Last night Showbiz 411‘s Roger Freidman broke the sad news about the imminent passing of Aretha Franklin. The 76 year-old soul singer has been grappling with cancer for some time now, and is reportedly not far from walking across the footbridge. I’m very sorry. HE hugs and heartfelt condolences to family, friends and fans.

It’s not the time to discuss business matters, but down the road it would be wonderful to finally see Sydney Pollack‘s Amazing Grace, a never-released 1972 doc about Aretha Franklin performing gospel tunes inside a Los Angeles church. The doc almost appeared at the 2015 Telluride Film Festival, but the showing was blocked by an injunction filed by Franklin’s attorney. Some mucky-muck about rights or revenue sharing or something in that realm.

Franklin’s gospel concert, performed inside L.A.’s New Temple Missionary Baptist Church (So. Broadway near 87th Place), happened 46 and 2/3 years ago. Pollack shot over 20 hours of 16mm footage and had hoped to put the film out in concert with Franklin’s Amazing Grace album. But a release never happened due to music rights issues or some other monetary hangup.

Franklin’s performances happened on Thursday, 1.13.72 and Friday, 1.14.72. A double platinum album was released about six months later. Amazing Grace is still Franklin’s biggest seller ever.

Had it not been for a recent Steven Gaydos tweet, I never would’ve even considered re-watching The First Deadly Sin, which I recall being a doleful, partly unbelievable detective-hunts-serial-killer flick. An above-average Frank Sinatra performance — his last starring role and a kind of companion piece to his New York cop role in The Detective (’68).

“Sinatra who plays this role close to his chest, and who looks and acts very touchingly like a tired old cop on the threshold of retirement,” Roger Ebert wrote on 10.30.80. “We can empathize with him, and that’s partly because he resists any temptation to give us a reprise of those wisecracking wiseasses he played in the 1960s. This is a new performance, built from the ground up.”

There’s no First Deadly Sin Bluray or HD streaming option, but there’s a 480p version streaming from Amazon, and in a 1.37 aspect ratio. Boxy Sinatra is beautiful.

I have about six or seven umbrellas in the WeHo pad, but I rarely get to use them. Serious rainstorms don’t happen much in Los Angeles, and so my mantra has always been “I love it when it rains…good for the city, good for the reservoirs and everything smells good when it ends.” The northeast corridor, on the other hand, has been waterlogged for the last three weeks or so, and I’m starting to get really sick of it, sick of it, sick of it. The current forecast is that another monsoon has begun, and that it won’t clear until mid-week. The after-aroma smells better in this woodsy environment than it does in West Hollywood, but I’ve had enough.

Two years ago Beatrice Welles was full of warm memories of her father, the late Orson Welles. “He was the best father in the world,” she said during a 2016 AFI Fest interview with Scott Mantz. Now, less than three weeks before Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind has its long-delayed premiere at the Venice Film Festival, Beatrice is singing quite another tune.

Yesterday (8.12) the Sunday Times‘ Bryan Appleyard quoted her in somewhat confusing, contradictory terms:

“I’m turning up in Venice, and I’ll have my name up in stars,” Beatrice says. Doesn’t the phrase go “I’ll have my name up in lights”?

“It’s not what I wanted for it, it’s not my movie, it was never my movie,” Beatrice explains. “I just had better ideas about how it could end.” Uh-huh. And…?

Then Beatrice drops a bomb by saying that The Other Side of the Wind is “in the hands [of people] my father would have hated.” Wait…who’s she talking about? Frank Marshall and Peter Bogdanovich? Filip Jan Rymsza? Netflix, without which the film would never have been completed? This isn’t adding up.

“I have to talk about it, and I have to be Orson Welles’ daughter,” Beatrice goes on. “I really honestly can’t tell the truth on this one. I hope I’m going to be writing a book finally, and I hope I’m allowed to tell the truth of what’s going on behind that movie.”

Translation: Beatrice feels compelled to talk about her Other Side of the Wind experience, but not quite truthfully. She hopes, however, that certain parties will “allow” her to tell the truth when she writes a book about it.

Yesterday I posted HE’s latest best-of-the-year roster, which numbered 17 or 18. (I think.) I’ve since added a couple of overlooked titles (We The Animals, Equalizer 2) for a grand total of 21, and in this order:

Tied for first place: Bjorn Runge‘s The Wife (Sony Pictures Classics, 8.17) and Paul Schrader‘s First Reformed; 3. Ari Aster‘s Hereditary; 4. Stefano Sollima‘s Sicario — Day of the Soldado; 5. Chris McQuarrie and Tom Cruise‘s Mission : Impossible — Fallout; 6. John Krasinski‘s A Quiet Place; 7. Eugene Jarecki‘s The King; 8. Lynne Ramsay‘s You Were Never Really Here, 9. Tony Zierra‘s Filmworker, 10. Andrej Zvyagintsev‘s Loveless, 11. Jeremiah Zagar‘s We The Animals, 12. Tony Gilroy‘s Beirut, 13. Wes Anderson‘s Isle of Dogs; 14. Bo Burnham‘s Eighth Grade; 15. Morgan Neville‘s Won’t You Be My Neighbor; 16. Ryan Coogler‘s Black Panther; 17. Matt Tyrnauer‘s Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood; 18. Betsy West; Julie Cohen‘s RBG; 19. Spike Lee‘s BlackKKlansman; 20. Antoine Fuqua‘s The Equalizer 2; and 21. John Curran‘s Chappaquiddick.

Repeating: My three biggest misses so far are Sally Potter‘s The Party, Joel Francis Daley‘s Game Night and Cory Finley‘s Thoroughbreds.

“You can feel the fire and rage in Spike Lee’s veins in more than a few scenes, and especially during the last five minutes when Lee recalls the venality of last year’s ‘Unite the Right‘ really in Charlottesville, which ended with the death of protestor Heather Heyer, and reminds that Donald Trump showed who and what he is with his non-judgmental assessment of the KKK-minded demonstrators. Lee paints Trump with the racist brush that he completely deserves, and it makes for a seriously pumped-up finale.” — from my 5.14.18 review, “Lee’s Klansman Busts Trump Like A Bitch.”

“Trump, of course, knows the game he’s playing: The refusal to condemn, which he repeated at his recent press conference keyed to the anniversary of the Charlottesville riots, equals a wink of endorsement. It’s that simple. Anyone who now denies that we have David Duke in the White House is either lying, not seeing reality, or not minding it.” — from Owen Gleiberman‘s 8.12 Variety essay, “No Film Has Channeled the Hateful Pulse of Our Moment Like Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman.”

Everyone knew The Meg was throwaway junk and they didn’t care. $96.8 million overseas, $44.5 million domestic = $141.3 million. In my review I said “I didn’t hate The Meg, but I didn’t believe a second of it.” I also called it a wank that’s structured like a kind of musical. That’s probably how everyone took it. Did anyone like it unironically?

Robert Duvall is good every time at bat. Open Range, Lonesome Dove, Frank Hackett, Boo Radley, the taxi driver in Bullitt, The Apostle…always right on the mark. When luck and the angels are with him, he’s great. But the marriage of Duvall and Mac Sledge was perfect. I despise country-style Christians for the most part, but I sure related to them here. Tender Mercies is probably the greatest getting-sober-and-turning-your-life-around movie of all time. And yet when it opened in ’83, audiences mostly blew it off. It cost over $4 million to make, and only made $8 million and change.

Wiki excerpt: “The post-screening feedback was, in the words of director Bruce Beresford, ‘absolutely disastrous.’ As a result, Universal executives lost faith in the film and made little effort to promote it. Screenwriter Horton Foote said of the studio, ‘I don’t know that they disliked the film. I just think they thought it was inconsequential. I guess they thought it would just get lost in the shuffle.’ Others in the film industry were equally dismissive; one Paramount Pictures representative described the picture as ‘like watching paint dry‘.”

Originally posted 16 years ago: “In ’02 I wrote a short piece about a touchy anatomical subject — i.e., why feet are almost never given close-ups in films.

“Has anyone ever wondered why? Because 90% if not 95% of human feet are strange and alienating, is why. But it goes farther than that. For me, bare feet are a contemporary pestilence that no culture since the sandal-wearing Greeks and Romans has had to deal with. Once upon a time sandled feet were a subject for light mockery, something that only eccentric beatniks went for. Exposed digits have been ubiquitous, of course, in warm weather months since the mid ’60s. I for one regret it.

“Nobody talks about it, but everyone understands. In real life all but the most unusually perfect feet are good for a glance at best, and should rarely be contemplated further. This goes double for the movies. Hands, kneecaps, ear lobes, fingers, noses, biceps, chest hair (or lack of) — these and others anatomical features are routinely displayed in films. But never feet.

“Well, almost never.

“There’s a close-up of Michael Keaton and Geena Davis‘ bare feet soaking in a fountain in Ron Underwood‘s relationship comedy Speechless (1994). An argument could be made that this insert shot was one of the reasons it didn’t perform all that strongly. I remember recoiling in my theater seat after glancing at those gleaming, well-pedicured nubs and deciding I would give Speechless a failing grade.”

Update: I don’t know how many times Quentin Tarantino has zeroed in on women’s feet, but the only instance I recall is Melanie Laurent‘s bare-footed running in Inglorious Basterds.

“The only tolerable close-up of male peds happens about a half hour into Nicholas Ray‘s King of Kings (1961). Jeffrey Hunter‘s Nazarene is looking for spiritual purification in the desert, and at one point the camera cuts to a shot of his bleeding feet stepping on sand and cactus thorns and sharp stones. Hunter’s feet (perhaps Ray used a foot double?) looked good — lean, tanned, athletic, perfect pedicure.

“Having bad feet can really mess with the aura that an attractive or extra-talented movie star has carefully built up. One definition of bad feet are those with extra-long European-styled toes. New York writer Pete Hamill once described the toes belonging to Nastassja Kinski‘s for an interview he did with her in the early ’80s as ‘bad toes.’ So I’m not the first one to bring this up.

The other night I watched John Frankenheimer‘s The Manchurian Candidate with a friend, and all I saw were the mistakes and plot holes and dialogue that needed rewriting. I realized all the more that it wouldn’t work half as well without David Amram‘s string-quartet score. That music tells you from the get-go that something unusual and high-toned and even a bit curious is about to unfurl. Frankenheimer’s film delivers on these counts, of course. Amram’s main-title music tells you “this movie was made by adults with a thoughtfully baroque mindset…a mature thriller with a mind of its own.”

On the other hand the opening main-title bars of Don Ellis‘ French Connection score couldn’t be less complex. Bang bang, clang clang, wham bam. It tells you “this movie is going to be blunt and raw and hard-hitting…it’s a fairly sophisticated film in a sense, but it’s not going to deliver in any kind of roundabout way…what you’re hearing and feeling is what you’re going to get, trust us.”

If there’s one thing film twitter wants you to abandon, it’s your comfort zone. Be brave, step over the fence and experience the exotic, uncertain, challenging realms that exist outside of your little piddly backyard. Of course! Hollywood Elsewhere agrees that people who refuse to step outside of their c.z. are missing so much and absorbing so little in the way of life-giving nutrients or eye-opening realizations. I’ve been in rooms with people who don’t want to see what they don’t want to see, and it’s not pretty. The wrong kind of vibe.

On the other hand I’ve always defined “comfort zone” in a different way.

To me a comfort movie is one that presents three basic things. One, semi-recognizable human behavior (i.e., bearing at least some resemblance to that which you’ve observed in your own life, including your own something-to-be-desired, occasionally less-than-noble reactions to this or that challenge). Two, some kind of half-believable story in which various behaviors are subjected to various forms of emotional or psychological stress and strain. (This should naturally include presentations of inner human psychology, of course, as most people tend to hide what they’re really thinking or scheming to attain.) And three, action that adheres to the universal laws of physics — i.e., rules that each and every life form has been forced to submit to since the beginning of time.

The physics thing basically means that I can enjoy or at least roll with superhero fantasy popcorn fare, but on the other hand these films have a way of delivering a form of profound irritation and even depression if you watch enough of them.

There are, in short, many ways of telling stories that (a) contain recognizable human behavior, (b) engaging stories and (c) adhere to basic laws of gravity, inertia and molecular density. I’m talking about tens of thousands of square miles of human territory, and movies that include Her, Solaris, Boyhood, Betrayal, Children of Men, Leviathan, Thelma and Louise, Superbad, Cold War, Across 110th Street, Shoot the Piano Player, Them!, A Separation, The Silence, Se7en, Holy Motors, Silver Linings Playbook, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, Hold That Ghost, The Miracle Worker, The Wolf Man, Ikiru, Crossfire, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Duck Soup, Moonlighting, What’s Up, Tiger Lily?, the better screwball comedies of the ’30s, The Blob, First Reformed, Ichi the Killer, The Equalizer 2, Adaptation, Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days, Punch Drunk Love, Out Of the Past, Danton, Some Like It Hot, The Big Sky and God knows how many hundreds or thousands of others.

But if a movie presents human behavior that I regard as completely unrecognizable or nonsensical, that insists on ignoring the way things are out there (or “in” there), I tune out. And if you don’t like that, tough.

Michael Avenatti lacks the resume of a typical Democratic presidential contender. He’s a bit out of his depth — more hat than cattle — and of course he’s an opportunist. What attorney isn’t? But he strikes me as a highly intelligent, relatively decent fellow. He’s tough, well-organized and and well-phrased, and has never stumbled in all the interviews I’ve seen him do. His domestic political views are basically compassionate and humanist. I don’t see a huge problem.

From Maggie Astor’s 8.10 N.Y. Times story: “[Yesterday] Avenatti used his first big speech as a prospective presidential candidate to call on the Democratic Party to reject Michelle Obama’s oft-quoted advice about President Trump and his allies: “When they go low, we go high.”

“The hard-charging lawyer who represents the pornographic film star Stephanie Clifford, known as Stormy Daniels, did not mention the former first lady in his keynote speech Friday night at the Democratic Wing Ding, a party fund-raiser in northern Iowa. But there was no mistaking his meaning.

“’We must be a party that fights fire with fire,’ Mr. Avenatti said to cheers from the audience, his voice rising. ‘When they go low, I say hit back harder.’

“He received a thunderous ovation at the end of his speech, notably louder than the applause for the night’s other speakers, including Representative Tim Ryan of Ohio as well as Representative John Delaney of Maryland, who is running for president.”