Month: September 2023

Friendo: “Poor Things + Barbie = same story. Imagine if Barbie was about a sexual awakening after she gets her VAG.”

HE: “[A critic friend] said Poor Things was like Barbie directed by the Marquis de Sade.”

Friendo: “Okay but I say Russ Meyer.”

This morning I asked World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy about the best films he’d seen thus far the 2023 Toronto Film Festival, and he listed six — Alexander Payne‘s The Holdovers, Richard Linklater‘s Hit Man, Cord Jefferson‘s American Fiction, Azazel Jacobs‘ His Three Daughters, Hayao Miyazaki‘s The Boy and the Heron and Kristoffer Borgli‘s Dream Scenario.

HE: “The Holdovers and Hit Man aside, would you describe the other three as triples, homers, ground rule doubles or line-drive singles?”

Ruimy: “I think they’re all triples or homers.”

A couple of hours later Ruimy listed 12 allegedly top-tier films hat he’d seen in Toronto — the above six plus Michel Franco‘s Memory (HE automatically endorses all Michel Franco films), Errol Morris‘s The Pigeon Tunnel (which I saw and loved in Telluride), Kitty Green‘s The Royal Hotel (Australian outback animals making life hell for two female bartenders….forget it), Bertrand Bonello‘s The Beast, Harmony Korine‘s Aggro Dr1ft (forget it), and Anna Kendrick’s Woman of the Hour.

Three days ago (9.10) London Times columnist Hadley Freeman posted a thoughtful, paywalled essay about Woody Allen that’s certainly worth reading. I usually post excerpts from articles that I approve of, but this time I’ve pasted the whole thing.

By striking terror in the hearts of industry cowards and thereby suppressing the distribution of Allen’s Coup de Chance (even as a streaming title), Woody haters are perpetrating a social and cultural crime that is absolutely loathsome and pernicious.

After 31 years of this, it’s really time to back off and let it go. Lord knows their punitive point has been made over and over. They are the witch dunkers of Salem.

And as difficult as it may seem, they all need to once again attempt to understand a basic truth that all mature societies understand. A work of art or art-tinged commerce, like a movie or a play, is one thing, and the private behavior of its creator, however imperfect (and who among us is?), is something else entirely. They are two parallel twains that can not and should never meet.

My Cannes Killers of the Flower Moon review, tapped out on my iPhone 12 outside an old-town eatery, amounted to a B or a B-minus.

What I wrote between bites of pizza and salad under a damp awning wasn’t a pan. I don’t regard Killers as a weak or poorly crafted film (from a technical standpoint) at all. It’s not. I regard it as a solemn, diligent, semi-haunting, very well made film that “doesn’t quite get there.”

Repeating: Flower Moon isn’t a bad film or a failure. It’s somewhere between a B and B-minus. But it never really tags one. Albert Pujols‘ bat never really goes crack. You know that feeling when a film is moving along at a steady professional clip and then the big crescendo is supposed to happen but it just kind of trickles off? A film that rumbles along in a steady, workmanlike and then cruises to the finish line without setting off fireworks? That’s Flower Moon.

HE to World of Reel’s Jordan Ruimy: “Whadaya mean by saying that The Holdovers is ‘far from Alexander Payne’s best film’?

“It is one of his best, and it’s very carefully rendered…every line and and every shot lands just so…each and every brushstroke contributes exquisitely to the whole…c’mon, man, don’t be a snob!”

Here’s my abbreviated Telluride review.

In a 9.12 Time cover story by Stephanie Zacharek, Killers of the Flower Moon director Martin Scorsese has confirmed what costar Lily Gladstone told Variety‘s Zack Sharf nine months ago, which was that Flower Moon, a sprawling crime epic about the FBI’s investigation of the Osage Nation murders in 1920s Oklahoma, was given a woke rewrite — one that de-emphasized the FBI nailing the bad guys and emphasized the perspective of Osage Nation and the pain their community had endured.

“After a certain point, I realized I was making a movie about all the white guys,” Scorsese tells Zacharek. “Meaning I was taking the approach from the outside in, which concerned me.”

In a 1.20.23 article, Gladstone explained to Sharf, Variety‘s resident wokester lobbyist and spokesperson, that Scorsese had basically re-thought the 1920s saga, which had begun as a kind of “birth of the modern FBI” story.

This is how Scorsese’s adaptation of David Grann’s 2017 novel began, according to what costar Leonardo DiCaprio told me at a San Vicente Bungalows party in late 2019.

The basic plot, Leo said, would focus on former Texas Ranger Tom White (whom Leo was intending to play at the time), and his having been ordered by top G-man J. Edgar Hoover to take over the Osage murders case and make sure the bad guys pay the price.

But eventually Scorsese and screenwriter Eric Roth concluded that a “birth of the modern FBI” tale wouldn’t be woke enough (i.e., too white-guy oriented), and that their film hadn’t sufficiently considered the Osage native point of view of the killings and the investigation of same.

Gladstone told Sharf that Scorsese “worked closely with the real-life Osage Nation to ensure his movie would properly represent the community.”

The result was that “the Osage Nation ended up positively changing Flower Moon from what Scorsese [had] originally planned.”

“The work is better when you let the world inform the work,” Gladstone explained to Sharf. “That was very refreshing how involved the production got with the [Osage Nation] community. As the community warmed up to our presence, the more the community got involved with the film.

“It’s a different movie than the one [Scorsese] wanted to make, almost entirely because of what the community had to say about how it was being made and what was being portrayed.”

HE antagonist Glenn Kenny, for one, didn’t like the thrust of Gladstone’s statements, which was that Scorsese had altered course out of concern that Flower Moon would be perceived as too white-guy oriented (a la James Stewart in Mervyn LeRoy‘s The FBI Story, which I rewatched and riffed about on 7.16.23).

“That’s Gladstone’s perspective,” Kenny argued, “shaped through that of Sharf, and in any event has nothing to do with reshoots. Scorsese and company were getting Osage input from well before the cameras started rolling.

Kenny to HE: “Look, man, I know how precious the ‘Native Americans strong-armed Scorsese into going woke‘ narrative is to you, and I know you’re gonna stick with it through thick and thin, but just don’t pretend too much insider knowledge here.”

HE to Kenny: “So Gladstone misstated Scorsese’s creative strategy (i.e., before the alleged Osage Nation re-think) in order to celebrate the Osage Nation’s strength as a culture and to emphasize that their perspective on the 1920s murders was, thank God, crucially included at the 11th hour?

“You’re saying, in other words, that Scorsese had understood the entire Killers equation from the get-go, as had original author David Grann, and that neither of them needed woke tutoring as far as the Osage perspective was concerned? And that DiCaprio was full of shit when he told me in late ’19 that the film would be about the birth of the FBI?

“Gladstone, in short, was spinning her own impressions last January, and Sharf, a go-along wokester parrot, played along?”

Kenny to HE“: “Maybe so.”

HE respects Scorsese for dealing straight cards by confirming what Gladstone conveyed to Sharf last January.

To hear it from Zacharek, Marty is basically saying, in effect, “I knew we had to respect the Osage Nation viewpoint, first and foremost, and so we did that.

“I also knew, to be perfectly honest, that our movie wouldn’t be approved by the wokester chorus if Eric and I didn’t ease up on the ‘FBI agents as white saviors’ theme, and so we decided to woke it up and make the kind of of film that Lily and the Native American community in general wanted to see.”

Scorsese elaboration by way of HE interpretation: “It just seemed like a politically sensible and sensitive thing to do…now I can say with a proud and straight face that I’ve made a Scorsese-style woke film about Native American genocide in 1920s Oklahoma, and I feel completely at peace with this approach because the facts required it.

“In the final analysis these are the times in which we’re living, and I knew that the wokesters had dismissed The Irishman because it was too white and too goombah Italian and wasn’t in the multicultural swing of things like Parasite, and so I adjusted our approach so that Native Americans would approve, and that wokesters wouldn’t give us a hard time.”

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Most of us are okay with on-screen romantic pairings between older guys and younger women. Five- or ten-year gaps are fairly common in real life, of course, with many women preferring the relative security of guys who (a) are more emotionally secure or at least less hound-doggy, (b) have been around the block a few times, and (c) earn better-than-decent incomes.

In other words movie romances about 10 to 20 year age gaps are generally accepted, especially if the older guy looks fit and trim (flat abs, decent muscle tone, no jelly belly) and hasn’t allowed thinning hair or bald spot issues to get out of hand, and still has that old sparkle in the eye, which generally translates into a suggestion of sexual vigor.

25-year gaps are pushing it but even they can pass muster, depending on the chemistry and charm factors.

If you like the older guy for his spiritual and emotional qualities, falling in love with a compatible younger woman (and vice versa) can seem like a good thing all around…thematically such pairings suggest renewal and revitalization…a second chance at life.

But in order to accept or approve of such relationships moviegoers have to be able to imagine the couple still happening five or ten years down the road. There has to be a credible future of some kind.

In North by Northwest, for example, Cary Grant‘s Roger Thornhill is supposed to be mid to late 40ish (although Grant was actually in his mid 50s), while Eva Marie Saint‘s Eve Kendall was presented as being in her early 30s. It wasn’t hard to imagine Thornhill and Kendall having a sexually active (perhaps even kinky) relationship ten years hence, although I couldn’t see them raising kids.

In As Good As It Gets, Jack Nicholson‘s Melvin and Helen Hunt‘s Carol appeared to be a good quarter-century apart, and communal instincts told most of us that Melvin, a wealthy author who was around 60, would always be more than a bit loony, with or without mood stabilizers. I saw them lasting no more than a couple of years, if that.

In Quentin Tarantino‘s Jackie Brown (’97), Robert Forster‘s Max Cherry, a mid 50ish bail bondsman, seemed roughly a decade older than Pam Grier‘s titular character. (In actuality Forster was only seven or eight years senior.) They were so similar in terms of age, attitude and attractiveness, in fact, that their mellow romantic attraction barely qualified as an “age gap” thing. It was obvious that Max was not only in love with Jackie but easygoing and accepting. You knew they would never fight about anything.

I’m discussing age gaps because I happened to land this morning on hollywoodagegaps.com, and because I recently encountered an unusual romantic couple in Phillip Noyce‘s Fast Charlie (Screen Media), a droll, character-driven genre thriller that will open in October following a Mill Valley Film Festival debut on Sunday, 10.7.

There’s a quarter-century gap between Pierce Brosnan‘s Charlie, a civilized, soft-drawl hitman who loves fine cooking, and Morena Baccarin‘s Marcie, a taxidermist with a world-weary, Thelma Ritter-ish attitude about things, and yet they fit right together. Like Max and Jackie, Charlie and Marcie are all about ease and compatibility.

An adaptation of Victor Gischler‘s “Gun Monkeys” with a screenplay by Richard Wenk, Fast Charlie (which costars the late James Caan in his final performance) delivers a fair amount of gunplay, albeit the understated, no-muss-or-fuss kind. It’s a reflective, character-driven story of cunning and desire (not just romantic but epicurean) on the Mississippi bayou.

All to say that if you’re rooting for the couple in question and want their relationship to build into something, age differences tend to recede.

Way-too-extreme age gaps in age and temperament: James Stewart and Kim Novak in Vertigo, Sean Connery and Michelle Pfeiffer in The Russia House, John Wayne and Capucine in North to Alaska, Wayne and Angie Dickinson in Rio Bravo, Humphrey Bogart and Gina Lollabrigida in Beat Hhe Devil, Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn in Charade, Robert DeNiro and Amy Brennaman in Heat, Daniel Day Lewis and Vicky Krieps in Phantom Thread, Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe in The Misfits.

And yet I believed in a future for Cary Grant‘s John Robie and Grace Kelly‘s Francie in To Catch A Thief. Go figure.

I doubt if I’ll ever re-watch Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York (12.02) again.

Daniel Day Lewis’s “Bill the Butcher” performance and Dante Ferretti’s production design are the best aspects. It certainly looks and feels authentic in terms of sets and period details and whatnot. But the idea of rival 19th Century gangs hacking and clubbing and chopping each other to death…later.

This Shawn Levy tweet (posted last night) got me going:

The Gangs of New York Wikipedia page notes the following:

Here’s my favorable review of Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker’s Gangs of New York work print as it existed in October ‘01, or roughly 14 months before the final version opened in theatres. I titled the article “Gangs vs. Gangs”:

Note: In paragraph #2 I should have written “Scorsese’s apparent lack of interest” rather than “disinterest.” Disinterested means impartial, which wasn’t the case.

Posted recently on Instagram by Drew Barrymore:

In the same way that Mitch McConnell will never step down despite his freezing episodes, doddering Joe Biden will never throw in the towel until he’s forced to. He could be drooling and wearing diapers in a wheelchair, and he still wouldn’t quit.

Anyone who’s spent family time with an elderly grandfather or great-grandfather knows he’s too old to be President, and that it’s at least theoretically possible that he could become Woodrow Wilson during the last couple years of his second term, if not sooner…God forbid.

So given the impossibility of Trump winning against Biden, we’re all stuck with a muttering, slurring, wispy-voiced, physically healthy but obviously-less-than-mentally-alert President between now and 1.20.29, when Joe will be 86. (He’s now 80 — his 86th birthday will be on 11.20.28.)

Joe is holding things together and making some good moves (his strong support of the ongoing Ukraine defense effort is commendable) but there’s no question that he’s too old for the job. And I am literally terrified of Kamala Harris becoming president.

Every time I listen to Joe give a speech I sink into depression. God, how I miss the oratorical snap and cadence of Barack Obama or, for that natter, JFK.

If there was an activist God trying to make things better for American citizens from time to time, He/She/It would convince Joe to admit reality and throw in the towel and thereby allow the two most appealing gubernatorial heir apparents — Gavin Newsom and Gretchen Whitmer — to compete for the 2024 Democratic nomination. And then one or the other could run against Nikki Haley, and then things would feel right again.

Haley is a conservative, but she’s not a crazy sociopath — she’s sane and practical in the Glenn Youngkin mode.

As one who’s visited Morocco three times (and Marrakech twice — mid ’70s + the 10th annual Marrakech Film Festival (12.3 to 12.11) I can only say how sorry I am for all the misery and suffering following last Friday’s earthquake. The epicenter was closer to the Atlas mountains and so Marrakech didn’t get hit too horribly, but I wonder what the Marrakech town square (setting of the knife-in-the back sequence in Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much) and the medina look like now. I’m very, very sorry.

UPDATE: The number of people killed in Morocco’s deadly earthquake has reached 2,681, according to official stats.

🔴 LIVE updates: https://t.co/NfK0xSQUDY pic.twitter.com/UlU4HK1cS0

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) September 11, 2023

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