The only episode I’m strongly interested in is The Murmuring, directed and written by JenniferKent (The Babadook) with Guillermo taking a “story by” credit. Guillermo “storied” only one other episode — GuillermoNavarro‘sLot 36.
Of all the scary anthology series of the early to mid ’60s, who was your favorite moderator — The Twilight Zone‘s Rod Serling, Way Out‘s Roald Dahl or Thriller‘s Boris Karloff?
I wish someone would remake “The Cheaters,” my all-time favorite Thriller episode. Based on a short story by Robert Bloch. Music by Jerry Goldsmith.
Smith slapping Chris Rock on the Oscar stage several months ago was “bad form,” obviously, but only in a performative or ceremonial sense. Superficially uncool but at the same time revelatory.
For what really happened was that Smith, after pretending to be Mr. Chuckly Happyvibe for over three decades, showed us who he really was deep down — an angry, abused dude from West Philadelphia who was ready for violence at a moment’s notice. And what’s wrong with that? It’s who he is, and he finally broke through and told us that. Don’t we value honesty and confession?
One significant revealing by the Emancipation teaser is that apart from the opening shot (green leaf, red blood), the suggestion is that the film is largely in black-and-white with faint hints of desaturated color.
Various understandings of who and what they are may be flawed, but there’s a certain common ground. My understanding (take this with a grain) is that incels are lonely guys who are both (a) unattractive to women and who (b) haven’t made a great effort to be attractive to women.
This is mainly (or at least partly) because they’ve given up. They tend to live in their own realm (not a lot of socializing) and spend an inordinate amount of time at home with their computers. They exist, of course, but they clearly don’t want to to be “in the game.” And they don’t seem to want to take hints about how to fix this.
By all appearances incels don’t eat healthily, they don’t work out (i.e., are overweight) , they’re probably medicating too much (alcohol) and they tend to groom and dress horribly — the usual beardface thing, contemptible flannel shirts, baggy shorts, ugly T-shirts, lace-up sneakers with black socks (or no socks), backwards baseball caps and all the rest of that awful garb. And their absorption in online forums and superhero realms verges on the neurotic, if not the diseased.
If I was a reasonably attractive straight woman I would run in the opposite direction and I wouldn’t stop running until I ran out of breath, and then I’d hail an Uber or a Lyft to put even more distance between me and these fucking guys.
With a less desirable genetic inheritance and an even more punishing upbringing and minus the deliverance of movies and journalism, I could have been an incel. I’m not indifferent to their plight. But c’mon, man…God helps those who help themselves.
Don’t Worry, Darling, by the way, plummeted 75% this weekend. That means people really don’t like it. And it’s not the craft levels — it’s a reasonably well made film and that’s obviously on Wilde. The problem is with the third act, which leaves you with nothing and jettisons the whole “social focus on the ’50s” and the granddaughter’s inheritance from Martin Ritt’s No Down Payment.
[Originally posted on 3.31.11] I’d always wanted to see Fred Zinnemann‘s A Hatful of Rain on a big wide screen (rather a small television set, which is what I saw it on when I was 15) because it’s in black-and-white Scope — my favorite format. So I caught it last night at the Aero, and briefly spoke with star Don Murray (who’s looking very fit and vibrant at age 82) and listened to a q & a with Murray and costar Eva Marie Saint.
Released in 1957 and set mostly in a small, lower Manhattan apartment, A Hatful of Rain is an on-the-nose melodrama about middle-class drug addiction.
Murray plays Johnny Pope, a married Korean War veteran in his late 20s with a heroin habit that keeps him out at all hours. His brother Polo (Anthony Franciosa) has helped him score for months out of misplaced sympathy, and in the process has blown $2500 that had been loaned by their father (Lloyd Nolan), who’s just come up from Florida to visit. And Pope’s wife Celia (Saint) suspects that he’s having an affair, and is in fact relieved when she finally discovers that he hasn’t been unfaithful in a sexual sense.
The main problem I had with A Hatful of Rain (which is a great-sounding title without thinking about what it might mean) is that it’s not actually about drug addiction as much as 1950s middle-class denial — about the inability of Average Joes like Johnny and Polo to own up to shameful situations and deal with them straight-on.
The ’50s were about everyone trying to live up to a nice white-bread homogenous ideal, about “everything’s okay” and conforming to the norm and not rocking the boat, and boy, is this movie ever about that!
And so for at least 95 minutes of A Hatful of Rain‘s 109-minute running time, all that happens is denial and lying, denial and lying, and more denial and lying. No habit, no horse, no desperation…”everything is fine, pop…really.”
The guilt-wracked Murray and Franciosa can’t tell Saint or Nolan what’s actually going on despite abundant indications that something’s way off, and it becomes very, very exasperating after an hour of this. You’re muttering to yourself, “C’mon, guys…lying about being a junkie all the time is much, much worse than facing up to it, no matter how ashamed you might be.” And you have to sit through another 35 to 40 minutes of endless dodging and fibbing and covering up before it all comes out in the wash.
And Franciosa is constantly over-acting, and I mean in a way that says, “I am an actor playing a character and I am going to pretend like hell that I’m feeling all the heavy stuff that I’m dealing with because an audience needs to understand and consider all this.” He’s giving it everything he has and then some, and it’s definitely one of the more painful performances I’ve had to sit through in a long while.
It’s partly Zinnemann’s fault, of course — he could have told Franciosa to use a little subtlety and economy, but he didn’t. But on-the-nose emoting was par for the course in the 1950s for all but a very few (i.e., Brando, Dean, Clift). Henry Silva plays “mother,” Murray’s drug dealer, and William Hickey plays Silva’s twitchy-scumbag pally or assistant or whatever.
And yet Michael V. Gazzo‘s script, adapted from his B’way play, is reasonably realistic and well-honed for what it is. It has believable dialogue and behavior that seems palatable and recognizable. And it has a clean and decisive ending. (I’m presuming everyone knows that Gazzo played FrankiePantangeli in The Godfather, Part II.)
But the Aero’s projection, unfortunately, was a little soft. Or the print was a dupe. Either way it looked okay but not all that terrific. I kept saying to myself, “This is going to look so much better when and if it comes out on Bluray.”
HE’s big office romance…I’m sorry, I meant to say the emotionally devastating extra-marital affair that I fell into during my time as an in-office freelancer at People magazine and which continued until her husband found out a couple of years later…it was almost the emotional death of me. (The actual span was between early ’98 and the early fall of ’00…call it 32 months.) No relationship had ever brought so much heartache, hurt or frustration. Graham Greene and Tom Stoppard had nothing on us. I was a man of almost constant sorrow. I was so upset by one of our arguments that one afternoon I made a reckless left turn on Pico Blvd. and got slammed by a speeding BMW, and for weeks I told myself it wasn’t really my fault — it was the married girlfriend’s. Definitely a form of insanity.
Bones and All director Luca Guadagnino speaking at the Zurich Film festival, as reported by Variety‘s Marta Balaga: “The idea the U.S. wants to give to the world has a lot to do with the imagery they create about themselves. We have been sold this imagery like dope. I tried to go [to the States] and do what the great foreign filmmakers of the 1930 and 40s did. They immersed themselves into it.”
Guadagnino said he “doesn’t believe in looking for chemistry between the performers, calling it ‘American stupidity…it’s so ridiculous. The only chemistry has to be in the mind of a director towards his actors.”
Teasing his upcoming tennis movie “Challengers” and “An Even Bigger Splash,” now clocking in at over three hours, Guadagnino wondered if his characters are always driven by passion, not reason.
“I like Election by Alexander Payne. [Tracy Flick] is stubborn and knows what she wants, which is fantastic, but I don’t know if I could make a movie like that or be with a character like that.”
Luca’s next two films are Challengers, a Boston-shot tennis flick with Zendaya, Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor, and An Even Bigger Splash, which Balaga says is “now clocking in at over three hours.”
A friends says this five-year-old video made JordanPeterson “famous.” I had never seen it until just now. Comment #1: “The fact that [Peterson] gives them these trans women the time of day and patiently listening before giving a thoughtful response, when at the same time he is being repetitively and aggressively misquoted, his words and intent misrepresented, and just overall berated, is so damn impressive to me. He has incredible self control.” Comment #2: “It’s like you just can’t win with these people. No matter how civil or respectful you try to be to them they will always find something to be offended by.” Comment #3: “This [8.16.21] video was intended to demonize Peterson. It did the exact opposite. His thoughts are now universally appreciated [while] the person who recorded this video and posted it…their greatest contribution was that the video backfired.”
HE is sorry to report that Nicholas Stoller and Billy Eichner‘s Bros, billed as the first mainstream gay romcom, is already dead. The wide release is under $5 million for the weekend, and not expected to earn much more than $12 million domestic. I wrote a mostly approving review two nights ago and it reportedly played half-decently in the big cities, but most of the country (especially the deep hinterlands) wasn’t into it, bruh. Everyone likes a good romantic tale, and Bros is just as good (and certainly as well written) as any Tom Hanks or Billy Crystal romcom from the ’90s, and most auds approve of frisky sexual behavior but…well, perhaps not so much in the realm that I’m afraid to identify in this sentence for fear of being called homophobic. The collapse of Bros shows that Joe and Jane Popcorn are not all that keen about wading into a sexual-emotional realm that is not theirs to have and hold. If you count Zoomers the U.S. gay population is somewhere around 6% or 7% — do the math.
This is either a foyer or a section of the living room inside Marilyn Monroe’s home, the only place she ever owned, at 12305 Fifth Helena Drive in Brentwood. It was taken the morning of 8.5.62, a few hours after she’d been found dead.
The heritage of the home was classic Mexican adobe (overhead beams, classic brick patio), and she had bought a few pieces of Mexican-made furniture earlier that year when she visited Mexico City. On or about 3.1.62 she dropped by the set of Luis Bunuel‘s The Exterminating Angel, which was finishing shooting at Churubusco Studios. It played in Cannes less than three months later.
A copy of the N.Y. Times sits on the peasant bench, along with two coffee-table books (Mexico + the paintings of Pierre-Auguste Renoir).
What gets me is the dinky little portable stereo. You’d think she would’ve placed it atop a wooden table of some kind, but no — on the floor! The same kind of cheap-ass stereo player that kids fresh out of college put on their bedroom floors in the ’60s. Monroe either forgot to buy a table or thought the stereo sounded better on the carpeted floor, transmitting the vibes to the floorboards or something. Monroe wasn’t rich when she died. It’s so touching to imagine her deciding to go with an inexpensive college-dorm stereo rather than the swanky kind that, say, Frank Sinatra or JFK would’ve owned.
This is the Marilyn Monroe I’ve always had in my head, as opposed to the bruised, traumatized, exaggerated victim in Blonde. A neurotic smarty who cared about culture, world events, good music, etc. I wonder what she listened to during dinner hour? Did she ever wander around Paris or Rome?
HE is down with Nicholas Stoller, Billy Eichner and Judd Apatow‘s Bros, which I saw Thursday evening. I admired the witty writing, the expert acting, the character-building and professional construction, and it also touched me in a somewhat old-fashioned way. It struck me as generally gutsy and first-rate schmaltz, and at times more than that.
Is it like a typical Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks romcom from the ’90s? Yeah, but a good one! And with boners and beards!
I felt a genuine kinship and a comfort level with the characters and even, to a significant extent, with the sexuality.
The alone-ness, defensiveness and brusque “I don’t trust you” personality of Eichner’s “Bobby Lieber”, an openly gay museum curator and musician, are very clearly and movingly conveyed, and I really liked LukeMacFarlane‘s “Aaron”, a muscular wills attorney and fledgling chocolatier whom Bobby falls for early on, only to stumble through the usual commitment-or-not issues.
I got as much of a relaxed upfront gay feeling from this as I did from Luca Guadagnino‘s Call Me By Your Name, which is much tamer and less sexually provocative than Bros.
Coming from a straight guy like myself, this kind of approval means something. Or it might mean something, I should say. I caught a 5pm showing of Bros with a friend in Westport, and we were the only ones in the house.
I don’t know what Apatow’s writing input was, but aside from the pointed, confessional, signature-level writing from Eichner, whose story this primarily is, I could feel the Apatow-ness all the way through. It had a King of Staten Island-like feeling of assurance and carefully measured control…a professional sense of timing and pacing and all-around wholeness that I bought into. (Eichner and Stoller are credited as cowriters.)
Speaking of my straightness, Bros struck me (and I know what this is going to sound like) as a little too pronounced in terms of the gay consciousness factor. Just a wee little bit.
Did everything in this movie have to be about sexuality and sexual identity and frank, take-it-or leave-it, this-is-what-gay-life-is-like revelation? How many lines in this film dealt with the occasional banality or neutrality of things? How many lines in this didn’t address or comment upon gay behaviors or culture or history? Damn few. As Sigmund Freud might have said, occasionally a gay man will enter a tobacco shop for a couple of good cigars, and he’ll just say “gimme a couple of good cigars” without mentioning or alluding to his orientation.
Bros has been described as a somewhat predictable, straight-laced gay romcom, but there’s nothing restrained about the sexual scenes, which at times almost reminded me of Frank Ripploh‘s Taxi Zum Klo. Forgive me but I somehow don’t recall a scene in Sleepless in Seattle in which Meg Ryan talked to a girlfriend about peeing on Tom Hanks, or told Hanks during a vulnerable moment that she wants him to fuck her, or that the last time his big fat banana slid into her she went “oh wow.”
There are two great scenes (okay, one and a half) with Debra Messing. The Abraham Lincoln-was-gay thing is simultaneously acknowledged as bullshit but also pushed a little too far. But Amy Schumer’s Eleanor Roosevelt and Kenan Thompson‘s James Baldwin are just right. Ditto Bowen Yang, Kristin Chenoweth, Harvey Fierstein, a Ben Stiller cameo, etc.
Forgive me but there’s so much in our daily lives that falls under the headings of “banal” or “middle class whatevs”, and this movie just won’t ease up with the avoidance of that banality and the persistence of the gay experience and corresponding sensibilities.
There’s a dinner scene with Aaron’s parents that drives this aspect home. Along with Aaron, I was silently begging Bobby to ease up and tone it down. In this scene Bobby voices his support for educating second-graders about gay views and lifestyles. I don’t care what this sounds like coming from me, but kids 10-and-under should be left the fuck alone. That part REALLY didn’t work for me.
But otherwise Bros is refreshingly smart and engaging and well-structured, and I really liked the romcom squareness of it all. I can’t think of a kicker line so this’ll have to do.
No one in the world is more knowledgable than restoration guru Robert Harris about how films of distinction should ideally look on home video, particularly via 1080p and 4K Blurays. He is the absolute Yoda of this realm.
Harris knows much, much more than I will ever know about this stuff, but I’ve seen Heat in all kinds of formats over the last 27 years (including a first-peek 35mm press screening at the Steve Ross theatre on the Warner Bros. lot). I was upset because I know for an absolute fact that the 4K Heat Bluray looks way too dark, and that what my eyes saw three nights ago was and is a desecration.
I felt confused and stunned by Harris’s remarks, and particularly by a suggestion that my settings may be “off.” HE’s Wilton TV, owned by the honorable Jody Jasser, is a solid, relatively new, state-of-the-art 65 inch Sony OLED.
4K’s middle name, after all, is darkness. But there’s a possible solution for due diligence types. “If you dig into the setup menu,” I was told, “you’ll find black level settings.”
HE commenter ‘Kyle D’: “The UHD Heat looks great on a calibrated display in a dark room, but it will probably look like ass on most displays in most viewing conditions, and I can’t really blame or disparage people for not putting in the effort to get it looking right.”
“I just needed to remind myself that a 4K remastering of a great film doesn’t have to be an infuriating stew of murk and mud covered by a black nun’s stocking.
“While I understand that it’s not as true of a capturing of the 1972 original as your version, I was delighted by the ‘22 4K nonetheless
“The Willis blacks are deep and satiny and delicious as fudge, and that indoor golden-amber lighting and those luscious taxicab reds and the detail on those tweed overcoats and those shiny, hand-rubbed 1940s cars, and those sunlit hues during the wedding scene and the death in the tomato garden scene and in Sicily, and I didn’t have to go into settings and adjust the black levels on the 65-inch Sony OLED. Imagine! It just looked that way on its own.
“I will always prefer your 15 year-old version (I’ll always think of it as the one that Willis heartily approved of) but in the wake of my dreadful 4K Heat nightmare the Godfather 4K looked like absolute heaven on earth. And the 4K The Godfather Part II disc, which I watched earlier this year in West Hollywood…fuhgedaboudit.
