And what an impressive cast for a piece of shit — Anne Bancroft, Raymond Burr, Cameron Mitchell, Lee J. Cobb (who also shot On The Waterfont the same year), Lee Marvin. And a score by Lionel Newman. But what a lame ending — they distract the gorilla with fireworks and then the cops shoot him three or four times, and then he “falls” to the ground.
George Barrows (1914 – 1994) played the titular character. He wore gorilla suits in many films, but “Goliath the gorilla” was his most famous outing. Barrows played his first gorilla in Tarzan and His Mate (’34); his last was playing Monstro the Gorilla in AIP’s The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini (’66). Barrows’ gorilla suit, which he built himself, is currently in the collection of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.
I’ve been getting more and more irritated by having to constantly wipe my glasses when I walk around with my flag mask. If I wear it correctly, I mean, with the steam engine-like nostril breath collecting and escaping and fogging the hell out of the lenses. As Ashley Judd said to Robert De Niro in Heat, “I’m sick of it, sick of it!”
It’s gotten so when I’m walking outside and a safe distance from other humans I just tug the mask below my nose…fuck it.
Don’t kid yourself — right now we’re living through the Second Great Depression. In late March I called it “a dystopian realm, almost a kind of On The Beach atmosphere…a low-security, self-policed concentration camp with wifi.” Except now things are a tad more liberal and semi-open. Toilet paper isn’t an exotic rarity any more. But we’re still “in it.”
Instead of bread lines we have masked citizens waiting in line outside supermarkets. Instead of Midwestern downmarket gangsters (Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger) holding up banks as a reaction to economic devastation, we have bumblefuck “open up!” protestors storming state houses and causing infections to spike. In many ways the same dynamic. The winter of our discontent.
Perhaps the biggest difference is that in the early ’30s FDR was in the White House, and today we have a sociopathic gangster-demagogue running things.
I’d love to hit the local drive-in for a showing of Unhinged, Russell Crowe‘s road-rage drama, when it opens on 7.1. But the only half-operating drive-ins in Los Angeles are in the godforsaken burghs of Paramount and Industry. That’s called “a bridge too far.” There isn’t a single drive-in in the entire San Fernando Valley. How about showing Unhinged at the Hollywood Forever cemetery?
Elley excerpt #1: “The legend of Lars Von Trier — part deserved, part self-constructed — comes crashing to the ground with Dancer in the Dark, a 2 1/2-hour demo of auteurist self-importance that’s artistically bankrupt on almost every level.” Elley excerpt #2: “An attempt to feed off the heritage of the traditional Hollywood musical while reinterpreting it for a young, modern audience through the prism of Von Trier’s romantic fatalism.”
HE reply: Besides being emotionally ravishing and technically innovative, Dancer in the Dark is one of the very few form-altering musicals of the last 90 years.
For decades the basic premise of stage & screen musicals was a given — at various moments the characters are so seized with urgent, slap-happy emotion that they break into song. Songs were spirit-lifters, time-out celebrations.
Then came Oklahoma! on the B’way stage in ‘43 — song lyrics and dance or ballet moves were now integrated parts of the narrative, expressions of what characters were going through internally.
Then along came the 1964 musical playbook of A Hard Day’s Night — songs happen among members of a certain British rock band when whimsy or fantasy strike, or when it’s simply time to perform.
And then Cabaret (‘72) — songs not so much about this or that character’s emotional state but which offer ironic or bitter commentary about what an entire culture is going through, and only expressed on-stage in the Kit Kat Club (except for “Tomorrow Belongs To Me”).
And then Dennis Potter‘s 1978 TV drama Pennies From Heaven (followed by Herbert Ross‘s 1981 feature remake), in which Depression-era characters lip-synched popular ’30s tunes as a means of fantasy-escaping from poverty and cruel fates.
Then came Dancer In The Dark (‘00) — a woman is so unable to handle the pain, cruelty and rough & tumble of life that she retreats into song and dance fantasies — without them she can’t continue, can’t cope. And of course this sad but inwardly joyous failing, this neurotic avoidance syndrome leads to tragedy.
How Derek Elley managed to not only miss but dismiss and deplore this simple transcendent concept (not to mention Von Trier’s revolutionary technique of capturing these musical sequences with several strategically mounted vidcams) was, for me, mind-blowing.
It was this review that reminded me all the more that effete, scholarly film dweebs are often (or at the very least sometimes) indifferent or hostile to strongly conveyed, take-it-or-leave-it emotion.
Martin Scorsese has used so many excerpts of girl group doo-wop songs in his gangster films that I’ve lost count. I’m not even sure if Darlene Love‘s “Wait Til’ My Bobby Gets Home” is heard in Goodfellas or Mean Streets or The Irishman or Who’s That Knocking On My Door?. But I know that when I look at that Philles Records label, it seems only right and fitting that the authorship credits should read (P. Spector-E. Greenwich-J. Barry-M. Scorsese).
I don’t even like this song all that much, but I can’t get it out of my head. It’s ear-bugging me.
“Wait ‘Til My Bobby Gets Home” was recorded at Gold Star Studios in Los Angeles in May 1963. Vocals by Love and her sister Edna Wright. Arranged by Jack Nitzsche, engineered by Larry Levine. Spector’s Wall of Sound was played by The Wrecking Crew.
On 5.29.09 Spector was sentenced to 19 years to life for second degree murder. Now 80, he’s currently at the California Health Care Facility in Stockton, California.
Former N.Y. Daily News film critic and GoldDerby prognosticator Jack Mathews has died. Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neillreports that he passed last night from pancreatic cancer, which Mathews only learned about a week ago.
Jack (whose last name is spelled with one “t”) began his career as a regular reporter for the Detroit Free-Press in the ’60s, and then moved into the movie realm, eventually becoming an interviewer, columnist and critic with the LA Times, Newsday, USA Today and the NY Daily News. He retired in ’08.
In a 2.12.08 interview with Jen Yamato, Matthews said that his favorite films were “My Darling Clementine, Some Like it Hot, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jaws, Casablanca, The Deer Hunter, Singin’ in the Rain, The Godfather I and II…if I have to pick just one: Some Like it Hot.”
He said that the worst movies he’d ever seen, “considering its level of pandering manipulation,” was TheColorPurple (yes!), and that the ’80s had been the worst decade for filmgoing.
Asked whether critics are in touch with the hoi polloi, Mathews said that “most of us know what the public likes but we generally don’t like what they like. So, if being in touch means sharing their tastes, we’re definitely out of touch.”
Yamato asked Mathews who his favorite film critics/bloggers/entertainment journalists were. Answer: Critics: Tony Scott (NY Times), David Denby (New Yorker), Todd McCarthy (Variety). Bloggers: David Poland, Jeffrey Wells, Lou Lumenick, Stu Van Airsdale. Entertainment journalists: Anne Thompson (Variety), Michael Cieply (NY Times).
Thanks, Jack. Knowing you somewhat was an honor and a pleasure.
First in a series of Cannes Film Festival memories, posted at random: 20 years ago the first-anywhere screening of Lars von Trier‘s Dancer in the Dark happened in the Grand Lumiere. The date was 5.17.00. I was sitting in the balcony. The lights went down about halfway, and Bjork’s overture began to play. The music and the moment — I knew something exceptional was about to happen. I could feel it.
I saw Dancer two or three times in the States a few months later, but the overture was either ignored or the effect wasn’t the same. You had to be there. I’ll never forget that feeling, that vibe, that premonition. A slight lump in my throat. Honestly? I just choked up as I listened for the second time.
Filed by NPR’s Brian Naylor: “Richard Bright, a government scientist-turned-whistleblower, told a congressional panel Thursday that ‘time is running out’ and that the window is closing to address the pandemic ‘because we still do not have a standard, centralized, coordinated plan to take our nation through this response.
Bright added that without a stronger federal response, the coronavirus threatens to make 2020 the ‘darkest winter in modern history.’
“Bright was testifying before the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health, which called the hearing after Bright filed a whistleblower complaint about being removed from his post as director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA)” and being more or less replaced by Jared Kushner.
“Bright said he believes ‘we could have done better‘ in responding to the coronavirus back in January when its deadly effects became apparent.
“He told lawmakers that he raised the need to obtain samples of the virus in meetings with Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar. Once the virus began spreading, he said, his alarms were not responded to with action. Bright said he was told that his ‘urgings were causing a commotion,’ and he was removed from relevant meetings.
My father, an ex-Marine who fought the Japanese during World War II, told me there was never a soldier in the history of warfare who “give his life for his country.” What happens is that a bullet or a grenade or a shell fragment catches you and sometimes kills you. So Donald “bone spurs” Trump talking about the beauty of doctors and nurses “running into death just like soldiers run into bullets”…odious bullshit. Bullets catch you like coronavirus spray lands on you when the wrong person coughs in your immediate vicinity. Analogy-wise “firemen running into a burning building” more or less works, but that didn’t come to him. Kamikaze death is not “beautiful” — it’s fictitious.
