Month: October 2023

“…and I’ll probably end with that platitude.”

Interviewer (starting at 3:28): “If drug addiction is that stultifying, why does it take such a grip on people for so long orm, indeedm, until they die?”

Taylor: “The key for an addict is how much of a relief [he/she may] feel when they first discover their drug of choice.” [HE: In Taylor’s case it was horse.] “When that really works for them, watch out for the back end. Because you’ll hold on to the very end. You’ll be the last person to admit that [your drug of choice has] gotta go.”

HE confession: “Recreational drugs didn’t exactly ‘run the show’ when I was 22 or 23, but they sure were my friends. I saw my life as a series of necessary survival moves, spiritual door-openings, comic exploits, adventures, erotic intrigues — everything and anything that didn’t involve duty, drudgery, having a career and mowing the lawn on weekends. Pot, hashish, mescaline, opiates, peyote buttons, Jack Daniels and beer were my comrades in crime.”

For all of my insane drug experimenting in my early 20s, I never got stuck in an addiction pit. Okay, I got into trouble with vodka-and-lemonade in the mid ’90s, but I put that puppy to bed also. I just have this resistance to self-destruction…an ability to shrug it off and walk away.

Todd McCarthy‘s approving review of Fast Charlie is a little too flourishy in terms of tallying the shooting victims.

Opening line: “Rasty and nasty with a cherry on top, Fast Charlie is a down-home Southern gangster yarn with a staggering body count but a sweet taste awaiting the survivors at the end of the day.”

HE exception: “Staggering”? The actual Fast Charlie body count is four on-screen and eight guys total. No offense but McCarthy’s review kinda makes it sound like it’s competitive with Sam Peckinpah‘s The Wild Bunch.

In my 9.20 review, I called it “half of a laid-back, settled-down relationship drama 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 half of a blam-blam action thriller.”

McCarthy: “This adaptation of Victor Gischler’s 2003 novel ‘Gun Monkeys‘ is an inelegant affair that gushes hot blood all over the place but leaves enough room for an appealingly credible May-December romance to grow in the midst of the constant mayhem.”

Pierce Brosnan as low-key, gourmet-food-loving assassin in Fast Charlie.

During last night’s Mill Valley Film Festival q & a (l. to r.): Scott Allen Perry (songwriter), Fil Eisler (score composer), second-unit director Warren Thompson, book author Victor Gischler, director Phillip Noyce.

HE: I chose to focus on the Pierce Brosnan-Morena Baccarin thing because that’s where the soul and the nourishment are, and I chose to downplay the shootings because shootings are inevitably rote. Plus McCarthy didn’t mention the laundry chute sequence, Pierce’s gourmet appetites or the Morena’s freelance gig as a taxidermist…little quirks and character touches that stand out.

McCarthy: “Whereas senior movie mafia and gangster characters through the decades have tended to be revered — if only for simply having survived for decades — it nonetheless seems that Charlie Swift (Brosnan) may not get the respect he deserves from the bad-guy wannabees who populate the bayou country of Louisiana. Young hot-shot punks often think they’re better than anyone, but the fit, gray-haired Charlie knows the score much better than they do and some of the reckless show-offs don’t last very long.

“The way the first victim bites the dust immediately sets the darkly seriocomic tone for the entire film, and it’s an approach that veteran Australian director Phillip Noyce manages to more or less sustain no matter how gruesome and perverse any given situation may become.

“[The film] puts you in a position to either embrace [the violence] as fun or discard it as foolish. What tilts you in the former direction is the energy Noyce injects into the silliness as well as the kick that results from pushing the material so far. The filmmakers look to have gone all out to make something of this and it more or less pays off in its outlandish boisterousness.”

“The [Brosnan-Baccarin] scenes are nicely written. Despite the fundamentally preposterous nature of their situation, the actors invest their performances with a palatable sense of their hopes, desires and uncertainties. The result is a conclusion that seems both wish-fulfilment and not entirely implausible, even if, as Charlie admits, ‘In my line of work, it’s best not to have any long-term plans.'”

Surely the Gaza militants — principally Hamas but also Hezbollah — understand that launching an all-out war with Israel will end in rockets and ruin. Backed by the U.S., Bibi is about to unload Israel’s full military might big-time.

Israel obviously needs to defend itself, but their maneuvers will soon turn savagely offensive. The Hamas attacks, in short, will prove a suicide move, so why bring about their own self-destruction?

Furious and illogical rage. Rage so infernal and absolute that it can’t be stilled. Some don’t like to be reminded that there’s a history behind this, but here it is:

However welcome and applauded they may have been during the Clinton era, the 1993 Oslo Accords were an incremental step in a long process that has steadily been about Palestinian disenfranchisement, oppression, humiliation and generally getting the shit end of the stick.

The Oslo Accords ratified a peace agreement between Israelis and Palestinians, founded upon recognition by the Palestine Liberation Organization of the State of Israel (as in “the right to exist”) and a recognition by Israel of the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people (“self-rule”) and as a partner in negotiations, etc.

But over the last three decades there has been a steady encroachment and usurpation of Palestinian West Bank territory by Israeli settlers and the Israeli military, and the Palestinian pie slices have gotten thinner and thinner.

In 1975 U.N. resolution 3379 declared that Zionism was “a form of racism,” and even though 3379 was renounced in ’91, the ’75 resolution stands as a historical statement of widely-shared opinion.

Today Israel controls well over 60% of the West Bank, and Palestinian economic development has been stymied and/or obstructed. Please watch “Israeli settlements, explained | Settlements Part I,” a 2016 Vox report.

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The brutality and slaughter of war has always been hateful and horrible. Plus Israelis and Palestinians have been at each other’s throats since the ’60s. So when I heard about the new hostilities a day ago, I went “okay, here we go again.”

But according to N.Y. Times columnist Thomas Friedman, “This is not your usual Hamas-Israel dust-up.”

Israel newspaper columnist Nahum Barnea has told Friedman that “this is the worst day that I can remember in military terms in the history of Israel, including the blunder of the Yom Kippur war, which was terrible.”

Friedman: “This time Israel was invaded in 22 locations outside the 37-mile-long Gaza Strip, including communities as far as 15 miles inside Israel, by a military force belonging to ‘the equivalent of Luxembourg.’ And yet this tiny force not only invaded Israel, overwhelming Israeli border troops; it took Israeli hostages back to Gaza across that same border — a border where Israel had spent roughly $1 billion erecting a barrier that was supposed to be virtually impenetrable. That is a shocking blow to Israel’s deterrent capabilities.”

I’m presuming Quentin Tarantino is back in Tel Aviv, where he lives with his wife Daniella, son Leo and a year-old daughter, and keeping a sharp eye out. Brett Ratner recently emigrated to Israel.

I thought I had listened to Joni Mitchell‘s “You Turn Me On” too many damn times. And then I listened to this ballsy version…Joni, Neil Young and the Stray Gators…the absolute best.

Spike Lee in recent Washington Post interview:

HE (i.e., me) several weeks ago:

It has long been my conviction that HE commenter Castor Troy, Jr. is a liar and a flinger of mud pies. I find him detestable, and here’s one reason why.

Chris Rock‘s Martin Luther King film will be based upon Jonathan Eig’s “King: A Life. It’s been described by its publisher as an “intimate portrayal of King as a courageous but emotionally troubled individual who demanded peaceful protest while grappling with his own frailties and a government that hunted him.”

Initial HE reaction: Emotionally troubled?? Because he routinely cheated on his wife (Coretta Scott King) with white women in hotel rooms? Didn’t that just make him a standard-issue hound? Maybe he felt he needed perversity in his life to counter-balance everything else?

I wrote yesterday that football star and actor Jim Brown “was into white women also. Was this due to Brown being a somewhat frail, emotionally troubled guy, or was it because his tastes simply led him in this direction?

“Remember that Spartacus scene in which Laurence Olivier‘s Marcus Licinius Crassus says he enjoys both snails and oysters? Were Crassus’s appetites a result of his being an emotionally unstable fellow? As J.J. Hunsecker once said, ‘Are we kids or what?'”

What did Castor Troy, Jr. make of this? Like a good little scumbag, he slandered.

If I run into a guy with a closely trimmed moustache and fairly short hair, I say to myself “uhm, okay…a man’s man type, possibly a conservative, probably born and raised in the West or Midwest or the South or northern Maine…possibly a former athlete or an ex-military guy…probably steady and trustworthy but not that hip.”

But a Wyatt Earp handlebar moustache and super-short hair with Marine Corps whitewalls? No way, man…no way in hell.

If I was a real-deal artist like Taylor Swift, I definitely wouldn’t fuck this guy. Because if I did I would know what everyone would be saying…another quickie relationship, and then she’ll write a song when they break up.

I was speaking to Spike Lee in early December ’18 in a Manhattan screening room. (Alan Elliott‘s Amazing Grace had just shown, and Lee, one of the producers, had just sat for a q & a.) Being a huge fan of Green Book, I asked Spike if he’d seen it. Spike said he hadn’t, but a little voice was telling me that he had and was fibbing because he didn’t want to get into it.

Sure enough, Spike turned out to be a Green Book hater. Which really surprised me. I figured a director as skilled and sophisticated as Lee would at least admire the craft that went into Peter Farrelly’s film, not to mention Mahershala Ali‘s sublime performance. But no — Spike had decided to join the haters because he wanted a film set in 1962 to look, talk and feel like it was set in 2018 — i.e., all woked up.

“Wow, that’s not very perceptive,” I muttered to myself. “Why would a feisty independent guy like Spike, a guy who was born in 1957…why would he  side with the wokesters?”

Now Lee has done it again, and I’m realizing that there are two Spike Lees — the smart and willful guy who knows all about sharp-edged filmmaking (Lee #1), and another who says what he feels he ought to say given the anti-white-guy woke climate and whatnot (Lee #2).

He’s told The Washington Post‘s Jada Yuan that Killers of the Flower Moon is “a great film” when he knows deep down it’s more of a sturdy, well-crafted one than a truly stellar achievement…one that exudes that Scorsese aliveness, that snap-crackle-and-pop. He’s calling it “great” because it says over and over that greedy white Oklahoma murderers were really bad news, and because Lee feels a natural kinship with anti-racist cinema.

He’s also told Yuan that Lily Gladstone — “that Native American woman,” he calls her — will be “winning an Oscar. And I don’t think that’s a supporting role. I think that’s a leading role. She’s got my vote.”

I’m sorry but Lee #2 is just full of shit. He knows what a leading actor has to do in order to qualify as such (i.e., stand up, carry the ball, confront the bad guys). He’s not saying what he really thinks deep down. He’s playing along with the identity fanatics.

Message from a critic friendo, received yesterday: “With Killers of the Flower Moon, Scorsese has become a dull moralist. This is not why we all loved his films over the decades.”

We’re all familiar with a certain Howard Hawks quote, the one that says a good movie (or a formidable Best Picture contender) always has “three great scenes and no bad ones.”

An hour ago i was reading a Vanity Fair excerpt from “My Name Is Barbra,” Barbra Streisand‘s forthcoming autobiography. It was a chapter about the arduous and complicated making of The Way We Were.

A few paragraphs in I read a slight stunner:

So Hawks has competition? I’d never read Lean’s version before and was immediately suspicious. Just to be sure I spent a half-hour Googling it….nothing.

If the quote is genuine, Lean seems to be saying that even if a film has three or four great scenes, it isn’t quite enough. It needs a full five, he’s saying, which I think is overly demanding.

I also like Hawks’ quote better because of “and no bad ones.”

I would rather stick needles in my eyes than see David Gordon Green‘s The Exorcist: Bologna.

I have, however, read the Wiki synopsis. The fate that befalls Ellen Burstyn‘s Chris McNeil character is cruel and humiliating.

A half century ago Burstyn emerged from William Friedkin‘s The Exorcist with pride and dignity. That’s gone now.

“Torturing of Ellen Burstyn“, posted on 7.6.21:

Leslie Odom: “Excuse me…are you Chris MacNeil? My God, it’s you! How are you? Are you good? I’m asking because my daughter’s been possessed by Pazuzu or some cousin of his and I’m wondering if you’re up for kicking that demon’s ass like you did back in the early ’70s.”

Burstyn: “I’m fine, thanks, but I didn’t do anything. I persuaded a Jesuit priest named Damien Karras to exorcise the demon, and he asked an older priest, Father Merrin, to help him. I didn’t do a thing. All I did was scream and weep and plead for help.”

Odom: “Yeah, but you know all about demons and shit, right? You know how to deal with the moving beds and green vomit and all that. You’re experienced.”

MacNeil: “I don’t know anything. I just went through a horrible ordeal a half-century ago, and now I’m almost 90. Find your own exorcist.”

Odom: “But I need your help.”

MacNeil: “What’s wrong with you? Look at me…what am I gonna do?”

HE commenter Jeff Jinx: “Anticipating another mind-numbing, CGI shit-fest. The power of green compels them.”

The conventional time to memorialize poor Chris Reeve would be 12 months hence — the 20th anniversary of his death. The Superman star and quadriplegic crusader passed almost exactly 19 years ago — 10.10.04. Three days later I wrote a piece called “Guarded Guy.” Hollywood Elsewhere was only two months old at the time. Here’s an excerpt:

I had an experience with Reeve in 1980, when I was a pup journalist living in New York. It began with an interview piece I wrote about him for a New Jersey weekly called The Aquarian, the main subject being Somewhere in Time, which I had a thing for at the time, or more particularly the beautifully shot finale. (I wrote about this in ’17 — reposted below.)

Reeve and I met for the interview at a restaurant on upper Columbus Avenue. I had done my homework and prepared a lot of deep-focus questions, and I think he enjoyed our talk. Sonia Moskowitz, a gifted photographer whom I was seeing at the time, sat in for the interview and then took some photos of Reeve (plus one of him and me) outside the restaurant. Then we went back inside to sort out the bill.

I was a bit green back then, but I’d done a few celebrity interviews and knew that the basic rule was that the studio always picked up the tab. I assumed this would be the case but there was no Universal publicist at the restaurant to cover the check, and I didn’t know what to do because my Aquarian editor had never talked to me about expenses, and I didn’t have the cash to cover it on my own.

I thought Reeve (wealthy actor, right?) might step up to the plate and get his money back from Universal. It was that or somebody would have to leave a personal check or wash dishes. Talk about embarrassing. When I told Reeve I was a bit light I could see he was irritated. We kind of hemmed and hawed about it on the sidewalk, I offered everything I had (about $15 bucks), and he finally dug out his wallet and said, “Well, all right” and paid the balance.

When I wrote my piece I threw in a couple of graphs at the end about this bill-paying snafu. I thought it was both amusing and humanizing on some level that a successful big-name actor who’d played Superman was capable of getting flustered about paying a check, just like anyone else.

A week or two later, just as the Aquarian piece came out, I went with a couple of friends to see Reeve in The Fifth of July. We visited his dressing room to say hello after the show, and as an ice-breaker I asked if he’d seen the article. Bad question. Reeve hadn’t liked my closer and said so. He was scowling at me. I felt like I was suddenly in the Twilight Zone. I thought I’d written about the restaurant-tab thing with humor and affection. I’d figured this plus the fact that the overall piece was highly flattering would have charmed him.

To soothe things over I wrote him a note the next day saying I was sorry he had that reaction, that I really thought the humor I got out of our check-paying episode made it a warmer, fuller piece, and that I hoped he wouldn’t hold a grudge.

A few weeks later I ran into Reeve at an invitational party at a Studio 54-like roller skating joint in Chelsea. As soon as he spotted me he came right over, smiling, and said, “Hey, Jeff. Got your note…everything’s cool…don’t worry about it.” We shook hands, he smiled again and said “peace,” and that was that.

What this told me about Reeve is that he was gracious, obviously, and able to handle embarassments and whatnot. It also told me that deep down he was into dignity and protocol and doing things a certain way. I think that attitude bled into his acting on a certain level, and that’s why he wasn’t quite Marlon Brando.

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