Day: August 13, 2025

Here’s Armond White’s full review of An Officer and a Spy, but I love his use of the term “dismissible embarassments” in the first sentence.

We all have stand-out, less-than-becoming physical traits of one kind or another. Myself included.

Way back when a girlfriend joked that I had “bird legs”…not my thighs as much as my calves. She wasn’t wrong. They’re also called stork legs. I was born with them…couldn’t do much about that. Still can’t.

You know who else had bird legs and didn’t feel good about it, and didn’t want to wear swimming trunks before movie cameras out of shame? Paul Newman. He admitted this once in an interview about The Drowning Pool (‘75), for which he was obliged to wade into a large Louisiana lake (or the Gulf of Mexico) during an Act Two scene.

The late Israeli actress Dalia Lavi clearly had bird legs.

So for myself, Newman and Lavi, a common trait was acknowledged.

In one of my 2024 Poor Things riffs I wrote that Emma Stone had “large, slender, shovel-like feet.” Was I blaming her for this? Of course not —just observing a physical fact. No biggie. Join the Greta Garbo club.

It’s a universal rule that actors and actresses and foot close-ups are a must-to-avoid. Directors never go there. Nobody wants to be tagged for having funny-looking or less-than-attractive feet, which applies 98% of the time. Man-peds…no!

If anyone ever comes up and says, “You’re no one to talk…you have bird legs, for God’s sake!”, my response will be “yup…guilty.”

Comment thread from “When Priggish Moral Standards Were At An All-Time High“, originally posted on 8.11.24:

The Rotten Tomatoes verdict on Scarlet Johansson‘s Eleanor The Great (Sony Picures Classics, 9.26) is “okay, it feels fairly conventional as a ‘what a tangled web we weave when we practice to deceive’ story, and it certainly could’ve been better, but it’s at least worth the price for June Squibb‘s lead performance. Not a winnning success, but not a failure either.”

I’m sick to death of movies that portray this or that white guy as the proverbial villain — deplorable or weak or impossibly selfish or, you know, some kind of primal seed of evil. I’m sick of this shit…sick of it, sick of it, sick of it.

If the 32 year-old Martin Scorsese, livid about the MPAA’s demand to cut much or most of the Taxi Driver shoot-out finale, had somehow stolen the original work print and thereby preserved the original look of this climactic sequence…if Scorsese had manned up and done this, he would’ve found himself in a heap of legal trouble but would nonetheless have behaved like a dude of resolve and consequence.

In Rebecca Miller‘s forthcoming Mr. Scorsese (Apple TV+, 10.17) the now 82-year-old director tells the story of this traumatic episode. He definitely intended to steal the work print, he says. He also bought a gun and was thinking of waving it around or something.

Scorsese should have somehow gotten hold of that Taxi Driver work print and sent it to a lab and copied it. At least that. His failure to preserve the original color scheme of that shoot-out scene was nothing short of an artistic tragedy. It remains a stain upon his legacy to this day.

“Son of Brown Blood,” posted on 8.22.20:

On 3.11.11 I ran a piece called “Taxi Driver‘s Brown Blood“. It was about (a) Grover Crisp and Martin Scorsese‘s Bluray restoration of Taxi Driver (4.5.11). and more particularly (b) a technical question asked of Crisp by The Digital Bits‘ Bill Hunt.

Hunt asked about the brownish, sepia-tone tinting of the climactic shoot-out scene, which had been imposed upon Scorsese by the MPAA ratings board. Scorsese had always intended this scene to be presented with a more-or-less natural color scheme, in harmony with the rest of the film. Hunt to Crisp: “Why didn’t you and Scorsese restore the originally shot, more colorful shoot-out scene?”

“There are a couple of answers to this,” Crisp replied. “One, which we discussed, was the goal of presenting the film as it was released, which is the version everyone basically knows. This comes up every now and then, but the director feels it best to leave the film as it is. That decision is fine with me.”

HE response: “There can be no legitimate claim of Taxi Driver having been restored without the original natural color (or at least a simulation of same) put back in. The film was shot with more or less natural colors, was intended to be shown this way, and — with the exception of the shoot-out scene — has been shown this way since it first opened in ’75.

“There’s nothing noble or sacred about the look of that final sequence. The fact that it was sepia-toned to get a more acceptable MPAA rating is, I feel, a stain upon the film’s legacy.”

Crisp explained that even if Scorsese wanted to present the natural color version, the original Taxi Driver negative is gone and there’s no way to “pump” the color back in.

Steven Gaydos 2011 comment: “Jeff’s right that it’s a shame a filmmaker had to alter his film in order for it to be seen in wide release, but according to my in-house expert (Monte Hellman, who oversaw the digital restoration/release of his 1971 film Two Lane Blacktop), if the negative is gone, as Crisp clearly says it is, then ‘you can put the color in but it will never look right, and certainly won’t look anything like the original footage.'”

And that was that.

But two or three years later I came upon this image of the wounded Travis Bickle, and damned if it doesn’t look like the original probably did before the MPAA stepped in.

I wondered right away where it came from, and I asked myself “if someone could satisfactorily manipulate a single frame from that shoot-out sequence to make it look right and natural, why couldn’t someone manage the same trick for the whole sequence?”

Who knows how Josh “wackadoodle” Safdie‘s Marty Supreme will play as a feature? Trailers never lay their cards on the table. They always lie.

But the trailer is certainly telling us that Marty Supreme isn’t a ping-pong competition movie, but a film about the power of positive thinking…confidence, swagger, self-promotion. There’s one little snippet of a ping-pong game — the rest is about Timothee Chalamet‘s Marty Reisman seducing or otherwise selling himself to women, businessmen, everyone.

I’m especially looking forward to the supporting performance by Shark Tank‘s Kevin O’Leary.

The only “uh-oh” element is in the final clip…a massively obese guy (a Josh Gad lookaike) saying that the tangerine-colored ball is “an original [ping-pong] ball for an original guy. It’s the Marty Supreme ball, not the Marty normal ball.”

The problem is that by the standards of the late ’40s to mid ’50s, which is when table tennis maestro Marty Reisman was peaking, fat guys weren’t the size of circus tents. They looked like Jackie Gleason or Andy Devine or Oliver Hardy for the most part, and not like Jabba the frickin’ Hut…350-pound sumo wrestler types were pretty much confined to travelling circus side shows.

Some kind of real-world hacked ticket from a seemingly deranged gremlin posing as a Trenitalia rep arrived last night in my inbox:

But if you read Anthony D’Alessandro’s 10.12 Deadline story…ahh, feck it, too complicated and overqualified. Just give us a nice, simple, black vs. white story about bureaucratic cowardice without mucking things up with a torrent of ninny-nanny particulars.