Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi‘s Beatles ’64, a newish doc that Disney+ will release on Friday, 11.29, will feature (a) never-before-seen footage of the lads and their howling, shrieking fans during the height of Beatlemania in February ’64, and (b) new interviews with Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr.
But the main selling point, it seems, will be up-rezzed, digitally-enhanced footage from Alfred and David Maysles‘ “What’s Happening! The Beatles in the U.S.A.“, a 16mm documentary that originally aired on 11.13.64 on CBS.
The footage, restored in 4K by Park Road Post. will look much, much better than ever before. But the restoration aspect aside, Beatles ’64 sounds like a nice Disney + gimmee for Marty, David and friends….paychecks all around.
Marty’s co-producers are Margaret Bodde, McCartney, Starr, Olivia Harrison, Sean Ono Lennon, Jonathan Clyde and Mikaela Beardsley, with Jeff Jones and Rick Yorn executive producing.
Eight months ago I lamented that footage of the Beatles first U.S. press conference, which happened inside the Pan Am terminal at JFK airport on Friday, 2.7.64 or 60-plus years ago, still looks shitty. The Park Road guys will presumably make it look brand new.
Posted on 2.3.24: Earlier today I was looking for some restored news footage — HD, 4K, perhaps even a 60 fps makeover or at least deliciously restored with enhanced sound — that I was sure someone had created. To my gradual surprise I was surprised to discover that except for some cruddy-looking colorized footage nobody has done squat. The same footage that was broadcast later that day on local news channels is all you can find. Strange. You’d think someone along the way would have done something to intensify those iconic sounds and images, but no.
But five or so years ago I started to think like a sensible left-centrist. And yet two and a half years ago I registered in Wilton as a straight Democrat. Old habits die hard. I grew up with suburban liberal attitudes in the house, and it just stuck to me. My parents were Democrats. Well, my father was.
Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone has been working slavishly to structurally create and finesse the first installment of the brand-new GATE CRASHERS award-season forum, but the whole kit and kaboodle won’t be ready until tomorrow morning (Tuesday, 10.15).
The current plan is for Jeff Sneider to be leaking the across-the-board Best Picture consensus…first out of the gate.
But in the meantime, here are my own preferences…subject to change, of course, due to shifting instincts and mood swings.
Hence the bizarre popularity of a racist, sociopathic felon, conman and sexual assaulter among just over 45% of the voting population. They don’t care about his criminality — they just want those damn Venezuelan gang members cuffed and booted.
There’s a very real possiBility (although not a genuine likelihood) that Kamala Harris might get edged out in the battleground states on 11.5. She actually might not squeak through. There are simply too many millions of none-too-bright voters (including significant swaths of POCs) who don’t wanna know what they don’t wanna know.
It’s not a rumor — last weekend Trump pugnaciously asserted that if elected he’ll use the military to get tough over immigrant-related issues.
PBS.org: “Speaking in Colorado on Friday, Trump described the city of Aurora as a ‘war zone’ controlled by Venezuelan gangs, even though authorities say that was a single block of the Denver suburb, and the area is safe again.”
I was driving along and thinking about Timothee Chalamet‘s Bob Dylan in James Mangold‘s A Complete Unknown, and right on cue my random-ass iTunes library started playing “She Belongs To Me.” And I began singing along and it felt really great, but when it came to the third stanza a certain memory kicked in.
The lyrics go as follows: “She never stumbles, she’s got no place to fall / She never stumbles, she got no place to fall / She’s nobody’s child, the law can’t touch her at all.”
All my life I’ve been of the firm opinion that the last line should read as follows: “She’s nobody’s child, ma can’t touch her at all.”
We all know what and who “Ma” is. She’s the enforcer, the sheriff, the take-no-shit Ma Barker…a ramrod authority figure from way back…the “Egyptian ring” woman’s mother, a voice of bluster, a proverbial butch boss, Cody Jarret’s doting and devotional “ma!”, etc.
The law may wag its finger and say this or that, but “ma” is the matronly dictator whom people fear the most. (I certainly feared my own whip-cracking mom, Nancy.) And yet “ma” can’t touch this woman at all. Talk about formidable.
A few days ago I was sitting in my usual cubicle inside Wilton’s public library, and there was an overweight bearded guy sitting one cubicle away, and he was making King Kong or Mighty Joe Young “urp” sounds…the kind of belchy noises that older people with bad plumbing sometimes make.
I could see his black curly hair above my cubicle wall, and I was staring a hole in the back of his mongrel head. I was shaking my own head and wondering how people get this way….how they manage to sacrifice their dignity and composure. The noises were so bad that they interfered with my concentration. It’s three or four days later and they’re still interfering.
…are basically bullshitting the pollsters. What they mean is “I’m not so sure about a woman becoming our commander in chief, especially a woman of color…I just don’t know about that.”
I didn’t find Brady Corbet‘s The Brutalist (A24, 12.20) distancing or vaguely off-putting or dislikable. Well, I did but it was worse than that. The cold, hard truth is that I hated, hated, HATED it. I was seething with disdain, convulsed with loathing. I found it slow, soul-draining and dull as dishwater.
I began to disengage less than 15 minutes in. I deeply hated Lol Crawley‘s dreary, murky-ass VistaVision cinematography. The dialogue sounded soft, whispery and often muddy-murky, and my son Dylan had the same aural experience so don’t tell me it’s my aging ears.
Daniel Blumberg‘s overture lasts for…what, 30 or 35 seconds, if that? The only overture that’s shorter is heard during the opening seconds of Pearl Harbor, written by Hans Zimmer, and it’s a much catchier composition.
Set in a glum, late 1940s and ‘50s gulag of suburban Pennsylvania and New Jersey, The Brutalist is an unwelcome envelopment…the 215-minute running time is a direct result of Corbet and Mona Fastvold’s screenplay yielding zero narrative urgency. The film feels like a head cold, vaguely suffocating and narcotized…somberly, pretentiously affected…like a three-hour-plus stretch in a Brady Corbet concentration camp…for my money it doesn’t engage or arouse or put any kind of hook in…it doesn’t even begin to organically or narratively develop into anything that an Average Joe or Jane might find compelling or which might amount to a hill of beans.
I didn’t give a shit about Adrien Brody‘s Laszlo Toth, a Hungarian holocaust refugee blah blah you’re boring my ass off. Toth is a gifted architect with an elegant sense of design, a bizarre back-room heroin habit and a curious, joined-at-the-hip friendship with Gordon, a mostly silent black dude (Isaachy de Bankole)…a relationship that makes no sense from a seven-decades-old cultural perspective, particularly that of a shaken Eastern European. Is Gordon his dealer or something?
As I took stock of Toth during the first 20 to 30 minutes and particularly a bus-station scene in which he succumbs to effusive, gushing sobs upon learning that his wife Erzsebet (Felicity Jones) has survived the Holocaust horrors of Eastern European Jewry, I felt tortured and doomed by the notion of having to hang with this lethargic simpleton for the next three-plus hours.
It wasn’t so much that I didn’t want his company — it was the fact that if Toth had been murdered at the half-hour mark I would have breathed a huge sigh of relief. I was muttering my HE death wish….”die, you lethargic, cigarette-smoking junkie fucker….die, die, die, die, die,” etc.
I felt a bit more toleration for Guy Pearce‘s Harrison Lee Van Buren, “a wealthy industrialist who becomes László’s most important client” blah blah, but I didn’t care at all for his bullshit son (Joe Alwyn) or anyone else. I wanted Alessandro Nivola, Brody’s furniture store cousin who won’t stop smiling and hugging and cheek-kissing Brody and then hugging some more…stop it!…I wanted him bitch-slapped or better yet made a recipient of a stray bullet.
I hated everyone and everything in this film. I couldn’t stand it. I wanted to leave less than a half-hour in, and totally bailed during the intermission…lemme outta here!
Everyone at the Venice Film Festival fell for the pretension. Only the phonies will stand by this thing during Oscar season. The movie is flat, plodding, boring. Fuck the immigrant experience, fuck Hungarian immigrants, fuck Brody’s thick and ooze-dripping bullshit accent, fuck his fucking cigarettes (he lights one up just about every damn scene), fuck his stupid-ass heroin habit….bullshit, bullshit, bullshit….pot-bellied Corbet can go fuck himself.
Two Girls and a Guy opened 27 years ago….27! Downey was 31 or 32 at the time. (He’s now 59.)
A dialogue-driven three-hander about dishonesty, game-playing and erotic obsession, pic was written and directed by James Toback and produced by Edward R. Pressman and Chris Hanley. Downey’s costars were Heather Graham and Natasha Gregson Wagner.
