If you’re living in one of these soulless, pencil-thin glass towers on Central Park South, you are definitely suffering from a serious aesthetic deficiency — a condition some would call the wealthy Shallow Hal syndrome.
Day: October 17, 2023
Rossen’s Dream Dashed
In other words, during filming of The Hustler director Robert Rossen developed the hots for female lead Piper Laurie, unaware that she’d been “seeing” critic Joe Morgenstern (aka “JoMo”). Just before filming ended Rossen offered Laurie a significant role (presumably the sensuous, mentally disturbed temptress that Jean Seberg eventually played) in Lilith, but the blood drained from Rossen’s face when Laurie said she was about to marry Morgenstern…gaahhh!
Persistence of Marketing
Friendo: “A grieving widower appears on TV to lament his wife’s passing, but also to push a website and products he’ll continue to sell. The average person is too obtuse these days to see what a cynical move this is. This is Elmer Gantry stuff. Alan Hamel pushed products and a website and claimed in this chat with Today‘s co-hosts that his late wife, barely dead a couple of days, wanted women to keep buying ‘incredible’ products. This is a eulogy delivered via QVC.”
Week-Long Ear Bug
Eight or nine days ago I listened to a newly released version of Joni Mitchell‘s “See You Sometime” from “Joni Mitchell Archives, Vol. 3: The Asylum Years (1972-1975).”
And it won’t let me go. I’m hearing it over and over…car, shower, writing, walking, shopping. The only way to discharge a pernicious ear bug is to simply tough it out through dozens of listenings….eventually it’ll run out of gas.
This song is not one of Mitchell’s all-time greatest, but I can tell you one thing: There’s no way Taylor Swift will ever write or perform a song anywhere near as gentle, complex, delicate, intimate, poetic and melodically moody as “See You Sometime.”
Swift does what she does very well or least very successfully, but Mitchell’s eclectic mode of expression (or a facsimile) just isn’t in her. She’ll never get there. Mitchell’s stuff is alluring, sexy, sophisticated, nectary, lasting — Swift songs are candy.
Reverse Magritte
Jonathan Glazer‘s The Zone of Interest has been shorn of explicitness while humming with implication. That’s the basic idea, and either this approach knocks you flat or it doesn’t. It’s a “brilliant” film as far as its austere design allows it to go, but the only thing that really got me was the opening overture — intense “oh, shit” music played over a black background before light invades and the film begins.
The Day The Tables Turned
Osage Nation language consultant Christopher Cote on Killers of the Flower Moon: “This story is almost being told from the perspective of [Leonardo DiCaprio‘s] Ernest Burkhart, and they kinda give him this conscience and it kind of depicts that there’s love [between Ernest and Lily Gladstone‘s Mollie]. But when somebody conspires to murder your entire family, that’s not love….that’s not love. That’s just beyond abuse.”
Obviously with Christopher taking issue with a key dramatic choice made by DiCaprio, Martin Scorsese and screenwriter Eric Roth and with Jeff Sneider also balking, Killers of the Flower Moon is clearly in trouble. (And so is Gladstone although she may not know it yet.) For those who think Oppenheimer is the cat’s meow, Cote and Sneider have given them reason to feel comfort.
@hollywoodreporter #osagenation language consultant christopher cote shares his complicated feelings about #martinscorsese’s #killersofthesunflowermoon #killersoftheflowermoonmovie ♬ original sound – The Hollywood Reporter
“I Am Sick of This False World and Will Love It Not!”
In the wake of all those non-convictions, Kevin Spacey has delivered a riveting, commanding performance.
