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Led Zep Doc Hiding in Tall Grass

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What’s happened to Bernard McMahon’s Becoming Led Zeppelin? In early September the 137-minute doc screened at the Venice and Telluride film festivals, which almost always signals some kind of imminent fall release, or at least early the following year. But then it disappeared. Either nobody acquired it or it was withdrawn for further editing or something. All I know is that there’s no word about anything.

HE wild guess: There’s been a general sense of frustration with the critical response to the doc. Most reviewers found it overly obsequious and not even slightly inquisitive, and so (again, purely a guess) some re-editing and re-shaping is going on.

Led Zeppelin headliners Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, who had apparently turned down previous proposals for a definitive Led Zeppelin doc over the years, presumably because they didn’t want a warts-and-all portrait (i.e., infamous drug use and groupie debauchery on the road + the drug-related death of dummer John Bonham), are presumably hammering things out with McMahon as we speak. Or not. Who knows?

I saw and reviewed Becoming Led Zeppelin at Telluride ’21. Like most many reviewers I found it satisfactory if (and I say “if“) you’re willing to just go with it and put away your cranky hat. Providing, in other words, that you’re willing to ignore the doc’s kiss-ass attitude and general lack of curiosity about anything other than how the band came together and how the early songs were created, etc.

Forty-eight words: Becoming Led Zeppelin is highly enjoyable but a bit under-nourishing due to control-freak conditions imposed by Page and Plant. Overly sanitized, dishonest by way of omission, totally obsequious. But I still “liked” it — i.e., had a mildly good time except during the last 20 or 25 minutes.

Excerpt: “The first hour relates the individual paths of the three remaining Zeppers, and straight from the mouths — Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones (all currently in their 70s and in good spirits) as well as the late John Bonham, who is heard speaking to a journalist about this and that.

“The second hour is about the launch of Led Zeppelin — the early play dates, the creation of the first two albums, the acclaim, the power and the glory. It’s basically about good times, and there’s certainly nothing ‘wrong’ with that.

“The problem is that it doesn’t dig in. It’s not even slightly inquisitive. It’s way too obliging, almost feeing like an infomercial at times. It offers, in short, a really restricted portrait, and around the 110-minute mark (and with 27 minutes to go) I started to mind this.

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Buzz Ignition

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Two big advance screenings this week — Ridley Scott‘s House of Gucci (UA Releasing, 11.24) on Wednesday and Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Licorice Pizza (UA releasing, 11.26) on Saturday. Scott’s film runs 157 minutes; Anderson’s runs 133 minutes with credits, 128 without.

Cancel “Dune” For Failure To Cast MENA Actors?

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“Denis Villeneuve and his collaborators do not call [or otherwise identify the Dune desert culture as] Islam, nor Arab or any other MENA culture. Part One presents the Fremen as generic ‘people of color.’

“For all the inclusivity of its 2021 ensemble — which includes Jason Momoa, Dave Bautista, Oscar Isaac, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Chang Chen and frequent Villeneuve collaborator and half-Iranian actor David Dastmalchian (under white makeup and a bald cap) as representatives of Houses Atreides and Harkonnen — not a single MENA actor was chosen to play Fremen.”

HE comment: I say cancel Dune right now. Villenueve and the other anti-MENA racists messed up, and they have to pay the piper. Cue Timothee Chalamet reaction: “I had nothing to do with the casting of Dune, but if you guys want Villeneuve cancelled or demoted, I’ll go along with it.”

“Instead, they are played by actors like Sharon Duncan-Brewster, Zendaya, Javier Bardem and Babs Olusanmokun. (As Dune super fan John Hodgman recently said, ‘I’m very conflicted about Javier Bardem. I don’t know what accent he’s doing. What’s that supposed to be?’)” — from Roxana Hadadi‘s “Dune Has a Desert Problem,” Vulture-posted on 10.29.21.

You’re Here, Then You’re Not

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“What did Thomas Alva Edison know? He sure knew how to rain on people’s parades back in 1910, I’ll tell you that much! In any event we, the citizens of 2021, don’t want to hear his alleged insights either.”

Seriously, folks…when Tom O’Neill, Steven Gaydos, Guy Lodge and all the other wonderful people of our delightful mutual hellscape escape this mortal coil, I’m afraid that no cosmic residue will remain. Me too, I’m afraid. Lights out and adios, muchachos. Be here now.

Emmerich Recycling Greatest Disaster Hits

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So the moon’s on a collision course with earth due to…what again? Basically another Armageddon by way of When Worlds Collide (’51). The lead casting of scary movie guy Patrick Wilson is a tip-off. The fat Millennial guy with glasses is British actor John Bradley (Game of Thrones).

YouTube guy: “It’s been awhile since we’ve had a movie like this. I feel like we’re overdue for another fun and entertaining disaster flick. And leave it to the pioneer himself, Roland, to deliver!”

“To Sleep, Perchance to Dream of Things To Come”

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The unnamed daughter of Jett Wells and Caitlin Bennett is due on 11.18. (I’ve just been told that Maeve is a placeholder.). My first reaction to the new ultrasound image was “part serenity, part Francis Bacon portraiture, part Rodin’s ‘The Thinker.’” It’s like she’s resting her face on the palm of her right hand.

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Jackals and Serpents

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I thought I knew what ugliness was in high school, and I did in a manner of speaking. Young, callow, short-sighted ugliness. But the ugliness of right now (the Millennial and Zoomer kind, the Tom O’Neill kind, the wokester snowflake kind, the Variety kind) is worse, much worse.

Flash In The Pan

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You could almost call…hell, I will call SNL guy and King of Staten Island star Pete Davidson the Warren Beatty of the 20teens and ’20s. I don’t keep close tabs and it’s none of my damn business anyway, but it seems as if the guy is constantly getting ass, and now Gawker is reporting that Pete is putting the high hard one** to Kim Kardashian.

Quote: “Gawker can exclusively confirm via our own ‘insider’ that Kardashian, 41, and Davidson, 27, spent the night together at a Los Angeles hotel on October 28. Do we need to say it? They were not having a Gilmore Girls marathon.”

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Slow Death From a Thousand Social Media Cuts

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The impulsive Shallow Hal crowd (Millennials, Zoomers) will probably avoid Asghar Farhadi‘s A Hero (Amazon, 1.7.22) like the plague, but it’s easily one of the 2021’s finest films. It’s all dialogue and all medium shots, but the titular character of Rahim (Amir Jadidi) is slowly nibbled and then bloodied and finally swallowed by the social media mob. 127 minutes long, A Hero is a steady and persistent indictment of…I don’t know, everyone and everything.

“Candy Store Years”

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“They were the candy store years because there were drugs, stardom, the pill. I met a couple of girls in bed more than once, and I had sex in public places, like Studio 54.” — Dustin Hoffman, quoted in a Studio 54 piece on colorized.com.

The original Schrager-Rubell version of Studio 54 opened on 4.26.77 and closed on 2.3.80. Hoffman turned 40 on 8.8.77.

From HE review of Matt Tyrnauer‘s Studio 54 (“The Way It Was“), posted on 1.22.18: “Bob Calacello or somebody mentions how Studio 54 happened in a glorious period in American culture that was post-birth control and pre-AIDS. The film explains how liberal sexual attitudes were particularly celebrated by urban gay culture, which was just starting to sample freedoms that today are more or less taken for granted. Guys couldn’t hold hands on the street but they certainly could once they got inside Studio 54.

“But one thing you can’t say in today’s climate (and which Tyrnauer’s film doesn’t even mention in passing) is that the ’70s were also a glorious nookie era for heterosexual guys. It was probably the most impulsive, heavily sensual, Caligula-like period (especially with the liberal use of quaaludes) to happen in straight-person circles since…you tell me. The days of Imperial Rome?

“This kind of thing is now a verboten topic, of course, with the 2018 narrative mainly being about how guys need to forget ‘impulsive’ and turn it down and be extra super careful in approaching women in any context. But things were quite different back in the Jimmy Carter era. I’m not expressing any particular nostalgia for those days, but the new Calvinism of 2018 couldn’t be farther away from what the social-sexual norms were 40 years ago. Just saying.”

Thompson’s Finest Moment

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Australian actor Jack Thompson was just shy of 40 when he portrayed Maj. James Francis Thomas, defense attorney for three Australian soldiers charged with wartime atrocities during the Boer War, in Bruce Beresford‘s Breaker Morant (’80).

For this ringing performance, Thompson won the Best Actor award from the Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts Awards (AACTA) as well as a Best Supporting Actor trophy during the 1980 Cannes Film Festival.

Thompson/Thomas: “The fact of the matter is that war changes men’s natures. The barbarities of war are seldom committed by abnormal men. The tragedy of war is that these horrors are committed by normal men in abnormal situations. Situations in which the ebb and flow of everyday life have departed, and been replaced by a constant round of fear and anger, blood and death. Soldiers at war are not to be judged by civilian rules.”