Now I really fucking hate it. A movie aimed at money whores who ask “how much does this apartment cost?” Not to mention a matchmaker who smokes? That snippet when some angry dude says “is that my charger?” and then throws it into the kitchen sink…what is that? Chris Evans: “When I see your face, I see wrinkles and children that look like you….where does that leave us?” I kinda hate Dakota Johnson‘s breathy, inconclusive, opposite-of-Lauren Bacall voice. And the guy who says he doesn’t want a girlfriend “who’s over 20 BMI”? Isn’t that atypical? single women these days generally have a 30 BMI, and a fair amount are at 40 or over…right?
A chick flick, Materialists (A24) opens on 6.13.25. Be very, very concerned about a film from Celine Song.
In the original French-language shooting draft (dated 1972) of Bernardo Bertolucci and Franco Arcalli‘s Last Tango in Paris, which I scored a copy of yesterday, the beginning of the controversial sexual assault scene is described on page 97.
The scripted scene includes one of Tango‘s most famous lines, which in the finished film was spoken in English by Marlon Brando: “Go get the butter.” /p>
Brando’s character, a recently widowed hotel owner named Paul, is telling Maria Schneider‘s Jeanne to retrieve a stick of butter in the kitchen. Paul’s intent, we soon learn, is to use the butter as a lubricant in an imminent incident of back-door sexual assault. Here is a capture of page 97. Brando’s ominous line is clearly written in French: “Va chercher le beurre“
The script doesn’t describe an incident of anal penetration. It describes Paul flipping Jeanne over on her stomach and lying on top of her and holding her down, and she says with a tone of alarm, “No…no!” But it doesn’t specifically say that Paul pulls her pants down or that he enters her anus.
The person who passed along the 53-year-old Tango shooting draft (the PDF contains several notes that were hand-written by Bertolucci himself) explains as follows: “Yes, the handwritten notes [were written] by Bertolucci. This was his personal copy of the script. The controversial scene starts from page 97.
“In the script there is the butter as a prop, and also a scene of [sexual] violence that Bernardo explained to Maria Schneider and to the troupe, very accurately, before the filming began, as [an unsettling] sexual scene. This is what Vittorio Storaro told me.
“Anyway, not only that scene but much of Last Tango in Paris is an improvisation, which started from the script.
“The butter as a symbol of the family was something shared in common between Brando and Bertolucci, who both grew up in the country.”
Jessica Palud‘s Being Maria, which opens commercially on Thursday, 3.20, explores the ramifications and results of trauma visited upon poor Schneider, who died of cancer in 2011. Her troubles were due to the shooting of the infamous anal sex scene, the film seems to say, and especially due to persistent toxic reactions to that scene. The film’s main topic is the jagged relationship between Schneider, Brando and Bertolucci.
There’s a scene in which Schneider (played by Anamaria Vartolomei) states that the sexual assault scene was a Brando-Bertolucci idea that was sprung on her at the last minute — “It wasn’t scripted like that.”
“Here also is a very important French-language TV interview with Schneider, aired in 2006, in which she clearly says that she would make Last Tango in Paris again because it became part of the history of cinema.
“Schneider also says clearly that she started to take drugs because of the fame and controversy, not because of the content of Tango or that scene in particular. “She also says that the scene was not real, but played realistically. (When the butter scene controversy first broke in the mid teens, some thought it was a real rape). “You should listen to it all with someone who can translate it for you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdRoJoDTfUU“
…about an apparently prevalent view that Disney’s woked-up, anti-traditional Snow White isn’t too bad or is even moderately pleasing. I wanted a howling catastrophe of some kind, but this, I’m sorry to admit, apparently isn’t in the cards.
You can’t trust the early-preview whores, of course, but I trust The Ankler‘s Richard Rushfield to some extent, and after attending last weekend’s premiere screening the worst things RR said were (a) “this might not be your cup of tea” and (b) “If you don’t want to see a family film closely based on the original story of Snow White, then Snow White probably isn’t your movie.”
Wait…what does that second quote even mean? Given what Snow White star Rachel Zegler more or less said early on (i.e., “fuck Disney’s 1937 version…we’re past that shit!…our Snow White is a leader!”), why doesn’t that sentence read “if you want to see a family film closely based on the story of Snow White, then Snow White probably isn’t your movie.” Right?
I will see Snow White at the earliest opportunity (Thursday, 3.20), and if there’s any way to honestly and fairly trash it, i will naturally do so. But only if the condemnation is earned.
What follows are not White Lotus spoilers but little dingle-daisy teasers…most of them hinted or suggested within the episode 6 trailer.
Sure enough, the brother-on-brother handjob scene happens in episode 6 (airing on Sunday, 3.23), but then you knew that. At least there will be no more whoo-boy ass-fucking reveries from Sam Rockwell….that shit has been put to bed, thank God.
Series creator Mike White decides to forsake the general bacchanalia and return to the tightening of story strands….a welcome development.
A bit more attention is paid to Jon Gries‘ Gary / Greg, the rich baldie who’s with Charlotte Le Bon‘s Chloe. We know he’s thinking about somehow icing Natasha Rothwell‘s Belinda Lindsey, the chubby spa manager who suspects his complicity in the Sicily drowning death of Jennifer Coolidge’s Tanya McQuoid.
Will Carrie Coon‘s corporate attorney be tpipped off by the Texas Trumpie wife (Leslie Bibb) that after Coon went to bed Michelle Monaghan‘s Jaclyn Lemon fucked that muscle-bound Russian guy…the guy Coon was briefly interested in?
The wimpy Asian security guy…Jesus, show a little gravitas…be a fucking man.
Back in Bangkok Rockwell, despite having given Walton Goggins a gun inside a black leather vag, wants nothing to do with Goggins zotzing that guy who allegedly murdered his dad.
Oh, and “what is it like to die?” You know which wealthy resort guest asks this question. It’s not even necessary to guess.
…because she confessed to Vanity Fair‘s Michelle Ruiz that she felt a little creeped out by the presence of Marty Supreme‘s intimacy coordinator. Because GP is 52 (born in ’72 and therefore a bit of an old schooler. Se7en is a few months shy of 30 years old, but GP’s first two films were 1991’s Shout and Hook)…obviously a bit skeptical about the kneejerk anti-male belief system that result4er in wokey #MeToo theology, Doing her part to support the general public revulsion towards wokeism….thanks, Gwynneth. Seriously. Sincere HE respect.
Gone at 83, Jesse Colin Young lived a healthy, vibrant, productive life. Strictly a boomer, hippie-heyday guy. Beautiful, velvety, high-pitched voice. I stopped listening decades ago, but not out of boredom or anything. I just moved on for whatever reasons. Full respect.
I’m just reminding the open-hearted, fair-minded contingent that I’m no longer paywalling this site, and that the content is entirely free and wide open, and this is the only pitch I’m making. $25 or $50….whatever’s affordable. Oh, and if you’d rather keep your donation anonymous, please send it to my Venmo account — @gruver56.
My mind is currently blown and spinning by a $500 donation that came in Tuesday afternoon…wow.
3.18, 7:45 pm update: The total donations have almost reached $2500 (including Venmo). I need another $1K to make the Venice funding goal….gettin’ there, gettin’ there. Thanks to all the generous HE friendos. Love you guys.
With the Telluride Film Festival (which I’ve been attending since 2010) no longer an option, it’s really important to attend Venice. I can’t just be a Manhattan-centric guy. I have to get out there and engage with the world-class sharpies. I’ve visited the city of Venice six or seven times as a regular wanderer, but I’ve never attended the Venice Film Festival before.
Should enough dough rolls in I could use to it to also attend the ’25 Cannes Film Festival, which is only eight weeks off. But I don’t think this will happen. If I can only raise enough for Venice, so be it and thanks from the bottom of my heart.
I mentioned a couple of days ago that I’ll be attending a Being Maria post-screening q&a at Manhattan’s Quad Cinema. Thursday evening (3.20) at 7:15 pm. Director Jessica Palud and Matt Dillon (who does an excellent job of portraying Marlon Brando in the film) will be taking questions.
Being Maria, which I saw last night, explores the ramifications and results of trauma visited upon poor Maria Schneider, who died of cancer in 2011. Her troubles were due to the shooting of the infamous anal sex scene, the film says, and especially due to the persistent toxic reactions to that scene. The main topic is the jagged relationship between Schneider, Brando and Last Tango in Paris director-cowriter Bernardo Bertolucci.
I for one believe that it’s a dishonest film as Schneider (played by Anamaria Vartolomei) states that the sexual assault scene was a Brando-Bertolucci idea that was sprung on her at the last minute, which wasn’t the all of it or so I strongly suspect.
Bertolucci stated in 2016 that the only surprise visited upon Schneider was the use of butter as a lubricant, and that Schneider, having read the shooting script, knew that the scene would depict sexual assault.
I’m presuming that Bertolucci was speaking honestly when he said this, and yet Schneider claimed years ago that the anal sex scene wasn’t scripted but was cooked up on the morning of filming between Bertolucci and Brando…an improvisational thing altogether and not just regarding the use of butter.
And yet before shooting the scene Bertolucci (played by Giuseppe Maggio) tells Schneider that it will represent a breaking of trust between the Paul and Jeanne characters.
I have reason to believe that the Tango shooting script spells out the assault with some clarity, and I may even have proof that it’s actually in the shooting script, as I received a 100% authentic Tango shooting script PDF earlier today.
The 201-page script is all in French, but if the scene is in there I’ll find it.
‘
A friend says that the Tango shooting draft “indicates the scene in question will depict a sexual violation.”
Before shooting the scene Bertolucci tells Schneider that the scene will enact rape and represent dominance.
I won’t know for sure until I’ve read the 201-page shooting draft cover to cover, but I do trust (or WANT to trust) that Bertolucci, being a first-rate artist, a legendary sensualist and an immaculate truth-teller, was not fibbing in 2016 when he recounted the 1972 filming episode in question.
The fact that Jack Nicholson was “that guy” between the late ’60s to the mid ’90s, especially the first few years when he was relatively slender and had decent hair…that, for me, was part of the joy of living, fan-wise, absorption-wise. Nicholson’s hot run began with Easy Rider (’69) and lasted over 25 fucking years. Okay, he didn’t really start to downshift until after his last great role, in The Departed (’06).
This morning a producer friend told me about how Jack Nicholson saved Jim Harrison‘s financial ass in 1978 with a loan of $15K.
The late author-poet (whose recent death prompted yesterday’s post) became friendly with Nicholson through novelist and screenwriter Thomas McGuane, who had written The Missouri Breaks (’76). McGuane and Harrison had met from their mutual base of Livingston, Montana. Harrison published three books in the early to mid ’70s — “Wolf: A False Memoir” (’71), “A Good Day to Die” (’73) and “Farmer” (’76), but the income from these works was negligible and by ’78 he was “broke and all but starving,” the producer relates. Harrison was working on “Legends of the Fall” (which was actually three novellas — “Revenge,” “The Man Who Gave Up His Name” and “Legends of the Fall”) and so Nicholson, advised by McGuane of Harrison’s desperate situation, stepped in with the $15K, which gave Harrison enough breathing room to finish. “Fall” was published in ’79. It became Harrison’s biggest success of his life at the time, and he lived more or less comfortably after that.
Greenwich Entertainment will release the new Bonjour Tristesse sometime in the summer. Otto Preminger’s 1958 version used both color and black-and-white. In the newbie Lily McInerny plays Jean Seberg, Chloë Sevigny is Deborah Kerr, Claes Bang is David Niven, and Aliocha Schneider plays Goeffrey Horne.
My favorite aspect of the Preminger film? Saul Bass‘s poster art.
In a lengthy 2.10.25 New Yorker profile, White Lotus creator Mike White laid out the basic game plan of The White Lotus. The default idea, as always, has been to “find ways of depicting gay life as transgressive or even perverted.” White: “It’s not all harmless, but it’s not inherently harmful.”
Over the show’s three seasons White has made certain that the quivering pleasures that come from the heavenly stimulation of men’s anuses…giving and receiving analingus, guys being fucked in the ass, slurping bro kisses, the visual savoring of ripped male bods…are always lurking or hovering or what-have-you. Women also seek and receive a fair amount of hetero dick action, of course, but anal bend-overs are obviously closer to White’s heart.
Last night Sam Rockwell‘s Frank, a longtime friend of Walton Goggins‘ Rick…a dude who’s obviously straight…delivered a long confession about his once active and very bacchanalian Bangkok sex life, and the main part of his confession was about…well, lots of anal action. Frank wanted to feel what it’s like to be a hot Asian girl, and so he gussied himself up in feminine apparel and invited a series of white dudes to fuck him in the ass, over and over and over. And then, gradually, he decided to forego the endless cycle of lust, frustration and anxiety and become a Buddhist.
Rockwell delivered Frank’s anal soliloquy in a certain whack-ass, wide-eyed fashion…the kind of acting that says to the audience “this is kinda ridiculous…you know it, I know it. I’m a hetero dude…there’s nothing the least gay or Mike White-ish about me…and here I am talking about getting fucked by lots and lots of guys….logjammin’, logjammin’, logjammin’. I’ve never taken it up the ass but listen to my White Lotus shpiel…I’m goin’ nuts here.”
Outside of gay porn, there hasn’t been this much devotional attention paid to the pleasuring of male anuses since Pier Paolo Pasolini‘s Salo, or The 120 days of Sodom (’75). White would probably never admit it, but I began to develop an idea that his basic White Lotus goal is is out-Pasolini Pasolini. All White has to do to even things up is to arrange for a young straight woman to take it up the ass…I shouldn’t say any more. All I’m saying is that White is really playing the transgressive card this season.
Next week, more brotherly incest with a beneath-the-sheets handjob!
How can I resist a “new 4K digital restoration, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack approved by Friedkin”? Plus an “alternate 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack…one 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and two Blu-rays with the film and special features”?
“I’ve seen Sorcerer (a terrible title in terms of what the 1977 Joe Popcorn crowd was led to expect) six or seven times, but until last night I’d never wondered about the gas. The two trucks make a 200-mile journey through the jungle, and driving entirely in first and second gear. Surely they couldn’t make the trip on a single tank each, and yet I didn’t notice any extra cans of gas strapped to the flatbeds. And how long did the journey take? Two days? 36 hours? The film gives you no real clue about the clock.
“And Scheider getting iced at the very end seems wrong. The trip was hell but he made it through and had earned redemption by delivering the nitroglycerin. I wanted his character to taste the satisfaction of a job well done, and perhaps a little serenity.
“Scheider apparently wasn’t happy with how he came off. From the Wiki page: “Scheider was angry that in the final cut Friedkin removed a subplot that showed his character in a more sympathetic light; it involved him befriending a small boy from the village. For that reason, Scheider consistently refused to comment on the film.”
“I’ve never completely bought William Friedkin‘s theory that Sorcerer died because the hugely popular Star Wars, which opened on 5.25.77 (or a month before Friedkin’s film), had ushered in a sudden sea-change in mainstream cinematic appetites.
“He meant that a new comic-book, popcorn-high attitude had taken over, and had brought about a consequential lessening of interest in gritty, noirish, character-driven adult dramas.
“Sorcerer, of course, was never going to be a hugely commercial thing. It’s a fairly downbeat, men-against-the-elements adventure flick made for guys. Women don’t go for sweaty, atmospheric, end-of-the-road Latin American fatalism.
“You But I suspect that Sorcerer would have been at least a modest success if it had delivered a sense of justice in the case of Roy Scheider‘s character, a wise guy on the run from the New Jersey mob.
“Sorcerer is about four desperate men hired to deliver nitroglycerin in trucks to a burning oil well in the middle of the South American jungle. Scheider is the only one who makes it in the end. He’s gone through hell, and despite his previous criminal inclinations, the audience has been taught to respect him for getting through this terrible ordeal. They may not love him, but he’s done a really tough thing and earned, in movie-story terms, a kind of redemption. A little peace and gratification.
“But then Friedkin and screenwriter Walon Green turn around and stab Scheider with an icepick. Mob assassins (accompanied by a friend who had helped him escape the country and who has now obviously betrayed him) arrive at the very end to rub him out, and there’s no escape.
“Yeah, yeah, I know — that’s what ‘noir’ is. Life is hard and cruel and then you die. But that’s not how audiences see it.
“I felt this way when I first saw Sorcerer, and I felt it again last night. Scheider doesn’t deserve death — he’s earned a chance to live again and maybe do things right for the first time in his life. But Sorcerer rejects this notion, and that’s why audiences rejected it. It left a sour taste by (a) making it clear that Scheider’s scummy, low-life character is possessed by fierce determination and concentration and courage, and then (b) zotzing him anyway.
“That’s a kind of ‘fuck you’ to the audience, a kind of a burn.
“This, trust me, is a major reason why Sorcerer screwed the pooch. A movie doesn’t have to end happily or sadly, but it does have to end on a note of justice.”
