A friend recently said that he found the faint but distinct current of paranoia in Tar to be the film’s most arresting aspect.
I zeroed in on this during my last viewing of Todd Field’s film, and now I agree — once the paranoid stuff begins to manifest, it becomes stronger and stronger until Lydia Tar’s downfall.
My favorite definition of paranoia is one attributed to Willam S. Burroughs — “knowing all the facts.” But what exactly defines paranoia in films?
Most of us would say it’s a vague but persuasive feeling that something undefined but threatening is approaching or waiting around the corner. This feeling gathers strength as the film progresses, but the superior paranoid films hold off at the climax…the prickly vibes linger after the payoff.
I never really thought about paranoid currents in movies until reading about Alan Pakula‘s paranoid trilogy — Klute, The Parallax View and All The President’s Men. I’m actually not so sure about Pakula’s journalism docudrama but the first two are paranoid masterpieces.
In my book the most striking or penetrating paranoid films are, in fact, thrillers — The Conversation, Rosemary’s Baby, The Witch, It Follows, The Innocents, Taxi Driver, Three Days of the Condor, Repulsion, Cutter’s Way.
What films (if any) feel paranoid without conforming the usual scheme of thrillers?
In a 10.22 N.Y. Times interview, “Ralph Fiennes, Master of Monsters,” the 59 year-old star of David Hare‘s Straight Line Crazy has, to his immense credit, once again defended J.K. Rowling in the face of trans hate:
“I can’t understand the vitriol directed at [Rowling]. I can understand the heat of an argument, but I find this age of accusation and the need to condemn irrational. I find the level of hatred that people express about views that differ from theirs, and the violence of language towards others, disturbing.”
Here are HE’s choices for Fiennes 11 greatest performances, be they lead or supporting…if your performances ring true, the amount of screen time matters not:’
1. Monsieur Guystave H. in The Grand Budapest Hotel. Fiennes has a classic line about graceful aging and adjusting one’s appetites. Gustave is telling Tony Revolori‘s Zero Moustafa, a Grand Budapest hotel bellboy, that he Biblically “knew” Tilda Swinton’s recently deceased Madame D. Noting that she was “great in the sack,” Fiennes explains that “in your youth it’s all fine filet but as you get older you have to settle for the cheaper cuts.” Or words to that effect.**
2. Amon Goth in Schindler’s List — a performance that spoke for itself from the get-go. I interviewed Fiennes in the fall of ’93 for a regular Sunday column I did for the N.Y. Daily News — the piece called “The Reich Stuff.”
6. Heathcliff in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.
7. Dennis “Spider” Cleg in David Cronenberg‘s Spider.
8. Count László de Almássy in The English Patient (though I find his performance a bit labored, a bit of a slog).
9. Coriolanus in Coriolanus.
10. Maurice Bendrix in The End of the Affair.
11. Justin Quayle in The Constant Gardener.
I have to add that I’ve always half-admired Fiennes for that 2007 seven-mile-high episode aboard Quantas Airlines. Only good-looking movie stars get away with this kind of thing, and I had to chuckle with I first read about it. Fiennes had most of his hair back then and his natural good looks were still untouched my middle-aged crease, and Quantas steward Lisa Robertson had loved him in The English Patient so he was in like Flynn.
** That’s generally true if you’re not married, but for the middle six months of 2013 I was utterly blessed by a relationship with an exquisite, marbled, grass-fed filet mignon, to go with the metaphor. God smiled, and I will never forget His generosity. Despite the woundings at the end I caught an amazing break.
So Will Smith had a recent private screening of Antoine Fuqua‘s Emancipation (Apple, 12.2), but he invited only celebs of color. The same thing happened with that recent D.C. screening, which reportedly was mainly composed of African-American groups. Why am I hearing that the earlybird audiences been racially segregated? It feels like Smith is going for a stacked-deck consensus. The advance word of mouth on Emancipation will not travel unless a certain percentage of tough white critics give it a thumb’s up. Non-invested critics, I mean, who have no particular dog, etc.
In his 10.20 piece called “Will She Said Hit Too Close to Home for Oscar Voters?,” Variety‘s Clayton Davis is trying to guilt-trip older Hollywood males into applauding this first-rate docudrama about how Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey took down Harvey Weinstein.
Except She Said doesn’t need Clayton Davis’s help — it stands confidently and efficiently on its own two feet.
If you ask me Davis has invalidated himself by putting quote marks around cancel culture in the third-to-last paragraph.
Quote marks bookending this term is a standard wokester move. It’s meant to suggest skepticism about the validity of the term itself. It’s the same thing as writing “so-called cancel culture.”
So let’s understand this clearly — by attempting to cast doubt or suspicion upon usage of cancel culture, Clayton has made it unambiguously clear that he stands with the bad guys.
Three oldies costar in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania —Michael Douglas, Michele Pfeiffer and an uncredited Bill Murray as a villain of some kind. I adored the original Ant-Man (’15) but not so much Ant-Man and the Wasp (’18). I’ll probably have difficult with this one also. Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Kathryn Newton, Jonathan Majors, Randall Park
Tim Burton to Deadline: “My history is that I started out [at Disney]. I was hired and fired like several times throughout my career there.
“Dumbo is why I think my days with Disney are done. That movie is quite autobiographical on a certain level [because] I realized that I was Dumbo, that I was working in this horrible big circus, and I needed to escape.”
I tried watching Tar again last night — my third viewing. It happened at Stamford’s Avon, which turned out to be a mistake. My next viewing will happen when Tar starts streaming. I’m very much looking forward to reading the subtitled dialogue as there are still passages (particularly when Cate Blanchett‘s Lydia Tar is whispering to her young adopted daughter) that I can’t make heads or tails of.
Tar is exactly the same mindfuck that I saw in Telluride several weeks ago. I still find it complex, ravishing, brilliant (certainly as far as Blanchett’s performance is concerned) and more than a little frustrating at times.
I still don’t get the ticking metronome in the middle of the night or the unseen shrieking girl in the woods scenes. I’m still deeply bothered by the crude table manners of the young Russian cellist. I get that the black dog or wolf in the old tenement buildjng is a metaphor for secrets that Lydia is afraid might come out, but it’s presented as a half-real thing and not a dream sequence so it left me puzzled at first.
I finally realized that the grubby two-bedroom home that Lydia crashes in toward the end is her childhood home, and that the insolent guy at the bottom of the stairs is her under-educated brother, and that her real first name is Linda. (I’ve no explanation for missing this the first time.) I still think it’s absurd that Lydia’s career would be completely destroyed over the Christa thing. And I still think that anyone who would call the last shot racist (a slow tracking shot of cosplaying fans at a kind of Asian ComicCon gathering) is demented.
Alas, the whole experience was diminished due to the Avon’s crummy screening conditions. Yes, it’s an independent theatre and a beloved Stamford mainstay but I’ll never see a film there again. Three bad things — the screen is too small for the auditorium, the screen lighting was way too dim (the minimum SMPTE standard is around 14 or 15 foot lamberts — I’d be surprised if last night’s Avon image was more than eight or nine) and the sound was way too soft.
I complained to the manager (a chubby woman in her 40s or early 50s) and I suspected right away that she didn’t even know what “foot lamberts” means. I returned to my seat, resigned to sit through two hours and 38 minutes of shadows and mud and murky, often indecipherable dialogue.
The idea or concept of Jack Nicholson-style insouciance (i.e., that vaguely grinning, self-amused, slightly paunchy, middle-aged swagger hound attitude) didn’t really come into being until his Garrett Breedlove performance in Terms of Endearment, which opened 39 years ago.
Today the Breedlove routine would be shut down so fast that Nicholson’s head would spin. The world that half-chuckled at such antics is dead and gone.
Okay, it’s not dead and gone but people in the heady Hollywood heat of things are too terrified to admit this so it might as well be. Okay, there’s still room for “you need a lot of drinks to kill the bug that is up your ass”…that still works. Just don’t ask IndieWire‘s Anne Thompson, who served as the unit publicist for Terms. Different era.
HE to Beverly Walker: “I’m re-reading your 1985 Jack Nicholson Film Comment interview, and I’m wondering what you’re hearing, if anything, about Jack’s well-being or health or whatever. He’s 85 now, and I know he doesn’t say anything to anyone these days, largely due to diminished capacities.
“But dear God I would love to hear the old Jack weigh in on woke Stalinism and the idea that any actor or filmmaker whose personal behavior has resulted in a blemish or two needs to be expelled or at least discredited. I don’t know what he’d say exactly, but I can guess. To hear it in his own words, his own phraseology…”
HE: “Malibu is an over-crowded car community with a side order of beachside real estate. It’s arguably the most unpleasant coastal region in the civilized world.”
Overlord: “Then why go there at all. or are you a masochist?”
HE’s Own Insect Antennae: “The same reason all their hikes are through residential Hollywood. He enjoys the proximity to wealth.”
HE: “Because when you finally arrive at the mostly empty and semi-secluded El Matador, La Piedra and Leo Carillo state beaches, the effort feels worth it. For a while.
“But getting there is hell unless (a) you’re on a motorcycle or an HE-approved rumblehog or (b) you manage to avoid peak traffic by traveling between 11 pm and 6 am. Most of the time there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between PCH and the 405. It’s basically about cars and foggy haze and the near-futility of finding a parking spot (unless you’re visiting the afore-mentioned, Trancas-area beaches) and that constant whahhh of traffic and that atmosphere of speed and aggression and predatory restaurants and the suffocating howl of it all. It just drains your soul.
“I’ve visited so many tranquil, extra-beautiful, far-from-the-madding-crowd beach areas around the world. The Florida keys, Northern California and Oregon, central Vietnam, Maine, New Jersey’s Long Beach island…yes, even New Jersey!…France’s Côte d’Azur, Marina del Campo on the island of Elba, Baja California, Cape Cod, San Blas, the Spanish coast near Almeria, Placencia in Belize and Playa del Carmen and Cozumel in Mexico.
“I’m sorry but alongside these havens the Malibu region is nothing to cherish or speak fondly of.
“It’s one thing if you own a nice canyon home or cliffside spread or if you’re jogging along the track at Pepperdine U., but otherwise ‘later.'” — from “Paradise Cove Overchqrge,” posted on 12.1.19.
Last night I submitted to roughly 80 minutes’ worth of Ol Parker‘s Ticket to Paradise (Universal, 10.21), the George Clooney-Julia Roberts South Seas bitchcom. That’s right, I bolted because I couldn’t stand it any longer.
It’s all cynicism and luxury travel porn and infuriating superficial bullshit from each and every lightweight character. There’s no river running through or beneath this piece of shit. It’s not tethered to anything except its own smugness.
Kaitlin Dever, playing Clooney and Roberts’ daughter, still doesn’t resemble either of them even slightly. You can almost set your watch by mainstream Hollywood’s refusal to cast younger actors who bear even a FAINT resemblance to the older actors they’re supposed to be the sons or daughters of.
Plus the shrimp-sized Dever (5’2″) is way too short to be the daughter of Clooney and Roberts (5’11 and 5’8″ respectively). I’m sorry but tallish parents almost never produce Hobbitt-sized children.
And if I’d just graduated from law school (which Dever’s character does as the film begins) I would never, ever decide to marry a guy who works as a Balinese seaweed farmer. At the very least I would make sure I could practice English-language law in Bali, and if that wasn’t an option then I just wouldn’t marry the guy…period.
Have I mentioned that I hated Mr. Mellow Seaweed (Maxime Bouttier) and especially his hideously serene and cheerful family? Well, I did. I loathed everyone in this film, in fact, and particularly Lucas Bravo as Roberts’ 35 year-old boyfriend who actually gets down on his knees to propose to 55 year-old Roberts…embarassing!
Plus I hated the couple sitting next to me, and more particularly the guy who ate three courses of food (including a fries-and-gravy dish…slurp!…slurp!) and who had to discuss every turn of the plot with the wife-girlfriend. It never occured to either of these animals to simply watch the film without commentary. Did I give them the HE stink-eye? I should have but I wimped out. I didn’t care so I just left.
Every seat in the theatre was filled, and a terrible psychic weight dissolved into thin air when I finally summoned the resolve to get the hell out of there.
By the way: “Thank you for your application for voter registration. You are not a voter until your application is approved by the registrar of voters. You should receive a confirmation within 3 weeks. If you do not, contact the registrar of voters in your town hall. Registrar of Voters, Town Hall, 238 Danbury Road, Wilton, CT.”
The last time I paid close attention to Jake Hoffman (born 41 years ago, son of 85 year-old Dustin) was when he did a cameo as Steve Madden in The Wolf of Wall Street. Now I’m looking and listening again, this time at a trailer for Same & Kate (Vertical, 11.11), obviously a light and harmless four-way relationship thing costarring Jake, Dustin, Sissy Spacek and Schuyler Fisk (Sissy’s daughter). And you know what? Jake has a nice-sounding voice and a steady planted vibe — my immediate response was one of approval. I trust him.
I realize that Congressperson Val Demings has been behind Sen. Marco Rubio all along in the polls. A new pool from Florida Atlantic University shows Rubio leading Demings by 6 points, 48 percent to 42 percent.
That said, Demings came off as a better debater, and I believe she’s a better human being. Nobody laughed at her during the debate, but they laughed their ass off at Rubio when he lied about his former position on the 2020 election.
“Senator Marco Rubio of Florida and his Democratic challenger, Representative Val Demings, met for the only debate of the Florida Senate race on Tuesday, a fast-paced, fiery face-off that cruised through a series of the top issues affecting the country and the state.
“Mr. Rubio, who participated in around a dozen debates as a Republican presidential candidate in 2016, was polished and quick. Taking a more evocative approach, Ms. Demings sought to cast him as heartless, disconnected from the human impact of his policies on issues like abortion and guns.
“Still, she may not have gotten the kind of viral moment necessary to shift the trajectory of the race in her favor. For months, polls have shown Mr. Rubio with a lead in Florida, a perennial battleground state but one that has shifted to the right.”
