Afewhoursago THR’s Mike Barnes posted a report on the death of director JonathanKaplan, whose finest feature was and always will be OverTheEdge (‘79), a fact-based teen crime film that included
the screen debut of Matt Dillon.
The subhead of Barnes’ story acknowledges OverTheEdge, but the article doesn’t mention this 46-year-old film (made when Kaplan was 30 or so) until paragraph #16, and even then in a no-big-deal, keep-your-shirt-on fashion. That’s not cool. It’s also derelict. OverTheEdge is historic…drills it down, wakes you up.
It strikes me as vaguely odd that for the filming of Lolita (‘62), director Stanley Kubrick chose to build a sizable sound-stage set for a simple daylight scene in Shelley Winters’ suburban backyard.
This seems like an awful lot of trouble and expense for a boilerplate dialogue scene that might last 50 or 60 seconds.
It’s interesting, however, to discover stills of James Mason and Sue Lyon chatting in this backyard — presumably from a cut scene that follows the initial first-glance or “cherry pies” scene between Mason, Lyon and Winters.
HE strongly suspects that a majority of the haterswhosawredyesterday and went crazy toxic over a mild-mannered notion that Liam Neeson ought to take certain measures inordertolook63again…
HE strongly suspects that many of these meltdown cases haven’t even caught one of Neeson’s finest films ever, 2024’s InTheLand of Saints and Sinners, much less urged their friends to see it or talked it up on HE or whatever.
Some may have seen and admired it, I’m guessing, but the others need to wake the fook up.
In The Land of Saints and Sinners is “a Liam Neeson movie,” and we all know what that means. It means adherence to a certain slow-build formula.
Repeatingfortherecord: To a steady and stalwart Neeson fellow who’s not looking for trouble and in fact would like to back off into a shelter or backwater of some kind, shitinevitablyhappens.
A slow burning, a gradually tightening situation, implications of tough terms, bad people up to bad stuff (including the threat of serious harm to a couple of innocent characters as well as to Neeson’s guy) until it all blows up in the end.
But the story, set in rural Ireland in the mid ’70s, pulls you in bit by bit, and the script has been carefully and compellingly written by Mark Michael McNally and Terry Loane.
InTheLand of SaintsandSinners began shooting in Ireland (County Donegal, Dublin) in March ‘22. It premiered 18 months later at the 2023 Venice Film Festival. Netflix began streaming it on 4.26.24.
Liam Neeson turned 73 a few weeks ago, and that’s fine. What isn’t entirely fine is the fact the movie stars are expected to look ten years younger than their age, and Neeson — no offense, love the guy — looks 73, if not 75.
You know where this is going. Neeson needs to lose the neck wattle, clean up the eye lids and eye bags, brighten (and possibly enlarge) his teeth, etc. The usual usual. He basically needs to look 63 again…is that such a terrible thing? It’ll extend his career, for one thing.
If HE can submit to certain measures, Neeson can surely do the same.
On top of which he probably needs to invest in the latest and most effective…uhm, performance pills, given his much-commented-about relationship with the makeup-averse Pamela Anderson, 58, who’s apparently not much of a stayer when it comes to boyfriends. A bit volatile, I mean. Two years or less. Rumor has it that Neeson is hung like a horse, but a voice is telling me he’s too nice of a guy to hook up with a hair-trigger hellcat. Just ask Jon Peters.
Radicalconcept: James Bond re-imagined as a cerebral, borderline-dweeby, George Smiley smarty-pants type…fully capable of self-defense but no one’s idea of fiercely aggressive. And no seducing the broads.
Will you look at those twinkle-toe beach sandals that Albert Einstein is wearing here? My mom used to wear summer shoes like this; ditto Bette Davis and Barbara Stanwyck. I understand that genius types are usually indifferent to macho fashion statements and traditional male garb, but this is embarrassing, man!
Kamala Harris’s forthcoming campaign memoir “107Days” (Doubleday, 9.23) will not admit failure on her part. Listen to her shpiel tonight when she chats with Stephen Colbert. Laying her cards face-up on the kitchen table is not her specialty. I don’t think she knows what “cards face up” even means.
She will not admit that she torpedoed herself when she said on TheView there were no Biden policies that she disagreed with. She will not admit that her campaign had no interest in listening to, much less trying to win over, alienated white males and young right-leaning black dudes. She won’t admit that she erred in picking Tim Walz instead of Josh Shapiro as her vp running mate.
Harris sees herself as an evangelist for ambitious, well-educated women and willful women of color in particular, and so she can’t let hair down. And so her book will dodge, equivocate, sidestep, blah–blah and shilly–shally.
I voted for Harris but her missteps (the View thing in particular) really pissed me off, and all I can say now is that she really, really needs to forget about running again in ‘28.
The Dems need to go with Rahm, Gavin or Pete…a tough but sensible moderate liberal dude…not a woman this time.
If I was a USC film student who wanted to direct, and if guest lecturer David Fincher told me to “shut up and siddown” after asking me for a movie pitch, I would either say (a) “wait…hear me out…it all comes together at the end” or (b) “don’t be rude, dude…have a little patience…a little faith”.
