Let me explain something. I’ve seen Spellbound four or five times, and as I sit here I can’t remember a single thing about Rhonda Fleming’s appearance in it. I know she plays a mental patient in Ingrid Bergman and Leo G. Carroll’s sanitarium and that she has an analysis scene with Bergman early on, but nothing she said or did in that 1945 film ever made the slightest impression.

Update: I just found a YouTube clip of the first ten minutes of Spellbound, which contains Fleming’s performance as a somewhat venomous sort. The performance struck me as brittle and surface-skimmy. She’s saying the lines but there’s a part of you that doesn’t want to listen. Which is why I hadn’t remembered anything before.

Fleming’s third-act scene with Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past was pretty good — she was bland but vaguely memorable in a “junior league patter” sort of way.

I don’t mean to project dismissiveness. Fleming had a noteworthy career and obviously lived a long life, and that took some doing. She hung in there. On the other hand she was a Republican. I don’t want to sound like I’m sounding. She was fine, a trouper, a one-time “Technicolor queen,” etc. And she sat for a 2006 interview with Bob Furmanek, the man most responsible for the 1.85 cleavering of God-knows-how-many 1950s films on Bluray, when Those Redheads From Seattle was shown in 3D at the American Cinematheque.

This reflects the way things were a week and a half ago. Right after Trump had left Walter Reed and was pumped up on drugs and talking about how great he felt. Things date so quickly now. The pace keeps accelerating.

The movie-watching world is divided into three distinct groups. One, those who not only know what FGD135 is but also CRM114. Two, those who have only a slight or vague idea what FGD135 might be but can’t quite place it. And three, those who don’t have even the slightest ephemeral interest and are even annoyed that you would ask them…”who cares?” One look at the analog technology tells them “not my orientation!”

From Adrian Horton’s Guardian review of HBO’s The Perfect Weapon:

“The hacking of Sony emails by a North Korean-backed team in China — a bizarre response to the studio’s planned release of a movie co-written by Rogen, The Interview, which depicted the fictional assassination of Kim Jong-un — marked a shift in the public understanding of corporate vulnerability to cyber-attack. But the concerns over security and kowtowing to the hackers’ will (the studio ultimately pulled the movie from most theaters) was frequently overshadowed by the gossipy contents of the hack itself, a media pattern repeated and refracted to more insidious effect in 2016, with the Russian hack and WikiLeaks release of Democratic National Committee emails.

“The Perfect Weapon argues, as numerous cyber and media experts have pointed out, that zeroing in on the content of the emails, and in particular on the narrative of a Democratic party ‘rigged’ against Senator Bernie Sanders, played into the Kremlin’s intention to roil the election with destabilizing noise. Even the specter of Russian meddling created an environment where ‘nothing is real and everything is possible’, says John Podesta in the film. ‘That really destroys the credibility of democracy, and that’s what Putin wants.”

“’America is uniquely susceptible to these kinds of attacks because of our openness, because we have a public square,’ said Maggio. ‘Disinformation, the hack-and-dump kind of attacks, are very effective at sowing a lot of chaos.’ Cyber weapons do not need to strike to be effective, due to what Sanger called the ‘perception hack’ — the recognition of foreign meddling as a possibility in any unclear scenario, a caustic understanding which erodes trust in American democratic processes and opens the door for muddled disputes of illegitimacy.'”

Last night’s SNL opener about the Trump-Biden town halls was a series of segments or highlights, separated by electronic noise or “snow”…the harsh-dot exploding pixel pattern that some of us recall from the antiquated ’80s (blank VHS tapes) but which really originated in the analog, pre-cable, coathanger-antenna days of the ’50s and ’60s.

How odd, I thought, that SNL, which bases its currency on being connected to the here-and-now, would employ a visual signal that reaches back to early Ronald Reagan at the most recent. How would I transition between segments if I was Lorne Michaels? I don’t know to be honest, but give me two or three minutes and I’ll come up with something better than Milton Berle-era silver noise.

Brian Fox, a respected repertory cinema owner and programmer from the ’70s and ’80s and a longtime friend of mine, passed last Monday evening. A massive heart attack. Condolences to his wife Diane, whom I’ve also known for decades. HE commenters knew Brian as “Grandpappy Amos.”

I met Brian though the Westport Playhouse Cinema, which he began co-managing with partner Fred Kraushar, in late ’76 or early ’77. I wrote program notes for the WPC as a kind of warm-up exercise before becoming a columnist for the fledgling Fairfield County Morning News. Then I moved to Sullivan Street in Soho and began my miserable period of freelance struggling and living hand-to-mouth — easily the darkest chapter of my professional life.

Brian was a personable, soft-spoken guy with a certain dry, droll attitude. He could be blunt in his own deft and darting way. I distinctly recall Brian calling me “a failure” during my arduous freelance agony days in ’79 and ’80. He didn’t mean to hurt my feelings exactly — it just came out that way. His assessment may have helped me on some level. It may have lit a fire.

I also recall a late-afternoon moment in ’77 when a young Hispanic guy and his girlfriend came into the WPC to talk about movies and pick up a printed program. As they were leaving and wishing the business well, Brian said “adios.” Fred was laughing his ass off at Brian’s faux pas two seconds after they’d left. One of those momentary embarassments that was quickly brushed under the carpet. It’s okay to mention it now. (Or is it?)

Brian and Diane were married in ’79. They tied the knot in a temple in Fairfield or Bridgeport. I was invited to attend a large post-wedding reception that was thrown by Brian’s dad, Morris, who was a crafty, level-headed, well-connected businessman. That day I sampled my first taste of anti-WASP ethnic prejudice. The reception was all about Morris’s business pallies, and Brian’s WASP friends were not, shall we say, treated with a great deal of familial warmth. We were seated right next to the kitchen with the door swinging open every 20 or 30 seconds. The message was “as friends of Brian, you guys are welcome but that’s all.”

In early ’79 Brian leased a South Norwalk porn theatre and turned it into the Sono Cinema, a Thalia- or Nuart-like arthouse that helped launch a cultural urban renewal initiative. I became a licensed projectionist around this time and occasionally worked in the Sono booth. (This was when I learned about aspect ratios, aperture plates and headroom.) The Sono Cinema was a thriving business for three or four years but then the burgeoning home video business began to eat into revenues. In the mid ’80s Brian tried a fundraising campaign to get out of debt, but eventually had to throw in the towel.

Residents of Durham, Brian and Diane have lived for decades in a nice, well-tended home with a large deck and beautiful backyard landscaping. They also own a condo in Belize, on Ambergris Caye.

Diane called with the bad news last night, two or three days after some news outlets had reported it.

She and Brian had just finished a nice meat loaf dinner. Brian stood up and said he was feeling badly, and then he sat on the couch and recanted (“I’m okay”). Then he began to drift in and out in terms of verbal coherence. Diane called an ambulance, and they took Brian out on a stretcher. He either died on the way to the hospital or once he got there.

No warnings from his primary physician, no cholestoral concerns, and Brian took exercise walks three times weekly…it happened just like that. His biological father, whom Brian never had much contact with, also passed from a heart attack at around the same advanced age.

Brian was my idea of an excellent fellow. He knew movies backwards and forwards. A serious Fassbinder fan.

Bill Maher last night (10.16.20): “The vast majority of Catholics are not scary, not doctrinaire. But there’s another strain of uber-conservative Catholics who have an agenda, and it’s really about pining for the return to the middle ages, when the church was the state. The attorney general is one of these people. So is the Federalist Society, [which is partly] responsible for putting five justices on the court. The Knights of Malta and Opus Dei. These old-school Catholics play the long game. Amy Barrett has been on their radar since forever, because she was raised in an extremist Catholic community called People of Praise, an organization [in which] a husband’s responsibilities may include ‘correcting’ his wife should she stray from a ‘proper path.'” And so on, etc.

Except for the Four Fakers aspect, Martin Scorsese‘s Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story was pretty much a purely pleasurable experience for everyone who saw it during the summer of ’19. It’s been on Netflix ever since, of course. And now Criterion has a 4K Bluray version coming on 1.19.21.

What’s my richest musical recollection from Scorsese’s doc? Easy — Joni Mitchell playing the then-recently composed “Coyote” for Dylan, Roger McGuinn, Gordon Lightfoot and others at Lightfoot’s home during the tour. The clip, originally shot for Dylan’s misbegotten Renaldo and Clara, is on YouTube, of course. “Coyote” would go on to open Mitchell’s 1976 album Hejira but was in the early stages while Mitchell was performing on the RTR tour.

From “The Four Fakers,” posted on 6.10.19: To my mind the only serious problem with Martin Scorsese‘s Rolling Thunder Revue doc is that he includes four phony talking heads among several real ones, and thereby violates the trustworthiness that we all associate with the documentary form, and for a reason that strikes me as fanciful and bogus.

The doc acquaints us with 22 or more talking-head veterans of the tour (Dylan naturally included) but among this fraternity Scorsese inserts what Toronto Star critic Peter Howell is calling the “four fakers” — made-up characters portrayed by real, recognizable people.

Sharon Stone, who was 17 when the Rolling Thunder Tour was underway, seems to be speaking as herself but she’s actually “playing” The Beauty Queen. At first Michael Murphy seems to be speaking from his own perspective, but then you realize he’s playing The Politician. Actor-performer Martin von Haselberg (the husband of Bette Midler) plays The Filmmaker. And Paramount chairman and CEO Jim Gianopulos portrays The Promoter.

Some of what they say to the camera might be factually correct in this or that anecdotal way, but it’s all basically bullshit — made-up, written-out or improvised recollections that are performed for a chuckle, for the hell of it.

Scorsese explains his decision to include the four fakers in the press notes: “I wanted the picture to be a magic trick. Magic is the nature of film. There’s an element to the tour that has a sense of fun to it…doing something to the audience. You don’t make it predictable. There’s a great deal of sleight of hand.”

Who says RTR was driven by a sleight-of-hand, put-on mentality? I never heard that before. I thought it was about keeping it real, small-scale, people-level, driving around in a small tour bus, passing out pamphlets, etc.

Scorsese’s doc isn’t some fanciful, mask-wearing thing. 96% of it is just footage of Dylan’s ’75 Rolling Thunder tour throughout New England intercut with visual-aural references to what life was like back in the mid ’70s. The fact that it contains invented testimony from four fleeting fakers doesn’t dilute the basic composition. Perhaps the four fakers idea came from Scorsese’s regard for Italy’s Comedia dell’arte tradition.

In the process of reviewing Bruce Wagner‘s latest novel, “The Marvel Universe: Origin Stories“, Wagner’s editor at Counterpoint Press said that certain terms in the novel were “problematic,” first and foremost being the word “fat.”

Wokesters have banished the “f” word as flatly, decisively and eternally as the “n” word and other hateful epithets. I understand that, of course, and I know that the preferred term is “person of size” or, if you will, non-svelte. (“Calorically challenged” has always been frowned upon.) The long and the short is that Wagner was appalled at the editor’s refusal to allow the “f” word in his book, and for this and other reasons decided to self-publish the book for free.

Yes, I’ve used the “f” word a few times — Fat Thor, Fatzilla, etc. In late May of ’07 I was standing on a small bridge in Venice when I noticed a morbidly obese fellow and his wife reclining in a passing gondola, and the combined weight was such that the gondola was almost taking on water. “Wow, look at that fat guy,” I muttered to my son Jett, who was standing next to me. I knew I had misspoken. My voice had echoed slightly. Jett’s immediate response was to touch my forearm and go “sshhhhh.’

I’m not so stupid as to not understand that avoiding the “f” word is advisable. I get it. Of course. I realize. I’m just trying to get along. I am not a harshly judgmental person as a rule. I simply err on the side of offhanded candor from time to time.

In honor of yesterday’s Netflix debut of Aaron Sorkin‘s The Trial of the Chicago 7, here’s my original 9.25.20 review plus excerpts:

This is a truly exceptional smarthouse drama — a character-driven procedural that will hook adults of whatever age.

Despite the tumultuous late ’60s milieu Sorkin’s film is not about the usual noise, rage and chaotic energy, but about thought and procedure and agendas laid face-up on the table. It’s about clarity and drillbits and impressive brain-cell counts.

The endless Chicago 7 trial (September ’69 to February ’70) was about a Nixon administration attempt to nail eight anti-establishment activists for activities tied to violent conflicts during the August ’68 Chicago Democratic convention.

Four of the defendants were Abbie Hoffman, Tom Hayden, Jerry Rubin and activist David Dellinger, respectively played by Sacha Baron Cohen, Eddie Redmayne, Jeremy Strong and John Carroll Lynch. The idea was to convict them for violating the Rap Brown law by crossing state lines in order to incite a riot.

In so doing Nixon’s attorney general John Mitchell was ignoring a previous assessment by LBJ’s attorney general Ramsey Clark (Michael Keaton), which was that the conflict was primarily provoked by the Chicago police.

The number of defendants was reduced to seven when the attempted prosecution of Bobby Seale (Yahya Abdul-Mateen) was declared a mistrial.

The Trial of the Chicago 7 works because it’s all on the page — because of Sorkin’s shaping and honing — emphasizing and de-emphasizing to achieve a certain focus and tone. And then he assembled a top-tier cast and hired Phedon Papamichael to shoot it without any muss or fuss. Sorkin could’ve made a half-dozen other films about the Chicago 7 trial with all kinds of attitudes and approaches, but he decided to make this one.

The film’s central conflict is not a good guys vs. bad guys thing, but between Hayden and Hoffman — between their differing approaches to stoking or harnessing the social unrest.

Hayden’s approach was cerebral and sensible — classic political organizing, focused pragmatism, position papers, non-violence. Hoffman was about trusting in theatrical instinct — hippie-yippie tribalism, generational anger and a vaguely understood practice of cultural revolution for the hell of it (i.e., irreverence, impulsiveness, cranked-up emotion).

The Hayden approach dominates, certainly as far as the defense strategy is concerned, but Hoffman’s (and Rubin’s) wise-ass theatricality and flamboyance punches through.

It’s actually a kind of four-way debate by way of defense attorney William Kuntsler (played by the always-good Mark Rylance) and co-attorney Leonard Weinglass (Ben Shenkman).

But the payoff (and it’s a rouser) comes when Kuntsler decides to put Hoffman on the stand, which sets the stage for one of those robust Sorkin-crescendo moments.

“Positively Bank Street“, posted on 6.17.18: “The last time I posted this true story, about an event that happened in ’81, I was accused by some of having lacked scruples. That wasn’t the thing. I’m going to try it again with extra wording — maybe this time it’ll be understood. The original title was “My Own Llewyn Davis Moment“:

For a good portion of ’81 I was living in a sublet on Bank Street west of Hudson, almost exactly opposite HB Studios. The rent was around $350 per month. (Or so I recall.) The sublessor was a 40something guy who lived in Boca Raton, Florida. The landlord, who knew nothing of this arrangement, was one of those tough old New York buzzards in his ’70s.

Anyway the landlord got wind and told me to vacate as I was illegally subletting. He naturally wanted a new fully-approved tenant who would pay a bigger rent, but he wouldn’t consider my own application as I was a shiftless scumbag in his eyes. I hemmed and hawed and basically refused to leave until I could find something else.

And then one day I came home to find my stuff (clothes, IBM Selectric typewriter, small color TV, throw rug, framed American Friend poster) lying in a big pile in the hallway with the locks on my apartment door changed. The buzzard was playing rough.

When you’re looking at sleeping on the sidewalk, you man up and do what you have to do to avoid that by any reasonable means necessary. Which is what I did.

There was no point in paying any rent at that point as I was a marked man who would have to leave the place fairly soon. The sublessor’s actual rent was $185 or something like that so he’d been making a monthly $165 profit from me. I figured once the buzzard started playing rough by (a) refusing to consider my application for a legit lease and (b) changing the locks and moving my stuff into the hallway that all bets were off and it was a game of habitat survival at all costs until an alternative presented itself.

My place was on the top floor of the building (i.e., the third or fourth floor). I went up to the roof and looked down the air shaft, which was smack dab in the middle of the building and about eight or ten feet square. I noticed a piece of lumber — not a four-by-four beam but an old pinewood board of some kind — bridging the air shaft with one end lying on a metal ladder or mini-platform of some kind and the other end on a brick ledge outside my bathroom window. I lowered myself down the ladder and slowly crawled along the air shaft board and opened my bathroom window and let myself in. (I said a prayer as I did this and God decided to cut me a break.)

I immediately moved my stuff back inside and then called a locksmith and changed the doorknob and bolt locks. The buzzard or one of his flunkies came by two or three days later and tried to open the door and couldn’t — hah!

I knew I’d have to leave before long but the air-shaft derring-do bought me an extra three or four weeks rent-free. Soon after I found another sublet (the bottom floor of a duplex on West 76th between Amsterdam and Columbus) and all was well.

How was this a Llewyn Davis moment? This was a tale of dark, lowball, no-direction-home desperation with no apparent light at the end of the tunnel. That’s Inside Llewyn Davis in a nutshell. The only difference is that God is indifferent if not mocking in the Coen brothers universe and yet He allowed me to cross the air shaft on that piece of lumber and not fall to the basement level.