I’m about to receive scripts for Backseat, First Man, Bohemian Rhapsody, Beautiful Boy, Old Man And The Gun, Boy Erased and The Sisters Brothers. I’m asking again for Quentin Tarantino‘s Once Upon A Time in Hollywood script. By the way: I’ll be personally delighted if QT goes with a historical fantasia ending a la Inglorious Basterds, in which Adolf Hitler and the Nazi high command were burnt to death inside a Parisian movie theatre. I’m imagining Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt‘s characters, a struggling actor and a stunt man who live near Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski‘s home at 10050 Cielo Drive, saving Tate and her pals from the brutal knives of the Manson gang, maybe by drilling the would-be hippie murderers with hot lead or maybe in some other way.
Daily
“Did Your Parents Have Any Children That Lived?”
R. Lee Ermey, the ex-Marine who became a well-employed actor after playing the loud-mouthed Gunnery Sergeant Hartman in Stanley Kubrick‘s Full Metal Jacket, has bought the farm. He was only 74, but he was a right-winger who hated Obama and said some fairly awful things, and as a result had trouble getting hired by liberal Hollywood over the last few years. (Or so I’ve read.) I was about to say “Tough shit, twinkletoes!” but then I thought, “Naah, ease up and back off….don’t do a Bob Clark.”
The Hartman yellathon is Ermey’s masterpiece. (I would actually call it a comic masterpiece.) He was good but only sufficiently so in his other acting roles. He had plenty of work over the 33-year period that followed Full Metal Jacket, or from ’87 until Ermey put his foot in his mouth and skull-fucked himself in 2010.
Vittorio Taviani In The Clouds
Italian director Vittorio Taviani has died at age 88. He and his younger brother Paolo co-directed over 20 noteworthy Italian films. The Tavianis, who began churning them out in the ’50s, were probably the most celebrated directing brothers of the Italian cinema realm.
The last Taviani film I saw was Ceasar Must Die, about some prisoners putting on a performance of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. My favorite Taviani flick was Good Morning, Babylon (’87), about two Italian immigrant brothers (Vincent Spano, Joaquim de Almeida) who get hired as set designers for D.W. Griffith‘s Intolerance. It always seemed that their most popular film was Night of the Shooting Stars (’82).
For what it’s worth, the very first film I reviewed for any Manhattan publication was Vittorio and Paolo’s Padre Padrone. I seem to recall reviewing it sometime in early ’78 (i.e., when it opened commercially) for the Chelsea Clinton News. I was a mediocre writer back then. My prose was on the turgid, overworked side. I knew it and so did my editors. It was agony when I would try to write anything. It would take hours to write a single decent paragraph. It was like digging ditches.
Whereabouts
Halfway through last January’s Sundance Film Festival (i.e., “socialist summer camp in the snow”), I mentioned that “the only films I’ve felt truly touched and levitated by are three highly intelligent, smoothly assembled but fairly conventional documentaries — Susan Lacy‘s Jane Fonda in Five Acts, Marina Zenovich‘s Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind and especially Matt Tyrnauer‘s Studio 54.”
I was also mostly down with Amy Scott‘s Hal, a 90-minute portrait of iconoclastic ’70s director Hal Ashby. On 1.22 I called it “exhilarating, colorful and not, if you’re going to be honest (as Nick Dawson‘s “Being Hal Ashby: Life of a Hollywood Rebel” was and is), altogether tidy or pretty…Scott’s film isn’t hagiography, but my sense is that roughly 90% is a touching, fascinating, no-holds-barred, this-is-who-he-really-was portrait and the other 10% is a little blowjobby here and there.”
Calling a documentary “fairly conventional” is not a putdown, but an acknowledgment that it plays by the certain structural and stylistic rules (pacing, exposition, careful editing of talking-head commentary, scoring, articulation of themes, technical polish) that hundreds of docs have adhered to in years and decades past.
These four docs — Fonda, Ashby, Williams, Studio 54 — know their subjects well and how to tell their stories in exactly the right way. As the closing credits roll the viewer knows he/she has eaten a professionally prepared, nutritional, fat-free meal.
So when will they stream? I called and searched around and one of them, it seems, haven’t been acquired — Tyrnauer’s Studio 54 film, which is repped by Altimeter Films.
Zenovich’s Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind, produced in association with Alex Gibney‘s Jigsaw Prods., will be in theatres and then on HBO starting in July.
The Ashby doc has been picked up by Oscilloscope, but no release date has been announced, or at least not to my knowledge.
Trump: “Do I Look Like A Guy Who Needs Hookers…?”
Comey: “Really weird…it was almost an out-of-body experience for me…I was floating above myself, looking down, saying you’re sitting here briefing an incoming President of the United States about prostitutes in Moscow…I never thought these words would come out of my mouth, but I don’t know whether the current President of the United States was with prostitutes peeing on each other in Moscow in 2013…it’s possible, but I don’t know.”
Trump said at the time, “If there’s even a 1% chance my wife thinks that’s true…” That train has left the station, boss!
The 20/20 chat between Comey and Stuffin’ Envelopes, taped last Monday in Comey’s Virginia home, airs tonight at 10 pm eastern.
One Of Best All-Time Fight Scenes
I’ve watched this King Kong-vs.-Tyrannosaurus Rex duke-out dozens of times, and despite the primitive VFX (it was shot 86 years ago) it gets me every time. All hail Merian C. Cooper, Ernest B. Schoedsack and Willis O’Brien. Skillfully choreographed, nicely cut, just-right sound effects, completely credible.
By the same token I despise Peter Jackson’s ridiculous re-imagining and re-casting of this classic scene. Typical Jackson calculation: If Kong fighting a T-Rex was thrilling in the original, let’s have him fight three T-Rexes in our version…it’ll be three times as good! Jackson has never known from restraint. Everything that happens in this detestable scene is a cliffhanger moment, every potential threat pushed to the limit before the last-second avoidance or rescue. Jackson constructs every action scene in his Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies the same way…oh, God…almost…aagghh!…whew, that was close!
Before The Scourge
As much as I hate even thinking about Avengers: Infinity War (Disney, 4.27), much less the idea of retro-injecting the Marvel serum into the mid ’90s, these casting decisions are fairly spot-on. I’m figuring it was cast in early to mid ’94, began shooting in late ’94 and was given a wide release in the fall of ’95. Then again things were a lot different 23 or 24 years ago. The gamer and comic-book-reading generation hadn’t begun to take over Hollywood and the first stirrings of hunger for superhero fables weren’t really being felt until after 9.11.01, and more like ’03 or ’04.
John Huston Was Actually Young Once
All my life I’ve regarded John Huston (1906-1987) as quite the fellow, and now at long last I’m reading his autobiography, which was first published in 1980. A 1994 trade paperback version was just delivered by Amazon.
Huston was first and foremost a lion, and not incidentally a director of above-average and sometimes brilliant films for over 45 years in a row.
The ones he made during his first decade are unassailable — The Maltese Falcon, Across The Pacific, Let There Be Light, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Key Largo, The Asphalt Jungle, The Red Badge of Courage and The African Queen. Huston’s early to mid ’50s output was pretty formidable also — Moulin Rouge, Beat The Devil, Moby Dick and Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison.
For the next 30 years Huston’s films were in and out, but at least they included The Unforgiven, The Misfits, The Kremlin Letter, Fat City, The MacKintosh Man, The Man Who Would Be King, Under The Volcano, Prizzi’s Honor and The Dead.
From David Thomson‘s “New Biograhical Dictionary of Film”: “Huston was…the movie director who told manly, energetic stories, and [who] liked to end them on a wry chuckle. He was himself a writer, a painter, a boxer, a horseman, a wanderer, a gambler, an adventurer and a womanizer.
“More than most he relished the game of getting a movie set up and the gamble of out-daring and intimidating the studios. His best pictures reflect those tastes and that attitude and had an expansive, airy readiness for ironic endings, fatal bad luck, and the laughter that knows men are born to fail.”
Five Weeks Later
Last September Focus Features announced that Josie Rourke and Beau Willimon‘s Mary, Queen of Scots would open on 11.2.18 — a good award-season date that gives everyone (Academy, HFPA, BFCA, guilds, critic groups) plenty of time to see it and assess its value. Now the opening has been pushed back to 12.7.18. I don’t know what this means exactly. Maybe nothing. An award-season release between late October and late November is generally preferred over a December one, although there’s nothing “problematic” with an early December date.
Mary, Queen of Scots will presumably tell the basic story of Mary Stuart (Saoirse Ronan), who ruled over Scotland for 14 and 1/2 years (December 1542 through July 1567), experienced all kinds of marital and political intrigues during her reign and after, and who was imprisoned by Queen Elizabeth in 1568 and lost her head some 19 years later, in 1587, also at Elizabeth’s behest. Pic is based on John Guy’s 2004 biography “My Heart Is My Own: The Life of Mary Queen of Scots” (“[A] portrait of a shrewd and charismatic young ruler who relished power and, for a time, managed to hold together a fatally unstable country”).
Pic costars Margot Robbie (Queen Elizabeth), David Tennant, Jack Lowden, Martin Compston, Joe Alwyn, Brendan Coyle and Guy Pearce.
Saoirse Ronan in Josie Rourke‘s Mary, Queen of Scots (Focus Features, 12.8).
Only in Moronville
An Arkansas father-to-be wanted to announce the baby’s feminine gender in a flashy, yaw-haw, Dukes of Hazzard manner, and in a way that would impress his low-rent yokel friends. So he arranged for his Mustang engine to belch out pink smoke….it’s a girl! Welcome to the realm of the douchebag rube.