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I’ve had a problematic relationship with Todd Field‘s Tar since first catching it six and a half months ago in Telluride, but I would vastly prefer it winning the Best Picture Oscar over the infuriating EEAAO. Because it’s a much richer and far more interesting package, for one thing. Anyone with any standards understands this.

But of course, Tar was never a serious Best Picture contender because Field refused — bravely or admirably, you could say — to make a film that was semi-accessible to your average none-too-bright or mental lazybones.

Field had a choice between making a film for the popcorn munchers or one that would delight Martin Scorsese and/or your typical Criterion Channel subscriber, and he obviously went for the latter.

Posted on 10.6.22: TAR is such a brilliant, odd-duck, upper-stratosphere thing — elliptical and elusive, neither here nor there but at the same time alluring and fearless — that it makes insider types feel like outsiders.

It’s more about aroma than actual taste, and it refuses to come to you. And for a while that’s a turn-on…”piece by piece I’m putting it together,” you tell yourself during the first hour, “and eventually all the strands will cohere…all will be revealed and known.”

Field is saying “no, you come to the film…it’ll require work on your part and maybe some feelings of uncertainty or frustration even, but when you finally get there you’ll feel sated and satisfied.”

Except that never happens. Not really. A certain itchy feeling builds up as it goes along, and although TAR tantalizes and intrigues as it feeds you little hints of information and motivation (it’s basically about a brilliant Berlin-based conductor getting #Me-Too’ed to death) but without any of the meat-and-potatoes, Adrian Lyne-ish plot points and shock revealings that would tie it all together, at least for the dumb people in the room.

That’s what I didn’t like about TAR — it made me feel like a dumb-ass. I had to ask friends what had actually happened (or had seemed to happen) and even now I still don’t really get it. That’s why I want to see it for a third time, crazy as that might sound. Plus the fact that I love the cushy affluence of it all. The scarves, the great apartments, the five-star restaurants, the sublime lighting, etc. I wanted to move into TAR and never leave.

The term “love affair” has long signified a sexual relationship cemented by deep profound feelings. But not so much lately, it seems.

Leo McCarey‘s original Love Affair (’37) captured what an affair really feels like. Ditto the hot-and-heavy between Kirk Douglas and Kim Novak, both married to other people, in Richard Quine‘s Strangers When We Meet (’60), or the thing between Albert Finney and the married Rachel Roberts in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (also released in ’60).

Edward Dmytryk‘s The End of the Affair (’55), based on Graham Greene’s 1951 novel of the same name, was partly about a sexual affair between Van Johnson and Deborah Kerr during the London blitz, but primarily about emotional resentments. McCarey’s An Affair to Remember (’57) wasn’t about a sexual thing between Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr, but was certainly about an emotional entanglement that seeped deep inside.

Affairs are sometimes (often?) more intense and deeply felt than relationships that result in marriage. Glenn Ford has a years-long thing with Rita Hayworth, and from what I’ve read it mattered a great deal to both of them for many years.

I had an affair with a married journalist that lasted nearly three years (early ’98 to late ’00), and that, trust me, was the most painful thing I’ve ever been involved with. If it’s real, it hurts.

All to say that the word “affair” has been cheapened over the last couple of decades.

Time and again I’ve read about an “affair” between JFK and Marilyn Monroe, when most reliable biographers say they got together exactly twice — once at Bing Crosby‘s place in the desert, another time at Peter Lawford‘s beach house in Santa Monica. (And some biographers are unsure about the Lawford thing.) Two boinks does not an affair make. An affair has to involve at least four or five boinks, and even that is only scratching the surface. (I actually shouldn’t use the term “boink” — erotic minglings or spiritual mergings is better.)

Over the last few years the thing between Donald Trump and Stormy Daniels, which was described by Daniels as a one-off, has been routinely described as an “affair”. A total no-go. Even a brief affair involves a few furtive encounters. Three or four, I suppose, but somehow that doesn’t feel sufficent. A classic affair involves a sexual-emotional relationship that goes on for weeks, months, perhaps years.

BTW: Yesterday’s ruling from District Judge Lewis Kaplan in the E. Jean Carroll rape defamation case was bad for Donald Trump, which is good for everyone else. Kaplan ruled that the infamous Access Hollywood tape (“grab ’em by the pussy”) and the testimony of two other women who have accused former President Trump of sexual assault (Natasha Stoynoff, Jessica Leeds) can be used as evidence at the trial.

Roughly 50 years ago Marlon Brando and Sacheen Littlefeather were the first to inject a social justice warrior ethos into the annual Oscar telecast, which had been purely entertaining (i.e., unsullied by political opinion) since its inception in the late 1920s.

Their attempt to redirect Oscar attention from the Italian-American, amber-lighted legend of Don Corleone to the plight of struggling Native Americans was a ground-floor cultural ignition moment that, as Bill Maher put it last night, “transformed the Oscar telecast into what it is today — a four-hour lecture on how bad most people have it, by the people who have it the best.”

It was basically an acknowledgment of how progressive improvements always take a while to be adopted. It never happens with a snap of the fingers. Important people and powerful organizations are always late to dinner when a new dish is being served.

On the other hand Maher’s “Oscars, No White” rant, which focused on the announcement of Oscar representation and inclusion standards two and 1/3 years ago, had a little more bite.

Key quote: “Art and coercion is a bad combination. People don’t want to be hired because they filled the quota. They want to be hired because they’re good, and [many] of them are.”

Critical Drinker, three weeks ago:

“From a sensible center perspective, woke is a divisive and destructive ideology that aggressively pushes hardcore leftwing agendas into all aspects of entertainment while demonizing anyone who happens to be straight, white and male…undermining western cultural values, hijacking and destroying long-established characters and franchises and generally chipping away at everything that our culture is built on

“Raising awareness of social, cultural and environmental issues [obviously] isn’t a bad thing. Neither is encouraging people to look at the world for various perspectives. Or giving historically underrepresented groups a bit more visibility and attention. But pushing all of this stuff too hard, too aggressively or with ill intentions is having a damaging effect on modern entertainment…instead of encouraging people to broaden their minds and consider new perspectives, woke is basically about lecturing and browbeating them into making them think the way their creators want them to think…replacing one form of arrogant narrow-mindedness with a different one…instead of elevating marginalized groups, it’s insulting and demonizing everyone else….socio–political indoctrination with a thin veneer of entertainment wrapped around it.”

Please, God…please make something go horribly wrong on Sunday evening. Anything will do. As long as it upsets the applecart.

“”You have a piece of time and you get to decorate it.”

if a film has debuted under the Cannes Acid section, that’s an automatic concern. Plus if I’m going to immerse myself in a hetero erotic drama of some kind, at least one of the partners have to be suitably attractive. 99 Moons is now playing at Manhattan’s Quad…no interest.

The fanciful bond between Robert Blake and Scott Wilson has been pretty much carved in stone for decades, hence today’s reposting of a time-worn Wilson anecdote. I last mentioned it after Wilson passed on 10.6.18 at age 76.

Initially posted on 12.22.11: In the summer of ’81 I had a special Scott Wilson moment. It happened (or more precisely didn’t happen) in a hip West Hollywood dive bar on Santa Monica Blvd. (I can’t recall the name but it was between Sweetzer and Harper, and favored by actors at the time.) I was with a lady, and the first thing I noticed after entering the main room and ordering a drink was Wilson sitting at a table with a friend.

Wilson had played murderer Dick Hickock in the 1967 film version of In Cold Blood, and this was foremost on my mind. After mulling it over I told my girlfriend that I wanted to go over and get Wilson’s autograph and (this was crucial) ask him to write “hair on the walls” below his name.

The phrase came from Truman Capote‘s nonfiction novel and the film version of same. Prior to their late-night visit to the home of Kansas farmer Herb Clutter, Hickock promised his dark-spirited accomplice Perry Smith (Robert Blake) that no matter what happens “we’re gonna blast hair all over them walls.” I thought it might be ironically cool to persuade Wilson to acknowledge that.

But I wimped out, thinking he’d probably be offended. That was probably the right thing to do, but I’ve felt badly for years about this. The things that won’t leave you alone later in life are the ones you chickened out on.

In last night’s death-of-Robert Blake post (“Blake’s Epitaph“), I mainly focused on a 1983 stolen Vespa scooter episode that involved Blake. The 50-year-old actor had found my stolen scooter abandoned on the concrete L.A. river bed near Magnolia Blvd. and reported it to the fuzz. I met Blake around dusk and thanked him, etc.

Blake was always a fascinating, first-rate actor, but the truly worthy films that he starred or costarred in were relatively few.

His most fully realized performance was a somewhat sentimental capturing of the real-life Perry Smith, a sadly abused, frustrated and emotionally constipated mass murderer, in Richard Brooks‘ In Cold Blood (’67). His second strongest performance was as a Native American fugitive in Abe Polonsky‘s Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (’69 — unavailable to stream), opposite Robert Redford and Katharine Ross. At age 14, the cherubic Blake was spot-on as a Mexican lottery-ticket seller in Treasure of the Sierra Madre (’48) –= his third most vivid performance.

Blake played affecting supporting roles in Pork Chop Hill (’59), Town Without Pity (’61) and This Property Is Condemned (’66). I somehow never got around to seeing James William Guercio‘s Electra Glide in Blue (’73). I never wanted to see Busting (’74) because of my general loathing of director Peter Hyams. And I never saw Hal Ashby‘s Second Hand Hearts (’81) in which Blake costarred with Barbara Harris, as the word of mouth was awful. And I never saw a single episode of Baretta, the colorful cop series (’75 to ’78) in which Blake starred, and which made him fairly rich.

Blake was impressively creepy, of course, in David Lynch‘s Lost Highway (’97).

Originally posted on 8.30.15: “The older Richard Brooks‘ In Cold Blood gets, the more Hollywood-ized it seems. Much of the film has always struck me as an attempt by Brooks (who once sat right next to me in a Manhattan screening room during a showing of his own Wrong Is Right) to almost warm up the Perry Smith and Dick Hickock characters (played by Robert Blake and Scott Wilson) and make them seem more ingratiating and vulnerable than how they were portrayed in Truman Capote‘s nonfiction novel.

“You can always sense an underlying effort by Brooks and especially by Robert Blake to make the audience feel sorry for and perhaps even weep for Perry Smith. That guitar, the warm smile, the traumatic childhood. Take away the Clutter murder sequence and at times Blake could almost be Perry of Mayberry. Scott Wilson‘s Dick Hickock seems a little too kindly/folksy also.

“These are real-life characters, remember, who slaughtered a family of four like they were sheep. I realize that neither one on his own would have likely killed that poor family and that their personalities combusted to produce a third lethal personality, but I could never finally reconcile Blake and Wilson’s personal charm and vulnerability with the cold eyes of the real Smith and Hickock (which are used on the poster for the film).

“In Cold Blood is nonetheless a striking, reasonably honest, nicely assembled re-telling of the Smith & Hickock story. I respect it. I worship Connie Hall‘s cinematography. I love the editing. Quincy Jones‘ blues combo score is partly haunting and even mesmerizing and partly laid on too thick at times. The film is certainly a cut or two above mainstream fare of the ’60s. But it’s not a great film. It feels a bit too cloying and manipulative too often. Those memory and dream sequences (the sound of the mother’s voice going “Perrrry!”) are a bit much.

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