Jeffrey Wells If Nancy Sinatra says no, perhaps her sister Tina feels the same way?
Anyone with any respect for the biological reality of Francis Albert Sinatra as he walked the earth in the early ‘50s would find the proposed casting of the too-tall, too-wide-faced Leonardo DiCaprio in Martin Scorsese’s Frank-Ava biopic to be absurd.
World of Reel’s Jordan Ruimy caught this first.
Variety’s Tatiana Siegel, posted on 4.17:
HE agrees with Nancy — the proposed Leo–JLaw casting doesn’t cut it:
On 11.23.11 or 12 and 1/2 years ago I wrote that Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio (then 37) were apparently seriously interested in a Frank Sinatra biopic with Leo playing the relatively short-statured Hoboken crooner.
I was relieved when this idea fell by the wayside as DiCaprio’s physical characteristics don’t even vaguely echo Sinatra’s (zero facial resemblance, Leo is way too tall and not skinny enough, the timbre of their speaking voices couldn’t be further apart).
But now this crazy idea is back again with Variety’s Tatiana Siegel filling in some of the details.
The focus will be on the volatile early ‘50s chapter of Sinatra’s career (seriously slumping as a singer and an actor, embroiled in a torrential marriage to Ava Gardner) and how he was finally rescued and restored by his Pvt. Maggio performance in From Here to Eternity (‘53).
Except the about-to-turn-50 Leo (DOB: 11.11.74) is too old to play Sinatra in his late 30s, plus he’s still the wrong size and shape and everything else.
Plus Jennifer Lawrence can’t possibly pull off an Ava Gardner performance…not in the cards.
A 4.16 Daily Mail article tells me that as far as Sydney Sweeney is concerned, producer Carol Baum (Dead Ringers, Father of the Bride, The Good Girl) and Hollywood Elsewhere park their cars in the same garage.
It’s nice to be agreed with by persons of taste and accomplishment, but when Baum asked her USC students to explain Sweeney’s appeal not one of them had the courage to say “formidable rack”?
Warner Bros. and Martin Scorsese’s The Film Foundation have produced a 4K digital restoration of John Ford’s The Searchers, and in the process created a new 70mm print.
The latter will be screened five days hence — Sunday, 4.21, 3:15 pm — at Hollywood’s Egyptian, as a closing-day presentation from the TCM Classic Film Festival. Alexander Payne will offer a few thoughts.
No screenings for NYC film cognoscenti? Nothing planned for MoMA or FSLC’s Walter Reade? Or at the Film Forum or at Pleasantville’s Jacob Burns? Odd.
There’s just one problem. The Searchers is rife with problematic depictions of Native Americans. Wokesters certainly won’t approve. Don’t even speculate what Lily Gladstone might say.
…that could been used for the forthcoming Criterion 4K Bluray, the Criterion guys chose the most rotely familiar (i.e., the dullest) and certainly the gayest.
I would have chosen a two-shot of Tom Cruise’s Joel Goodson and Joe Pantoliano’s Guido, the killer pimp. Or the car dealership guy saying “who’s the U-boat commander?” Or Cruise saying “what the fuck!” to Richard Masur’s moustachioed college-entrance guy.
I like the original theatrical cut — it’s perfect. You can have Paul Brickman’s director’s cut
“Paul Brickman‘s Risky Business reflected and in some ways defined the early ’80s zeitgeist (Reagan-era morality, go for the greenbacks, the receding of progressive ’70s culture).
“And it brought about an ungodly torrent of tits–and–zits comedies, so numerous and pernicious that they became a genre that forever tarnished the meaning of ‘mainstream Hollywood comedy.’ But Risky Business was a perfect brew.
“The Tom Cruise-Rebecca DeMornay sex scenes were legendary, the vibe of upper-middle-class entitlement was delivered with natural authority, Joe Pantoliano‘s Guido is arguably a more memorable character than his Ralph Cifaretto in The Sopranos, and the opening dream sequence is just as funny and on-target in its depiction of encroaching doom as Woody Allen‘s Bergmanesque train-car sequence at the beginning of Stardust Memories.
“I had an invite to a special Risky Business screening at the Beverly Hills Academy a week before the opening, but I blew it off because a girlfriend was visiting that night and things were hot and heavy at the time. I wound up catching it ten days later at a theatre in Westwood, and I remember saying to myself after it ended, ‘Wow, what I was thinking when I missed that screening?’
“I remember sitting at the long-ago-shuttered Joe Allen (Third Street across from Cedars Sinai) a month or two after Risky Business opened, and noticing Cruise and DeMornay sitting at a darkly lighted table together, apart from the crowd.
“HE’s all-time favorite sex scene is the one on the Chicago “L” between Cruise (by anyone’s measure an unlikely participant in this realm) and DeMornay. It’s perfect because like any transcendent sexual encounter it feels levitational — orchestrated, finely tuned, rhythmic, musical. It multiplies and compounds the sexual train metaphor that Alfred Hitchcock created in that last shot in North by Northwest, and it ends with that perfect (i.e., very subtle) electric train-track spark.”
I can’t believe this is happening, but it is. Biden almost certainly isn’t going to be re–elected eight months hence, and I’m deeply sick of the denialists on this site saying “ohh, pooh-pooh to the polls…the election is several months off” and all that crap.
When The Beast is restored to power in November the HE denial brigade will have to either disappear or change their social media identities or move to Portugal or Vietnam. They’ll certainly have to wear sunglasses and fishing hats for the next 10 or 15 years. Because Trump’s victory will be largely their fault. Because they looked the other way or otherwise fiddled while Rome burned.
I’m not talking about the expected right vs. left dynamic…status-quo, social-justice liberals vs. fired-up MAGA wackos…half of the country is terrified of an authoritarian sociopath winning and the other half believes that purging wokester fanatics is more important than anything else…alas, weakened Democrat fervor will decide things. Centrist moderates staying home on election day out of a lack of enthusiasm for sending great-grandpa back to the Oval for another four years. People sitting on their hands.
2024 is not 2020…the terror of The Beast is right around the damn corner.
National Public Radio’s newly-installed honcho Katherine Maher, by any fair-minded standard a flared-nostril, POC-worshipping, white-male-hating woke storm trooper, has wasted no time in bull-whipping (and nearly terminating) NPR senior editor Uri Berliner for having written a sharply critical 4.9 Free Press article about how NPR went over the woke waterfall five or six years ago and thereby lost the trust of moderately liberal and centrist listeners.
Berliner surely understood that his Free Press article, however truthful and grounded, would be a bridge-burner and that the odds of keeping his NPR job wouldn’t be good.
Right now Berliner is only suspended but you know he’s going to be facing great difficulty in the weeks ahead.
I could never decide where to scatter Tony’s remains. (He passed in the fall of ‘09.) I still have no good ideas. So he resides inside a small wicker storage thing in my bedroom. It’s not grotesque — he’s just there. Inside a dark-blue imitation velvet pouch with a drawstring.
