In Matt Ruskin‘s Boston Strangler (Hulu, 3.17), Boston Record-American reporters Loretta McLaughlin (Keira Knightley) and Jean Cole (Carrie Coon) combat sexism and corruption among fellow Boston journalists and within the police ranks in order to investigate a serial killer who later became known as the Boston Strangler. Mclaughlin and Cole have to fight tooth and nail, but their diligence gradually prevails.
In Ali Abbasi‘s Holy Spider, journalist Arezoo Rahimi (Zar Amir Ebrahimi) arrives in the Iranian Holy City of Mashhad to investigate several murders of local street prostitutes. She uncovers evidence that suggests a serial killer, but her hunches are not taken seriously by male journalists and policemen. Cultural misiogyny blocks or restrains at every turn, but by posing as a prostitute and placing herself in danger Rahimi manages to identify and incriminate the killer, Saeed Hanaei (Mehdi Bajestani). Soon after police arrest him.
My honest opinion of Jack Lemmon (1925-2001) is that he was always an engaging actor and sometimes an extraordinary one, but his performances began to feel overly neurotic and mannered when he hit his late 30s, or roughly from ’64 onward. His best period began with Mr. Roberts (’55) and ended with The Fortune Cookie (’66) — an eleven-year stretch. His peak years amounted to only four — Operation Mad Ball (’57) to Some Like It Hot (’59) and The Apartment (’60).
Posted on 9.8.19: “Lemmon was the hottest guy in Hollywood after starring in the one-two punch of Some Like It Hot (’59) and The Apartment (’60), both directed and co-written by Billy Wilder. Because the latter mixed ascerbic humor and frankly sexual situations, Lemmon was offered almost nothing but frothy sex comedies for five years following The Apartment.
The only decent film he made during this period was Blake Edwards‘ Days of Wine and Roses (’62).
“The sex comedies were The Wackiest Ship in the Army (’60), The Notorious Landlady (’62), Irma la Douce (’63, minor Wilder), Under the Yum Yum Tree (’63), Good Neighbor Sam (’64) and How To Murder Your Wife (’65). He also costarred that year in The Great Race, a period costume comedy about arch humor, empty artifice and scenic splendor.
“Lemmon finally broke out of that shallow, synthetic cycle with Wilder’s The Fortune Cookie (’66). Not grade-A Wilder but certainly half-decent, and a great boost for Walter Matthau. And then Luv, The Odd Couple, The April Fools, The Out-of-Towners, Kotch, Avanti! and Save the Tiger. And then he hit another wall with Wilder’s The Front Page.
“The Lemmonisms are all over Save The Tiger (’72), but five or six scenes in that film are true and on-target, and that ain’t hay. His performance in The China Syndrome also made me snap to attention. Ditto Ed Horman in Missing.”
I relate to the Lemmon profile in David Thomson‘s “The New Biographical Dictionary of Film” (2002 edition), page 513:
“I have to confess that sometimes one squeeze of Lemmon is enough to set my teeth on edge. There’s no doubt that, as a younger actor, Lemmon could be very funny. He is very skilled, meticulous and yet — it seems to me — an abject, ingratiating parody of himself.
“Long ago worry set in. The detail of his work turned fussy, nagging and anal. His mannerisms are now like a miser’s coins. There have been a few films — like James Foley‘s Glengarry Glen Ross (’92) — that used this demented worryguts as necessary material. And Lemmon is very good in that film. But far too often, he stops his own roles and starts preaching anxiety, leading everything away from life and into the jitters.”
Last night some neo-Nazi hooligans protested the first preview performance of Jason Robert Brown and Alfred Uhry‘s Parade, a 1998 historical musical that’s being revived at the Bernard B. Jacobs theatre (242 West 45th Street).
It dramatizes the trial, imprisonment and lynching of Leo Frank, a Jewish factory superintendent who was falsely convicted of the murder of a 13-year-old employee, Mary Phagan, in 1913 Atlanta. After his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in 1915, Frank was seized by an anti-Semitic mob and hanged from a tree in Marietta, Georgia — Phegan’s home town.
Ben Platt (Dear Evan Hansen) plays Frank in the stage revival. Last night he posted a statement about the anti-Semitic protest.
I don’t have much interest in catching Parade, but this morning I was recalling my one and only viewing of Mervyn LeRoy‘s They Won’t Forget, a 1937 drama based on the same tragedy.
Pic was based on Ward Greene‘s “Death in the Deep South,” a fictionalized account of the Frank case. It starred Claude Rains, Gloria Dickson, Edward Norris and — in her feature debut — Lana Turner.
For decades LeRoy successfully functioned as a smooth and dependable house director of big-studio features — The Wizard Of Oz (partially — Victor Fleming received credit), Thirty seconds Over Tokyo, Little Women, Any Number Can Play, Quo Vadis?, Million Dollar Mwemaid, Mister Roberts, No Time for Sergeants, The FBI Story, The Devil at 4 O’Clock, A Majority of One, Gypsy. But he made his best films in the early to mid ’30s — Little Ceasar, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang and They Won’t Forget.
Consider how LeRoy concluded Forget‘s lynching scene — not with a literal depiction but a snagging of a mail sack as a train speeds by. That’s John Ford-level expressionism.
Last Sunday (2.19) Variety‘s Clayton Davis was entertaining a notion that the DGA bounce for Everything Everywhere All At Once had immediately stalled following BAFTA having more or less blown it off by giving most of their organizational love to All Quiet on the Western Front. The Best Picture situation, he felt, was suddenly “up in the air.”
World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy was immediately skeptical. He’s as much of an EEAAO hater as myself, but is also striving for a little straight-from-the-shoulder.
“I don’t think the BAFTA [aftermath] changes much in the Oscar race. It’s still EEAAO’s Oscar to lose. Yes, the UK voting bloc is fairly pronounced within the Academy, but I don’t believe we should take last night’s EEAAO snubbing as total gospel.
“The [unfortunate] fact of the matter is that the Academy has decided to be heavily influenced by Film Twitter this year, and thereby get sucked into the EEAAO bandwagon.
“This is still a three-film [dynamic] between EEAAO, The Banshees of Inisherin and Top Gun: Maverick. But what we need right now is love sweet love….that’s the only thing that there’s just too little of”…kidding!
Actual Ruimy statement: “What we need right now is for Everything Everywhere to lose at the Producers Guild of America” — the Daryl F. Zanuck award (the org’s equivalent of a Best Picture trophy) at the PGA awards, which will happen on Saturday, 2.25.
I know God doesn’t hate me personally. I know He doesn’t give a damn one way or the other, and certainly doesn’t believe in placing any thumbs on the scale. But I am nonetheless on my knees and begging Him/Her/It to somehow step in and prevent this horrific scenario from happening.
Posted six or seven years ago: “I began my life feeling very angry at God for giving me such a miserable life in suburban New Jersey, and especially for giving me such strict, hard-nosed parents, particularly a mother who made me go to church every fecking Sunday. Then in my teens I went through a period of mocking and taunting Him. Then I reversed gears in my early 20s, embracing and worshipping Krishna as a result of my mystical LSD trips. Then I came to an existential understanding that God is, depending on how lucky or unlucky you are in terms of parental or tribal lineage and birth location, at best impartial about whether you’re living a happy or miserable life.
Then again God does give you the freedom to become whomever, depending upon your hustling abilities. If you want happiness and you’re not living under a horrible dictatorship, orchestrate your own version of it without making things worse for others.
HE / Ahab: “What nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it…what cruel, remorseless emperor commands me against all natural lovings and longings that I keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time, recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I would not so much as dare? Is Wells, Wells? Is it I, God, or who that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of itself but is as an errand boy in heaven, nor one single star can revolve but by some invisible power, how then can this one small heart beat, this one small brain think thoughts unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I?”
God doesn’t care at all. He’ll shine bright sun, love you, nourish your land with rain and rich minerals, make you rich or poor, drown you, plague you, abuse you, Holocaust you, rape your cities, cut off your heads…anything that any earth-residing monster dreams up and wants to do, God will go along.
In the view of the Critical Drinker, Ant Man and the Wasp: Quantumania “sums up everything the MCU has become…a plot so entirely predictable and generic that it feels as if it was written by an overworked AI, basically consisting of a series of tired and played-out tropes that have been done a million times before…visuals that are so obnoxiously overdone you can barely process what you’re seeing…
“Ant Man 3 is everything that most of us have come to despise about Marvel at this point…two hours of trite, bland, corporatized, predictable, pointless, soul-destroying nothingness…what a pile of absolute shite.”
If Sonny Bono hadn’t slammed into a tree while skiiing in the Lake Tahoe region on 1.5.98 and if he’d otherwise kept himself in good health, he would have celebrated his 88th birthday five days ago (2.16.23).
Bono was 64 at the time of his death. I’m sorry he suffered through that. But he lived an interesting life with an unusual arc — at first a hippie-ish songwriter, singer and performer in the ’60s and ’70s, and then a “protect the small businessman” Republican in the ’80s and ’90s.
An early ’80s memory: I was driving west along the hilly-curvy section of Sunset Blvd. (near Hugh Hefner’s Playboy mansion) when I noticed Bono in his car, waiting to slip into the eastbound lane.
Two or three years later I ordered a drink at Bono, his Italian joint on Melrose near La Cienega. My immediate impression was that there were too many tables scrunched together.
I’m mentioning Bono because until this morning I somehow hadn’t read that he and Roddy Jackson co-authored “She Said ‘Yeah!’“, a fast and catchy RollingStones song from ‘64 or ‘65. The song is basically a horndog thing — a lust-struck guy wants to have it off with a hot girl, and to his infinite delight she’s down for it… “yeah!”**
I’d also never read that Bono co-authored “Needles and Pins,” a 1962 song that took off when a version by The Searchers charted in ’64. Bono co-penned the song with Jack Nitzsche and Jackie DeShannon, who recorded a version in ’63. The song is more commonly known as “Needles and Pinzah.”
HE to friendo: “When did Kate Winslet become silver-haired? And with close-cropped silver hair at that? Would it be insensitive if I mentioned that she might not be slender enough to wear white?”
I think I watched Richard Belzer‘s performance as Detective John Munch in Homicide: Life on the Street (’93 to ’99) and the Manhattan-based Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (’99 to ’13), but for some reason I can’t recall any takeaways. What this probably means, in all fairness, is that I didn’t find Munch an especially rich or compelling character. Amusing, yes, but in a sidelight fashion. Mainly he struck me as compulsive.
Mine is a minority view, I realize. N.Y. Times/Jason Zinoman: “As Detective Munch, Mr. Belzer was brainy but hard-boiled, cynical but sensitive. He wore sunglasses at night and listened to the horror stories of rape victims in stony silence. He was the kind of cop who made casual references to Friedrich Nietzsche and the novelist Elmore Leonard. He spoke in quips; when accused of being a dirty old man, he responded: ‘Who are you calling old?’
I recognize that Belzer, who passed yesterday (Sunday, 2.19) at his home in Beaulieu-sur-Mer, France, was a funny, witty, ascerbic guy who was highly skilled at stand-up comedy. I loved his comedy-club patter in Mad Dog and Glory (’93) when he introduced Bill Murray‘s character — “Ladies and gentlemen, from Highland Park, the land of velour seat covers and razor-cut hair, the comedy stylings of Frank Milo…dig it.” (He also played the emcee at the fabled Babylon Club in Brian De Palma‘s Scarface.)
For years I had an idea that Belzer owned a home on Huntley Drive in West Hollywood, a couple of blocks from my place and just down the slope from Santa Monica Blvd. I tried verifying this a few hours ago from the usual online sources, but it wasn’t there. This impression is therefore probably wrong. But there’s a pocket in my memory that insists otherwise.
HE’s latest Substack discussion (i.e., Jeff and Sasha) mostly focuses on the glorious, EEAAO-snubbing (except in the matter of editing) BAFTA Awards. We also got into some standard Oscar race pulse-taking. Again, the link.
