On the 56th anniversary of the murder of Malcolm X, it somehow never sank into my thick head that the former Malcom Little was six-feet-four. I can’t blame Spike Lee or Denzel Washington — it’s basically my fault, my lack of focus. Nor had I paid much attention to the fact that Martin Luther King was only five-foot-seven. I knew he wasn’t Wilt Chamberlain but I never understood that he was what most people would consider “on the short side.” He shared the same height as Al Pacino. Then again he was an inch taller than Alan Ladd.
Actual conversation that took place yesterday (HE being one of the participants), mostly focused on Kylie Jenner:
Friendo #1: “You can be as shamelessly sexual as you want any time you want. You just can’t be a guy noticing or commenting or looking.”
Friendo #2: “I think that cognitive dissonance you’re talking about in the culture — i.e., encouraging male lust while demonizing male lust — is almost psychotic. And toxic in its hypocrisy. One can only weep for the vanished honesty of Sex and the City. The demonizing of male sexuality now symbolizes a kind of cultural death wish.”
Friendo #1: “Hah — I can’t imagine what it’s like to grow up as a young white male right now.”
HE: “But wasn’t female sexuality (much less open expression of same?) rigidly of not punitively repressed in this country and throughout the world for centuries? Since forever? The pendulum has simply swung sharply in the other direction. Woke society to young males: We can’t stop your natural hormonal urges, but step out of line just once and WE WILL LOP YOUR HEAD OFF.”
Friendo #2: “True enough. But that repression of female sexuality took place within a more repressed culture, period. That didn’t justify it, but that was the context. Trying to make the pendulum swing the other way in a culture as openly, rabidly sexual as ours is insane. It doesn’t work. It only breeds…more Republicans!”
Kylie Jenner
HE: “Funny.”
Friendo #1: “What I’m noticing is the Kardashian brand…Cardi B or Miley Cyrus or any young female on Instagram or Tiktok, and even the rise of ‘only fans’ where young women are selling naked pictures of themselves. For instance, on Tinder apparently young beautiful girls attract a whole bunch of men who then pay them to send photos. Most of the young women only want that kind of interaction.”
“But the puritanism is played out on a much bigger stage where men are ‘creepy’ if they even comment on a woman’s looks (like Variety‘s Dennis Harvey). Maybe this ONLY applies to white men. Maybe black men or men of color can say or do whatever they want and it won’t matter. But I just find it all very odd — women seem to be at once infantilizing themselves as perpetual victims while also, and at the same time, feeling empowerment by displaying their hyper sexuality.
“I find it all really confusing. We know what the rules are who must obey them but they seem to change all of the time with the one constant being to remove the cultural power of straight white men.
“Like, for instance, how does this picture [of Kylie Jenner] get 12 million likes on Instagram:
HE: “What’s she drinking, iced tea? WHO CARES?”
Friendo #1: “I know. But she has 200 million followers. Barack Obama only has 34 million. The point is that ALL she’s selling is sexuality. That is it. Sold mostly to women, I would imagine.”
Friendo #2: “The power of EVERYONE is being removed. Women are coerced into these roles, and it only looks like ‘freedom.’ This is late-capitalist corporate control — Orwellianism in a thong.”
Jodi Shaw to Smith College as passed along by Bari Weiss: “I ask that Smith College stop reducing my personhood to a racial category. Stop telling me what I must think and feel about myself. Stop presuming to know who I am or what my culture is based upon my skin color. Stop asking me to project stereotypes and assumptions onto others based on their skin color.”
…and native Roman architecture that I am and never having seen Meville Shavelson‘s The Pigeon That Took Rome (’62), which was shot in black-and-white Panavision (2.39:1) by the respected Daniel Fapp (The Joker Is Wild, One, Two, Three, West Side Story, The Great Escape)…being soft and susceptible I foolishly, unthinkingly and idiotically bought a $15 bootleg DVD of this all-but-forgotten comedy, which costarred Charlton Heston, Harry Guardino and Elsa Martinelli.
I was already annoyed about the DVD being advertised with a 16 x 9 aspect ratio, which apparently means the sides of the Scope image have been lopped off. Which is a huge fuck you to Fapp. HE to the guy who decided to present a 16 x 9 version: “If there was a God you would somehow suffer for this. Maybe you’ll suffer anyway. I hate you.”
And then I found a muddy looking, pan-and-scan clip from the film on YouTube, and my heart stopped.
One, the little kid (played by the native Italian child actor Carlo Angeletti (aka “Marietto”) somehow manages to sound like an American kid trying to fake an Italian accent. (Maybe Angeletti was dubbed,) Two, as he’s running toward his mother (Martinelli) across a field we see bullets from a German machine gun tear up the soil and the kid falls, presumably dead. Three, Heston comes upon the German soldiers who shot the kid and doesn’t shoot them with a .45 because they look too young. (“Give them to their mothers.” he tells Guardino.) Four, Heston and Martinelli come upon the groaning kid and discover “he’s all right,” as Heston says. So the young Germans missed him? Then why did the kid fall? What’s he groaning about — the dialogue?
From Bosley Crowther’s 8.23.62 review: “Forget Rossellini’s Open City and any other films you may have seen about the hardships and tensions among the people in occupied Rome during World War II. Conditions were tough, but everybody had a jolly, jouncy, topsy-turvy time while the Nazis were in control of the Eternal City — even the Nazis.” (Here’s the whole review.)
In short, I’d paid $15 to watch a side-cleavered WWII comedy that is clearly, obviously shit-level. All I have to look forward to is the Roman architecture. I hate myself.
Let’s hear it for the Brooklyn-born Melville Shavelson! — Bob Hope pally and screenwriter of several Hope films — ThePrincessandthePirate, WhereThere’sLife, TheGreatLover, SorrowfulJones, TheSevenLittleFoys, BeauJames. (He also directed the latter.) He also wrote Houseboat. He also wrote and directed The Five Pennies, It Started in Naples, On the Double, A New Kind of Love, Cast a Giant Shadow and Yours, Mine and Ours.
Yes, I’m aware that Texas has a non-regulated, pick-and-choose, market-driven utility system and that California will never go there. I nonetheless wonder what I would do if God or fate had determined that my SoCal Electric could suddenly surge to $20K or thereabouts. Rest assured I wouldn’t pay it. I know that if they pulled this shit back in the early ’70s that Steve McQueen‘s Doc McCoy would pick up a 12-gauge pump shotgun on his way down to the local utility company.
..,to compliment any woman about anything to do with appearance in a workplace environment these days? If you want to say anything complimentary to anyone, say it only to other guys, and even then you might be walking on thin ice. One wrong move these days and you’redead.
Henry Fonda starred in a pair of classic films during a four-month period in the mid ’50s — Alfred Hitchcock‘s The Wrong Man (opened 12.22.56) and Sidney Lumet‘s 12 Angry Men (4.10.57). Both were financial disappointments, but this didn’t matter in the long run. Today the film snobs (i.e., guys like Glenn Kenny and Richard Brody) absolutely worship the Hitchcock while your hoi polloi, hot-dog-eating Average Joes (i.e., film mavens like myself) tend to prefer the Lumet.
Both are first-rate efforts. Blurays of both are sitting on my bookshelves. While I certainly don’t “dislike” The Wrong Man, it is (be honest) a bummerish film that basically says one thing for 96% of its length — “This Queens-residing, moderate-mannered family man and musician is unlucky and therefore fucked.”
I feel a much greater degree of affection and camaraderie for 12 Angry Men.
Sometime last night San Franciscco Chronicle critic Bob Strauss declared that The Wrong Man is “better” than 12 Angry Men. I tapped out a reply this morning:
“The Wrong Man is certainly ‘well made’ as far as that term goes or allows, but it mainly plays like a suffocatingly Kafka-esque thing, a chilly and rather downish and dull procedural about what it’s like for an innocent man (Fonda’s Chris Ballestrero, a Stork Club bass player) to be caught in the vines and tendrils of a judicial system that regards him as guilty of theft, and then what it’s like when his wife (played by Vera Miles) begins to succumb to depression and mental illness.
“The Hitchcockian care and craft levels are there in every frame, but watching The Wrong Man is like sinking into a pit of quicksand and being helpless to climb out…deeper and deeper into the slithery muck. Artier than 12 Angry Men — moodier, more visually expressive — but so much grimmer.
“And what a cast of dispirited downheads! Poor Fonda and Miles. Those suspicious, hawk-eyed detectives (the borough-sounding Harold J. Stone and the younger, WASP-ier Charles Cooper). The none-too-bright women from the insurance company who mistakenly identify Fonda as the thief. The intelligent and personable attorney (Anthony Quayle) who tries to defend Fonda in court. The woman who plays Fonda’s mother and even the two young sons. They’re all part of the sameoozyswamp, and then the stuff begins to seep into your pores and down into your lungs and gradually you’re asphyxiated.
“It all alleviates when the real bad guy is captured at the very end. My favorite shot is when Cooper happens to spot the bad guy being brought into the police station. He walks outside, starts down the street and then begins to realize that the bad guy looks an awful lot like Fonda, and so he turns around and goes back inside.
“But that’s one good moment in a movie that’s all about being slowly smothered by a large bureaucratic judicial octopus. Compare this to the 15 or 20 diverting, emotionally engaging, character-rich or soul-stirring moments in 12 Angry Men, which is also one of the most inventively staged and shot confined-space films in cinema history.
“I’m sorry but only a Get Out-worshipping contrarian film snob would call The Wrong Man “better” than Sidney Lumet’s 1957 classic. For all I know Kenny and Brody feel the same way. (And don’t forget that these guys are Marnie fans also.)”
My God, the NYC jurors in 12 Angry Men could have been theoretically assigned to Chris Balistrero’s suspicion-of-robbery trial instead of the boy-allegedly-stabbing-his-father murder case, and then they would’ve died of boredom. As juror Robert Webber says early on, “Boy, these cases can be the dullest…”
It’s a story about heroin-using, velvet-toned Billie Holiday, perhaps the greatest American blues singer of the 20th Century, and the constant persecution of the poor woman in the late ’40s and ’50s by Federal Bureau of Narcotics honcho Harry Anslinger (Garrett Hedlund) and a charming, lower-level agent named Jimmy Fletcher (Trevante Rhodes) whom Holiday “takes a shine to” despite being a predator.
We’re not just talking about an authoritarian campaign to eliminate the scourge of drugs and needles but a racist determination to punish Holiday for occasionally (often?) singing “Strange Fruit,” a protest song about lynching of African Americans. Anslinger and others in his realm felt that the song might goad African Americans into this or that form of social protest.
The movie basically says that (a) Holiday won’t stop using smack (obviously regrettable but then again she’s not hurting anyone except herself) and (b) Anslinger and his goons won’t stop arresting and harassing her and making her life miserable. And it goes on and on like that for 130 minutes, give or take.
Holiday finally dies in 1959 at age 44. She could have had a gentler, happier life, or at least one less defined by persecution.
I didn’t “enjoy” watching Daniels’ film — it’s an absoluteslog to sit through. I was looking at the time code and muttering “lemme outta here” over and over. But at the same time it’s his most rigorous, ambitious and meticulously mounted film (period detail and all) and so I had to admit that it’s his “best” film. especially when compared to his previous four stabs at direction, none of which I was especially knocked out by — Shadowboxer, Precious, The Paperboy, Lee Daniels’ The Butler.
When I say “best” I mean that it’s his biggest, boldest “try” — a film that’s not just about a certain character but about the whole racist enchilada of the U.S. of A. in the bad old days of the ’40s and ’50s.
On 1.28 I wrote that Day‘s performance “as the gifted, tortured, persecuted and self-destructive Holiday is obviously an Oscar-calibre thang…Andra Day for Best Actress, Andra Day for Best Actress, Andra Day for Best Actress.”
“Gone Girl is a gas, and I mean that in a truly fascinating ass-wind sense. It’s a wonderfully tight, highly disciplined, utterly delightful ‘who killed the missing wife?’ flick by a master craftsman, but don’t kid yourself about it being just on that level. It’s much more than a rote crime melodrama. Gone Girl is basically an entertaining sociology lecture from Professor Fincher. A blistering assessment of American upscale marriages and social values and self-fuckitude like you’ve never quite seen. How do I get outta here? Look at how miserable we manage to make each other…togetherness! And the pigslop tabloid media brigade…God!
“Women and men are going to have sharply different reactions to Gone Girl, but for openers guys are going to go ‘wow…whoa’ and some feminists are going to howl ‘is this a comprehensive portrait of 2014 male misogyny or what?’ This view is complicated, of course, by the fact that Gillian Flynn, a whip-smart ex-Entertainment Weekly staffer, wrote the book to begin with. On the other hand Fincher brings the shit home.
“Gone Girl is a deliciously cold, twisted, half-satiric portrait of elite American values — the whole rotten state of disillusioned post-2008 married yuppie barforama. And fuck me. It’s 10:18 pm on a lovely warm night in midtown Manhattan. I’ve just uploaded two pics and two short videos of the post-Gone Girl press conference at Leows Lincoln Square, and now I have about 15 minutes before heading over to the post-gala party at Tavern on the Green. Later.” — posted on 9.26.14.
Posted on 10.7.14: “Two days ago a Glenn Whipp L.A. Times piece drove a stake through Gone Girl‘s Best Picture chances. The article assessed reactions to last Saturday’s Academy screening of David Fincher‘s film, and the basic take-away was that the 50-plus crowd was mostly underwhelmed or ‘subdued.’
“Nobody Whipp spoke to seemed to understand that Gone Girl is a kind of Luis Bunuel film, and that Gillian Flynn‘s story is only the half of it, that the film is really about the social-cultural undercurrent…about all of us.
“One Academy guy told Whipp that ‘this is first-class filmmaking but, like a lot of [Fincher’s] other movies, you admire it more than you enjoy it.’ In other words, first-class chops and socially pungent content aren’t enjoyable enough. This guy wants to laugh, to be charmed, hugged and caressed, to have his heart melted down. ‘What did I just see?’ one Oscar-nominated producer said to Whipp as he walked along Wilshire Boulevard to his car. ‘That’s it? Really? I’ve seen better social commentary in a good episode of Bob’s Burgers!’
“You can lead a 62 year-old Academy member to a screening, but you can’t make him ‘see’ it. Yes, I wish that just one time Academy members could stand inside my shoes. They’d know what a drag it is to report about them.” — posted on 10.7.14.
Word around the campfire sez that Cannes Film Festival honcho Thierry Fremaux doesn’t like the idea of a masked festival starting on Tuesday, July 6. He doesn’t want to half-ass it — Fremaux wants a classic event in which everyone can relax and breathe openly and be human beings while dressed in sweaters and scarves.
World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy, who has some kind of pipeline going with a French guy who hears things, reports that Fremaux is mulling the idea of bumping Cannes all the way into October. Maybe. He couldn’t do it concurrent with the big September festivals so he’d have to choose October.
The thinking (please stop me if I’m wrong) is that if worldwide vaccinations proceed at a good pace then maybe things could get back to normal in, say, six or seven months time. Maybe. Right now, as I’m sure most of you agree, the July 6th date (less than five months henceforth) is probably too soon. I don’t think we’ll REALLY be in the clear until the spring of ’22. At best.
If this turns out to be true, I’m very, VERY sorry about Wes Anderson‘s The French Dispatch and Leos Carax‘s Annette once again getting the shaft end of the stick and having to recalculate strategies. If this happens, of course. I know nothing for a fact.
Ruimy #1, posted on 1.18.21: “I reported in January that the Cannes Film Festival was very serious in eyeing a September/October event this year. It turns out the intel was accurate.”
Ruimy #2: “It seems as though the head honcho of the biggest and most important film festival in the world isn’t opposed to moving the event into the fall. [This] would have to do with Fremaux not being a fan of experiencing a ‘middle ground’ version of the festival. Meaning, he wants Cannes 2021 to be without masks or other PPE. And if that’s the case where France requires that people wore masks at large public events, then he’d rather just wait it out saying, ‘The middle ground is the worst.'”
Ruimy #3: “A Cannes that happens after Venice, Telluride, Toronto and potentially NYFF would throw everything out of whack.”
Uptown film festival veteran: “I’ve long suspected that launching Cannes ’21 on July 6th was a pipe dream. It felt weird and wrong that Thierry would even try it. But the fall? Maybe he will meld it with his Lyon thing?”
I’ve seen and admired Nick Jarecki‘s Crisis (Quiver, 2.26), a skillfully wrought, multi-charactered, Traffic-like drama about the intrigues and ravages of the opioid epidemic. It began shooting roughly two years ago, and was ready to roll out by early ’20, or roughly a year ago.
I don’t know how it would have fared critically or commercially if the pandemic hadn’t hit, but I know two things. One, Crisis (originally called Dreamland) deserves everyone’s respect, and two, it doesn’t deserve to contend with so much as a single bad Armie Hammer joke.
As Jake Kelly, an undercover double agent dealking with users and sellers and basically in quicksand up to his neck, Hammer delivers a steady, no-frills performance. He doesn’t try to do anything the cute or charismatic way. Crisis is a complex ensemble piece, but at the same time as lean and trim as anyone could imagine, and trouper-wise Hammer fits right in. He holds back.
Not once during my viewing did I think about Hammer’s recent travails. Okay, I did think about them but mostly I was muttering “this is what good cinema does…it brings you in and shuts the world out….nice deal.”
I was also thinking that whatever Hammer might have gotten wrong in terms of excessive zeal or showing a lack of sensitivity or consideration for this or that B&D partner, his troubles are his own turf’s. No overlap, leave it alone.
The same consideration should, of course, be given to the other two Hammer films opening this year — Kenneth Branagh‘s Death on the Nile (20th Century, 9.17) and Taika WaititiNext Goal Wins, which will probably “open” during the ’21 and early ’22 award season.
“After all, I was there — in the house, in the room — and I know both my father and mother and what each is capable of a whole lot better than you.” — from Moses Farrow‘s “A Son Speaks Out,” 5.23.18.
And yet Allen v. Farrow (HBO Max, 2.21) suggests that perhaps Moses wasn’t in Frog Hollow that day, or that he wasn’t around much or was off walking or sulking. The doc focuses hard on Moses in episode #4 and does what it can to discredit him. I can’t recall precisely if the contrary information is offered in episode #3 or episode #4, but it arrives when the doc quotes Woody Allen‘s testimony in the 1993 Judge Wilk child custody case.
Although the doc doesn’t excerpt any passages from “A Son Speaks Out“, it passes along a Moses statement about his being at the house and seeing this or that, and then it flashes a statement on the screen: “Allen, during his testimony [at Judge Wilk’s custody hearing], said Moses “was nowhere to be seen” that day, or words to that effect. (I wish I had frame-captured this — my bad.)
And yet at the beginning of his essay Moses writes that he “was present for everything that transpired in our house before, during, and after the alleged event.”
If, like me, you dismiss a notion that Moses was lying when he wrote that he was there “before, durng and after”, it sounds as if Allen v. Farrow directors Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering are being dishonest on this particular point, at least as far as blowing smoke up viewers’ asses is concerned.
I’m especially bothered — flummoxed is a better word — by the “train set in the attic” thing. Dylan said the train was choo-chooing around the attic — the actual quote is “circling around the attic” — during the alleged assault. In episode #4 an undated Connecticut police drawing (or “schematic”) of the attic crawl space shows a circular (or oblong-shaped) train track of some kind, but why not a photo? Why wasn’t it dated? Who’s the artist?
Moses, on the other hand, wrote flat-out that there was no train set in the attic — period. (He said an electric train set was actually in a first-floor converted garage playroom that the boys used.) Why is this unresolved in the doc? Why didn’t Dylan mention a train set in her earlier statements? Why didn’t the doc drill down and clear this up one way or the other? Who drew the schematic?
Undated police-issued drawing of Frog Hollow attic crawl space, presented in episode #4 of Allen v. Farrow.
