With Bradley Cooper‘s Maestro about to stir the soup at the 2023 Venice Film Festival, it’s allowable, I feel, to look back at what happened when Cooper’s A Star Is Born premiered at the 2018 Toronto Film Festival, and why the lizards leapt and hissed.

The inciting incident was triggered by Variety‘s Kris Tapley, and it happened just shy of five years ago (on 9.4.18) and posting all of those “whoa, wait a minute…let’s have some perspective” essays was thoroughly exhausting, and I’m speaking only as one who merely joined the cause after Tapley declared that Bradley Cooper‘s remake of a remake (‘76) of a remake (‘54) of a remake (‘37) was an historic humdinger to end all humdingers.

I genuinely admired the first half of Cooper’s film but not so much the second half, and those inner voices just wouldn’t stop. This well-made film had been over-praised to death, and it had to be cut down to size. Proportionality was all.

The people who brought the Bullet Train pollution — director David Leitch, screenwriter Zak Olkewicz, producers Kelly McCormick, Antoine Fuqua and Leitch again — are walking cancer cells…pure poison. Motive-wise I’m excusing the cast (a paycheck is a paycheck) but they were all reprehensible regardless.

From HE’s 8.22 Bullet Train review:

As much as I admire and enjoy the Jacob Burns Film Center — a truly first-rate, well-curated theatre for serious film buffs — I don’t like the 45 minute drive to Pleasantville, and that’s how long it takes from Wilton. A scenic journey for the most part, but those constantly swerving country roads plus the stressful Saw Mill River Parkway X 2 = 90 minutes plus a third of a tank of gas plus everything else.

I can always see the same films (and earlier) in Manhattan. The train is simpler and easier plus I can file stories as I go.

The Bedford Playhouse is only a half-hour drive, but the films are rarely choice and artified — they play the same popcorn fare that you can find at any multiplex.

As long as we’re acknowledging major anniversaries, Errol Morris‘s The Fog of War is now 20 years old. It won the Best Documentary Feature Oscar as well as the Spirit Award for Best Doc Feature. In my book it’s Morris’s best film, easily.

The Fog of War actually premiered on 5.21.03 (Cannes) but was screened in this country for the first time at the ’03 Telluride Film Festival.

I’m mentioning it because I’ve been thinking about great film scores, and for the last 20 years I’ve lietened over and over to Phillip Glass‘s original techno score. My favorite track, which arrives at the 1:08:13 mark on the YouTube soundtrack video, is titled “No Second Chance.”

Robert McNamara died on 7.6.09 at the age of 93.

With the Venice Film Festival’s Maestro premiere only two weeks away (9.2) and the overblown Schnozzgate finally starting to fade, I thought I’d drop this decades-old video of Leonard Bernstein speaking admiringly and, of course, knowledgably about the Beatles’ musical innovations.

Lenny focuses almost entirely on Revolver. 95% of then-current pop music was crap, he said, but 5% of it was sublime.

I wonder what Bernstein thought of the Left Banke‘s “Pretty Ballerina“?

Sex (especially great sex) can make strong men feel weaker or less driven, or at least persuade them to ease up to some degree. Among creative types post-coital drainage always slows your rivers down to a trickle. Okay, I don’t know how true this actually is, but it’s a well-established myth — i.e., “There goes another novel.”

From Jake Malooley’s “After Hours: The Oral History of a Cult Classic” — Air Mail, 8.22.23:

On Friday afternoon Jeff and Sasha faced the music…uhm, the issues of the moment. Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein schnozz. Rachel Zegler’s woke Snow White flick. The sad finances behind the “Blind Side” situation. “The Pot au Feu” (aka “The Taste of Things”) and other Telluride forecastings.

Again the link.

In the thread for yesterday’s “Speaking of Blind Sides,” Seasonal Aflac Disorder mentioned that the young Steven Spielberg was a film nerd “so you’d expect he’d be listening to film scores as a young man.”

To which I replied that I, too, was listening to film scores as a lad — Elmer Bernstein, Miklos Rosza, Maurice Jarre, Max Steiner, Franz Waxman. Bronislau Kaper, Dimitri Tiomkin, Bernard Herrmann, Hugo Friedhofer. Except I never bought a compilation album of Freidhofer’s best film music, and I dearly love his scores for One-Eyed Jacks, The Best Years of Our Lives, The Young Lions, Hondo, Vera Cruz, Soldier of Fortune, The Harder They Fall, The Sun Also Rises, An Affair to Remember, etc.