Daily

I was bitching earlier about how some areas of Belgrade are a tiny bit ratty and rundown with altogether too much graffiti, but when you get into the upscale regions (basically in the city’s center) everything is cool, refined and approved. All the spiritual and material perks of any hip town. This is a city, remember, that had the shit bombed out of it by NATO forces from 3.26.99 thru 6.10.99. I never knew before arriving here that everything is spelled with Cyrllic script as well as the Latin alphabet. The U.S. dollar goes a long way here.

Moritz Eis gelato, Vuka Karadzica 9, Belgrade.

Banks of the Sava River — Wednesday, 5.25, 6:55 pm. Belgrade is located right at the juncture where the Sava joins the Danube.

Read more

Hollywood Elsewhere touched down at Belgrade’s Nikola Tesla airport around 2:15 pm. It began raining within 20 minutes of my arrival, and then it stopped 15 minutes later. Now it’s started again. I have to say that I’m not impressed by the architecture in the Belgrade suburbs, which reminds me of the drab northern New Jersey area just to the west of the George Washington Bridge. The city is another story. I’m heading out now with HE’s own Svetlana Cvetko (who persuaded me to pay a visit) and editor/producer David Scott Smith for a walk and a bite. The Airbnb “loft” I’m staying in is about 50% smaller than I expected based on the photos.

Read more

I just paid $20 and change for a Masters of Cinema Bluray of Andre de Toth‘s Day of the Outlaw (’59), a black-and-white “snow western” in 2.35:1. I succumbed against my better judgment because I’m queer for ’50s and ’60s films shot in this all but vanished format. (A cruddy-looking version is watchable on YouTube.) I will watch and consider buying almost any film shot in monochrome Scope.

Day of the Outlaw costars Robert Ryan, Burl Ives and the then-24-year-old Tina Louise. It was shot by Russell Harlan and written by Philip Yordan, who also produced. Yordan told a Ryan biographer that the Outlaw script was “one of the best I’ve ever written” but that the $400K budget “wasn’t big enough.”

The fact that Quentin Tarantino has spoken highly of Day of the Outlaw is an anecdote at best — he was either plugging his own snow western, The Hateful Eight, or acknowledging that the De Toth was an influence. Martin Scorsese allegedly saying that De Toth’s low-budgeter exists in the same respected B-movie realm as Sam Fuller‘s 40 Guns and Budd Boetticher‘s Seven Men From Now is also a concern. Never trust impassioned film buffs when it comes to B westerns. They’re too kind, too generous.

Read more

I’ve posted one or two Prague streetcar videos before. This one probably won’t be the last. Yeah, I have a thing about them. If you choose the right angle and hold the camera steady and just shoot and wait, it’s hard to miss. The short blonde running for the second train is what makes it.

Read more

Advance-review-wise it appears as if I chose a good week to be out of the country, at least in terms of the two big openers. Bryan Singer‘s X-Men Apocalypse and Tim Burton‘s Alice Through The Looking Glass both have lousy Rotten Tomatoes ratings, 52% and 48% respectively. The best-rated opener appears to be Ido Haar‘s Presenting Princess Shaw, a Magnolia-released doc about the YouTube star. It’s currently RT’d at 89%. If anyone has seen the doc, please advise.

I’m not predicting that Gary Ross‘s Free State of Jones (STX, 6.24) is going to be all that great, but at least this trailer seems to promise more in the way of Confederate racist ass-kicking than Nate Parker‘s The Birth of a Nation. That’s the satisfaction element in these sagas, right? Seeing the defenders of an evil, inhumane system catch hell from those who despise slavery? After seeing The Birth of a Nation last January I lamented that the slave rebellion led by Nat Turner (Parker) takes too long to happen and is over too soon. It would appear that Jones, whatever its merits, doesn’t make that mistake.

Talking animated animals are fine; ditto talking tomatoes and celery sticks. But not processed foods. Why? Because all foodstuffs are dead. Even recently picked, fresh-smelling vegetables at outdoor farmer’s markets are dead. All food markets are, in a sense, large, antiseptic funeral homes for foodstuffs composed of elements that were once fresh and alive before they were picked, chopped, slaughtered, refined, pasteurized, reconstituted and corporatized. If you’re drinking fresh milk right out of a warm cow or swallowing the yolk out of freshly-cracked eggs a la Sylvester Stallone in Rocky — okay, not dead. But you certainly can’t get much deader than hot dogs (partly made from the unusable guts of steers scooped up from the slaughterhouse floor) and sausage, which of course were once pigs. (During an early ’80s visit to a working farm in New York State I ate fresh sausage from a recently butchered pig, and the taste was very robust and even spicy but that didn’t change anything.) Therefore the idea that foodstuffs are cute little quipsters with souls, personalities, hopes, dreams and crushes on would-be girlfriends is pathetic.

Yesterday N.Y. Times/”Upshot” columnists Nate Cohn and Toni Monkovic explained why those new polls showing Bernie Sanders doing much better against Donald Trump than Hillary Clinton should be regarded askance. One mitigating factor, Cohn points out, is that “Sanders supporters are a big reason Clinton is doing worse in her polling against Trump. The second is that Sanders hasn’t faced any major attacks on his record. The Republicans have cheered him on against Clinton, whom they realize they’re inevitably going to face. Clinton never really attacked him, either — no big negative television ad buys, for example — in no small part because she didn’t want to alienate his supporters.”

What Cohn and Monkovic fail to mention, of course, is this: while Sanders, who is essentially an FDR-style New Dealer, would be clobbered by Trump for being a “Communist” (an actual Trump description) who will make their lives miserable with higher taxes, Clinton, whose negatives are nearly as high as Trump’s, is going to be hammered just as brutally for all of her alleged transgressions (including, of course, the email thing, for which the FBI will probably not indict her).

Read more

This morning I noticed a 5.22 tweet that claimed knowledge of how Cannes Film Festival jury chairman George Miller felt about Maren Ade‘s Toni Erdmann. The next time I run into Miller I’m going to give him…okay, not a bro hug but certainly a big smile and an upper-arm pat. It can be argued that I’m not the Erdmann hater that Miller is as I walked out on the 162-minute film at the 100-minute mark, but I couldn’t stand it any longer. I’m assured that Erdmann has a knockout ending but the only way I would re-watch it would be (a) with a gun at my head, (b) in a straightjacket, and (c) with one of those Clockwork Orange devices attached to my eyelids. My 5.13 review.

The more I meditate upon Jim Jarmusch‘s Paterson, the richer and deeper it gets. That’s usually the mark of an exceptionally good film, just as the opposite principle — an intense sugar-high movie will often dwindle upon reflection — is also true for the most part. Not always, of course, but often enough.

In traditional movie-plot terms nothing and I mean nothing happens in Paterson. No inciting incident, no conflict, no gathering of elements, no second-act pivot point, no climax. It’s all about impressions and meditation. But it’s good. It sticks, gains, expands.

This led to thoughts about other respected films in which “nothing happens.” Nothing, to amplify, in the way of the main character (a) having some specific goal, (b) interacting with or responding to contrarian characters or forces, and (c) finally taking decisive action to achieve a desired end. There are actually two categories — films in which literally nothing happens of any real consequence, and films in which very little happens. But emotional or spiritual journeys always occur.

The most interesting, view-worthy films of the last 20 or so years in which very little happens but which pay off nonetheless: Nebraska, Lost in Translation, Barcelona, Barton Fink, Shame, Hunger, Naked. There are many others. Please advise.

The standouts in which nothing really happens at all: Everybody Wants Some, Clerks, My Dinner With Andre, Dazed and Confused, Sofia Coppola‘s Somewhere…what others?

Read more

Monday’s weather in Prague was abundantly warm. I wore a black shirt over a T-shirt and after a half-hour of running around I was wishing I’d left the shirt home. And then it turned cloudy, and when it started thunderstorming around 5:30 pm it was hailing for a bit. Where did I get the obviously wrong idea that it had to be at least cool if not cold for hail to happen? I’m doing the research as we speak.