I’m sitting in Chips (11908 Hawthorne Blvd, Hawthorne, CA 90250), a nostalgic old-school diner, while the recently purchased VW Beetle is being maintenanced.
With its naugahyde booths, formica tabletops and Venetian blinds on the windows, Chips is a close relation of the diner that was held up by Pumpkin and Honey-Bunny (Tim Roth, Amanda Plummer) in Pulp Fiction. That scene was shot in the Hawthorne Grill, an actual, since-demolished restaurant (14763 Hawthorne Blvd.) about 20 blocks south of Chips.
Otherwise this is a horrible area of town — a cultural Siberia pockmarked with the usual strip malls, modest bunaglow neighborhoods, small trees, gas stations, auto parts stores, stray dogs and friendly people coping with this or that form of quiet desperation.
The only other place of interest besides the Hawthorne Grill was the original Murry Wilson home (where Brian, Carl and Dennis grew up), but that was flattened in the ’80s to make way for the 105. Nothing in Hawthorne makes you want to stay — the whole area says “get the fuck out of here…run for your life!…run!”
And the music on the Chips sound system…yeesh. Right now they’re playing “Sugar Shack,” a 1963 cutesy pop tune about a guy falling in love with and then marrying a waitress. “Sugar Shack” was recorded by Jimmy Gilmer and the Fireballs at Norman Petty Studios in Clovis, New Mexico. Wiki excerpt: “The unusual and distinctive organ part was played by Petty on a Hammond Solovox, Model J.”
“Sugar Shack” is 56 years old. Do you think that people having breakfast in Americana diners 56 years hence (2075) will be playing tunes from the 20-teens? Not likely. They’ll probably be playing the same old dooh-wah-diddy-bop. Music from the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s never ends.
A day or two ago Variety‘s Chris Willmanattended a Sharon Tate triple feature at the New Beverly — Valley of the Dolls (awful), Fearless Vampire Killers (lesser Polanski but tolerable) and The Wrecking Crew (flat-out stinkeroonie).
Willman: “I enjoyed The Wrecking Crew maybe a little less than the audience at the Bruin in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood but what a doll.” What did Willman actually mean when he said he “enjoyed it a little less,” etc.? We can only guess, of course, but my presumption is that Willman hated it so much that at the halfway point he suddenly bolted into the New Beverly bathroom and threw up.
The fact that poor Sharon Tate died in a ghastly and horrific way doesn’t automatically mean that the films she made in the late ’60s were any good.
From Scott Feinberg’s intro to his “THR Awards Chatter” podcast with Shia (Honey Boy) Lebeouf: “I had just told the 33-year-old that Alma Har’el‘s Honey Boy — a film that he wrote about his traumatic upbringing as a child actor, and in which he plays his abusive father — not only impressed me, but left me feeling guilty for making dismissive assumptions about him in recent years as he repeatedly wound up in the headlines for all of the wrong reasons.
Lebeouf: “I think context is really important, and I think what Honey Boy does is it contextualizes who I was publicly, and kind of plays on it. And I’m grateful it’s effective.”
“Honey Boy, which premiered in January at Sundance, has played the fall film fest circuit and will be released by Amazon on Nov. 8. It is one of two LaBeouf projects currently garnering widespread acclaim. The other is Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz’s The Peanut Butter Falcon, a $6.2 million indie that premiered in March at SXSW, was released by Roadside Attractions on Aug. 23 and has grossed $20 million in the U.S., making it the top platform release of the year so far.
“It was while working on Peanut Butter Falcon that LaBeouf hit a personal low point that led to the beginnings of Honey Boy. Collectively, they represent one of the great comebacks in Hollywood.
All hail Hildur Guðnadóttir‘s cello-ish Joker score, which seems to seep into and finally inhabit Arthur Fleck’s tortured psyche. A classically trained cellist, the 37-year-old Guðnadóttir is an Icelandic musician and composer. She’s played and recorded with several bands I’ve never heard of, including Pan Sonic, Throbbing Gristle, Múm and Stórsveit Nix Noltes.
#Joker composer Hildur Guðnadóttir talks about the journey of the film, which is led by the cello, and how it reflects Arthur's mindset pic.twitter.com/4phD1ZCMKc
Catholicism and the Pope are concepts that millions still cling to worldwide. Because they offer a feeling of steadiness and security in a tumbling, tumultuous world. Included among the faithful, one presumes, are thousands of movie-worshipping Catholics, and so Fernando Meirelles and Anthony McCarten‘s The Two Popes (Netflix, 11.27) is, not surprisingly, faring well as a potential Best Picture nominee. The fact that it won the Audience Award at the 2019 Middleburg Film Festival is an indication of this.
I have nothing but respect and admiration for the film, and particularly for McCarten’s script (which is based on McCarten’s 2017 play, The Pope). In my humble opinion McCarten should definitely be nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay. And it seems increasingly likely that Jonathan Pryce‘s performance as the future Pope Francis (aka Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio) will be Best Actor-nominated as well.
But honestly? I still feel emotionally removed from The Two Popes (as I wrote in my 9.1.19 Telluride review). Because I don’t feel any sort of kinship, much less a profound one, with the Catholic Church. I never have and I never will.
I don’t believe in holiness. I don’t believe in the Vatican carnival. I don’t believe in robes. I don’t believe in red shoes. I believe in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel frescoes and in Charlton Heston‘s performance in The Agony and the Ecstasy, but I haven’t the slightest belief in those Vatican City guard uniforms or the mitre or the scepter of any of the theatrical trappings. I believe in humanity and simplicity. I’m not exactly saying that I believe in Pope Lenny more than Pope Francis, but in a way I kind of do. Almost.
I don’t believe in the Bible…not really. I certainly don’t believe in celibacy for priests, and I despise the thousands of priests who’ve molested children worldwide and the countless bishops and cardinals who’ve protected them from the consequences. I believe that women should definitely be admitted into the priesthood. And while I understand and respect the fact that millions believe in the Catholic mission and its hierarchy, I myself don’t. Catholicism is more against things than for them.
Fernando Meirelles‘ The Two Popes is an interesting, mildly appealing two-hander as far as it goes. I had serious trouble with the refrigator temps as I watched, but I probably would have felt…well, somewhere between faintly underwhelmed and respectfully attentive even under the best of conditions.
It’s a wise, intelligent, non-preachy examination of conservative vs progressive mindsets (focused on an imagined, drawn-out discussion between Anthony Hopkins‘ Pope Benedict and Jonathan Pryce‘s Pope Francis a few years back) in a rapidly convulsing world, and I could tell from the get-go that Anthony McCarten‘s script is choicely phrased and nicely honed. But I couldn’t feel much arousal. I sat, listened and pondered, but nothing ignited. Well, not much.
Possibly on some level because I’ve never felt the slightest rapport with the Catholic church, and because for the last 20 or 30 years I’ve thought of it in Spotlight terms, for the most part.
I love that Pope Francis (formerly or fundamentally Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio of Argentina) is a humanist and a humanitarian with simple tastes, and I was delighted when he jerked his hand away when Donald Trump tried to initiate a touchy-flicky thing a couple of years ago. And I’m certainly down with any film in which two senior religious heavyweights discuss the Beatles, “Eleanor Rigby” and Abbey Road, etc.
“I’d rather be remembered than rich.” — the late Robert Evans in a 1977 interview.
There’s something terribly somber and sobering in the idea of the churning Evans dynamo being silent and still, above and beyond the fact of a life having run its course and come to a natural end. I don’t like finality as a rule. I prefer the idea of fluidity, of a beating pulse and the constant search for action and opportunity. I don’t like it when a store closes and is all emptied out and boarded up with “for lease” signs pasted on the windows. Keep it going, sweep the floors, stock the shelves, pay the bills. All things must pass, of course, but not now…later.
The last time Evans and I saw each other was over dinner at the Palm in ’02, sometime around the release of Nanette Burstein and Brett Morgen‘s The Kid Stays in the Picture. Evans covered the meal, but they never brought him a check. I didn’t ask and he didn’t explain. Some kind of gratis deal he had with management — Evans arrives, orders, eats, leaves a generous tip and leaves.
In the published view of director Peter Bogdanovich, Evans “was good Hollywood, not bad Hollywood.”
When Evans broke in as a producer in the mid ’60s “he brought a fresh kind of attitude to the movies,” Bogdanovich says. “He had very good taste and he produced movies of his own that were damn good.
“He was a movie fan too. It’s rare to have executives that really like movies. Not all executives are like that. He was really enthusiastic, and he encouraged talent. I loved Bob. He was friendly and amiable and charming.”
In a 10.28 tribute pieceVariety‘s Owen Gleiberman wrote that “you can see why they thought Evans would be a movie star in the late ’50s. Evans was gleamingly handsome, yet he always had a touch of the geek about him. With his toothy grin and beautiful slick coif, he looked like a cross between Tom Cruise and the young Donald Trump, and as his career as an actor fizzled, the role of producer became the perfect fit for him. He was born not to tell a story but to sell it.”
Bogdanovich agrees: “Bob was the last of a breed. He connected to the Hollywood of the ’50s. They made fun of him because he was an actor who became a studio head. But why not? He played the part very well.”
But Glieberman and Bogdanovich disagree about Evans’ vision of a genetically Italian Godfather.
“The Godfather was the most important film of the decade, and it wouldn’t have been made the way it was without Robert Evans,” Gleiberman notes. “In hiring Francis Ford Coppola to direct, Evans grasped that the then-moribund gangster genre needed a major helping of ethnic authenticity; as much as that, he saw that it needed to be epic. The result was a new benchmark in operatic Hollywood realism.”
“Oh, yeah?” Bogdanovich more or less replies. “Evans offered me The Godfather right after The Last Picture Show. [But] I just wasn’t interested in doing a mob picture.” Not to mention the fact that Bogdanovich’s Serbian-Austrian heritage wasn’t exactly an ideal perspective for understanding and conveying the saga of the Corleone crime family.
What this means, of course, is that Evans only gradually came to understand that The Godfather had to be directed by a guy who understood Italian culture — the music, food, expressions, traditions, flavorings. Evans was’t a perfect genius but when the right idea came to him, he knew it.
“The evil that men do lives after them…the good is oft interred with their bones.” Not in Evans’ case. He was never my idea of even a half-evil guy, but he had his flawed aspects. But nobody’s talking about that stuff now. Only the good, only the glorious. That’s what friends are for.
What do Alan Parker‘s Angel Heart and Richard Donner‘s Lethal Weapon have in common, apart from having been released on the same day — 3.6.87? They both advanced what was then a radical new idea in movies — i.e., “the good guy did it.”
Two lean descriptions of Martin Scorsese‘s The Irishman (Netflix, 11.1 theatrical), and both absorbed within the last two days. The first is from New Yorker critic Anthony Lane: “Wild Strawberries with handguns.” The second is from Broadcast Film Critics Association honcho John DeSimio: “A film that is steadily, consistently and masterfully under the top.”
“I’ve just watched Todd Haynes‘ Dark Waters (Focus Features, 11.22). A true story, as you know, about a corporate attorney, a guy who made his living defending chemical companies, going after DuPont for polluting the water used by thousands of people in West Virginia. In some ways a familiar Erin Brockovich thing, but Haynes’ direction is first class, and Mark Ruffalo is excellent as the obsessive barrister. Keep your eyes peeled — it’s a good one.”
Having been a West Hollywood person since ’91, I know a lot of the local history and architectural lore, etc. I especially love visiting the homes and apartments of long-gone residents. But until last night I’d never visited the final home of F. Scott Fitzgerald at 1403 No. Laurel Ave. It’s a 90 year-old apartment building with peaked roofs, high ceilings in each unit, and a quiet, lulling vibe outside.
Fitzgerald lived on the second floor, but died of a heart attack at the nearby apartment of columnist girlfriend Sheila Graham, at 1443 Hayworth Ave. It happened on 12.21.40. Dude was only 44.
25 years of steady boozing and smoking won’t necessarily kill you, but they played a part in Fitzgerald’s case. He reportedly had a weak ticker to begin with. Five or six weeks prior to his death, Scott suffered a non-fatal heart attack at Schwab’s, reportedly while waiting to buy smokes.
Scott and Sheila had been together and more or less cohabiting since ’37. Legend has it that Fitzgerald’s next-door neighbors at the Laurel building were the unmarried Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz.
No, I’ve never seen Beloved Infidel (’59), partly because it doesn’t exactly have an exalted reputation but also because I’ve always found alcoholic characters dull and frustrating. This prejudice partially explains my longstanding dislike of John Huston‘s Under The Volcano. The one exception to HE’s alky rule is Mike Figgis‘s Leaving Las Vegas.
Word of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimybelieves that by simply reacting honestly to a question about superhero flicks, Martin Scorsese sparked a pushback movement that will continue to be felt for weeks, months and years to come. It was a kind of flashpoint Stonewall moment, Ruimy feels, and I for one was deeply impressed when I read this 10.26 riff.
HE respects and agrees with Ruimy’s essay. Plus it’s expressed through good, clean, non-fussy writing. Straight from the shoulder, heart and head simultaneously.
