For me, the editing of this Wolf of Wall Street YouTube clip is shattering because at the very end it truncates Jimmy Castor‘s “Hey Leroy” — it cuts right into this ineffably right 1966 tune right when the song is lifting Wolf into a groove-and-soothe mode. Leonardo DiCaprio‘s inspirational howling-alpha-male speech is the brick and mortar, and “Hey, LeRoy” is the combination quaalude and back-rub that follows. “Selling Steve Madden” is easily one the greatest scenes in the canon of 21st Century art-cinema. Historians will study it a thousand years hence, but will they get where Martin Scorsese was really coming from?
And the two best reader comments fell under the “Brain Snatchers” piece, to wit:
(1) “I’m not sure exactly what the idiots are thinking when they use [the term ‘woke’], but the definition that seems closest to the mark is ‘woke’ = ‘white liberal who has outsourced his/her/its/their thinking to non-white liberals-in-name-only in a desperate bid for Cool Kid points.” — “Zerowing”
(2) “If [Get Out] wins Best Picture, it will cement the fact that the Oscars, especially for Best Picture, is a total crap shoot, and a political-social awareness merit badge award, and consequentially the Oscar will soon be regarded as flatly meaningless by an even larger swath of society and industry.” — “Brad“
Sterling Hayden, a Wiltonian whom I came to know in the late ’70s, was a fascinating, hungry, obviously vulnerable fellow, insecure and ridden with guilt about naming names in the ’50s, jolly or surly depending on the time of day, very singular, a great contentious bear of a man, always the thinker, certainly a poet or a man trying all the time to be one, a man of the sea and a boy in some ways.
And his legendary interviews with Tom Snyder around this late Carter period (when Hayden was 63 or 64) conveyed this. Watch this ten-minute clip and try to resist him — you can’t. So charmingly unsettled, so spirited and twitchy, speaking in his own special idiosyncratic shorthand. He really knew how to tell a story his way.
There are the rote facts of life, the plain material truth of things, and then there are the currents within. The singing angels, the demons, the fireflies, the banshees, the echoes, the dreams…the vague sense of a continuing infinite scheme and how we fit into that.
We all define our lives as a constant mixing of these two aspects, but the charm and final value of a person, for me, is about how much he/she seems to be dealing with the interior world, and how much he/she comments and refers to those currents and laughs about them, and basically lives on the flow of that realm.
Some go there more frequently or deeply than others, and some are just matter-of-fact types who let their spiritual side leak out in small little droplets from time to time, but Hayden, by my sights, was almost entirely about those currents.
Nothing happens until the 5:21 mark — just push the bar forward. This is the thing about New Year’s Eve in Los Angeles — it’s nearly the last major city on the globe to celebrate. When the L.A. clock strikes twelve, Muscovites and even Parisians will be having brunch the following morning.
I own a UHD 4K version of The Guns of Navarone. I bought it from Amazon sometime last year, for around $20 bills. Last week Amazon removed it from my library. I’m sure there’s a sensible motive behind this, but I couldn’t care less. You don’t sell somebody something and then say “sorry, we’re taking it back.” That falls under the heading of disreputable business practices.
I was just reading a 12.20 N.Y. Times profile of Elizabeth Banks, written and reported by former “Carpetbagger” Melena Ryzik. It explains how Banks, a once-frustrated actress, has become a multi-hyphenate — director (Pitch Perfect 2), production company chief, benefactor of female comedians and actress with her hand still very much in. But there’s a mistaken quote in the piece.
“When [Banks] arrived in Los Angeles, equipped with drama training from the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, she had clear goals,” Ryzik writes. “‘I came to be Julia Roberts,’ she said. ‘And they stopped making rom-coms the minute that I got here. I have literally fallen in love exactly one time in a movie.”
Banks was referring to a dud comedy called Walk of Shame (’14). However, she did fall in love “in a movie” that very same year, and with Brian Wilson, no less. The film was called Love and Mercy, of course, and Banks gave her best performance in it, bar none.
Wells: “This is a movie that traffics in social satire and horror, and basically says there’s a quietly malicious attitude that elite whites have toward people of color, and that they’re trying to turn them into zombies and make them into the kind of people they want…this is a weird metaphor because the same people who are loving Get Out are the people who are depicted in the film, the same malicious whites who are trying to manipulate people of color. The liberals with money and taste and who would’ve voted for Barack Obama a third time…these are the bad guys in the film and it’s this crowd…this liberal crowd is pushing Get Out the most.”
Ruimy: “We’re living in a very interesting time right now in film criticism. Back in the ’90s, even ten years ago it was such a different spectrum…and now political theory [has] snuck in, and any film you watch now you have to judge it politically, and that’s the way it’s going right now. And it’s very infuriating. Even though art should be political in a way. If Get Out had come out ten years ago, we would have totally forgotten it by the end of the year. We wouldn’t have even remembered it. That’s what’s really maddening about this whole thing.
“Do I think Get Out is a good movie? Yeah, I do. As I said I had one hell of a time watching it with a big crowd [at the AMC Boston Common plex]. But to go back to this criticstop10 site which has compiled over 388 critics list, and Get Out made 276 lists in the top ten. It’s also topped the most lists — 46 lists have it at #1. Most of the people who really rave about the movie are the Millenials. They always connect it to the woke movement and to the current political climate. If this were ’01 or ’02, and there was no woke movement, no critical theory…”
Last night I tweeted that the “Get Out might win Best Picture” thing is a bizarre enthusiasm that seems to be about (a) extending the #OscarsSoWhite guilt complex by supporting a politically “woke” film, (b) industry POCs doing their usual identity-politics bonding and (c) GenX and Millenial coolios wanting to crown a horror-satire genre film for sheer perversity’s sake, largely because it doesn’t exude traditional Best Picture criteria.
I was inspired by a conversation between publicist Daniel Plainview (i.e., ClooneyDisciple), senior Indiewire critic David Ehrlich and Atlantic associate editor David Sims.
Plainview began by tweeting that “the only movies I think have a chance to win Best Picture in the order of likelihood (as of 12/30): 1. Get Out, 2. The Post, 3. Lady Bird, 4. Dunkirk, 5. Three Billboards.” Ehrlich: “I don’t think 3 billboards has a chance.” Sims: “It has a chance if the [Oscar noms] match the enthusiasm the guilds are showing for it. Like, if [Martin] McDonagh gets a directing nom and it gets 2 supporting actor slots? Look out.”
Twitter photo of Get Out devotee & propagandist “Clooney Disciple”
Then Ehrlich said, “I think it’s Get Out, The Post and Lady Bird, with Nolan winning for directing [Dunkirk].” And then Sims asked, “Where is this Get Out resurgence coming from? I say this as someone who predicted it a while back [but] this all just stinks of a wide-open race to me…I need the noms to help sort things out!”
And then Plainview laid his agenda on the kitchen table. “I think it’s still pretty wide open,” he told Sims, “but Get Out is (1) genuinely beloved, (2 & 3) a political choice AND a woke choice, (4) a hit, and (5) the rare movie to actually benefit from being released forever ago — it’s only gained momentum in the cultural conversation over last 10 months.”
What he meant by calling Jordan Peele‘s film “political” and “woke” is that the Academy needs to demonstrate for a second year in a row that #OscarsSoWhite mentality has been expunged and wiped clean. He meant that while 2017 was clearly owned by strong, stand-up women and the #MeToo pushback against sexually inappropriate behavior, renouncing #OscarsSoWhite is still paramount.
Penelope Cruz, Daniel Day Lewis during a promotional photo shoot of Rob Marshall‘s Nine, which no one wants to even think about much less recall or re-watch. I can barely remember a single scene from this 2009 Weinstein Co. release. I saw it once and put it out of my head. Okay, I remember DDL driving along Italy’s Amalfi coast in a hot sports car, heading toward Positano.
Ingrid Bergman, Cary Grant during or after filming of Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious (’46).
Marlene Dietrich in David O. Sleznick’s The Garden of Allah, which lost money.
Last night I persuaded Tatyana to attend a 70mm screening of Lawrence of Arabia at the American Cinematheque Egyptian. She had never once seen it and was barely familiar with T.E. Lawrence, and I figured that despite the Egyptian’s so-so presentation it would be worthwhile for her to see it on a monster-sized screen with a big crowd of fans. I wasn’t delighted with the lack of truly sharp focus and that punch-through, extra-knockout quality that 70mm used to signify (but signifies no longer), but I didn’t mind it.
“I’ve seen the restored, 8K-scanned Lawrence digitally projected via DCP under high-end conditions and at home via 1080p Bluray, and there’s no denying that the 4K streamed version (which is not real-deal 4K due to intense compressing, but somewhere between 2K and 4K) is really a cut above.
From a 12.30.17 N.Y. Times piece, written by Sharon LaFraniere, Mark Mazzetti and Matt Apuzzo: “The hacking and the revelation that a member of the Trump campaign may have had inside information about it were driving factors that led the F.B.I. to open an investigation in July 2016 into Russia’s attempts to disrupt the election and whether any of President Trump’s associates conspired.
“If Mr. Papadopoulos, who pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I. and is now a cooperating witness, was the improbable match that set off a blaze that has consumed the first year of the Trump administration, his saga is also a tale of the Trump campaign in miniature. He was brash, boastful and underqualified, yet he exceeded expectations. And, like the campaign itself, he proved to be a tantalizing target for a Russian influence operation.
While some of Mr. Trump’s advisers have derided him as an insignificant campaign volunteer or a ‘coffee boy,’ interviews and new documents show that he stayed influential throughout the campaign. Two months before the election, for instance, he helped arrange a New York meeting between Mr. Trump and President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt.
“The information that Mr. Papadopoulos gave to the Australians answers one of the lingering mysteries of the past year: What so alarmed American officials to provoke the F.B.I. to open a counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign months before the presidential election?
“It was not, as Mr. Trump and other politicians have alleged, a dossier compiled by a former British spy hired by a rival campaign. Instead, it was firsthand information from one of America’s closest intelligence allies.”
