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.
English was, of course, a second language for the Mexican-born Ricardo Montalban (1920-2009) so no demerits for the “it’s” possessive or the misspelled “than”. What mattered was that he meant it.
Excerpt from Pauline Kael’s review of Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan (‘82):
“[Ricardo] Montalban’s performance doesn’t show a trace of Fantasy Island. It’s all panache; if he isn’t wearing feathers in his hair you see them there anyway. You know how you always want to laugh at the flourishes that punctuate the end of a flamenco dance, and the dancers don’t let you? Montalban does. His bravado is grandly comic.” — Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, 1982
Two…no, three observations abut the bizarre persistence of the Bradley Cooper-Leonard Bernstein-Maestro nose thing, which really didn’t warrant much attention in the first place.
One, the Maestro makeup team obviously wanted to create a strong resemblance between Bradley Cooper and Leonard Berstein, which partly meant creating a correctly proportioned Bernstein prosthetic nose. They just wanted the resemblance factor to stand out in the right way, and that’s all — nothing more. I find it astonishing that anyone would ascribe any ulterior motives of any kind.
Two, it is beyond bizarre that the Maestro makeup team nonetheless got the nose wrong. It’s close to the Bernstein original but a bit too extreme — almost Pinocchio-like from side angles.
And three, what possessed Mark Harris to want to write such a long Slate piece (11 heavyweight paragraphs) about this kerfuffle?
Just a slight reminder about Disney’s woke-feminist Snow White (’24), which everyone hates thanks to Rachel Zegler‘s remarks about how profoundly tiresome the 1937 animated version was (who wants a sappy love story featuring a stalker Prince Charming?) and how the forthcoming version is about Snow White becoming a progressive leader of some sort (perhaps vaguely similar to 2012’s Snow White and the Huntsman)…just a slight reminder that this proto-feminist version was co-written by Greta Gerwig and Erin Cressida Wilson. in other words, a fairy-tale version of manosphere pissnado…right?
Two days ago I was standing next to a Bridgeport shopping complex, waiting to meet Vinny-the-mechanic so he could fix my injured car window. To pass the time I decided to visit a sporting goods store. The glass door opened out and was manual.
As I opened it two middle-aged women of color were close and approaching, so I stepped back and gave them full leeway. The glass door had one of those cylindrical metal-washer devices so it was slowly closing (i.e., not slamming) in their direction.
Naturally one of the women got huffy about this — offended that I hadn’t quickly stepped to my right and held the door open like Sir Walter Raleigh in Elizabethan England. “You don’t hold doors?” she snorted. If I had said a single questioning word in response, it would have been a whole big thing. It could’ve been a TikTok or YouTube video. Lucretia McSnippy was ready to get down and have it out…I could feel it.
I thought I was doing the right thing by getting out of their way…not actually! What I should have done was disappear into thin air.
[Posted seven and 1/2 years ago — 1.18.16] Three days ago I was on my way to returning a SIXT rental car (La Cienega south of Wilshire) when I decided to pick up my Beatle boots from a West Hollywood shoe guy. Acting on impulse and very suddenly, I swerved into the shoe guy’s parking lot.
The boots were too tight so I’d asked the guy to stretch them out. I wasn’t wearing socks but I put them on and they fit well enough. I impulsively decided to ask the guy to repair the banged-up suede mocassins I was wearing, so I wore the Beatle boots from then on.
Or I did, at least, until I dropped the car off and began walking back to the pad. My bare heels began rubbing against the inner boot leather and were starting to really hurt. So I went into a men’s store opposite the Beverly Center and bought a pair of socks. No, not gold toe socks.
But with the socks on I discovered that the Beatle boots were too tight again. So the hell with it — I walked the rest of the way home in the socks, carrying the boots in a plastic bag. At that moment I was the only sober guy in Los Angeles who was walking on a major boulevard in socks — nobody else was doing that. I had to stare at the sidewalk the whole way, of course, as I had to watch for stones or shards of broken glass.
I’m realizing now that the Beatle boots will probably never work out. Because I used to be a size 12 but now I’m a 12 and 1/2 or so.
Back in the mid ’90s Robert Evans told me the following: “When you get older your feet get a little bigger, your ears get longer, your teeth get smaller and your nose gets bigger. And women won’t fuck you as much. Or you don’t want to fuck them as much. Or something like that.”
Flash forward to 8.18.23: I still have the same Beatle boots. I can wear them as long as I’m not walking several blocks.
Justine Triet, the director of the Palme d’Or-winning Anatomy of a Fall, would be in a stronger position with woke critics if she was gay. Unfortunately she’s straight with two kids. (Her boyfriend is director Arthur Harari, who co-wrote the Fall script.) The film will almost certainly play Telluride. Pic stars Sandra Hüller (The Zone of interest) as “a writer trying to prove her innocence in her husband’s death.”
