Friedman to HE (received at 6:54 pm eastern): “I don’t know how you came upon the unlisted link to our Woody Allen interview. It was not yours to publish. We’re always grateful for publicity, but the piece was not finished. It’s been removed and will launch soon properly. I’m disappointed that you didn’t contact me before posting it. Just so there’s no question, Woody loves the interview. It’s our decision to launch it properly.”
Friendo: “Right now Sentimental Value is one of the most profound arguments against AI. Whatever you may feel about Chat GPT 5, Grok 4, Claude 4.5, Deepseek R1 and Gemini 2.0, they can’t replicate what Sentimental Value holds and nurtures and quietly delivers in a couple of hundred different ways.”
I’ll finally be seeing Joachim Trier‘s film again tomorrow night (Wednesday at 7:15 pm)…my first and only previous viewing was six months ago in Cannes.
Am I sorry that director-cowriter Trier didn’t write a role for an obese, wheelchaired LGBTQ-of-color character? Or that he didn’t least insert a South Korean maid who gets stuck in a heavy rainstorm while shopping? Am I sorry that he decided against making Stellan Skarsgard‘s paterfamilias into a late-blooming homosexual (like Chris Plummer in Beginners)? Yes, I’m sorry for this…all of it. Because Sentimental Value would have a much better chance of taking the Best Picture Oscar if he’d constructed his film with a nice, diverse Wicked: For Good attitude.
Too many white Norweigans = definite Academy issues.
This Gold’s Gym member (POC on the left) is obviously arrogant, egoistic and horridly insensitive. If there was a God she would be sentenced to a year in a damp isolated dungeon for her trans hate.
Listen to every word.
The last ten seconds are
Any man who thinks he’s a woman who listens this and still says IDGAF I’m going in, should not be anywhere near women. Ever. Zero empathy. He’s a significant danger.
Zohran Mamdani will win big tonight. Gavin Newsom‘s Prop. 50 will also win — yes! –but who knows by how much? New Jersey’s sensibly liberal Mikie Sherill will be elected governor. And these are the only races I’ve focusing on.
Vice-President Dick Cheney having shot a guy he was hunting with isn’t funny. The victim, a 78 year-old lawyer named Harry Whittington, could have been seriously hurt and thank fortune he’s in stable condition, etc.
What is funny to me is that New York Times report that said Cheney “fired his shotgun without realizing that Mr. Whittington had approached him from behind, spraying his fellow hunter on his right side, on his cheek, neck and chest.”
Fulldisclosure: I once mistakenly shot one of my own guys with a paintball during a war game I took part in north of Los Angeles, so I know how Cheney might feel. But at least I didn’t tag the guy in the neck and face.
Posted on 10.3.18:
Christian Bale‘s Dick Cheney voice is very close to the Real McCoy‘s. Not to mention that unhurried way of speaking and that look of settled, laid-back corruption in his eyes. Plus the bulky appearance (bloated bod, basketball-shaped head) and hairline. And of course the aging as the film moves along. That’s it — I’m a convert. The downside is that Adam McKay‘s Vice doesn’t open until Christmas, which probably means no press screenings until mid-November.
Director-screenwriter friend: “I know a couple people who’ve seen Vice, and they’re calling it the movie that Oliver Stone‘s W wanted to be. The only weak link is Steve Carell, who isn’t convincing as Donald Rumsfeld.” I told him I’d heard that Sam Rockwell‘s Dubya is more or less a cameo, two or three scenes. His reply: “Just like in the actual administration, Bush plays a small supporting role. While Bale fully inhabits Cheney like DeNiro did LaMotta in Raging Bull, Carell merely does an impression and shtick under conspicuous makeup.”
Until last night I had ducked Jack Clayton and Harold Pinter‘s The Pumpkin Eater (’64) for decades. I never even thought about giving it a whirl, mainly out of fear that it might smother me in dreary wifey nihilism and perhaps make me feel morose. (It’s based on a novel by Penelope Mortimer.)
But I finally gave in last night, and it’s actually quite exceptional — a sophisticated, finely wrought, moderate-mannered parlor drama about a gradually deteriorating London marriage.
Vaguely similar to David JonesBetrayal‘ (’83), which Pinter also wrote, of course, based on his 1980 play, The Pumpkin Eater has a wry, half-fleeting, matter-of-fact quality. But it also conveys genuine compassion for a woman who’s slowly perishing within.
It’s basically about Peter Finch‘s chilly screenwriter husband — an aloof, constantly disloyal hound who in his heart of hearts needs to be constantly worshipped and massaged and, I’m guessing, blown for good measure — quietly and relentlessly cheating on the poor, wounded, downhearted Anne Bancroft, who allows their many children to basically run their marriage.
This is going to sound shallow but I felt deflated by the fact that Bancroft’s hair is rather gray throughout — only in the very beginning are her locks dark and ravishing in the style of Mrs. Robinson, whom she would play two or three years later. It makes her look drained and faded. Bancroft was only 32 or 33 when the film was shot, and yet Clayton tries to make her look at least 47 or 48, if not older. But her performance is staggering, and it resulted in her second Best Actress Oscar nomination.
Costarring James Mason, Maggie Smith, Cedric Hardwicke, Alan Webb, Richard Johnson and Yootha Joyce. Oswald Morris‘s black-and-white cinematography is generally delicious; ditto Georges Delerue‘s score.
Pauline Kael: “Bancroft’s performance as the (compulsive childbearing) Englishwoman whose nerves are giving out has an unusual tentative, exploratory quality. (It ranks with her more straightforward acting in The Miracle Worker.)
“The Pumpkin Eater is a stunning, high-style film — fragmented yet flowing. The murky sexual tensions have a fascination, and there are memorable moments: Bancroft’s crackup in Harrods; glimpses of Mason being prurient and vindictive, and Maggie Smith being a troublemaking ‘other woman.'”
That’s correct — the first hit is Ladd’s Flo Castleberry, a world-weary, sharp-tongued waitress in Martin Scorsese‘s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Any More. The second hit is her performance as the doomed Ida Sessions in Roman Polanski‘s Chinatown.
Chinatown was released in the atmospheric heat of Watergate — 6.20.74. Alice opened almost exactly six months later — 12.9.74.
Between 2:35 and 2:41 you can definitely see Janet Leigh‘s Marion Crane catching a subdued breath. Leigh is trying so hard, but her lower neck muscle buckles or expands ever so slightly. No question about it. Once you’ve noticed this, the realism of this scene goes right out the window.
Paddy Chayefsky won a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for Marty (’55), but it wasn’t adapted from a book or a play or any non-cinematic source. The Delbert Mann-directed Marty was, line for line, Chayefsky’s own live-TV play — same dialogue, barely “adapted”. It was simply filmed on celluloid and slightly “opened up” with two or three exteriors rather than captured on live TV.
Initially posted on 6.2.14: “There’s one thing wrong with Delbert Mann and Paddy Chayefsky‘s Marty, which won 1955’s Best Picture Oscar and launched the career of Ernest Borgnine after he took the Oscar for Best Actor. (Mann also won for Best Director; ditto Chayefsky for Best Adapted Screenplay.)
“The problem is that jaunty Marty theme song, which apparently wasn’t written by score composer Roy Webb but songwriter Harry Warren and arranger George Bassman. The brassy and fanfare-ish waltz is entirely out of synch with the simple, somewhat sad story of a lonely Bronx butcher and his loser friends and a girl he falls in love with.
“The purpose of the song was purely about marketing — the idea was to persuade audiences that Marty wouldn’t be too much of a downer. It succeeded in that goal but the music sure feels like a downer now.”
Bill Maher: “Yeah, the R-rated comedy, Naked Gun…”
Michael Rapaport: “They fucked it up. They fucked the R-rated comedy up. I liked the Liam Neeson remake of Naked Gun, but the R-rated comedy went out with cancel culture.”
Maher: “Yeah, but don’t you think there’s a different vibe now?”
Rapaport: “I don’t think it’s different.”
Maher: “All right, woke is not [entirely] dead.”
Rapaport: “It ain’t dead. Every move you make, every step you take…if you screw up they’ll dump on you. All that old-school stuff…Farrelly brothers…awesome but they won’t make ’em.”
Maher: “Very politically incorrect except for the one I so love…I just watched it again…Green Book. The Peter Farrelly film. That’s an adult movie. It won the [Best Picture] Oscar, but the woke shit on it…it was a movie that they should have loved…ten years ago they would have come all over it because it’s about racism and has all the right moves…the black guy is way smarter than the white guy…but it was directed by a white guy so it had to be [trashed].”
