Las Vegas Police Department announcement: “Calling all cars…calling all cars. Be on the lookout for a moderately good-looking male who may live or work in Las Vegas, between 5′ 9″ and six feet, mid 30s to early 40s, sometimes wears a hoodie, lean but fit. Suspect looks like a genetic cross between Ken Wahl when he was starring in Wise Guy, Republican actor Vincent Gallo when he made The Brown Bunny and Willem Dafoe in the ’90s and early aughts. Be careful when approaching suspect as he threatened Stormy Daniels as well as her daughter, so he may threaten you. Daniels’ attorney is offering a $100K reward for anyone who accurately identifies and locates the suspect.”
Alden Ehrenreich was almost certainly chosen to play the rogue-ish Han Solo by producer Kathy Kennedy because she felt obliged to kiss the ring of her longtime boss Steven Spielberg. The famed director discovered Ehrenreich in 2003, when the 28-year-old actor was 14, after seeing him in a Bat Mitzvah video at a party. Spielberg’s endorsement eventually led to Ehrenreich getting an agent, landing gigs on TV series like Supernatural and CSI, and being cast as Vincent Gallo‘s younger brother in Francis Coppola‘s Tetro (’09).
So when you’re watching Solo a few weeks hence and asking yourself how the producers could have possibly decided that the too-short, beady-eyed Ehrenreich could fill Harrison Ford‘s shoes in a way that audiences would totally accept (instead of hiring Baby Driver‘s Ansel Elgort, the obvious choice), remember that Aldenreich was primarily chosen as a deferential gesture to big bossman Beardo.
My gut tells me this is a total lock for a Best Documentary Feature Oscar nomination for two…no, three reasons: (1) Rogers, an ordained Presbyterian minister before becoming a children’s TV star, was the personification of everything Donald Trump never was, isn’t today and never will be, so everyone who will want to salute that; (2) The doc was highly praised (RT 95%) during last January’s Sundance Film Festival; and (3) Everyone who loved Neville’s Oscar-winning 20 Feet From Stardom will be favorably disposed.
I’m not exactly the kind of guy who strolls around with a gentle, open-hearted, sunny-faced attitude, but I admire guys who can pull that off. Rogers was also something of a progressive, forward-thinking lefty, which makes me admire his memory all the more. And I’m a longtime admirer of Neville (Best of Enemies: Buckley vs. Vidal, Keith Richards: Under the Influence). Missed the Rogers flick during Sundance, but would love to see it soon (i.e., before leaving for Cannes on 4.29). What say, Focus?
Stormy Daniels‘ attorney Michael Avenatti, who was in the courtroom earlier today, is such a gifted raconteur….great stuff, starting around 4:50, peaks at 6:25…”the client’s name is Sean Hannity.”
For whatever reason I never paid attention to Tom Steyer‘s most recent videos until this afternoon. This is all basic “duhh” stuff, but a sizable percentage of the viewing population doesn’t pay attention as a rule. Who had to look up the title of this post? It’s from a well-known film, but is not actually spoken.
Hannity has always been in the Trump-Pravda tank so it’s not exactly a shocker that he and Cohen are joined at the professional hip, but what little journalistic integrity Hannity had until today seems compromised all the more.
Hannity interviewed Cohen in January 2017 about the Steele dossier [below]. During this interview Cohen reiterated his claim that he’s “never been in Prague…never.” That assertion was disputed last Friday by a McClatchy report.
This isn’t an easy thing to contemplate but in less than five years Jodie Foster, who was barely pubescent when she made Taxi Driver, will turn 60. I’m mentioning this because she seems to be playing that age in Drew Pearce‘s Hotel Artemis (Warner Bros., 6.18), an original-sounding, noir-atmosphere crime drama with a strongish cast — Sterling K. Brown, Brian Tyree Henry, Dave Bautista, Sofia Boutella, Zachary Quinto, Jeff Goldblum, Jenny Slate. Wiki premise: “In riot-torn, near-future Los Angeles, The Nurse (Foster) runs a secret, members-only hospital for criminals. Waikiki and Honolulu (Brown, Henry) become patients after an armed robbery goes wrong,” blah blah.
What a shame that a ripped piece of cardboard who refuses to star in half-decent films has been named by Variety as the closet thing Hollywood has these days to a Seriously Bankable Star.
Roughly speaking Dwayne Johnson is doing the same kind of top-dollar, macho-action-star thing that Kirk Douglas consolidated in the ’50s, Steve McQueen delivered in the ’60s and early ’70s, Sylvester Stallone dealt in the late ’70s, ’80s and early ’90s, Arnold Schwarzenegger monetized in the ’80s and ’90s, Vin Diesel tried and failed to do as a stand-alone (until the Fast & Furious franchise took off), Robert Downey, Jr. began to do with Iron Man in ’08 and which Bruce Willis did in the early ’90s and is still half-doing today.
Except Johnson is no Douglas or McQueen (please!), and he represents an evolutionary step down by the standards of Stallone, Willis, Downey and Schwarzenegger, who actually made good films in their prime years. Johnson makes big, dopey, adolescent wank-offs, and then raises his fist and goes “yeaahhh!”
On top of which he seems less than hardcore when it comes to political principles and launching (don’t laugh) a possible Presidential run.
Last December Johnson toldVariety‘s Elizabeth Wagmeister that he cares “deeply about our country, and about our people…decency matters and being a decent human being matters, and character matters, and leadership matters.”
And yet Johnson said that a 2024 run “would be the realistic consideration” because he has more movies and more millions to make before he tries to restore big-government decency and character. “Realistically, as we go into 2018, when you look at my slate as we’re developing and shooting into 2019 and 2020,” Johnson says, “[and] the slate goes deep into 2021, so it feels like the realistic consideration would be 2024.”
I’m not misinterpreting or misquoting in the slightest way here. Johnson really told Wagmeister that while he has serious arguments with Trump and that he’s giving serious thought to running because he cares about the U.S. and wants to restore a climate of decency and character, he can’t see running in ’20 because of existing commitments to make and produce a few more films.
1. The Right wrote the book on political blacklisting in the late ’40s and especially the ’50s. So much so that they kinda “own” blacklisting in perpetuity, as they put many good people of conscience and principle through considerable misery, and thereby earned a good amount of poison karma for themselves, and so any blacklisting that comes back at their descendants is just too effing bad. Blacklisting is a bad thing, but they can’t deny the discriminatory karma that’s in their blood. If you hatch ugly eggs, you can’t complain when the chickens come home to roost, even if it’s a half-century or more later.
2. Speaking for myself I’d never be in favor of denying anyone work if they’re good at their job or craft or even if they’re less than talented — no blacklisting under any circumstances! Jon Voight‘s views may be reprehensible, but he’s a first-rate actor and should never be shit-canned because he said some appalling things about Barack Obama. Good creative ferment is all that matters.
3. But given the UNDENIABLE FACT that the Right created and implemented the toxic blacklisting of certain Hollywood persons on the Left during the late ’40s and ’50s, and because the evil karma serum has been generationally passed down through blood and genetics, Righties have NO LEG TO STAND ON if they want to cry foul. They can’t. If they run into any anti-Right blacklisting or discrimination they’ll have to TAKE IT and LIKE IT because their souls are stained. Because their grandfathers brought horror and hell into the lives of many good and principled directors, screenwriters and actors back in the day. Somewhere in heaven Dalton Trumbo, Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson are listening and noting the irony.
4. Once again, blacklisting is a lousy thing to even consider, much less implement, but Righties have no ethical leg to stand on IF and WHEN political blackballing were to rear its ugly head in their backyards. In a serial or generational sense they own it, their grandfathers wrote the book and they have to take the karma like men.
I’m about to receive scripts for Backseat, First Man, Bohemian Rhapsody, Beautiful Boy, Old Man And The Gun, Boy Erased and The Sisters Brothers. I’m asking again for Quentin Tarantino‘s Once Upon A Time in Hollywood script. By the way: I’ll be personally delighted if QT goes with a historical fantasia ending a la Inglorious Basterds, in which Adolf Hitler and the Nazi high command were burnt to death inside a Parisian movie theatre. I’m imagining Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt‘s characters, a struggling actor and a stunt man who live near Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski‘s home at 10050 Cielo Drive, saving Tate and her pals from the brutal knives of the Manson gang, maybe by drilling the would-be hippie murderers with hot lead or maybe in some other way.
R. Lee Ermey, the ex-Marine who became a well-employed actor after playing the loud-mouthed Gunnery Sergeant Hartman in Stanley Kubrick‘s Full Metal Jacket, has bought the farm. He was only 74, but he was a right-winger who hated Obama and said some fairly awful things, and as a result had trouble getting hired by liberal Hollywood over the last few years. (Or so I’ve read.) I was about to say “Tough shit, twinkletoes!” but then I thought, “Naah, ease up and back off….don’t do a Bob Clark.”
The Hartman yellathon is Ermey’s masterpiece. (I would actually call it a comic masterpiece.) He was good but only sufficiently so in his other acting roles. He had plenty of work over the 33-year period that followed Full Metal Jacket, or from ’87 until Ermey put his foot in his mouth and skull-fucked himself in 2010.
Italian director Vittorio Taviani has died at age 88. He and his younger brother Paolo co-directed over 20 noteworthy Italian films. The Tavianis, who began churning them out in the ’50s, were probably the most celebrated directing brothers of the Italian cinema realm.
The last Taviani film I saw was Ceasar Must Die, about some prisoners putting on a performance of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. My favorite Taviani flick was Good Morning, Babylon (’87), about two Italian immigrant brothers (Vincent Spano, Joaquim de Almeida) who get hired as set designers for D.W. Griffith‘s Intolerance. It always seemed that their most popular film was Night of the Shooting Stars (’82).
For what it’s worth, the very first film I reviewed for any Manhattan publication was Vittorio and Paolo’s Padre Padrone. I seem to recall reviewing it sometime in early ’78 (i.e., when it opened commercially) for the Chelsea Clinton News. I was a mediocre writer back then. My prose was on the turgid, overworked side. I knew it and so did my editors. It was agony when I would try to write anything. It would take hours to write a single decent paragraph. It was like digging ditches.
