I visited Houston, Texas, in late April ‘06 or 18 years ago, and I frankly doubt if I’ll ever return. There are so many beautiful, soul-stirring cities, towns and regions out there worldwide (I could write chapters upon chapters) and I’m sorry but comparison-wise and with all due respect Houston just doesn’t knock your sucks off.
Here’s howIputitbackthen…deep in the Dubya miasma and roughly a year before Barack Obama launched his presidential campaign. The HE article was called “Texas Town.” The money quote (“Houston is L.A. without the soul”) came from Texas gal and good friend Cherry Kutac, who had invited me to cover the still-thriving Worldfest, the Houston-based film festival.
I’m sorry to have missed last weekend’s Los Angeles showing of a freshly restored 4K version of North by Northwest, which will be the basis of a forthcoming 4K UHD Bluray that will street late this year. Alfred Hitchcock‘s 1959 classic screened Saturday afternoon (4.20) under the auspices of the TCM Classic Film Festival.
I presumed the TCM NXNW screening was a premiere. (Distributors routinely debut new restorations at TCM Classic Film Festival.) Which is why I was thrown when I discovered yesterday that a “4K restoration” of North by Northwest played at the Film Forum roughly five months ago (late October-early November).
This morning I called the Film Forum and was told by a seemingly knowledgable employee that the restored 4K version of NXNW that played at the West Houston Street theatre last fall was the same version that played last Saturday at the Chinese on Hollywood Blvd.
The employee mentioned that FF senior programmer Bruce Goldstein, who’s also involved with the TCM Classic Film Festival, had finessed the booking, etc.
And yet this didn’t seem right. Why would Warner Bros. Discovery, which oversaw the NXNW restoration and will release the 4K UHD disc…why would they present a freshly minted NXNW 4K restoration at the Film Forum five months before the big TCM Classic Film Festival debut?
Then again, the FF page plainly states “4K restoration.”
Just before last weekend’s TCM showing I reached out to George Feltenstein, WBD’s in-house archivist and restoration hotshot (his technical job title is WBD Library Historian). I wanted to learn about the technical details of the restoration and when the disc might be released, etc.
I didn’t hear back until this afternoon. I was informed as follows by email:
Sentence #1: “The version of North by Northwest that was shown at the TCM Film Festival last weekend is a brand-new scan from the original camera negative, using a new scanner adapted for VistaVision.”
Sentence #2: “To confirm, this is not the same version of the film that played at Film Forum last year.”
Because I hated David Leitch’s BulletTrain with exceptional passion, I’m 96% certain I’m going to loathe and despise TheFallGuy (Universal, 5.3). I know what Leitch is (ex-stunt man, delusions of adequacy) and what he’s basically about deep down (a quarter-of-inch deep aspirations). There’s an all-media screening in Manhattan on Monday evening (4.29) but I don’t feel that TheFallGuy is worth the hassle of travelling in and out. I’ll catch it locally on Wednesday, 5.1…like a dentist appointment.
“LoudLatinoConstructionWorkers,” posted on 10.25.21: “There’s a Latino apartment renovation crew working in the building next door, three or four guys, and they’re being (what else?) obnoxious — shouting to the extent that their voices sound like sonic booms, playing loud sombrero ballads and singing along and occasionally going ‘whooo-whooo!’
“And it’s awful to listen to, man. It’s hell.
“I’ve asked myself if I should walk over to the worksite and ask these guys to consider the fact that this is West Hollywood and not East L.A. and would they mind giving the neighborhood a break with their awful Tijuana border crossing music, etc. But that wouldn’t accomplish much. I understand that.
“I’ve been all around the block with coarse Latinos so don’t tell me. My battles with the Hispanic Party Elephant in North Bergen. The “Loud Latinos” piece that I posted from Brooklyn in June 2010, and got in trouble over.
Posted on 6.26.10: “We all act thoughtlessly from time to time, but the mark of a real animal is someone who never considers that he/she might be giving offense.
“I’ve been all around Spain and I’ve rarely noticed this level of conversational obnoxiousness in cafes. Nor did I notice this element when I visited Buenos Aires a few years ago. The Latin men and women I’ve observed in other countries can be spirited and exuberant, of course, but they mostly seem to converse at moderate levels. People with money and/or accomplishment under their belts are always more soft-spoken.
“You can bet that if you were to go to a cafe with Paul Shenar‘s Alejandro Sosa, the Bolivian drug dealer in Scarface, that he wouldn’t be shouting and bellowing. Does Edward James Olmos bellow in cafes and cause guys like me to complain about him? I seriously doubt it.”
Yet another team — New Regency, director John Hillcoat, screenwriter John Logan — is trying make Cormac McCarthy‘s “Blood Meridian” (’85) into a movie.
Don’t they understand this is an all-but-unfilmable property?…that the history of failed adaptations stretches back at least 25 years?…that Joe and Jane Popcorn lack the constitution to cope with frank depictions of such a blistering and ultra-violent book?
“The black stepped out of the darkness bearing the bowie knife in both hands like some instrument of ceremony. The white man looked up drunkenly and the black stepped forward and with a single stroke swapt off his head. Two thick ropes of dark blood and two slender rose like snakes from the stump of his neck and arched hissing into the fire. The head rolled to the left and came to rest at the ex-priest’s feet where it lay with eyes aghast.”
Producer Scott Rudin has been riding herd on a Blood Meridian adaptation for many, many years.
In the late ’90s, Tommy Lee Jones acquired the adaptation rights to the story and subsequently rewrote Steve Tesich‘s 1995 screenplay. Never happened, deemed too violent.
Ridley Scott and screenwriter William Monahan entered discussions with Rudin for adapting “Blood Meridian” with Paramount Pictures financing. Abandonedm, too violent, etc.
James Franco took a crack at McCarthy’s novel in 2011. He shot 25 minutes of test footage starring Scott Glenn, Mark Pellegrino, Luke Perry and Dave Franco. Never went anywhere.
On 5.5.16 Variety reported that Franco was negotiating with Rudin to write and direct an adaptation to be brought to the Marché du Film, starring Russell Crowe, Tye Sheridan and Vincent D’Onofrio. Nope.
I'm presuming that the partly-diseased, woke-stricken HE commentariat is going to respond to this frank and seemingly fair-minded video essay by attacking me.
Login with Patreon to view this post
Talk about priceless remnants of ancient civiizations and the various complications (ethical and otherwise) that ensue when a very special remnant is discovered…
Jean Negulesco‘s Boy on a Dolphin (’57) is about as far away from Alice Rohrwacher‘s La Chimera as you can get. The first Hollywood film shot in Greece, this 20th Century Fox release is square, schmaltzy, simplistic, sentimental and very strongly opposed to any sense of native authenticity.
Set in Hydra, Sophia Loren is a poor local girl with great boobs, Alan Ladd is a good-guy archeologist with shimmering blonde hair, and Clifton Webb is a nefarious sophisticate with links to the black market.
The only anecdote I can recall is the one about a two-inch height disparity between Ladd and Loren (who was making her English-language debut).
Wiki excerpt: “The dissimilarity in heights between the 5 foot, 8 inch Loren and 5 foot, 6 inch Ladd led to complications. Some of their scenes together required him to stand on a box; another forced a trench to be dug for Loren when the pair walked along the beach.”
I missed Alice Rohrwacher‘s La Chimera at last year’s Cannes Film Festival and then again in Telluride eight months ago, but I finally saw it at the Jacob Burns on Sunday night and man, it has a real unwashed, hand-to-mouth, transportational spirit thing going on.
It’s about the ancient past (Etruscan artifacts) being dug up in Tuscany and sold and exploited by lowlife scruffs, and how this all shakes down in a moralistic or fable-like sense. It doesn’t pay off emotionally, or at least not in a way that I recognize, but it almost does. And it definitely feels whole by the end — I can say that for sure.
Rohrwacher, her dp Hélene Louvart (who mostly shoots within 1.37 and 1.66 aspect ratios), editor Nelly Quettier and the mostly tramp-like, generally unattractive cast (except for the radiant Carol Duarte, a Brazilian actress playing a kind of Gelsomina- or Guilietta Masina-like innocent, and the white-haired, eternally beautiful Isabella Rosellini)…Rohrwacher and friends are definitely up to something here.
Tall, pale-faced, unshaven Josh O’Connor plays Arthur, a kind of artifact whisperer — a filthy British-born bilingual fellow who smokes all the time, wears dirty clothing and ugly footwear and shuffles around with one of the worst haircuts in movie history.
But Arthur is about more than just stinky socks and rancid cigarette breath — he can sense or smell where Etruscan artifacts (sculpture, goblets, statues, frescoes) are buried, and so most of the film is about Josh guiding a band of tomb robbers on illegal digs. Their findings are sold to a sinister art dealer (Alba Rohrwacher, the director’s older sister), and that’s how they make ends meet.
La Chimera is about hundreds upon hundreds of spirit elements coexisiting in a hungry, dirt-poor realm without showers or deodorants or laundromats…the soiling and pirating of ancient remnants by low-life scuzzies…buried Etruscan pottery and tiled floors and erotic figurines…soil whispers, dusty ghosts.
Ethical conflicts abound, of course, but what matters is treating the past with care and reverence and allowing others to bask in its beauty. I don’t see what’s so bad about selling found history. As long as the artifacts are respected and not hoarded, what’s the problem?
It took me a good half hour before I got past O’Connor’s smelly feet and disgusting cigarette smoking and began to realize where the film is headed — before it hit me that it’s a casting a kind of underclass spell that really takes hold…that it’s a La Strada-like adventure or dirt poem, a half-fantasy or fairy tale about wretched refuse types looking to survive as best they can and not fretting about ethical issues…about digging up Etruscan pots and cups and marble statues and you-name-it…poor folks sifting through soil in Tuscany’s hidden regions (i.e., the kind that tourists rarely gaze upon).
Talk about a curious turn-on mechanism but this is Rohrwacher’ssignature…she takes all kind of disparate, haunting, non-hygenic elements and throws them together like a salad maker…nothing is the least bit glammy or posed or polished or conventionally alluring…everything is half-assed, raggedy-assed…the sublime merged with the ugly.
La Chimera features one of the ugliest coastline super-sized factories I’ve ever seen in my life — it reminded me of a coastline factory in Piombino, a working-class town where tourists catch the ferry to Elba.
La Chimera has a real sense of spirit. Rohrwacher (her first name is pronounced Ahh-LEE-chuh) really goes for the off-handed, the weird, the gunky, the untidy, the muddy. It’s not exactly pleasant, but is kind of wonderful all the same.
Longerversion: Fuck your sentimental boomer attachments to riveting hot-button movies that ruled the roost between the late ‘60s and IronMan (‘09). GenX is mostly running the show now but down the road we’ll be taking the fuck over, and if you think there’s too much third-rate, zone-out streaming content now, wait until we get our hands on the gears.
You want some attempts at old-fart, boomer-type flicks? There aren’t any. Try original content longform streaming, and if that’s not nourishing enough, tough.
All we care about are jizz-whizz fiicks — IP reboots, moronic romcoms and comedies, VFX and horror. And we definitely don’t want to adapt books or plays — eff that noize.
Wearegoingtorunthisbusinessintotheground, man.
A quarter-century hence the corpses of Ben Hecht, John Ford, Spencer Tracy, Daryl F. Zanuck, Gregg Toland, Jean Arthur, John Huston, Ida Lupino, Nicholas Ray, Agnes Varda, Tom Cruise, Howard Hawks, Billy Wilder, James Stewart, Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock, Meryl Streep, Oliver Stone and Kevin Costner will be spinning in their graves on a permanent basis.
20 years from now people are going to be saying “wow, remember TheFallGuy? What a great film!”
…on YorgosLanthimos’s KindsofKindness said that it’s, like, heartwarming and touchy-feely and possibly the most inviting and emotionally friendly film he’s ever made? How would you respond to this scuttlebutt? Boredom, right?
…but dear God, it feels so good when Alec Baldwin slaps Crackhead Barney and Friends‘ phone…I would have held myself in check, but my God, what a wonderful thing it can be to swat a mosquito.
This 1976 Benefit Blowout poster was posted on Facebook this mornhing by musician and old friend Eric Pearson. It was composed by the late Chris Browne (Hagar the Horrible). His older brother, fellow cartoonist and extraordinary musician Chance Browne, passed away a few weeks ago. Notice the “BlackWellsFiasco” logo at the bottom left.
The below photo ran in the Wilton Bulletin in early August ’76. It accompanied a story about a then-upcoming Save The Whales concert, which then-girlfriend Sophie Black (on my left) and I co-produced, and which was held on a hilly 52-acre farm owned by Sophie’s parents, David and Linda Cabot Black. The focus of the story was that a portion of the proceeds would be donated to Camp PIP, a non-profit that offered recreational facilities help to lower-income kids.
