In all my decades of movie-obsessing, only one film has given me pause in the matter of male anatomy. Pause and a slight feeling of discomfort.
I must have been 14 or 15 when I first watched this scene from Mr. Roberts in our family TV room, and I distinctly remember saying to myself, “Jesus, you can see Jack Lemmon‘s twin gonads right through his Navy khaki pants.”
It wasn’t so much distasteful as distracting — I stopped listening to the letter that Lemmon was reading. I didn’t hear a word of it.
If I’d been directing (not sure if it was John Ford, Mervyn LeRoy or Joshua Logan shouting “action” and “cut” when this scene was shot), I would have pulled Lemmon aside and told him to duck into wardrobe and put on one of those metal jockstraps that baseball catchers wear. That or stuff his underwear with a big wad of toilet paper, Mick Jagger-style.
I couldn’t be the first person to notice this, I told myself. Mister Roberts played everywhere in 1955, and was considered family-friendly for the most part. But not this part.
HE’s all-time favorite Lemmon performances: Operation Mad Ball, Some Like It Hot, The Apartment, Days of Wine and Roses, The Fortune Cookie, Save the Tiger, The China Syndrome, Missing, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, JFK, Glengarry Glen Ross, Short Cuts, Off the Menu: The Last Days of Chasen’s (13).
Late last night I streamed B.J.Novak‘s Vengeance (for $20 bills!) and was seriously, genuinely impressed. How the hell did the Blumhouse animals get involved with this? It’s way, way above their usual crude-horror level. And at the same time it’s a Focus Features release, and I was asking myself “what the hell happened with the marketing on this thing?” I’d barely heard of it until Sasha Stone urged me to see it yesterday afternoon.
The Texas-based Vengeance is VERY sharp and savvy, and at the same time one of those rare films with the capacity to settle down and “listen to the grass grow” (a line from Hud, another rural Texas drama) and even feel a semblance of generosity and human compassion for the lives and values of red-state primitives, which is to say folks who aren’t so appalling once you get to know them. Come to think of it I don’t just mean the Texas rurals but also Novak’s “Ben Manalowitz”, whom we also get to know in ways we don’t see coming.
This semi-dweeby 30something who’s played by the star (as well as the director and screenwriter) is a bright, low-key, entirely rational Brooklyn horndog type, way ahead of himself in some ways and at the same time on the emotionally stunted side, and what he experiences in Vengeance is part Brigadoon, part Local Hero and part…well, not quite The Long Goodbye but something that certainly flirts with that realm.
My initial assessment was to call Vengeance a culture-clash dramedy — an extremely social-media-attuned Brooklyn hipster & writer/podcaster & hook-up artist vs. more-than-initially meets-the-eye, family-anchored rurals in Bumblefuck, Texas.
Except it’s not really a “dramedy.” The satirical humor is so dry and under-stated and nuanced and even drill-bitty at times, punctuated as it occasionally is by curiously wise reflections about liberal social media perceptions and ways of living and relating that one could describe as empty or at least lacking in a smartphone-oriented sense vs. under-educated, trailer-park Whataburger Texas primitives, and delivered with a near-total absence of conventional schtick that I didn’t know where to put it.
But I knew for sure that I was watching something real and refreshing. Plus it conveys a learning curve and emotional growth on Novak’s part. And it gives Ashton Kutcher his best-written, most quietly charismatic role ever.
The problem comes at the very end when Novak delivers a surprise ending that was seemingly stolen from, as mentioned, Robert Altman‘s The Long Goodbye, and I’m telling you that it really, REALLY doesn’t work, even though Novak declares early on that he’s not a Texas-styled vengeance type of guy, which is a set-up for an ironic finale. Ben Manalowitz isn’t Shane or Charles Bronson in Death Wish, and there’s no way a guy like this will suddenly morph into an angel of moral justice…no way in hell. I would go so far as to call what I’m half-describing as a train-wreck ending, although Novak manages it throw in a few grace notes after the big surprise. There were four or five ways to go at the very end, and Novak chose the absolute worst option.
That aside (and it’s only a short bit at the very end), Vengeance is WELL worth seeing and thinking about the next day, I’m actually considering giving it a re-watch later this week. There’s no question that Vengeance, which sounds like a primitive actioner in the Mel Gibson mode, is a completely shitty title considering what it’s actually about. Whoever said “wait, let’s call it Vengeance!” should be put into a paddock for seven days and be made to suffer the ridicule of being hit with tomatoes and rotten bananas. Okay, that might be too harsh. But they should at least go on an apology tour and try to explain what their thinking was.
One small thing: Within the Texas family that Ben Manalowitz spends a fair amount of time with is a foxy airhead-y teenage blonde, played by Dove Cameron. Her character, “Kansas City Shaw”, just wants to be “famous”, she says, and for a while you’re thinking “okay, where’s this going to go?” Is she going to hit on Ben in hopes of his inviting her to visit Brooklyn? (She delivers a line early on that alludes to oral predilection.) Is she going to post Instagram videos of herself interacting with Ben or something? But nothing happens. We all like hot blondies but Novak drops her like a bad habit. There’s a second-act family feast scene at Whataburger, and we can see the back of Cameron’s blonde head, but Novak doesn’t give her a line or even a quick insert close-up. She’s part of the family but has been, in a manner of speaking, erased. A curious call.
I’m presuming that someone figured that it’s wrong to promote smoking of any kind so the cigar was zotzed. HE is calling this an advertising form of woke “presentism.” What’s next? Digitally erasing Robert Mitchum‘s cigarettes in Out of the Past?
Filed by THR‘s Aaron Couch, Sydney Odman and Borys Kit: “The footage shown included a big sequence during a New York ticker tape parade, a horseback chase in a subway tunnel, a train sequence and Indy using his iconic whip to take on a dozen guns.”
How do you “take on a dozen [presumably loaded] guns” with a bullwhip? Remember that scary bedouin villain threatening Indy with a huge sword in the 1981 original, and Indy pulling out his pistol and shooting the guy? I could see Indy using his whip to disarm a swordsman but a dozen guns?
This has already been kicked around, but Owen Glieberman’s Lost King review got me going again.
HE to Gleiberman: “Very keen on seeing this, and your TIFF review excited me. But why oh why does the film insist that Richard III wasn’t a vaguely grotesque figure, or the glint-eyed. hunchbacked fellow played by Laurence Olivier in the mid ‘50s? Why does the film insist on depriving us of that perversely pleasurable characterization?
“Even if you claim that Richard III was contorted into a deformed or misshaped figure whom dogs barked at…even if you assert that Shakespeare mangled him into a creep in order to please the Tudors, Richard was still a scheming bastard who murdered his way to the throne. And Harry Lloyd’s beatific expression is infuriating in this light. One glance at Lloyd and I felt a surge of instant loathing. How dare you, Stephen Frears and Steve Coogan? The ghost of Lord Olivier is puzzled; ditto the alive-and-well Ian McKellan, Ralph Fiennes and Al Pacino. Unwelcome revisionism, to put it mildly.”
From Owen Gleiberman’s The Lost King review (9.9.22): “As Philippa Langley, a middle-class British divorcée who, with no special knowledge or skill, goes on a quest to find the remains of King Richard III, Sally Hawkins, who has given so many extraordinary performances, may, in this movie, have given her greatest one yet.”
We all understand that Michelle Yeoh has been grandfathered in by the powers-that-be. And there’s absolutely no question about Cate Blanchett and Olivia Colman…don’t even question it. Whatever the general response to Blonde, Ana de Armas will probably qualify because of the Cuban-actress-plays-Marilyn factor (reassuring to non-white actors who may one day aspire to play this or that famous white character) plus the touching metaphor of MM, bruised and maimed by pig males all her life, dying from a combination of their sins and her own calamitious childhood.
British royalty is mostly about the notion of high-born continuity, which most of us find vaguely comforting on some level. (My heritage and bloodline come from England, a fact that automatically makes me a racist cad, so I can feel it to some extent.) Nostalgic, misty-eyed history, pomp and circumstance, and tourism. When did the British monarchy become ceremonial rather than authoritative? During the mid to later stages of Queen Victoria’s reign (1860s-1901), most would say. 130 or 140 years ago. Exalted in a sense but mainly about soft, symbolic power throughout the entire 20th Century and into today. And yet…
For those who may have ignored the initial link (posted yesterday), I'm reposting this nine-year-old Politico piece, It's very refreshing when a political campaign staffer admits to simply having made (or more precisely been part of) a colossal mistake. I would love to watch a political campaign series called "Boy, Did We Fuck Up or What?"
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We’re all familiar with those unfortunate biological quirks of nature in which people of quality and achievement are occasionally stuck with lesser, weaker family members or in-laws, otherwise known as the black-sheep or bad-seed syndrome.
There’s the bad-son syndrome (i.e., Hunter Biden, Cameron Douglas), as well as the bad-brother syndrome (Billy Carter) or the bad half-brother syndrome (Roger Clinton). My younger brother Tony, who passed in 2009, was closer to an under-achiever than a bad seed, but everyone is familiar with this. Remember George Clooney‘s no-account brother in Michael Clayton, the guy with the substance issues who stole steel-belted radial tires from his sister’s garage?
It follows that many fathers or older brothers or wealthy benefactors from within the family, motivated by love or misplaced loyalty or a simple urge to protect and defend, sometimes do what they can to clean up the messes caused by bad-seed types.
No reasonable person will dispute that Hunter Biden behaved like a fairly bad seed during his crack-and-cocaine-and-hookers addiction period. We all understand that during the Obama administration Hunter profited in various ways from being Joe Biden‘s son. (Are you telling me that Donald Trump‘s sons are any better from an ethical perspective?) At the same time no reasonable person would argue that Hunter’s behavior casts any kind of substantial reflection upon President Joe Biden‘s character or moral behavior. Fathers will always try to help their bad-seed sons. For much of his life Hunter was a wrong one — weak, derelict, craven, maybe even depraved. And so what? American families are full of Hunter Biden types.
Which is why bullshit rightwing movies like My Son Hunter are disreputable distractions. Distributed by Breitbart News, directed by Robert Davi and costarring Gina Carano as a secret service agent…hah!Laurence Fox plays Hunter Biden, and John James plays his dad. Production began in October 2021 in Serbia and lasted for four weeks (!).
