Daily

“Personal Shopper” Forever

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It was decided early on that Kristen Stewart‘s Princess Diana in Spencer would be campaigned for Best Actress, and I mean before anyone had seen Pablo Larrain‘s film. Once I saw it in Telluride I knew for a fact that it stunk, and was basically a dream-trip, loony-tune Diary of a Mad Princess. Knowing all the while that Olivier Assayas’s Personal Shopper is easily her best movie ever.

Did Stewart’s “people” even consider promoting her Personal Shopper performance for Best Actress? Of course not. Because your empty-Coke-bottle Academy members never vote for a lead character in a scary movie.

So I feel rather badly for Stewart — she knocked it out of the park almost six years ago and nobody gave enough of a shit. She does a decent job as crazy Diana in the mediocre, mostly-painful-to-sit-through Spencer and people are going “oh, she’s so wonderful!” Because she’s playing the tragic princess.

For me, Personal Shopper deliver the biggest high of the 2016 Cannes Film Festival. It left me breathless and even a trembling a bit.

“Assayas taps a wellspring of thought on forms of communication [while drawing] parallels between 19th century drawing room seances and Skype calls. In Personal Shopper, death is just another form of alienation, a physical remove from a person we once knew. Words themselves come under close scrutiny, and Assayas asks if we can ever truly connect with another person if we’re not standing right in front of them and communing fully with the senses. The incessant buzz of a smartphone becomes an attention-grabbing scream from out of the ether.” — Little White Lies’ David Jenkins.

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Don’t Forget Russell’s Elvis

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With Baz Luhrman‘s Elvis (Warner Bros., 6.24) only five months away from opening commercially (and a month sooner if it premieres at the ’22 Cannes Film Festival, which may or may not happen in May) it’s surely time to take a fresh look at John Carpenter‘s Elvis, a nearly three-hour ABC TV flick which premiered on 2.11.79.

It was praised for being harshly realistic as far as The King’s anxieties, failings and foibles were concerned, and particularly for Russell’s performance, which had a fair amount of rage and nailed Presley’s voice.

Carpenter’s film aired only 18 months after Presley keeled over on the toilet seat in August 1977. It ends on an upbeat note in 1970, and therefore skips the decline years — no looking to persuade President Nixon to make him a special narcotics agent in December ’70, no fat Elvis, no prescription drugs, no peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches.

Will Millennials and Zoomers in particular give a shit about an Elvis movie? Presley pre-dates even the boomers as his heyday was between ’54 and ’58, back when the nothing generation kidz of the ’50s (kids who dressed in chinos and loafers and wore flattops and admired James Dean and Marlon Brando) was in their mid to late teens.

To the average Millennial or Zoomer Presley might as well be Johnny Ray or Frank Sinatra.

Five years ago Shout Factory restored the original elements of Carpenter’s film to create a first-rate Bluray. The original TV cut apparently ran 168 minutes but the Bluray runs 11 minutes longer — 179 minutes. I can’t find an HD trailer for the Bluray — only a trailer for the 2010 Shout Factory DVD version. Plus an awful-looking “pink” trailer.

Sorry But I Like This

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Colorizing black-and-white movies is a heinous practice as a rule, except in the case of certain films. Some day a skillfully colorized King Kong could be a keeper. Colorizations are still far from the mark, but they’re getting there. The idea in colorizing a 1933 film is to make the color look primitive, almost like the old two-color process. Kind of a glowing amber-brownish tint. Look at that grayish, slightly blue sky behind the Empire State Building…not bad!

Tatiana in Moscow

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For the next couple of weeks Tatiana is visiting family (mother, son, sister) and old friends in Russia. She’s currently staying at 9 Tverskaya Street, just down the road from Red Square. By my humble HE standards, the place is a little too Kardashian. I like Moscow rentals that are more historical and old-school-ish — a residence that reeks of early 20th or late 19th Century, a pad that Vladimir Lenin or Sergei Eisenstein or Peter Tchaikovsky or Anton Chekhov might’ve lived in back in the day. But that’s me.

Unquenchable Lust

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At the end of this year Louis Malle‘s Damage will celebrate its 30th anniversary. I saw it when it opened, of course, but I’ve had a thing for this film since buying the Warner Archive DVD 11 years ago. I’ve probably seen it nine or ten times, and I really wish that an HD streaming version would be made available. as the DVD’s 480p resolution is unsatisfying.

Boilerplate synopsis: “Adapted by David Hare from the short, same-titled novel by Josephine Hart, this is a gripping tale of a desperate sexual obsession and scandalous love affair in upper-crust British social circles. Stephen Fleming (Jeremy Irons) has wealth, a beautiful, well-bred wife (Miranda Richardson), two younger children, an adult journalist son (Rupert Graves), and a prestigious political career in Parliament.

“But Fleming’s life lacks a certain spark of passion, and this emptiness drives him to an all-consuming, and ultimately catastrophic, relationship with his son’s fiancée, Anna (Juliette Binoche).”

No, I don’t personally relate to the idea of surrendering to obsessive sexual madness and self-destruction, and yes, the movie defies basic logic in terms of normal human behavior and priorities. But it’s one of the best cinematic explorations of that famous Woody Allen-ism, “The heart wants what it wants, or at least the loins do.” (Alternately: “You don’t choose who to fall into obsessive love with — obsessive love chooses you.”)

Another first-rate film that understands crazy doomed love affairs is Francois Truffaut‘s The Woman Next Door (’81).

Damage ends in death, devastation, downerism and ruin, but the first two-thirds are quite tantalizing in a crazy, well-behaved sort of way.

There’s a brief moment near the very beginning when Malle conveys the “lack of passion” aspect; he does this by having Irons gaze at his well-tended living room with a look of utter boredom. Please accept my apology for failing to properly frame the footage, but here it is:

A scene or two later Fleming meets Anna at a party, and the way they look at each other tells you it’s a done deal. It’s obvious they’ll be slamming ham within hours if not sooner.

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Springsteen and Crosby Need to Join Young, Mitchell, Lofgren

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HE to Bruce Springsteen and David Crosby: You guys are supposed to be socially attuned, politically engaged artists who’ve been around and are grounded in (or at least have some basic understanding of) the Average Joe proletariat experience, and so you’re naturally against Joe Rogan promoting misinformation and Covid vaccine bullshit. With Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and Nils Lofgren having stood up against Rogan and Spotify but you guys being silent (at least so far), it’s fair to ask the following question — are you men of backbone and consequence or are you scurrying little mice? I’m not accusing you of the latter — I’m just asking “who are you?”

A Little Gratitude

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Even in jest I’ve never heard anyone mention No Time To Die as a potential Best Picture contender. Never so much as fiddled with. But the same kind of pitch, obviously, could and should be made for Spider-Man: No Way Home. The copy would read “Spider-Man: No Way Home pretty much saved exhibition, you bastards, and it’s still saving it as we speak. So when you vote, show a little decency and respect for what this film has done. Because it didn’t just ‘sell tickets’ but generated repeat business. Because people truly love it, which is something that no other 2021 film has managed to do. Think about it.”

Denzel vs. Finch vs. Fassbender

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I’m sorry but Jon Finch‘s reciting of William Shakespeare‘s “tomorrow and tomorrow” soliloquy in Roman Polanski‘s Macbeth (’71) strikes me as far more moving (i.e., more bitter an∂ despairing) than Denzel Washington‘s version of same in Joel Coen‘s The Tragedy of Macbeth.

Finch delivers like a perfect British instrument — carefully measured. exquisitely phrased, a straight-up RADA version minus anything quirky or modernist or side-angled. Denzel, on the other hand, is doing it “the Denzel way”, which is fascinating in its unaffected manner but at the same time lacking sufficient passion — more of a tone of lament and defeat than anything else.

Don’t even talk about Michael Fassbender‘s 2015 version in this context. Don’t even bring it up. Not a chance.

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