I hated The Brutalist so much that when I saw it at the NYFF, I walked out just before the ending of Part One. I finally saw Part Two a few weeks hence but enduring it was awful. So of course I understand the difficulty some allegedly had in watching the whole damn thing. The Academy members who’ve said they “didn’t get to it” are lying — they’ve heard what it basically is and didn’t want to watch it…period.
It was this exact moment in The Brutalist —- the bus-station moment when Adrien Brody starts weeping WAY TOO MICH when he hears his wife is alive — it was this exact moment when I said to myself “Jesus, I really hate this film.”
I’d forgotten how ludicrous Moonraker is. Released 45 and 1/2 years ago, it’s easily the stupidest, least reality-grounded 007 film ever.
I’d forgotten that Lois Chiles’ character was actually named Holly Goodhead, described on the Wiki page as “an astronaut scientist on loan from NASA who gives heavenly blowjobs.” (I’m kidding about the last four words.)
I hadn’t forgotten that Richard Kiel‘s “Jaws” falls in love with Blanche Ravalec‘s “Dolly.”
It’s almost as if Albert “Cubby” Broccoli sat down with Roger Moore, director Lewis Gilbert and the screenwriters and said, “We need to devalue this franchise as much as possible…we need to completely abandon the spirit of From Russia With Love and Dr. No…we need to turn 007 into a totally lightweight asshole.”
It took me nearly five years to sit down and actually read significant portions of Michael Benson‘s “Space Odyssey” (Simon & Schuster, 4.23.19). A hardback copy was sitting in the Wilton library’s film section…easy.
We all understand that roughly 19 or 20 minutes of footage was cut from 2001: A Space Odyssey after a hostile New York City press screening on 4.3.68. The original version ran 160 minutes. Director Stanley Kubrick, seriously freaked by the response, cut it down to 139 minutes.
In the book’s photo section I came upon a frame capture I’d never seen before — dead HAL. The image was apparently included in the 160-minute version after Dave Bowman disconnects the homicidal, calm-voiced, heuristically programmed algorithmic computer…the glowing red light snuffed out.
I’ve always understood that HAL wasn’t so much terminated by Bowman as given a kind of partial lobotomy — still operating and regulating the voyage of Discovery but with his higher brain functions cut. Maybe that’s why the dead HAL image wasn’t used, as it didn’t make basic sense.
I reviewed David Lynch‘s The Elephant Man for Films in Review. The Paramount film, exec produced by Mel Brooks, opened on 10.10.80 (less than a month before Jimmy Carter lost to Ronald Reagan). The review had to be 250 words or thereabouts, which made the writing of it incredibly difficult. I had to bang out draft after draft on an IBM Selectric, tearing my hair out. I went through a lot of White-Out, which used to come in little glass bottles. And I can’t find the FIR issue that the review appeared in anywhere.
I decided a couple of months ago that I had zero interest in seeing Lockerbie: A Search for Truth (Peacock, 1.2.25).
Based on Jim Swire‘s “The Lockerbie Bombing: A Father’s Search for Justice” and starring Colin Firth as Swire, it’s a story that we all know the ending to, and which dramatically speaking can’t do anything except swirl around in the Scottish mud.
Firth plays the anguished father of poor Flora Swire, one of the 243 passengers and 16 crew members who were murdered on 12.21.88 (not to mention 11 Lockerbie residents who died) when a Libyan bomb exploded in the luggage compartment of a U.S.-bound Pan Am 747 (flight 103). A gruesome slaughter.
It’s a story that can’t help but infuriate because the scumbag convicted of having orchestrated the bombing and who was handed a life sentence, Libyan intelligence officer Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al-Megrahi, was sprung from a Scottish prison after serving ten years because he was ailing from cancer (i.e., “compassionate grounds”). Al-Megrahi returned to Libya on 11.2.09, moved into a villa in Tripoli, and died almost three years hence (5.20.12).
In a fair and just world, Al-Megrahi would have suffered some kind of traumatic execution…hanging, firing squad, thrown into a hungry wolf pit like Ernest Borgnine in The Vikings. But instead he more or less walked after serving a decade behind bars. What kind of a shitty ending is that?
Another Libyan guy, Lamin Khalifah Fhimah, was prosecuted for his involvement in the crime but was found not guilty.
Zero Dark Thirty delivered a kind of dramatic satisfaction for the 9/11 victims, but what possible payoff could result from broken-hearted Jim Swire digging into the particulars and becoming more and more angry and haunted and disillusioned?
Last night I tried watching Return to Lockerbie with Lorraine Kelly, a 2023 doc that’s mainly focused on the trauma that Lockerbie residents went through.
If Pan Am flight #103 hadn’t been delayed, the bomb would have exploded over the Atlantic.
AI sez: Alpine goats are the best for vegetation management because they’re good at clearing land with taller plants and weeds because they can reach higher than other breeds. Boer goats, who are primarily meat goats, are the fastest at clearing land and are considered the best breed for land management.
“Many years ago the New York Times paid all my expenses and held out a nice check on the simple condition that I hang out for a few days with David Lynch and write up the experience.
“I did the hanging-out part, but it didn’t really amount to an experience. I couldn’t get a grip on him, at all. Because there was nothing to grip.
“I’m not saying he was shallow, more that he was truly elusive, meaning the ‘self’ that was in there, supposedly, was simply that of an artist in his off hours. Which is like the self of a vaccum cleaner in its off hours. Meaning it just sits there.
“In Lynch’s case, he smoked and drank coffee while he just sat there. And sometimes he said something. Nothing memorable.
“Anyway, the assignment completely defeated me in a way that no other magazine assignment ever has. I think I’ll write about this at greater length soon, this non-experience I had with someone so eccentric he didn’t even come off as an eccentric, but suffice it to say I’m sorry to hear he’s gone. He kept alive in the minds of millions the figure of the artist, the artist as individual, useless to society at large and therefore invaluable to all.”
At noon on 1.20.25, Orange Plague will be inaugurated inside the Capital rotunda. No, I haven’t the slightest interest in watching. (YouTube clips will suffice.) Horrid cold temperatures have forced the ceremony, which normally happens outdoors on the nippy Capitol steps, to huddle inside.
The same deal prevailed 40 years ago when Ronald Reagan‘s second-term inauguration happened under the Capitol dome.
Washington, D.C, was covered in several inches of snow — essentially a coating of “ice-nine” — during JFK’s inauguration.
Last night I spoke with HE’s “Eddie Ginley” about what the recent BAFTA and PGA nominations portend. And Ginley’s basic thesis was that BestPictureOscarsarefundamentallyaboutBigSwings.
What Ginley said, in essence, was that Sean Baker can and should be celebrated, but he can’t win a Best Picture Oscar…very sorry…because Anora, obviously his finest film, isn’t enough of a Big Swing. It’s too Brooklyn, too Russian, too slapstick, too boozy and lap-dancey… right? It doesn’t, like, “say” anything.
This, at least, is what your basic industry dullards appear to feel, according to Ginley. To them it doesn’t matter if a Big Swing movie hits the ball long and hard. Babe Ruth swings don’t have to pay off in a sweet-smell-of-success fashion. All that matters to the none-too-brights is that a filmmaker said “no half-measures or standard strategies…here comes my go-for-broke Stanley Kubrick or Andrej Tarkovsky or trans Stanley Donen film!”
Hats off because Jacques Audiard and Brady Corbet picked up that big fat bat and swung hard! Big concept, drug cartel guy goes trans, long length, overture, intermission, etc. Okay, so they only got a piece of the ball and maybe hit a line drive or a pop-up. Doesn’t matter!
What matters is the ambition, the hunger, the size of the dream and the pretensions and the fevered imaginings that were poured into it. Don’t tell us about smart tap-dancers and brainy popcorns and soul baths that leave audiences in states of soothe and groove…toss that stuff aside, they’re saying.
Eff those guys.
Anora, Conclave, A Complete Unknown…these are the “sing” movies…clear water and unpretentious nourishment….movies that work.
Warning: I’m heartbroken about the static disturbance sounds in these two mp3 recordings, which last about 30 minutes each. I’ll have to figure another way of recording. My trusty digicorder served me well for so many years…no longer!
I’m just going to be flat-out honest about eccentric filmmaker extraordinaire David Lynch, whose untimely passing at age 78 (four days short of his 79th birthday) was reported earlier today. But I’m going to speak in generalities.
Lynch was basically a fascinating, unconventional, gut-hunchy, marquee-brand surrealist artist who excelled as an auteur filmmaker for roughly a quarter-century (from ’77’s Eraserhead to ’01’s Mulholland Drive).
In HE parlance Lynch didn’t exactly peak for that whole 25-year stretch but he certainly flourished creatively for most of that period– Eraserhead, The Elephant Man (sturdy, compassionate period piece), Dune (not admired), Blue Velvet (arguably his only truly great theatrical film), Wild at Heart, the groundbreaking Twin Peaks TV series (’90 and ’91), Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, Lost Highway (in my book his second best feature), The Straight Story (fourth best…spare, earnest and true) and Mulholland Drive (third best).
Yes, Lynch continued to work excitingly or at least imaginatively in the 21st Century (Inland Empire, the 2017 Twin Peaks reboot for Showtime, paintings and musical collaborations and whatnot) but if you ask me his main creative effort / handle / identity over the last 15 or so years was projecting his testy, feisty, snappy-ass personality in YouTube and TikTok videos…his John Ford cameo in Steven Spielberg’s The Fablemans was a standout for most, but for me the clips of Lynch losing his temper over this and that are wonderful. The iPhone rant, the “what is this shit about the length of a scene?” rant…all are magnificent.
So he was basically a prolific signature-level director over the last quarter of the 20th Century (face it…the ’80s were his glory years), and a sometime filmmaker but mainly a great, irascible, cranky-as-fuck personality from the late aughts until just recently.
A lifelong smoker, Lynch stated last November that emphysema had gotten the better of him. And yet his poor health was exacerbated, it seems, by the ongoing L.A. firestorms. Sometime last week Lynch evacuated one of his Los Angeles homes (he owned three on or near Mulholland Drive) due to the fires. He went downhill soon after.
Barry Levinson‘s The Alto Knights (Warner Bros., 3.21.25) would sell more tickets if it was called Wise Guys (original title), Goombahs, Vito and Frank or Old Fuckheads.
Okay, those aren’t very good titles either, but what the hell does The Alto Knights mean?
The Alto Knights Social Club was the original name of Little Italy’s’s Ravenite Social Club (247 Mulberry Street). Founded in 1926, the joint was a hangout for Charlie “Lucky” Luciano and Albert Anastasia. (The name “Alto Knights” came from the Order of Saint James of Altopascio.)
The screenplay is by Nicholas Pileggi (co-author of Goodfellas).
The Alto Knights stars 81-year-old Robert De Niro in a dual role as mob bosses Vito Genovese and Frank Costello. Debra Messing, Cosmo Jarvis, Kathrine Narducci and Michael Rispoli play supporting roles.
