“The aspect of Hopper/Welles that is bound to cause confusion among some reviewers and ordinary viewers who don’t know Welles’s work well or aren’t familiar with the shooting of The Other Side of the Wind is that most of the time in the documentary, Welles is sitting in for Hannaford. He told me that August that he hadn’t decided whom he would cast in the role of the aging macho director trying to make a comeback in the New Hollywood, but that it would be ‘either John Huston or Peter O’Toole doing his imitation of John Huston.’
“Since he didn’t settle on Huston (the perfect casting for the legendary, gruff old cynic) until early 1974, we had to play scenes to Welles off-camera as Jake, as Hopper does here (you can tell at one point that Welles is thinking about Huston, because he addresses Hopper as ‘Kid,’ Huston’s favorite all-purpose greeting). Sometimes Hopper addresses him as Jake and makes teasing comments about him, but sometimes he seems baffled whether he is speaking to Jake or Orson, as some viewers will be too. The danger in this approach is confusing Hannaford’s often reactionary, fascist, and racist views with Welles’s own. If you think viewers can sort out this complexity on their own, you’re mostly mistaken, since numerous reviewers of Other/Wind were confused by Hannaford’s blatant sexism, assuming Welles shares his views, even though the film is, as Welles told his longtime associate Richard Wilson on the set, ‘an attack on machoism.’
I’m mildly interested in visiting the now-abandoned Indian ashram of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (aka “Sexy Sadie”) and the specific areas where the Beatles, the Farrow sisters, Mike Love and other transcendental meditation followers visited between February and April, 1968. Meditating, relaxing, writing songs, smiling cosmic smiles and considering inappropriate sexual behaviors. Why not, right?
“The book ‘Maharishi & Me: Seeking Enlightenment with the Beatles’ Guru‘ cites witnesses saying Mia Farrow told them he made a pass at her, and stroked her hair. She even came up with a memorable line — ‘Listen, I know a pass from a puja.’
“By the time John Lennon remembered it for ‘Lennon Remembers‘, the hullabaloo turned into a game of telephone with stories of Maharishi “trying to rape Mia Farrow or trying to get off with Mia Farrow and a few other women, things like that.’ The Beatles were happy writing songs in spiritual solitude. ‘Then everything went horribly wrong,’ Pattie Boyd wrote in her memoirs ‘Wonderful Tonight: George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Me‘. “Mia Farrow told John she thought Maharishi had been behaving inappropriately,” Boyd wrote. ‘I think he made a pass at her.’
The incident with the Rosemary’sBaby star happened on her birthday — February 9, 1968. The Maharishi would always do Puja for people who were close to him. (The Puja is a ceremonial invocation of the spiritual lineage.) After the Puja, he stroked her hair — or so Farrow reported. In Farrow’s autobiography ‘What Falls Away‘, she writes that the Maharishi also put his ‘hairyarms‘ around her.
“According to ‘Lennon Remembers‘, John and his fellow meditators ‘stayed up all night discussing [if it was] true or not true. And when George started thinking it might be true, I thought, ‘Well it must be true, ’cause if George is doubting it, there must be something in it.’
“John threw a hissy fit. ‘Come on, we’re leaving,’ Boyd wrote in her memoir. ‘Then Magic Alex claimed that Maharishi had tried something with a girl he had befriended.
“’So we went to see Maharishi, the whole gang of us the next day charged down to his hut, his very rich-looking bungalow in the mountains,’ Lennon told Jann Wenner in Rolling Stone. ‘And I was the spokesman — as usual, when the dirty work came, I had to be the leader, whatever the scene was, when it came to the nitty gritty I had to do the leading. And I said, ‘We’re leaving.’
“The guru stopped giggling. ‘He said, ‘I don’t know why, you must tell me,’” Lennon recalled. ‘And I just kept saying, ‘You know why’ — and he gave me a look like, ‘I’ll kill you, you bastard.’ He gave me such a look, and I knew then when he looked at me, because I’d called his bluff. And I was a bit rough to him.’
“Poor Maharishi. I remember him standing at the gate of the ashram, under an aide’s umbrella, as the Beatles filed by, out of his life,” Boyd wrote in her book. “‘Wait,’ he cried. ‘Talk to me.’ But no one listened.”
Congrats to Schitt’s Creek producers for last night’s triumph — for winning nine Emmys, and for the now-concluded show becoming the first-ever comedy or drama series to sweep the four acting categories (Outstanding Lead Actor, Outstanding Lead Actress, Outstanding Supporting Actor, Outstanding Supporting Actress) and yaddah yaddah. Congrats also to HBO’s Watchmen for winning the best limited series Emmys, and to Euphoria‘s Zendaya for becoming the youngest-ever winner of a best drama actress Emmy.
Is it okay if I respectfully postpone plans to watch Schitt’s Creek and Euphoria for the time being? I’m hearing this little voice in my chest, a teeny little voice saying “you’ll probably be okay if you don’t, like, totally immerse yourself in these shows after the fact.” I’ve been ducking Schitt’s Creek since 2015 so why switch horses?”
It wasn’t for a lack of respect that I only watched two Watchmen episodes (including the Tulsa race riot one). I just have a profound aversion to all things Lindelof. I also found it a little mindfucky, a little hard to follow and so I said to myself, wisely or unwisely, “My life will be less difficult if I don’t watch the other seven episodes.” Go ahead — call me a weakling or a wimp or lazy.
To think that just a few weeks ago, to go by press reports, the besieged Ellen DeGeneres was seriously thinking about bailing on her daytime talk show. Which she probably was.
Ellen verbatim: “There were also articles in the press and on social media that said I’m not who I appear to be on TV, because I’ve become known as the ‘be kind’ lady. Being known as the ‘be kind’ lady is a tricky position. Anyone thinking of changing their name or giving themselves a nickname, do not go with the ‘be kind’ lady. The truth is, I am that person that you see on TV, [but] I am also a lot of other things. Sometimes I get mad or sad or anxious or frustrated and impatient, and I’m working on all of that. Especially on the impatient thing. And it’s not going well, not happening fast enough. [That said] I’m a pretty good actress, but I don’t think I could come out here for 17 years and fool you. This is me, and my intention is to always be the best person I can be.”
In some circles federal judge Barbara Logoa, a Cuban-blood Republican, is believed to be a likelier Supreme Court nominee than Barrett, who’s more than a bit of an Irish Catholic loon.
…at this horrible juncture in our nightmare concentration camp life is a little Miklos Rozsa interlude.** To remind that a gradual end to the horror will occur…eventually, somehow, sometime down the road. Probably starting on the evening of 11.3…maybe.
Herewith a five-part Showtime docuseries on L.A.s The Comedy Store, directed by none other than HE’s own Mike Binder (Black and White, Reign Over Me, The Upside of Anger) and launching on 10.4. Boilerplate: “…brings to life the legends, heartbreak and history created at The Comedy Store, which opened in 1972 in West Hollywood and operated by Mitzi Shore until her death in 2018. TCS was an early breakout forum for dozens of big-time comics (Jay Leno, David Letterman, Garry Shandling, Jim Carrey). As a Comedy Store alum and former stand-up comic, Binder spotlights one of pop culture’s great laboratories with never-before-seen footage and incisive, emotional interviews with Whoopi Goldberg, Howie Mandel, Michael Keaton, Andrew Dice Clay, Whitney Cummings, etc.
In my 9.12 review of Nomadland I called it a Best Picture Oscar nominee; ditto Chloe Zhao and Frances McDormand for Best Director and Best Actress. Pretty much a universal consensus. Nomadland recently won the Golden Lion in Venice, as we all know, and today it won the Toronto Film Festival’s top People’s Choice award. So I guess we know where things stand.
Regina King‘s One Night in Miami came in second place in Toronto, so to speak. Tracey Deer‘s Beans was voted second runner-up
I was thinking about driving down to Brea, La Habra, Fullerton or Garden Grove — four of the ugliest, most culturally barren, most beyond-miserable Los Angeles suburbs you’ll ever have the misfortune to drive through, much less visit — to see Tenet for the second time.
But I guess I won’t. At least not this weekend. Partly, I suppose, because I don’t want to feel lost or locked out again, cupping my ears and throwing up my hands. Because I know I won’t understand it any better than I did the first time, when I saw it in Flagstaff a couple of weeks ago.
“Tenet is not intended to be specifically understood in the way that 98% of the films out there are,” I wrote the morning after. “It’s meant to be submitted to, absorbed, bounced off, smeared on a slice of bread, drowned in.”
I guess I’m mainly looking forward to streaming a 4K version or watching it on Bluray. Both options will allow me to use subtitles, and that will obviously open a few doors.
In the meantime I’m very sorry that Tenet, which has earned well over $200 million overseas, is more or less crapping out in U.S. theatres. A lousy $4.7 million eared this weekend, for a grand North American total of $36 million and change…peanuts.
Variety‘s Rebecca Rudin: “As the first major film to release in theaters since the pandemic, “Tenet” has boldly tested the waters to see how willing people would be to return to the movies during a global heath crisis. Warner Bros., the studio behind the $200 million-budgeted film, again stressed that Tenet’s theatrical run will be ‘a marathon, not a sprint.’ The hope is that without much competition in terms of new Hollywood tentpoles, Tenet will steadily draw crowds for weeks to come.
“[But] it’s not just Tenet having trouble generating traction among ticket buyers. Given the challenging marketplace, every movie is facing headwinds at the box office. Though 70% of cinemas in the U.S. have reopened, venues in New York and Los Angeles — two areas that account for a bulk of the country’s ticket sales — are still closed. Multiplexes that have reopened are operating at reduced capacity due to the pandemic. However, executives are optimistic that movies will continue to see an increase in sales as additional markets are given permission to turn marquee lights back on.
“A glint of optimism: Theaters in the greater Los Angeles area, including Orange County, that reopened have accounted for a bulk of this weekend’s ticket sales. Among the highest-grossing venues, three of the top five — and five out of the top 10 — were in California, despite 80% of theaters in the state being closed. Studio bosses are taking that as a sign that when Los Angeles and other popular moviegoing areas reopen, people will turn out to theaters in larger numbers.”
The simplest and easiest way to see a good-looking HD version of Buster Keaton‘s The General (’26) is to stream it on Amazon. And yet I’m ashamed to admit that I found this colorized-with-sound-effects version somewhat engaging and perhaps even a bit more. I watched the whole 75-minute film earlier today. Heresy, I know.
The genius-level Keaton starred, produced and co-directed. He was 31 at the time. 24 years later Keaton performed a cameo (more or less playing himself) in Billy Wilder‘s Sunset Boulevard. The poor guy looked 65 if a day.
The General was inspired by the Great Locomotive Chase of 1862. The story was adapted from William Pittenger‘s 1889 memoir “The Great Locomotive Chase.”
A less inventive, non-comedic but respectably sturdy retelling of the tale arrived with Walt Disney’s The Great Locomotive Chase (’56), costarring Fess Parker and Jeffrey Hunter. It was shot by Charles Boyle with a 2.39:1 aspect ratio.
The Disney film didn’t do as well commercially as hoped, probably due to the fact that it went with a downer ending. Parker’s character, Union spy and train hijacker James J. Andrews, ends up captured and hanged.
