hates thanks to Rachel Zegler‘s remarks about how profoundly tiresome the 1937 animated version was (who wants a sappy love story featuring a stalker Prince Charming?) and how the forthcoming version is about Snow White becoming a progressive leader of some sort (perhaps vaguely similar to 2012’s Snow White and the Huntsman)…just a slight reminder that this proto-feminist version was co-written by Greta Gerwig and Erin Cressida Wilson. in other words, a fairy-tale version of manosphere pissnado…right?
Two days ago I was standing next to a Bridgeport shopping complex, waiting to meet Vinny-the-mechanic so he could fix my injured car window. To pass the time I decided to visit a sporting goods store. The glass door opened out and was manual.
As I opened it two middle-aged women of color were close and approaching, so I stepped back and gave them full leeway. The glass door had one of those cylindrical metal-washer devices so it was slowly closing (i.e., not slamming) in their direction.
Naturally one of the women got huffy about this — offended that I hadn’t quickly stepped to my right and held the door open like Sir Walter Raleigh in Elizabethan England. “You don’t hold doors?” she snorted. If I had said a single questioning word in response, it would have been a whole big thing. It could’ve been a TikTok or YouTube video. Lucretia McSnippy was ready to get down and have it out…I could feel it.
I thought I was doing the right thing by getting out of their way…not actually! What I should have done was disappear into thin air.
[Posted seven and 1/2 years ago — 1.18.16] Three days ago I was on my way to returning a SIXT rental car (La Cienega south of Wilshire) when I decided to pick up my Beatle boots from a West Hollywood shoe guy. Acting on impulse and very suddenly, I swerved into the shoe guy’s parking lot.
The boots were too tight so I’d asked the guy to stretch them out. I wasn’t wearing socks but I put them on and they fit well enough. I impulsively decided to ask the guy to repair the banged-up suede mocassins I was wearing, so I wore the Beatle boots from then on.
Or I did, at least, until I dropped the car off and began walking back to the pad. My bare heels began rubbing against the inner boot leather and were starting to really hurt. So I went into a men’s store opposite the Beverly Center and bought a pair of socks. No, not gold toe socks.
But with the socks on I discovered that the Beatle boots were too tight again. So the hell with it — I walked the rest of the way home in the socks, carrying the boots in a plastic bag. At that moment I was the only sober guy in Los Angeles who was walking on a major boulevard in socks — nobody else was doing that. I had to stare at the sidewalk the whole way, of course, as I had to watch for stones or shards of broken glass.
I’m realizing now that the Beatle boots will probably never work out. Because I used to be a size 12 but now I’m a 12 and 1/2 or so.
Back in the mid ’90s Robert Evans told me the following: “When you get older your feet get a little bigger, your ears get longer, your teeth get smaller and your nose gets bigger. And women won’t fuck you as much. Or you don’t want to fuck them as much. Or something like that.”
Flash forward to 8.18.23: I still have the same Beatle boots. I can wear them as long as I’m not walking several blocks.
Justine Triet, the director of the Palme d’Or-winning Anatomy of a Fall, would be in a stronger position with woke critics if she was gay. Unfortunately she’s straight with two kids. (Her boyfriend is director Arthur Harari, who co-wrote the Fall script.) The film will almost certainly play Telluride. Pic stars Sandra Hüller (The Zone of interest) as “a writer trying to prove her innocence in her husband’s death.”
Yesterday afternoon I met Vinny-the-mechanic at the same vaguely-down-at-the-heels Bridgeport shopping center. It took him about 90 minutes to take everything apart and repair the up-and-down driver-side window, which involved replacing the whirring, battery-driven electric motor that controls the movement.
Everything apparently back to normal…great! I paid Vinny, thanked him, drove back home.
25 minutes later I pulled into a Balducci’s parking lot in Southport, and pulled the latch that opens the door. Nothing…door wouldn’t open. Vinny had forgotten to connect the inside-the-door whachamacallit. I crawled over the console and escaped through the passenger side door. To my relief the outside driver-side door latch still worked, but the inside latch was kaput.
I called Vinny…silence. He made a mistake, okay, but he’s still a smart, methodical mechanic. Having a bad day, I presumed.
Nonetheless a sixth sense told me I should hire someone else to fix the door-latch problem. This morning I drove the VW Passat up to a Georgetown Shell station, as I know and trust the mechanic. I dropped it off around 8:30 am. Two hours ago they told me I’m good to go.
Everyone’s maximum musical receptivity happens in their late teens and 20s, and young Spielberg was right in that sweet spot (18 to 21) during the mid ’60s era when the Beatles were really cooking with petrol.
Has anyone ever heard of a baby boomer who wasn’t completely throttled and transformed by the trifecta of Rubber Soul, Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band? What kind of walls did you have to live behind to be immune? And yet Spielberg didn’t become a Beatles fan until he listened to the White Album in late ’68. Where the hell was he in ’65, ’66 and ’67? What was he doing, living off the land in Borneo?
Oh and the Beatles were a “fad” for only the first few months after they exploded, and their musical maturity phase began to kick in around mid ’65. If you weren’t tuned into what they were doing between Rubber Soul and Sgt. Pepper you were a Martian. And by his own admission, that was exactly what Spielberg was back then.
“I was a teetotaler,” he toldRolling Stone‘s Peter Travers 16 years ago. “I used to collect soundtrack albums from movies that I loved. I wasn’t smoking grass or taking LSD, though many of my friends were…I know, I know. I’m a disappointment. But I was just too busy making pictures.”
So if he wasn’t “hearing” the Beatles during their most creative period what else has he missed over the last half-century? Seriously — this quote is huge. It contains volumes, multitudes.
HE’s Moneyball review (“Moneyball Serenity“) was posted nearly 12 years ago, and almost exactly a decade about the 9/11 massacre. I don’t want to hear any bullshit about how Billy Bean‘s sabre-metric strategies didn’t pan out like the movie implied that they would. I simply responded to what Bennett Miller‘s film was and still is, and I phrased it very nicely. It’s one of HE’s best-ever reviews.
Bennett Miller‘s Moneyball (Sony, 9.23) is my idea of a triumph. A triumph of surprise and deception, I should add. It’s an emotionally low-key, thinking man’s Field of Dreams — a smart, true-to-life, business-of-baseball movie with a touch of the mystical and the sublime, and propelled along by a highly pleasurable lead performance by Brad Pitt.
It’s not just the emotional and spiritual currents that makes it great, but the subtlety of them.
Earlier this year someone called it “the Social Network of baseball movies,” and that’s a close enough description except for the fact that Pitt’s lead performance is highly likable. Moneyball is definitely a nominee for Best Picture, Best Actor (Pitt), Best Director (Miller), Best Adapted Screenplay and so on.
And I don’t want to hear any crap about how it’s not rousing enough or sports-movie-ish enough or emotionally uplifting enough in a Rocky-Warrior sense. Fuck all that. This is a movie about how things work, and what it’s really like to say, “Wait, I’ve got a new idea” and to deal with the entrenched hate that always comes from that.
I’m not into baseball that much but I used to be, and Moneyball re-awakened my affection for the game precisely because it’s a little nerdy — my first text was that “it’s baseball nerd heaven” — and kinda mystical and because it doesn’t traffic in the standard sports-movie inspirational uplift crap…and yet it does do that in a nicely grown-up way.
On a rote level Moneyball is a complex, enjoyably verite, real-life, beautifully directed sports flick about two baseball-underdog iconoclasts (Brad Pitt as the Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane + Jonah Hill as a brilliant, Yale-educated nerd-dweeb that Pitt hires) using a kind of new-math strategy to try and win games. But that’s just the plot-engine aspect, the “hook”…whatever.
What it’s really about is the ecstatic, pure-gravy pleasure of watching a first-rate, award-quality fall movie that’s made for you and me and everyone out there who hated Stupid Crazy Love, plus the holy-shit excitement of a serious, Oscar-level Brad Pitt performance. Seriously. Pitt has never had a better-written part, or such a spirited, multi-layered and vulnerable character to dig into, or given a more primal movie-star performance in his life.
Yep — it’s Pitt vs. Clooney in this year’s Best Actor race. Okay, Pitt vs. Clooney vs. Leonardo DiCaprio as Gay Edgar Hoover.
Moneyball is exactly the kind of sports movie that I’ve recently come to love (i.e., partly a Friday Night Lights-type deal and partly an Undefeated thing but without a do-or-die locker-room speech or a “we’re Number One!” third-act win). It’s mystical, statistical, spooky, emotional and wonderfully original. And wonderfully “pure” in a sense. The complexity mixed with the spirituality and the political reality of things…just brilliant.
Plus it’s elevated all along by killer-level Steve Zallian-meets-Aaron Sorkin dialogue. Did I mention Pitt is great in it?
Put another way, it’s about organizing a baseball team in a different nerdy way (“saber-metrics” and all that) and the political pushback that Pitt and Hill have to deal with from almost everyone, but — this is the exceptional surprise element — it’s also about how the forces and wills of the Gods suddenly step in and make things happen when they feel like it. Angels over the outfield. So call it a nerdy baseball movie mixed with spirituality and politics and adult-level complications…sublime.
Hill is perfect — it’s easily his best performance since Superbad and his first normal-level adult performance. Phillip Seymour Hoffman is tight and testy and spot-on as the Okalnd A’s manager. Arliss Howard delivers a perfect third-act cameo. Robin Wright has exactly one scene as Pitt’s ex-wife (director Spike Jonze plays her boyfriend…hilarious!) Tammy Blanchard is visible as a player’s wife but has no lines. The woman in Pitt/Billy Beane’s life is his daughter (Kerris Dorsey), and she’s all the movie needs.
I’m going to repeat an observation from an HE reader that was initially posted last March:
“Sports films are almost never really ‘about’ sports. They always have a primary, more traditionally cinematic concern on their mind: a relationship on the rocks or a budding romance, the rise of the downtrodden or the triumphant return of the forgotten or discarded. Even the notion of the big game being won is a well-trodden, pedestrian conceit that serves as the usual metaphor for the final challenge a protagonist or team must face.
“Moneyball may well be the first sports film not seen through the prism of a romance a la Bull Durham, a character drama a la The Blind Side, a tragedy a la Brian’s Song, or a comedy a la Major League. Rather, it is the first of its kind: a sports film seen through the prism of sports.”
“[The film’s version of] Michael Oher is treated, by the Tuohys, as a kind of family mascot. There’s never any conflict between them, and not much in the way of conversation.
“Bullock’s Leigh Anne, with her diamond-studded crucifix necklace, charges through the film like a refugee from Dallas, crusading for her sainthood merit badge, while Michael, with his benign torpor, rarely rouses himself with a force of ego. At one point, when Leigh Anne and Sean are discussing whether to become his legal guardians, Sean says, ‘Michael’s gift is his ability to forget. He’s mad at no one, and he really doesn’t care what happened in the past.’ Leigh Anne agrees, making a (comic) point of how much she hates it when her husband is right.
“But Sean’s statement about Michael is shocking in how wrong it is. Michael’s gift is his ability to forget? Who would say that about a white character who’d suffered the kinds of things Michael did? The movie is reducing him to a Teddy-bear simpleton, with little to no psychology. He never has rich exchanges with the other family members; he never expresses anything but gratefulness (or, after he crashes the truck they just bought him, cringing regret). There’s no interior complexity to Michael, and that’s the lie of The Blind Side. It’s what allows his character to basically be used by the Tuohys to feel good about themselves.”
Okay, but you know what I remember about The Blind Side? I bought the bullshit. I knew I was being fed suspicious vegetables, but they found their way into my heart all the same. And the sales agent was Sandra Bullock‘s performance as Leigh Anne. Everyone bought it, and no amount of complaining 14 years later can change that,
We’re all pleased that IFC/Sapan will be opening Trân Anh Hùng‘s The Pot au Feu (aka The Taste of Things) later this year as part of a generally vigorous effort to snag Oscar attention and perhaps even Best Picture and Best Director nominations.
And we’re extra double ding-dong delighted that the NYFF guys aren’t calling it a North American premiere, which means this masterful foodie flick will be debuting at Telluride two weeks hence. (The Toronto Film Festival slate is not an option as its slate is wrapped tight with no room to breathe.)
But we’re still appalled that IFC/Sapan has (a) dropped the original, perfect-sounding French-English title, which translates as The Pot Roast and was used when it played in Cannes three months ago, and (b) saddled it with the pedestrian title of The Taste of Things….please!
I wrote last night that The Taste of Things “isn’t an awful title, but it sounds vaguely antiseptic and blanded down…flat, lacking in flavor and aroma…it no longer sounds or feels like a film simmering in French culture, but like a gourmet cookbook that might have been written by the owner of a suburban restaurant in northern New Jersey or Westchester County.”
The best response was posted early this morning by HE commenter “Christophe“: “I don’t mind the new title, but somehow find it ironic that notoriously marketing-obsessed Disney/Pixar had the guts to release a mass-market film called Ratatouille, and yet an indie foreign-film distrib thinks The Pot au Feu is too strange-sounding for discerning audiences.”
When you get right down to it, IFC/Sapan is hung up on au Feu as the original title starts with “The“, followed by “Pot,” a familiar kitchen term to any rube in Arkansas.
IFC/Sapan exec #1 during conference: “But they won’t understand what au Feu means, and we’ll lose tens of thousands in revenue!”
IFC/Sapan exec #2: “But millions understood Ratatouille, and that’s obviously a bigger tongue-challenge than au Feu could ever be.”
IFC/Sapan exec #3: “Will you come up for air, please? Clem Kadiddlehopper is not going to pay to see this film in Dogpatch, Kentucky…it’s a film that discerning, semi-educated audiences will flock to in the cities and suburbs, and a nice easy title like The Pot au Feu won’t give them a moment’s hesitation.”
This means it’ll open this year and not, as feared by HE, in the winter or early spring of ’24. From my perspective this is wonderful and gratifying news, as The Pot-au-Feu is still HE’s hands-down favorite film of the year.
It is extremely heartening, to say the least, to learn otherwise, and that this Cannes-praised film might….do we dare to dream? …play Telluride and one or two other prestigious fall festivals…who knows?
I apologize for airing my pessimistic concerns, and I congratulate IFC and Saban for doing the right thing.
The bad news is that Tran Anh Hung‘s film has been retitled, according to Variety‘s Clayton Davis, as The Taste of Things. HE’s gut reaction: gaaahh!
IFC and Saban’s concern, obviously, is that U.S. audiences might find the original French title, which basically means meat and vegetable stew, meaningless or overly obscure.
The Taste of Things isn’t an awful title, but it sounds vaguely antiseptic and blanded down….like something that a whitebread PTA committee might have decided upon. It’s flat, lacking in flavor and aroma. It no longer sounds or feels like a film simmering in French culture, but like a gourmet cookbook that might have been written by the owner of a suburban restaurant in northern New Jersey or Westchester County.’
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But overall this is excellent news, at least as far as IFC & Saban’s Oscar determinations are concerned.
