Obviously Peter Weir‘s direction, Earl W. Wallace and William Kelley‘s screenplay and John Seale‘s cinematography, coupled with Lucas Haas and Harrison Ford‘s performances. But the most active ingredient is Maurice Jarre‘s score. That’s what really siezes and brings you in.
Jarre, who passed in 2009 at age 84, was unquestionably pantheon-level. I know that Doctor Zhivago is generally regarded as sappy and that we’re not allowed to praise it too strongly, but Jarre’s music for David lean’s 1965 film melts me down every time I hear. Not to mention his scores for Lawrence of Arabia, The Train (’64), Grand Prix (’66), The Man Who Would Be King (1975), The Year of Living Dangerously (’82 w/ Vangelis), Witness (’85), The Mosquito Coast (’86), Fatal Attraction (’87), Gorillas in the Mist (’88), Dead Poets Society (’89), and Ghost (’90)
A day or two ago I read about about Ashley Morgan Smithling recanting her allegation of sexual abuse against Marilyn Manson, which appeared nine months ago in People magazine (5.5.21). But I was afraid to re-post and discuss for fear of the #MeToo brigade using it to say I’m defending Marilyn Manson. You know how they are. It seemed safer to bypass it. Yes, I am capable of cowardice.
Friendo: “Yeah, I think it’s the Armie Hammer thing…kind of a domino effect. No one wants to be exposed like that so they get ahead of the story. It’s the right thing to do to tell the truth. I never bought her story, and I can’t stand MM.”
Boilerpate: Marilyn Manson accuser Ashley Morgan Smithline has recanted her sexual abuse allegations against the musician. As in “oops, never mind.”
In a 2.19.23 Los Angeles Superior Court filing, Smithline has stated she was “manipulated” by actress and ex-Manson fiancée Evan Rachel Wood and others to accuse Manson of sexual and physical abuse. “I succumbed to pressure from Evan Rachel Wood and her associates to make accusations of rape and assault against [Manson] that were not true,” the statement says.
Smithline stated that she had a “brief, consensual sexual relationship with Brian Warner,” aka Marilyn Manson, in November 2010.
Scott Adams, the Dilbert guy, asked for the grief he’s in. He said some blunt stuff that might be true in some respects (i.e., deep down there’s probably not a great amount of love for white people among a good portion of black people, and who could blame them?) but it was crazy unwise to say this stuff on social media.
Friendo: “Yeah, agreed. Like the severe anti-trans stuff, all it does is feed the beast. It vindicates the crazies. Like suddenly they found a real witch in Salem.
“The only part I agree with is that no matter what you do the woke crazies call you a racist, because they believe every white person IS racist. You’re either flat-out racist or unconsciously racist, but either way you’re pretty bad.”
Hollywood Elsewhere will be submitting to Elizabeth Banks‘ Cocaine Bear sometime around 5:25 pm eastern. Call it 5:30. I’ll post some kind of half-assed, lean-and-mean, “don’t fuck with me” reaction by 8 pm…okay, no later than 9. Meanwhile the early birds are saying it’s not awful, “reasonably silly”, “gonzo goofy,” etc.
HE readers know that Martin Scorsese‘s Killers of the Flower Moon will almost certainly have its big debut at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. So what follows is mostly water under the bridge.
I know that I popped in for a little taste on 7.26 (i.e., seven months ago) after Mike Fleming and Justin Krollreported that Flower Moon would be skipping a late ’22 release in favor of “a possible ‘global showcase premiere’ at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival.”
On Jan. 12 World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimyreported that “two sources” had told him Flower Moon would play Cannes.
I was told privately on February 1st that this would indeed happen.
The last columnist to report same was Showbiz 411‘s Roger Friedman, on Monday, 2.20.
And now (Thursday, 2.23) Variety‘s Elsa Keslassy and Justin Kroll have posted a Cannes caboose story, timidly reporting that Killer Moon is “eyeing” a Cannes debut. Their story qualifies three times that the Cannes booking isn’t 100% firmed, but it is, I’ve been told. Plane fares and hotels are booked — done deal. Probably in an out-of-competition slot.
Nearly three months ago bbc.com’s Nicholas Barberexplained why Top Gun: Maverick is the only film that deservers to win the Best Picture Oscar….okay, he didn’t say that but he might as well have.
Barber also made it clear that anyone who votes instead for Everything Everywhere All At Once is a cinematic philistine and a sworn enemy of the Movie Godz ethos…okay, he didn’t say that but he might as well have.
Barber: “Top Gun: Maverick was a romantic-comedy-drama-action-thriller – which is another way of saying that it was simply a Hollywood movie that everyone could enjoy. To people who had stayed away from cinemas since before the pandemic, TG:M felt like a warm welcome home.
“Still, it was a bittersweet feeling — as if we were being welcomed home, but we had to leave again soon. Even while we were cheering, laughing and crying at the film, we were aware, on some level, that it was a one-off. Top Gun: Maverick won’t set any trends because it isn’t part of a trend. It’s unique, the last of its kind — just as its hero was the last of his. It marked the end of an era. But as long as the film was on the screen, we could tell ourselves that it hadn’t ended yet.
“The screenwriters put it best. ‘The future is coming, and you’re not in it,’ says Ed Harris says to Tom Cruise. ‘Your kind is heading for extinction.’
Will you listen to this freshman kid’s voice? Remind you of anyone? Ben Shapiro‘s perhaps? The reedy-voiced kid says that he wrote “ALL LIVES MATTER” on a blackboard and was soon after told by school supervisors that this sentiment is politically problematic (i.e., racist). This is why we need Seth Rogen to school this little prick.
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.
