I’ve bought the Kindle version of Mark Harris‘s “Mike Nichols: A Life”, which pops on Tuesday. The Nichols signature was always about knack and intuition and doubt and a lot of fretting, and somewhat less about striking creative oil and channeling divine guidance and inspiration. (Although that happened from time to time.) In my view Nichols was God’s gift between ’66 and The Day of the Dolphin (which I half-liked). After that the Nichols brand was an in-and-out, touch-and-go thing.

If you were into Nichols back in the day (and who wasn’t?) you were at least partly looking to be part of the Nichols attitude clan, which was a kind of cool kidz fraternity…an in-crowd thing that you felt every time you watched one of his better films.

I’ve just watched the CBS Sunday Morning piece on his book and Nichols and the whole serpentine journey of the guy, and I have to say that Mark looks satisfied but exhausted. Covid appears to have been as rough on him as it has been on me. You don’t want to know. In the space of 11 months Covid has aged me five years. Inwardly, I mean.

HE’s Nichols obit, posted on 11.20.14: Some are truly gifted, and if those in that small, choice fraternity are tenacious and lucky and sometimes scrappy enough, they get to develop their gift and turn what they have inside into works that matter for people of all stripes and philsophies. And then there are those gifted types who are fortunate enough to catch a certain inspiration at the right point in their lives, which turns into a wave that carries and defines their finest work for all time to come.

This was how things pretty much went for the late and great Mike Nichols, who passed yesterday from a heart attack.

His film-directing career (which alternated from time to time with directing and producing hit Broadway plays), which was flourishy and satisfying and sometimes connected with the profound, lasted from the mid ’60s to mid aughts. Nichols had a touch and a style that everyone seemed to recognize, a certain mixture of sophisticated urban comedy and general gravitas. His first gusher was Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolff in 1966, and his last truly excellent film was HBO’s Angels in America. If you add Nichols’ brilliant early ’60s stand-up comedy period with Elaine May he really was Mr. King Shit for the better part of a half-century.

But Nichols’ most profound filmic output lasted for eight or nine years, or roughly ’66 through ’74 or ’75 — a chapter known for a certain stylistic signature mixed with an intense and somewhat tortured psychology that came from his European Jewish roots. Longtime Nichols collaborator Richard Sylbert, whom I knew fairly well from the late ’80s to the early aughts, explained it to me once. Nichols had developed that static, ultra-carefully composed, long-take visual approach that we saw in The Graduate, Catch 22, Carnal Knowledge, Day of the Dolphin and The Fortune, and this signature was, Sylbert believed, what elevated Nichols into the Movie God realm.

Hollywood Elsewhere mildly….no, take that back…heartily approves of Simon Stone‘s The Dig (Netflix, 12.29). That means I wasn’t exactly knocked flat but it did move me in a gently nudging way, and that I found it generally pleasing as far as this kind of modest and unassuming British period drama goes. And I loved Ralph Fiennes‘ performance as real-life archeological excavator Basil Brown — his gutty working-class accent is note perfect, but the performance is in his eyes…at various times determined, defiant, sad, compassionate.

And Carey Mulligan‘s Edith Pretty…wow! Talk about a performance at once strong, heartbreaking (as in sadly resigned) and resilient. Between this, Promising Young Woman and her Netflix detective series Collateral, there’s no disputing that she’s sitting high atop the Alpine peak these days…she and Streep, Blanchett, Davis, Ronan, Williams.

It tells the story of the famous Sutton Hoo dig of 1939, which uncovered a sixth-century Anglo Saxon burial site. It’s about a lot more than soil and geology and long-buried artifacts, of course. Pretty, the ailing owner of a large Suffolk estate, hires Brown to discover what may or may not be lying underneath some large mounds on her property. Once the importance of Brown’s find gets around, establishment archeologists rush in to share (or even claim) credit, or to try and get rid of Brown because he hasn’t the right speech patterns or pedigree.

Question #1: Around the halfway mark Edith becomes more and more ill with heart disease, Basil’s discovery phase recedes in the mist, and the movie is largely taken over by three young newcomers — Edith’s young, good-looking cousin, Rory (Johnny Flynn), and a loveless couple, Stuart and Peggy Piggott (Lily James, Ben Chaplin). For some reason the narrative dovetails into a heated triangle with James looking to schtup the daylights out of Flynn. Who cares if James gets royally laid or not? I was so put off by this detour that I began to entertain a delicious fantasy — of Lily James never having sex again! Blissful celibacy!

Question #2: Why did Sixth Century Anglo Saxons decide to bury exalted kings and warriors inside a ship, of all things? A rite that required hauling the ship out of water, hauling it across dry land, digging a huge hole in which to bury it and then covering it up. Why go to all that trouble?

Question #3: Once the remnants of the ship have been fully excavated, we can see impressions of the ribs of the hull. The wood, I presume, has long since rotted or been eaten away but impressions of the main hull beams remain. But has the wood been completely destroyed by natural elements? The film can’t be bothered to explain. I for one would have liked to know some more archeological particulars. This 1.29.21 National Geographic article helps.

“Gone the museums, gone the tourist-filled riverboats plying the Seine, gone the sidewalk terraces offering their pleasures at dusk, gone the movie theaters, gone the casual delights of wandering and the raucous banter of the most northern of southern cities. In their place, a gray sadness has settled over the city like fog.

“I have seen sunlight three or four times since arriving from New York about seven weeks ago. A glimmer, a summons to life, gone soon enough to leave doubts as to whether it was real. New York does not do drizzle or weeks of uninterrupted gray skies.

“So my adaptation has been harsh, particularly to a Paris with its soul torn out. ‘It’s of an absolute sadness,’ Alain Ducasse, the celebrated chef, said, when I asked how Paris felt these days. ‘It’s a terrible imprisonment. The French are not accustomed to life without its social side, a drink at a cafe, a touch, a kiss.’

“Yes, even the ‘bisou,’ the little kiss on both cheeks that is a rite of greeting or farewell, is gone.

“With more than 74,000 people dead across France from the pandemic, everyone understands the restrictions imposed. Almost all major cities across the world have had to endure lost lives, lost jobs, lost ways of life. Paris is far from alone in its deprivations.

“But each city changes in its own way. In New York the absence that feels most acute is of the energy that defines it. In Paris, the hole in its heart is the absence of the sensual conviviality that makes people dream. It is the disappearance of pleasures the French have spent centuries refining in the belief there is no limit to them.” — from “Paris, Shuttered, Must Be Imagined,” a 1.30.21 N.Y. Times piece by Roger Cohen.

Certain songs and experiences are sometimes welded together in our hearts and memories. For me, The Police’s “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” will always be the song I listened to in a London pub on the night of December 7, 1980 — hours before the death of John Lennon. “Synchronicity” is the soundtrack to my so-called West Hollywood + Hollywood Reporter life of ’83 and ’84. Chumbawumba‘s “Tubthumping” will always be the anthem of the 1997 Mill Valley Film Festival, which the boys and I attended start to finish. And Simply Red/Mick Hucknall‘s “Sunrise” will always always always be the theme song of the 2003 Locarno Film Festival — another great adventure shared by Jett, Dylan and myself

Always frank, reliably caustic Fran Lebowitz (Bowen Yang) and adoring sycophant Martin Scorsese (Kyle Mooney) on SNL‘s “Weekend Update”…Fran riffing on the annoying horrors of Manhattan life, plugging Pretend It’s a City. Best bit on SNL last night by far — I was shocked to find myself actually laughing as opposed to LQTM-ing. Question: Is this skit more funny to devoted fans of Parasite than of The Irishman?

Did Scott Alexander receive the same package?

Until last night I’d never seen Albert Lewin‘s The Picture of Dorian Gray (’45). I’d caught a mid ’70s BBC adaptation but never the Hollywood-stamped film. Lewin directed and wrote the screenplay adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s 1891 novel, and so the dialogue (especially when spoken by George Sanders‘ drolly effete character, “Lord Henry Wotton” character) is delicious.

But what an oddly gayish film…gayish but closeted and corseted to a curious extreme. The face of Hurd Hatfield‘s Dorian Gray isn’t just exquisite to look at, but there’s something else going on — Hatfield’s expression suggests that he’s fully aware of his beauty and his effect upon others, and that’s an unattractive counterweight. He doesn’t seem human, like a robot of some kind. Stiff as a board.

In a 10.20.20 Criterion essay titled “Queer Fear: Dorian the Devil,” Michael Koresky writes that the film “is a central work of ambiguously queer cinematic horror. Like in Wilde’s original, Dorian Gray’s sexuality remains ethereal and slightly unknowable; the ‘love that dared not speak its name’ in late-nineteenth-century England found an easy correspondence with Hays Code–era Hollywood, which forced every inference of homosexuality to exist within winking subterfuges. Just one year after The Uninvited, we have a version of Dorian Gray as a strange, otherworldly being, seemingly incapable of human feeling.”

From a Hurd Hatfield Tumblr page: “Truth be told, Hurd’s so-called ’emotionless’ performance in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945) was 100% on Albert Lewin’s direction. According to Angela Lansbury, Lewin would stop rolling the cameras once Hatfield registered an obvious expression on his face. Much to Hurd’s frustration because his usual acting style is quite animated, Hurd wanted to perform with more emotion just like the character in the novel. Alas, the director’s power overrides that of the actor’s.

“Film scholars have rationalized Hatfield’s minimalist performance on the notion that his character essentially became the painting itself. Dorian wished to have eternal youth while the picture would age in exchange for his soul, thus the man and painting traded places. The painting has life, it grows old and grotesque as a consequence of Dorian’s actions. Dorian, a man with no soul, lives in shallowness and emptiness as reflected in his mask-like face.

Imagine if N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott were to start up again with those “Critics Picks” YouTube essays that he was narrating…oh, eight or ten years ago. And then watch this adoring four minute and 19-second essay that he did on Roman Polanski‘s Rosemary’s Baby.

And then imagine that Scott never wrote it and Gabe Johnson never produced it. Do you understand that Scott and Johnson would never compose such a piece today? Because the political climate at the N.Y. Times and throughout wokester culture (which Scott subscribes to body and soul) wouldn’t allow for a favorable Polanski tribute because of the #MeToo vendetta against the 78 year-old director.

If Scott was for some reason ordered by his eccentric editors to re-assess Rosemary’s Baby in a video-essay format, he would adopt an entirely different tack — trust me. Because at the end of the day, all film criticism is political.

Cultures change and consciousness evolves, and this is where we are today — an artist’s unfortunate personal history (which I personally deplore in Polanski’s case) automatically and irrevocably cancels the artistic value of his or her films…period. The idea of judging a flawed but genius-level artist and his/her work on separate planes has been thrown out the window. “Polanski is evil” and so his latest film, J’Accuse, must be indefinitely shunned.

And I mean shunned…you can’t even buy an English-subtitled Bluray or rent a streaming version of same, and it’s easily among my top-five films of 2020. A brilliant investigative drama on the level of Z, a first-rate courtroom drama, a magnificent capturing of 1890s “belle epoque” Paris…crafted with absolute surgical genius…a meticulous, hugely engrossing reconstruction of the Dreyfus affair..a tale told lucidly, clue by clue, layer by layer.

It’s just tragic.

Everyone suspected that Midnight Cowboy would win the 1969 Best Picture Oscar. Because it had sadness, soul, big-city grit, great performances, great music and visual poetry…obviously a deeper, meatier, more ambitious film than Anne of the Thousand Days, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Hello, Dolly!, which were also nominated.

But deep down I adored the fifth competitor, Costa Gavras‘ Z, a little bit more than Midnight Cowboy, partly because I was creeped out by the Bob Balaban blowjob scene. I wouldn’t have been the least bit unhappy if Z had won.

Which of the five is the most beloved or most widely seen today? Butch Cassidy, most likely, with Midnight Cowboy a close second. Nobody cares about Hello, Dolly! or Anne of a Thousand Days, and for the most part Z is a low-profile arthouse curio — admired and respected by film connoisseurs but ignored by Joe and Jane Popcorn.

Jon Voight was regarded as a good, gentle soul in the spring of ’70 — he wouldn’t cross over into rightwing lunacy until the dawn of the 21st Century.

For roughly a year we’ve all accepted (or at least have not strenuously argued with) the Wuhan wet market explanation of the origins of the coronavirus pandemic — that it came from contact with dead bats and spread from there. This scenario was fortified, in my mind at least, by the worldwide pandemic in Steven Soderbergh‘s Contagion (2011) also originating with bats.

But last night that presumption shattered into pieces, in my head at least. And it really hurts to give serious weight to this hypothesis because it was initially spread by Orange Plague and Mike Pompeo…Jesus.

On Real Time with Bill Maher, biologist and evolutionary theorist Bret Weinstein, whom I respect for standing up to the Evergreen State College wokesters in 2017, and his wife and colleague Heather Heying, co-authors of “A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century”, said that the odds that it did come from a Wuhan lab (specifically the Wuhan Institute of Virology) are roughly 90% — not proven and warranting further study, but very likely.

As I understand it, the theory is that Covid-19 accidentally escaped. Potentially from the Wuhan Institute of Virology but possibly from the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention — which is located 300 yards south of the Wuhan wet market where the virus allegedly started.

Maher to Weinstein and Heying: “We’ve heard a lot recently about the possibility that the coronavirus did start in a lab. Let’s talk about that. The fact that there is this lab…I think it’s the only one in the world quite like it, [and located] in Wuhan, where the whole thing started. It would almost be a conspiracy theory to think it didn’t start in a lab.

“And that theory was demonized at first — ‘Oh, come on, that’s conspiracy thinking, that it started in the lab.’ But it’s certainly a 50-50…would you say that?”

Weinstein: “Oh, it’s far more likely than that. I think I said last June that the chances it came from a lab were about 90%. This was never a conspiracy theory. In fact that term was used to simply make it go away. It’s an obvious hypothesis that is in need of testing, and we are only now, a year [into the pandemic], getting to the point where we can discuss it out loud without being stigmatized.”

Heying: “Part of the problem is that we are so polarized and partisan in this country, that if the wrong guy” — Trump — “proposed this to begin with, and for half the country it was the wrong way, then [everyone] says ‘no way, no how, we’re gonna call this a conspiracy theory’ and we’re never gonna revisit it.”

Before the 1.6.21 Capitol riot, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) had everyone thinking he was a rancid, cynical opportunist — dismissing the obvious legitimacy of the 11.3.20 election in order to win future electoral support from your Trump-supporting, alt-right bumblefucks. Now he’s infamous — a seditious scumbag who deserves to be censured for exploiting paranoid fictions with the same kind of panache that Sen. Joseph McCarthy used to build his notoriety. Should Hawley also be tied to a wagon wheel and horse-whipped?

But Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Georgia’s 14th) is next-level cray cray — a case of lunatic exhibitionism and rightwing “theatre” who spins figure-eights around Hawley — full QAnon, “Trump Won”, questioning the Sandy Hook and Parkland massacres, 9/11 conspiracy theories, Facebook support for shooting Nancy Pelosi, filed articles of impeachment against President Biden the day after his inauguration, etc. Psychotic, venal, troublemaker — all about playing to the idiot prejudices of the northwest Georgia yahoos who voted her in.