Month: September 2023

I liked Nikki Haley (fast on her feet, razor-sharp comebacks) and Chris Christie (stood his ground, told it straight) in Wednesday night’s Republican debate -— definitely my top two.

True Detective: Night Country: “As the endless winter darkness envelops Ennis, Alaska, it id discovered that eight guys who operated the Tsalal Arctic Research Station have vanished without a trace. To solve the case, Detectives Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) and Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis) will have to grapple with the gloom they carry in themselves and dig into the haunted truths that lie buried under the eternal ice,” blah blah.

Imagine if Martin Scorsese‘s Killers of the Flower Moon (Apple/Paramount, 10.20) had stuck to the original scheme by focusing on unambiguous, straight-ahead, white-guy FBI fortitude, and if the ads had used an image of Leonardo DiCaprio‘s Tom White, the guy who headed up the Osage Murders investigation back in the 1920s…

Imagine if the Flower Moon one-sheet had mimicked the ads for Mervyn Leroy‘s The FBI Story with Dicaprio wearing the hat and firing the pistol instead of James Stewart…

Better still, imagine if Scorsese and Apple marketers had decided to (ironically?) re-use Max Steiner‘s main-title music from The FBI Story.

You can laugh if you want, but a “heroic FBI!…hooray for Leo and his team!” approach to this story would, I suspect, connect better with Joe and Jane Popcorn than the melancholy Native American guilt trip that the movie actually is…an approach that has, by the way, no particular point of view. It just catalogues what happened.

I’m imagining this because the original conception of Killers would have starred DiCaprio as Tom White. When Scorcese and screenwriter Eric Roth decided their adaptation of David Grann‘s non-fiction book needed a woke rewrite, Dicaprio decided to play yokel bad guy Ernest Burkhart while Jesse Plemons was tapped to play White.

Posted on 9.12.23: 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.

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It is Louis CK‘s opinion that Stanley Kubrick‘s Eyes Wide Shut “doesn’t touch earth…it takes place in an incredibly high-up, thin-oxygen world…it’s not about anyone that anyone [in the audience] knows,,,the movie has this plodding tone and plodding pace, which is what [Kubrick] does here.,..if he was a comic book artist, people would say ‘this is how the guy draws.’ Kubrick was a masterful filmmaker, and [when I watch Eyes Wide Shut] I just say ‘this is where he was at, and what his fucked-up brain was making.'”

I remember writing two or three pieces in ’99 and ’00 about how Eyes Wide Shut was a fascinating stiff that essentially portrayed Kubrick’s decline. I remember bully-boy David Poland unloading ridicule in my direction because of this.

All to say that it gave me comfort to come upon a similar judgment in David Thomson‘s re-review of Kubrick’s final film, which is found on page 273 of Have You Seen…?.

Here’s the first paragraph and two sentences at the article’s end:

“This is the last film of Stanley Kubrick — indeed, he died so soon after delivery of his cut that the legend quickly grew that he intended doing more things to his movie. But it’s hard at the end not to see the substantial gulf between the man who knew ‘everything’ about filmmaking but not nearly enough about life or love or sex (somehow, over the years those subjects did get left out).

“Not that the film lacks intrigue or suggestiveness. Mastery can be felt. It is just that the master seems to have forgotten, or given up on figuring out, why mastery should be any more valuable than supremacy at chess or French polishing.”

The last two lines of Thomson’s review: “It is a shock to find that the film is only 159 minutes…every frame feels like a prison.”

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What if, God forbid, President Joe Biden experiences a Mitch McConnell freeze-up this year or next? Or, God forbid, falls off a bandstand like Bob Dole did at the relatively young age of 73? You think something in this realm won’t happen? If Biden wins re-election he’ll finish his second term at age 86. He’s a good capable man in relatively good shape for an 80-year-old, but we know what’s almost certainly coming.

Biden can barely handle himself now in interviews, and a day-old Axios piece reported that amid concerns about his age, Biden’s team is on a “don’t-let-him-trip mission.” And his second term, if he wins, won’t even begin for another 16 months, and it will end on 1.20.29. You think Joe’s going to…what, reverse the natural process and be in better shape when he takes the oath of office on 1.20.25?

Many of us with older parents know what coping with final-stage aging entails. At age 82 or 83 my father (who died in ’08) fell in his living room, hit his head on a coffee table and cut his upper lip all to hell. I visited a couple of days later and he was scowling and infuriated. Coping with body failure (primarily balance, not to mention Depends) is brutal.

It would be one thing if Biden was 65…fine. Or even Dole’s age during the ’96 campaign, but he’s seven years beyond that. Reality is knocking on everyone’s door right now, and most Democrats are going “oh, he’s fine and if he dies Kamala Harris will be a great president.” Good God!

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Donald Trump is finished as a businessman in New York State, and he’s looking at a likely fine of $250 million when it’s all over. He’ll probably be forced to sell off key properties. Not to mention his astronomical legal costs regarding the numerous indictments, etc.

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A 9.26 post on a British 007 fan site (www.ajb007.co.uk), written by a Minnesota-based fanatic named “Gymkata”, has passed along allegedly knowledgeable intel about negotiations between Chris Nolan, EON and Amazon that would involve restarting the Bond franchise as a stripped-down, back-to-raw-elements ‘60s period fantasy a la Dr. No and From Russia With Love.

World of Reel’s Jordan Ruimy yesterday passed along the second–hand “Gymkata” dish, chapter and verse.

Nolan’s alleged idea would theoretically mean a complete time-travel return to the Eisenhower-and-Kennedy eras, and particularly a refined and gentlemanly James Bond (possibly to be played by Aaron Taylor Johnson) with a vague undercurrent of casually cruel, sexist-pig entitlement…a perverse restoration of that (heh-heh, just kidding) good old “run along like a good girl, time for man talk” Sean Connery attitude…a rabbit hole immersion in a dusty, possibly pre-Beatles, low-tech realm of typewriters, newspapers, black-and-white TVs, phone booths, early ‘60s muscle cars, narrow-lapel Saville Row suits, unfiltered Turkish cigarettes, shaken-not-stirred Martinis and worldly but compliant sex bunnies who…Jesus H. Christ, who the hell are we kidding here? Ourselves?

You can’t go home again, bruh. Delicious as it may seem from a hazy distance, the pre-Goldfinger era couldn’t be fully, organically reconstructed unless the commitment to go back there is 100% total and absolute, and that would require a director with a brutally demanding Kubrickian mindset.

Plus the #MeToo brigade would shriek and howl. The deadweight EON caretakers (i.e., Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson) haven’t the courage for such a radical venture. And Nolan, a chilly control freak who’s shown time and again that he’s fundamentally unable to even flirt with the sensual, much less connect with pulp-erotic yesteryear dreamscapes…even Nolan would lack the necessary cojones to reinvest in a politically intolerable, dead-and-gone realm. And adhering slavishly to the original Ian Fleming stories…again, you can’t go home again.

Don’t get me wrong. I would love to surrender to a convincing reboot of those old From Russia With Love ingredients. I just don’t think it’s politically or psychologically or even physically (i.e., financially) possible.

Would I love to be proved wrong? Most certainly. Not so much for the inevitable resuscitation of Connery-recalling, Hugh Hefner-ish sexism (which a time travel Bond film would have to accommodate for honesty’s sake) as a revisiting of old-fashioned, bare-bones plotting and atmosphere.

Taylor Swift is riding the hormones, buzzing along, giddy, giggling…another meaningless, thoroughly disposable new relationship once it runs outta gas.

Sooner or later she’s gonna dump him, and soooo what? Nobody ever lasts with her, man. Everything winds down, and it’s all stinking bullshit. Plus all football players get fat.

Thank God Kelce isn’t a freckly redhead…at least there’s that.

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The “Ruth Bader Biden” paragraph was spoken by Carville.

HE regrets the passing of David McCallum. Then again the Scottish-born actor lived a rich and mostly robust 90 years, which puts him in a kind of creme de la creme realm. Plus we all have to go sometime.

I never felt much enthusiasm for his Illya Kuryakin character in The Man from U.N.C.L.E, but what could my personal interest in or enthusiasm for a rotely-written exotic second banana in a plastic James Bond ripoff…who cares about any of that stuff?

I was slightly more intrigued by McCallum’s portrayal of Lt. Cmdr. Eric Ashley-Pitt in The Great Escape (’63). Pitt was the guy who created that long-shoulder-sock-with-a-string device that enabled the prisoners of Stalag Luft III to camouflage the dirt that had come from the digging of the three tunnels, Tom, Dick and Harry.

On the other hand I was infuriated when Ashley-Pitt intentionally attracted attention and drew fire from German security forces at that train station so as to protect Richard Attenborough‘s Squadron Leader Roger Bartlett (aka “Big X”) and Gordon Jackson‘s Flight Lieutenant Alexander MacDonald.

Where is it written in the annals of honorable war behavior that sometimes a lower-ranked guy needs to sacrifice himself so that two higher-ranked guys can get away?

If I’d been in Ashley-Pitt’s shoes and saw that Bartlett and MacDonald were about to be captured, I would have kept my head down and said to myself “tough break for those guys…I’m very sorry but this is war and them’s the breaks…I’m sure as shit am not going to commit suicide so they can get away…fuck that noise.”