Month: December 2024

How could the celebrated director of Platoon, JFK, Salvador, Born on the 4th of July, Wall Street, Natural Born Killers, Nixon, Any Given Sunday and W.….how could Oliver Stone drop to his knees in praise of effing Wicked, of all the ‘24 films he could have singled out?

Wicked is a fine, well-produced musical but it obviously doesn’t represent the values that Oliver has put forth since the mid ’80s. Why then has he praised it above and beyond the obviously superior Anora, A Complete Unknown, Conclave, A Real Pain, etc.?

The bottom line is that henceforth the idea of hiring or otherwise working with Blake “I Love Trouble” Lively and Justin “We Will Bury You” Baldoni on a movie or limited series…the mere thought of this is generating heebie–jeebie shockwaves among producers and studio execs worldwide.

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Seven months ago Shiloh Jolie-Pitt, 18, filed legal papers to change her name to a Pitt-less Shiloh Jolie. The basic idea was to publicly proclaim that she regards her dad, Brad Pitt, as some kind of living embodiment of Satan and therefore wanted the Pitt struck from her last name.

Angelina Jolie, Shiloh’s deeply neurotic mother, was the engine and the propellant behind that legal initiative, trust me.

6.1.24: “Why is the divorce initiated by Angelina Jolie against William Bradley Pitt still ongoing and unresolved eight years later? Sane exes don’t behave this way as a rule.

“I’m not the first person on planet earth to rhetorically ask ‘what exactly is Angelina’s basic psychological malfunction?’

Then again I may be thinking too narrowly. Perhaps Pitt is the devil incarnate, and therefore deserves to be hunted down with clubs and spears and burned like Joan of Arc or Oliver Reed’s Father Grandier from Ken Russell’s The Devils….right?

Flash forward to 12.31.24: It was announced at 1:08 am today that Pitt and Jolie have finally settled their divorce after eight ridiculous years of acrimony.

Statement to People magazine from Jolie’s attorney James Simon:

“More than eight years ago, Angelina filed for divorce from Mr. Pitt. She and the children left all of the properties they had shared with Mr. Pitt, and since that time she has focused on finding peace and healing for their family. This is just one part of a long ongoing process that started eight years ago. Frankly, Angelina is exhausted, but she is relieved this one part is over.”

I’ve travelled through the Pyrenees mountains twice. The first time (June of ‘76) I was hitchhiking with girlfriend Sophie; the second time was during a France-to-Spain journey in a rental car, sometime in the late aughts.

My “Bernstein on the Staten Island ferry” moment happened the first time around. We were strolling (or were we sitting in the back seat of a car?) along a narrow Pyrenees blacktop and looking up at a huge, very steep, grass-covered mountainous foothill and being struck by the sight of a distant herd of sheep about, oh, a third of a mile away but way up there…high, high, all the way to the sky.

They were so far off you couldn’t hear those little cowbells that shepherds loop around the baahers’ woolen necks. But it was such a magnificent sight…awed by the enormity of that emerald-green Pyrenees slope, and the serenity that came with that.

There were six media-eyeball events that hurt poor President Carter during his administration.

The first five inflicted different kinds of wounds. Most damaging was the failed, politically crushing attempt to rescue Iranian hostages. Then came Ted Kennedy’s 1980 primary challenge. Three, that silly story about the hissing rabbit allegedly attacking Carter’s fishing boat. Four, that “lust in my heart” quote from that Playboy interview. Five, being half–ignored by TV sports reporters when he visited the Pittsburgh Pirates clubhouse following their 1979 World Series triumph.

But the sixth was the most damaging of all — collapsing from heat exhaustion during a six-mile marathon on 9.15.79. If you’re going to compete in a marathon, do so like a serious athlete or not at all. And never, ever exhibit physical weakness.

Dylan and I caught a FSLC screening of Anora around 3 pm (he’d never had the pleasure) and then we took the B train down to Grand Street station, which is three or four blocks from Kiki’s, a smallish, crowded, very lively Greek restaurant with two separate bars. Luscious cuisine, cool staff, darkly lighted, not murderously expensive.

…or more exquisitely designed or 20th Century elegant than these Italian-made honeys.

One of the wellsprings or chief motivators of Nancy Meyers’ romantic fantasy films (It’s Complicated, Something’s Got to Give, The Holiday) was…I feel that candor is allowable now…the apparent fact that her 20-year marriage to and creative partnership with the late Charles Shyer ended bruisingly, due to infidelity.

Imagine if Meyers were to write and direct an Ingmar Bergman-type film about the collapse of her marriage under this duress.  I don’t think she has it in her to make such a film, mind, but if she did it would really be something.

I related to Shyer as a dude acquaintance in various ways, and it wasn’t just the moldy strawberries.

One of them, I’m now starting to believe, was a vague sense of low self-esteem in the early chapters —- a bad teenage mood pocket that adversely affected our psyches. Suffering the derision of classmates for being odd or different — that shit can really stay with you. Not to mention the alcoholic dad factor. I don’t know if Charles’ dad was a bit of a boozer, but mine sure was, and we all know what that leads to in terms of self-esteem among kids who had to live through that emotional shitstorm.

I just explained to a friend this morning why I was so sexually…uhm, energetic in my ‘70s to mid ‘80s heyday, and then again in the ‘90s and aughts and even into the early to mid 20teens. 

I was kind of a hound because I had no sexual self-esteem as a teenager — because I was regarded as an oddball dweeb who looked funny and behaved oddly and lived internally through movie worship, and I certainly wasn’t regarded as attractive as far as many teenaged women were concerned.

That downish, depressive self-image was so awful and internally ravaging that it felt truly glorious to renounce that image when I started to get lucky in the early ‘70s, and especially when my shameless slut-whore Studio 54 Lemmon 714 quaaludes period kicked in during the Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter administrations.

Roughly 175 rhapsodic transcendent celestial starbursts between ‘75 and 2015 or thereabouts.

It really wasn’t about being macho or cynical or being some kind of reckless purveyor of gymnastic sporting events, but about a truly wondrous and nourishing renunciation of my grim teenage life. Every time I got lucky I felt and meant it sincerely. I was never a cad. My vulnerable heart was always on my sleeve.

I’m presuming that Charles was a nerd like me in his early youth, and maybe felt some of the same things during his teenaged torture era.  I don’t know very many of his biographical particulars, but he lived a somewhat similar journey, I’m thinking.

I might be completely or mostly wrong, but my gut says otherwise.

Earlier this evening HE spoke to the remarkable Eddie Ginley, film maven, HE correspondent and longtime resident of Melbourne, Australia. The primary topic was Brady Corbet‘s The Brutalist.

Ginley is a fan but on a limited basis — “Impressed by certain aspects, but other aspects are frustrating,” he said. We kicked it all around, and dipped every so often into other topics.

Random thoughts and jabs: (a) The Brutalist announces itself as a major film by way of the 215-minute length, an overture, the use or VistaVision and a grand thematic indictment (European ingenuity and creativity vs. American arrogance, dominance and short-tempered impatience; (b) Why did I feel so much empathy for Brody in The Pianist and none for him here?; (c) What’s up with the heroin habit?; (d) unfair as it sounds, I’ve never liked Brady Corbet — I’ve disliked his vibe since Funny Games and Lars von Trier‘s Melancholia — hated him in Simon Killer; (e) Many if not most critics feel that Corbet managing to shoot an “epic”-sized film for only $9.6 million warrants special respect, or so it seems from this corner.

The discussion lasted roughly an hour. I’ve broken it down into two parts.

If any other HE big-mouths want to engage in one-on-one discussions on any topic, I’ll be happy to pick up the phone and post an audio file. 30 to 45 minutes, something like that

Part 1:

Part 2: