Jeff Wells The most emotionally moving moment in Steven Spielberg‘s The Fabelmans comes when we hear the opening passage from Max Steiner‘s score for John Ford‘s The Searchers. It’s a payoff like no other. I beamed and went “aahh, yes…this hits home, feels right.”
HE acknowledges that Everything Everywhere All At Once may end up with a token Best Picture nomination to placate Zellennials, but the less said about that unpleasant possibility the better. With the unseen Babylon and Avatar: The Way of Water in a limbo position, the best films of the year are as follows…these are the 2022 motion pictures that have earned the serious points except for Water and Babylon, which are likely to score highly before long:
1. The Fabelmans
2. TÁR
3. Top Gun: Maverick
4. Avatar: The Way of Water
5. Babylon
6. Empire of Light
7. She Said
8. Armageddon Time
9. Bardo
10. Close
The early to late ’70s saw the flowering of a revolutionary sexual awakening all over…in showbiz circles, in elite professions, in the major urban areas, in upper middle-class neighborhoods. Hell, everywhere.
And especially for rich, powerful, good-looking actors on the prowl. For them every day was a combination of Plato’s Retreat and I, Claudius. It was madness back then.
Even Average Joes tasted the nectar. From a certain perspective they were lucky to be living and frolicking in one of the most breathtaking nookie eras since the days of Ancient Rome.
In our Salem Witch Trial climate there’s nothing to be gained and everything to be lost by being candid about this. I certainly can’t go there but…
The context of the ‘70s was so dramatically different than the climate of today. We’re living in the midst of #MeToo Puritanism — a very conservative and punitive social movement.
That aside, any adult actor who may or may not have had his way with an under-age teenager…such behavior was selfish and cruel. That was then, but this is now. And criminally is criminality. You don’t mess with jailbait.
So many people today have no understanding of how many people in Hollywood and the pop music world diddled around with jailbait back in the day. They think it was just Warren Beatty and Led Zeppelin. Celebrities, or at least many of them, have little sense of morality when it comes to showing restraint or putting the brakes on. They lead wild lives. But no one seems to understand this. The tabloids present banal addiction and divorce dramas as The Truth. They don’t report on most of what actually goes on.
I’m truly dreading seeing Wakanda Forever later today. It’s going to be awful — I know it. I’m going to suffer and ache and whimper. They’re going to pull my tooth out without an anasthetic…..aaauuuggghhh!
“If Black Panther was Wonder Woman, Wakanda Forever is Wonder Woman 1984. It’s that level of shittiness, and that much of a dive in quality. It’s just like…it succumnbs to pretty much every negative aspect of the MCU. It’s overblown, it’s over-stuffed with ridiculous CG…none of it has any weight or meaning, the villain is forgettable, crappy…his origin story makes no sense and [in fact] none of the characters’ motivations make any sense in this movie…and because it’s Marvel Stage Four, it’s the girl power show naturally,…pretty much the entire cast is female.”
…or work for the first third or first half, but don’t work as an overall story — an HE riff if I ever devised one!
I recently happened to re-watch Sydney Pollack‘s Random Hearts (’99), a forlorn adult romance that flopped financially and totally tanked in terms of critic and ticket buyer opinions.
It’s about a tentative, uncertain love affair between a D.C. cop (Harrison Ford) and a New Hampshire Congressperson (Kristin Scott Thomas) who meet because their spouses (Susanna Thompson and Peter Coyote, respectively) were having an affair before dying in a plane crash.
Random Hearts doesn’t work because it can’t — you can’t launch a loving, adult, non-obsessive relationship with the shattered spouse of the person your husband or your wife was having an affair with. The thing that Ford and Thomas have (they fall for each other and make love in a woodsy cabin) will always be a weird menage a quatre between two living and two dead people. It’s just not in the cards for things to work out, but Pollack and screenwriter Kurt Luedtke try their best to make it work anyway.
And to a certain extent, they succeed. There are several scenes during the first half that work quite well — they really do. Carefully written, well acted, appropriately steady and somber.
And because of the more or less successful first half Random Hearts doesn’t deserve a 15% Rotten Tomatoes rating — that’s ridiculous!
What other films are at least reasonably good during the first third or first half, only to steadily crack and shatter and fall apart during the second half?
…always bothered me. Okay, something very particular. Gallagher was “funny” in a dopey, good-natured, “egoistic drunk guy having fun at a rowdy party” way, but he lacked a hip aesthetic. He lacked thought. He wasn’t an iconoclast. There wasn’t so much as a tiny salt sprinkle of Lenny Bruce or Richard Pryor or Louis CK or Bill Burr in the man.
He didn’t seem to have any opinions about anything. I never had a clue if he was a rightwinger or a leftie or what. He just seemed to like goofing around and making people giggle and chortle and spit-take and whatnot, but why was it that I loved it when David Letterman threw watermelons off the top of four-story buildings but I didn’t crack a smile when Gallagher smashed them with a sledge-o-matic?
I didn’t like his face, to be honest. I didn’t like his long stringy ’70s hair and his bullshit golf cap and the threads he wore, and I literally hit the roof back in the ’80s when I noticed that Gallagher was wearing mandals. The first rule of comedy is that stand-up comics can’t wear mandals. He even performed barefoot at times…God.
Gallagher has passed at age 76. Respect and condolences.
Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert‘s Everything Everywhere All At Once (A24) opened on 3.25.22. It took me nearly six months to finally watch this sucker and get my royal HE hate on — “Frequent Agonies of Everything Everywhere” appeared on 8.6.22. And now, two-thirds of a year after opening, Showbiz 411‘s Roger Friedman has seen it and shat on it.
Quote #1: “Indeed, just by accident, I wound up discussing [Everything Everywhere] with two pretty solid Academy voters. Their response? ‘We turned it off, and there was good stuff there.'”
Quote #2: The visuals are dazzling, but are put together with some form of ADHD. If there’s a story in the alternate universe, I couldn’t figure it out. This is a comic book movie pretending to be something else — maybe Cloud Atlas, but that movie didn’t work either.”
Quote #3: “So how did this adventure in tediousness make $60 million? It is really a big cult film. The comic book stuff is what sold it to a certain audience, which is fine.”
If Everything Everywhere All At Once was a person napping on a couch in a living room, I would take off my shoes, sneak up and suffocate it with a throw pillow.
[Initially posted on 9.24.20] A couple of days ago screenwriter Daniel Waters asked followers to post four or five films that they deeply admire or feel guilty-pleasure pangs for, but which are generally regarded as insufficiently loved.
Five films, in short, that the hoi polloi never seemed to care very much for (or never knew much about or have forgotten) but which you privately swear by.
Five years ago I posted a list of HE’s 160 greatest all-time films , but none apply here because each is loved and respected. We’re talking lone-wolf, off-in-the-corner films. So here are five…make it six picks:
Sandra Nettlebeck‘s Mostly Martha (’01). Probably the greatest sensual foodie + unlikely love affair flick I’ve ever seen. Martina Gedeck and Sergio Castellitto‘s lead performances are perfection. Scott Hicks‘ No Reservations, an American remake costarring Catherine Zeta Jones and Aaron Eckhart, missed the mark.
John Flynn‘s The Outfit (’73). A classic hard-boiled revenge film, lean and blunt and crafted in the tradition of Point Blank. Outside of noir cultists and film bums, few have paid much attention. Robert Duvall, Karen Black, Joe Don Baker, Joanna Cassidy and Robert Ryan.
Bob Rafelson‘s Stay Hungry (’76). Love, character, destiny, Southern culture and body-building. Charming, low-key, funny. Arguably contains the most winning Arnold Schwarzenegger performance ever. Definitely my all-time favorite Jeff Bridges film. Sally Field, R.G. Armstrong, Robert Englund, Helena Kallianiotes.
Frank Perry and Thomas McGuane‘s Rancho Deluxe (’75). Another Jeff Bridges film about destiny and character, this time by way of Montana cattle rustling. Harry Dean Stanton and Richard Bright played Curt and Burt, and of course their names are a running gag. Not a lot of narrative urgency, but that’s also the charm of it.
Lamont Johnson‘s The Last American Hero (’73). One of the best redneck flicks ever. Yes, Bridges again. The story of racecar driver Junior Johnson, called Elroy Jackson in the film. Based on Tom Wolfe‘s Esquire piece titled “The Last American Hero Is Junior Johnson…Yes!”.
Susanne Bier‘s Things We Lost In The Fire (’07). My all-time favorite film about drug addiction, containing my favorite Benicio del Toro performance. Fans were few and far between when it opened in ’07, but I was instantly sold. Alone but hooked,
I half-liked the first John Wick flick, but I hated the two that followed. I might watch John Wick: Chapter 4 (Lionsgate, 3.24.23) because of the locations — Paris, Berlin (including Studio Babelsburg sound stage interiors), osaka and Lawrence of Arabia‘s Wadi Rum.
I’ve just finished reading the delicious opening chapter of Quentin Tarantino‘s “Cinema Speculation.” It’s called “Little Q Watching Big Movies,” and it has a great recollection of what it was like for seven-year-old Quentin to watch John Avildsen‘s Joe (’70), and especially how audiences loved Peter Boyle’s titular character — not loved by way of admiration, but because Joe, low-rent doofus that he was, occasionally expressed popular rage about this and that cultural issue.
I’m going to post a chapter excerpt but first a Boyle obit that I posted a day after his passing on 12.12.06 — nearly 16 years ago.
“Thanks to reader Tommy Matolla for sending along a photo of Peter Boyle as campaign manager Marvin Lucas in Michael Ritchie‘s The Candidate (1972) — my all-time favorite Boyle performance.
“When I heard of Boyle’s passing this morning I thought immediately of how superbly on-target he was as the guy who managed, manipulated and mind-fucked Bill McKay (Robert Redford) in his California campaign for the U.S. Senate. Well-mannered and nicely dressed in a trimmed beard and glasses, Lucas was a sly politico with a cynical heart and a whatever-works attitude, and Boyle’s air of witty refinement surprised a lot of people given his then-current rep as a thuggish meathead type — due, of course, to his breakout performance in John Avildsen‘s Joe (’70), in which he played a hippie-hating blue-collar oaf.
“And yet Boyle also portrayed Lucas with a subtle (and in my view, quietly hilarious) comedic edge. He delivers each line with total sincerity (as far as it goes) but at the same time lets the audience know that Boyle knows that Lucas is partly a practical pro with a job to do, and partly a user-faker. It was this performance, I think, that made people realize he was much more than a one-trick pony. On top of which few seemed to understand when it first opened that The Candidate was a very dry comedy — every scene has an oblique comic thrust.
98% of the public thought of Boyle as the cantankerous Frank Barone in Everybody Loves Raymond, which ran from ’96 to ’05 (while providing Boyle with much financial comfort) but his glory period was from ’70 to ’76: Joe, The Candidate, Steelyard Blues (another hilarious turn), The Friends of Eddie Coyle (as a sinister Boston bartender who handled the hit on Robert Mitchum), Mel Brooks‘ Young Frankenstein (his legendary performance as a randy, tap-dancing, Wall Street Journal-reading monster with a huge schtufenhaufer) and lastly Martin Scorsese‘s Taxi Driver (in which Boyle played Wizard, the loutish, know-it-all cabbie).
He had a good career after this run, but the quality of roles and films for the last 30 years were touch and go. Boyle’s last solid performance in a first-rate feature film was in Marc Forster‘s Monster’s Ball, in which he played Billy Bob Thornton‘s racist father.
In the summer of ’70 or ’71 a guy I used to know ran into Boyle one night at an outdoor bar on the grounds of the Tanglewood Music Festival. After a couple of pleasantries he offered Boyle a freshly-poured brew and said, “Have a Budweiser, king of beers!” — one of the signature lines from Joe. I don’t remember if Boyle accepted it or not, but as he walked off he said to my friend (or so I was told), “Thanks, kid — you’re all right.”
Quentin on Joe and Boyle (and please excuse the two blurry pages….infuriating):
Julia Butters, 13, is going to luck into something momentous. A feature, I hope. She’s got it. Unfortunately The Fabelmans doesn’t let her do all that much, but that’s not a tragedy. I’m just sensing that something exceptional will come her way within four or five years.
