Daily

“It’s just an accident that we happen to be on earth, enjoying our silly little moments, distracting ourselves as often as possible so we don’t have to really face up to the fact that, you know, we’re just temporary people with a very short time in a universe that will eventually be completely gone. And everything that you value, whether it’s Shakespeare, Beethoven, da Vinci or whatever, will be gone. The earth will be gone. The sun will be gone. There’ll be nothing.

“The best you can do to get through life is distraction. Love works as a distraction. And work works as a distraction. You can distract yourself a billion different ways. But the key is to distract yourself.” — Woody Allen in a 2013 “What I’ve Learned” Esquire piece.

It would obviously be a worthy endeavor if somehow the finest 5000 films could be saved and digitally encoded and sent out into space on hundreds of sentinel-like, torpedo-shaped cruisers. Hundreds of them, travelling every which way. It might take decades or centuries but eventually some intelligent civilization would find one of them, and then all that beauty would at least be somewhere.

Read more

Over the last 12 years there have been, by my count, three significant films about journalistic screwups at major publications, two of them concerning the N.Y. Times. 2003 saw the release of Billy Ray‘s Shattered Glass, about the exposure of several fabricated news stories by New Republic staffer Stephen Glass. Ten years later Samantha Grant‘s A Fragile Trust: Plagiarism, Power, and Jayson Blair at the New York Times, a documentary, was released. And on 4.17 Rupert Goold‘s True Story, a truth-based thriller based on a memoir by discredited N.Y. Times reporter Michael Finkel, will hit theatres. I’m now betting that within a couple of years we’ll be watching a fourth movie in this vein, one about the staggering screw-up by Rolling Stone reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdel and her editors in the UVA rape story of 2012, which has now been retracted and discredited. The Rolling Stone saga has the potential to be All The President’s Men in reverse — not a story of a liar or a plagiarist but an entire news organization turning a blind eye to basic journalistic essentials because the news story presented a politically correct legend — i.e., campus rapes are commonplace and college authorities rarely seem to do enough to adequately condemn or prevent them.

The moviegoing public will never be that interested in films about journalistic malfeasance, but Shattered Glass, at least, was a gripping, above-average melodrama about faking it in order to get ahead. It regarded an anxious American go-getter mentality that lusted for fame regardless of how that fame is achieved, and in so doing seemed to put its finger on something unsettling in the culture. In my view there’s something just as unsettling contained in the story of Rolling Stone reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdel and her editors in the reporting and almost total lack of fact-checking of the UVA “Jackie” story, which has now been retracted and discredited. It’s basically a tale of a reporter who so believed in the politically correct legend contained in a story about a gang rape of a woman named “Jackie” at the University of Virginia that Erdel (and her asleep-at-the-wheel editors) decided that the “facts”, ignored or unexplored as they seem to have been, weren’t as important as the general story it told, and how that story supported a description of a deplorable problem (i.e., campus rape is definitely prevalent today) that the p.c. crowd wanted to call attention to in a big way.

Read more

I’m sorry but Roger Sterling‘s flamboyant new moustache, inescapably present in “Severance,” the first episode of the final Mad Men season (airing tonight), is a huge mistake. The appearance of a character should never overwhelm what he/she is about within. One look at Sterling’s perverse, snow-white dandy stache and you can’t hear a word he says. All you can hear is your own startled voice saying over and over again, “Why the fuck did he grow that thing?” (In a 4.5.15 conversation with Vulture‘s Kyle Buchanan, Weiner said Roger “doesn’t look good with a white, trimmed mustache…this soup-strainer thing that’s going on is much more appropriate for him.”) On top of which it makes him look like he’s 75, and why would Roger want to look like an eccentric Civil War grandfather if he’s trying to nail the latest interesting youngish woman, which he always is? “Oh no!”-wise, Roger’s moustache is, no exaggeration, almost on the level of that Afro wig that Phil Spector wore to his murder trial. I was going to ask John Slattery about this at the Mad Men after-party but I wimped out, lazy coward that I sometimes am.

Legendary producer David Brown (Jaws, The Verdict).

Read more

As I mentioned the other day, almost all biopics about musical legends end with an early death, mostly due to drug or alcohol abuse but sometimes due to simple bad fortune, like the plane-crash death of Patsy Cline. Blues legend Bessie Smith, portrayed by Queen Latifah in Bessie (HBO, 5.16), bought it in a car crash in 1937, when she was 43. The most popular female blues singer of the 1920s and ’30s, one of the all-time greatest (right up there with Billie Holiday), a live performer, never made any films to speak of…and bisexual. Which is alluded to in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it clip in the trailer. Bessie also heralds the return, after a five-year absence, of Mo’Nique.

This may be the first time in my life that I’ve more or less agreed with and even felt a degree of kinship with Glenn Beck. “More or less” because a Clinton win, as offensive as that notion sounds from a political dynasty perspective, would of course ensure a somewhat more progressive administration, certainly regarding environmental policies and a general belief in government acting as a corrective counter-weight to, say, the priorities of the Koch Brothers. Jeb Bush (whose alleged inevitabilty as the 2016 Republican Presidential candidate is far from assured, according to a N.Y. Times story out today) and Hillary Clinton are backed by many of the same financial donors, as Glenn Greenwald points out, which would indicate similar priorities, but you can’t tell me their policies would be identical or even similar. (Thanks to Mr. Sunset Terra Cotta for the link.)

If you’ve seen Alex Gibney‘s Scientology takedown doc Going Clear, you know there’s very little about this SNL piece that uses exaggeration for comic effect. It’s spot-on and amusingly done but it’s not what most of us would call “funny” because the joke histories aren’t that different from what’s actually happened to certain Scientology members, etc.

My heart goes out to any guy married to a woman who’s into nightly applications of Vicks Vaporub before retiring at 7:30 pm, but my mind furiously recoils from images of Mike O’Brien and Michael Keaton doing each other in the back seat of a car. I’m sorry but I don’t want that image in my head on a Sunday morning. But it’s there anyway. Thanks.

A week and a half ago a Variety piece indicated that next month’s Cannes Film Festival might turn out to be “mildly deflating” — i.e., lacking in triples and homers. The idea of flying all the way to France for an experience that will partly include Matthew McConaughey contemplating ritual suicide fills me with levels of dread that I’d rather not describe.

Then an idea hit me this morning. What if Guillermo del Toro‘s Crimson Peak (Universal, 10.16), which Stephen King and Joe Hill saw and praised three weeks ago, shows out of competition in Cannes? Del Toro’s “blood-soaked Age of Innocence, a gloriously sick waltz through Daphne Du Maurier territory” (as Hill called it) sounds to me like a triple and just what the doctor ordered to counter-balance those images of McConaughey trying to work up the guts to disembowel himself over a bowl of ramen.

Read more

I’ve been paying for regular bundled cable TV since around ’81, when I first moved into my Bank Street apartment with a half-decent income. And now it’s finally time to cut the cord and make do without regular TV, which I never watch at all. I’ve got a top-of-the-line Roku Player along with an Apple TV box (completely superfluous compared to what the Roku contains), and right now I pay for HBO but I can obviously get that straight from the horse’s mouth when I give my Time Warner channel bundle the heave-ho.

The only thing I’m reluctant to give up is my occasional check-ins with MSNBC and CNN, which aren’t as frequent as they used to be but I like the fact they they’re there. And I’m certainly going to want them around when the 2016 election kicks off in earnest…what, five or six months from now?

If only I could independently access those two channels along with the usual HBO, Showtime, Netflix, TMC, AMC, Amazon and Warner Archive, I’d be totally fine. I know it sounds ridiculous to delay on a significant monthly saving over a sentimental attachment to two news channels, but there it is. It’s the only thing holding me back.

Read more

For whatever reason I never read Shawn Levy‘s “Rat Pack Confidential” when it came out 16 or 17 years ago, but I suddenly bought it on Amazon right after posting my review of Alex Gibney‘s All or Nothing At All, a two-night, four-hour doc about Frank Sinatra which pops tomorrow night. The old Frank magic vaguely had me in its spell. Levy’s book is a lot more candid and less cautious than Gibney’s doc in terms of portraying the Sinatra who swaggered around like king shit in the heyday. The Sinatra family gatekeepers, Tina and Frank, Jr., got along with Gibney but had no love for Levy. In any event the book arrived today, and here’s a passage at the very end that summarizes how suddenly and quickly the Rat Pack era, which peaked with the shooting of Ocean’s Eleven around January 1960, came to a close with the arrival of the Beatles four years later:

“There [in 1960] you had them — a group consisting of the nation’s greatest and most popular entertainers, with the blessing of a dynamic political star and fearsome crime lords, the favors of gorgeous women, an enviable playground, all the money in the world — and within four years of commanding the world’s attention they were deposed. That blip of teen culture that they’d mocked and derided but secretly envied and aped? It echoed back off the far side of the abyss and overwhelmed them. What seemed like high-spirited fun in the winter of 1960 came to look like pathetic lechery and debauchery by the summer of 1964, the high hopes of one generation — a delusional sham which obscured a corrupt, licentious core — were replaced with the simply adolescent cheeriness of the next.”

Well-written, adult-angled, dryly comedic but not out-and-out funny. But at the same time romantic and middle-budgeted with stars. Ben Stiller or Seth Rogen or Will Ferrell or Kevin Hart would kill to be in a film as good as John McNaughton and Richard Price‘s Mad Dog and Glory, but low-key, character-driven dramedies are as extinct as dinosaurs in today’s realm. Big studios won’t touch them and indie producers don’t seem to have the touch or something. “Put down the magazine before you hurt yourself, Harold”….lines like this are beautiful.