It goes without saying that Chris Nolan‘s forthcoming The Odyssey will have to surpass (a) Mario Camerini and Kirk Douglas‘s Ulysses (’54), a cheeseball fantasy-adventure based on Homer’s epic poem, and (b) Andrei Konchalovsky‘s 1997 two-part miniseries that starred Armand Assante, Greta Scacchi, Irene Papas, Isabella Rossellini, Bernadette Peters, Eric Roberts, Geraldine Chaplin, Jeroen Krabbe, Christopher Lee and Vanessa Williams.
I’m not very knowledgable about the Kazakhstan plane crash, but it may have been caused by a bird strike. I’m reading that one engine was lost, but the landing area was fairly flat and wide open so couldn’t the (now dead) pilot have attempted some kind of half-assed bellyflop landing? Why couldn’t he ease into a landing…why did he have to crash into the ground at a sharp angle and cause a fireball explosion?
15 years ago a bird strike caused the loss of both engines when a commuter flight took off off from LaGuardia, and yet somehow pilot “Sully” Sullenberger (aka Tom Hanks) managed to skillfully land the plane in the Hudson river with no loss of life.
I remember watching this 208-minute doc with 18-year-old Jett in the summer of ’06, and his saying around the 70- or 80-minute mark, or roughly where Dylan’s career was in ’60 or ’61, “I don’t get it” — i.e., what was the big deal about this guy?
That’s because Dylan didn’t really come into full flower until ’63, and because Part One of No Direction Home (roughly the 110-minute mark) ends with Dylan’s triumphant performance at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival. That’s when the heavy journey really began, and when the tectonic plates began to shift.
People forget that Dylan wasn’t fully free of his lefty-social-protest folk troubadour chapter until Another Side of Bob Dylan (8.8.64). And for many (including myself), he didn’t really hit the brass-ring zeitgeist jackpot until Bringin’ It All Back Home” (4.10.65).
I offer no apologies or explanations as to why I’m strictly a once-a-year churchgoer. That said, this evening’s service was soothing, familial, good-vibey in a Brian Wilson way, and not too long.
I’m inclined to half-disbelieve Zarem’s stories about (a) John Travolta and Gerard Depardieu having had a thing sometime in the late ’70s and (b) Katie Holmes walking in on Tom Cruise and David Beckham. (A friend who worked for Zarem in NYC says “I heard about Travolta and Depardieu back in the day.”)
So I’m inclined toward suspicion but I’m not 100% certain that Zarem was bullshitting about Cruise and Beckham. I’m asking for opinions, suspicions, intuitions.
Bobby Zarem, the whipsmart, highly-charged, occasionally volatile New York publicist who “conceived” the “I Love N.Y.” campaign and represented a cavalcade of big Hollywood clients (Sylvester Stallone, Jack Nicholson, Eddie Murphy, Alan Alda, Cher, Dustin Hoffman, Michael Caine, Sophia Loren, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Pee-Wee Herman) during his ’70s and ’80s heyday, and whom I dealt with as a Manhattan-based journalist from the late ’70s to ’83 and worked for in Los Angeles in ’85 and ’86….poor Bobby died today in his home town of Savannah.
Lung cancer got him. Zarem was 84. I somehow can’t imagine Bobby being in heaven or in hell. I kinda see him hovering over Savannah now, but without angel wings. That town is full of ghosts.
Somewhere along the way Zarem picked up the name “super-flack.” He certainly seemed to earn that title during his peak period. To me he became a p.r. legend when he was chased down a street by protestors during the shooting of Fort Apache, The Bronx, somewhere near City Hall. That’s when Zarem, already noted for his colorful manner and being a mainstay at Elaine’s and whatnot, seemed to become a brand…an embodiment of the spirit of rough-and-tumble, pre-corporate, pre-Giuliani Manhattan…the vaguely odorous city captured by Sidney Lumet‘s Prince of the City, and which no longer exists.
Bobby was a character…a tireless, Yale-educated, quintessential Manhattan operator…hustler, gadfly, human locomotive, idea man.
It’s not as if Zarem was often angry or arguing. He was primarily a charmer and an enthusiast. But when he got angry he was amazing. I remember being deeply impressed by his ability to tear people’s heads off without degenerating into sputtering incoherence. When Bobby was pissed he became a kind of dinosaur, a force of nature — the back of his neck and face would turn almost cherry red — but he was always lucid and razor-tongued. I remember saying to myself once, “Wow, I wish I could be that intellectually commanding when I get angry.” But I could never manage it, which is one reason why I’ve always turned it down.
Zarem was driven, neurotic, larger than life, meticulous, a bundle of nerves, occasionally volcanic and every inch a New Yorker. He was a magnificent schmoozer. His hair wasn’t as frizzy as that of Larry Fine of the ThreeStooges, but I sometimes regarded him as Fine-like, if you could re-imagine Fine as one of the smartest stooges to ever walk the earth.
I last saw Bobby when he invited me to his Savannah home in…I forget, 2012 or thereabouts. I don’t want to dissect the arc of his wild career or his character traits, and I’ll leave the N.Y. Times-like obits to the Times and other major-reach organs, but Zarem’s Wiki page makes for great reading.
Here’s a rundown of things I’m thankful to Zarem about…things that happened or were made possible by his largesse or whim:
(a) By working with and for Zarem I savored occasionally glancing, sometimes fascinating face-time with Sylvester Stallone, Jack Nicholson, Jane and Peter Fonda, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, Kirk Douglas, Andy Vajna and Mario Kassar, Pee-Wee Herman…more names and faces than I can actually recall off the top.
(b) I became one of Douglas’s flirtations back in ’82 after an Elaine’s luncheon thrown by Zarem on behalf of the yet-to-shoot Eddie Macon’s Run. I was subsequently flown to Laredo to report on the shooting of that film for the New York Post. Universal publicity conveyed a certain disappointment that my article didn’t mention Eddie Macon’s Run more often, and that I spent too many paragraphs talking about Douglas’s career. Bobby dutifully called to inform me of their disappointment, adding that “this isn’t the end of the world.”
Douglas talked about anything and everything during our chats, and I remember his being fairly wide-open with his impressions about Stanley Kubrick (i.e., “Stanley the prick”), with whom he’d famously partnered on Paths of Glory and Spartacus. I told him I half-loved the foyer freakout scene with Lana Turner in The Bad and the Beautiful. And much of The Devil’s Disciple. And almost all of Champion. And every frame of Paths of Glory and Lust for Life and Lonely Are The Brave.
Sam Harris on the left’s racial derangement syndrome [14:25]: “You have to go all the way to the neo-Nazis to find people on the right who are as vocal about the salience of race and racial differences [as people on the left are]. It’s patently crazy in my view.
“There are many ways to come at this but what’s wrong with identity politics, to come back to the Daniel Penny-Jordan Neely case…if you described a situation on a subway car in which a violently deranged and threatening person has entered a subway car and terrified everyone including women and children, and another man, at some risk to himself and at obvious risk of future prosecution, stood up and tried to pacify the aggressive person, at first using a minimum amount of force but because of a lack of perfect skill winds up injuring or even killing the aggressor…
“If you describe this situation to left-of-center people, and I mean just a step left-of-center, these are people who don’t know how they feel as you describe this situation…they don’t know how to feel about it unless you tell them the skin colors of the people involved. And if you swap the skin colors…the white-skinned Penny being the aggressor and Neely being the man who tries to restrain him and winds up killing him, they feel a different way…these markers of identity are incredibly salient for them morally.”
In my mind or memory, the great Michel Hordern enjoyed four career highlights — (a) the howling Jacob Marley in Brian Desmond Hurst’s A Christmas Carol (’51 — aka Scrooge), (b) Ashe, the effete, seemingly gay British fellow who first approaches Richard Burton on behalf of the East Germans in The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (’65), (c) the absurd British officer who gave the “wily pathan” speech in How I Won The War (’67) and (d) the narrator of Barry Lyndon (’75).
Marley is the high-water mark because Hordern plays him so broadly and flamboyantly, and especially because of his banshee wail when Alistair Sim‘s Ebenezer Scrooge tells Marley he’s not an actual presence. I’ve never believed that Hordern did the actual wailing — the scream is too high-pitched for an actor with such a deep, smooth voice — but it’s wonderful all the same.
There’s one thing that elite film critics like Bilge Ebiri never touch with a ten-foot pole, and that’s how a given film feels at the very end. And the way a film feels at the finale is, of course, always a measure of whether or not the ultimate fate of the characters seems fair or reasonable.
Did a character fuck up badly and maybe hurt someone as a result? Then he or she deserves to feel some degree of pain at the finale. Has a character been falsely accused of something he/she didn’t do? Then his/her lack of guilt should be revealed at the end. He/she doesn’t have to end up rich or married to a movie star or elected President of the United States, but the record needs to be set straight to some extent.
If a more or less decent, fair-minded character is hit by lightning or a falling tree limb at the very end of a film and dies, that’s a completely shitty ending. “What did that happen for?”, the audience will say. No good reason, says the director or screenwriter. We just felt like killing him/her off because, you know, life can be randomly cruel at times. Audience: “Yeah? Well, fuck you then!”
A film doesn’t have to end happily or sadly or humorously or tragically, but you have to feel on some level that the characters have met with a fair and even-handed fate — that what happened or didn’t happen to them seems justified.
When George Kennedy‘s psychopathic asshole character was killed and eaten by guard dogs at the end of Michael Cimino‘s Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, there was no disputing that he’d gotten what he deserved.
Ditto when Elliot Gould‘s Phillip Marlowe shot Jim Bouton‘s Terry Lennox at the end of The Long Goodbye.
I’ve noted a couple of times that the ending of The Godfather, Part II wan’t an upper but it felt justified. Michael Corleone has grown into a monster, and at the end he’s left all alone with his recollections of the idealistic youth he used to be and a realization that this younger version of himself has more or less died. Not a happy ending but a fair one. Corleone has accrued all the power but lost his soul.
Same thing with Paul Newman at the end of Hud. He takes a swing of beer and says “fuck it” but he’s no happy camper. He will have very little love or serenity in his life, and he knows it and so do we.
The ending of Million Dollar Baby totally works. Clint’s character is devastated for what he felt he had to do, and he’s alone at the end in that diner. But he did what he felt was right. A sad but even-handed ending.
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? is a tragedy that ends with Jane Fonda‘s character getting what she wants, in a sense. Obviously an unhappy fate but she gets what she wants. The ending works. It feels fair, I mean, given who she was and the dark forces weighing upon her (including her own fatalistic attitude) and the options she no longer has.
I know that life can be horribly unfair at times and that the worst things can happen to the nicest people, but we’re not talking about life here but the scheme of good drama. If the characters in a film don’t meet with a fair fate, something feels wrong and audiences get angry.
The ending of The Deer Hunter is one of the oddest, least morally satisfying finales of all time. I sat there seething and hissed through my teeth, “You stupid rural fuckheads…singing ‘God Bless America’…God, not a clue!”
So fuck the critical elite for having given films like The Brutalist, Maria and (from what I’ve been told by trusted viewers) I Saw The TV Glow a pass without noting how it makes you feel at the end, which is fucking awful.
This is why people don’t trust elite film critics. They don’t lay it on the line about how movies feel and more particularly about whether the payoff feels “right.” I do this all the time because that’s how I roll, but they don’t. Just saying.
And I’ve heard his voice on hundreds of YouTube quickies. Something about the flatness of tone, the way he pronounces “the hand of God” and “out of fear“…he just sounds like a carnival huckster or some commercial announcer from some remote radio station. And I’m wondering if anyone knows his name because he deflates my soul like no other video narrator.
Older dudes should stay the hell away from young women under the age of 20. Once she hits 20 (i.e., the age of a typical college junior), all bets are off. But when it comes to men who are more than ten years older than the woman in question, the age of consent shouldn’t really apply. If they’re under 20, keep your damn distance.
It is therefore fair and appropriate to condemn Matt Gaetz for having had sex with a 17 year-old on two different occasions at a party.
The $400 Gaetz gave her is, I believe, neither here nor there.
Step back for a second and ask if a man giving money to a woman he’s sexually interested in….well, isn’t that the way it usually works? An expensive dinner date, help on the rent, a weekend at a pricey resort, a trip to Europe for a week or two, diamond necklaces and bracelettes…sex without love or charm or serious passion can be a barren thing, but guys have always paid for primal pleasures. Way of the world.
Keep in mind also that there are seven states in which the legal age of consent is 17: Colorado, Illinois, Louisiana, Missouri, New York, Texas, Wyoming.
There are quite a few more states in which the legal age of consent is, believe it or not, 16: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut, Georgia, Hawaii, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, etc.
In short, there are roughly 35 states (more?) in which an adult male having sex with a 16- or 17-year-old, however distasteful or odious this might be if the male is significantly (more than ten years) older, is not illegal.
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Snicker #1: “This is not absolutely authoritative, but a former Amazon hotshot confides that Amazon and MGM Studios honcho Jennifer Salke has never seen any of the James Bond films before Daniel Craig‘s.”
Snicker #2: “Salke considers anything made before the ’80s to be an old movie. She’s not interested in the classics, and never reads scripts.”
Snicker #3: “You can ask people from her NBC days about this, but agents and managers [will tell you] she never read scripts. She just makes deals with name talents like the Russo brothers and greenlights crap like Red One. She’s not material-driven.”
Snicker #4: “Things were chugging along fine at MGM when Mike DeLuca, who obviously knows Bond and isn’t wokey, was running the show.”
