Is “balding, gray-haired pudgebod” one of Joaquin Phoenix’s looks for Ari Aster’s epic–scaled Disappointment Blvd. (my presumption) or is it a recent aspect of JP’s own day-to-day? Either way the black, bulky Animal Liberation Front hoodie is, no offense, a problem in the “normcore” sense of that term. Pic has been described as a “nightmare comedy.”
On 9.17 I conveyed admiration for Roger Durling’s costly amber-red Jack Nicholson glasses. 16 days later I received a poor man’s version of Durling’s costly red specs (Blubox, $125, made in Australia), and I’m very happy with them.
This recent exchange between Paul Schrader and Howard Casner is a concise capturing of what I hate about lefty kneejerk accusers and what I can’t stand about 70% of HE comments — that reaction that boils down to “why aren’t you more sensitive and supportive of certain social causes?” blah blah. For what it’s worth I will always hate Black Widow. And thank you, Dan Lee.
Clark Gable was in his late teens when this photo was taken with his dad around ’19 or ’20. He’s almost freakish looking. Baby Huey-ish, over-fed or even chubby. Imagine if Gable’s head was shaved and he was wearing a Dan Aykroyd conehead. I’m fairly sure he had his ears surgically pinned back when he began to happen as an actor in the mid to late ’20s. And yet by the mid ’30s Gable was a huge matinee idol. It just goes to show that sometimes actors don’t really become their iconic selves until they hit 30 or 35 even, and have acquired a few creases and character lines.
Please post photos of actors or actresses who really didn’t look attractive or have that X-factor thing in their mid to late teens, but grew into it later on.
On 6.5.12 I posted about a chat I had with Jackson Browne way back when. (It was actually a four-way — Browne, myself and a couple of pretty ladies.) It was at some kind of political fundraiser that Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon were attending. (Or so I recall.) It was at the Mondrian on Sunset, around late ’94 or early ’95. And I was very favorably impressed by Browne’s manner and focus.
When you collar a celebrity at a party, it’s understood that you’ll have his/her attention for maybe two or three minutes, and then someone else will move in. Browne was different in that we were talking about something political, and he didn’t respond to others trying to wheedle in on the conversation. We all stayed focused and just hung in there for 20 or 25 minutes, which is an eternity at a party.
I liked how Browne seemed to think in long sentences, and how he stayed with a thought (his or someone else’s) and how he tried to develop it and push it along, and how he really seemed to listen and engage and make an effort to stay away from the usual chit-chat. Yes, he may have been persisting in the conversation because he liked the ladies. But one can usually sniff out hounds and their personalities, and my sense was that Browne wasn’t one.
For years I’d been a fan of Browne’s songs like everyone else, but after that night I knew first-hand that he was genuine and grounded as far as it went, and that he really disliked being glib or skirting or going “yeah, yeah, uh-huh” without really listening.
I can’t recall if it was a post-Oscar party, but it might have been. The subject may have been the Gingrich revolution and the piece I had just written Hollywood conservativbes for Los Angeles magazine, which was eventually called “Right Face“.
Pete Hammond says Barbra Streisand is like Browne in this respect. Engage her in a good political discussion and she’ll stick with it.
Tatiana and I attended last night’s 6 pm screening of George Clooney and William Monahan‘s The Tender Bar (Amazon, 12.17 theatrical, 1.7 streaming) at the DGA. Then we hit the after-party at the Sunset Tower hotel.
Set in Manhasset and Connecticut in the ’70s and ’80s, the movie is a warm, occasionally jarring family affair about the usual dysfunctions and obstacles…nurtured in a bar, romantic yearnings, toil and trouble, struggling to be a writer, etc.
Tye Sheridan‘s performance was the best element for me; Ben Affleck delivers an “amiable boozy uncle with a distinctive Long Island accent” performance that might result in a Best Supporting Actor nom. This, at least, was the general consensus at the Sunset Tower.
Tatiana says The Tender Bar is going to emotionally connect like Kenneth Branagh‘s Belfast has. Sid Ganis wasn’t at the screening or the party so I couldn’t check about this, but if Tatiana likes a film, attention should be paid.
The food, drink and company were all wonderful, and we were especially delighted by a three-song performance by Jackson Browne, which included one of the all-time favorite songs of my life, “These Days.”
Titane submission in less than an hour, and then The Tender Bar at 6 pm.
SPOILERS FOLLOW: A day or two ago I wrote that Leslie Odom’s Harold McBrayer struck me as the most compelling character in The Many Saints of Newark. Or at the very least the most centered — he just “was” in a Zen sense — a character with a thing or two to prove to the goombahs, but an actor with nothing to prove to the audience.
I also mentioned that Harold’s rising in the ranks with impunity and murdering a certain prominent Italian guy without apparent reprisals seemed a bit of a stretch.
There’s also the matter of Odom’s affair with a certain well-connected Italian woman, which seems unlikely given the deeply embedded racism in Newark’s Italian mob culture of a half-century ago.
Even more so this Italian woman inexplicably confessing this affair to her significant other, knowing as she surely did that Italian mob attitudes about black dudes were extremely toxic, not to mention the Italian machismo factor and territorial attitudes when it came to wives and girlfriends.
This really doesn’t calculate. A woman in her position would never confess to this, as in NEVER EVER as it would be tantamount to suicide.
Friendo spoiler: “I can believe that Giuseppina would have slept with a black guy, but no way would she have ever confessed this to Dickie. In that time period, when this kind of thing was hugely verboten among urban Italians? Just no way.”
The Critical Drinker’s review of No Time To Die is fairly amusing (a bit that appears at the :43 mark is a good hoot) and he doesn’t spoil anything. For a discussion of the ending and whatnot, you need to watch this Critical Drinker After Hours video (96 minutes) and go to the 11-minute mark.
Most of the British YouTubers are discussing spoilers as the film opened in England on Thursday, 9.30. It opens here in select, early-access venues on Wednesday, 10.6.
The Critical Drinker sidesteps the obvious conclusion that your progressive purists wanted James Bond, the smooth, martini-sipping pig chauvinist from MI6, dating back to the Kennedy era and before…they wanted him finished and finalized. In this climactic sense No Time To Die is, from a certain perspective, definitely wokey-wokey.
Prior to its BFI Löndon Film Festival debut (10.10), George Clooney’s The Tender Bar (Amazon, 12.17) has screened this weekend for Los Angeles industry early-birds, and will show again this evening. Upbeat responses so far, particularly for Ben Affleck as a Manhasset bartender with paternal instincts and inclinations. (Thanks to Jordan Ruimy.)
“…tryin to be a rock star at age 50, you’re sadly, sadly mistaken.” — Jimmy Fallon to Stillwater members in Almost Famous (“00).