Jeff Wells

The last time I checked Truman Capote’s mid ‘70s social suicide (Esquire’s publishing of “La Cote Basque, 1965“, a roman a clef chapter from his never-published “Answered Prayers”), was more his story than the story of “the swans.”

But the trailer for Feud: Capote vs. The Swans (FX Hulu, 1.31) seemingly has it ass backwards. The scenario is all about Babe Paley (Naomi Watts), Slim Keith (Diane Lane), C.Z. Guest (Chloë Sevigny), Lee Radziwill (Calista Flockhart) and Joanne Carson (Molly Ringwald), and secondarily about Capote.

I’ve no idea why the late Gloria Vanderbilt isn’t a character (she was certainly in “La Cote Basque, 1965“), but perhaps CNN’s Anderson Cooper, her son, presented the filmmakers with difficult terms.

That said, Tom Hollander seems to have his Capote impersonation well in hand.

The eight-part miniseries was directed by Gus Van Sant, Max Winkler and Jennifer Lynch, and written by Jon Robin Baitz.

Wiki excerpt: “Capote sold four chapters (‘Mojave’, ‘La Cote Basque, 1965’, ‘Unspoiled Monsters’ and ‘Kate McCloud’) of the novel-in-progress to Esquire at the behest of Gordon Lish in 1975 and 1976.

“’Mojave’ was published in the magazine’s June 1975 issue to little fanfare. However, with the publication of ‘La Cote Basque, 1965’ in the November 1975 issue, there was an uproar of shock and anger among Capote’s friends and acquaintances, who recognized thinly veiled characters based on themselves.

“Both ‘Mojave’ and ‘La Cote Basque, 1965’ were exposés of the dysfunctional personal lives led by the author’s social benefactors, including CBS head William S. Paley, his wife Babe (then terminally ill with cancer), Gloria Vanderbilt (depicted as being insufferably vacuous), Happy Rockefeller and Ann Woodward.

“The Paleys would never socialize with Capote again and led an exodus of ostracizing friends. Subsequently, ‘Unspoiled Monsters’ and ‘Kate McCloud’ were published in the periodical in May 1976 and December 1976, respectively.”

Here’s a summary of the “Cote Basque” nitty gritty, written by Madeline Hiltz of the Vintage News.

A month ago I briefly reviewed Jeff Pope‘s Archie, a four-part Britbox miniseries about the emotionally and psychologically fraught Cary Grant. I didn’t like it much, but after watching the final two episodes I was struck by a curious observation.

The series is based upon a 1992 tell-all by Grant’s fourth wife, Dyan Cannon, titled “Dear Cary: My Life With Cary Grant.” (They were married between 1965 and 1967.) Cannon, an executive producer of Archie, is played by Laura Aikman.

You would think, given the political circumstances, that Cannon would be portrayed sympathetically, but she isn’t. She comes off as anything but a day at the beach. Aikman portrays her, frankly, like a wife from hell — contentious, argumentative, feisty, completely uninterested in peace and placidity, and ready to take Grant’s head off at the drop of a hat.

One naturally presumes that Cannon was okay with this, but you have to wonder why. No marriage is ever a bed of roses, but my impression was “Jesus Christ, why did Grant ever marry that predator?”

Grant and Cannon began dating in 1961, when she was 24 and he was 57. They married on 7.22.65. Cannon filed for divorce in September 1967.

“I’ve made thuh preservationuharrAmerican democracy thuh central issue of my Presidency…agh believe in free and fair elections, the right to vote fairly and tuh have your vote counted…” — Joe Biden‘s opening words in new campaign ad.

It’s fair to say that this 60-second ad is primarily aimed at diverse rainbow types.

Until the one-third mark all the sympathetic faces are non-white. Footage of white, Confederate-flag-carrying yokels who marched in Charlottesville and during the Jan. 6th insurrection are shown between :12 and :18. A neutral-mannered 70something white bumblefuck type (i.e, blue plaid shirt) appears at the 19-second mark; another aging, white-bearded bumblefuck voter with a Home Depot baseball cap appears at the 24-second mark.

We’re shown a blonde Anglo Saxon female (40ish) with a ballot covering her face at the 40-second mark. The 1945 Iwo Jima guys (including Native American Ira Hayes) appear at the 52-second mark. But no white male Millennials and Zoomers, or none that I’ve noticed. And no middle-aged, beefy-faced white guys at all, most of whom are presumed to be Trump or RFK, Jr. voters.

At the 48-second mark Biden says, “That’s our soul…we are the United States Uhmerica.” He wanted to say “of” but it didn’t quite happen, and the ad guys decided against looping it in.

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Zelda Williams and Diablo Cody‘s Lisa Frankenstein (Focus Features, 2.9), which I will almost certainly hate, appears to be a blend of two basic ideas.

One, the trope of a headstrong teenage girl (Kathryn Newton‘s “Lisa Swallows”) falling for some kind of eccentric, misunderstood outlaw or anti-social weirdo (Cole Sprouse), except in this instance it’s a reanimated corpse who smells bad. (And probably has bad breath.)

And two, a riff on Winona Ryder‘s “Lydia Deetz” in Beetlejuice, a goth girl communing with the dead except in this instance it’s a rotting, stinky dead guy instead of husband-and-wife ghosts (Alec Baldwin, Geena Davis).

Plus Lisa Frankenstein is set in 1989, or one year after the release of Beetlejuice.

Ryder will return in Beetlejuice 2 (Warner Bros., 9.6.24). The Tim Burton-directed sequel stars Michael Keaton, of course, along with Catherine O’Hara, Jenna Ortega, Monica Bellucci and Willem Dafoe “as a ghost detective who, in life, was a B movie action star.”

I just want to come clean and admit that despite my projecting a devotional film buff profile all my life or at least since the ‘80s, I never got around to seeing Carl Dreyer‘s The Passion of Joan of Arc (’28) until last night.

But I finally went there, man, and now I’m “experienced” in the Jimi Hendrix sense of the term.

An English-subtitled version of the definitve director’s cut (i.e., the 1981 Oslo version) became available for free public domain streaming on 1.1.24, you see, and that’s what I watched. Lying in bed, MacBook Pro, best headphones.

Good God, what a lapel-grabbing, no-way-out masterpiece! Right away it leaps out at you and says “stop scrolling and whatever the hell else you’re doing and grim up and give it up and watch this, will you?”

I knew right away it was made by a genius…a no-bullshit artist from the same general gene pool as Eisenstein, Murnau, Fincher, Eggers, Kubrick, Ford, Bresson, Fellini, Kurosawa, Scorsese, Powell.

The incessant close-ups, the feeling of Dreyer being in total control, the penetrating focus, the brilliant use of montage, the tracking shots, the sets (painted pink so as to stand out against the white sky), the anguish, the purity, the pain and the cruelty.

What a bleeding, bllistering, open-hearted titular performance by Renee Jean Falconetti.

And the cinematography by Ruolph Mate, who also shot Foreign Correspondent and Gilda and directed D.O.A., When Worlds Collide and The 300 Spartans (a decent sword-and-sandal epic).

I can’t stand tapping this out on the iPhone with the car running…more later.

We haven’t seen much snow in the northeast recently, and the odds are that with global warming and all we’re not going to see much of the stuff from here on. Spotty, half-assed snowfalls at best.

I grew up in New Jersey and Connecticut, and each and every winter we were pretty much blanketed with snowfalls between December and March. Two or three and sometimes four, I mean. Shovelling out the front steps and pathways. Shovelling out driveways. Snowball fights. Carrot-nosed snowmen in the front yard.

Blizzards, I fear, are pretty much a thing of the past. I endured an astonishing blizzard in NYC in ’81 or thereabouts.

It’s going to snow this weekend, I’m hearing, but not that much. It didn’t snow at all last year. Be honest — the world that some of us knew in the mid to late 20th Century is going away. Climate change is affecting everything. We’re all melting.

Faced with a new round of accusations over plagiarism in her scholarly work and despite the rumored back-channel intercession of Barack Obama, Harvard University’s first Black president, Claudine Gay, has resigned.

Gay’s tenure began on July 1, 2023 and ended on January 2, 2024 — six months total, the shortest of any Harvard president ever. She was the institution’s first Black president, and the second woman to lead the university.

N.Y. Times: “Support for Dr. Gay’s nascent presidency began eroding after what some saw as the university’s initial failure to forcefully condemn the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel and some pro-Palestinian student responses. Outrage grew in early December after Dr. Gay gave what critics saw as lawyerly, evasive answers before Congress when asked whether calls for the genocide of Jewish people were violations of school policies.”

All Gay had to do was unequivocally condemn anti-Semitism without any ifs, ands or buts. But instead she hopscotched and equivocated around, and now she’s toast.

“The December congressional hearing also led to the ouster of Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, whose support had already been shaken in recent months over her refusal to cancel a Palestinian writers conference. She resigned as Penn’s president four days later.”

Other than believing that A New Hope and especially The Empire Strikes Back are the only first-rate Star Wars films ever made, HE has no investment in the currently evolving Star Wars franchise.

And I couldn’t care less about the utter ruining of the material, the legend and the lore by Lucasfilm’s Kathy Kennedy (the Critical Drinker has been saying this for some time) and particularly her plan to launch an Untitled New Jedi Order film that will be directed by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy and star Daisy Ridley as Rey.

Average Joe fanboys hate this, of course. They’re up in arms. They don’t think the Star Wars franchise should be about pushing woke values or feminism but classic escapism, primal themes and the usual yaddah yaddah.

Obaid-Chinoy’s Wiki page describes her as “a Pakistani-Canadian journalist, filmmaker and activist known for her work in films that highlight gender inequality against women.”

…is a dead man ’round these parts. Tossed off the bridge about five minutes ago. C’est la guerre.

Eric Clapton first performed “My Father’s Eyes” on the 1992 “Unplugged” album. Written by Clapton and produced by Clapton and Simon Climie, it was released as a single in 1998. This might be my favorite easy-listening white guy soul song of all time.

The Ringer‘s Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins are making trouble for Alexander Payne‘s The Holdovers.

On Fennessey’s list of Best Films of 2023, The Holdovers is #25…well below The Iron Claw, Showing Up and May December.

Friendo: “You gotta be on the front foot about this because these people are attempting to diminish The Holdovers in every way they can, and they do have influence among cinephiles. These arguments are not going away so you should tackle them head on.”

HE to friendo: “There’s no tackling a generational dislike of The Holdovers. Either you get what Payne and Giamatti are doing…either you appreciate the way films used to be made in the ’70s…either you’ve seen The Last Detail and thereby appreciate the care and the craft and roll with it, or you don’t. The fact that dumping on one of the finest films of the year makes you sound like a Millennial shithead…that doesn’t matter to people like Sean and Amanda, and why should it?”

Sean: “A movie that older audiences are feeling warmly towards.”

Amanda: “This is a lovely, well-made film…a set of characters who are thrown together for two weeks and they’re gonna talk through some feelings and go through some things and we’re going to keep moving. I didn’t connect to it and I don’t know why.”

Sean: “There are some people who think it’s a masterpiece of filmmaking but that wasn’t my takeaway. There are younger folks who are pretty much where you are. Thought it was really well made, lots to admire but there’s more here. We can be more audacious in our filmmaking.”

Amanda: “This movie lands but is maybe not that ambitious. Safe is unfair, but The Holdovers feels a little smaller.”

Sean: “What I can’t find in The Holdovers is what is the big idea? I don’t know what it represents more broadly.”

Amanda: “I wonder what my block is here. You know, I like it a lot. I do wonder if I am just responding to some of the larger enthusiasm, particularly awards enthusiasm. The word CODA kept popping into my brain. It’s like, can I, I was going to say something mean? It’s like Pottery Barn. And I say that as someone who owns a lot of Pottery Barn but you can feel the ageing on it is aged as opposed to it being, you can feel the reference and the difference.”

Sean: “Are you evoking Paper Moon? Is this for me or is this for you?”

Amanda: “There’s no Tracy Flick for me to latch onto.”

Sean: “I saw someone greviously or egregiously declare this [to be] this year’s Green Book, which makes me want to gouge my eyes out. But I know what they meant by that.”