It was the middle of March in 2012, and I was talking to Prague’s Esthe Plastika about having some touch-up work on my eyelids, eye bags and neck wattle. I explained what I wanted, and they asked me to take some close-ups of my face and neck area and send them along.
So I did, and when I looked at those horrific snaps I went into catatonic shock. I was looking at the features of a bloated, wine-drinking manatee.
The first thought that hit me was “okay, that’s it for the evening sips of Pinot Grigio and Sauvignon Blanc…I’m done.” The shock of those photos was so great that I stopped that very night. I haven’t touched a drop since.
My 12-year sober anniversary was celebrated on 3.20.24.
HE to Feinberg: I’m not putting down Tim Fehlbaum‘s September 5 — it’s a very decently constructed historical procedural about ABC’s Munich coverage of the 1972 Olympic Games / Black September tragedy — but I’m not understanding why it’s sitting at the top of your current Best Picture Oscar forecast. It’s good but not that good. John Magaro has more screen time than Peter Sarsgaard, but he doesn’t have much X-factor charisma — a sturdy actor but a tiny bit dull.
You’ve got Emilia Perez in your #2 slot, and I get it. Putting it farther down your list might trigger the fanatics and possibly start a whisper campaign that you (and by extension The Hollywood Reporter) might be transphobic on some deep-down level. So you’re playing it safe, and I totally understand and sympathize with this strategy.
That said, the most significant driver of the Emilia Perez bandwagon is woke identity stuff — you know it, I know it, the HE commentariat knows it. It’s a good, verve-y film in many respects, but while the beginning section is pretty great the ending disappoints. Sooner or later the tent will begin to deflate.
Right now there are four deserving heavy hitters — Conclave, Anora, All We Imagine as Light (get behind this snubbed masterpiece, Academy members!), and A Real Pain. Emilia Perez brings the total to five. I still haven’t seen The Brutalist but I’ll probably include it as a sixth-place contender after I finally catch it on Friday, 10.11.
Bad on Scott for relegating TheApprentice, Ali Abassi’s excellent Trump-Cohn period drama with a truly brilliant supporting performance from Jeremy Strong, to 23rd place…really bad! By any fair standard this movie delivers carefully cured, blue-chip goods.
Feinberg ranking The Substance and The Piano Lesson in 25th and 26th place = adios muchachos!
Here’s hoping that James Mangold and Jay Cocks‘ A Complete Unknown joins this modest fraternity, and maybe Babygirl also for a total of eight noms. Okay, maybe September 5 will slip in and occupy the ninth slot.
Forget Sing Sing, Saturday Night, Inside Out 2, The Wild Robot, Walter Salles‘ I’m Still Here, The Room Next Door, The Seed of the Sacred Fig (good but not good enough) and Civil War (I was a huge fan but too many people didn’t like it).
The basic drill is that too many campus Zoomers have succumbed to woke tyranny, and that “many problems on campus have their origins in three ‘great untruths’ (a) “What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker”; (b) “always trust your feelings”; and (c) “life is a battle between good people and evil people”. The authors argue that these untruths not only contradict modern psychology but ancient wisdom from many cultures.
Hollywood Elsewhere is clearly representative of the baddy-waddies, and I am beaming with pride over this.
It happened at a Bob Dylan tribute concert on 10.16.92. Kristofferson said to the crowd, “All right, I gotta tell ya…I’m real proud to introduce this next artist, whose name has become synonymous with courage and integrity. Ladies and gentlemen, Sinead O’Connor!”
A “playful” photo op from the 1953 Venice Film Festival, just over 71 years ago. 37 year-old KirkDouglas was bearded for the forthcoming filming of Ulysses (’54), a cheesy adaptation of Homer‘s “Odyssey” by way of pulp sword-and-sandal aesthetics, courtesy of producers Dino de Laurentiis and Carlo Ponti.
Woody Allen once nonsensically said he’d like to be reincarnated as Warren Beatty‘s fingertips. I would settle for being reincarnated, just as nonsensically, as Douglas’s felt-tip pen or, failing that, Douglas himself.
The first significant thing I noticed about getting stoned was dry mouth. The second thing was succumbing to uncontrollable laughter. The third thing was the munchies. But the fourth thing was the most interesting. I’ve since come to identify it as short-term memory loss, otherwise known in my head as the Chris NolanMemento effect.
Basically when you’re blasted you tend to follow curious thoughts and left-field observations into a mental rabbit hole. These thoughts and observations can take hold of your mind and feel so compelling and enveloping that whatever your rudimentary activity of the moment may be — walking, making coffee, driving, ordering food at McDonald’s, taking out the garbage — you emerge at the other end of the tunnel with no recollection of what’s just happened. And you say to yourself, “How did I get here?”
You could have just ordered small fries and a Coke, but when you come out of the Paul McCartney / “Day in the Life” dream you have no memory of having done so.
And then another dream comes along and you drop into another rabbit hole, and it keeps going like this until the THC finally wears off.
Guy Pearce in Memento: “What am I doing?…oh, I’m chasing this guy. (beat.) No, he’s chasing me.”
Baron Bror von Blixen (Klaus Maria Brandauer) is a tiny bit miffed that his estranged wife Karen Blixen (Meryl Streep) has taken Denys Finch Hatton (Robert Redford) as her lover.
Brandauer to Redford: “You might’ve asked, Denys.”
Redford to Brandauer: “I did. She said yes.”
Redford was around 46 when Out of Africa was filmed; Streep was 34.
The Out of Africa screenplay is credited to Kurt Luedtke, but the above exchange was almost certainly penned by Sydney Pollack pinch-hitter David Rayfiel.
Having missed it in Telluride, I finally saw Will and Harper (Netflix) last night. It’s basically a cross-country road doc about Will Ferrell and Harper Steele, SNL colleagues and friends since the mid ’90s, exploring and working through Steele’s relatively recent decision to become a woman.
The film amounts to more than just an asphalt journey, of course. It gradually becomes a probing inward thing — gentle, affecting, emotionally vulnerable. The theme might be an echo of a Steele quote: “There isn’t a trans person I’ve met who doesn’t have a sense of humor about themselves.” Steele has described herself, politically and philosophically, as “purple-haired woke.”
The 62-year-old Steele further describes herself as well past her relationship sell-by date, but adds that she misses being in a relationship and would love to find someone. She also discloses that she hasn’t had her dick surgically removed so, you know, finding the right person might be a challenge. She also has a voice as deep as Harvey Fierstein‘s. She also insists on wearing heels everywhere, and I don’t know a single woman who doesn’t prefer sensible shoes or sneakers. She also has a thing about visiting rural, blue-collar bars with Ferrell and telling the local yokels why she’s transitioned. (Wise?)
Harper knew she was different as a little kid, she recalls, but never wore dresses or beads or became actively gay. She wanted to transition decades ago, she says, but kept it all under wraps. Plus she never mentions if she enjoyed an occasional discrete same-sex affair.
The film is full of many such questions and curiosities, but it’s a compassionate, kind-hearted thing so let’s not pass along too much grief.
Farrell, 57, is almost totally gray-haired in the doc but was back to his trademark light-brown hair color on a recent talk-show appearance. The gray hair makes him look at least 20 years older.
Marilyn Monroe gave a cameo-strength performance as a streetwalker in O. Henry’s Full House, an anthology feature from 20th Century Fox. Released on 10.16.52, it was her fourth film release that year. It feels like the kind of role that a young actress (Monroe was 25 during filming) would play in hopes of being noticed or, considering her costar Charles Laughton, classing up her career. But Monroe was already well on her way.
Her twin breakout performances in John Huston‘s The Asphalt Jungle (’50) and Joseph L. Mankiewicz‘s All About Eve (ditto) had surfaced two years prior. Her performances in Fritz Lang‘s Clash by Night (6.16.52) and Edmond Goulding‘s We’re Not Married (7.11.52) received above-the-title billing. Plus she was Richard Widmark‘s front-and-center costar in Don’t Bother to Knock (7.18.52). Plus she’d been seeing Joe DiMaggio (whom he would marry in early ’54) for several months.
The great KrisKristofferson — poet, troubador, songwriter, actor, hang-back guy — has passed at age 88.
Film acting-wise, Kris enjoyed a truly great peak period between the early ‘70s and early ‘80s. I think his finest all-time role and performance was in PaulMazursky‘s Blume in Love (‘73).
It’s been 43 years, but I seem to recall Rollover being a relatively decent effort. Second-tier Alan Pakula but passable. It more or less predicted the 2009 worldwide crash, and the legitimized-with-empty-bullshit reasons why it would happen. And it was made right as the Reagan administration was deregulating the crap out of everything.
David Shaber (The Warriors, Last Embrace, Hunt for Red October) wrote it. Key line: “Of course it’s a game…that’s ALL it is.”
But Rollover was largely sold as a hot-sex-in-high-places thing**. Wall Street hotshot Kris Kristofferson, looking buff and well-coiffed in one perfectly-tailored three-piece suit after another, giving Jane Fonda‘s chemical-company chairperson the old invitational eye-twinkle.
Hume Cronyn, as First New York Bank chairman Maxwell Emery, delivered the reality-check assessments, and very effectively.
Fonda and Kristofferson were allegedly involved during filming (i.e., one of those “what happens during filming stays there and goes no further” affairs), but I only heard this once from a second-hand source.
I checked Amazon and Vudu to see if it’s streaming in high-def…nope. I can’t roll with 480p any more.
“When I first heard about the premise of Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night — the entire film takes place in the 90 minutes leading up to the late-night comedy landmark’s first episode in 1975 — it seemed like there would be a backstage let’s-put-on-a-show “What can go wrong? Everything can go wrong!” real-time frenetic bustle to the thing. And that sounded like fun.” — from Owen Gleiberman‘s “What Does Saturday Night Think Saturday Night Live Is About?“, posted this morning.
It didn’t sound like “fun” to me for I knew what Chevy Chase has recently stated, which is that the material that would consitute the first episode (skits, jokes) had been very thoroughly rehearsed and worked out down to the tiniest little detail. So the final 90 minutes before the show went on the air live couldn’t be hellzapoppin’. Nobody on the show (Lorne Michaels, writers, performers) could or would have been that improvisational or self-destructive.
So the film is just dishonest about how this NBC counter-culture comedy show came together all those years ago. It’s a phony scheme, I mean. The performers (dull-as-dishwater GabrielleLaBelle aside) are pretty good but I wasn’t buying the premise that it was all last-minute juggling. How could anyone?
