Yet another team — New Regency, director John Hillcoat, screenwriter John Logan — is trying make Cormac McCarthy‘s “Blood Meridian” (’85) into a movie.
Don’t they understand this is an all-but-unfilmable property?…that the history of failed adaptations stretches back at least 25 years?…that Joe and Jane Popcorn lack the constitution to cope with frank depictions of such a blistering and ultra-violent book?
“The black stepped out of the darkness bearing the bowie knife in both hands like some instrument of ceremony. The white man looked up drunkenly and the black stepped forward and with a single stroke swapt off his head. Two thick ropes of dark blood and two slender rose like snakes from the stump of his neck and arched hissing into the fire. The head rolled to the left and came to rest at the ex-priest’s feet where it lay with eyes aghast.”
Producer Scott Rudin has been riding herd on a Blood Meridian adaptation for many, many years.
In the late ’90s, Tommy Lee Jones acquired the adaptation rights to the story and subsequently rewrote Steve Tesich‘s 1995 screenplay. Never happened, deemed too violent.
Ridley Scott and screenwriter William Monahan entered discussions with Rudin for adapting “Blood Meridian” with Paramount Pictures financing. Abandonedm, too violent, etc.
James Franco took a crack at McCarthy’s novel in 2011. He shot 25 minutes of test footage starring Scott Glenn, Mark Pellegrino, Luke Perry and Dave Franco. Never went anywhere.
On 5.5.16 Variety reported that Franco was negotiating with Rudin to write and direct an adaptation to be brought to the Marché du Film, starring Russell Crowe, Tye Sheridan and Vincent D’Onofrio. Nope.
I'm presuming that the partly-diseased, woke-stricken HE commentariat is going to respond to this frank and seemingly fair-minded video essay by attacking me.
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Talk about priceless remnants of ancient civiizations and the various complications (ethical and otherwise) that ensue when a very special remnant is discovered…
Jean Negulesco‘s Boy on a Dolphin (’57) is about as far away from Alice Rohrwacher‘s La Chimera as you can get. The first Hollywood film shot in Greece, this 20th Century Fox release is square, schmaltzy, simplistic, sentimental and very strongly opposed to any sense of native authenticity.
Set in Hydra, Sophia Loren is a poor local girl with great boobs, Alan Ladd is a good-guy archeologist with shimmering blonde hair, and Clifton Webb is a nefarious sophisticate with links to the black market.
The only anecdote I can recall is the one about a two-inch height disparity between Ladd and Loren (who was making her English-language debut).
Wiki excerpt: “The dissimilarity in heights between the 5 foot, 8 inch Loren and 5 foot, 6 inch Ladd led to complications. Some of their scenes together required him to stand on a box; another forced a trench to be dug for Loren when the pair walked along the beach.”
I missed Alice Rohrwacher‘s La Chimera at last year’s Cannes Film Festival and then again in Telluride eight months ago, but I finally saw it at the Jacob Burns on Sunday night and man, it has a real unwashed, hand-to-mouth, transportational spirit thing going on.
It’s about the ancient past (Etruscan artifacts) being dug up in Tuscany and sold and exploited by lowlife scruffs, and how this all shakes down in a moralistic or fable-like sense. It doesn’t pay off emotionally, or at least not in a way that I recognize, but it almost does. And it definitely feels whole by the end — I can say that for sure.
Rohrwacher, her dp Hélene Louvart (who mostly shoots within 1.37 and 1.66 aspect ratios), editor Nelly Quettier and the mostly tramp-like, generally unattractive cast (except for the radiant Carol Duarte, a Brazilian actress playing a kind of Gelsomina- or Guilietta Masina-like innocent, and the white-haired, eternally beautiful Isabella Rosellini)…Rohrwacher and friends are definitely up to something here.
Tall, pale-faced, unshaven Josh O’Connor plays Arthur, a kind of artifact whisperer — a filthy British-born bilingual fellow who smokes all the time, wears dirty clothing and ugly footwear and shuffles around with one of the worst haircuts in movie history.
But Arthur is about more than just stinky socks and rancid cigarette breath — he can sense or smell where Etruscan artifacts (sculpture, goblets, statues, frescoes) are buried, and so most of the film is about Josh guiding a band of tomb robbers on illegal digs. Their findings are sold to a sinister art dealer (Alba Rohrwacher, the director’s older sister), and that’s how they make ends meet.
La Chimera is about hundreds upon hundreds of spirit elements coexisiting in a hungry, dirt-poor realm without showers or deodorants or laundromats…the soiling and pirating of ancient remnants by low-life scuzzies…buried Etruscan pottery and tiled floors and erotic figurines…soil whispers, dusty ghosts.
Ethical conflicts abound, of course, but what matters is treating the past with care and reverence and allowing others to bask in its beauty. I don’t see what’s so bad about selling found history. As long as the artifacts are respected and not hoarded, what’s the problem?
It took me a good half hour before I got past O’Connor’s smelly feet and disgusting cigarette smoking and began to realize where the film is headed — before it hit me that it’s a casting a kind of underclass spell that really takes hold…that it’s a La Strada-like adventure or dirt poem, a half-fantasy or fairy tale about wretched refuse types looking to survive as best they can and not fretting about ethical issues…about digging up Etruscan pots and cups and marble statues and you-name-it…poor folks sifting through soil in Tuscany’s hidden regions (i.e., the kind that tourists rarely gaze upon).
Talk about a curious turn-on mechanism but this is Rohrwacher’ssignature…she takes all kind of disparate, haunting, non-hygenic elements and throws them together like a salad maker…nothing is the least bit glammy or posed or polished or conventionally alluring…everything is half-assed, raggedy-assed…the sublime merged with the ugly.
La Chimera features one of the ugliest coastline super-sized factories I’ve ever seen in my life — it reminded me of a coastline factory in Piombino, a working-class town where tourists catch the ferry to Elba.
La Chimera has a real sense of spirit. Rohrwacher (her first name is pronounced Ahh-LEE-chuh) really goes for the off-handed, the weird, the gunky, the untidy, the muddy. It’s not exactly pleasant, but is kind of wonderful all the same.
…but dear God, it feels so good when Alec Baldwin slaps Crackhead Barney and Friends‘ phone…I would have held myself in check, but my God, what a wonderful thing it can be to swat a mosquito.
This 1976 Benefit Blowout poster was posted on Facebook this mornhing by musician and old friend Eric Pearson. It was composed by the late Chris Browne (Hagar the Horrible). His older brother, fellow cartoonist and extraordinary musician Chance Browne, passed away a few weeks ago. Notice the “BlackWellsFiasco” logo at the bottom left.
The below photo ran in the Wilton Bulletin in early August ’76. It accompanied a story about a then-upcoming Save The Whales concert, which then-girlfriend Sophie Black (on my left) and I co-produced, and which was held on a hilly 52-acre farm owned by Sophie’s parents, David and Linda Cabot Black. The focus of the story was that a portion of the proceeds would be donated to Camp PIP, a non-profit that offered recreational facilities help to lower-income kids.
2. Its findings have been disputed by more enlightened voices.
3. It’s been totally covered by the American media**.
4. And why are you so obsessed with this issue anyway, Jeff?
5. Do you really think Joe Biden wants genital mutilation for five-year-olds on demand?
All in all, the HE comment chorus has Cass Review supporters outflanked and boxed in six ways from Sunday.
Seriously, this is how progressive ditto-heads rationalize reality…
** In point of fact, places like the Times did an obligatory news piece, but they’ve done no reporting on the reaction and fallout in, you know, the United States.
“The British doctor behind a landmark study into transgender treatment in the UK has called criticism of her research ‘inaccurate’ and ‘unforgivable’.”
“Dr. Hilary Cass told the Times she wished to address the ‘disinformation’ circulating about the findings and recommendations handed down by the Cass Review when it was published on April 10th.
“The physician also said she fears using public transport and for her personal safety after receiving online abuse in the wake of the report’s release.”
Michael Douglas on age and Joe Biden, 7:14 mark: “The people I’ve talked to say he’s sharp as a tack. We all have issues with memory as we get older [but] let’s just say that Joe’s entire cabinet would be more than happy to work wth him again [over] the next term. I cannot say that about the other candidate [as] nobody in his cabinet from 2016 wants to be involved with him.”
HE agrees with YouTube guy #1: “No smart, talented, experienced, accomplished, reasonable person…a person who puts the country first…no one with those qualities will endorse Trump in 2024.”
Ditto YouTube guy #2: “Right now it doesn’t matter if Biden is too old. I would rather have a too-old guy who will uphold the constitution than someone who actively wants to destroy it.”
“Do I have to pretend [this stuff] is cool in order to keep my liberal ID card? Sorry — can’t do that.”
“Wokeness is no longer an extension of liberalism — it’s more often taking something so far that it becomes the opposite — at a certain point inclusion becomes promotion. Endlessly talking about gender to six year-olds isn’t just inappropriate — it’s what the law would call entrapment.”
It hit me yesterday that Josie Rourke, who made her bigtime feature directing debut with Mary, Queen of Scots, has been absent from the flush realm since Mary opened in late '18. There are reasons for that, of course. One is that people like me felt novocained to death, Mary being an overbearing exercise in woke presentism.
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Three days ago I rewatched Robert Benton‘s Places in the Heart (9.21.84). Sometimes older films hold up and sometimes they can seem a bit softer or less formidable in retrospect. Well, you can sheath that sword because the sands of time haven’t diminished Places in the Heart in the slightest. In my book it’s a truly great film. The church communion scene at the very end still turns me into mush.
Sally Field‘s “you really like me!” speech upon winning the Best Actress Oscar has been endlessly belittled, but over the last 40 years I’ll bet that few have given the film another shot and really settled into her performance. Her Edna Spalding is fairly magnificent…about as pained and stressed and rock-solid as it gets.
Director-writer Benton, who’s still with us at age 91, really knew rural, Depression-era Texas, having been born and raised in the backwater of Waxahachie (where Places in the Heart takes place) and you can feel that authority and authenticity in every scene.
Heart includes uncomfortably frank depictions of racism, and there’s no way in hell that the wokesters would allow such a film to be made today. But every frame is real and honest and humane. It’s touching, grueling, affecting…the way it really was back then, at least in Benton’s recollection.
I don’t want to hear one HE comment-threader argue this point…not one!
And the cast….good God! Field, John Malkovich, Danny Glover, Lindsay Crouse, Ed Harris, Amy Madigan, Lane Smith, Terry O’Quinn, Bert Remsen.
There’s a scene in which Smith urges the financially strapped Field to allow Malkovich’s “Mr. Will”, his blind brother-in-law, to stay with her as a lodger. Field’s initial response is “this isn’t a good time,” which I partly understood. At the same time I was muttering to myself, “Don’t say ‘no’ to Malkovich staying with you…please! He’s John Malkovich!”
Malkovich’s career erupted that year. His Heart performance resulted in a Best Supporting Actor nomination. He played a tough photojournalist in Roland Joffe‘s The Killing Fields. And he played Biff in a celebrated Broadway revival of Death of a Salesman, costarring with Dustin Hoffman. I caught Salesman in the spring or summer of ’84, and five minutes after Malkovich came on stage I said to myself, “Jesus fuck, this guy is amazing.”
