Day: December 8, 2023

Ryan O’Neal has died at age 82, presumably from cancer. It feels unsettling to acknowledge (or remind ourselves of the fact) that death doesn’t fool around, and because…well, a half-century ago O’Neal was quite the hotshot with golden-amber hair and a Prince of Malibu title and all the rest of it.

On 8.4.19 I wrote that I preferred to think of O’Neal as the guy he was in the early to mid ’70s, when things were as good for him as they would ever get.

I had two minor encounters with O’Neal in the ’80s.

The first was after an evening screening of the re-issued Rear Window** at West L.A.’s Picwood theatre (corner of Pico and Westwood) in late ’83. As the crowd spilled onto Pico O’Neal and his date (probably Farrah Fawcett) were walking right behind me, and I heard O’Neal say “that was sooo good!” Being a huge Alfred Hitchcock fan, this sparked a feeling of kinship.

Four years later I was a Cannon publicity guy and charged with writing the press kit for Norman Mailer‘s Tough Guys Don’t Dance, which didn’t turn out so well. I for one, however, liked Mailer’s perverse sense of humor.

I did an hour-long phoner with O’Neal, and my opening remark was that he was becoming a really interesting actor now that he was in his mid 40s with creased features. He was too good looking when younger, I meant, and so his being 46 added character and gravitas. O’Neal was skeptical of my assessment but went along — what the hell.

In fact O’Neal’s career had been declining for a good five or six years at that point. He knew it, I knew it — we were doing a press-kit-interview dance because there was nothing else to say or do.

O’Neal’s last hit film had been Howard Zeiff and Gail Parent‘s The Main Event (’79), which critics panned but was popular with audiences. He had starred in four mezzo-mezzos before that — Peter Bogdanovich‘s Nickelodeon (’76), Richard Attenbrough‘s A Bridge Too Far (’77), Walter Hill‘s The Driver (’78) and John Korty‘s Oliver’s Story.

Consider this HE anecdote about some 41-year-old graffiti on an Oliver’s Story poster.

O’Neal’s career peak lasted for five years (’70 to ’75) and was fortified by a mere four films — Arthur Hiller‘s Love Story (’70), Bogdanovich’s What’s Up Doc? (’72) and Paper Moon (’73), and Stanley Kubrick‘s Barry Lyndon (’75). (The Wild Rovers and The Thief Who Came to Dinner, which O’Neal also made in the early ’70s, were regarded as mostly negligible and therefore didn’t count.)

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Geoffrey Mcnab’s 12.8 Independent interview with Paul Schrader is a good read, but it’s paywalled. I’m not a subscriber but have managed to read it anyway. I don’t think I should share the link…sorry.

Last night I watched the first two episodes of Jeff Pope‘s Archie, a four-part Britbox miniseries about the inner turmoils and insecurities of Cary Grant. I’d read some weak reviews and didn’t expect much, and during the sit I was trying to imagine such a series looking or feeling more inauthentic.

You can really feel a certain communion —- vibes, textures, atmospheres — with ‘50s Italy in Michael Mann‘s Ferrari, for example. Archie rarely ventures beyond the banal and mundane and superficial.

Laura Aikman‘s Dyan Cannon aside, nobody even vaguely resembles the characters they’re playing. It’s almost all third-string. Pope makes no attempt to make the mid-20th Century dialogue sound like it was spoken back then — his script is riddled with 2023 slang expressions and attitudes, which is awful.

But it’s not altogether awful.

Pope’s view (shared by biographers) is basically that once Grant finally got going as a movie actor in the early 1930s, he faked it left and right and gradually came uo with the wryly debonair “Cary Grant” — an alternate personality that was mostly divorced from the anxious, insecure guy he actually was.

I like the fact that Archie adventurously time-jumps all over the place — British childhood, snowy-haired finale, 20something years, late middle age…here, there, everywhere.

The first-rate Jason Isaacs doesn’t begin to resemble Grant, but he does a half-decent job of inhabiting or recreating certain aspects of Grant’s charming but shifty nature. Most of the time you’re thinking “this is too low-budget, too sloppy and slipshod” but now and then it’s interesting.

Received this morning from Bill McCuddy: “Finally caught up with Todd Haynes‘ May December last night…this after reading that Owen Gleiberman and Peter Debruge have it on their Top Ten lists, and then I saw that Vanity Fair‘s Richard Lawson has it at number one.

“I’d heard it was actually bad. It’s not, but where some critics are seeing subtlety- — except for the goofy soap opera music jolts — I saw missed opportunities.

“There are definitely spoilers here so HE readers be warned.

“1. I’d have made Natalie Portman‘s character more obsessed with Julianne Moore‘s character. Parrot her more than she does. Have her dress like Moore earlier in the film.

“2. I’d have had Portman say she’s also a producer on the film and continually reassure the couple (Moore and the much-younger Bruce Melton) that they will be portrayed truthfully and sympathetically, only to have Moore find a copy of the script and realize it’s not that, and in fact borders on a sleazy takedown.

‘3. Late in the second act I would reveal that the movie Portman is supposedly making has actually been put in turnaround or cancelled altogether and Portman went to Savannah anyway. Way creepier.

“4. Instead of sleeping with Portman’s character, I would have had Melton rebuff her, fueling her anger and disillusionment.

“5. I’d have ended the film not with a scene from the real (not in my version) movie but instead from a faux-documentary about what happened when Portman’s character came down there.

“The basic idea that anyone in that Savannah-region hamlet might still gave a shit about something that happened 25 years ago (i.e., a May Kay Letourneau trauma) is a ludicrous premise. In Hayne’s version the whole family is still living with the affair. So is the whole town. They’re still buying her cakes out of sympathy 25 YEARS LATER?! Bullshit.

“The real tension in the movie should be that all the horrific attention they got 25 years ago is gonna come back. It’s long gone and over with in my version.

“Finally, and this is a small nit, but where in the hell did they get the money for that waterfront resort island house? Reading X-rays and baking Gingerbread men? Uh, no. I saw that house in the first few frames of the movie and thought ‘well, at least they sued someone like Fox News and got a lot of money’ but nope.”

If you walk over and look them in the eye and ask them to please cut the crap, the AFI Sight & Sound gang will admit the truth.

They know that Martin Scorsese‘s Killers of the Flower Moon is not one of his top-tier films. They know it’s basically a woke movie, a guilt-trip thing. They know that it has no character viewpoint other that “century-old Oklahoma white guys bad.” They know that Scorsese and Eric Roth decided to more or less abandon FBI agent Tom White, the central figure in David Grann’s 2017 book, in favor of Leonardo DiCaprio‘s dumbshit Ernest Burkhart, who isn’t worth the effort.

They know all that and voted Killers as the year’s top film regardless. Because they wanted to proclaim their belief and investment in the redemption narrative. It’s their way of saying “we get it Marty…you did your best under the circumstances and understandably felt that you couldn’t go with White as the champion…we get it and we support you and are on your side despite the fact that if we were voting on merit alone we wouldn’t have chosen Killers….you get that and so do we…plus we absolutely believe in the metaphor of Lily Gladstone‘s identity campaign for Best Actress…all hail our recognition of past sins and our attempt at absolution or at least forgiveness.”

Finally but limited…AMC Lincoln Square, Regal Union Square, Brooklyn Drafthouse. The suburbs are cooling their heels.

The romantic intrigue in Phillip Noyce‘s Fast Charlie (Vertical, 10.8) is the thing. The blam-blam is fine the 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…that’s what holds you. Is he too old for her? (Call it a quarter-century age gap.) Does it matter if he is somewhat? Nobody makes any overt moves, but you can feel the simmering.

Charlie reminded me of Robert Forster and Pam Grier in Jackie Brown, sprinkled with a little Elmore Leonard sauce. One of those smooth older guy + middle-aged woman ease-and-compatibility deals.

Most of us are down with these pairings. 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.

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.

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I prefer the idea of Poor Things or Maestro or The Holdovers taking the Best Picture Oscar because they’re such grand buffets…because they combine lavish and concurrent servings of cinematic nutrition and dessert, fascinating novelty and invention in the case of the first two and well-constructed involvement (endless emotionalism and irony, thematic richness, abundant imagination and just-right-ism, and inescapable leakage in the case of Maestro’s ending)…because they flipped me over and held me in their grip.

Oppie on the other hand…that oppressive college-lecture hall delivery and horrible, aching sense of frigid isolation (stuck in that godawful makeshift New Mexico isolation camp and that suffocating D.C. committee testimony room with the killer combo of Nolan’s dialogue and that soul-stifling, cold-eyed, alien-from-planet-Tralfamadore performance from Cillian Murphy, whom I now never, EVER want to watch in a film ever again….please.

I’ve begun to rewatch Oppie on Amazon and the subtitles do help to some extent, but I once again felt caught in a long, punishing endurance test…that same feeling I had during my two theatrical viewings…DEAR GOD I’ll never forget that feeling of entrapment and interior devastation…those volumes upon volumes of dialogue pages and a running-time clock that proceeded at a snail’s pace, only to chickenheartedly avoid the obvious and inescapable climax of those Hiroshima and Nagasaki infernos.

Oppie is obviously a smart, well-crafted, full-court-press film for smarty-pants viewers with greater intestinal fortitude than I, but it killed me to slosh through that Murphy-Oppie swamp…that dense narrative thicket, that after-school detention feeling…wading through a three-hour technical briefing that murdered my spirit and killed my legs and made me feel like Winston Smith’s head in a rat cage…a steady, plodding, scene-by-scene procedural that was always about Nolan saying “I won’t be coming to you because you have to come to ME”…an intellectually freeze-dried process if I’ve ever endured one.

And I’m supposed to feel somehow knocked out, by the way, by Robert Downey Jr.’s performance as the Salieri-like Lewis Strauss and those 16 or 17 repetitions of that outdoor Einstein-Oppie-Strauss scene that Nolan diabolically keeps cutting back to over and over and over again?

I’m glad that Oppie is so well liked and has enjoyed great financial success, and if it wins the Best Picture Oscar…fine.. But it compressed and suffocated and held me down on the wrestling mat, and is basically, for me, this year’s TAR.