Month: September 2023

Last night I re-watched my Bluray of J. Lee Thompson‘s Cape Fear (’62), which costarred Gregory Peck, Robert Mitchum, Polly Bergen, Martin Balsam, Telly Savalas and, as Peck and Bergen’s Tinkerbell-sized daughter, Lori Martin.

The Martin casting side, I’m a much bigger fan of Thompson’s version than Martin Scorsese’s 1991 remake, which costarred Nick Nolte, Robert De Niro, Jessica Lange, Joe Don Baker and, as Nolte and Lange’s daughter, Juliette Lewis.

The Martin casting made no sense because she was way too tiny to be the daughter of the 6’3″ Peck and the 5’5″ Bergen. And I don’t want to hear any bullshit about how normal it is for the daughter of an exceptionally tall father and an average-sized mom to look like the daughter of Mickey Rooney or Truman Capote. Don’t even try it.

Martin was 14 during filming in ’61 and is clearly pubescent, but she’s roughly the size of a seven- or-eight-year-old. The publicity photo wth Peck shows she was at least 18″ shorter, or roughly 4’10”. Most teenage girls reach their full height by age 15 so don’t try that crap either.

Will you look at that photo of Martin sitting next to Bergen? Martin looks like Howdy Doody.

Thompson reportedly wanted to cast Hayley Mills in the daughter role, and was unhappy about being more or less forced to cast Martin.

I’m very sorry to report that Martin died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound on April 4, 2010, two weeks before her 63rd birthday. Her Wiki page says she had “struggled with mental illness (bipolar schizophrenia) and illicit drug use in the decade after her husband died.”

It was almost exactly 62 years ago when Robert Shelton’s N.Y. Times article about Bob Dylan, a then-unknown 20 year-old folk singer who was performing nightly at Gerde’s Folk City (11 West 4th Street, New York, NY 10012), appeared in the 9.29.61 edition.

The author of the Times article was a respected chronicler of the folk music scene.

The Chicago-born Shelton was 35 when he wrote the 9.29.61 Dylan review. His Dylan biography, “No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan“, was published in 1986. Shelton died in 1995 at age 69.

From Jon Pareles’ Times obit of Shelton, dated 12.15.95: “During the McCarthy era, Shelton was subpoenaed by a Senate subcommittee that had intended to subpoena a man named Willard Shelton, a nationally known columnist. Even though he was summoned in error, [the music critic] refused to answer any questions and was convicted of contempt of Congress.”

Wiki follow-up: “In 1955, Shelton was one of 30 New York Times staffers subpoenaed by the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, who were informed by Times counsel Louis M. Loeb that they would be fired if they took the Fifth Amendment.

“Because he did not plead the Fifth, Shelton was allowed to continue working at the Times but was transferred away from the news department onto the less sensitive entertainment desk, where he became a music critic. Convicted and sentenced to six months in prison, he appealed his conviction and had it reversed on a technicality, only to be indicted, retried, convicted, and have the conviction overturned on a technicality again.

“After several years of appeals in which he was represented by noted civil liberties lawyer Joseph L. Rauh, Jr. the case was finally dropped in the mid-1960s.”

There were at least two reasons why George Clooney‘s The Tender Bar, an adaptation of J.R. Moehringer‘s autobiography, didn’t work as well it could or should have.

I’m speaking of Clooney’s virtue-signaling, inclusion-mandate casting calls.

Example #1 was casting young Daniel Ranieri as a 10 year-old version of Tye Sheridan. The resemblance factor was less than zero as Rainieri looked Southern Italian or Middle Eastern.

Example #2 was Clooney’s decision to change the identity of a wealthy Westport white girl named Sydney, whom Moehringer fell in love with during his time at Yale and who represents the unattainable ideal for a working-class kid from Manhasset…Clooney changed Sydney from a blonde, Daisy Buchanan-like character with a small nose, ample breasts and whiter-than-white parents, into a beautiful woman of color (Briana Middleton) and her parents into an interracial couple (mom is played by Quincy Tyler Bernstine).

This was presentism, of course — i.e., Clooney and producers Grant Heslov and Ted Hope trying to groove along with the ethos of progressive woke Hollywood.

And yet Clooney doesn’t appear to have cast his latest film, The Boys in the Boat, a mid 1930s sports saga based on Daniel James Brown’s 2013 book of the same name, with the same eccentric pretensions.

As best as I can tell, Clooney has adhered to (gasp!) historical realism in casting this true-life saga about a University of Washington boat-rowing crew that represented the U.S. during the 1936 Summer Olympic games in Berlin.

By this I mean no actors of color were cast as crew members, and no LGBTQs were involved. Because the team and its trainers, working-class natives of Seattle, were (gasp!) regular-ass hetero white guys, and for whatever reason Clooney hasn’t tried to fudge this fact.

Pic costars Callum Turner, Joel Edgerton, Jack Mulhern, Sam Strike, Peter Guinness and Alec Newman.

The Wiki page says that Amazon MGM will open The Boys in the Boat on on Christmas day — Monday, 12.25. That can’t be right.

Where’s the teaser?

All hail Marty’s St. Crispin’s Day clarion call, but in terms of mainstream theatrical venues the game hasn’t just been lost but forfeited, starting around the dawn of the Obama era.

I’m hugely grateful that elite cinema havens (Metrograph, Film Forum, Jacob Burns in Pleasantville, New Plaza, Elinor Bunin Monroe, Netflix Plaza, BAM, Alamo, Angelika) are part of our NYC-area culture, and that elevated film festivals (NYFF, Tribeca, Montclair, Woodstock) are still going concerns. But over the last 15 years or so the moronic masses have made their position clear.

As far as the megaplex gladiator arenas are concerned (excluding the odd-but-welcome Nolan-brand detour that was Oppenheimer), your average Millennial or Zoomer schlubbo is averse to paying through the nose for “cinema” in a theatre. I wish it were otherwise but apps and streaming are carrying the ball these days.

This isn’t to say that classic Marty-style cinema shouldn’t be “fought” for but…

“There is a term for Joe Biden, but not two.”

“If I’m on a plane and a voice says, ‘This is your captain speaking, Buzz Aldrin’…I’m getting off.”

“At some point, perception becomes reality. What matters is that voters think Biden is too old. What matters is that he’s going to lose.”

Posted on 9.24.23: Please read Cenk Uygur’s 9.22 Newsweek piece that argues a statistical likelihood that President Biden might lose to Donald Trump.

Plus a new Washington Post-ABC News poll (1,006 adults contacted between 9.15 and 9.20) has The Beast ten points ahead of Biden, 52 percent vs. 42 percent.

Not to mention this Hill opinion piece by Derek Hunter (9.20).

Since she began talking a few months ago and using this and that nickname, 22-month-old Sutton has referred to Joey as “Jo-Jo.”’ Yesterday morning, only a few hours after Joey’s sudden passing, she asked the above.

I was three when the reality of pet death sank in. Here’s what happened.

Posted on 8.31.23:

I’m not saying that extreme inconvenience or suffering due to flooding is a good thing. It obviously isn’t, and I certainly feel badly for those tristate area residents who’ve been impacted. But gullywhumper rain definitely cuts through that flatline feeling that we all feel from time to time.

‘

New York City emergency officials have issued a travel advisory as heavy rain and flooding hits https://t.co/E30q97yK2O pic.twitter.com/xw1EgGvXmM

— philip lewis (@Phil_Lewis_) September 29, 2023