25 years have passed since my one and only viewing of Robert Zemeckis‘ What Lies Beneath (7.21.00). I was thinking last night about giving it another watch, but then I dredged up some memories and went “naaah.”
Besides not liking it much, I was also kind of distraught over Harrison Ford having made one of the biggest mistakes of his career by blowing off the role of Robert Wakefield in Steven Soderbergh and Stephen Gaghan‘s Traffic, which was shot around the same time as the Zemeckis and opened six months later (12.27.00).
Michael Douglas played the Wakefield role…skillfully, effectively. I couldn’t understand why Ford would reject this kind of acting opportunity in order to play a deranged husband in a piece of shit like What Lies Beneath. Douglas was totally fine in Traffic, but Ford might’ve been even better…we’ll never know,
“Gee, I really shouldn’t say that, being so normal and everything,” etc.
There’s something hilariously diseased in the way Peter Sellers improvises through this Lolita scene with James Mason. I laugh every time I watch this as it never stops being a sick-genius thing because (a) it feels so unhinged…an impishly eccentric, anything-goes riff on a closeted gay guy trying to ingratiate himself with a straight-arrow, and (b) at the same time Sellers is imitating Stanley Kubrick‘s Bronx-accented voice with a slight lisp…
“A couple of normal guys like us could get together and discuss world events…it’s great to have a lovely tall pretty little small daughter like that…I get sort of carried away, you know, being so normal and everything.”
The Dealey Plaza bullets will never add up or square with the official story. The first bullet missed, many have said, and hit a curb or something, the second bullet hit President Kennedy in the neck (although no one’s sure if it came from the TSBD or the grassy knoll) and the third bullet was the pink-spray head shot.
And no one will ever know what definitely happened because it’s been 62 years and people are still speculating and spitballing…forget it! The only irrefutable thing is that Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t fire four bullets.
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again — forget the back-of-the-head blowout testimony. It’s not in the Zapruder footage, and there was a young crew-cutted father who appeared on a local Dallas TV news station right after the shooting, who reported that the right side of JFK’s head took the damage, just like the Zapruder film shows.
So forget those crazy Parkland Hospital doctors who claimed otherwise. And double-triple-quadruple forget those doo-wacky conspiracy guys who believe that the Zapruder film was secretly altered…bullshit. Plus Time-Life’s Richard Stolley saw the Zapruder footage hours after the assassination and never said boo, etc.
And I’ll tell you something else: I’ve been to Dealey Plaza and have stood behind the grassy knoll wooden fence, etc., and eyewitnesses have never said that Elm Street, upon which JFK’s limo was cruising when the shots rang out, is more of a downward hill than a gentle slope…it’s a steeper hill than news footage indicates.
One more thing: Oliver Stone, who had hair plugs put in four decades ago, needs to go my Prague hair guy. He just needs to fortify things…no biggie.
According to Kid Rock, Donald Trump and Bill Maher put on their “what the hell, let’s be congenial” masks during last night’s dinner at the White House.
Like all meetings of longtime antagonists (i.e., RichardNixon and ChouenLai in ’72), it was a performative (i.e., less that 100% sincere) experience that outraged progressive Dems, of course, but technically harmed no one.
Hey, we were both born and raised near New York City! And we both despise wokesters.
Despite what The Daily Beast‘s Leigh Rimmins has reported, KR didn’t specifically say that Maher’s “mind was blown” — he said that his mind was blown while everyone was pleasantly surprised by the vibes.
This doesn’t change the fact that Trump is still an under-educated guy who likes McDonalds and probably farts a lot…a dangerously un-inquisitive, animal-level authoritarian, liar, short-fingered vulgarian and sociopath who’s shown very little respect for the U.S. Constitution, and who sure as shit proved this on 1.6.21.
Most directors understand that human feet should never be shown. Two who resisted this rule were Richard Quine and Ron Underwood. It’s wrong of me, even, to have posted the below photo…aaagghh!
Really attractive, well-shaped, perfectly pedicured feet are very rare in any realm. Usually female peds are more pleasing to the eye than men’s, but not in this instance. The gentleman in question is James Stewart.
In a story posted three hours ago, La Parisien‘s Renaud Baronianreported that Luca Guadagnino‘s After The Hunt may be headed for Cannes. But who knows?
If true and if the film plays as well as it most of it reads, Julia Roberts will probably emerge as a hot contender for the festival’s Best Actress prize. Maybe. Where’s the harm in generating a little optimism?
The culture has been telling smart, ambitious women to walk away when this or that dude has an issue or two…”you don’t need the imperfect man”…get shut of him, shut him out.
The culture isn’t wrong.
I was batting around .300 or .350 between my early 20s and late 30s, and even then my general feeling was on the downish side…that things weren’t really working out and that there wasn’t much hope for the future, relationship-wise. I can’t imagine what it must be like for homely guys with tennis-ball hair and lumpy bods to be striking out time and again, over and over. But that’s the reality out there. I don’t blame women a bit for being choosy.
Bill Maher’s Club Random with Maureen Dowd (posted on 3.30) is a pretty good one. They start talking about their favorite films around the 44:00 mark: Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Double Indemnity, Saving Private Ryan, Body Heat, Shakespeare in Love, etc.
Lusty, sexualized, infidelity-driven film noir “is my favorite genre,” Dowd says.
And then, at 46:03, she says that her all-time favorite in this realm is Jacques Tourneur‘s Out Of The Past (’47)…”you gotta watch it…Robert Mitchum, Kirk Douglas, Jane Greer…it’s the perfect film noir.” And Maher says, “Oh…never heard of it. Out of the Past?”
Lord knows there are several good films I haven’t seen and perhaps others I haven’t heard of, but good heavens. It’s one thing if you haven’t seen one of the most revered film noirs of all time, but to have never heard of it? Okay, man…some of us roll in different ways.
Dowd mentions that funny Body Heat scene in which Ted Danson‘s district attorney, who’s friendly with Bill Hurt‘s Ned Racine, reports that a little girl who had come upon Kathleen Turner‘s Matty Walker in a sexual situation…he reports that the girl drew a blank when it came to describing the facial features of the guy Walker was with, recalling only that he was short and bald. Danson: “I guess she’d never seen one angry before,”
Dowd converses like an everyday, unpretentious, water-cooler colleague…a very smart one. I listened to her speak inside L.A.’s Skirball Center 15 or 20 years ago. She and Alessandra Stanley were alternating on the mike.
NEW: Bill Maher, Maureen Dowd say Dems' woke era isn't over
DOWD: "[Dems] just stopped being any fun. They made everyone feel that everything they said and did, and every word, was wrong. And people don't want to live like that."
Nothing turns me on like luscious, highly detailed, well-rendered HD black-and-white films. I’ve loved watching them all my life and especially, since the aughts, in 1080p or 4K.
And by the same token, of course, I have no interest in watching crudely colorized monochrome knockoffs. No honorable cineaste tolerates them.
But — but! — if someone were to finesse an expert, top-of-the-line color transformation of Howard Hawks‘ Red River (’48) and issue it in 4K or at least 1080p, I would buy a copy tout suite.
I’m a fully contented owner of Criterion’s Red River Bluray, mind — it’s one of the handsomest monochrome westerns ever shot — but not capturing it in Technicolor was, I believe, a serious mistake on Hawks’ part.
Black-and-white was chosen for cost, I’m sure, but if there was ever a Hollywood example of penny-wise and dollar-foolish, Red River is it. Every frame of that film cries out for Technicolor hues.
Ditto in the matter of Hawks’ The Big Sky (‘52), another eye-filling outdoor adventure that was unfortunately shot in vivid monochrome. If you ask me the absence of color in this Kirk Douglas vehicle is a flat-out tragedy.
Which reminds me of the fact that you can’t even watch The Big Sky in 1080 or 4K — only in 480p standard def. It looks fairly awful. Which is kind of ridiculous in this day and age.
How many iPhones were shooting this as it happened? At least three. And the editing is pretty slick also. It’s all a staged performance by professionals, dammit! Nothing the least bit natural or spontaneous.
