Talk about priceless remnants of ancient civiizations and the various complications (ethical and otherwise) that ensue when a very special remnant is discovered…

Jean Negulesco‘s Boy on a Dolphin (’57) is about as far away from Alice Rohrwacher‘s La Chimera as you can get. The first Hollywood film shot in Greece, this 20th Century Fox release is square, schmaltzy, simplistic, sentimental and very strongly opposed to any sense of native authenticity.

Set in Hydra, Sophia Loren is a poor local girl with great boobs, Alan Ladd is a good-guy archeologist with shimmering blonde hair, and Clifton Webb is a nefarious sophisticate with links to the black market.

The only anecdote I can recall is the one about a two-inch height disparity between Ladd and Loren (who was making her English-language debut).

Wiki excerpt: “The dissimilarity in heights between the 5 foot, 8 inch Loren and 5 foot, 6 inch Ladd led to complications. Some of their scenes together required him to stand on a box; another forced a trench to be dug for Loren when the pair walked along the beach.”

I missed Alice Rohrwacher‘s La Chimera at last year’s Cannes Film Festival and then again in Telluride eight months ago, but I finally saw it at the Jacob Burns on Sunday night and man, it has a real unwashed, hand-to-mouth, transportational spirit thing going on.

It’s about the ancient past (Etruscan artifacts) being dug up in Tuscany and sold and exploited by lowlife scruffs, and how this all shakes down in a moralistic or fable-like sense. It doesn’t pay off emotionally, or at least not in a way that I recognize, but it almost does. And it definitely feels whole by the end — I can say that for sure.

Rohrwacher, her dp Hélene Louvart (who mostly shoots within 1.37 and 1.66 aspect ratios), editor Nelly Quettier and the mostly tramp-like, generally unattractive cast (except for the radiant Carol Duarte, a Brazilian actress playing a kind of Gelsomina- or Guilietta Masina-like innocent, and the white-haired, eternally beautiful Isabella Rosellini)…Rohrwacher and friends are definitely up to something here.

Tall, pale-faced, unshaven Josh O’Connor plays Arthur, a kind of artifact whisperer — a filthy British-born bilingual fellow who smokes all the time, wears dirty clothing and ugly footwear and shuffles around with one of the worst haircuts in movie history.

But Arthur is about more than just stinky socks and rancid cigarette breath — he can sense or smell where Etruscan artifacts (sculpture, goblets, statues, frescoes) are buried, and so most of the film is about Josh guiding a band of tomb robbers on illegal digs. Their findings are sold to a sinister art dealer (Alba Rohrwacher, the director’s older sister), and that’s how they make ends meet.

La Chimera is about hundreds upon hundreds of spirit elements coexisiting in a hungry, dirt-poor realm without showers or deodorants or laundromats…the soiling and pirating of ancient remnants by low-life scuzzies…buried Etruscan pottery and tiled floors and erotic figurines…soil whispers, dusty ghosts.

Ethical conflicts abound, of course, but what matters is treating the past with care and reverence and allowing others to bask in its beauty. I don’t see what’s so bad about selling found history. As long as the artifacts are respected and not hoarded, what’s the problem?

It took me a good half hour before I got past O’Connor’s smelly feet and disgusting cigarette smoking and began to realize where the film is headed — before it hit me that it’s a casting a kind of underclass spell that really takes hold…that it’s a La Strada-like adventure or dirt poem, a half-fantasy or fairy tale about wretched refuse types looking to survive as best they can and not fretting about ethical issues…about digging up Etruscan pots and cups and marble statues and you-name-it…poor folks sifting through soil in Tuscany’s hidden regions (i.e., the kind that tourists rarely gaze upon).

Talk about a curious turn-on mechanism but this is Rohrwacher’s signature…she takes all kind of disparate, haunting, non-hygenic elements and throws them together like a salad maker…nothing is the least bit glammy or posed or polished or conventionally alluring…everything is half-assed, raggedy-assed…the sublime merged with the ugly.

La Chimera features one of the ugliest coastline super-sized factories I’ve ever seen in my life — it reminded me of a coastline factory in Piombino, a working-class town where tourists catch the ferry to Elba.

La Chimera has a real sense of spirit. Rohrwacher (her first name is pronounced Ahh-LEE-chuh) really goes for the off-handed, the weird, the gunky, the untidy, the muddy. It’s not exactly pleasant, but is kind of wonderful all the same.

Longer version: Fuck your sentimental boomer attachments to riveting hot-button movies that ruled the roost between the late ‘60s and Iron Man (‘09). GenX is mostly running the show now but down the road we’ll be taking the fuck over, and if you think there’s too much third-rate, zone-out streaming content now, wait until we get our hands on the gears.

You want some attempts at old-fart, boomer-type flicks? There aren’t any. Try original content longform streaming, and if that’s not nourishing enough, tough.

All we care about are jizz-whizz fiicks — IP reboots, moronic romcoms and comedies, VFX and horror. And we definitely don’t want to adapt books or plays — eff that noize.

We are going to run this business into the ground, man.

A quarter-century hence the corpses of Ben Hecht, John Ford, Spencer Tracy, Daryl F. Zanuck, Gregg Toland, Jean Arthur, John Huston, Ida Lupino, Nicholas Ray, Agnes Varda, Tom Cruise, Howard Hawks, Billy Wilder, James Stewart, Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock, Meryl Streep, Oliver Stone and Kevin Costner will be spinning in their graves on a permanent basis.

20 years from now people are going to be saying “wow, remember The Fall Guy? What a great film!”

…on Yorgos Lanthimos’s Kinds of Kindness said that it’s, like, heartwarming and touchy-feely and possibly the most inviting and emotionally friendly film he’s ever made? How would you respond to this scuttlebutt? Boredom, right?

…but dear God, it feels so good when Alec Baldwin slaps Crackhead Barney and Friends‘ phone…I would have held myself in check, but my God, what a wonderful thing it can be to swat a mosquito.

White devil Alec Baldwin attacked me
While I was trying to get coffeee pic.twitter.com/qebME0V4Wl

— Crackhead Barney & Friends (@CHBAF) April 22, 2024

This 1976 Benefit Blowout poster was posted on Facebook this mornhing by musician and old friend Eric Pearson. It was composed by the late Chris Browne (Hagar the Horrible). His older brother, fellow cartoonist and extraordinary musician Chance Browne, passed away a few weeks ago. Notice the “Black Wells Fiasco” logo at the bottom left.

The below photo ran in the Wilton Bulletin in early August ’76. It accompanied a story about a then-upcoming Save The Whales concert, which then-girlfriend Sophie Black (on my left) and I co-produced, and which was held on a hilly 52-acre farm owned by Sophie’s parents, David and Linda Cabot Black. The focus of the story was that a portion of the proceeds would be donated to Camp PIP, a non-profit that offered recreational facilities help to lower-income kids.

1. The report is basically bullshit.

2. Its findings have been disputed by more enlightened voices.

3. It’s been totally covered by the American media**.

4. And why are you so obsessed with this issue anyway, Jeff?

5. Do you really think Joe Biden wants genital mutilation for five-year-olds on demand?

All in all, the HE comment chorus has Cass Review supporters outflanked and boxed in six ways from Sunday.

Seriously, this is how progressive ditto-heads rationalize reality…

** In point of fact, places like the Times did an obligatory news piece, but they’ve done no reporting on the reaction and fallout in, you know, the United States.

And by the way….”Hilary Cass says criticism of gender care review ‘inaccurate’ and ‘unforgivable’,” filed on 4.20:

“The British doctor behind a landmark study into transgender treatment in the UK has called criticism of her research ‘inaccurate’ and ‘unforgivable’.”

“Dr. Hilary Cass told the Times she wished to address the ‘disinformation’ circulating about the findings and recommendations handed down by the Cass Review when it was published on April 10th.

“The physician also said she fears using public transport and for her personal safety after receiving online abuse in the wake of the report’s release.”

…I had never seen Stanley Kubrick’s bare feet — not in real life, not in a photo. It’s not that big of a deal, but I immediately felt a twinge of regret. Let’s leave it at that. Male director toes should always be covered by animal leather or hip sneakers or at the very least socks. Especially if the male director hails from the Bronx. The only thing worse in this regard are mandals.

Filed on 10.31.11: Following a Savannah Film Festival screening of Barry Lyndon, James Toback told a funny story that happened during the cutting of Spartacus, which Stanley Kubrick directed and Kirk Douglas produced and starred in.

The story came from editor Robert Lawrence, who later edited Toback’s Fingers and Exposed.

“Kubrick and Lawrence were editing the finale when Jean Simmons, escaping from Rome with the help of Peter Ustinov, is saying goodbye to Douglas, who’s dying on a cross. Kubrick told Lawrence he didn’t want to use what he felt was a grotesque close-up of Douglas. Lawrence said the shot wasn’t so bad and in any case Douglas will surely complain when he notices that his closeup is missing. “I don’t care what he says,” Kubrick said. “I’m the director…take it out.”

They later showed the scene to Douglas, and his immediate comment was exactly what Lawrence had predicted — “Where’s my closeup?” Kubrick shrugged and said, “I don’t know, Kirk.” Kubrick then turned to Lawrence and said, “Where’s his close-up?”

It’s understood that everyone in Cannes is going to bend over backwards to be open-hearted and gracious in their reactions to Megalopolis, and where is the downside in doing so? I’m not saying anything yea or nay, but among those who may have issues with Coppola’s film, who will be so cruel as to blurt out truth bombs? Turn the other cheek, consider the risk factor, judge not lest ye be judged.

If you’re capable of feeling anything above and beyond the immediate and especially if you’ve been lucky and double especially if you’re been gifted with any kind of enviable insight or ability, it’s hard to not weep with gratitude…even with all the lumps and bruises and the endless parade of shitty people and craven impulses, not to mention the crushing, soggy banality that constitutes so much of civilized life on this planet…if you’ve had any kind of “ride” it’s still a gift.

Criterion has a multi-disc Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid Bluray package coming out on 7.2 — two 4K discs, two 1080p discs, all kinds of extras.

It will contain three versions of Sam Peckinpah’s 1973 western. The longest and most true to Peckinpah’s original vision (allegedly around 122 minutes) is called the 50th Anniversary Release. A 115-minute version, I think, and the truncated 106-minute theatrical cut will round things out. Something like that.

I saw the 106 way back when, and it’s slightly better than okay. Standard Peckinpah flourishes. Talky. Decent performances (James Coburn’s Garrett stands out, Kris Kristofferson’s Billy is okay, Bob Dylan’s “Alias” is mostly a goof). Peckinpah himself has a cameo. The film reaches for sadness, radiates a certain folklore current, a loathing of selling out and thereby losing your soul, etc. I recall R.G. Armstrong getting shot by Kristofferson, and Kris performing a sex scene with Rita Coolidge.

I wouldn’t call it a problematic film, but I can’t imagine an extra 15 minutes making a huge difference. I’m therefore not sure that the film is worth the royal Criterion treatment.