Day: October 29, 2024

The career of poor Teri Garr, who sadly passed today at age 79, peaked between ’74 and ’85…roughly 11 years. Garr was 30 when it began, 41 when it ended.

The highlight vehicles were Mel Brooks‘ Young Frankenstein (ditzy, good-sport blonde), Steven Spielberg‘s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (the almost villainous, spirit-crushing wife of Richard Dreyfuss), Carl Reiner‘s Oh, God!, Sydney Pollack‘s Tootsie (ditzy actress friend of Dustin Hoffman‘s Michael Dorsey), Francis Coppola‘s One From The Heart (1982), opposite Michael Keaton in Mr. Mom and in Martin Scorsese‘s After Hours. What is that, seven?

Garr’s smallish performance in Tootsie resulted in a nomination for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar, but her big signature role…the one we all immediately recall… was the frisky Inga Binga in Young Frankenstein.

Gene Wilder: “What knockers!” Garr: “Oohh, zenk you, doctor!”

Several classic actresses are known for certain signature lines of dialogue. Faye Dunaway…”Christina, get the axe!” or “don’t fuck with me, fellas!” Vivien Leigh…”I’ve always depended upon the kindness of strangers” or “after all, tomorrow is another day!” Ingrid Bergman…”play it, Sam…play ‘As Time Goes By’.” Bette Davis…”what a dump!” Katharine Hepburn…”Mr. Allnut, could you make a torpedo?”

It’s a fact (and certainly not a put-down) that Garr’s signature line is “he would have an enormous schwanzstucker!”** But she had a lot more going on than mere attractiveness and a flair for light, self-deprecating comedy.

** It would have been a funnier line if Garr had said “enormous schtufenhaufer.”

Eccentric, livin’ large fellows who enjoyed drinking, etc.

Posted on 10.7.24: “Queer is a truly fascinating mood piece and space-out…a film has never taken me to a realm like this…an amazing reach, amazing combustion……much more transformative than Call Me By Your Name…it may be Guadagnino’s best film ever, or his most out-there or whatever…I’m not sure how to label it but Daniel Craig’s performance is staggering…purely a matter of heart and spirit and twitchy emotion…all I know is that he’s uncovered something fresh and alive…really something else. Queer is a wake-up thing. It delivers a feeling of inwardness, extra-ness.”

Herewith is a rundown of HE’s drop-out moments (or lack of) as they apply to 2024’s leading Best Picture contenders, of which there are 15 or 16.

It was screenwriter William Goldman (Marathon Man, All The President’s Men, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) who first explained what a drop-out moment is — i.e., when something happens in a film that just makes you collapse inside, that makes you surrender interest and faith in the ride that you’re on. You might stay in your seat and watch the film to the end, but you’ve essentially “left” the theatre.

The movie had you and then lost you, and it’s not your fault.

HE’s simpler definition: An element or aspect of a film that is so abhorrent or unsettling or indigestible that you can’t help but respond with “okay, that’s it…I quit.” Classic example: I dropped out of Parasite when the drunken con-artist mom lets the fired maid into the Seoul mansion in the middle of a fierce rainstorm.

1. Sean Baker‘s Anora — no drop-out moments whatsoever…holds you start to finish….builds and builds and then settles in for a surprisingly intimate finish. Bull’s-eye.

2. Edward Berger‘s Conclave — I was fascinated from the get-go and by the ending in particular (no spoilers), but others have been calling it a drop-out moment. I’m not saying they’re wrong, but I was totally “wow…talk about pushing the wokey.”

3. Denis Villeneuve‘s Dune II — I wasn’t able to follow the story, but the acting, cinematography, production design, editing and music were such that I was completely enthralled. I read the Wikipedia plot synopsis as I watched.

4. Jacques Audiard‘s Emilia Perez — I dropped out the instant I learned that a drug cartel kingpin, Juan “Manitas” Del Monte (Karla Sofia Gascon), wants to surgically transition into becoming a woman as a way of escaping from his drug-kingpin life. I stayed in my seat and watched Emilia Perez to the end, but I wasn’t the least bit invested. No way would a big-time cartel guy go trans.

5. Brady Corbet‘s The Brutalist — I totally dropped out during an early bus-station scene in which Adrien Brody‘s Laszlo Toth, a Hungarian holocaust refugee, succumbs to effusive, gushing sobs upon being told by his furniture store-owning cousin (Alessandro Nivola) that his wife Erzsebet (Felicity Jones) has survived the Holocaust horrors of Eastern European Jewry. He was crying way too much…stop it! I felt tortured and doomed by the notion of having to hang with this lethargic simpleton for the next three-plus hours….aaaggghhhh!

6. Greg Kwedar‘s Sing Sing. I dropped out roughly 10 or 15 minutes into the film, which is when I realized it wouldn’t be delivering a story of any kind and was basically a documentary-styled acting-exercise movie.

7. Steve McQueen‘s Blitz. I still haven’t seen it, but I dropped out anyway when I read it wasn’t going to debut at the Venice, Telluride or Toronto film festivals. I knew it would be an underwhelmer.

8. Ridley Scott‘s Gladiator II. I dropped out the instant when I read that Paul Mescal would be playing Lucius Verus, the son of Russell Crowe‘s Maximus.

9. Jesse Eisenberg‘s A Real Pain. No drop-out moments. Total engagement start to finish.

10. Jason Reitman‘s Saturday Night. I dropped out when I learned of the basic premise, which was that the 1975 debut episode of Saturday Night Live was a totally chaotic, juggling-balls, Hellzapoppin’ situation, which it actually wasn’t if you listen to Chevy Chase, who should know.

11. James Mangold‘s A Complete Unknown — I haven’t seen it although I’m told a certain former Oscar blogger has had a looksee and that he believes that Timothee Chalamet‘s performance as Bob Dylan will become a highly favored Best Actor contender. I haven’t seen Babygirl either.

12. Luca Guadagnino‘s Queer — No drop-out moments…the entire film is a drop=in…the sexuality is there, obviously, but subordinate to the spiritual current, the exotic atmosphere, Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey’s truly fascinating performances, the nimble editing, the South American jungle scenes….the trippy mystical vibe kinda sneaks up on you…it’s one of the most fascinating, out-there films about vulnerability, transformative intimacy and emotionality that I’ve ever seen…amazing!

13. Ali Abassi‘s The Apprentice — No drop-out moments. A fascinating, first-rate exploration of Donald Trump and Roy Cohn‘s student-mentor rleationshp in the ’70s and ’80s.

14. Tim Fehlbaum‘s September 5. No drop-outs — held me all the way through.

15. Payal Kapadia‘s All We Imagine As Light. No drop-outs.

The “Puerto Rico is a floating island of garbage” meme from the MSG Trump rally + yesterday’s ABC News / Ipsos poll (51% Harris vs. 47% Trump among likely voters) has relaxed me somewhat…I’m no longer hyperventilating or breathing into a brown paper bag.

“The less attention paid to this picture, the better for the simple dignity of the human race.”

So wrote N.Y. Times critic Bosley Crowther in his 3.10.62 review of Vincente Minnelli‘s The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse.

The fact that The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse hasn’t been remastered for HD streaming or issued on Bluray — that should tell you something.

The rest of Crowther’s review is pretty good also:

“As different from Rudolph Valentino as Glenn Ford depressingly is — and, believe us, it’s more than just the difference between a guy who did the tango and one who does not — there is that much (and more) between the impressiveness of the filmed The 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse, in which Valentino leaped to fame, and the one with Mr. Ford as its hero, which dragged its great sluggish bulk into Loew’s State yesterday.

“In the first place, this latest film endeavor to bear the name of Vicente Blasco Ibáñez‘ popular novel of World War I has no more resemblance to the novel — or, indeed, to the 1921 Rudolf Valentino film — than may be found in the similarity of names of characters and in a couple of cut-ins of ghostly horsemen riding in clouds of surging smoke across the screen.

“This one tells a slow and vapid story of a colorless Argentine sport (Glenn Ford), caught with his father, mother and sister in Occupied Paris during World War II, who takes up with the wife of a French journalist and, finally, when down to his last dress suit, joins the Resistance movement and carries messages in folded magazines. It is a pompous and idiotic fiction, and it is staged by Vincente Minnelli in an incredibly fustian ‘Hollywood’ style.

“Although some of it smacks of actual Paris and the country regions of France, most of it reeks of the sound stages and the painted sets of a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio…shot on wide screen in color and lighted like a musical show, it conveye no more illusion of actuality than did Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

“The second thing is the way it is played — or isn’t played — by a cast of the most non-Argentine and non-French seeming people you’ve ever seen. Mr. Ford as the gay hidalgo from the pampas who hits the boulevards wearing a gray fedora, black gloves and swinging an ebony cane is about as convincingly Argentine and possessed of urbanity as a high-school football coach from Kansas who has never been out of the state. And in his romantic scenes with Ingrid Thulin, who plays the wayward wife, he is aggressively flat and solemn. In short, he is just plain dull.

“Miss Thulin is beautiful and graceful, in her svelte Scandinavian way, but she is made to act a very shallow woman — and her voice and lip movements do not match. Charles Boyer is drab as the father who had been living in Argentina since his youth and still talks with such a thick French accent that all the other Frenchmen sound like hicks alongside him.

“Yvette Mimieux plays Mr. Ford’s young sister who gets in with a Paris student crowd that swings into the Resistance movement with all the fervor and frenzy of high-school rooters at a football game. Paul Henreid as the journalist whose wife deceives him and Paul Lukas as the Germanic uncle of Mr. Ford who becomes a top Nazi general in the Occupation dutifully go along. The less said of Karl Boehm as a Germanic cousin and Lee J. Cobb as the Argentine grandfather whose anti-Hitler sentiments in 1938 are as fiery as those of a Jewish character in Exodus, the better for all concerned.”

You might presume that dismissive reactions like Crowther’s helped to diminish Ford’s career, as he soon after stopped appearing in grade-A productions. And yet on 4.13.62, only a month after Apocalypse opened, one of Ford’s best films ever, Blake Edwards‘ Experiment in Terror, premiered to excellent reviews and better-than-decent business. Ford’s performance as an emotionally somber San Francisco detective was one of his best ever.

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