Yesterday Collider posted an interview with GuillermodelToro in which he elaborated (somewhat) about his vision of Nightmare Alley, which might have starred LeonardoDiCaprio but will, in fact, star BradleyCooper.
GDT: “The [William Lindsay Gresham] book was given to me in 1992 by RonPerlman, before I saw the TyronePower movie, and I loved the book. My adaptation that I’ve done with [co-writer] Kim Morgan is not necessarily…the entire book is impossible, it’s a saga. But there are elements that are darker in the book, and it’s the first chance I have…in my short films I wanted to do noir. It was horror and noir. And now is the first chance I have to do a real underbelly of society type of movie. [There are] no supernatural elements. Just a straight, really dark story.”
FBI and local Floridian law enforcement should be immediately advised. This radical fanatic is no different than any ISIS murderer. Hollywood Elsewhere lives fairly close to Silverman and hereby offers to do whatever I can do within reason to help protect her — this is horrendous.
This is Adam Fannin of the Stedfast Baptist Church in Florida and he is going to get me killed. pic.twitter.com/I6Us59o59v
And speaking of contrarian uglies, TheWrapreported this evening that the FBI has advised Rosanna Arquette to make her Twitter account private after online critics attacked her yesterday for tweeting that she was ashamed of being “white and privileged.”
Arquette to TheWrap‘s Sean Burch and Sharon Waxman: “Yes, I’m locked to protect myself…I was told by [the] FBI to lock it up. There are toxic and very vicious people on social media. Threatening and cruel. I said yesterday that I am ashamed of the color of my skin. I am privileged just because I’m white. I feel shame. Because of all the violence that is happening in America and other racist countries.”
Updated Thursday evening: It’s hardly sticking my neck out to say that Martin Scorsese‘s The Irishman will definitely be Best Picture nominated, and that it’s looking like the odds-on favorite to win. Because apart from the story being about Robert De Niro‘s Frank Sheeran taking a long, hard look at his life, it’s also a Scorsese sum-upper — a kind of “who am I and what have I accomplished?” movie, the fifth and final Scorsese gangster flick that will assess the previous four (Goodfellas, The Departed, Mean Streets, Casino) along with itself, and issue a late-in-life assessment of the moral, ethical and aesthetic meat of the matter. Half street saga, half melancholy elegy. A cinematic equivalent. if you will, of Frank Sinatra‘s “It Was A Very Good Year.”
I wouldn’t call myself a devoted reader of popular fiction, but in the late ’70s I was heavily into all things Ira Levin (Rosemary’s Baby, The Stepford Wives, Sliver, A Kiss Before Dying, Deathtrap). Authors of his sort are sometimes under-appreciated, but Levin was a gifted craftsman. He really knew how to shape a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter, a story.
And then along came Levin’s heyday period — the novel of The Boys From Brazil in ’76, and then his most successful play, Deathtrap, in early ’78.
I loved The Boys From Brazil — so deliciously written, so crafty and hooky. All through ’77 and most of ’78 I was highly cranked about Franklin Schaffner’s film version, which I anticipated would be the equal of Roman Polanski‘s Rosemary’s Baby (’68). How could it not be?
I also felt a certain personal investment due to Jeremy Black, the younger, blue-eyed brother of ex-girlfriend Sophie Black, having been cast as a clone of the young Adolf Hitler.
Then I attended a press screening of The Boys From Brazil in September of ’78, and was startled — the word is actually “stunned” — by how disappointing it seemed.
Gregory Peck was too mannered and actorish as the evil Josef Mengele, but Laurence Olivier‘s performance as Nazi-hunter Ezra Liberman was steady and invested. The film wasn’t inept or clumsy, exactly, but somehow it never took flight. “How could this have happened?” I wondered, shaking my head. But it became a mediocre film for the most part.
And on top of everything else Schaffner hadn’t given poor Jeremy the right kind of direction in a couple of scenes. What a bummer.
It just goes to show that any adaptation of a catchy, fine-tuned novel can be messed up if there’s a will to do so, and especially if the wrong director is in charge.
Can anyone name similar cases? A novel they were in love with, and then the film came along and the reaction was “what happened?”
“Five or six weeks ago a major renovation began, and it’s still happening. That’s not the problem, but the sudden plunge in store temperature is.
“Last night and again tonight the temperature dropped to that of a typical refrigerator. Or should I say freezer? For years and years the same cool but tolerable climate has been the norm in this store. Now and all of a sudden, the place has turned into Antarctica. I’m talking fall jacket and scarf weather. Gloves even. I’m not exaggerating.
Last night I complained to a manager at the checkout counter. She said she knew it had turned suddenly cold and that she certainly understood my discomfort, but said she couldn’t do anything about it, blah blah. I complained again tonight to another manager (a heavy-set guy in his 30s with glasses), and he said he had no control over the matter. The colder temperature was “a corporate decision“, he said, and that he had nothing to say about it.
“‘But it’s FREEZING in here,’ I said. ‘And this lower temperature has only just began. I noticed it last night for the first time, and it’s freezing again tonight. I’ve been loyally shopping her for years and it’s really unpleasant, man.’
“The heavy-set manager muttered ‘well’ and shrugged his shoulders. Which was like waving a red cape.
“‘This is your response?’ I replied. ‘You have no say in the matter and it’s a corporate decision blah blah, and so you’ve washed your hands of the matter? Your store is no longer a pleasant environment to shop in. Do you care about this, homey? Is this of any concern at all?'”
The plan, apparently, is to drive people away from Pavilions and into the arms of Gelson’s (Santa Monica and Sweetzer). Except Gelson’s is more costly.
I’m looking forward to catching Pedro Almodovar‘s Pain and Glory for the second time at the Telluride Film Festival. Because Almodovar’s films are always worth a second look. And who knows — maybe I’ll come away with a greater degree of enthusiasm this time. Antonio Banderas won the Cannes Film festival’s Best Actor prize, after all. Respect must be paid.
Posted from Cannes on 5.18.19: “A meditation about decline, disease, looming death, drugs, old lovers, creative blockage and memories of childhood, Pain and Glory left me with feelings of respect and appreciation more than any sense of excitement or bracing discovery. It all unfolds in a settled, confident way but in a distinctly minor key.
“I’ve worshipped Almodovar all my adult moviegoing life. With the exception of I’m So Excited, his films have always made me smile and swoon. This one felt a little more recessive than most. Settled, reflective, gray-haired, a little morose at times. I can’t say I was turned on, but I felt sated and assured as far as it went.
“It’s a film about getting older and dealing with physical maladies and to a lesser extent creative blockage. An old boyfriend, copping street heroin, a third-act discussions with his late mom (PenelopeCruz), memories of her washing clothes in the river…all of it swirling around in Banderas’s mind. I liked Pain and Glory well enough. It was certainly time well spent. I just wasn’t knocked out.”
From CNN’s Jake Tapper, posted yesterday: “For more than a year White House officials rebuffed efforts by Department of Homeland Security colleagues to make combating domestic terror threats, such as those from white supremacists, a greater priority as specifically spelled out in the National Counterterrorism Strategy.
“‘Homeland Security officials battled the White House [staffers] to get them to focus more on domestic terrorism,’ a senior source close to the Trump administration tells CNN. ‘The White House wanted to focus only on the jihadist threat which, while serious, ignored the reality that racial supremacist violence was rising fast here at home. They had major ideological blinders on.'”
The most visually arresting film that Sharon Tate ever starred in was J Lee. Thompson‘s Eye of the Devil (’66). It was poorly reviewed and lost money, but the black-and-white lensing by the exacting Erin Hillier was quite handsome. The outdoor lighting is just right. And look at the cloud formations behind Tate, Deborah Kerr and David Hemmings, and consider a mention of Hillier’s “obsession with clouds…he would often beg for filming to be delayed until a cloud had appeared to break up a clear sky.”
Tate was a limited actress, of course, but there’s something mesmerizing about her glazed-over, steely=eyed performance as a witch named “Odile de Caray”. It strikes me as a semi-respectable effort because at the very least she was part of a prestige-level horror film with grade-A costars.
And it hit me this morning that if Once Upon A Time in Hollywood director Quentin Tarantino had decided to depict Margot Robbie‘s Tate catching an Eye of the Devil screening at, say, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art or at Arthur Knight‘s USC’s film school class instead of showing her traipsing over to Westwood to catch an afternoon showing of the reprehensible The Wrecking Crew…well, I for one would have been happier because it would have presented Tate in a more respectable light.
Speaking as an X-factor white guy from a middle-class New Jersey and Connecticut upbringing, I don’t feel repelled or disgusted by my Anglo-Saxon heritage and family history. I deeply regret the cruelty visited upon immigrants and various cultures of color by whites, but the fact that racist attitudes were common throughout most of the 20th Century and certainly the 19th Century doesn’t mean that white people (more particularly my parents, grandparents and great-grandparents, reaching back to the mid 1800s) were inherently evil.
By current standards they seem insufficiently evolved, of course, but they were born into a certain culture and were dealt certain cards, and most carried the weight as best they could. They weren’t born with horns on their heads.
Nor do I feel that elemental decency is absent in the majority of white people today. I feel profoundly repelled by the attitudes of your backwater Trump supporters, of course, but they are not me. I come from a family of “good”, well-educated, imperfect people who believed in hard work, discipline and mowing the lawn on Saturday afternoons, and who exuded decency and compassion for the most part. I am not the devil’s spawn, and neither is my Russian-born wife or my two sons. I’ve witnessed and dealt with ignorant behavior all my life, but I’ve never bought into the idea of Anglo-Saxon culture being inherently evil. Please.
Bottom line: Rosanna Arquette‘s feelings of tribal self-loathing is what many Americans can’t stand about progressive lefties.
Pontius Pilate by way of Gore Vidal: “Where there is great striving, great government or power, even great feeling or compassion, error also is great. We progress and mature by fault.”
