Month: November 2023

On top of which it’s more than a couple of days old…a mind-blowing Zoomer blow-up.

…the whore-ish, kiss-ass reactions of the early-bird crowd. I haven’t seen The Color Purple (Warner Bros., 12.25) but if you read between the lines…well, try doing that.

Purple’s Danielle Brooks is a likely Oscar contender and an apparently serious threat to The Holdovers‘ Da’Vine Joy Randolph.

But overall the only reactions you can probably trust are from the hard-nosed veterans, two of whom — Dave Karger and Greg Ellwood — are hilarious in their descriptions.

Ellwood flat-out faults the “script, direction, editing.” When Karger praises the “costumes and the choreography,” you know what he means.

Prediction: Travis Kelce, 34, will either get dumped or leave on his own accord six to nine months hence, mostly, I’m guessing, because Taylor Swift will be increasingly unable to tolerate his less-than-progressive views about women. He’s a Cro-Magnon man.

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The night before last a friend who had seen Ridley Scott‘s Napoleon and scratched his heasd over Joaquin Phoenix‘s lead performance, said “what is driving Napoleon?…what is he out to accomplish?” Scott’s film never lays the French general’s cards on the table, but another film did….

Napoleon: “I judge my conduct by my conscience, and my conscience is not troubled. Day by day I too gave my life for my country. I made war in order to secure peace. Not for a year but for a dozen centuries. I dreamed of the United States of Europe. Frenchmen, Italians, Germans, Poles, Russians and all the others. One law, one coin and one people. Was that so rash a dream?”

The screenwriter was Daniel Taradash (winner of Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for From Here to Eternity), the actor was Marlon Brando, and the film was Henry Koster‘s Desiree (’54). Could the dialogue have been more complex, or less staid and simplistic? Sure but at least it gives you an idea of where Taradash’s Napoleon was coming from.

The scene in question begins at the one hour and 45 minute mark…close to the end.

Do you want to look at those black, soul-dead eyes for four or eight years? Eyes that would fit right into a Blumhouse horror film? Forget it, man. Manchin doesn’t have it.

I’ve been waiting a long time for the “Princess Diana dies in Paris with Dodi Fayed” chapter of The Crown, and now it’s finally streaming with the towering Elizabeth Debicki in the title role. The first half of it, I mean. The final episodes stream in December.)

The fatal car crash in the tunnel can’t skirt what happened — it has to be real. The ending will presumably cover the same material as Stephen Frear‘s The Queen (’06….17 years ago!) but without Helen Mirren‘s elk moment.

I was working at People magazine when Diana began seeing Fayed in July 1997. Two or three of us were asked to make some calls and prepare a file on the guy. Within three or four hours I’d learned that Fayed was an irresponsible playboy, didn’t pay his bills on occasion, lacked vision and maturity and basically wasn’t a man. And yet Diana overlooked this or didn’t want to know. And that’s why she died. She orchestrated her demise by choosing a profligate immature asshole for a boyfriend.

Fayed was just foolish and insecure enough, jet-setting around with his father’s millions and looking to play the protective stud by saving Diana from the paparazzi, to put her in harm’s way. It all came to a head on that fateful night in Paris. Fayed told his drunken chauffeur to try and outrun a bunch of easily finessable scumbag photographers on scooters, and we all know the rest.

Over the decades I’ve experienced many dozens (hundreds?) of perfect moments that were so rich and serene and soul-settling — moments in which I said to myself “Jesus, this is perfect in every way.”

The dusky light and settled atmospheres, I mean…soothing meditations and moods of unusual quiet …solace and contentment…pause moments.

I’m thinking of the faint scent of sea water and the sound of crying gulls at 5 am in Cannes…the taste of a special moment after a super-heavy rainfall in Paris or during a hike in the Palm Desert outback below cloudy skies or a cappuccino detour in Venice’s Campo Santa Margherita in the late afternoon or standing on the deck of a tourist ferry as it approaches Napoli harbor just before dawn…

That feeling we’ve all tasted from time to time…the usual rock ‘n’ roll and hustle and bustle suddenly beating a temporary retreat as you say to yourself “I’d kinda like to hang onto this for an hour or two, or maybe even a couple of days or a week even…where would be the harm in that?”

These stop-the-world moments are so special when they drop in…”away from the maddening crowd,” as Dean Martin once sang in defiance of Thomas Hardy…like that 1982 moment when Rutger Hauer’s “Roy” went to sleep and the white doves fluttered and flew off…

I distinctly recall feeling this in the early fall of ‘88 when my ex-wife and I began to drive across those ancient brownish-green country landscapes in southwestern Ireland, and I said “man, I could die here” even though I was fairly young (decades away from my first Prague touch-up) and in the full vigor and prime of life with six-month-old Jett sleeping in the backseat.

11.16 update: Bradley Cooper’s Maestro will welcomely begin theatrical engagements at two first-rate Westchester County venues before going to streaming on Netflix on 12.20 — Pleasantville’s Jacob Burns Center on 11.30 (or eight days after its 11.22 theatrical debut in NYC and Stamford) and then at the Bedford Playhouse on Friday, 12.8.

Posted on 11.15: Maestro is Netflix’s crown jewel of the ‘23 Oscar season, and there are only three theatrical options in the NYC region between 12.22 and 12.20 — the Paris (cramped but fine), the mildly shitty Angelika plex on Houston (tolerable despite the occasional rumble of the subway underneath) and the storied but generally horrendous Avon theatre in Stamford — smallish screen, shitty sound, dim lamp. Definitely not a state-of-the-set facility.

For the sake of a friend I was hoping that Maestro might be playing at the first-rate Jacob Burns in Pleasantville, which is where The Killer was playing until recently. Alas,  it’s not booked there until 11.30.

I’m seen Maestro twice in two first-rate theatres over the last 10 days or so (Dolby 88 and last night at the DGA on 57th), but Netflix is essentially telling residents who live north of the city that they’re out of luck between 11.22 and 11.29. The Avon, trust me, is the pits. (I saw TAR there, and it was hell.)