From Owen Gleiberman‘s “Is Leonardo DiCaprio Playing a Dumb Hick, a Pitiless Sociopath…or a Muddle?,” posted on 10.29:
“In Killers of the Flower Moon, Leo’s Ernest Burkhart feels less like a character of dark or even tragic impulses than like a man who, in any given scene, is what the film needs him to be.
“When he’s asked to do the ultimate dark deed — to add poison to the insulin shots his wife is taking — he carries out the task with such methodical thoughtlessness that instead of the heart of darkness opening up before us, we may feel like we’re seeing the heart of darkness closed off. Our connection to Ernest as a character should be deepening, but instead we’re on the outside looking in. Can a man slow-kill the wife he loves, without a shrug, all because he’s a dunce yokel following orders?
“There’s a disorienting lack of background to much of what takes place in Killers of the Flower Moon. Like how Robert DeNiro’s William Hale brought this scheme of organized murder into being. How Hale himself, a public friend and benefactor of the Osage, evolved into a genocidal terrorist is never even addressed — his terse heartlessness is presented as a fait accompli. And Ernest Burkhart’s compliance in the scheme is presented with the same quality of rote objectivity. It’s as if they’ve all been doing this their whole lives.
“The film is scrupulously true to the terrible facts of the Osage murders. Yet the answer to the ‘why?’ of how the Reign of Terror happened — that these men were heartless racists — is an accurate answer that still doesn’t always feel like a dramatically full answer.
“As we watch Mollie waste away, Lily Gladstone acts with a sorrowful bewilderment that haunts us, but the fact is that Killers of the Flower Moon is a movie that asks us to spend three-and-a-half hours in the shoes of her affectless deceptive scoundrel of a husband, who by the end we may feel we understand less than we did at the beginning.”
He’s honestly concerned about Biden’s numbers being too low, which they are. He’s genuinely concerned that Trump might prevail in ’24. Plus he’s thoughtful and well-spoken.
But Phillips isn’t high-profile enough to launch a credible New Hampshire challenge, and he’s not good-looking like a movie star. His eyes are too small and beady-ish, and his nose is bigger than Bill Maher’s. But I’m glad he’s doing this regardless. At least someone on the Democratic side is trying to shake things up.
Imagine being a fly on the wall during the writing of Five Nights at Freddy’s (Blumhouse/Universal, 10.25). Pic was co-written by direcor Emma Tammi, Seth Cuddeback and original videogame creator Scott Cawthon. Imagine the odious cultural devolution required for this to happen, and then imagine the torrents of cash. Five Nights at Freddy’s has opened with a $78M haul — the second biggest opening ever for a videogame pic. Super Mario Bros ($146.3M) it still first in this regared, and Sonic the Hedgehog 2 ($72M) is third.
Pic stars the too-short Josh Hutcherson as a troubled security guard who takes a night-time job at an abandoned family entertainment center, after which four animatronic mascots come alive and are prone to murder. Costarring Lizabeth Lail, Piper Rubio, Mary Stuart MastersonMatthew Lillard.
I’m very sad and sorry about the death of Friendsstar Matthew Perry, 54. Drowned in his jacuzzi, they’re saying, but one way or another…it feels cruel to blurt it out but we all suspect that Perry’s decades of off-and-on drug abuse probably had something to do with this. Success, money, luck, good looks, and he couldn’t make it work. A tragictale from any angle. Chandler, adieu.
No marriage, no kids, 54 years old.. Nobody just falls asleep in a jacuzzi and drowns,
Friendo: Just saw Jeff Nichols‘ The Bikeriders and loved it. Why the mixed reviews? Jody Comer and Tom Hardy are terrific. Oscar nom potential for Jody. HE: It’s gotten mnixed reviews because it’s, like, terrible. Friendo: The audience here loved it. Gave it a standing ovation. HE: Jody Comer is very conspicuously doing a working-class accent on Saturday Njght Live. It’s awful. Friendo: She’s from working class Liverpool. Has had a lot of trouble in the snobby London theatre scene so it’s a nice comeuppance. She’s a future huge star. Watch. HE: Comer is a good actress but she needs to steer clear of trashy biker flicks. Friendo: That shouldn’t be too difficult. And even though you may think it’s trashy, Austin Butler is the next Brad Pitt. HE: Maybe but he needs to be in something solid and gritty. He’s a posturing pretty boy. He was kind of a drag in Tarantino’s OUATIH (“I’m here to do the devil’s bidness”), a vigorous and acceptable but not very Elvis-y Elvis, and now this. All hat, no cattle. Friendo: The women in the audience beg to disagree and they’re the ones who count. HE: Stanislavsky says avoid chain-smoking cigarettes — they’re a cheap device. Friendo: That goes for Hardy also, you’re saying. HE: Correct. Friendo: And Bette Davis. HE: I felt I was getting cancer just watching them inhale those fucking things. Friendo: We weren’t looking at the cigarettes when it come to Butler. HE: Actors use them to hide behind. If Marlon Brando had smoked like a chimney in The Wild One, no one would have called his performance iconic. Friendo: Cigarettes would have been an awkward addition in The Wild One performance. Yes, he was iconic. But I still loved Bikeriders.
11 months ago I wrote a big “whatever happened to?” piece, and it resulted in nothing whatsoever…no hints, suspicions, loose talk, red herrings…nothing at all. We’re talking about a kid behind the most famous blooper in movie history, and nobody knows who he was or whether he was killed in Vietnam or how his life turned out…nothing at all? So I’m trying again….somebody out there must have an idea who this damn kid was…someone must have a clue of some kind…c’mon.
Whatever happened to the Peck’s bad boy of North by Northwest? The earplug kid, I mean. Who was this little Southern California jackass and what was his basic malfunction? And what happened to the production associate who should have spotted this bad business during repeated takes?
The kid’s place in history is secure. NXNW was shot in ‘58, and he appears to be nine or ten. If he’s still with us the little fucker with the obstinate (or playfully sociopathic?) attitude and the Brylcreamed hair is in his early ‘70s now. Once you’ve seen that green plaid shirt and those nail-bitten adolescent fingers plugging those Jerry Mathers-type ears…there’s no un-seeing any of it.
Does anyone know his name? Or how his life turned out? Did he work his way into a good profession or achieve some measure of financial security or whatever? Did he get married and have kids? Did he wind up serving in Vietnam or participating in anti-war demonstrations in the late ‘60s? Given his mischievous inclinations the kid almost certainly grew up into a leftist. This was no obedient rule-follower. Maybe he became a writer or a politician or a Wall Street guy…who knows?
The plugged-ear kid is right in there with all the various dialogue-speaking characters invented by screenwriter Ernest Lehman…right in there with Glen Cove police sergeant “Emile Clinger” (John Beradino) and the older “good woman” with the CIA whose humanistic concern for the fate of Roger Thornhill is casually and patronizingly dismissed by Leo G. Carroll’s “professor” and with the unseen midtown Manhattan cab driver who dryiy and confidently states his ability to lose the pursuing followers (“Yes, I can”) only to fail to do so. Or the hot blonde (Patricia Cutts) in the Rapid City hospital room (“Stop!”)
“Kid Ears” is as much of an iconic NXNW presence as anyone else…as memorable as the Madison Ave. building custodian (Tommy Farrell‘s “Eddie”) who’s “not talkin’” to his wife, or the Plaza Hotel itself or “Victor” (Harry Seymour), the bald-headed Oak Bar maitre d, or “Elsie” the Plaza maid (Maudie Prickett), or the suspicious and somewhat surly overweight detective (Tol Avery) on the 20th Century Limited who questions Eva Marie Saint, or the slender, reedy-voiced farmer (Malcolm Atterbury) who chats with Cary Grant at Prairie Stop Highway 41, or the cultured hotel concierge at Chicago’s Ambassador East (can’t find his name) or “Sergeant Flamm” (Patrick McVey), the fleshy beat cop who co-arrests Grant at the Michigan Ave. auction only to drop him off at Midway Airport…
Earplug kid doesn’t speak, of course, and is the only discordant note in the entire film…the only accident that wasn’t corrected. He’s probably the only NXNW veteran besides 98 year-old Eva Marie Saint and maybe one other who isn’t dead as we speak. Or maybe he too has passed on. Either way he certainly belongs to the ages.
What discipline was handed out to the guilty party who failed to notice this Leave It To Beaver-aged troublemaker…who failed to spot this potentially disruptive behavior in front of those costly VistaVision cameras? Hitchcock’s continuity person or the 1st assistant director or whomever — somebody was responsible, and someone must have spotted him. My guess is that Hitchcock may have been told about the kid after Grant, Saint, James Mason and Martin Landau had satisfactorily performed the scene on an MGM Culver City sound stage, but he blithely ignored the potential for narrative interruption, figuring no one would notice (and nobody did until NXNW appeared on DVD, which allowed for easy freeze-frame capture).
…if Ridley Scott’s Napoleon (Columbia/Apple, 11.22) was still called Kitbag? I haven’t loved a movie title this much in a long time. Imagine those hundreds of thousands of Joe and Jane Popcorn types reacting in the usual ADD dumbshit way…”Kitbag…fuck is that?…let’s see something else.”
The political rehabilitation campaign for former New York governor Andrew Cuomo began last night. Unfairly sandbagged by Millennial #MeToo-ers, or so the legend now goes.
In my original ecstatic review of David Fincher‘s The Killer (10.15), I noted that it could be (or even appears to be) be a form of self-portraiture — a seeming reflection of Fincher’s basic nature as well as my own. Here’s how I put it:
Last night (Friday) Paul Schrader took a half-swipe at The Killer, allowing that while it’s technically impressive it’s mostly an example of a film being “all hat.” Schrader also noted that Michael Fassbender‘s constant narration makes him “the Chatty-Kathy of hit men.”
facebook commenter William Speruzzi took exception to Schrader’s “all hat” remark, stating in no uncertain terms that if Fincher has ever made a film about self-portrayal, The Killer is the strongest in this regard.
FrankJ. Lauta, the father of my ex-wife Maggie, passed a little more than a week ago. Maggie and our sons Jett and Dylan are attending a memorial service for Frank in Hamlin, New York — a suburb of Rochester. I’ve been watching a live–stream for the last hour or so. I’ve just posted the following on the church’swebsite:
“Frank was a good citizen, a kind soul and a compassionate human being. He was the father of my ex-wife, Maggie, and therefore ‘family’ for roughly four-plus years (‘87 through ‘92). We had sporadic contact for a few years. We all vacationed in the summer of ‘91 in Cape Cod when his grandsons (Jett and Dyian) were toddlers. I was honored to know him and his wife, Jeanne.
“I’m sorry that Frank never met his great-granddaughter, Sutton (daughter of Jett), but she’s part of him and he will always be part of her. Goodbye and farewell, Frank…you’re part of the infinite stream now.”
