I’ve just read Adriane Quinlan’s 4.7 “Curbed” piece about Paul Schrader’s life these days at TheCoterie, a pricey (at least $15K monthly) luxury high-rise for interesting (read: fairly loaded) seniors. It’s called “Paul Schrader’sVeryPaul SchraderDaysinAssistedLiving.”
This is a dry, well-written observational that almost reminded me at times of Didion’s “Play It As It Lays.” But unlike his well-tended wife Marybeth, Paul doesn’t seem to be living “in” assisted living, or at least not according to my limited understanding of that term.
Living in The Coterie is easy and luxurious, sure, but with Paul churning out screenplays, planning to shoot a kind of Ivan Ilyich-type drama with Richard Gere later this year and thinking about visiting a Manhattan dive bar in order to counter-balance a feeling of too much sterility and perhaps keep in touch with the hurlyburly to some degree, he seems to be living in a fashion that’s more adjacent to assisted living (out of necessity for his wife) than “in” it.
I tend to avoid or at least suffer through prison movies as a rule. To varying degrees they’re all about yearning for freedom, of course, but they always feel more confining than liberating (i.e., why does the caged bird sing?) and because life itself, for me, has always been about thedefianceofsuppression, confinementandregimentation so I already knew that tune backward and forward.
I don’t need and in fact have been forbidding the idea of a movie reminding me about these basic terms, and I’ve felt this way since my early teens, which is when I started to understand thedegreeofdullunderlyinghorror that permeatednormalmiddle–classlife. This is how it seemed, at least, in suburban New Jersey (Westfield) and exurban Connecticut (Wilton).
As much as I admire Morgan Freeman’s performance in TheShawshank Redemption, I’ve never been able to derive any real pleasure or payoff from that film. Ditto Papillon, BirdmanofAlcatraz, Bronson, Hunger, TheGreenMile, StarredUp, EachDawnIDie, 20,000YearsatSingSing, et. al.
Don’t even mention Oz or OrangeIsTheNewBlack.
The only prison flicks I’ve enjoyed, unsurprisingly, are about breakouts. Don Siegel’s EscapeFromAlcatraz (‘79) is the champ. Stuart Rosenberg’s CoolHandLuke (‘67) is more about the spirit of freedom than escape, but it still qualifies. Ben Stiller’s EscapeatDannemora** (‘18) is an excellent bust-out film. I love the comical breakout sequence in Peter Yates’ TheHotRock (‘71).
There’s one exception to my rule — a prison flick that isn’t about escape and just says “fuck it — life on the block is what it is” while staking claim to being a serious meditation on morality and jailhouse ethics: Robert M. Young and Miguel Pinero’s Short Eyes (77).
A couple of months ago I visited a friend who lives near the village of Ossining, which is about 40 miles north of Manhattan and is the home of Sing Sing prison. Peter Falk grew up there, and during an interview he recalled that all the lights in the town would flicker and grow dim whenever a guy was getting fried in the chair.
** Escape at Dannemore is actually a limited series so that makes it a whole different bowl of rice!
Roger Friedman has seenWoody Allen’s CoupdeChance, and is so impressed with the 90-minute, French-speaking noir that he’s suggesting it could end up winning the Best Int’l Feature Oscar next year.
It’s great to hear this level of enthusiasm, and it makes me all the more hopeful that CoupdeChance will play Cannes next month.
It goes without saying, of course, that Allen haters would never allow it to even be nominated, much less win. They would shriek and howl at even the possibility.
And what’s with the 90-minute length, by the way? Doesn’t Allen understand that the average running time these days is well over two hours?
I’ll almost certainly never speak to the great Richard Lester, 91, but if somehow this were to happen, I would begin by praising Juggernaut (’73) and The Three Musketeers (’74). I would also sing the praises of Petulia (’68) — a landmark film. And then…
Does Greta Gerwig’s Barbie represent a rebirth or regeneration of Alan Carr’s Can’tStopTheMusic (‘79)? Because the male characters in these new Barbie posters are obviously modeled on the Village People of the late ’70s. Actually, scratch that — the Village People guys were mocking traditional machismo, but they were certainly more manly than these Barbie kewpie dolls.
No, Klaus Barbie doesn’t fit in, and that’s not even funny. The ‘63 version of Steve McQueen rides his motorcycle into Barbieland in search of the infamous Nazi war criminal, but gets distracted by the impossibly sexy AlexandraShipp…naah, doesn’t work. I’m totally confused.
Q: Where are the men in this movie? A: What can I do, what can I be…when I’m with you, I wanna stay there.
From “What Is Barbie Going For, Exactly?” by Vulture‘s Jason P. Frank:
“The main issue is that we don’t actually know what the plot of the movie is.
“In the early stages of the film, it was supposed to be ‘a fish-out-of-water story a la Splash and Big, whereby Barbie gets kicked out of Barbieland because she’s not perfect enough, a bit eccentric and doesn’t fit in,’ Deadline reported back in 2018. ‘She then goes on an adventure in the real world and by the time she returns to Barbieland to save it, she has gained the realization that perfection comes on the inside, not the outside, and that the key to happiness is belief in oneself, free of the obligation to adhere to some unattainable standard of perfection.’
“That plot is not out of the question, but the film seems a bit more meta than that description allows for — the teaser implies a specific knowledge of Barbie’s real-world impact, for example. Also, Will Ferrell has been confirmed to be playing the CEO of Mattel, which means that Barbie could gain sentience (??) at some point.
“We do have one other fun clue — Margot Robbie’s Letterboxd account, which was unearthed and then promptly deleted. The category of ‘Watch for Barbie’ included such titles as The Truman Show, Splash, Puberty Blues, The Young Girls of Rochefort and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. The Truman Show has an obvious connection to the ‘CEO of Mattel’ situation, but perhaps most interesting is the inclusion of Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort, both of which are musicals. Umbrellas is a searingly emotional, entirely sung-through romantic drama, while Young Girls is a musical comedy.
“Given the amount of dancing that is flashed through in the teaser trailer — including with Simu Liu and Margot Robbie in a disco dress — Barbie might be…a musical. Not to mention Dua Lipa, confirmed singer, is part of the cast.
“What is Barbie? So far, it’s a collection of references — meta, esoteric, and pop culture alike — all wrapped up in a pretty pink bow.”
HE: London in November can sometimes be on the mild side, but it’s certainly not T-shirt weather…try again! At the very least it’s jacketweather. Oh, and November leaves have turned orange, yellow and brown and are generally on the ground…try again.