In the forthcoming “American Canto”, Olivia Nuzzi will reportedly write about her “digital affair” with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Trump’s Secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services.
This is fair game, of course, but sharing personal intimate messages feels a tad icky. To me, at least.
There’s titillation in sharing private texts, of course, but not much personal honor. I’m no fan of RFK Jr.’s thinking about vaccines and whatnot, but revealing allegedly intimate texts that he sent to Nuzzi is ethically questionable or, if you will, a bit slimey. (It would be different if Nuzzi had somehow obtained transcripts of texts that RFK, Jr, had sent to another would-be digital lover…that’s a different deal.)
Roughly the same thing happened to me when the careless James Mangold forwarded a private email that I’d sent to him. Out of the emailed 15-paragraphs my thoughts contained a single paragraph that touched very briefly on private voyeurism. Embarassing, yes, but also private. Mangold in turn sent it to Lionsgate’s Tim Palen, who in turn forwarded it to Nikki Finke because she wanted to “get” me because I had shared a relatively minor anecdote about Finke with some N.Y. Daily News guys back in’94.
It was a cheap and callous move on Mangold’s part, because it was meant for his eyes only and yet he violated that trust without blinking an eye. Mangold could have copied and pasted the content of a single live-wire paragraph in my email that he figured Lionsgate would want to know about (i.e., I’d spoken with Elmore Leonard about Mangold’s 3:10 to Yuma) but naaahh….too much trouble, right?
Gacy was a fat, gay sociopathic beast who had an amiable personality and liked dressing up like a clown, but who also murdered around 34 young men in the ’70s (mostly during the Jimmy Carter era)…he buried most of his victims in a crawl space under his home, and some under his garage’s cement floor. And he dumped a few in the Des Plaines river.
As long as McManus sticks to the Gacy investigation by the Norwood Park cops (and then the prosecution in the later episodes), Devil in Disguise is aces…gripping and fascinating and appropriately gloomy. It has story tension, realism, a strange Midwestern eeriness.
But when it starts veering into the lives of some of the victims and the anguish of their families after they’ve disappeared, you can feel the tension dissipating more and more…you can feel the narrative padding slowing things down.
HE to MacManus: We’d rather not familiarize ourselves with the young gay victims, and we really, really don’t want to deal with the grief of their parents. Bohhr-innnng! If you’d just stuck to the cops and the prosecutors and cut all the dramatic flotsam and jetsom, you’d have a perfect miniseries. Read the “investigation” section of Gacy’s Wikipage…it sucks you right in.
The girthy Michael Chernus, whose Gacy perf sorta kinda reminds you of John Candy in Uncle Buck and Planes Trains and Automobiles, is fairly great as this suburban monster. The last time I wrote about Chernus was when he played the extra-marital boyfriend of Stephanie Allynne in a glum 2015 Sundance comedy called People Places Things. My basic thought was “why would the pistol-hot Allyne want to cheat on her husband with a not-all-that-handsome overweight guy?”
In a sharply worded response to Owen Gleiberman‘s 10.19 Variety piece that disputes the notion that One Battle After Another celebrates radical militant lefty agitation, Breitbart.com’s John Noltestates a fair, neutral-minded observation about Leonardo DiCaprio‘s Bob Ferguson, the film’s grungy, bathrobe-wearing, start-to-finish protagonist.
Nolte observes that Leo doesn’t do anything — not one fucking thing — to affect the fate of his kidnapped daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti)
Nolte: “What [Gleiberman] doesn’t tell you is that DiCaprio’s Bob is a moron. Why? Because One Battle After Another only portrays white people as either useless idiots or evil racists. Director Anderson is so exacting with this agenda that every single member of the military (ICE) is white.
“What’s more, unlike Perfida, DiCaprio’s Bob has no redemption arc. When we meet him, he’s a child-like beta male to Perfidia’s oh-so competent girlboss. When we leave him, he’s looking at his new iPhone like a confused chimpanzee. From A to Z, Bob is so useless, you could literally remove his character from the movie and the plot would remain exactly the same (but blessedly shorter). Because he’s white, Anderson will not allow Bob to shape or move any of the action, even though he’s supposed to be our protagonist.
“The only competent and decent people in Battle are racial minorities — especially all the girlboss black women.”
Here’s an actual discussion that happened an hour or two ago between HE and a very adamant friendo…
Friendo: “Leo is the hero of the goddamn movie! And he undergoes a Hero’s Journey that is so classic, it’s practically Old Hollywood. He rescues his daughter from an army of government killers, and redeems himself in the process.”
HE: “He actually doesn’t rescue her. She rescues herself by shooting the Chistmas Adventurers assassin on that hilly desert road. And then Leo arrives and talks her out of shooting HIM when he says, ‘Willa…it’s okay…I’m your dad.’”
Friendo: “If Bob had not embarked on that journey, Willa would be dead. That’s called rescuing.”
HE: “I saw the movie twice. Leo really, really doesn’t rescue her. He just arrives after she’s killed the Christmas assassin, and then pleads with her and says ‘let’s go home, baby’ or whatever. He makes a lot of clumsy, anxious, stumbling-around moves during the film, but he does ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to resolve things or save the day.”
Friendo: “But doesn’t his BEING there at the climax count as a rescue? I get that PTA didn’t want to make a glorified Charles Bronson movie. He has gone to the ends of the earth for Willa, out of his devoted dad-hood.”
HE: “Yeah, he’s done a good devoted-dad thing. But Leo hasn’t actually solved anything or made things safer. He hasn’t stopped the bad guys. He’s done nothing decisive or crucial. He doesn’t even have a big climactic moment with Sean Penn at the very end…nothing.”
Craig Brewer‘s Song Sung Blue (Focus Features, 12.25), a period musical about a NeilDiamond tribute duo, will be screening soon for Critics Choice members on both coasts.
Before film writers start digging into Diamond’s music and career history and especially his recent, very sad encounter with Parkinson’s disease, let’s get one thing out of the way — the blackface sequence in Richard Fleischer‘s The Jazz Singer, a remake of the 1927 original that starred Al Jolson.
The Fleischer film came out 50 years ago, and even then critics were raising their eyebrows…just leave it there.
I must admit that I was impressed by Zohran Mamdani‘s razor-quick mind and general debating skills the other night. He’s obviously going to be the next NYC mayor, but his seemingly pro-Muslim, anti-cop, anti-Jewish agenda…I guess I shouldn’t say stuff like this. Give the guy a chance, right?
But his mayoral administration will probably be, I’m guessing, a little bit like London Breed‘s term as San Francisco mayor (2018 to 2025), and you know how that fucking turned out.
Mamdani wants to make bus service free for hard-working plebes struggling to make ends meet…fine. But you know who’s going to become a permanent fixture on those buses, right? Bums. Smelly, drooling bums.
Tippi Hedren’s characters in The Birds and Marnie have always struck me as curiously prim, overly tidy mannequins. She fit that immaculate, early ‘60s department store window persona — not just conservative, but a bit chilly and brittle.
I’m sorry but you don’t believe for a second that either character has ever been possessed by a single erotic impulse. Alfred Hitchcock was once quoted saying that Hedren “didn’t bring the volcano.” He wasn’t wrong.
Grace Kelly had a similar porcelain quality, but one always sensed an undercurrent of suppressed hunger and passion from her performances.
There’s nothing wrong with inhabiting or conveying a curiously chilly and brittle persona, but if that’s your main game there has to be at least a hint of some range implied.
Try to imagine Hedren as Blanche DuBois — you can’t.
She radiates a certain cool officiousness, a real-estate agent vibe. As such Hedren has reminded me of many women of wealth and assurance that I’ve run into or have known in upscale circles. There’s nothing false or ungenuine about this.
Is the private, off-screen Hedren a woman of kindness, elegance, poise, compassion, etc.? Allegedly so and good for her. She’s lived a good, long, healthy life, and she loves her big cats.
But remember Mitch Brenner mentioning that salacious news item about Melanie Daniels having allegedly taken a nude dip in a large Roman fountain? The instant he brings this up you say to yourself “no way…Melanie Daniels isn’t the type to disrobe in public, drunk or sober, and she never will be.”
And that’s fine. No disapproval — just a statement of fact.
This Indecent Proposal scene was written by Amy Holden Jones, who was around 40 when this not-all-that-great Paramount film was released. But Robert Redford‘s subway car recollection is a wee bit devastating. Because I’ve been there myself.
I’ve lost count of how many brief eyeball romances I’ve had with women on the NYC subway, or on the Boston MTA or the Paris Metro. When I was young or youngish, I mean. Each and every one was at least a little bit heartbreaking.
Loss hurts, and that includes lost opportunity. “Of all words by thought or pen, none so said as ‘it might have been.'”
In the immediate wake of poor Diane Keaton‘s death it would’ve been bad form to share my completely honest view of her interpretation of Louise Bryant in Warren Beatty‘s Reds, but I guess I can share it now.
My view is that Bryant is irritating — during the first hour she’s always seething and pouting — because she’s angry about not being talented enough to measure up to Jack Reed.
A friend said that her resentments weren’t really period-accurate — that Keaton/Bryant’s anger was primarily fed by the fires of 1970s feminism. I agreed but added that early feminism and the suffragette movement and free love were certainly starting to bloom in the early teens — it wasn’t as if there was nothing resembling ’70s feminism going on before World War I.
For six long years I’ve been waiting for the demise of Taika Waititi, or, you know, for his streak to run out of gas. At least that.
And now, to go by the Critical Drinker, it finally has. I’ve been secretly hoping for the Waititi torch to go out since sitting and suffering through JoJo Rabbit, which I called “a stylistic wank-off and about a quarter-inch deep” in September 2019.
Only now can it be told: In my 9.25.19 JoJo Rabbit review I reported that “there was a seasoned industry guy sitting behind me who couldn’t stop laughing, and heartily at that. At one point I half turned in my seat as if to say ‘what the fuck?’, but I didn’t turn all the way around.” That industry guy was no one else but Jeff Sneider.
Consider a brief fencing match between HE commenter JHR (J.R. Ewing with an inserted middle initial) and The Living, Breathing Embodiment of Hollywood Elsewhere in this morning’s “Accepting But Mystified” thread, the subject being a friendly, gracious, middle-aged Connecticut woman having never even HEARD of Anora:
HE: “Anora-wise, there are many concentric circles of passion and interest and engagement. The innermost circle is being an Anora devotee who’s seen it two or three times and can even quote dialogue from it. The outermost ring is, at the very least, having heard of its existence and/or its multi-Oscar triumph. To have not even HEARD of 2024’s Best Picture winner is to have no pulse — you are a flatliner.
“John Huston once famously said that all you need is a healthy sense of curiosity in order to live a well-educated life.”
JHR: “None of my friends (seniors, late 60s, retired college+ educated professionals with $) had ever heard of Anora when I pitched it to them, nor do they have any knowledge of the Oscars results.
“I had lunch with seven of them yesterday, I asked if anyone had been watching the MLB playoffs, and none of them had. They pay little attention to sports except for our big time college football team just down the road where most of us attended college.”
HE: “Seven of your senior chums got together for lunch? Seven? Isn’t that a bit crowded? A group of four is more like it, no? Seven is too conversationally competitive.
“Then again why not go bigger? Why not 10 or 12 having lunch at the same coffin-sized table? Hell, make it twenty! Twenty friends sharing a big luxurious lunch together. Think of all the shouting and guffawing…think of all the shrieking, raucous laughter and the tee-hee giggling!”
JHR: “What do my friends do with their leisure time? They read books, they have hobbies like golf, and they travel a lot — Europe, etc. Lifestyles most people would envy. I do all the above, too, but I am the only movie fan in my crowd, and I think that [Anora ignorance] is more common than you may understand, particularly when it comes to Oscar films.
“I can count on three fingers the number of my friends who are current on movies like me, out of a broader circle of about 40 lifelong friends.”
HE: “’40 friends’? That’s too many. Five’ll get you ten 30 or 35 of those 40 are fair-weather types.”
HE: “To live a life without a semi-active or semi-vibrant sense of curiosity is not living. Have your friends ever heard of Socrates? He was a Greek philosopher…oh, wait, have they ever heard of ancient Greece?
“In any event Socrates once wrote that ‘an unexamined life is not worth living.’ Maybe that’s too historical. Let’s try this…have your friends ever heard the expression ‘the lights are on but nobody’s home?’ Have they ever listened to the 1965 Zombies song ‘She’s Not There‘?”
Kathryn Bigelow and Noah Oppenheim‘s A House of Dynamite (Netflix), which opened theatrically last Friday (10.10) on select screens, will begin streaming on on Friday, 10.24, or ten days hence.
Has anyone taken the plunge? How about sharing some reactions? I reviewed it out of the Venice Film Festival on 9.3, or nearly six weeks ago
Remember the good old JFK days when it took a little while to attack the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons? If a rogue order to bomb the Russkis had been given by an unstable SAC base commander in the early ’60s, say, nuclear bombs would then be delivered by Air Force guys flying big-ass B-52s, and with “one geographical factor in common — they are all two hours from their targets inside Russia.”
President Merkin Muffley has two hours to try and stop this bonkers attack and thereby prevent the Doomsday Machine from going off? Man, that’s a really luxurious time frame to work with, certainly compared to the lousy 25 minutes that top-level strategists and officials (White House, government, military) have in Kathryn Bigelow‘s A House of Dynamite (Netflix, 10.10).
A bum 25 minutes to, like, do something about a North Korean or Chinese or possibly even a Russian nuclear missile heading toward the great city of Chicago? C’mon! Some people need 25 minutes just to take a dump and then wash their hands, brush their teeth and spray the bathroom with Febreze.
First of all, isn’t 25 minutes a bit too short, as in not enough dramatic breathing room? Wouldn’t it be schematically preferable if the missile’s travel time took 40 minutes instead? More time to think, consider options, fire back at Pyongyang, freak out, call loved ones, generate an immediate warning to Chicago-area smartphones, etc.
A 6.22.18 Business Insider report estimated that a nuke travelling from Pyongyang to Chicago might take 39 minutes and 30 seconds. Has that Armageddon clock really been cut by 50% over the last seven years?
The fact that Dynamite lasts 112 minutes may suggest to some that the essential suspense kicks in for only 25 or so, once, or roughly one-fifth of the running time….wrong.
Bigelow and screenwriter Noah Oppenheim‘s strategy is to wade into three versions of the same 20-minute countdown — different locales, different key characters, all wearing the usual clenched, super-grim expressions.
Now that I’m re-running the film in my head, I’m not precisely recalling how those three 25-minute sections add up to 112. I’d really like to watch it again with a stopwatch.
If Bigelow went with three 40-minute sequences, more situational stuff could happen. Little things, big things, eccentric whatevers. 20 minutes is just too crammed, man. Especially for the people of Chicago.
Unless I missed something (and it’s quite possible that I did), none of the Dynamite decision-makers give serious thought to the idea of instant-messaging the entire Chicago populace (not to mention the people of Illinois, Wisconsin and Indiana) and saying something like “hey, guys…not much time for anything, but you need to immediately find some local school with old-fashioned classrooms so you can can all put your heads under the desks…seriously, you have 25 minutes to confess your sins or fuck your boyfriend or girlfriend one last time or go to church and pray to the one and only God or order your favorite spicy hot dog or Subway salami andwich or tell your kids that you adore them or, you know, pop an Oxy or inject yourself with Vietnamese heroin.”
One of the basic Dynamite messages, by the way, is that this country’s “iron dome” defense system doesn’t work all that well, especially when the task is “htting a bullet with a bullet.”
Fair question #1: “Yeah, okay, it’s a tough nut to crack but if you can’t lick this technological challenge, then what good are you, Jimmy Dick?”
Fair question #2: If you were Oppenheim and creating A House of Dynamite on your Macbook Pro, would your instinct be to show Chicago being melted to death and/or blown into little shards with a super-gigantic mushroom cloud reaching so many miles high that even Cary Grant‘s Roger Thornill could see it from that Prairie Stop Highway 41 cornfield, which was….what, in southern Illinois or western Indiana?
Or would you figure “naaah, it’s more effective to hold back and prompt the audience to imagine the carnage instead?”
Cheers and congrats to all the Dynamite players, first and foremost Rebecca Ferguson (generally the coolest and most composed), followed by Idris Elba (irked and perplexed U.S. President), Gabriel Basso (second most disciplined), Jared Harris (unstable James Forrestal-like Defense Secretary), Tracy Letts (the General Buck Turgidson of this scenario, only older and without the laughs and no pistol-hot girlfriend), Anthony Ramos (hardcore team leader who vomits when push comes to shove), Moses Ingram, Jonah Hauer-King, Greta Lee (North Korean expert) and the great Jason Clarke
A House of Dynamite is not my idea of a game-changer in any kind of stylistic visual sense. It’s basically just a highly effective throttle-ride, very nicely shot by regular Bigelow dp Barry Ackroyd, and razor-cut like a motherfucker by Kirk Baxter.
What’s the default term? “A super-tense, nail-bitten thriller that Joe and Jane Popcorn will have a high old time with”…something like that But it won’t deliver the same charge on a 65-inch HD screen. It was great seeing it on the huge screen at the Sala Darsena. Everyone should be so lucky or priveleged.
You can tell from the get-go that Sam Raimi and Damian Shannon‘s script for Send Help, a #MeToo feminist revenge drama, is on the pulpy and simplistic side.
To go by the trailer for this Raimi-directed film, sexist yuppie dickhead Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien) has been sketched with one basic color, making him into an acidic boor and a snothead. Obviously he’s going to suffer at the hands of co-worker Linda Little (Rachel McAdams), who quickly gains the upper hand after they make it to shore after their private plane crashes into the Pacific.
This morning a friend noted the obvious similarity to Lina Wertmuller‘s Swept Away, but Hollywood’s wokezoid mentality would never permit any sort of surprising or transformative relationship to develop between the two. (Imagine McAdams turning over on her stomach and purring “sodomize me” to O’Brien…right.)
This is clearly…okay, seemingly a boilerplate film for unsophisticated women — a “make the male asshole suffer for his sins” flick.
The friend then wondered if Send Help might be “Misery on a South Seas island” with McAdams as Kathy Bates and O’Brien as James Caan.
In my view, Raimi’s first fully mature and dramatically effective film was A Simple Plan (’98), a moralistic midwestern noir. He followed this up with For The Love of the Game (’99), a not-as-good sports drama that was nonetheless reasonably decent, and then came The Gift (’00).
But with the dawn of the 21st Century Raimi never even tried to operate in the naturalistic realm again. To be frank about it, Raimi pretty much committed creative suicide by selling his soul to the Marvel empire…Spider-Man (’02), Spider-Man 2 (’04), Spider-Man 3 (’07), Drag Me to Hell (09), the vaguely shitty Oz the Great and Powerful and, most recently, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (’22).
