One noteworthy thing about Michael Caine‘s icy performance in Get Carter is that he always looks stern, steady and focused. But by his own admission Caine was half in the bag while filming this Mike Hodges classic. During the ’60s and early ’70s he was smoking at least 80 cigarettes and “drinking two to three bottles of vodka” a day, Caine was once quoted as saying. He reportedly quit cigarettes “following a stern lecture from Tony Curtis at a party in 1971,” and he has credited his wife Shakira, whom he married in ’73, for steering him away from vodka.
I’m not saying that dislikable but tolerable Hillary Clinton won’t muddle through, land the Democratic nomination for President and beat whomever the Republicans nominate, but I’m not the only one who’s feeling more and more concerned that the email thing (i.e., “Eghazi”) is going to hang around forever, and that her negatives are going to keep climbing and that she’s going to gradually sink further in the polls, and that somebody like Marco Rubio or Donald Trump might actually win the general election, and then we’d have a climate-change denier in the White House.
I realize that the odds still favor Hillary because of her support from women, educated male liberals, Hispanics and African Americans. But the situation still feels dicey and I for one am very, very scared. There’s certainly no basis for unshakable confidence in Clinton. Nobody loves or even likes her very much in my realm. She obviously lacks that natural rock-star thing that her husband had and still does. She’s smart and scrappy but a shitty candidate with a curiously suspicious nature and the wrong kind of vibes, not to mention a flat, brittle voice and a cackly laugh.
But there’s a solution, and its name is Biden-Warren. If Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren would announce they intend to run as a pair, as President and Vice-president respectively, the Hillary bandwagon would run out of gas very quickly. Imagine! Warren alone would scoop up a lot of Hillary’s female supporters in a heartbeat, and the candidacy of Bernie Sanders would just as quickly lose the dynamism because Warren’s beliefs about income inequality are seen as more or less synonymous with his.
Yesterday a tally of the best (i.e., most popular, significant, important or essential) films by women directors surfaced on Cinemafanatic.com, a blog by movie-worshipper and journalistic pinch-hitter Marya Gates. The list came from a poll that Gates conducted of “over 500 critics, filmmakers, bloggers, historians, professors and casual film viewers.” I agree with nearly every film that made it. Not with the rankings in some cases, but the list is a reasonable one. Except, that is, for Amy Heckerling‘s Clueless being the #1 film of them all.
True, Clueless has 142 votes compared to the 144 votes cast for Sofia Coppola‘s Lost in Translation so maybe Gates just forget to switch them out, but even Clueless in second place is pretty weird. Clueless above Zero Dark Thirty, The Piano, The Hurt Locker, Orlando, Winter’s Bone, et. al.?
Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone posted a piece about the poll earlier today and had this to say:
“Again, not criticizing Clueless but to me when you’re talking about ‘best’ you’re not talking about ‘favorite.’ You’re talking about incomparable works of art that are unequivocal. The Coen brothers, Scorsese, Hitchcock, Fincher, Coppola, Welles…on the female side, Campion, Bigelow, Wertmuller, Kent, Coppola, Ramsay, DuVernay, etc. I’m going to say it because probably no one else will. No one wants to be the one who is the asshole in the room shitting all over something as beautiful as this poll. And I’m not shitting on it. I’m not even shitting on Clueless.
“I’m just saying that if women want to really compete, if they want to really be taken seriously as artists on par with their male counterparts, we have to up the game a little here.”
“Young people are the only ones who ever talk about growing old gracefully. For those actually in the thick of it, the romance of that notion burns off pretty quickly, and wrinkles and creaky joints are the least of it: Growing old, gracefully or otherwise, means becoming the person you were always meant to be, only more so. After days, months, and years of gradual transformation, you wake up one day to find that you’re 1,000 percent you. Your good qualities have entwined so fixedly with the bad that it’s hard to distinguish which are which. By the time you feel wholly comfortable in your own skin, everyone around you may find you unbearable.” — from Stephanie Zacharek‘s Village Voice review of Grandma, an above-average film about a cranky, prickly older woman (Lily Tomlin) trying to help her granddaughter (Julia Garner) pay for an abortion.
I love that “1000 percent you” line — that’ll be bouncing around in my head for years to come. Ditto the “good qualities entwined so fixedly with the bad.” But I don’t feel at one with the tone of resignation in this paragraph. (It almost feels defeatist.) I guess this is because while I might have felt “wholly comfortable in my skin” a few years or even a decade or two ago, a lot of old skin was shed when I went sober three and a half years ago, and as much as I recognize there are certain aspects of my nature that will never change and that a certain sector of humanity will always annoy me (and very possibly vice versa), I don’t see the climate out there as all that prickly or adversarial. Sobriety really does make your life seem like something that might work out. And aside from advertisers, I don’t give that much of a shit about what most people think of me so…you know, fuck’ em.
I’ve heard from reputable sources that Alejandro G. Inarritu‘s The Revenant (20th Century Fox, 12.25) is definitely the shit, and if that turns out to be true I’m betting that Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays the lead role of 19th Century trapper Hugh Glass, may finally snag a Best Actor Oscar. He’s been Best Actor-nominated three times (The Aviator, Blood Diamond, The Wolf of Wall Street) so maybe this’ll finally be it, 22 years after he broke into features with This Boy’s Life. The guy’s paid his dues.
Leo has been a power-hitter and marquee headliner for nearly 18 years now, or since Titanic. Nobody can ever diminish or take away the killer performances he gave in The Departed, Inception, Revolutionary Road and The Wolf of Wall Street, but when I think of vintage DiCaprio I rewind back to that dynamic six-year period in the ’90s (’93 to ’98) when he was all about becoming and jumping off higher and higher cliffs — aflame, intense and panther-like in every performance he gave. I was reminded of this electric period this morning that I watched the above YouTube clip of DiCaprio in Woody Allen‘s Celebrity (’98).
I respected Leo’s performance in This Boy’s Life but I didn’t love it, and I felt the same kind of admiring distance with Arnie, his mentally handicpped younger brother role in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, partly because he was kind of a whiny, nasally-voiced kid in both and…you know, good work but later. Excellent actor, didn’t care for the feisty-kid vibes. But a few months before Gilbert Grape opened I met DiCaprio for a Movieline interview at The Grill in Beverly Hills, and by that time he was taller and rail-thin and just shy of 20 years old. I was sitting in that booth and listening to him free-associate while saying to myself, “This kid’s got it…I can feel the current.”
At first glance Tony McNamara‘s Ashby (Paramount, 9.25) seems like a loose rehash of Theodore Melfi‘s St. Vincent. Bill Murray played the suburban-residing, raggedy-ass social misfit in the latter while Mickey Rourke plays a slight variation (i.e., an ex-CIA guy) in Ashby. Women hover in both films. One difference is that the kid being uncle’d, watched over and mentored in Ashby is a high-schooler (Nat Wolff) rather than a 12 year-old.
Both versions have been described as comedy-dramas, which seems logical. The Wiki page for the Giannoli version is said to be “loosely” based on the life of notoriously mediocre opera singer Florence Foster Jenkins. The Frears-Streep version, which is being produced and distributed by Pathe, is directly based on the Jenkins saga. What’s the difference? The Streep factor, of course. Many more people (in this country and in England, at least) are going to sit up in their seats and pay close attention when Florence Foster Jenkins opens next year than the Giannoli version, I can tell you that.
But the Giannoli version is said to be pretty good (at least according to Europe-based critics who’ve recently seen it). And the Giannoli will benefit from a feeling of freshness (something the Frears-Streep can’t hope to deliver). And it will presumably enjoy a hearty reception in Venice and Telluride and probably open commercially before the Frears-Streep.
Despite Indiewire having reported that Sydney Pollack‘s Amazing Grace, a never-released 1972 doc about Aretha Franklin performing gospel tunes inside a Los Angeles church, will premiere at the Toronto Film Festival, I’m told it’ll play the Telluride Film Festival first. And thank your lucky stars if you’re catching it at Telluride or Toronto because a money dispute may prevent Amazing Grace from being seen commercially. Franklin, 73, has just told the Detroit Free Press‘s Brian McCollum that she and her attorney may file an injunction to prevent the doc’s release. Presumed translation: Aretha wants a bigger paycheck.
Franklin’s gospel concert, performed inside L.A.’s New Temple Missionary Baptist Church (So. Broadway near 87th Place), happened 43 and 2/3 years ago. Pollack shot over 20 hours of 16mm footage and had hoped to put the film out in concert with Franklin’s Amazing Grace album. But a release never happened due to music rights issues or some other monetary hangup. In January 2010 Variety‘s Jon Burlingamereported that producer Alan Elliott and editor William Steinkamp had begun to assemble a final definitive cut.
I honestly hadn’t paid the slightest attention to French actor Jean-Hugues Anglade since he had a brief walk-on role in John Adams, the 2008 Tom Hooper/HBO miniseries. I remember saying as I watched it, “Hey, that’s the guy who starred in Roger Avary‘s bank-robbery movie, Killing Zoe!” But now JHA is a real-life hero who jumped into a scary situation with an Islamic wacko during a train ride between Amsterdam and Paris earlier today. Anglade alerted the law by pulling an alarm, and in so doing cut himself with shattered glass.
But the primary hero, to go by all accounts, was an Air Force guy named Spencer Stone.
Gunfire happened between the wacko, a 26 year-old Moroccan guy who was “reportedly armed with a Kalashnikov and several knives,” and two Americans — Alek Skarlatos, an Oregon Army National Guard guy returning from Afghanistan, and Airman First Class Spencer Stone. One of them was harmed during the fracas, but not seriously. Crisp salutes for Stone, Skarlatos and Monsieur Anglade, and thank God no one was killed. Sidenote: Maybe some iPhone video will turn up later this evening? This only happened about nine hours ago. Somebody must have caught some portion of what happened. A news story without footage is fairly unusual these days.
Update from the N.Y. Times‘ Adam Nossiter: “The two American service members who tackled a gunman on a high-speed train traveling from Amsterdam to Paris rushed him even though he was fully armed, then grabbed him by the neck and beat him over the head with his own automatic rifle until he was unconscious, one of them said in television interviews here on Saturday.
And now that I’ve made Ms. Fan’s acquaintance, I’d…well, I think I’d like to go back to not contemplating her if that’s okay. It’s not just my aversion to Asian cinema (sorry) and particularly historical Asian cinema (especially if it involves swords) but…I’m not going to go there. Let’s drop it.
How many of the top earners made their dough by acting in really good films and how many brought in the dough with shitty mass-market projects and/or commercial endorsements? Just about all of them.
How many noteworthy performances have been based upon an actor’s imitation of the director of the film in question? Or, to broaden it out, based upon imitations of anyone in particular? It’s common knowledge that the New Yawk accent used by Peter Sellers in Stanley Kubrick‘s Lolita was an imitation of Kubrick’s Bronx-cab-driver patois. I recall reading that Albert Finney‘s performance in Annie (’82) was basically an imitation of director John Huston? Are there any others on the list? I have a special liking for this Lolita scene because Sellers is actually blending Kubrick’s voice with the manner of a closeted gay guy of the period.
An old friend and his gentle, kindly wife are allowing me to crash at their condo during the 10-day Toronto Film Festival. This morning I sent them the following: “Thanks again to you both. I arrive in Toronto on Wednesday afternoon, 9.9, around 3:30. Flying in on Porter. I’ll go right to Bell Lightbox for my press pass & materials and whatnot. I’ll be at your place by 6 or 6:30 pm…something like that.
“Over the first five days I’ll be rising earlyish and attending screenings by 10 am or sometimes earlier, and then back around 11 or midnight. During the second five days everything slacks off. No promises but I’ll try to wangle some screening tickets. We’ll see how it goes. Maybe we can do a dinner on Wednesday night. On me, of course.
“Before it all starts we need to address the inevitable, which is referenced in that famous Chinese saying: ‘House guest like fish. After three days, stink.’
