The little kid on the raft being eaten in Steven Spielberg‘s Jaws was a pretty good visual trick, but that was it. Ditto Robert Shaw howling and coughing up blood as the shark bit into his mid-section. I felt badly about Bambi’s mom being shot, but the rabbit getting snatched by a hawk in Watership Down…meh. Okay, Diane Keaton‘s murder in Looking For Mr. Goodbar was rough stuff, but it arrived at the very end of a film that I’d stopped trusting at least an hour earlier. Alderaan blowing up in Star Wars was nothing — a large, slow-motion sparkler on a warm summer’s evening.
Honestly? I felt a little bit traumatized by Ruth Wilson‘s sudden death in The Affair, although I haven’t been watching that Showtime series with any consistency.
Glenn Close is definitely going to be Best Actress nominated for The Wife and she actually may win this time. The film is a solid double-A quality package — a tidy, well-ordered, somewhat conservative-minded, theatrical-style drama. Some may say it’s a little too stagey, a little too deliberate, but it’s as good as this sort of thing gets. It satisfies, add up, delivers. Will the New Academy Kidz fall in line? They should. Brilliant acting is brilliant acting.
The Hollywood Reporter‘s Jon Froschwrote that Close’s performance as the wife of a Nobel Prize-winning author (Jonathan Pryce) is “like a bomb ticking away toward detonation” — perfect. But she’s not just playing her husband’s better in terms of talent and temperament. She’s playing every wife who ever felt under-valued, patronized or otherwise diminished by a swaggering hot-shot husband along with their friends and colleagues as well as — why not? — society as a whole.
I saw The Wife at the Paris last night. The crowd whooped and cheered, and then Close and original “Wife” author Meg Wolitzer sat for a 20-minute q & a. There wasn’t a person in the crowd under 55. The over-55 Academy contingent is going to vote for Close en masse, no question. Over the last 30-plus years she’s been nominated for six Best Actress Oscars (The World According to Garp, The Big Chill, The Natural, Fatal Attraction, Dangerous Liaisons, Albert Nobbs) without a win — this will be the clincher.
Given all this, it’s shocking that the N.Y. Times gave The Wife a piddly three-paragraph review, which is basically their way of saying “meh, not bad, marginal fare, not very important.” Very curious for a film with a 93% Rotten Tomatoes score
My last iPhone 8 Nightmare report (“Latest From Apple Obstructionists“) was posted on 7.29 — 20 days ago. Yesterday this sordid saga finally came to a merciful end. The phone is now loaded and rolling with all the apps, all the music, all the photos, all the data, all the contacts…everything.
I once again need to express my heartfelt gratitude to “Mr. Hotshot,” a renowned director-actor who put me in touch with his tech guy, Michael Newman, who runs a company called Omegapoint-it.com. Last week Newman put me in touch with an iCloud engineer in Austin, and that’s what finally did the trick. If it hadn’t been for Newman, I would still be out in the cold.
That said, I have nothing but contempt for Apple’s drag-ass response to this situation. Losing the phone was totally my fault, of course, but the Apple guys were lackadaisical and inconsistent and, except for three or four exceptions, obstructionists when I begged over and over for help. I will never forget this. May the karma godz come back and bite them all in the ass.
By all means laugh heartily and merrily and deep from within, and as loudly as may be appropriate. But don’t laugh “uncontrollably”, at least not in the presence of others. Certainly not when I’m around. Once you’ve horse-laughed or bray-laughed for five or six seconds, turn that shit down already. Especially in a Starbucks or even a sports bar. The louder and longer you laugh in mixed company, the lower your level of breeding and social discipline. I’ve noted several times that the worst laughers are young women after they’ve had a glass of wine. Then come half-drunk guys in sports bars.
The exalted if somewhat tragic reputation of Orson Welles‘ The Magnificent Ambersons (’42) has been so deeply drilled into film-maven culture that even today, no one will admit the plain truth about it. I’m referring to the fact that Tim Holt‘s George Amberson Minafer character is such an obnoxious and insufferable asshole that he all but poisons the film.
I’ve watched Welles’ Citizen Kane 25 or 30 times, but because of Holt I’ve seen The Magnificent Ambersons exactly twice. (And the second viewing was arduous.) Even Anthony Quinn‘s Zampano in Federico Fellini‘s La Strada is more tolerable than Minafer, and Zampano is a bellowing beast.
Welles admitted decades later that he knew “there would be an uproar about a picture which, by any ordinary American standards, was much darker than anybody was making pictures…there was just a built-in dread of the downbeat movie, and I knew I’d have that to face.”
He’d calculated that audiences would forget their discomfort when Minafer “gets his comeuppance” at the very end. But even in the truncated 88-minute version of the film that exists today, audiences still have to suffer Minafer’s ghastly arrogance, snippiness and smallness of spirit for roughly 80 minutes, and most people simply can’t tolerate this much abuse.
The Wiki page notes that a rough cut of Ambersons received a mixed response after a previewing on 3.17.42. Welles’ film was previewed a second time after film editor Robert Wise removed several minutes from it, “but the audience’s response did not improve.” Uhm, hello?
Why is the final La Strada scene of Zampano weeping on the beach so emotionally satisfying while the finale of Ambersons leaves you feeling a mixture of “meh” and relief? Other than the fact that Fellini understood human nature better than Welles, I think I’ve explained why.
The same issue clouds the watching of Welles’ Touch of Evil — i.e., Detective Hank Quinlan is too gross, too drooling and altogether too much to take. He all but vomits in the audience’s lap.
Notice the black bars on the below ScreenPrism essay. This is how the film should be presented on 16 x 9 flatscreens. Shame on Criterion for this latest act of vandalism (on top of their teal-tinted Blurays of Midnight Cowboy and Bull Durham).
Especially Michel Gondry…aarrgghh! The best guy to replace James Gunn on Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3 would have to be able to deploy a wicked, anarchic, irreverent sense of humor at the drop of a hat. I therefore nominate Ben Stiller. Seriously. Or Shane Black. Or Wedding Crashers auteur David Dobkin.
I lived in Manhattan for five and a half years, but until yesterday I’d never been inside Argosy Books on 59th Street. “Six-story bookstore stocking an enormous array of antiquarian and out-of-print volumes since 1925,” etc.
Bluray Buff #1: Whoa…Criterion is releasing a new 4K digital restoration Bluray of Some Like It Hot in mid November. Bluray Buff #2: And how much better looking do you expect it to be? I own a Bluray version that popped a few years ago, and it’s clean, rich and silvery as all get out, and handsome as fuck with rich black levels. Bluray Buff #1: Criterion’s Bluray will be better. Bluray Buff #2: In what way? Bluray Buff #1: You know how all the versions of Some Like It Hot have been masked at 1.66 to 1? Going back to the laser disc days and into DVD and then Bluray, always 1.66? Well, Criterion’s version is going to be cropped at 1.85. Bluray Buff #2: How’s that better? Bluray Buff #1: Well, they’ll be slightly trimming the tops and bottoms of each and every shot in the film. We don’t like too much height in our Blurays. Think of it…for the first time in home video history, we’ll have a 1.85 fascist version of Billy Wilder‘s beloved 1959 classic. Bluray Buff #2: What’s wrong with you, man?
The author of Roma‘s transporting black-and-white imagery, captured on Alexa 65 digital, is director Alfonso Cuaron (Gravity, Children of Man, Y Tu Mama Tambien). The music is just right but I can’t find the composer’s name. Set in early ’70s Mexico City, Roma is basically Cuaron’s Amarcord — the story of his family, youth and history, culminating in the horrific Corpus Christi Massacre of 6.10.71. Team Roma (led by the Netflix-based Lisa Taback) will be launching a balls-out, take-no-prisoners Best Picture campaign, as well as (I’m hearing) a Best Supporting Actress campaign for Marina De Tavira, a 44 year-old actress who apparently plays the maternal heart and soul of said middle-class family. I’ve also heard that Yalitza Aparicio gives a knockout performance. Venice, Telluride, Toronto, New York.
