All the best directors are nervy. If you don’t take risks, you can’t be great, and hedging your bets is what mediocrity is all about. Spike Lee rolled the dice in this scene from Summer of Sam, and the all-media crowd I saw it with was all but rolling in the aisles.
It’s easy to play Monday morning quarterback, but I would have chucked the dialogue and implied that some kind of demonic vibration was coming from the black labrador. Using CG to turn his eyes yellow or something in that realm.
I never knew, by the way, that the dog’s voice belongsto John Turturro.
I wasn’t especially interested in seeing Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan‘s Hollywood miniseries (Netflix, currently streaming) as it sounded, to go by reviews, like another exercise in woke historical revisionism.
The series reimagines late ’40s and ’50s Hollywood by eliminating musty taboos and prejudices that were in force 60 or 70 years ago. Hollywood on the planet Tralfamadore. Powerful women players (directors, agents, casting directors), gay guys and people of color occupying significant slots in the power structure plus a Scotty Bowers-like gas station offering sexual services.
Recreating and re-inventing America’s ethnic and sexual history has been in fashion since Hamilton, I reasoned, or over the last five years. Hardly a radical or even interesting idea today. Or so I thought.
Last night I finally watched the first two episodes, and guess what? Hollywood is engrossing, well-written, briskly paced, not predictable and most of the actors get it right. (I was particularly taken with David Corenswet, the lead character.) The wokester fantasyland thing, it turns out, is dramatically liberating. Or it felt that way to me. I intend to watch the remaining five episodes.
The actor playing Rock Hudson, Jake Picking, still isn’t right. (Murphy couldn’t find a so-so actor who at least half-resembles young Hudson?) But the guy playing agent Henry Willson, Jim Parsons, is exactly right in every department. Samara Weaving as extra-ambitious actress Claire Wood has a special blonde spitfire thing going on. This is partly because she’s actually attractive in a 20th Century sense, which is somewhat unusual in this day and age.
In a sense Biden was sharing a confident jest about African American identity, as in “c’mon, seriously?” He was also saying with absolute sincerity, “People of color who are on the fence about whether or not to vote for Donald Trump are perhaps a tad whiter than me, not to mention a couple of cards short of a full deck.”
Blackness, he meant, is about more than a matter of skin shade or tribal identity. It’s about absolute gut recognition of The Beast. It means “never ever Trump” because you’re an idiot if you think that America’s Oval Office sociopath is driven by anything deeper than his own narcissistic self-regard.
In a general sense it means knowing in your bones the difference between (a) your real deep-down friends and allies and (b) the posturing phonies who are only interested in using your friendship or political support in order to benefit themselves.
Oh, wait, I forgot…lefties are just as racist as the worst tobacco-chewin’ storefront crackers. Right, Jordan Peele and Bob Strauss? Trumpies, at least, are honest about their racism — you know where they stand — while good liberals hide behind their gates. Or something like that.
Some people are so far down their own rabbit hole that there’s no reaching them.
Among WWII action films of the ’50s and ’60s, Dimitri Tiomkin‘s theme for The Guns of Navarone (’61) is one of the great rousing anthems. But there’s a specific version that accompanies the main-title sequence that’s different from any other (and there are several hokey versions on YouTube). The main difference comes with the very ending of the suite, in which four notes from the primary theme — c-d-e-c — descend in volume and settle into slumber. Budda-BAH-duh, budda-BAH-duh, budda-BAH-duh…
Posted this morning by N.Y. Times reporters Lisa Lerer, Jim Rutenberg and Stephanie Saul: “The lawyer for Tara Reade, the former Senate aide who has accused Joseph R. Biden Jr. of sexual assault, said Friday that he was no longer representing her, just two weeks after taking her on as a client. The lawyer, Douglas H. Wigdor, has been a leading plaintiff’s attorney of the #MeToo era. His firm is best known for bringing discrimination cases against Fox News — and its former star host Bill O’Reilly — and Harvey Weinstein, and his presence at Ms. Reade’s side gave her claims added legal heft. His announced departure came a day after defense lawyers in California said they were reviewing criminal cases in which Ms. Reade served as an expert witness on domestic violence, concerned that she had misrepresented her educational credentials in court.”
Bill Maher has been sharing one of his chief Donald Trump concerns for about two years now, which is that if he loses the ’20 election he won’t accept it and will call the results “fake” and whatnot. Perhaps he’ll even call for armed bumblefuck insurrection. The election is five and a half months away. Yes, 40% of this poisoned country would actually vote to give this sociopathic gangster another four years in office, even with the delusions and denials and deaths of tens of thousands due to his malignancy.
This chat between author and retired Army Lt. Col. Ralph Peters and CNN’s Anderson Cooper is nearly a month old (4.25). Discovered it this morning.
Boilerplate: “Peters appeared frequently as an analyst on Fox News until March 2018 when he resigned, calling the network a ‘propaganda machine‘ for the Trump administration and accused the network of ‘wittingly harming our system of government for profit.’ On Anderson Cooper 360°, Peters likened Trump’s behavior to sedition.”
I’m breathing some fragrant, automotive-smelling Los Angeles air as we speak, but I’ve watched the new Tenet trailer a couple of times on the phone, and my basic opinion hasn’t changed — a super-handsome mindfuck movie that leans a lot on reverse-motion cinematography. It’ll obviously be quite the diversion, and yes, it should ideally be a theatrical experience with streaming down the road. Debuting at home would be a disappointment all around.
Double Indemnity by way of The Bishop’s Wife. I could create a thousand movie posters that project exactly the wrong idea. Laughing, slap-happy costars of film noirs, policiers, monster movies, westerns, political thrillers, Biblical epics, etc.
For some reason I’m imagining an Aliens poster showing Sigourney Weaver, Carrie Henn, Michael Biehn and Paul Reiser joshing and kidding around. Or Dana Andrews, Gene Tierney, Clifton Webb and Vincent Price doing the same for a Laura poster. It’s too easy.
Please, Joe…please don’t pick Amy Klobuchar. She has guts and smarts, but people see her as a meanie and a bit of a snoozer. And what about that kid jailed for life? Kamala Harris makes much more sense. Please. You’re scaring me.
I’ve seen and sunk into Rod Lurie‘s The Outpost (Screen Media, 7.3), and I’ve tasted the panic and anxiety and sweat of it, and damned if this beautifully cut trailer doesn’t make me want to see the whole thing again. That’s salesmanship. Perhaps Michael J. Duthie cut this? Or some ad agency? Hats off to whomever.
So it appears that along with Russell Crowe‘s Unhinged Lurie’s Afghan war flick is going to be the first film “back”…right?
From “Good Film, Tough Break,” posted on 3.6.20: “A U.S. forces-vs.-the-Taliban war flick based on Jake Tapper’s book, The Outpost is a rousing, highly emotional drill into another tough battle that actually happened, and another example of the kind of combat flick to which we’ve all become accustomed — one in which the U.S. forces get their asses kicked and barely survive.
“Tapper’s same-titled book, published in 2013, is about the ordeal of U.S. troops defending Combat Outpost Keating. Located at the bottom of a steep canyon and absurdly vulnerable to shooters in the surrounding hills, the outpost was attacked by Taliban forces on 10.3.09. For a while there it was very touch-and-go. The base was nearly overrun. Eight Americans and four Afghans defenders were killed.
“Staff Sergeant Clint Romesha and Specialist Ty Michael Carter (respectively played in Lurie’s film by Scott Eastwood and Caleb Landry Jones) were awarded the Medal of Honor.
“The Outpost starts off, naturally enough, with a subdued queasy feeling of ‘okay, how long before the bad stuff starts?’ And then things start to go wrong vaguely, gradually, in small measures. Then it upshifts into unsettling (a name-brand actor buys it) and then bad to worse, and then worse than that. And then the bracing, teeth-rattling 30- to 40-minute finale.
“Lone Survivor, Hamburger Hill, Black Hawk Down, The Hurt Locker, In The Valley of Elah, Platoon, We Were Soldiers, Pork Chop Hill — American forces go to war for questionable or dubious reasons and the troops engaged get shot and pounded all to hell. Those who barely survive are shattered, exhausted, gutted. War is bad karma.
The night before last I was hook, line and sinkered by Peter Weir‘s The Last Wave (’77), which I’d found on the Criterion Channel. The last viewing was in January ’79, which is when it opened stateside. I remember calling a radio talk show that month from my Sullivan Street apartment and praising The Last Wave as “a thinking man’s disaster film.” Which it is.
It’s about an Australian tax attorney (Richard Chamberlain) engaged to defend four tribal Aboroginal males (one of them played by Walkabout‘s David Gulpilil) of a strange murder that didn’t involve weapons of any kind. The victim (another Aboriginal male) may have drowned, but another explanation is that he may have been spooked or hexed to death.
But the film isn’t about the charges as much as a sense of approaching catastrophic doom on a Biblical scale, and how the defendants seem to be much more in touch with the hums and portents of nature and how Chamberlain, who’s been “seeing” apocalyptic visions of floods and frog plagues, seems to understand this more and more as the film moves on.
It’s also about how Australia’s professional-class white-man culture is not only oblivious to what may be coming, but is perhaps the cause of it on some level.
In short, The Last Wave was one of the first “black man pure-of-spirit vs. white man corroded and evil” metaphor dramas. It’s very subtle and quiet for the most part, but at the same time quite spooky.
Reports about two encouraging tests for a potential coronavirus vaccine surfaced this week. A “prototype vaccine [that] has protected monkeys from the virus” was reported yesterday (Wednesday, 5.20) in the N.Y. Times. Two days earlier (Monday, 5.18) another Times story reported that an experimental coronavirus vaccine administered by Moderna Therapeutics has shown promising early results with “a strong immune response” in “eight healthy volunteers.”
Months of expanded testing will follow, of course, but suddenly there seems to be a half-decent chance of an effective vaccine being ready for distribution by sometime early next year.
Safety is obviously an essential concern in the development of any such remedy, but what that really means is a fear of lawsuits if such a vaccine were to theoretically produce worrisome results among the most sickly portion of the population.
Wouldn’t it be great if the FDA could approve a coronavirus vaccine that would be safe for 90% or 95% of the population, but which the chronically frail and vulnerable would be advised to avoid? The above stories indicate that this kind of vaccine has probably been formulated. Unfortunately that’s not how the bureaucratic approval process works.
