“Heaving Seas,” initially posted on 4.25.20: All my life I’ve dreamt of sailing a long distance on a sizable schooner. Five or six months, maybe longer. Not as an owner, God forbid, but as a traveller somehow paying my way. Or as a guest or crew member or whatever.
Down the Pacific coast to Mexico and Central America, through the Panama Canal and around the Caribbean, stopping in Belize, Cuba, Turks and Caicos and wherever the spirit points. And then across the Atlantic to the Canaries and then through the Strait of Gibraltar and then all around the Mediterranean — Spain’s Costa del Sol, southern France, Italy, Sicily, Greece, Turkey, Jordan, Israel, Egypt. Maybe even push on across the Indian Ocean to Southeast Asia…why not?
This 37 year-old Rod Stewart music video got me going. The schooner it was filmed on, I mean. I went looking for a facsimile and quickly found one — the Atlantic, a ten-year-old, three-masted schooner, 212 feet long, steel hull, currently moored off the coast of Italy. God knows what a craft this size would cost, but if you’re loaded…
I was initially inclined to ignore the whole story about Jihad Rehab (aka The UnRedacted), which was reported last Sunday (9.25) by Michael Powell in the N.Y. Times. My thinking was “another story about wokester cowards throwing a filmmaker under the bus because of accusations of racism even though they liked the film to begin with”…big deal, that’s what these serpents do for a living, react to accusations by killing or maiming careers.”
Key passage from N.Y. Times story: “Abigail Disney, a grandniece of Walt Disney, had been the executive producer of Jihad Rehab and called it ‘freaking brilliant’ in an email to the doc’s director, Meg Smaker. Now she’s disavowed it. The film ‘landed like a truckload of hate,’ Ms. Disney wrote in an open letter.”
Set 21 years ago in Masshad, Iran, Ali Abassi’s HolySpider is a disturbing (to put it mildly), fact-based drama about SaeedHanaei (MehdiBajestani), a serial killer of prostitutes.
The murders are ghastly enough, but a double-down comes when, post-capture, Hanaei is bizarrely supported by fanatical zealots who believe he has done Allah’s bidding.
The first half is pretty much a straightforward crime drama. After graphically depicting two of Hanaei’s grisly killings, it follows an intrepid female reporter (Zar Amir-Ebrahimi) who risks life and limb to bring about his arrest.
I can’t call this section any more than decent — efficient and good enough, but not exactly brimming with style or suspense or cinematic flair. Okay, the suspense does ratchet up when Amir-Ebrahimi’s journalist character Rahimi (who’s actually fictional), posing as a prostitute, is being driven by Hanaei to his home, and Amir-Ebrahimi’s colleague does a poor job of following them and suddenly you’re thinking, “oh, God…she could be next.”
The diseased social reaction among Hanaei’s fans in the second half is what shakes you. You’re left thinking “really?…a sizable contingent of Mashhad citizens cheered a serial killer because he was helping to rid the streets of streetcorner hookers? Whothinkslikethat? What kind of diseased culture?,” etc.
But then of course, this was Iran 20 years ago (the murders happened between ’00 and ’01) and the Masshad faithful were the country’s chief bumblefucks. All you can say is “wow.”
“Another art-versus-artist mess. Dave Chappelle’s legacy has unquestionably been tainted by his commitment in recent years to hardcore transphobia.” [HE insert: what?] Can we still enjoy the sketch-comedy series that he and Neal Brennan created, and the ways that the show bearing his name mixed hysterical parodies of Black celebrities like Rick James, Prince and Lil Jon with more nuanced but still funny ideas like the fake game show ‘I Know Black People’?
“As with several series on this list (and ones that didn’t quite pass muster with our voters, like Louie and The Cosby Show), perhaps it’s best to fondly remember the experience of watching it back in the day, rather than attempting to revisit and having to think more directly about the now controversial guy at the center of it.”
Sepinwall’s Chappelle diss aside, HE’s all-time favorite TV shows are…well, it’s not a massive list:
(1) Politically Incorrect and Real Time with Bill Maher,
(2) The Sopranos
(3) Curb Your Enthusiasm
(4) The Twilight Zone
(5) Mad Men
(6) The Larry Sanders Show
(7) Hill Street Blues
(8) Better Call Saul
(9) 30 Rock
(10) PBS’s American Experience series (which began in ’88)
(11) old kinescopes of live TV dramas from the early to late ’50s
(12) the original Twin Peaks (’90 and ’91) NOTThe Leftovers
(13) the first couple of seasons of Ozark (before it wore me down to a nub)
(14) 77 Sunset Strip (if watched ironically)
(15) NYPD Blue
(16) Freaks and Geeks NOTThe Wire or Breaking Bad (i.e., not a comment on their quality — I’ve seen episodes of both — but a comment on the HE comment vipers who’ve insisted for years that I watch them both in their entirety and then drop to my knees in absolute worship)
(17) The MacNeil-Lehrer Report
(18) Ted Koppel‘s Nightline
(19) Crossfire (’82 to ’05)
(20) SNL in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s
(21) SCTV during the John Candy glory years
(22) Late Night with David Letterman from ’82 to ’93 (NBC), and then in the ’90s and early aughts (CBS).
Friendo: Here’s a sexist comment for you, and one that the mainstream media would never touch. Do you think perhaps that George and Amal Clooney get along as well as they do (George claims they’ve never had an argument) because Amal was raised within a very traditional, patriarchal, Lebanese-Muslim family culture? Raised in England but still. I would never say this out loud.
HE: I suspect that’s probably one of the reasons they get along. She doesn’t do hissy fits, doesn’t challenge too strongly, doesn’t throw china and in all likelihood doesn’t occasionally moan and deride like a typically liberated American wife or girlfriend. Plus, being the brainy and studious type, she’s probably too smart to get into squabbles.
Friendo: Despite the British upbringing family ties and traditions are strong, and women raised by a Middle Eastern family tend to absorb “good wife” values in the Middle Eastern sense, and I don’t necessarily think that’s entirely a bad thing.
HE: That said, anyone will tell you that fighting is a fairly normal and persistent thing within marriages these days. Women are not going to back off and show obeisance just to get along. Those days are long gone.
Friendo: But the feminist movement…I know because I was part of it…was ME ME ME ME…my needs, my career, my pleasure, my empowerment, etc. If you have that mindset you’re never going to be happy in a marriage. The list is too lengthy and the collected angers are too great.
HE: Yup.
Friendo: This interview is just pablum. But Amal is very beautiful.
I’m personally heartbroken by David O. Russell‘s Amsterdam (20th Century, 10.7) I was so perplexed and confounded, I was almost in tears. How could a movie by a brilliant A-level director turn out this heebie-jeebie and wackadoodle?
I’m sorry but Amsterdam is pretty close to a disaster — a very busy and antsy period movie about an arcane, who-cares? bumblebee plot (something to do with ascendant U.S. fascism in the early 1930s) that won’t stop lurching to and fro and buzzing all around, and is totally irksome for that.
It’s all plot and exposition, plot and exposition, plot and exposition…jabber jabber, talk talk…over and over and over. No subtext, no heart, no downshifting, no “things that are there but not said.” I was having serious trouble trying to understand who was who and what was happening for the first hour. Only when Robert DeNiro‘s character (“General Gil Dillenbeck”) comes along at the 100-minute mark does the rubber begin to meet the road.
Christian Bale, Margot Robbie and John David Washington are pallie-wallies who first get together in the wake of World War I, and who reconvene in 1933 Manhattan.
Bale’s scarred, glass-eyed face struck me as an odd, meaningless distraction. Washington and Robbie share a deep attraction to each other but it goes nowhere and amounts to zero. For whatever reason Russell doesn’t show them being the slightest bit intimate. The reticence is strange.
There’s no question in my mind that Russell is a gifted madman, a firecracker, a genius. But something went horribly wrong this time. Seriously, this struck me as one of the worst films from a major director that I’ve ever seen in my life. Right up there with Michael Cimino‘s Heaven’s Gate, Brian DePalma‘s The Black Dahlia and Francis Coppola‘s Twixt.
Russell was on fire between Flirting With Disaster, Three Kings, I Heart Huckabees, The Fighter and Silver Linings Playbook — call it 16 or 17 years. I wasn’t as much of a fan of American Hustle but we’ll let that go. All I know is that the spirit gods seem to have flown away and Russell hasn’t gotten airborne in nearly a decade. Shattering.
I feel so badly for the guy. I’m beside myself with grief. The reviews are mostlyawful and this thing is going to sink like a stone when Joe and Jane Popcorn get a taste.
Russell needs to go simpler, smaller. A crazy family movie of some kind. No more films about greed and conniving and big evil shadowy plots.
I’m very, very sorry. I don’t know what else to say except when you fall down you need to pick yourself up and get back on the horse. Better inspiration next time.
Several weeks ago I was chatting with a Westport hairdresser. An Asian woman in her mid to late 40s. I suspected she might be Vietnamese (I’ve been to Vietnam three times) but I didn’t want to sound like a dumb Anglo who doesn’t know the difference between people from Vietnam, China, Japan, Burma, Malaysia or Korea.
But I took a risk anyway and asked if she was from Vietnam. Bingo! Born near the end of the Vietnam War, she had grown up near Saigon and emigrated to this country around 1990, she said. So let’s allow that I might have a certain ability to recognize people from certain regions, or at least that I got lucky that one time.
Yesterday around lunch hour I was speaking to a Latina counter waitress in her early 20s. There was something in her features that suggested…I couldn’t be sure. Possibly lower Mexico or perhaps Guatamela. She vaguely reminded me of Yalitza Aparicio, who played the housekeeper Cleo in Alfonso Cuaron‘s Roma, only a bit prettier.
I had no real idea, in short, but I took a wild stab and asked, “Have you ever been to Belize?”
Waitress: Where? HE: Belize. Waitress: No, I…I don’t know that. Where is that? HE: South of Mexico. You know…the Yucatan Peninsula. Caribbean coast. Waitress: Near Mexico? HE: Actually closer to Guatemala. Waitress: Huh. HE: Mostly English speaking. Waitress: Huh.
I’m not judging, mind. I recognize that we all have our own journeys and that we reach enlightenment at different times in our lives, and that includes me. But this woman had never heard of Belize until that moment. She may not have even heard of Guatemala.
What does this say about the teaching of geography in Fairfield County high schools? When I was 21 I had at least heard of all the countries in Central and South America, and about most of the Caribbean islands.
13 and 2/3 years ago a desecrated version of The French Connection — grubby, splotchy, desaturated — was released on Bluray, and fans hit the roof. It was a bizarre experimental remastering from director William Friedkin that everyone (including director of photpgraphy Owen Roizman) hated. A much more palatable version was released on 2012, and the complaints stopped.
I may be mistaken but I seem to recall that the only person in the world of critics and columnists who gave a thumbs-up to the 2009 version was David Poland. From that point on the term “Poland Curse” applied to every which way.
Now another Bluray debacle is upon us, and it took me six damn weeks to pay attention. The new 4K Heat Bluray, approved by Michael Mann and released by Disney’s 20th Century video division, is covered or more precisely smothered in needless shadow and murk, like a black scrim thrown over everything.
I watched the 4K version last night, and right away I knew something was wrong. “Why is everything darker?’, I asked myself. We naturally expect 4K to deliver some degree of enhancement — a noticable “bump” or upgrade of the film’s well-known visual quality. Well, the 4K does not deliver a noticable uptick. In fact it’s another desecration. It’s Heat with the lights turned down and a heavier emphasis on blue-gray. It’s Heat covered with a black stocking. It’s basically a vandalizing.
I was so pissed off by the 4K disc tHat I took it out and popped in the 1080p Bluray version. The Bluray is much, much more pleasing to the eye./
From HE’s 9.4.22 Telluride review of Todd Field‘s TAR (Focus Features, 10.7): “The focus of this chilly but fascinating film is (a) the magnificent work and lifestyle of Cate Blanchett‘s Lydia Tar — I wanted to move into this movie and live there and never come out — but primarily (b) the fanatical determination of “Millennial robots” (as Lydia calls them) to destroy careers of people they see as cruel and abusive.
“It’s mainly about a faintly alluded to, stubbornly non-dramatized relationship between an ambitious student and Lydia, a powerful God-like figure in her realm, and how it went wrong and why, and how this resulted in a kind of blood feud — a deliberate act of career assassination and a form of sexual harassment.
“But who rejected who exactly, and why do reasonable intelligent viewers of Tar have to argue about this hours later and still not be certain about what happened?
“All kinds of exposition is deliberately left out of Tar, and it’s triggering. I’m sorry but Tar takes forever to get going (at least 45 minutes if not longer), and once it does it’s too elliptical, too fleeting, too oblique, too teasing and (I guess) too smart for its own good. It made me feel dumb, and I really hate that.
“But I loved the flush world of brilliant, arrogant, confident Lydia. Not to mention the textures, the autumnal Berlin atmospheres, the perfect scarves, the dinners….I wanted to live in it forever.
“The bottom line is that Field can’t be bothered to tell a story in a way that most people would find satisfying. He doesn’t show the stuff that we’d like to see and be part of, obviously because he feels that’s the most interesting way to deal the cards. But not for me. Elusive narrative games and coy hintings and teasings and dingle-dangle maneuvers…nope. Maybe if I watch it again it’ll somehow come together? Note: I saw TAR a second time at Telluride and I’m afraid it didn’t improve much.
“I still can’t decide if TAR is a damning indictment of cancel culture or if it’s slyly dissing Blanchett‘s brilliant but callous conductor and more or less saying ‘well, she made her bed.'”
We’re all conscious of a Best Actress campaign underway for Ana de Armas‘ Marilyn Monroe performance in Andrew Dominik‘s Blonde (Netflix, streaming on 9.28).
For what it’s worth I think de Armas has done an excellent job of bringing Dominik’s version of Monroe (wounded, broken, extremely vulnerable) to life. She gives it her all, and I would have no argument with her being nominated for Best Actress. Nobody would.
I wrote a while back that Blonde is “artful torture porn.” Because it is.
I also agreed that her performance as the relentlessly brutalized and victimized Monroe is analogous to Martin Scorsese‘s The Last Temptation of Christ. Excerpt: “I’m thinking not just of the incessant dismissals and degradations and spiritual uncertainties, but the anguished and agonized relationship between the main protagonist and the elusive ‘father.’”
Variety‘s Clayton Davisbelieves, with at least some sincerity, that de Armas is Netflix’s strongest acting contender and that her performance has the “best shot for Latina Oscar attention.” (Should Best Latina Performance become a new Oscar category? If Clayton wasn’t a Variety columnist he could become a top-tier Oscar strategist and lobbyist on behalf of BIPOC contenders.)
But let’s be honest — Dominik’s honest but demeaning remarks about Monroe in a 9.27 Sight & Sound interview by Christina Newland have hurt the film’s Oscar chances, and possibly even damaged de Armas’s campaign.
Actually it’s not so much the interview itself as Twitter-ized outtakes from her Zoom chat with Dominik that have caused all the trouble.
Fascinating Dominik quote: “Blonde is supposed to leave you shaking. Like an orphaned rhesus monkey in the snow. It’s a howl or pain or rage.”
Consider the following and post whatever reactions that may come to mind:
