Month: April 2025

But the more I kick it around, the more I think “the ’60s” actually began on 5.29.63 — the day that Martin Ritt‘s Hud opened commercially. That was the real beginning of boomer anti-authoritarianism, of “whatever the WWII generation tried to teach us was wrong or at the very least hollow as fuck.”

…from the guy who got lucky, once, by impressing a racial stamp upon a certain Ira Levin novel.

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Except for Cailee Spaeny‘s pain-in-the-ass “look at my shell-shocked reactions” acting style, that is. Otherwise it’s great. Why hasn’t some CG wizard taken this clip and expertly switched out Nick Offerman‘s face for Donald Trump‘s?

George Clooney‘s blackish-brown Edward R. Murrow hair looks wrong. Like a vampire with a bad hairdresser.

If you don’t like an overabundance of gray hair, you have to color your thick locks just so. Don’t use too dark of a color (a nice medium brown), and always let some healthy gray shoot out from the edge of the temples, and never color the sideburns.

I’ve seen the 20th Century Fox / Henry King movie of Carousel two or three times, and while it’s not a great or even an especially high-grade film in a dramatic sense, the finale always melts me down.

But the deepest emotional depth charge, for me, has always come from Frank Sinatra‘s rendering of “Soliloquy,” which he recorded for the film’s soundtrack on 8.16.55

Sinatra sang at least two songs (“Soliloquy” and “If I Loved You”) that day for the 20th Century Fox / Henry King movie. The session happened on a Fox soundstage on Pico Blvd. The orchestra was conducted by Alfred Newman.

On the first day of shooting in Booth Bay, Maine, Sinatra was told he’d have to shoot his scenes twice, once in 35 millimeter and again in Cinemascope 55, a large format process similar to VistaVision and Todd-AO.

Stunned by this news, Sinatra said “no dice” and quit on the spot. He was replaced by Gordon MacRae. The finished film opened on 2.16.56.

From Owen Gleiberman‘s 4.17 Variety review of Becoming Madonna:

“We’d like an authoritative chronicle of everything that happened [during Madonna‘s struggle to make it], since Madonna intersected with as many notable figures as Zelig. And Michael Ogden, the director of Becoming Madonna, churns through these years in a slipshod way.

“The film keeps tossing out stray bits of information, like the fact that Madonna just about moved into The Music Building, the graffiti-strewn beehive of a studio rehearsal fortress several blocks south of Times Square.

“Yet it leaves out so much lore! Like the fact that Madonna studied under Martha Graham, or that she worked as a hat-check girl at the Russian Tea Room, or that she was sexually assaulted at knifepoint, or that she had a relationship with Jean-Michel Basquiat, or the pivotal way that she recruited ‘Jellybean’ Benitez to remix her first album.

“And though it’s part of Madonna’s legend that she pestered the DJs at Danceteria to play her demo tracks, it would have been nice if the movie filled in that chapter instead of just…mentioning it.”

Does anyone remember my 12.16.16 HE piece that praised Elyse Hollander‘s Blonde Ambition (“Popstar Bitch is Born”), a still-unproduced script that explores Madonna’s tough Manhattan years (’81 through ’83)?

I hereby pledge to send a PDF of Hollander’s script to anyone who’d like to read it.

Alas, Madonna didn’t like it and that’s where it ended.

An instant negative verdict was rendered after Mike Flanagan’s The Life Of Chuck won the 2024 Toronto Film Festival’s People’s Choice award.

Just about every visiting industry pro said “why did a film that generated zero festival conversation win the top trophy? What is wrong with the Toronto residents who voted for it? Are they saps? Why didn’t they show a little more taste?”

THR‘s Scott Feinberg on 9.15.24: “The Life of Chuck may be a lovely film, but it had virtually no profile coming in to the fest [and] generated virtually no discussion at the fest.”

An adaptation of a Stephen King novella, the “genre-trippping” feature costars Tom Hiddleston, Jacob Tremblay, Chiwetel “Chewy” Ejiofor, Karen Gillan, Mark Hamill (73 going on 94), Annalise Basso, Mia Sara and HE fave Nick Offerman narrating.

Neon will open Chuck stateside on 6.6.25 with a nationwide expansion a week later (6.13).

It was unnecessarily invasive and even cruel of Santa Fe authorities to release video of a cop examination of the Santa Fe residence of the late Gene Hackman and wife Betsy Arakawa.

Okay, they blurred out the bodies but c’mon…this is humiliating.

That said, why were several rooms in their sprawling home such a revolting mess? It looks like a home occupied by alcoholics or druggies…people with no discipline or any sense of sanitation.

Why did they allow their home to become infested by rats? Is this an age thing? Do old folks just give up and surrender to chaos because it’s somehow more comfortable to do so rather than maintain order and cleanliness?

And the size of the place….Jesus. It looks like a sprawling hotel or a sporting lodge of some kind…at least twice as large as any reasonable older couple might require. What couple would choose to live in a place this cavernous?

Ryan Coogler’s Sinners is a popcorn movie…a cheeseball thang…half-promising, half-wallow, aimed at the schmoes. And you’d better believe it’s been overpraised. I suspected as much when the first reactions broke, and now I know.

At first it’s a Mississippi folklore comic-book fable (great music, ecstasy dancing, sweaty sex, good cunnilingus), and then Coogler flips a switch and it becomes an ultra-violent schlock vampire flick that hits too hard and just bleeds, howls, groans and sweats all over the place.

Sinners is peddling comic-book country lore…actually impactful, storied, mythical and not half bad during the semi-realistic first 40%, but once the X-treme vampire stuff kicks in it’s basically coarse, bloody, gut-punch schlock. Crimson geysers, ragged bite wounds, wooden stakes, burnt flesh. Primitive slop.

Young Miles Caton is a gifted Delta Blues singer-guitarist — Robert Johnson reincarnated. And hangin’ with 89 year-old Buddy Guy at the very end is a treat. The musical sequences in the juke joint are joyful and jumpin’. And yes, the sight and sound of a chorus of Irish vampires singing Irish folk tunes under the moonlight as the bloody-faced Jack O’Connell dances an Irish jig is wonderful (O’Connell is probably doomed to play surly villains from here on) — the most bizarre spectacle I’ve ever seen or heard in a monster film.

And the buffed-up Michael B. Jordan, playing twin criminal brothers from Chicago, is straight and sturdy enough. He also gets laid twice, or rather the brothers make out separately, one with Hailee Steinfeld (turning 30 next year), another with Wunmi Mosaku.

But the second half is just crude vampire mulch. Much of the drawlin’ dialogue is unintelligible…so slurry and mumbly that I knew early on that I had no choice but to resort to the Wiki synopsis. Skim through this sucker….Eugene O’Neill, it ain’t…crazy, cartoonish gruel…pulp mythology.

And Autumn Durald Arakawa’s cinematography is way too dark. That or the Westport AMC’s projector lamp is close to death.

Yeah, there’s an obvious racial current or metaphor…Coogler sprinkles in a few Klanners, fat rednecks and dumb crackers straight out of Mississippi Burning, and they all meet with just desserts. Jordan filling them with hot lead a la Billy Wilder‘s St. Valentine’s Day massacre is part of the grand finale…yeah!

Sidenote for fanatical bully contingent:

I’m a deepwater cinephile with the usual exacting standards…the standards met and fulfilled by thousands of filmmakers throughout the 20th and early 21st centuries.

All the Metacritic and RT critics know there’s virtually no upside to slamming (or partially slamming) an ambitious Ryan Coogler movie that deals with deep-south racism and plays like a grindhouse flick from Sam Arkoff, and so they all put on their ballerina shoes before reviewing it.

I don’t play that tip-toe game.

I’ve begun to read Zach Dean‘s script of Day Drinker, a frothy thriller currently filming in Spain with a gray-haired Johnny Depp, 61, as an alcoholic named Kelly.

I’m only up to page 15, but it’s pretty clear that Kelly will either end up sober or a lot less shitfaced.

Dean’s story cruises around on a private yacht. Madelyn Cline, 28, plays the proverbial hottie; Penelope Cruz portrays a criminal of some sort.

Wikipedia says director Marc Webb (who always directs lightweight stuff) has actually been filming on the Canary Islands (Santa Cruz de Tenerife)

Depp’s Kelly is a friendly, enjoyable rogue…a charming fellow who needs to be sipping something at all times.

Dean’s script has a jaunty feel — I’ll give it that much. It ends with a twist,.