After a prolonged period of denial and obfuscation about the outcome of the 11.3 election, General Services Administration honcho Emily W. Murphyfinally agreed to initiate transfer of power procedures between the Trump and Biden teams. “I have always strived to do what is right,” Murphy wrote to Biden. “I was never directly or indirectly pressured by any Executive Branch official — including those who work at the White House or GSA — with regard to the substance or timing of my decision.”
From Keith Olbermann’s 11.23 rant: “This is no judgment call by an overly cautious bureaucrat…this is pure cover-your-ass politics…what Murphy is doing, simply, is trying to avoid Trump’s anger. More practically, she is trying to avoid having Trump fire her. She’s been holding up the peaceful transfer of power in this country for the sake of her resume. ABC News reported on 11.16 that Murphy privately sent a message to a colleague, [a message] which ABC has seen, in which Murphy asks for leads and help getting a new job.
“She is doing all this…inserting herself into the wheels of government and literally freezing a nation in place [while trying to] humor a psychopathic lame duck…so that she doesn’t piss off any other Trump cultists who might hire her, and for all potential employers she doesn’t have to admit that Trump fired her…this is how sick this individual is…’screw the nation, I need a good reference.'”
Variety‘s Clayton Davis has posted an updated list of the Top Ten Likeliest Best Picture Nominees, and I’m telling you right now that at least three of his picks are somewhat questionable. I’m speaking of Emerald Fennell‘s Promising Young Woman, Shaka King‘s Judas and the Black Messiah and Ryan Murphy‘s The Prom.
The safest bets on Clayton’s list are Nomadland, Mank, The Trial of the Chicago 7, Minari and The Father (5). The soft positives are One Night in Miami and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2).
If The Prom lands a Best Picture nomination…well, let’s hold up on that puppy.
It may be that Promising Young Woman will land a Best Picture nomination as a gesture of respect. It has its finger on the pulse, so to speak, and it’s an impressive film for its hardcore asshole-hating sensibility and its refusal to offer even a semblance of a warm, reassuring, semi-fuzzy ending. It’s a mark of integrity to stick to your guns the way Emerald Fennell has. I’d nonetheless be very surprised if a film this didactic and hate-driven turns out to be Best Picture nominated. Respected, yes. Ballsy, yes. But that may be all.
I’ve asked around and it doesn’t appear as if any of the usual in-the-loop handicappers have seen Judas and the Black Messiah. One naturally wonders if Clayton knows someone associated with the film, etc.
Judas and the Black Messiah seems to be basically a riff on John Ford‘s The Informer, minus the alcoholic Gypo Nolan factor. Lakeith Stanfield‘s performance as the FBI snitch William O’Neal, who infamously ratted out Black Panther organizer Fred Hampton, would have to be the central figure, I would imagine.
I’m sorry but Judas and the Black Messiah strikes me as overly “on the nose” for a movie title. Hampton wasn’t a “black messiah” by any definition I’m familiar with. The term generally alludes to perhaps a deliverer of some kind, or some kind of holy figure who might bring a measure of salvation to followers. Hampton was a hardcore Black Panther and a respected organizer who had a certain profile in New Left circles in Chicago. The FBI regarded him as an incendiary figure, but he wasn’t famous. He wasn’t Eldridge Cleaver or Bobby Seale or Stokely Carmichael. He had a certain profile, and of course he was killed (in December 1969) before the famous Radical Chic party thrown by Leonard and Felicia Bernstein, which had invited Don Cox as a guest of honor.
It just seems a bit excessive to call Hampton a messianic figure, and then to identify O’Neal as a “Judas”…yes, he was that but to label him as such in the title seems so sledgehammer. It indicates to me that the film may follow suit. Who knows?
When Sergio Leone titled his famous 1966 spaghetti western The Good, The Bad and The Ugly ,he didn’t specifically allude to the fact that Clint Eastwood was playing “the Good”, Lee Van Cleef “the Bad” and Eli Wallach “the Ugly.” The title allowed you to think that maybe all three characters possessed these characteristics in equal measure. It allowed you to think that it wasn’t necessarily a settled issue.
Translation: Forget turkey dinner with your in-laws, cousins, grandparents, best friends, good neighbors. None of that works this year. Small gatherings, immediate family. In John Le Carre terms, Thanksgiving 2020 can only be celebrated according to strict “Moscow rules“. I’n saying this because I keep hearing that roughly 30% of the country is determined to turn Thanksgiving into a super-spreader event.
Although it didn’t open commercially until March ’01, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu‘s Amores perros began to make the rounds in the fall of 2000. Hence the 20th anniversary excitement emanating from the upcoming Criterion Bluray (12.15.20).
The Mexico City-based film had a somewhat coarse and desaturated appearance, and Criterion’s 4K digital restoration, supervised by Inarritu and dp Rodrigo Prieto, recreates this visual aesthetic. Which presents a stark contrast with the more colorful if less accurate 2017 Lionsgate Bluray.
DVD Beaver’s Gary Tooze: “Criterion [has] restored a ‘bleach-bypass process on the camera negative’ technique to attain a certain rough-hewn image. This grittier appearance is both intended and important to the film’s visual expression — an appearance that appears less crisp and almost dirty. It is also now in the correct 1.85:1 aspect ratio.”
Red Flag: Tooze writes that the Amores perros disc contains “some minor teal infiltration”…teal again! So far the Criterion teal gremlins have distorted the color palettes of three significant films — Pier Paolo Pasolini‘s Teorema (which I watched last weekend on the Criterion Channel, and the teal-tinting is both glaring and vulgar), John Schlesinger‘s Midnight Cowboy and Ron Shelton‘s Bull Durham. If Tooze is correct, Criterion’s Amores perros Bluray is the fourth.
AP, filed on 11.21: “Skeletal remains of two guys — a rich man and a slave — have been discovered in Pompeii, officials at the archaeological park in Italy said Saturday. The two were attempting to escape death from the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius nearly 2,000 years ago
“Parts of the skulls and bones of the two men were found during excavation of the ruins from what was once an elegant villa with a panoramic view of the Mediterranean Sea on the outskirts of the ancient Roman city destroyed by the volcano eruption in AD 79.”
Jett and I visited Pompeii 13 and 1/2 years ago, but the administrators in charge of the ruins blew us off, in a sense, by not exhibiting any bodies to speak of. The bodies were on tour, it turned out. They could’ve left a few behind to sate the appetites of people like ourselves, but nope.
Posted on 5.31.07: Hollywood Elsewhere visited the actual Pompeii ruins yesterday. I’m very glad I went — this is the best-preserved ancient Roman city anywhere, covered as it was and frozen in time by tons of ash that spewed out of Mount Vesuvius on August 24, 79 AD. The problem is that I was too cheap to buy a map or go with a tour group, and by the end of our visit I’d come across only one lousy plaster-covered body.
The frescoes and the pottery and the precisely preserved apartments and villas are fascinating, but let’s be honest — if you come to Pompeii, you want to see how the citizens met their doom. You want freeze-frame death statues of people going “aaaah, this hurts!” And in this respect, Pompeii struck me as a faint ripoff. There should be bodies everywhere, in every house. Bodies of men, women, children, dogs, horses. Plus there were no chariots or carts. Or none that I came across.
On top of which the area just outside Pompeii’s ancient walls looks like a cross between Orlando Disney World and the border approach in Tijuana. Scores of ticky-tacky motels, gross souvenir shops, low-grade pizzerias and fruit stands. Jett found it disgraceful, saying that the commerce dishonors the dead.
People like Steven Gaydos will groan and slap their foreheads and say “give it a rest already!” But 40 or 50 years from now college students will ask their sociology professors what it was like to live through woke terrorism, and for starters the profs will send them this URL and say “watch this…this is what it was like.”
Posted on 11.18: “Is this a thing or a put-on…? Creating a substitute Facebook identity by way of an alternate name but still using your regular photos? I don’t know what this actually is, but it seems to be about splitting a social-media identity into two halves — the real-deal organic self with an actual history, and a recently created alternate mirror self that exists only as a reflection. Or something like that.”
By the visual effects standards of 1980 and ’81 and certainly compared to the razzle-dazzle of The Empire Strikes Back, Desmond Davis, Ray Harryhausen and Charles H. Schneer‘s Clash of the Titans (’81) was fairly groan-worthy. And yet it wasn’t murdered by critics and it turned a pretty good profit. Made for $15 million, earned over $70 million worldwide.
But what about the facial reactions of Judi Bowker (as Princess Andromeda) as she contemplates the Kraken while chained to a seaside cliff like Fay Wray in King Kong? Overreacting can be just as bad if not worse than under-acting, but Bowker could be hailing a cab on 57th Street.
Costarring Harry Hamlin, Laurence Olivier, Maggie Smith, Burgess Meredith and Ursula Andress — paycheck whores, the lot of them.
HE to Friendo after seeing Promising Young Woman (Focus Features, 12.25): “This is a really well-made film…carefully honed, brittle attitude, super-dry dialogue, well shot…Carey Mulligan’s Cassie is shut down and seemingly ‘over’ from the get-go…burning rage, nihilism, chilly and icy but highly controlled. The film itself is that way…ice cubes, deliberate glacier-hood, calculating.
“It’s been described as a kind of #MeToo Death Wish thing, but it’s a much finer creation than Michael Winner’s 1974 film. And yet God, the ice water in its veins! So angry at chauvinist prick fuckheads that it can’t…well, it can see straight but it can’t cut anyone a break. The evil parties must pay and die, and the feeling of vengeance and wrath is such that it just HAS to splash over and soak Carey’s character…I’ll leave it at that.
“Director-writer Emerald Fennell’s decision to make Ryan, the ostensible nice guy pediatrician boyfriend (Bo Burnham, the director-writer of Eighth Grade)…the guy is suddenly presented as…uhm, flawed. And this character decision is REALLY ICE COLD. Bold and brave on Fennell’s part but colder than shit. For we’ve been led to believe that Ryan is the one nice guy — the totem that says ‘there are some decent guys out there…they’re not all pigs and fiends.’
“And yet one mark of exceptional artistic achievement is not being afraid to go all the way. PYW definitely goes for broke and then some. It doesn’t just despise the young male tribe of insensitive assholes out there — it wants them exterminated like insects.
“In a sense, PYW is lucky it’s coming out during the pandemic because it would die a VERY quick death in theatres.
“THAT SAID, it certainly has the unflinching courage of its convictions. It does not lose its nerve. And so it stays with you. But aside from #MeToo hardcores and critics with the ability or willingness to step back and respect it for refusing to back off, who is going to recommend or earnestly praise this thing?
“For me, the last film that had this much of an icy attitude was Neil Labute’s In The Company of Men. Another in this vein is Michel Franco’s New Order. A similar feeling of ruthless payback and punishment. PYW isn’t the least bit political while New Order is very much that, but they share a certain hard clarity or severity of mind.”
I saw R.J. Cutler‘s Belushi doc last night, right after watching Emerald Fennell‘s Promising Young Woman. After that exacting but frigid experience I was looking for a little warmth and humanity, and Belushi shared what it had of that. It relaxed me to a certain extent. A feeling of security, comfort, bon ami, even joy. An easy sit. Right away I was muttering “this is good.”
So I’m glad for the 108 minutes that I spent with it. It turns out John was something of a romantic softie at heart, at least as far as letters to his longtime squeeze and eventual wife Judy (i.e., Judith Belushi-Pisano) were concerned. Deep down he was a modest, middle-class guy who was terrified that the world would eventually discover that he was only a rambunctious sketch comedian and that he didn’t have that much to bring to the table.
The doc has four chapters; the first three are worth the price.
Chapter 1 covers the childhood and high-school period in Wheaton, Illinois. (Belushi’s dad was Albanian, and was basically the inspiration for the “cheeseburger cheeseburger” diner sketch.) Chapter 2 and 3 explore the bound-for-glory period between the early to mid ’70s — from the time he joined Chicago’s Second City, and then National Lampoon’s Lemmings and then became a writer, director and actor for The National Lampoon Radio Hour. And then his first three and a half years with SNL (starting in ‘mid 75) and cresting with his breakout performance in National Lampoon’s Animal House.
And then the manic cocaine craziness takes over and it’s down, down, down…the disaster of 1941, the unfunny, slam-bang excess of The Blues Brothers, the brief resurgence of Continental Divide, the disappointment of Neighbors and then his Chateau Marmont speedball death in March ’82, at age 33.
I caught a very early screening of 1941 at Universal’s Manhattan screening room. It must have been in mid November ’79. When it was over I was saying to a friend who’d come with me, “It’s over…Belushi’s big ride is over….this is a major failure all around.” I read a year or two later that Michael O’Donoghue had created a white-type-on-black-background button that read “JOHN BELUSHI — born 1949 — died 1941.”
I saw Belushi live twice. Once at a Blues Brothers concert at Carnegie Hall (10.11.78), and then at an all-media screening of Raiders of the Lost Ark at Leows’ State, which happened sometime around 6.1.81. Belushi and Dan Aykroyd were there together, in fact — they were shooting Neighbors at the time, and Aykroyd’s hair had been dyed light blonde. I can’t recall if Belushi’s hair was partly gray, as it is in the John Avildsen film, but probably.
Belushi, who stood around 5’8″, was right in front of me as we slowly shuffled out of the theatre. He offered a one-word review of the film: “Yeaaahhh.”
It breaks my heart that you still can’t find a high-quality online capture of Belushi’s Joe Cocker impressions on Saturday Night Live. Or at least that one side-by-side performance (Cocker + Belushi] of “Feelin’ All Right” in ’76. There’s a cruddy tape of a Lemmings performance in which Belushi performs “A Little Help From My Friends” [after the jump].
