Yesterday afternoon I met Vinny-the-mechanic at the same vaguely-down-at-the-heels Bridgeport shopping center. It took him about 90 minutes to take everything apart and repair the up-and-down driver-side window, which involved replacing the whirring, battery-driven electric motor that controls the movement.
Everything apparently back to normal…great! I paid Vinny, thanked him, drove back home.
25 minutes later I pulled into a Balducci’s parking lot in Southport, and pulled the latch that opens the door. Nothing…door wouldn’t open. Vinny had forgotten to connect the inside-the-door whachamacallit. I crawled over the console and escaped through the passenger side door. To my relief the outside driver-side door latch still worked, but the inside latch was kaput.
I called Vinny…silence. He made a mistake, okay, but he’s still a smart, methodical mechanic. Having a bad day, I presumed.
Nonetheless a sixth sense told me I should hire someone else to fix the door-latch problem. This morning I drove the VW Passat up to a Georgetown Shell station, as I know and trust the mechanic. I dropped it off around 8:30 am. Two hours ago they told me I’m good to go.
Everyone’s maximum musical receptivity happens in their late teens and 20s, and young Spielberg was right in that sweet spot (18 to 21) during the mid ’60s era when the Beatles were really cooking with petrol.
Has anyone ever heard of a baby boomer who wasn’t completely throttled and transformed by the trifecta of Rubber Soul, Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band? What kind of walls did you have to live behind to be immune? And yet Spielberg didn’t become a Beatles fan until he listened to the White Album in late ’68. Where the hell was he in ’65, ’66 and ’67? What was he doing, living off the land in Borneo?
Oh and the Beatles were a “fad” for only the first few months after they exploded, and their musical maturity phase began to kick in around mid ’65. If you weren’t tuned into what they were doing between Rubber Soul and Sgt. Pepper you were a Martian. And by his own admission, that was exactly what Spielberg was back then.
“I was a teetotaler,” he toldRolling Stone‘s Peter Travers 16 years ago. “I used to collect soundtrack albums from movies that I loved. I wasn’t smoking grass or taking LSD, though many of my friends were…I know, I know. I’m a disappointment. But I was just too busy making pictures.”
So if he wasn’t “hearing” the Beatles during their most creative period what else has he missed over the last half-century? Seriously — this quote is huge. It contains volumes, multitudes.
HE’s Moneyball review (“Moneyball Serenity“) was posted nearly 12 years ago, and almost exactly a decade about the 9/11 massacre. I don’t want to hear any bullshit about how Billy Bean‘s sabre-metric strategies didn’t pan out like the movie implied that they would. I simply responded to what Bennett Miller‘s film was and still is, and I phrased it very nicely. It’s one of HE’s best-ever reviews.
Bennett Miller‘s Moneyball (Sony, 9.23) is my idea of a triumph. A triumph of surprise and deception, I should add. It’s an emotionally low-key, thinking man’s Field of Dreams — a smart, true-to-life, business-of-baseball movie with a touch of the mystical and the sublime, and propelled along by a highly pleasurable lead performance by Brad Pitt.
It’s not just the emotional and spiritual currents that makes it great, but the subtlety of them.
Earlier this year someone called it “the Social Network of baseball movies,” and that’s a close enough description except for the fact that Pitt’s lead performance is highly likable. Moneyball is definitely a nominee for Best Picture, Best Actor (Pitt), Best Director (Miller), Best Adapted Screenplay and so on.
And I don’t want to hear any crap about how it’s not rousing enough or sports-movie-ish enough or emotionally uplifting enough in a Rocky-Warrior sense. Fuck all that. This is a movie about how things work, and what it’s really like to say, “Wait, I’ve got a new idea” and to deal with the entrenched hate that always comes from that.
I’m not into baseball that much but I used to be, and Moneyball re-awakened my affection for the game precisely because it’s a little nerdy — my first text was that “it’s baseball nerd heaven” — and kinda mystical and because it doesn’t traffic in the standard sports-movie inspirational uplift crap…and yet it does do that in a nicely grown-up way.
On a rote level Moneyball is a complex, enjoyably verite, real-life, beautifully directed sports flick about two baseball-underdog iconoclasts (Brad Pitt as the Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane + Jonah Hill as a brilliant, Yale-educated nerd-dweeb that Pitt hires) using a kind of new-math strategy to try and win games. But that’s just the plot-engine aspect, the “hook”…whatever.
What it’s really about is the ecstatic, pure-gravy pleasure of watching a first-rate, award-quality fall movie that’s made for you and me and everyone out there who hated Stupid Crazy Love, plus the holy-shit excitement of a serious, Oscar-level Brad Pitt performance. Seriously. Pitt has never had a better-written part, or such a spirited, multi-layered and vulnerable character to dig into, or given a more primal movie-star performance in his life.
Yep — it’s Pitt vs. Clooney in this year’s Best Actor race. Okay, Pitt vs. Clooney vs. Leonardo DiCaprio as Gay Edgar Hoover.
Moneyball is exactly the kind of sports movie that I’ve recently come to love (i.e., partly a Friday Night Lights-type deal and partly an Undefeated thing but without a do-or-die locker-room speech or a “we’re Number One!” third-act win). It’s mystical, statistical, spooky, emotional and wonderfully original. And wonderfully “pure” in a sense. The complexity mixed with the spirituality and the political reality of things…just brilliant.
Plus it’s elevated all along by killer-level Steve Zallian-meets-Aaron Sorkin dialogue. Did I mention Pitt is great in it?
Put another way, it’s about organizing a baseball team in a different nerdy way (“saber-metrics” and all that) and the political pushback that Pitt and Hill have to deal with from almost everyone, but — this is the exceptional surprise element — it’s also about how the forces and wills of the Gods suddenly step in and make things happen when they feel like it. Angels over the outfield. So call it a nerdy baseball movie mixed with spirituality and politics and adult-level complications…sublime.
Hill is perfect — it’s easily his best performance since Superbad and his first normal-level adult performance. Phillip Seymour Hoffman is tight and testy and spot-on as the Okalnd A’s manager. Arliss Howard delivers a perfect third-act cameo. Robin Wright has exactly one scene as Pitt’s ex-wife (director Spike Jonze plays her boyfriend…hilarious!) Tammy Blanchard is visible as a player’s wife but has no lines. The woman in Pitt/Billy Beane’s life is his daughter (Kerris Dorsey), and she’s all the movie needs.
I’m going to repeat an observation from an HE reader that was initially posted last March:
“Sports films are almost never really ‘about’ sports. They always have a primary, more traditionally cinematic concern on their mind: a relationship on the rocks or a budding romance, the rise of the downtrodden or the triumphant return of the forgotten or discarded. Even the notion of the big game being won is a well-trodden, pedestrian conceit that serves as the usual metaphor for the final challenge a protagonist or team must face.
“Moneyball may well be the first sports film not seen through the prism of a romance a la Bull Durham, a character drama a la The Blind Side, a tragedy a la Brian’s Song, or a comedy a la Major League. Rather, it is the first of its kind: a sports film seen through the prism of sports.”
“[The film’s version of] Michael Oher is treated, by the Tuohys, as a kind of family mascot. There’s never any conflict between them, and not much in the way of conversation.
“Bullock’s Leigh Anne, with her diamond-studded crucifix necklace, charges through the film like a refugee from Dallas, crusading for her sainthood merit badge, while Michael, with his benign torpor, rarely rouses himself with a force of ego. At one point, when Leigh Anne and Sean are discussing whether to become his legal guardians, Sean says, ‘Michael’s gift is his ability to forget. He’s mad at no one, and he really doesn’t care what happened in the past.’ Leigh Anne agrees, making a (comic) point of how much she hates it when her husband is right.
“But Sean’s statement about Michael is shocking in how wrong it is. Michael’s gift is his ability to forget? Who would say that about a white character who’d suffered the kinds of things Michael did? The movie is reducing him to a Teddy-bear simpleton, with little to no psychology. He never has rich exchanges with the other family members; he never expresses anything but gratefulness (or, after he crashes the truck they just bought him, cringing regret). There’s no interior complexity to Michael, and that’s the lie of The Blind Side. It’s what allows his character to basically be used by the Tuohys to feel good about themselves.”
Okay, but you know what I remember about The Blind Side? I bought the bullshit. I knew I was being fed suspicious vegetables, but they found their way into my heart all the same. And the sales agent was Sandra Bullock‘s performance as Leigh Anne. Everyone bought it, and no amount of complaining 14 years later can change that,
We’re all pleased that IFC/Sapan will be opening Trân Anh Hùng‘s The Pot au Feu (aka The Taste of Things) later this year as part of a generally vigorous effort to snag Oscar attention and perhaps even Best Picture and Best Director nominations.
And we’re extra double ding-dong delighted that the NYFF guys aren’t calling it a North American premiere, which means this masterful foodie flick will be debuting at Telluride two weeks hence. (The Toronto Film Festival slate is not an option as its slate is wrapped tight with no room to breathe.)
But we’re still appalled that IFC/Sapan has (a) dropped the original, perfect-sounding French-English title, which translates as The Pot Roast and was used when it played in Cannes three months ago, and (b) saddled it with the pedestrian title of The Taste of Things….please!
I wrote last night that The Taste of Things “isn’t an awful title, but it sounds vaguely antiseptic and blanded down…flat, lacking in flavor and aroma…it no longer sounds or feels like a film simmering in French culture, but like a gourmet cookbook that might have been written by the owner of a suburban restaurant in northern New Jersey or Westchester County.”
The best response was posted early this morning by HE commenter “Christophe“: “I don’t mind the new title, but somehow find it ironic that notoriously marketing-obsessed Disney/Pixar had the guts to release a mass-market film called Ratatouille, and yet an indie foreign-film distrib thinks The Pot au Feu is too strange-sounding for discerning audiences.”
When you get right down to it, IFC/Sapan is hung up on au Feu as the original title starts with “The“, followed by “Pot,” a familiar kitchen term to any rube in Arkansas.
IFC/Sapan exec #1 during conference: “But they won’t understand what au Feu means, and we’ll lose tens of thousands in revenue!”
IFC/Sapan exec #2: “But millions understood Ratatouille, and that’s obviously a bigger tongue-challenge than au Feu could ever be.”
IFC/Sapan exec #3: “Will you come up for air, please? Clem Kadiddlehopper is not going to pay to see this film in Dogpatch, Kentucky…it’s a film that discerning, semi-educated audiences will flock to in the cities and suburbs, and a nice easy title like The Pot au Feu won’t give them a moment’s hesitation.”
This means it’ll open this year and not, as feared by HE, in the winter or early spring of ’24. From my perspective this is wonderful and gratifying news, as The Pot-au-Feu is still HE’s hands-down favorite film of the year.
It is extremely heartening, to say the least, to learn otherwise, and that this Cannes-praised film might….do we dare to dream? …play Telluride and one or two other prestigious fall festivals…who knows?
I apologize for airing my pessimistic concerns, and I congratulate IFC and Saban for doing the right thing.
The bad news is that Tran Anh Hung‘s film has been retitled, according to Variety‘s Clayton Davis, as The Taste of Things. HE’s gut reaction: gaaahh!
IFC and Saban’s concern, obviously, is that U.S. audiences might find the original French title, which basically means meat and vegetable stew, meaningless or overly obscure.
The Taste of Things isn’t an awful title, but it sounds vaguely antiseptic and blanded down….like something that a whitebread PTA committee might have decided upon. It’s flat, lacking in flavor and aroma. It no longer sounds or feels like a film simmering in French culture, but like a gourmet cookbook that might have been written by the owner of a suburban restaurant in northern New Jersey or Westchester County.’
‘
But overall this is excellent news, at least as far as IFC & Saban’s Oscar determinations are concerned.
Danny Wu‘s American: An Odyssey to 1947, a documentary that’s mostly but not entirely about the experience of genius filmmaker Orson Welles during the mid 1940s, will be released by Gravitas Ventures on 9.12.23.
A Wellesnet announcement, dated 8.4.23, says that the doc “follows the rise and fall of Welles while interweaving stories of diverse individuals amidst the backdrop of the Great Depression, World War II and the dropping of the Atomic Bomb.”
Synopsis: “Director Orson Welles navigated his meteoric Hollywood rise beginning in the early ’40s. As WWII begins a Japanese American boy visits abroad, and an African American soldier enlists in the U.S. Army. As the story advances, each character follows their own ambitions in search of their American identity. The doc’s first half is about the romantic rise of a great American director, and the second half transitioning into the realities of race and life in the Jim Crow era.”
I haven’t seen the film, but the title feels like a stopper….ungrammatical, inelegant. How does an odyssey go “to” a given year without mentioning the year of origin or the beginning of the arc? But let’s not dismiss or mischaracterize. I’m looking forward to it. Really.
Earlier today, however, I was struck by a remark from critic and author Joe McBride, a renowned Hollywood historian and Welles biographer who probably knows more about the late filmmaker (who died in ’85) than anyone else.
McBride: “Welles did a couple of shameful radio shows right after the Hiroshima bombing on 8.6.45, praising the dropping of it. I wonder if this film will ignore them.”
Shameful?
I replied to McBride as follows:
“Joe — The lives of tens of thousands of U.S. servicemen who would have been ordered to invade Japan were spared because of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki A-bombings.
“What’s so shameful about Welles praising Truman’s decision to bomb Japan on 8.6.45 and 8.9.45?
“I am here and alive and breathing (ditto my sons Jett and Dylan and my granddaughter Sutton) because my Marine lieutenant dad, Jim Wells, wasn’t ordered to invade Japan. The odds of his surviving that assault were relatively low, or so he and his Marine comrades believed.
“Japanese leaders started the war, and despite their growing inability to prevail against U.S. forces during the final two years of the war, they refused to consider surrender when it was proposed in ‘45. They made their own fanatical bed.
“The A-bomb murders of roughly 200,000 Japanese citizens were beyond horrific, of course, but savage cruelty is in the basic DNA…the basic nature of war.
“So if Orson Welles praising the atomic bombings of Japan was shameful, as you’ve said, would it have been better for the U.S. to invade Japan and thereby invite a mass slaughter of U.S. troops? Is that what you’re saying?
Here are HE’s finest films of the first eight months of ’23 — two thirds gone, four months to go.
I’ve given no consideration at all to box-office performance — the rankings are strictly about how successful and satisfying each film is according to its own game and rules, and how thematically fulfilled it feels when all is said and done.
A special demerit system applies in the case of otherwise commendable, first-rate films that delivered (a) manosphere pissnado or (b) caused my soul and knees to ache due to slow pacing and density of dialogue.
1. Tran Anh Hung’s The Pot au Feu
2. Guy Ritchie‘s The Covenant
3. Cruise & McQuarrie‘s Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning, Part One (2023)
4. Christian Mungiu‘s RMN
5. Eric Gravel‘s Full Time
6. Chris Nolan‘s Oppenheimer — first-rate film but I groaned at the one-hour mark, knowing there were two full hours to go…my soul cried out.
7. Greta Gerwig‘s Barbie [manosphere pissnado demerit]
8. Jonathan Glazer‘s The Zone of Interest
9. Martin Scorsese‘s Killers of the Flower Moon
10. Matt Johnson‘s Blackberry
11. Ari Aster‘s Beau Is Afraid
12. Ben Affleck‘s Air
13. Celine Song‘s Past Lives
14. Jean-Stephen Sauvaire’s Black Flies.
15. Steven Soderbergh‘s Magic Mike’s Last Dance
16. Nicole Holofcener‘s You Hurt My Feelings
16. Kelly Fremon Craig‘s Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret.
No offense but I still haven’t seen How To Blow Up A Pipeline.
Twitter/X statement from Jamie, Alexander and Nina Bernstein: “It breaks our hearts to see any misrepresentations or misunderstandings of Bradley’s efforts…it happens to be true that Leonard Bernstein had a nice, big nose. Bradley chose to use makeup to amplify his resemblance, and we’re perfectly fine with that. We’re also certain that our dad would have been fine with it as well.”
Sometime in the mid ’90s the late Robert Evans shared a biological observation with me: “When you get older your nose gets bigger, your ears get bigger and longer and your teeth get smaller.”
We’ve all sampled food-and-atmosphere moments to die for…perfect transitional serenity…that quietly radiant feeling in which the place and the warmth (and not just the climatorial kind) are so calming and poignant that time itself has seemingly stopped…much more than just sitting at a table…enveloped by bliss and rapture.
Two nights ago I happened upon a brief video of such a moment…12 years and three months ago (late May 2011) on a calm and sunny day in Venice, Italy…placid, a gentle breeze, the faint sound of water lapping at pilings…sitting at an outdoor table at Trattoria San Basilio, a fairly small (you could even call it tiny) restaurant, waterside in southern Dorsoduru…no tourists, no madding crowd…Calle del Vento, 1516, 30123 Venezia VE, Italy.
