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Opposites Attract At The Beach
This evening I’ll finally be submitting to Christian Petzold‘s Afire, a reportedly not-bad film about an unlikely romantic current between characters played by the fleshy Thomas Schubert and the much thinner Paula Beer (Transit, Undine). A 7:25 pm show at the Jacob Burns Film Center.
Boilerplate: “While vacationing by the Baltic Sea, writer Leon (Schubert) and photographer Felix (Langston Uibel) are surprised by the presence of Nadja (Beer), a mysterious young woman staying as a guest at Felix’s family’s holiday home. Nadja distracts Leon from finishing his latest novel and, with brutal honesty, forces him to confront his caustic temperament and self-absorption. An encroaching forest fire threatens the group as Nadja and Leon grow closer, and tensions escalate when a handsome lifeguard and Leon’s tight-lipped book editor also arrive.”
Journalist friendo: “It’s a relatively intriguing film. Works on two levels as a (very) slow-burning romantic drama between the budding writer and summer housemate (at least on his part), and equally on LGBTQ level between the other two guys, plus a bit of a bait-and-switch on audience expectations. [Chubby guy] is annoying throughout. It gets quite convoluted by the end.”
Long Time Gone
Before I launch into yet another Exorcist article, the latest of several I’ve posted since HE’s launch nearly 20 years ago, please listen to this Nixon-era testimony from a senior National Theatre usher. It was recorded roughly 49 and 1/2 years ago.
And here we are nearly a half-century later with another Bluray re-issue and David Gordon Green‘s The Exorcist: Believer (10.13.23). I don’t want to know about this stuff. How many times can our faces be sprinkled with the same old holy water?
I own a superb-looking Bluray of The Exorcist (’73). I rewatched it last year on the Sony 65″ OLED, and it was pure heaven. So there’s really no need at all to own the upcoming 4K 50th anniversary Bluray (streeting on 9.19.23). None whatsoever.
“Bygone Sensibilities,” posted on 5.26.15: A few days ago and for no timely reason at all A.V. Club‘s Mike Vanderbilt posted a piece about original reactions to William Friedkin‘s The Exorcist, which opened in December ’73. It reminds you how jaded and cynical the culture has since become. The Exorcist gobsmacked Average Joes like nothing that they’d seen before, but you couldn’t possibly “get” audiences today in the same way. Sensibilities have coarsened. The horror “bar” is so much higher.
But there’s one thing that 21st Century scary movies almost never do, and that’s laying the basic groundwork and hinting at what’s to come, step by step and measure by measure. Audiences are too impatient and ADD to tolerate slow build-ups these days, but Friedkin spent a good 50 to 60 minutes investing in the reality of the Exorcist characters, showing you their decency and values and moments of stress and occasional losses of temper, as well a serious investment in mood, milieu and portents.
In short, the first hour of The Exorcist is wrapped in the veneer of class — a genuinely eerie score, flush production values and the subdued, autumnal tones in Owen Roizman‘s cinematography. It’s only in the second hour that the brutal stuff begins.
The best parts of The Exorcist don’t involve spinning heads or pea-soup vomit. I’m talking about moments in which scary stuff is suggested rather than shown. The stuff you imagine might happen is always spookier.
Such as (1) that prologue moment in Iraq when Father Merrin (Max Von Sydow) is nearly run over by a galloping horse and carriage, and a glimpse of an older woman riding in the carriage suggests a demonic presence; (2) a moment three or four minutes later when Merrin watches two dogs snarling and fighting near an archeological dig; (3) that Washington, D.C. detective (Lee J. Cobb) telling Father Karras (Jason Miller) that the head of the recently deceased director Burke Dennings (Jack McGowran) “was turned completely around”; (4) Karras’s dream sequence about his mother calling for him, and then disappearing into a subway; (5) that moment when Regan MacNeil (Linda Blair) mimics the voice and repeats the exact words of a bum that Karras has recently encountered — “Can you help an old altar boy, father?”
My favorite bit in the whole film is that eerie whoosh-slingshot sound coming from the attic.
Listen again to this senior usher at Westwood’s National Theatre talking about people fainting and having to be brought around by smelling salts, and also to another employee, Cathy Hewitt, talking about the resilience of audiences as they stood in line for hours on end, sometimes even in the rain. They’re describing a culture and a sensibility that seems as quaint and bygone as that opening narration in Orson Welles‘ The Magnificent Ambersons when he talks about how people used to get around by horse and buggy and took their time and never seemed to be in too much of a hurry.
Memory Enhancement
Prevagen comes highly recommended by none other than Sasha Stone. I’m starting the regimen today…a double dose for starters.
“Don’t Eat The Fucking Thing Then!”
If an all-powerful cosmic wizard stepped into my life and told me “you will never again eat a perfectly grilled and seasoned T-bone steak,” I would be sad but unbroken — I would push on. If the same wizard came back the next day and said “you will never again eat a perfectly barbecued hot dog with a little mustard and chopped onions,” I would be devastated.
Jack Black Is Only 53
…but he looks like a blend of Gabby Hayes, Yosemite Sam, Klondike Clem and the ghost of Dr. John. (Borrowed from a Scott Alexander Facebook post.)
Better Quality “Romper Stomper” Gang Fight Scene
27 months ago I posted a six-and-a-half-minute version of the legendary gang fight sequence from Geoffrey Wright‘s Romper Stomper (’92), one of the most indelible, pared-to-the-bone, punch-kick-and-wallop flicks about hate groups ever made.
It starts with six or seven skinheads (led by an astonishingly young and slender Russell Crowe) beating up on three or four Vietnamese guys in a family-owned pub. But word gets out immediately, and a large mob of furious Vietnamese youths arrive and beat the living crap out of the skinheads. Hate in and hate out. Bad guys pay. Glorious!
Hashtags are well and good but, as Woody Allen said about Nazis in that MOMA-party scene in Manhattan, baseball bats really bring the point home.
I’ve just found a longer (15 minutes), much better looking version of the same sequence. It was posted 10 months ago by “Dunerat.”
Those who’ve never seen Romper Stomper are urged to do so.
One of the reasons Geoffrey Wright‘s Romper Stomper (’92) works as well as it does — an anti-racist, anti-skinhead film that isn’t afraid to dive right into the gang mind and pretend-revel in the fevered currents — is John Clifford White‘s score.
The main theme seems to simultaneously channel skinhead rage and, at the same time, deftly satirize it. I don’t know what kind of brass instruments White used on these tracks — tuba? trombone? — but the sound and mood are perfect. Just a clever instrumentation of a melodic hook and obviously less than complex, but once you’ve heard the theme you’ll never forget it.
Polanski’s “Palace” Seems Like “Triangle of Sadness” Rehash
No subtitles on the new Italian-language trailer for Roman Polanski‘s The Palace, but the satirical thrust is obvious.
As was the case with the guests aboard a super-yacht in Ruben Ostlund‘s Triangle of Sadness, the super-wealthy guests staying at a deluxe Gstaad hotel on New Year’s Eve in 1999 are arrogant, self-obsessed, super-rich fools, and some have been disfigured by extreme plastic surgery.
The Palace opens in Italy on 9.28. I for one would love an opportunity to see it in NYC prior to the Venice Film Festival.
“Napoleon” Is “Phantom Thread”-ish, A Bit “Weird’
However Ridley Scott‘s Napoleon turns out, an early consensus began emerging months ago that Joaquin Phoenix‘s titular performance is highly eccentric. Ditto Vanessa Kirby‘s as Josephine.
In an recent interview with Empire‘s Ben Travis, it’s mentioned that during an argument scene Phoenix’s Napoleon slaps Josephine — an unscripted improv, the actors have told Empire magazine.
“We were using the real words from their divorce in the church,” Kirby says. “When that happens, you can faithfully go through an archival re-enactment of it and read out the lines and then go home. But we always wanted to surprise each other.”
Phoenix: Kirby said “whatever you feel, you can do…you can slap me, you can grab me, you can pull me, you can kiss me, whatever it is.”
Kirby: “It’s the greatest thing when you have a creative partner and you say, ‘Right, everything’s safe. I’m with you. And we’re gonna go to the dark places together.’”
Consider a research screening reaction posted on 1.23.23 by World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy:
“In the first half hour Phoenix’s performance is mostly subdued and he speaks in either exposition or military orders, so we don’t have a great sense of the character either. After the Egypt part though the movie really takes off and becomes fantastic, I would say Scott’s best historical movie.
“Weirdly the movie I was reminded of most was Phantom Thread, because Napoleon and Josephine have this perverse but also funny and sad and abusive relationship. Kirby is great.
“The battle scenes are all huge in scope and unique and probably the best of Scott’s career.
“I wouldn’t say Phoenix’s Napoleon is whiny, but he’s an egomaniac and Phoenix does a great job of portraying that. The humor hit for me and it felt like it did for the rest of the audience, with the scene where Napoleon stages a coup being one the funnier scenes I’ve seen in a movie in a while.
“Overall it’s much weirder than I would’ve expected from Scott or the subject.”
No Remake Allowed
Joel Schumacher and Ebbe Roe Smith‘s Falling Down opened on 2.26.93 — 30 years and six months ago. No one would dare remake it today, but if someone did it would certainly be portrayed by the wokester congregation (all those who praised Women Talking and hated Empire of Llght) as a rightwing movie in the vein of Sound of Freedom.
Which means that apart from what the few truly independent-minded reviewers out there might say, no mainstream critics (i.e., the go-along-to-get-along types who represent the vast majority) wouldn’t be allowed to write anything praise-worthy. On top of which Clayton Davis would strongly disapprove.
Even if Son of Falling Down turned out to be good or half-decent or at least popcorn-worthy, it would nonetheless have trouble finding a distributor because the focus is too Joe Rogan or Daily Wire-ish…doesn’t follow the woke party lne. But if it found a distributor and managed to open theatrically, it would most likely become a word-of-mouth flick among MAGA types.
From Roger Ebert’s 2.26.93 review: “Some will even find it racist because the targets of the film’s hero are African American, Latino, and Korean…with a few Whites thrown in for balance. Both of these approaches represent a facile reading of the film, which is actually about a great sadness, which turns into madness, and which can afflict anyone who is told, after many years of hard work, that he is unnecessary and irrelevant.
“What is fascinating about the Michael Douglas character, as written and played, is the core of sadness in his soul. Yes, by the time we meet him, he has gone over the edge. But there is no exhilaration in his rampage, no release. He seems weary and confused, and in his actions he unconsciously follows scripts that he may have learned from the movies, or on the news, where other frustrated misfits vent their rage on innocent bystanders.”
I posted a shorter version of an HE Falling Down piece on 6.20.19.
Another crazy white guy movie that couldn’t be remade…forget it.
Saving Newspapers for Headline Value
Earlier today I paused in front of these newspapers, which were displayed upon a cardboard newsstand inside a CVS. “Hmm,” I wondered, “should I save these for posterity?” Then I figured “naahh.” Then I thought “no, maybe I should.”
The last N.Y. Times dead-tree edition I saved was when Obama was elected — 11.5.08. I also have JFK’s assassination (replica), Marilyn Monroe’s death (replica), JFK’s Cuban Missile Crisis blockade, Nixon resigns, Reagan shot, Gorbachev toppled by coup, Yeltsin takes power.
Hedren on Downslope
I was so disengaged during my one and only viewing of Charlie Chaplin’s A Countess From Hong Kong (‘67) that I can’t remember Tippi Hedren’s cameo performance as “Martha” — her first post-Hitchcock gig.
She had a more substantial role in The Harrad Experiment (‘73) as a married sex instructor, although her cool and somewhat icy manner in The Birds and especially Marnie made that kind of character a difficult sell. Her Harrad husband was played by James Whitmore…go figure.
Speaking of icy I was surprised to come upon this Coppertone ad the other day. I honestly didn’t think the mid ‘60s Hedren, who began as a model, was capable of wearing a two-piece bathing suit, much less posing in one for a magazine ad. The frigid-chilly Marnie persona had really sunk in by that time.
I’m trying to think of another actress during that era who conveyed such anxiety or acute discomfort with any sort of erotic presence or expression. She was like a brittle nun of some kind, tense and guarded and buttoned up.
