Bjork as “the Seeress.” Did Dancer in the Dark really debut in Cannes 22 years ago? Yes, it did.
Daily
Aging Tech Doesn’t Sell
I’m trying to unload my whole TV, streaming and Bluray set-up — a 65″ 4K UHD Sony TV with internal side speakers (SONY XBR-65X930C — 6 years old but in excellent shape) + Sony 4K Bluray player (18 months old) + Oppo Bluray set for Region 2 Blurays + Marantz AVR (audio-visual receiver) + Sony wireless earphones + external bass woofer speaker + wooden stand-console that holds all these devices as a single unit…the whole kit & kaboodle for only $1200.
And nobody wants it. Because nobody wants a 2016 TV, and nobody cares about Region 1 and 2 Bluray players, much less a Marantz AVR. The wireless headphone set-up might be of faint interest, but I’m insisting on selling everything as a big bundle. I would probably have trouble selling the TV if it was three or four years old. Everyone wants something brand-spanking new, of course.
It’s a first-rate living room set-up, but I guess it stays here.
Ukrainian Filmmaker Sniffing for Work
A director friend passed this along last night. A plea for work from Roman Perfilyev, a married Ukrainian film director and motion designer from Kyiv and a refugee from the current horror. As I know and trust the director, I’m presuming the contents of the letter are legit.
“I’m currently in the U.S. fleeing from the war with my wife and three-year-old old son. I’m looking for the opportunity to work in the US film industry so I’ve attached my resume and links to this email which represents my experience.
My IMDB page: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm9539414/
The Inglorious Serfs — Full-length movie; 2021 (director, scriptwriter)
Trailer — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yULObtOYKxI&t=2s
Full movie – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u63-7BxZYSs (English subtitles are available)
Showreel (commercial 2022) – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dUKjjTVfe8 (client: Artgrid.io)
33 — Full-length movie (TBS); 2022 (director)
Teaser – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtnZ5YnQIhA
I also know how to make films based on a micro-budget.
Keep Your Happiness Pills
Whenever someone asks if I’m happy, I always say “yeah, pretty much…within the bounds of the usual day-to-day hassles and hurdles and that HE burden that I carry around all day like a mule…moderately happy, sure.”
I’ve always found life demanding, of course, but meeting that challenge on a daily basis is satisfying, which you could call “happiness” if you wanted to. Plus those unexpected moments of peace and beauty and solace that drop in now and then. Plus the general ability to deal with life on a healthy, sensible, energetic basis.
Happiness is not bliss. Bliss is a whole ‘nother thing…a state of mind that comes and goes (but mostly comes) when you’re young.
Have I ever known bliss as a daily companion? Have I ever laughed often and smiled like an idiot and felt ecstatic about nearly everything on a day-in-and-day-out basis?
Yeah, when I was hanging with friends in my late teens and early 20s…when I was doing drugs a lot of the time and hitting bars and playing in a band and occasionally getting into wild situations (I was once arrested in the rural South for suspicion of murder) and falling in love over and over. And occasionally getting ghosted by this or that woman…even the bravest and most agile adventurer gets bruised on occasion.
Bliss never lasts, of course, Even rock stars can’t sustain that kind of living. Sooner or later you have to submit to the yoke and the burden and the plowing of fields. If you can work your way through the difficult years of trying to get established in a chosen field or profession…if you can somehow find your solace and strength within that realm, you have the potential to be randomly “happy.”
“Happiness Pills,” posted on 11.14.12: It was sometime in the early ’80s when I began using “happiness pills” as a term of disdain and derision. It came from a phoner I did with screenwriter Ed Naha, who later went on to co-write Honey, I Shrunk The Kids (’89). Ed was nice and obviously bright, but a little too euphoric and positive-minded. Alpha, alpha, gimme-a-break alpha. Like he was scared of even glancing at the sardonic or cynical or battle-weary side.
It got to the point in our conversation that I started to mutter to myself, “Is there anything in the world that you’re not fucking delighted by or blissed out about, you relentlessly Pollyannic fuck?” I complained about him later with a friend, saying that he must have been swallowing great handfuls of happiness pills. Ever since then I’ve used this term whenever I meet someone who overdoes the cheerful.
Because it feels like a kind of cover-up. It feels strenuous. Like Sally Hawkins‘ Poppy character in Mike Leigh‘s Happy Go Lucky (’08).
Hawkins’ character epitomizes a sort of person I’ve never been able to tolerate — the emotional fascist who’s relentless about being happy, smiling and sparkly, but who also insists — here’s the problem — on forcing her bubbliness upon others (acquaintances, strangers, anyone) with the ultimate idea of converting them to their way of looking at life, or at least giving them a contact high to take home.
What’s especially oppressive about smiley-faced brownshirts is their determination to gently bully you into submission. If you don’t get on board with the mutual-alpha, they’ll interrogate you like Laurence Olivier‘s Zell (the Nazi character in Marathon Man), looking at you with a quizzical grin and asking, ‘Are you happy?’ or ‘Having a bad day?’ Speaking from experience, I can advise that the best response is ‘I was feeling pretty good, actually, until you asked me that.’
The term ’emotional fascism’ was first coined by Elvis Costello in the ’70s, and it’s real, you bet. There’s a scene when Poppy’s friend Zoe says, ‘You can’t make everyone happy’ and Poppy replies, ‘There’s no harm in trying that, is there?’ I am here to stand up and say that yes, there is harm in it, and would all the Poppy girls of the world please refrain from ever doing so again in my presence? It’s like being beaten with Mao’s little happy-face book during the Great Cultural Revolution.
There are many of us, I’m presuming, who look upon cheery, cock-eyed optimists as people you sometimes have to speak to at parties — sometimes it’s better just to suffer quickly and get it over with so you can move on — but if you see them coming down the street do cross over to the other side and duck into a book store or something, and then stay there for a good 15 minutes, just to be safe.
And yet oddly, I gradually stopped feeling this way after I stopped drinking in March 2012.
Happy fascists are still a drag but they don’t bring me down and make me want to run out of the room like they used to. It may not sound deep, but happiness is a choice, I think. You do have to say “I’m not going to be the mildly judgmental, vaguely pissed-off guy…I’m going to be kinder and gentler and more turn-the-other-cheek about stuff and see how that goes.” Which I’ve been more or less doing. A friend told me the other day that I’m less crazy and less funny without the Pinot Grigio. Maybe.
But I still can’t abide the kind of happiness that seems to come from a place of fear and/or avoidance.
Rydell Kept On Plugging
Remember that scene in Se7en when Brad Pitt‘s character pronounces “Marquis de Sade” as “Markee duh shah-DAY” — an allusion to the pronunciation of Sade, the pop singer who peaked in the ’80s and ’90s? Morgan Freeman tells him the correct pronunciation and Pitt goes “whatever.”
The same thing happens in this amateurish fan video about ’50s teen idol Bobby Rydell, who passed today at age 79.
Toward the end (around the 6:24 mark) the under-educated narrator talks about Rydell “for over 30 years” having performed “over 700 shows” of The Golden Boys with costars Fabian and Frankie Avalon. Except the narrator pronounces Fabian like Fabio — “FAH-bee-AHN.” The name is correctly pronounced “FAY-bee-uhn.”
Nothing But Stand-Alones
Every so often I’ll do a film-review search on the N.Y. Times archive, which links to The Times Machine, which offers digital replicas of the all the Times issues from 1851 to 2002. Every damn time I get distracted by the movie ads placed alongside the review, and before you know it I’m lost in this or that time tunnel.
I’ve noted several stellar years for film releases (1939, 1962, 1971, 1999, 2007) in the past, but which year in the 1950s would qualify along similar lines? I’m not saying that 1954 is on the same level, but it might represent the best of that decade.
No “Whale” in Cannes
Alas, Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale isn’t ready to be screened at next month’s Cannes Film Festival. That aside, here’s the latest Cannes rundown from World of Reel’s Jordan Ruimy. Disappointment Blvd. may be on the squishy side, but otherwise we’re looking at a likelihood factor between 90% and 95%.
Rest Easy
The French trailer for Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis (Warner Bros., 6.24), now officially confirmed as a Cannes Film Festival attraction, offers nary a sliver of a glimpse of Austin Butler in a fat suit. I am therefore presuming that we can all relax in this regard. No decline years (‘75 to August ‘77), no keeling over on the toilet. Or so it seems.
Somehow Missed This
I’m posting this out of respect for the creator, Mojahed Fudailat, who assembled this 1:40 animated reel less than 24 hours after the actual slap. Plus he immediately nailed Jada Smith as the co-culprit, which took two or three days to be voiced by others.
Woke Critics Out To Discourage Whiteness and Elgort-ness.
I still haven’t seen J.T. Rogers and Michael Mann‘s Tokyo Vice (HBO Max, 4.7), but I know two things.
One, it’s based on Jake Adelstein‘s “Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan” (’09), and is about Adelstein’s working as the first non-Japanese reporter for one of Japan’s largest newspapers.
And two, it is therefore necessary and appropriate to cast a young American actor as Adelstein. Which is partly why Rogers and Mann hired Ansel Elgort for the role.
So far the Rotten Tomatoes score, based on six reviews, is 83% — a better-than-decent rating.
But the score would be higher if it weren’t for certain toxic critics complaining about the casting of Elgort, who continues to be idiotically tarnished by the woke community over non-factual, mob-rule accusations of “sexual assault” — a completely unsupported charge about Elgort having assaulted a 17 year-old named “Gabby” when he was 20, despite every piece of testimony (Twittered and otherwise) indicating that nothing resembling an assault ever happened and that the worst Elgort could be accused of was ghosting Gabby after being intimate with her.
The lowest score of the six is from Slashfilm‘s Josh Spiegel, who merges an anti-Elgort attitude along with some anti-white racism sauce.
In a review titled “A Moody Thriller Saddled By The Elgort Of It All,” Spiegel claims that
Elgort “makes for a very dull and uninvolving lead actor here…when the show begins in 1999, Jake is already well ensconced in Tokyo, having moved from his home state of Missouri…while he has quickly fallen in love with Tokyo’s culture, he has a very specific goal: becoming a journalist, despite the general hurdle of…well, being a white American.”
In other words Spiegel, besides disliking the idea of Elgort starring, doesn’t care for the idea of a white guy playing the lead in a Tokyo-based journalism drama. Imagine if Mann had produced an HBO Max miniseries about an English-speaking Japanese reporter having been hired by the Los Angeles Times to cover the crime beat here. Would Spiegel have written that this fellow does his best “despite the general hurdle of…well, being Japanese”?
Rolling Stone‘s Alan Sepinwall follows a similar train of thought. In a review titled “What If Miami Vice Had a White-Savior Complex?“, Sepinwall states that “this is a decent show, but one that feels like it would be much better if it were willing to be more Japanese.”
Again, reverse the set-up (Japanese reporter covering the L.A. crime beat) and ask yourself if Sepinwall could or would have declared that L.A. Vice “would be much better if it were willing to be more American, and more specifically more Anglo Saxon.”
In short, Sepinwall and Spiegel are singing the same woke tune. Translation: “We don’t want to know from Jake Adelstein or his book, and we don’t like the idea of a white guy reporting about the Yakuza because white guys are basically bad news. And Elgort, in our humble and misinformed opinion, is double bad because he…uhm, well, he legally had it off with a 17 year-old in 2014 (when he was 20) and then hurt her feelings by ghosting her, and in our judgment Elgort should pay the Polanski price for this. And so we’re doing our part as morally-attuned critics to destroy the toxic bad guys out there…to not only lock arms with the #MeToo community but bring about the ruin of the heartless Elgort.”
Variety‘s Daniel D’Addario echoes the Sepinwall-Siegel mindset, but he’s a little more fair about it.
“Say this much for Elgort, a controversial figure off-screen after allegations of sexual assault surfaced in 2020: On screen, he’s able to avoid many of the pitfalls into which an actor who looks like him on a Japan-set series might have fallen,” he writes. “The show is aware of what’s potentially uncomfortable about Jake as savior figure, and undercuts the narrative, and its protagonist, accordingly, starting with the performance.”
It is unlikely but entirely possible that I will agree with Spiegel and Sepinwall when I see Tokyo Vice, but for now I think it’s fair to post the above-mentioned judgments and suspicions about their viewpoints.
Close To The Heart
My old Wilson baseball glove means almost as much to me as my two Mac laptops (15″ Macbook Pro, 13″ Macbook Air). There’s something eternal and devotional about slightly worn baseball mitts. I’ll be driving the VW Passat back east before leaving for Cannes, and I’ll be bringing the Wilson along with a TPS first baseman’s mitt that Jett used in the old days.
