Anthony Bourdain: “Eat at a local restaurant tonight. Get the cream sauce. Have a cold pint at 4 o’clock in a mostly empty bar. Go somewhere you’ve never been. Listen to someone you think may have nothing in common with you. Order the steak rare. Eat an oyster. Have a negroni. Have two. Be open to a world where you may not understand or agree with the person next to you, but have a drink with them anyways. Eat slowly. Tip your server. Check in on your friends. Check in on yourself. Enjoy the ride.
“Actually, hold on. I feel like shit. Life itself is shit. My soul is drowning in it. My crazy girlfriend and I have no rules, but she’s making a show of fucking some guy in Rome right now, essentially throwing it in my face, and I feel really stunned and bruised and turned around. You know what? Fuck it — I’m going to hang myself in the bathroom.”
This Lady Gaga incident “happened” four or five days ago during filming of Todd Phillips‘ Joker: Folie a Deux (Warner Bros., 10.4.24). Some kind of uptight conservative Christian woman carrying a Folie a Deux prop (a tabloid newspaper) shouted “you’re going to hell!” (You can barely hear her.) LG stopped, turned around, put her hands around the woman’s face, gave her a big kiss and said “you’re going with me!”
It was all scripted, of course, but during my first viewing of a captioned version I thought for a brief moment the confrontation had happened for real, and under that impression I was momentarily filled with huge admiration for Lady Gaga, the person. If it had just happened, it would’ve been the kind of thing that only the young Pablo Picasso or Salvador Dali might’ve performed.
But of course, it was all written by Phillips and Scott Silver.
Hal Holbrook‘s “Deep Throat” in All The President’s Men: “The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.”
Sight unseen, HE is pretty much down with the dry comedic slant of White House Plumbers (HBO Max, 5.1). The absurdist deadpan tone feels like it might be…well, perhaps not quite Dr. Strangelove-ian but in that general ballpark.
Created and written by Alex Gregory and Peter Huyck; directed by David Mandell (exec producer and showrunner of Veep, exec producer and director of Curb Your Enthusiasm and Seinfeld).
It’s not the end of the world and the sun will come up tomorrow morning, but HE was rooting for Gwyneth Paltrow to lose the Deer Valley ski trial. That hasn’t happened. A Utah jury has bought her side of the story and that’s that. Time to move on.
I’ve just re-watched Steven Soderbergh‘s Kafka (’91), a half-spooky, half-gloomy noir that looks and feels like early 1920s German expressionism. It’s mostly and appropriately shot in black-and-white, but it’s such a downer to sit through that it almost feels euphoric when the film suddenly shifts into color during the last 15 minutes or so.
Written by Lem Dobbs and handsomely shot by Walt Lloyd, the Prague-set period flick (1919) fictionalizes the adventures of the fearful and paranoid Franz Kafka (Jeremy Irons) as he attempts to uncover the dark plottings of a creepy cabal of ne’er-do-wells who operate out of “the castle” that overlooks the city.
Kafka didn’t go down too well when it opened 31 years ago, and I can’t say it works any better today.
Irons overdoes the anxious, often terrified, bug-eyed thing. After a while you’re saying “Jesus, will you stop twitching and glaring and play it cool for a change?…channel some Lee Marvin and at least pretend to be a man.”
Okay, it’s not that bad. I was bored, yes, but I didn’t hate sitting through it. It’s just that my heart rate went down.
It’s a serious shame that an HD version isn’t streamable. The 480P version that I watched today looks awful…so soft and bleary at times that it almost seems out of focus.
Sometime in ’21 Soderbergh created a new version of Kafka, titled Mr. Kneff. Re-cut, re-imagined and dialogue-free with subtitles. It screened at the Toronto Film Festival that year, and was supposed to be released as part of a Soderbergh box set sometime in late ’21 or maybe sometime in ’22. It never happened, but I’m told the box set will show its face sometime…aahh, who knows? But maybe later this year.
The climactic final act of Kafka abandons black-and-white for color (which my eyes rather enjoyed) and becomes a kind of Indiana Jones film. Briefly.
Irons enjoyed a great big-screen run of A-quality films between the early ’80s and mid ’90s — roughly 12 or 13 years. The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Moonlighting, Betrayal, Swann in Love, Dead Ringers, Reversal of Fortune, Kafka, Damage, M. Butterfly, The House of the Spirits. In ’84 I saw Irons opposite Glenn Close in the first Broadway version of The Real Thing. He was the absolute king of the world back then.
I’ve enjoyed re-reading my second-hand (i.e., possibly inaccurate to some extent) story about Irons and temporary Kafka costar Anne Parillaud. The piece was initially initially posted in 2009.
Jacob Fisher of Discussingfilm.net is reporting that Clint Eastwood is closing in on directing a thriller called Juror #2 for Warner Bros.
The plot “follows a juror on a murder trial who realizes he may have caused the victim’s death and must grapple with the dilemma of whether to manipulate the jury to save himself, or reveal the truth and turn himself in,” according to Fisher.
There have been many great opening scenes over the last century or so, but if you’re asking which is the greatest opening shot, I would have to go with two films released in ’79 — Woody Allen‘s Manhattan and Francis Coppola‘s Apocalypse Now.
One of the greatest opening sequences is the Union Station opening of Strangers on a Train (‘51), as the camera follows two men whose faces are unseen and whose shoes are their primary identifying trait…arriving by taxi, strolling into the station, etc.
Within the last several hours McNally announced on Instagram that he had “wheedled” his way into am early-bird screening of Woody’s Coup de Chance, which many of us are hoping will show up in Cannes in mid May.
McNally #1: “It’s fucking great!…Allen’s best film since Midnight In Paris.”
McNally #2: “Coup de Chance is a contemporary film about romance, passion, jealousy, infidelity and murder. It stars terrific French actors and actresses, and is sensationally shot by maestro cinematographer Vittorio Storaro.
McNally #3: The film most critics will probably compare Coup de Chance to is Match Point, but the film it most reminds me of is Louis Malle‘s 1958 masterpiece, Elevator To The Gallows. The music especially. It’s a truly wonderful film.”
HE to McNally: A film reminiscent of Elevator to the Gallows suggests a plot that pivots on dark irony and passion-driven perps caught in the cruel grip of karma. In Match Point a lucky guy got away with murder — perhaps not this time.
(Thanks to World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy for the tip-off.)
Of all the familiar or brand-name actors in Wes Anderson‘s Asteroid City, two are featured more prominently than the rest — Jason Schwartzman, 42, as a bearded, somber, man-of-few-words type, and Jake Ryan, a dorky-looking actor in his early 20s with a bee-stung nose**.
I haven’t counted and categorized all the shots in the trailer, but it’s possible that Ryan has more lines than Schwartzman. He certainly has as many closeups, if not more. This is my primary observation.
Otherwise Asteroid City appears to be another visit to Andersonville with a few splashes of alien salad dressing. I’m getting a little bit of a Moonrise Kingdom vibe from the adult-ensemble-mixed-with-precocious-kids. I love the mid ’50s station-wagon woodie (driven by Rupert Friend) with “French Press” stenciled on the driver door. A whole lot of people on the film’s IMDB page are credited with visual effects and creating models and miniatures.
Here’s hoping that Woody Allen‘s Coup de Chance (i.e., Stroke of Luck) will debut at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival.
Early this month Jordan Ruimyquoted a buyer who saw Allen’s 50th film at Berlin’s EFM market, and called it “his best film in years.” Allen has described it as a spiritual kin of Match Point — a chilly romantic thriller “charting the story of two young people whose bond leads to marital infidelity and ultimately crime.”
Ruimy had also learned from a person who worked on the film that Coup de Chance has been submitted to Cannes with hopes of screening there in a few weeks time. Presuming this is true, it would be exceedingly strange for Allen’s first French-language film, which is set in Paris and costars many prominent younger French actors, to not debut on the Cote d’Azur.
We know, of course, that among many of the usual Cannes-attending critics there are a fair number of Allen-hating fanatics who are determined to pan it, no matter how good it might be or how much it resembles Match Point or whatever. Simply because they’re committed to his destruction because of the highly questionable Dylan Farrow thing.
Imagine being one of these maniacs. Imagine admitting to yourself in your darkest, most deep-down place, “No matter how this film measures up against Allen’s best films and even if it’s half-good or above average by this standard, I am going to give it a shitty grade…regardless of merit I will do what I can to take this film down.”
Imagine what it must be like to look at yourself in the bathroom mirror under these circumstances.
