At this stage I’m totally Candy Montgomery’ed out.
I tried to roll with the Love and Death teleplay, but as I mentioned last month after watching the trailer, the Jessie Plemons casting got in the way. When Elizabeth Olsen‘s Candy asks Plemons character, Allan Gore, if he’s interested in having an affair, something inside me recoiled and went “no effing way…no!”
Posted last month: “It would be one thing if the actress playing Candy was shlumpy or overweight or less than dynamically attractive. But Olsen, 34, is a double-A hottie and has been so for many years, so why in the real world would she want to have sex with a C-minus guy (at best) who looks like Jesse Plemons? Fleshy and ginger-haired, pale and puffy-faced, tiny pig eyes.”
When Olsen and Plemons, after much hemming and hawing, finally do the deed in a motel room, I couldn’t stand it. Guys like Plemons never score with double-dishies. It just goes against human nature.
That said, I want to offer serious respect to Plemons for recently dropping all that weight…seriously.
For decades I’ve been convinced that there are only two Sean Connery 007 films worth re-watching — Dr. No (’62) and From Russia With Love (’63), both directed by Terence Young. Because they’re the only two Connerys that aren’t undermined by high-tech gadgetry, silly stunts, Daffy Duck-level plotting and an attitude of smug financial arrogance on the part of the producers.
Guy Hamilton‘s Goldfinger (’64) was the film that demonstrated how the burgeoning Bond franchise had become drunk on its own fumes and begun to degenerate into foolery. The first two Bonds at least flirted with realism from time to time, but with Goldfinger the realism was more or less out the window.
For a reason I can’t quite fathom I popped in my Goldfinger Bluray last night and endured the damn thing. Okay, I watched it because it boasts a wonderfully clean and richly colored 1080p transfer. There’s no faulting the tech.
Goldfinger runs 110 minutes but feels a bit longer, mainly because it starts to descend into silliness starting with the Auric metal conversion plant sequence in Switzerland (which arrives around the 35-or 40-minute mark), and then it turns a truly ridiculous corner when the setting moves to Goldfinger’s horse farm in Lexington, Kentucky.
The instant wham-bam conversion of Honor Blackman‘s Pussy Galore from a flinty lesbian into a heterosexual James Bond ally is my favorite bit of absurdity, but compacting that black Lincoln Continental with a dead gangster in the back seat and a sizable load of gold bars in the trunk…none of it makes a lick of sense. Not to mention those Fort Knox Army troops pretending to succumb to knockout gas with absolute uniformity…arguably the dopiest display of substandard action choreography in the history of motion pictures.
What a surreal satire Goldfinger is…an unwitting lampoon of the old-school macho sexism that prevailed in late ’63 and early ’64. And yet the same basic foibles were tolerable in Dr. No and From Russia With Love.
Yes, okay — the first three sequences are approvable. Bond blowing up the drug laboratory in Latin America is pretty good, and I love that moment when Connery spots an oncoming assailant in a reflection in a woman’s eye. Screwing up Goldfinger’s crooked card game in Miami Beach while seducing Shirley Eaton‘s Jill Masterson, only to discover her dead, gold-painted body the next morning. And then the golf game with Goldfinger in a British country club, complete with a gold bar wager and some last-minute golf ball switching. But then it’s off to Switzerland and it all starts to fall apart.
A five-day-old Los Angelesarticle by Brian Stelter (“James Corden Bows Out,” posted on 4.24) reports that the departure of the Late Late Show host was primarily about sinking ratings and a total absence of profits. The show, in fact, was losing money hand over first.
It’s been “costing $60 million to $65 million a year to produce but was netting less than $45 million,” Stelter writes, and was “simply not sustainable,” according to one executive. “CBS could not afford him anymore.”
Steven Spielberg recently apologized for digitally altering E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial by replacing handguns with walkie-talkies, and everyone seemed to agree — it’s better to leave awkward 20th Century scenes alone and not try to cater to 21st Century sensibilities.
Hollywood Elsewhere agrees in the matter of E.T. but not in other cases. I’m referring to unwelcome dialogue in Goldfinger (’64), One Two Three (’61) and Rear Window (’54).
There’s a post-coital scene in Guy Hamilton‘s Goldfinger when Sean Connery explains to Jill Eaton about the proper temperature for drinking champagne. “My dear girl, there are some things that just aren’t done,” Connery says, “such as drinking Dom Perignon ’53 above the temperature of 38 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s as bad as listening to the Beatles without earmuffs.”
It’s amazing that the Beatles/earmuffs line made it into the script, which was written by Richard Maibaum and Paul Dehn. It makes James Bond sound like a stuffed shirt who doesn’t get it, and it’s almost astonishing to consider the fact that no one on the Goldfinger shoot said “wait, do we want 007 sounding like some crabby old guy who hates British rock music?”
The scene really does stop the film cold for a few seconds, and I wouldn’t have a problem if someone wanted to change Connery’s line to something less clueless.
There’s a moment in Billy Wilder‘s One Two Three when three MPs (led by Red Buttons) enter the Coca Cola bottling plant and explain to James Cagney that they’re looking for “some dame who has ‘Yankee Go Home’ tattooed on her chest.” (:50 to 1:07 — below)
There’s a great bit when Cagney does his neck-shrug thing and Buttons goes right into a Cagney imitation — “Oh, okay, buster!” But a few minutes later Buttons open up a locker and glances at a polka dot dress with two balloons with “Yankee go home” lettering. Buttons freaks out, slams the locker door and claims he saw a “naked” woman inside the locker except “one of [her breasts] was green, and the other was yellow….take me away!”
This isn’t just an atrocious joke that kills the mood of the film for 20 or 30 seconds — it may be the worst joke line that Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond ever wrote. For years I’ve been telling myself that the whole locker room scene needs to be cut out. I would have no argument with this…none whatsoever.
The third offender is a scene in Alfred Hitchcock‘s Rear Window. During one of Wendell Corey‘s visits to James Stewart‘s Greenwich Village apartment, the discussion turns to whether or not Raymond Burr‘s landlord may have been told about the departure of of Burr’s wife.
Corey hears Grace Kelly preparing food in the kitchen and notices that an open overnight bag with a folded negligee. Corey gives Stewart a teasing look and asks “do you tell your landlord everything?”
This is Hitchcock’s way of suggesting to 1954 audiences that it’s vaguely immoral for single apartment dwellers have sex with each other. That may not have sounded like a ridiculous notion to Ma and Pa Bumblefuck back in ’54, but most audiences were surely okay with sex outside the bonds of wedlock, and certainly between sophisticated New Yorkers like Stewart and Kelly.
In any event I always wince when Corey says that stupid line, and I wouldn’t have the slightest difficulty with the line being eliminated for good.
HE haters can take shots at Elon Musk and repeat their woke-denying bullshit, but please tell me how it’s a good, approvable thing for a typical high-school student to be asked what he/she knows about George Washington, and the first thing out of his/her mouth is “he was a slave owner.” That’s the woke mind virus in a nutshell.
If I were Jack I wouldn’t stop there. I would concurrently (a) drop 30 or 40 pounds on a Zen diet, (b) get a Hollywood Elsewhere micro-hair-plug Prague special, and (c) color my my hair so it’s dark gray, not borderline white. But that’s me.
Those perfectly tinted eyeglasses — half amber, half sunset red — are magnificent.
Jack Nicholson is back courtside at a Lakers playoff game for the first time in a long time. pic.twitter.com/MFIvMz4XxZ
I used to do Elmer Fudd for my friends when I was eight or nine. I was renowned for this. You could call the current version “Old Fudd between oxygen tank inhalations”, but this is what I sounded like as a kid.
There’s a moment in Martin Scorsese‘s After Hours (’85) when Griffin Dunne‘s miserable lost soul eyeballs a graffiti drawing of a guy’s schlong getting chomped on by a shark.
That’s the one transcendent, pure-light moment in this dark, hard-to-swallow situation “comedy” about how a thirtysomething Manhattan male gets swallowed up by a predatory vortex of Soho hostility.
But After Hours isn’t really about the vortex as much as Dunne’s feelings of panic, helplessness and self-loathing. Why does this guy refuse to man up and figure his way out of a difficult but far-from-insurmountable situation? And why have we paid to watch a film about this wormy?
All the hipsters and know-it-alls swear by After Hours, but it’s not very good..it really isn’t.
In the same sense that Parasite slit its own throat when the drunken con artist mom allowed the fired maid into the home of the rich family, After Hours never even tries to sell the idea that Dunne would visit Soho to see about trying to fuck Roseanna Arquette with a lousy $20 in his pocket (just under $60 in 2023 dollars), or that the $20 would somehow fly out of the taxicab window, or that Dunne believed he was actually stuck and stranded in Soho when all he had to do was hop the turnstile and catch a subway back home.
If he was too chicken to hop the turnstile all he had to do was scrape together 90 cents, which is what a subway ride cost at the time. 90 cents!
Criterion will release a 4K and 1080p Bluray combo of After Hours on 7.11.23. Why would anyone want to pay $40 for this?
When was the last time Chris Nolan had no choice but to explore or otherwise settle into a reality realm — a realm defined by the same terms that all sane earthlings are more or less obliged to live by? The answer, of course, is 2017’s Dunkirk. But before that, Nolan’s last RR flick (i.e., no exceptional visual augmentation) was Insomnia, which is nearly 20 years old. (It opened at the Tribeca Film Festival on 5.3.22, and commercially on 5.24.02.)
If you ignore Dunkirk, Nolan World was defined by indulgent, highly imaginative flights of visual fancy for 15 years — Batman Begins, The Prestige (HE’s 2nd least favorite Nolan film), The Dark Knight, Inception, The Dark Knight Rises, Interstellar (HE’s all-time unfavorite…most infuriating sound mix in motion picture history) and Tenet.
Memento (’00) is Nolan’s most satisfying reality-based film, hands down.
But surely he understands that reactions to the Bud Light and Maybelline promotions demonstrate that he’s triggered fierce emotion in the hinterlands. He can’t dismiss that entirely. DM is living on an isolated island, and residents of the territory surrounding that island have spoken. They can’t all be idiots.
Mulvaney is obviously free to promote whatever as long as corporate America sees an upside. More power, no skin off my backside, etc.
My understanding is that DM is biologically male and hasn’t resorted to surgical alteration…right? I further understand that Dylan regards anyone who may allude to his biological origins and/or ignores his preferred pronouns as a bad or even criminal person. But he has to understand, surely, that pretending to be a woman is different than having actually been born as a biological woman or, failing that, having been surgically altered into womanhood.
This message from Dylan Mulvaney…I cannot even imagine being in her shoes. She's received a level of venom that is beyond belief. But she shows so much more grace in this 3.5 minutes than all of her detractors combined. pic.twitter.com/UiajP0AR29
