A month ago I learned I was afflicted with atherosclerosis….hardening of the arteries. So I arranged to submit to a stress test, the results of which might have warranted a balloon agioplasty and maybe a stent for good measure.
So I finally had the stress test done five days ago, and two days later I got the verdict. And it wasn’t alarming or even that concerning. My situation is “normal“, according to my primary care physician.
I don’t believe that altogether. I still think I need to do something about the plaque, which is what stents are supposed to be good for. But my diet has improved, and my bad habits have been amended. Well, some of them.
Billy Wilder‘s Sunset Boulevard opened exactly 75 years ago — August 10, 1950. Everyone involved is dead, of course, except for the intrepid Nancy Olson, who turned 97 a month ago.
The Paramount marketers who created the below newspaper ad on behalf of the Radio City Music Hall took the art of lying to new absurdist heights, of course. Sunset Boulevard remains one of the darkest and most acidic portraits of Hollywood psychology ever crafted, and they were selling a happy, smiling, lovey-dovey glamour ride.
The thing about Sunset Boulevard that doesn’t quite play in today’s terms is Joe Gillis‘s refusal to confide to Betty Schaefer what he’s up to — that he’s become a kind of screenwriting gigolo, living high on the hog with a 50 year-old silent movie star.
Gillis cares for Schaefer and vice versa — audiences can tell they’d be a good match — but he’s too consumed with self-loathing to let her know what’s up. That doesn’t figure. He was broke and ready to skip town when he met Norma Desmond. Now he’s hustling a rich meal-ticket while he plots his next move. What’s so shameful about that?
The first 30 minutes of Sunset Boulevard are sharp and catchy, and the last 15 are grand-slammy. But the middle 65 of this 110-minute film are a little slow and frustrating.
And why hasn’t Gillis insisted to Desmond that he has to be paid an actual weekly salary? If he got one he could save up enough to buy a new car and move back into his apartment and get his career going again, especially with Schaefer as his new writing partner.
Cameron Crowe: “There is a famous story from the first Hollywood screening of Sunset Boulevard [in 1950]. Louis B. Mayer [head of MGM] was standing on a stairway, railing about ‘How dare this young man, Wilder, bite the hand that feeds him?’ What did you say to him when you overheard all this?”
Billy Wilder: “I am Mr. Wilder, and go fuck yourself.”
Crowe: “What did he say to that?
Wilder: “He was astonished. He was standing with the great MGM bosses who were below him, there at the studio, Mr. [Eddie] Mannix and Mr. [Joe] Cohen. And that so astonished them, that somebody had the guts to say, “Why don’t you go fuck yourself?” [And that’s when] I knew that I had a good picture there. — from October 1999 Vanity Fair piece, “Conversations With Billy.”
Posted on 11.16.20: The famous animal bone sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey lasts one minute and 54 seconds. It shows the moment in which Moonwatcher (Dan Richter) discovers a certain killer instinct that will save his tribe from extinction.
My favorite part is the final six seconds, starting at 1:48. This is when Moonwatcher says “okay, that was cool, I now understand how to kill prey for food…and now that I’ve figured this out I’m going to throw the fucking bone in the air and forget about it.”
Which he does. And then he runs his fingers through the sand and starts…whatever, daydreaming. I love this part…”fuck it, fuck the bone, I’m not doing this all day, I’m taking a break.”
80% of the critics reviewed the actual film as opposed to Polanski’s decades-old personal history, and were naturally, totally thumbs up. There is simply no intelligent way to pan this brilliant film.
You can feel Manohla Dargis’s clenched discomfort at having to acknowledge that An Officer and a Spy “is well-crafted…Polanski’s movies generally are.” And her subsequent relief when she adds that the film’s “contribution to cinema’s role in historical storytelling seems largely as an allegory about Polanski.”
Will there be any other theatrical bookings? Will an HD streaming version be made available? Right now, as before, the only way to see AOAAS is via some pirate torrent or by buying the English-subtitled Russian Bluray, a copy of which is sitting on one of my Bluray shelves.
It’s also the only kind that never dims in intensity, and certainly never runs out of fuel.
The fact that the bearer is guaranteed to suffer is almost rote as almost everyone who’s fallen head-over-heels knows (or eventually comes to know) that “love hurts”…that emotional anguish and even humiliation are almost always part of the deal.
And I don’t want to hear about enduring love between longtime silver-haired marrieds being just as strong and blissful and life-sustaining as ever. That kind of love-through-the-=decades is fine and good and certainly nourishing in a quietly slumbering, almost-nodding-off sort of way, but it doesn’t hurt, and if you can’t feel that terrible stab in the chest, where’s the dimensional residue?
