“It’s a matter of who deserves the benefit of the doubt,” Scott explains. The article is anything but bluntly worded, but Scott seems to be basically saying that Allen’s history and more specifically his films contain little hints and half-revelations about his sexual nature and longings, and that these, to Scott, are sufficiently disturbing to give him pause.
This means, I presume, that Scott will be giving A Rainy Day in New York a bad review if and when it finds some avenue of distribution. (Everyone seems to believe that Amazon will cut the film loose sooner or later.) That or someone else will review it.
Dave Itzkoff’s N.Y. Times takedown piece on Alec Baldwin reads like a Stalinist comintern critique about the shortcomings of someone who’s fallen out of political favor. Itzkoff’s case is that Baldwin lacks the moral authority to skewer Donald Trump on Saturday Night Live because (a) he’s either been supportive of or hasn’t sufficiently condemned accused abusers like Woody Allen, James Toback and Dustin Hoffman and (b) he’s questioned the characters and motives of Dylan Farrow and Rose McGowan.
There are no effective “yes but” rebuttals in Hoffman and Toback’s cases, but Baldwin’s defense of Allen has been rational, factual and tough-minded. Say it again: Any fair-minded assessment of the facts behind the Allen-Farrow case leaves room for considerable doubt.
Baldwin is an angry guy, for sure, and hardly a member in good standing of the #MeToo vanguard, but Itzkoff has basically gone after Baldwin not for anything he’s done, but for something he thinks. The underlying message is “it’s time to put guys like Baldwin out to pasture because all crusty boomer-aged dinosaurs have to be marginalized and discredited.” Just as those 18th Century Parisians whose views didn’t sufficiently align with those of Maximilien Robespierre needed to go to the guillotine.
The point was made in Itzkoff’s piece by TV writer Nell Scovell, who said that Baldwin’s support of Toback and Allen “smacks of overlooking and underestimating women while overvaluing the men.”
The first step in Donald Trump’s plan to deball and dilute Robert Mueller‘s investigation into Russian collusion and obstruction of justice happened this morning when the House Intelligence Committee released its cherry-picked memo. Trump-approved and Devin Nunes-finessed, the memo alleges anti-Trump bias on the part of the FBI and Justice Department in the Trump-Russia investigation.
The plan, of course, is to use this memo to fire Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and thereafter replace him with some Trump flunky who will presumably block or get in the way of Mueller’s investigation in every imaginable way.
This is a strong-arm Mussolini move — fascistic bully-boy behavior. Obviously part of an established pattern of Trump getting rid of his perceived Justice Department enemies — Deputy director Andrew McCabe, former FBI director James Comey, United States Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates.
The gist of the memo is that the allegedly biased (i.e., critical of Trump) Christopher Steele report “formed an essential part of the initial and all three renewal FISA applications against Carter Page,” per a Washington Examiner summary.
In his masterful Network, director Sidney Lumet clearly wanted the audience to regard Peter Finch‘s Howard Beale as half coming-apart but also half-inspired. As one who psychedelically sailed into the mystic and the Bhagavad Gita in my early 20s, I’ve always preferred to see Beale as a spiritual emissary, first and foremost:
“This is not a psychotic episode,” Beale says to William Holden‘s Max Schumacher. “This is a cleansing moment of clarity. I’m imbued, Max. I’m imbued with some special spirit. It’s not a religious feeling at all. It’s a shocking eruption of great electrical energy. I feel vivid and flashing, as if suddenly I’d been plugged into some great electromagnetic field. And even to some great, unseen, living force. What I think the Hindus call prana.”
Rose McGowan has meltdown on stage at Barnes & Nobles book signing after trans heckler yells that she hasn't done anything for trans women who are victims of sexual assault. pic.twitter.com/fTRafCUNcL
HE reply: “Yeah, she’s very hyper, like she’s on Ritalin. But sometimes the usual social niceties fall to the wayside when a person is really throbbing with a special spirit or current. She’s speaking her truth and seems sharp and lucid as far as that goes. On the other hand she’d like to string up a significant portion of the white male power structure, and there’s something a little Ox Bow Incident about that.”
HE reply: “Just as I was disinclined to see Howard Beale as raving and unstable, an instinct is telling me that however eccentric she may seem in terms of her manner and speaking style, McGowan’s anger is fed by honest experience, honest fuel. I’m not sensing a chemical imbalance as much as old-fashioned rage and rhetorical fire.”
Hollywood Elsewhere arrived in Santa Barbara late this afternoon, and then attended a big SBIFF tribute for The Florida Project‘s Willem Dafoe at the Arlington theatre — a 90-minute q & a with Deadline‘s Pete Hammond, the usual array of clips, and a presentation of the Cinema Vanguard award by The Fault In Our Stars director Josh Boone.
Huzzah for one of our most gifted and tenacious indie-level actors, a guy who’s been digging in and chugging along for 40 years now, and was lucky enough to enjoy a brilliant nine-year streak from ’85 to ’94 — the counterfeiter in William Friedkin‘s To Live and Die in L.A., Sergeant Elias in Oliver Stone‘s Platoon, Jesus of Nazareth in The Last Temptation of Christ, FBI agent Alan Ward in Alan Parker‘s Mississippi Burning, a pissed-off paraplegic in Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July, Bobby Peru in David Lynch‘s Wild At Heart, Jon LeTour in Paul Schrader‘s Light Sleeper, and John Clark in Phillip Noyce‘s Clear and Present Danger.
Dafoe often works with the strongest and most innovative directors around. I especially respected his performance as Pier Paolo Pasolini in Abel Ferrara‘s Pasolini (’14). Sure, Dafoe appears in crap from time to time, but who doesn’t?
Earlier this month Dafoe’s Florida Project performance was an apparent lock for the Best Supporting Actor Oscar, but all of sudden Three Billboards‘ Sam Rockwell stole the heat with Golden Globe and Critics Choice wins, and now…who knows?
Dafoe spoke a bit about playing Vincent Van Gogh in Julian Schnabel‘s At Eternity’s Gate, which recently finished shooting. He said it would be a more inward-looking, painter’s-eye study at Van Gogh’s struggle.
Hollywood Elsewhere couldn’t attend the Santa Barbara Film Festival’s opening night screening of Emilio Estevez‘s The Public, but I’ll be there later today. Within a couple of hours. Probably. I think.
Sebastian Lelio‘s Disobedience (Bleecker, 4.27) was one of my more satisfying viewings at last September’s Toronto Film Festival. It’s a classy, heartfelt hot-lesbo thing. That makes it sound a bit tawdry, I realize, but that’s the hook and the filmmakers knew that going in.
Ronit (Rachel Weisz) is a British-born Jew living a louche life in Manhattan. She returns to England when her Rabbi father passes away, and gradually reconnects with Esti (Rachel McAdams), a former lover who’s now married to an Orthodox Rabbi (Allesandro Nivola). Needless to add, Ronit and Esti get into it again.
I regret to say that my only Toronto-based comment about Disobedience was that it’s “so well-made and full of feeling that I’m not even going to use the phrase ‘hot lesbo action,’ although it does have that.”
When Abraham Lincoln passed away on 4.15.65, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton famously said, “Now he belongs to the ages.” Since that moment any allusion to “the ages” has had a special apartness, a ring of dignity and reverence. Until two months ago, that is, when Vanity Fair‘s Yohana DestacalledGet Out “a film for the ages.” Universal marketers seized on that quote PDQ and put it on a big fat billboard near the corner of Highland and Franklin. There’s no disputing Desta’s observation that Jordan Peele‘s horror-thriller “captured the zeitgeist,” but if the ghost of Edwin Stanton was somehow listening, he’d most likely be thinking “hmmmm.”
Fire and Fury author Michael Wolff was beaten up badly during a Morning Joe segment this morning. It was over an inference, first mentioned on Real Time with Bill Maher, that President Trump may have had a sexual relationship with a woman in his administration. Wolff told Maher that the woman’s identity is indicated by “reading between the lines” in a section near the end of the book. Nobody knows anything, but as far as I can tell Wolff never hinted that the party in question might be U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley. Nonetheless, Haley has strongly denied the alleged inference, and Wolff got hammered this morning on Morning Joe (and was interrogated yesterday on TheSkimm) for vaguely or indirectly floating this notion. The bottom line, as one of the Skimm co-hosts said, is that this is the wrong thing to hint about during “a watershed moment for women, especially in the workplace.” Correct — Wolff should have let well enough alone.
It’s been 63 and 1/2 years since the debut of Alfred Hitchcock‘s Rear Window, and it’s still the greatest film about voyeurism. (Right?) For me the second best is Steven Soderbergh‘s sex, lies and videotape, followed by Michael Powell‘s Peeping Tom, Francis Coppola‘s The Conversation, Brian DePalma‘s Body Double.
There’s one more that I’ve mentioned a couple of times but has all but disappeared — Jeannot Szwarc and Michael Crichton‘s Extreme Close-Up (’73), which you can’t rent or stream or anything. (There was a VHS version available in the ’80s under a different title, Sex Through A Window.) Not a top-tier film, but a smart, intriguing, well-written one.
I’m trying to decide if I want to spend $6 bills to stream Aaron Harvey‘s The Neighbor. It’s obviously a B-level thing, but maybe. To me William Fichtner will always be Roger Van Zandt in Heat.
Old story: During an early ’70s visit to The Dick Cavett Show, Jack Klugman told a story about watching his wife try on different evening outfits in their living room. No underwear, he said, so every time she changed she was Venus di Milo. And she was near a large window. And Klugman thought to himself, he said, “Gee, I wish I was across the street with a pair of binoculars.”
Jeremiah Zagar‘s We, The Animals, based on a 2012 Justin Torres novel, “is trippier and more affecting than Moonlight ever dreamed of. Adolescent queer stirrings aside, the analogy is not Moonlight but magical realism, Beasts of the Southern Wild, flying above the trees, animated drawings, Malick-like impressionism a la The Tree of Life, family conflict, dreamscapes.” — from 1.22 HE Sundance review. The Orchard has acquiredWe, The Animals for theatrical distribution later this year.
