Jeff Wells

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a prominent veteran of California politics for over half a century, has died at age 90.

A Democrat and strong activist liberal from San Francisco, six terms as a U.S. Senator and the state’s senior senator since ’93, three terms as mayor of San Francisco from 1978 (she succeeded Mayor George Moscone after his 1978 murder) to 1988, etc.

More recently (and certainly within the last five or so years) Feinstein became not only a symbol of age diminishment but of the same kind of obstinate refusal to accept reality that we’ve recently seen from Sen. Mitch McConnell and which we may see down the road from President Joe Biden.

Big-time politicians never, ever resign over aging issues. They either get voted out or die — there’s no third way.

Who will Gov. Gavin Newsom appoint to serve out Feinstein’s term? Will he choose a caretaker or one of the three announced candidates for Feinstein’s seat — Adam Schiff, Congressperson Barbara Lee, and Rep. Katie Porter?

If Newsom picks one of these three, he’ll be giving that person a huge leg-up in the ’24 primary.

It’s been 15 days years since Revolucian‘s Christian Bale temper tantrum mixtape — sourced from the set of Terminator Salvation in ’08. I really love it as a piece of music. It’s a masterpiece. I especially love playing it while driving, writing, getting dressed.

YouTube guy #1: “When I’m angry, I blast this song and dance-rage the tension out.”

YouTube guy #2: “This has been on my gym playlist for 10 years. Still makes me laugh.”

HE: “When I think of Yorgos Lanthimos‘ Poor Things (\Searchlight, 12.8), I think of a one-two effect. First I think of Frankenstein’s sexually vigorous daughter, and then a back-from-the-grave woman whose worldview evolves from wide-eyed wonderment into critical male-shirking wokeness. I also believe that Emma Stone has the Best Actress Oscar in the bag.”

Friendo: “When I think of Poor Things, I first think of a lurching, amusing and sometimes audacious [effort] that feels second-rate-ish at the end of the day. Then I think of the in-your-face woke design (Ms. Barbie Frankenstein in a world of angry, damaged, predatory men!), then I think of all that sex and how it’s really kind of gratuitous (unless this were 1972) but wow, it sure is going to help sell the movie!”

Posted on 9.9.23:

Michael Gambon has passed at age 82.

In a 5.7.07 interview with Future Movies‘ Adam Tanswell, Gambon was asked what went into playing Dumbledore in the Harry Potter films. He answered by discussing his approach to being an alleged character actor.

“I don’t have to ‘play’ anyone really,” Gambon said. “I just stick on a beard and play me, so it’s no great feat. I never ease into a role. Every part I play is just a variant of my own personality. I’m not really a character actor at all.”

In other words, Gambon’s characters in The Insider (’99) and Open Range (’03) — respectively Brown and Williamson CEO Thomas Sandefur and ornery Irish bully boy Denton Baxter — represented aspects of Gambon himself.

These, in any event, are my two favorite Gambon performances. He was a very fine stage actor, but you can have the Potter films and even The Singing Detective, which I found repellent (that awful skin condition) and never liked.

HE is heartened and gratified to read that legendary Russian helmer Andrey Zvagintsev (Loveless, Leviathan, Ellena) is finally back in the game.

Variety‘s Elsa Keslassy is reporting that he’ll begin directing Jupiter, a politically-tinged melodrama, sometime in the spring of ’24. Shooting will happen Spain and France. Zvyagintsev currently lives in Paris.

For roughly two years many of us weren’t sure if Zvaygintsev would even make another film, given his nearly fatal brush with Covid beginning in June 2021.

Wiki exceprt: “On June 25, 2021 Zvyagintsev received the Sputnik V COVID-19 vaccine. On the 3rd day after vaccination, he had a fever of 38-39 °C and was taken to the hospital. On July 8, he was admitted to intensive care. During his treatment in the hospital, he contracted sepsis as a result of contracting a nosocomial infection resistant to antibiotics.”

I know absolutely nothing, but I can’t help but wonder if Zvagintasev might have been deliberately virus-bombed by Putin-allied goons, considering the fact that Leviathian was directly and very sharply critical of the malevolent Russian leader. This is completely baseless speculation, but I wouldn’t be surprised if one day evidence comes to light, etc.

Sometime in July ’21, or 26 months ago, Zvagintzev succumbed to an extremely serious form of Covid, which resulted in his leaving a Russian hospital and being transferred to an intensive care ward in Germany. Why the transfer out of Russia? What do Russian hospitals lack in terms of treating lung infections that German hospitals are better at?

A report stated that Zvyagintsev’s lungs were 90% infected, or conditions to that effect.

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…for Al Pacino‘s big third-act crescendo speech in Scent of a Woman (’92), which won him a Best Actor Oscar. And especially for the author of that speech, the recently departed Bo Goldman.

Martin Brest‘s hefty-grossing, odd-couple, May-December relationship drama opened 30 and 3/4 years ago. It feels like yesterday.

I realize that during the ’90s Pacino’s acting style became more and more florid and bombastic, arguably reaching its apogee with another big crescendo speech in The Devil’s Advocate (’97). And I’m aware that soon after Scent‘s theatrical run “hoo-hah!” became as much of a Pacino signature as “you dirty rat!” was for James Cagney. I’m not 100% certain that Goldman didn’t write “hoo-hah!”, but I think it was a Pacino improv.

In late ’92 I wrote an L.A. Times piece about the somewhat controversial 156-minute length of Scent of a Woman. It was published on 1.3.93. The title was “LENGTH OF A ‘WOMAN’ — Minutes, Schminutes…Does It Play?”

Here’s most of the article:

The following comment-thread clash about Martin Scorsese and Killers of the Flower Moon appeared early this morning:

True Detective: Night Country: “As the endless winter darkness envelops Ennis, Alaska, it id discovered that eight guys who operated the Tsalal Arctic Research Station have vanished without a trace. To solve the case, Detectives Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) and Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis) will have to grapple with the gloom they carry in themselves and dig into the haunted truths that lie buried under the eternal ice,” blah blah.

Imagine if Martin Scorsese‘s Killers of the Flower Moon (Apple/Paramount, 10.20) had stuck to the original scheme by focusing on unambiguous, straight-ahead, white-guy FBI fortitude, and if the ads had used an image of Leonardo DiCaprio‘s Tom White, the guy who headed up the Osage Murders investigation back in the 1920s…

Imagine if the Flower Moon one-sheet had mimicked the ads for Mervyn Leroy‘s The FBI Story with Dicaprio wearing the hat and firing the pistol instead of James Stewart…

Better still, imagine if Scorsese and Apple marketers had decided to (ironically?) re-use Max Steiner‘s main-title music from The FBI Story.

You can laugh if you want, but a “heroic FBI!…hooray for Leo and his team!” approach to this story would, I suspect, connect better with Joe and Jane Popcorn than the melancholy Native American guilt trip that the movie actually is…an approach that has, by the way, no particular point of view. It just catalogues what happened.

I’m imagining this because the original conception of Killers would have starred DiCaprio as Tom White. When Scorcese and screenwriter Eric Roth decided their adaptation of David Grann‘s non-fiction book needed a woke rewrite, Dicaprio decided to play yokel bad guy Ernest Burkhart while Jesse Plemons was tapped to play White.

Posted on 9.12.23: In a 9.12 Time cover story by Stephanie Zacharek, Killers of the Flower Moon director Martin Scorsese has confirmed what costar Lily Gladstone told Variety‘s Zack Sharf nine months ago, which was that Flower Moon, a sprawling crime epic about the FBI’s investigation of the Osage Nation murders in 1920s Oklahoma, was given a woke rewrite — one that de-emphasized the FBI nailing the bad guys and emphasized the perspective of Osage Nation and the pain their community had endured.

“After a certain point, I realized I was making a movie about all the white guys,” Scorsese tells Zacharek. “Meaning I was taking the approach from the outside in, which concerned me.”

In a 1.20.23 article, Gladstone explained to Sharf, Variety‘s resident wokester lobbyist and spokesperson, that Scorsese had basically re-thought the 1920s saga, which had begun as a kind of “birth of the modern FBI” story.

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It is Louis CK‘s opinion that Stanley Kubrick‘s Eyes Wide Shut “doesn’t touch earth…it takes place in an incredibly high-up, thin-oxygen world…it’s not about anyone that anyone [in the audience] knows,,,the movie has this plodding tone and plodding pace, which is what [Kubrick] does here.,..if he was a comic book artist, people would say ‘this is how the guy draws.’ Kubrick was a masterful filmmaker, and [when I watch Eyes Wide Shut] I just say ‘this is where he was at, and what his fucked-up brain was making.'”

I remember writing two or three pieces in ’99 and ’00 about how Eyes Wide Shut was a fascinating stiff that essentially portrayed Kubrick’s decline. I remember bully-boy David Poland unloading ridicule in my direction because of this.

All to say that it gave me comfort to come upon a similar judgment in David Thomson‘s re-review of Kubrick’s final film, which is found on page 273 of Have You Seen…?.

Here’s the first paragraph and two sentences at the article’s end:

“This is the last film of Stanley Kubrick — indeed, he died so soon after delivery of his cut that the legend quickly grew that he intended doing more things to his movie. But it’s hard at the end not to see the substantial gulf between the man who knew ‘everything’ about filmmaking but not nearly enough about life or love or sex (somehow, over the years those subjects did get left out).

“Not that the film lacks intrigue or suggestiveness. Mastery can be felt. It is just that the master seems to have forgotten, or given up on figuring out, why mastery should be any more valuable than supremacy at chess or French polishing.”

The last two lines of Thomson’s review: “It is a shock to find that the film is only 159 minutes…every frame feels like a prison.”

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