Jeff Wells 
I’ve no intention of seeing Dune: Part Two no matter when it gets released. It had been slated to open on 11.17.63, and before that on 11.3.23, and prior to that on 10.20.23. It’s now scheduled to open on 3.15.24, or roughly seven months hence. Because of the SAG/AFTRA strike. Whatever.
Posted on 8.22.07: It’s too early to get into James Mangold‘s 3:10 to Yuma (Lionsgate, 9.7) which has a lot of good things going for it and will probably, I’m guessing, be widely liked. But if this film was an interactive video game with plastic pistols, I would have spent my whole time firing at Ben Foster‘s nutball bad guy. I wanted him dead — morte — as soon as he came on-screen. I almost mean Foster himself rather than the villain he plays.
Okay, that’s putting a bit harshly. Foster is “good” as Russell Crowe‘s loyal lieutenant — intense, commanding, colorful — but I hated his performance as much as his $850 Nudies-on-Lankershim leather jacket and all the Hollywood gunk he has caked all over his face at the end. I despised Foster’s performance even more than Joseph Gordon Levitt‘s in The Lookout, and that’s saying something.
Foster is totally actor-ish and post-modern diseased in this thing. He’s delivering one of those performances that say “look at me, Hollywood — I bring a charismatic evil-ness and a 21st Century loony-tunes intensity to my parts every time.” That is, unless he’s playing Angel in the X-Men movies or doing a quality TV thing in Six Feet Under, in which case he may be into something else. But that won’t happen for a while because Foster has become Hollywood’s go-to guy for parts Michael Madsen was playing ten years ago.
To deliver a classic lunatic performance you have to out-nutbag previous movie wackos, and one way to do this (ask the ghosts of John Ford or Budd Boetticher or Howard Hawks for advice) is to burn a guy alive inside a flaming stagecoach. And Foster manages this feat (the performance, not the burning) with just two expressions — his frozen-eyed Alpha Dog wacko look, and a slightly calmer version of same in which he seems to be thinking about turning wacko in about two or three minutes.
An awful lot of people get drilled in 3:10 to Yuma. I’ll bet more people die in this film than all the guys killed in all the dime western novels ever written by Elmore Leonard, Louis L’Amour and Zane Grey combined, and frankly I got a little tired of this after a while.
But I kept wishing that Mangold would kill Foster’s psycho. Kill him for those ice-blue eyes, for that hat he wears, for those buttons on the back of his leather coat. Mangold is good at killing other guys you want to see die, but he lets Foster skate and that’s too bad.
If I saw Foster on a Los Angeles street I would smile and shake hands and act like a gentleman, but I’d give him a covert dirty look when his back is turned.
The candidates who helped themselves the most during last night’s Republican debate were Nikki Haley (the most sensible and presidential sounding) and Vivek Ramaswamy. Tbe best of them, Chris Christie, didn’t do as well as he should have, but he said some good things. Haley came off the best.
Two or three times in my teens I ran away from home. Briefly, I mean. My friends and I wanted to see the world by way of hitchhiking adventures during spring vacation or summer holiday.
I never asked for my parents’ permission as it was understood they’d never approve. Everything was always “no, no, too dangerous, too late, too reckless, too rowdy,” etc. Not to mention “you need to buckle down and study harder or your life will be ruined.” My 16 year-old view was “how could my life be any worse?”
I would be grounded when I returned, of course, but at least my friends and I got to be Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady for a few days. Kings of the road.
Anyway it was this impulse that led to a brief episode when I sat in a rural South Carolina jail for a day and a half on suspicion of murder. In the mid ’60s.
A friend and I were hitching in some off-the-highway area west of Charleston. The cops, we later learned, were on the lookout for some guy with longish hair who had killed a middle-aged woman, or something like that. Beatle-length hair was a semi-exotic thing in the rural south back then. My hair was John Lennon-on-the-cover-of-Rubber Soul-styled, and that was all the local fuzz needed. They pulled over, asked where we were headed. One of the cops, adorned in a jacket and tie and a pair of reflector shades, smiled and said he needed to take us in and check our stories out. He called me “Ringo.”
We were booked on a vagrancy charge and put into a two-bunk cell. It was one of those mid-sized jails with eight cells, four on either side of a middle walkway. The lighting was on the darkish side.
There was a young African American dude in the cell across from ours, and he, too, was impressed by my Lennon hair. He was staring and grinning as his hands gripped the bars of his cell. The light was such that his white eyeballs and white teeth stood out as he smiled and sang “she loves you, yeah yeah yeah…she loves you, yeah yeah yeah.”
After 36 hours I somehow managed to get myself verified as non-dangerous and law-abiding without giving the cops my parents’ phone number. Maybe my friend’s father vouched for me. Or a cousin or someone. I forget.
There’s a new Rebecca Keegan THR article about Sofia Coppola‘s Priscilla (A24), and the support she got from Priscilla Presley, whose life with Elvis Presley from age 14 to 24 (barely pubescent girlfriend to wife-mother) is the subject of the film.
Repeating for emphasis, the article says that the Tinkerbell-sized (4’11”) Cailee Spaeny plays Priscilla “from age 14 to age 24.”
In other words Coppola’s film omits the last three years of Elvis and Priscilla’s strained and occasionally tempestuous relationship (they separated in February 1972 and divorced the following year), not to mention Presley’s untimely death in August ’77.
Priscilla wasn’t around at the time, of course, but c’mon…it’s about her long relationship with Presley and Coppola ignores his death, which happened only four years after their 1973 divorce?
To go by Keegan, the film’s 14-year saga happens between Priscilla’s first meeting with Elvis in 1959 at a party in Germany (she was born in May 1945) and sometime in mid 1969, or roughly two years after their Las Vegas wedding on 5.1.67. Exactly nine months later the now-deceased Lisa Marie Presley was born (2.1.68).
A few weeks or months later Priscilla “began taking private dance lessons” while the constantly-catting-around Elvis was filming Live a Little, Love a Little (released on 10.23.68), and she fell heavily for the instructor, identified only as “Mark” in Priscilla’s “Elvis and Me.” They did the nasty but not for long.
Priscilla had another, longer-lasting affair with Afro-haired karate instructor Mike Stone in ’72, but that, apparently, was after her separation from Elvis. There was apparently some back-and-forth, some push-pull variance of feeling. Presley forcefully had sex with Priscilla after he got wind of the Stone affair, or something like that. They did, however, divorce the following year. And yet they were seen holding hands after it was finalized.
The forceful-sex story seems to contradict reports that Elvis declined to have sex with Priscilla after Lisa Marie’s birth. (He apparently had some kind of bizarre hangup about mothers being used goods.) As many Presley biographers have reported, Elvis was totally into jailbait, or young teens starting around the age of 14.
All in all, Coppola’s film bypasses a lot of dramatic potential. It doesn’t even include their separation and divorce…c’mon.
Keegan’s story ends with this paragraoh: “[Last] May, Coppola screened the film for Priscilla. ‘When I saw the movie, I tried to separate myself and live it as if I was just a fan or just someone that’s wanting to see the movie,’ she says. ‘At the end, I actually…I was quite emotional. Only being 14. You look back and you go, ‘Why me? Why am I here? Why am I driving in a limo, going through the gates of Graceland with Elvis?’”
She meant that? Priscilla, 78, knew who Elvis was as well as his many biographers, and she was actually wondering why she was being driven through the gates of Graceland at age 14 or 15 or whenever it was?
It goes without saying that Keegan never mentions the bizarre 18-inch height disparity between Spaeny and Jacob Elordi, who plays Elvis in Coppola’s film.
The real-life Elvis and Priscilla were separated by eight inches of height — Elvis was 6’0″ and Priscilla was (and presumably still is) 5’4″. But in the film, the former Priscilla Beaulieu (later Presley) is played by the 59-inch-tall Spaeny (roughly the size of a ten-year-old) and Elvis is played by the 77-inch-tall Elordi.
Any film starring or costarring Paul Mescal gets an HE demerit. I really, really don’t like this guy, and I’ll repeat what I said yesterday, which is that if I were gay I wouldn’t “do” him on a bet. (Somebody replied that Mescal wouldn’t “do” me either…fine.) I’ve only seen Mescal in Aftersun and I’m already sick of him.
This aside, Garth Davis‘s Foe looks and feels like a bummer. Mescal’s character is “informed by a stranger that he’ll be sent to live on a large space station, and his wife (Saoirse Ronan) will be left in the company of someone else”?…eff that jazz. I know this film is going to put me into a very bad place. Saoirse Ronan clearly gives another first-rate performance…sorry.
Next Monday evening (8.28) all-media invitees in New York City and Los Angeles will revel in some good Denzel whupass. I for one would love to see those gangsta flash-mob store thieves receive a little Denzel discipline, but that’s me.
Wagner group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin is dead…down in a private plane…decimated, in shards and pieces, flame-roasted.
Of course Vladimir Putin was behind it…of course he was!
Russia is a mafia state, and this was a hit. Putin was planning to terminate the 62-year-old Prigozhin ever since the Wagner Group mutiny. He just took his time, is all.
Full disclosure: I know nothing, of course, but are you going to sit there and look me in the eye and tell me this was an accident?
Business Insider: “The CIA’s director predicted last month that Putin would seek revenge on Yevgeny Prigozhin after his failed coup.”
Al Jazeera: “Wagner group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin was among the dead when a private plane crashed in Moscow’s Tver region of Russia, killing all 10 people on board.”
BIG🚨 The plane of Wagner Group chief Prigozhin was shot down near Moscow, killing 10 people.
Russian Telegram channel claims Yevgeny Prigozhin and Dmitry Utkin are among the dead.#Russia #Ukraine #Putin #US pic.twitter.com/uhoPRHOBIB
— OSINT Updates (@OsintUpdates) August 23, 2023
Late last June Prigozhin led a brief mutiny against Russia’s top army command — an event President Vladimir Putin said could have tipped Russia into civil war.
Al Jazeera: “The mutiny was ended by negotiations and an apparent Kremlin deal which saw Prigozhin agree to relocate to neighbouring Belarus. But he had appeared to move freely inside Russia after the deal nonetheless.
“Grey Zone, a Telegram channel linked with Wagner, reported the air defences shot down the Embraer aircraft in the Tver region, north of Moscow, BBC reported.
“The jet, bound for St Petersburg from Moscow, had seven passengers and three crew on-board.”
If only my life’s journey had led me, in the parlance of Quentin Tarantino, toward “the gay way” and the absolute joy of having some Iceman dude “ride my tail.” Alas, I’m straight (along with 95% or 96% of the population**), and so I can only press my nose against the glass and wonder what this way of life…this way of being…might be like.
Vanity Fair exclusive: “All Of Us Strangers follows Adam (Andrew Scott), a 40-something writer living alone in a nearly deserted high-rise outside of London. His neighbor Harry (Paul Mescal) drunkenly flirts with him one night, a steamy, if messy, meet-cute that develops into a tender relationship.
“Between encounters with Harry, Adam finds himself drawn back to where he grew up. In that house left behind by the family long ago, he finds his parents (Claire Foy, Jamie Bell) getting on with life — [which is] odd as his parents died in a tragic accident when he was a child. He’s hardly thrown off by their presence or their youthfulness; he finds comfort in merely being able to see them again. To tell them he’s gay. To understand them as adults. To imagine their bond that never could be.
“’It’s an opportunity to revisit your parents long after they might have passed and to have a dialogue,’ says Oscar nominee Graham Broadbent (The Banshees of Inisherin), who, alongside producing partner Sarah Harvey, first brought Haigh the book to adapt. ‘What would you tell your parents about your life if you were an adult and they were no longer with us?'”
If I was gay I would never, ever hook up with Mescal — not my type, doesn’t do it, forget about it.
The AMPTP seems to be offering a half-decent deal. They’re gaslighters, of course, but they’re calling it “the highest wage increase for the WGA in 35 years.” Then again what do I know? Nothing.
In yesterday’s “Late To This…Brilliant” post, I responded to an exciting montage of scenes from several Martin Scorsese films, and more particularly to a clip from a black-and-white sex scene from Scorsese’s Who’s That Knocking At My Door?” (’68) — his first feature film.
It featured Harvey Keitel, of course. I wasn’t certain if costar Zina Bethune was part of it, but I thought she might be.
A guy I described as helpful (in this instance) friendo explained the basics:
“Yes, it’s Who’s That Knocking, and it’s NOT Zina Bethune, who was a nice girl who didn’t do nudity.
“The sex scene — a dream sequence — was shot in Amsterdam with Keitel and a series of European model/actresses.
“It was added because a would-be distributor in the United States agreed to pick up the movie but only if it had a nude scene that could give it grind house appeal.
“Scorsese was up to something in Paris at the time, got the funds from the would be distributor, had Keitel fly to Europe, tried to work the actor’s hair into an approximation of what it looked like when they shot the rest of the film, and concocted the sequence. For some reason Amsterdam was more viable than Paris at the time.
“Scorsese actually was so scared about running afoul of customs that he hid the reel like contraband when he left for the States.”
HE responds: Fascinating recap but I have questions. Scorsese presumably didn’t meet the Brooklyn-based distributor, Joseph Brenner (who was always looking to exploit sexual content in films, and whose company was either called Joseph Bremer Associates or Medford Film Distribution) in Paris. Why would he encounter Brenner way the hell over there?
Why Scorsese decided to fly Keitel to Amsterdam for the filming of the sexual dream sequence is a total mystery, but from our 2023 perspective it seems that if the pure-of-heart Zina Bethune (whose character obviously would and should have been a significant presence in the sexual fantasies of Keitel’s character)…if Bethune wasn’t such a conservative, no-nudity prude, the dream sequence could have been filmed in a lower Manhattan loft for a small fraction of the cost of the Amsterdam shoot. (No air fare or hotel bills, for one thing.)
Or should I say “skating on thin ice”? Or simply “in trouble”?
Anyway you slice it, Toronto Int’l Film Festival honchos have reason to feel extremely unsettled this evening. The reason is that Bell, a major TIFF sponsor since 1995, “is set to end its long-standing sponsorship of TIFF,” according to the Toronto Star‘s Robert Benzie.
Benzie excerpt: “In a blow to the Toronto International Film Festival, the telecommunications and media giant is moving on after this year’s event, sources say.”
I mean, the illuminated words “TIFF Bell Lightbox” is right on the side of the main screening facility, for Chrissake. Now the festival will have to redesign and re-mount new building logos that say just “TIFF Lightbox” without the Bell.
The following passage from Benzie’s story is probably key: “Sources say Bell, which earlier this month announced that second-quarter earnings plunged about 40 per cent from one year ago, is scrambling to find savings and sponsorships are low-hanging fruit.”
Do I hear the word “gulp”?
