Herewith is a no-big-deal marking of the 14th anniversary of a classic HE Larry David food–court story.
Barack Obama’s first term was nearly 75% served. It was fairly late on a Sunday afternoon, and for some curious reason I chose this moment to stand upon — defend — a fundamental principle.
How quaint that I mentioned that a seat could be saved with a newspaper.
And the task of somehow marshalling, organizing and leading a successful “Stop One Battle After Another” campaign — the Oscar-season equivalent of a June 1944 D-Day invasion — has become your responsibility.
A tall order, a steep uphill slog, and — be honest — almost sure to fail. But if you don’t man up and rise to this herculean challenge, the next three months will be a Bataan death march.
So you have no choice, Ike. The burden may break you, but you must become Fidel Castro in 1958 Cuba. Convince the citizenry that celebrating a leftist POC girlboss agitprop fable about a stoner stepdad trying to rescue his Zoomer stepdaughter from the clutches of her deranged biological beau pere boner pants will be against their economic interests. Warner Bros. has already eaten the bitter herbs. Let it end there.
Raise high the roof beam, carpenters! Persuade your flock that it has to be the last 25 minutes of Hamnet or the entirety of the obviously superior Sentimental Value. Save yourselves!
Painful as it may be, split your soul into two halves and become Ralph Meeker and Timothy Carey in Act Three of Paths of Glory. Meeker: “See that cockroach? Tomorrow I’ll be dead and it’ll be alive, and will therefore have more contact with my wife and child than I will.” Without a moment’s hesitation Carey squashes the bug with his right fist, and replies sardonically and sotto-voiced “now you’ve got the edge on him.”
Is it possible to flatten OBAA with the same take-it-or-leave-it decisiveness? Probably not, but as Richard Kiley’s Don Quixote once sang…
I’m still down with the final 25 or 30 minutes of Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly (Netflix, now streaming) but several first- and second-act scenes didn’t land like they did in Venice (for me at least), and certain portions felt arch, forced, artificial.
I don’t know why it felt less effective this time, but it did.
We all understand that you guys respect and admire each other and that certain performances you’ve both given are regarded as serious bell-ringers. But these “Actors on Actors” sessions all feel and sound the same, and it would be wonderful if you could somehow…it’s hard to say this in just the right way, but if you could somehow ease up on the damp fondling and caressing and the smooth talk…if you could back away from giving each other constant pecks on the cheek?
For some reason I’ve decided to re-watch Daniel Petrie and Ron Koslow‘s Lifeguard, which I haven’t seen since the Gerald Ford-Jimmy Carter era…half a century ago!
I love character-driven ’70s films, but this one doesn’t quite get there. It’s fairly compelling or at least interesting in terms of general character tension and low-key social realism (you can really feel the festering ’70s atmosphere), but it leaves you hanging at the end with the slender, dark-haired, good looking protagonist (played by 31 year-old Sam Elliott, who’s currently white-haired and handlebar-stache’d and who sounds like a droopy Deputy Dawg) at some kind of head-scratching, nowhere-man crossroads.
Good character-driven movies have to end with a sense of justice or finality or symmetrical balance…the main characters have to face reality and deal with their decisions in some kind of “okay, you called the shots and now you’re stuck with this” way. Actions have consequences, bruh.
South Bay lifeguard Rick Carlson (Elliott) loves his satisfying beach gig (which allows him to feel like a kind of king mixed with a judicious sheriff) but is bothered by family-and-friendo judgments that he should be manning up professionally and basically making more money and driving a snazzier car.
Rick would kinda like to get married to foxy ex-girlfriend Anne Archer (28 during filming) and vice versa, but she wants him to make more dough and so would he, but “fatten your bank account” isn’t who he is deep down. He tries selling Porsches at a Valley dealership but he hates the routine and quits. He’s reluctant to have sex with the teenaged Kathleen Quinlan (actually 21 during filming) because she’s too young, but he does her anyway. Once, I mean.
So what’s Rick going to do to resolve his situation? Answer: Not much or nothing very different. He’s basically just heading back to the beach. Which leaves you with a feeling of “that’s it?,…aahhh, fuck me.”
That said, Elliott, Quinlan, Archer, Stephen Young (Porsche guy) and Parker Stevenson (a rookie being trained by Elliott) deliver just-right performances. Even with the weak ending and all, Lifeguard is/was Elliott’s best film ever.
What do you do if you don’t care for older people to whom you’re vaguely “related”, and with whom you’ve been invited to share Christmas dinner with? The conventional answer is “grim up and suffer thorough it.” But maybe not, I’m thinking. Plus I’ve always sensed that they don’t care for my company either…fine. It’s almost a relief.
They’re ”nice” people, considerate, unfailingly polite, etc. But also a bit dull, sedate, incurious, not very well travelled and certainly not my idea of attuned to the here-and-now. I find them sleepily oppressive, and I really don’t want that vibe in my head. So I’m politely stepping back from Christmas Day dinner…no offense, not the end of the world.
What’s the problem exactly? A feeling of novocained numbness when they’re in a room. A minimum of verbal out-reach. A general lack of eye contact. A lack of laughter, wit, audacity. A basic lack of interest and inquisitiveness and opinions. I’d much rather hang out with neurotic actors or alcoholics or gambling junkies or Satanists, even, than fuddy-duds and flatliners.
In my mid teens my mother once confided that her mother Dorothy (my maternal grandmother) had made it clear on one or two occasions that she didn’t care for my father’s father (my paternal granddad). Family relations lean this way from time to time. We just have to roll with the fact that certain people are anathema to each other.
Fifteen minutes into my 10.10.25 NYFF viewing of Bradley Cooper‘s Is This Thing On? (Searchlight, 12.19), I knew it was a massive whiff. It will open theatrically 11 days hence, and not a bird will stir in the trees. It’s fine but my God, the congenial vibes! The mildness! No real conflict, no real challenges, no “drama”, no heavy pivots.
HE’s 10.11 review: Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman has called Bradley Cooper’s Is This Thing On? (Searchlight, 12.19), which I saw last night at Alice Tully Hall, “a feel-good divorce film”.
That’s a fairly accurate description — it’s a kinder, warmer, far-less-hostile Marriage Story, and the general behavioral drift is amiable. It’s superbly acted all around, but it also has a bit of a flabby belly. For my money it’s way too happy, too mellow, too easygoing, too turn-the other-cheek.
Set in the flush environs of Manhattan’s West Village and a handsome home in Westchester County, it’s mainly about Alex and Tess (Will Arnett and Laura Dern), a 40ish husband and wife with two ten-year-old boys (they’re called “Irish twins” due to having been born less than a year apart).
The key situation is that Alex and Tess have decided to call it quits because…well, because they’ve been written this way. The dramatic engine, if you will, is basically about Alex dipping his toe into the waters of Manhattan stand-up comedy as a form of therapy, using his personal saga for material. It’s also about personal renewal.
But the film, directed and co-written by Cooper, is also about gliding and sliding and loping along without pushing any of the usual emotionally fraught buttons.
Fortune‘s Eva Roytburg and Nick Lichtenberg, posted yesterday afternoon:
“Jared Kushner has quietly reemerged as a player in one of the biggest takeover fights in modern Hollywood. Paramount’s audacious, all-cash $108 billion hostile bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, announced Monday, names Kushner’s fully owned private equity firm, Affinity Partners, as one of four outside financing partners backing the offer, alongside the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, and Qatar.
“The detail is buried in Paramount’s tender offer, with Paramount listing “the Public Investment Fund (Kingdom of Saudi Arabia), L’imad Holding Company PJSC (Abu Dhabi), Qatar Investment Authority (Qatar), and Affinity Partners (Jared Kushner)” as investors who would, under a successful deal scenario, hold nonvoting equity and forgo governance rights, including board seats.
“The filing also states that because these investors are structured without such rights, “the Transaction will not be within CFIUS’s jurisdiction,” referring to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. Reports have suggested that WBD’s board opted for Netflix’s deal as it lacked any foreign financing components and therefore faced no issues with CFIUS, a notably opaque and powerful antitrust tool that the government can employ to block controversial mergers.”
I’d somehow never seen this local ABC News video report.
Curious as this sounds, watching it whooshed me back not just to a singular dark moment but to a long-ago neverland, 40 years before the sudden double-whammy nightmare of COVID and totalitarian woke terror…I would have that monocultural, pre-culture war time again…a time when the murder of a much-beloved, “Across The Universe”-y fellow…a sometimes feisty snappy brain who dreamt of cosmic fairy dust…a death that touched everyone equally, even the pickup-truck bumblefucks.
