Posted on 3.24.13: The Sapphires is an Aboriginal Dreamgirls…set in 1968, smaller-scaled and flavored/punctuated with rural Australia and war-torn Vietnam. Less flash and razzle-dazzle, no strobe lights and more emotionally restrained than Dreamgirls plus no Beyonce, Jamie Foxx or Eddie Murphy…but with the robust, note-perfect O’Dowd and ripe, live-wire performances from Deborah Mailman, Jessica Mauboy, Shari Sebbens and Miranda Tapsell — great singers, attractive and emotionally pronounced in every scene.

“A healthy portion is cool, snappy, rousing, well-cut and enormously likable. (And dancable.) That would be the first 40%, when the true-life tale of an Aboriginal Supremes-like group assembled and took shape in Australia in 1968. This 40-minute section, trust me, is definitely worth the price.

“But the main reason the film delivers overall is Chris O’Dowd‘s performance as Dave, a charmingly scuzzy boozer and Motown fanatic who steers the four girl singers (Deborah Mailman, Jessica Mauboy, Shari Sebbens, Miranda Tapsell) away from country and towards soul music, and then takes them to Vietnam to entertain U.S. troops.

“Dowd’s manner and personality are a total kick — an absolute hands-down winner and the best reason to see The Sapphires, even when it turns sketchy in the last half or so.

“I was saying to myself during the first 10 or 15 minutes, ‘Whoa, this is pretty good…not as high-throttle razzmatzzy as Dreamgirls but I like it better.’ And then it kept on going and hitting the marks for the most part. Blair is a talented director who knows how to cut and groove and put on a show. [Even during the parts] when it’s not really working The Sapphires at least keeps the ball in the air with reasonable agility and sass. The analogy, come to think, isn’t really Dreamgirls as much as Hustle and Flow and The Commitments, at least during those first 40 minutes.

“The soul classics are delightful throughout. The music put me in a good mood right away and kept me there.

“The script is by Aboriginal actor-writer Tony Briggs and Keith Thompson, and based on Brigg’s 2004 stage play, which was based on his mom’s true story (as the closing credits infom).”

Included on Wednesday’s Manhattan schedule is an afternoon screening of Uberto Pasolini‘s Nowhere Special. 100% Rotten Tomatoes rating. The only botherssome thing is that it premiered at the 2020 Venice Film Festival — three years and nine months ago. Cohen Media Group opened it in U.S. theatres on 4.26.24. Whassup with that?

Director-writer friendo: When I met Robert Vaughn, we talked about “Only Victims,” which was the basis for his doctorate. Not many people know about it.

Amazon: “A necessary book [that] stresses the importance of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and citing the dangers of what happens when its cherished tradition is jeopardized.”

And immediately humiliated myself when, having forgotten his name, I idiotically addressed him as “Captain Smith”. The glancing look on his face, a combination of mild contempt and mild disgust, is forever branded upon my memory.

I’m not saying that Captain Edward Smith was or wasn’t the chief culprit in the 1912 sinking of the Titanic, but someone needs to explain how Bernard Hill’s performance as this tragic figure in James Cameron’s 1997 blockbuster was in itself infamous.

These things happen, I realize, when an obit writer is under pressure to quickly bang out copy but still.

His performance as Theoden hadn’t happened at the time of our unfortunate encounter (sometime in ‘98 or ‘99) but being a Lord of the Rings hater I would have avoided any such mention anyway.

Ominous indications of what may be coming are making me feel more and more depressed and sick in my soul. I don’t want to succumb to despair but this awful pit-of-my-stomach feeling won’t go away.

If admitting this makes me a bad person, fine — I’m a bad person then. To alleviate my vague feelings of guilt I subsequently read through Wikipedia’s synopsis of Baby Reindeer’s seven episodes. Thank God I trusted my impulse to abandon this series after episode #1. No offense but Richard Gadd’s “Donny Dunn” is…I’m obviously in no position to judge after one lousy session but he immediately struck me as someone I really, really didn’t want to hang with. Not to mention Jessica Gunning’s “Martha Scott”. Yes, I know — the problem isn’t the show or the morbid obesity or the anal stuff or Donny’s sexuality or the trans thing…the problem is with me, the potential seven-episode viewer who ran shrieking from the room. I’m the bad guy, no question, but at least I’ve accepted my guilt in this matter. Go ahead — throw vegetables.

Just the sound of “Anita Pallenberg“…just the sound of her name gets your blood going. And the way she looked in the ’60s and early ’70s…those eyes, that slender model bod, that blonde hair, that great toothy smile and that mischievous expression.

Pallenberg, who passed in 2017 at age 75, was an elite, live-wire cultural adventuress like few others. An Italian-German model, a Roman Dolce Vita girl, a Warholer in Manhattan, an edgy actress (Barbarella, Performance) and a tantalizing, muse-like Rolling Stones girlfriend — initially linked with Brian Jones and briefly sexual with Mick Jagger, but mainly in deep with Keith Richards, with whom she lived for 13 years and had three kids with.

If any woman was right in the London Morocco Cote d’Azur vortex of it all, Pallenberg was…all of that hormonal energy and lust for life…all of that dizzy proximity to that druggy neverland playground feeling…an elite circle that drew nourishment from a well that everyone wanted to sip from…fame, decadent glamour, notoriety, discovery, depravity, provocation and all manner of drug-fueled breast-stroking and splashing around…what a time, what a life and what a comedown when it all tapered off.

Alexis Bloom and Svetlana Zill‘s Catching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenberg, which I finally saw last night, is hard to succinctly describe beyond the boilerplate. Everyone seems to find it fascinating but there’s something a bit resigned and downerish about it.

But I’ll tell you one thing…no, two things off the top. One, it’s based on an unpublished memoir that Pallenberg wrote, and so the narration has a tone of straight-shooting, take-it-or-leave-it authenticity. And two, Scarlet Johansson was the wrong actor to “play” Pallenberg by reading from it. Pallenberg’s voice had a dry, casually sophisticated, laid-back European flavor…a seen-and-tasted-it-all quality, and Johansson’s rural, shopping-mall voice is just all wrong…it makes Pallenberg sound coarse and common, which she certainly wasn’t.

The doc is certainly interesting but less than a half-hour in you’re saying to yourself, “Wow, she was a fascinating actress and a major presence, ahead of the curve and truly fearless…she knew everyone and was quite the social and sartorial influencer who whoo-whooed on ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ and inspired ‘Beast of Burden’…right there at the center of every significant Rolling Stones chapter and juncture, but what did she do wrong?”

I’ll tell you what she did wrong. She flirted too closely with danger and self-destruction. Pot and hallucinogens and the whole tingly, mid ’60s spiritual side of the equation were great, but she and Keith got too deeply into smack in the late ’60s and ’70s. That was it, the whole problem. Junkiedom, fatalism, no planning for the future.

But man, what an incandescent life before that factor moved in…a life that inspired my using the word “that” 15 or 16 times in this review, and that ain’t hay.

The entire Fall Guy team and especially Ryan Gosling, Emily Blunt and director David Leitch…they’re all in the dumps right now, chins on the pavement, hiding their faces or at least wearing sunglasses and thinking about escaping to Palm Springs for a week or two.

The Fall Guy hasn’t exactly been rejected en masse but it’s certainly been “meh”-ed or half-waved off by Joe and Jane Popcorn.

The whole Gosling balloon is sinking into the wetlands, the swamp. Imagine being Gosling right now and thinking back to your “I’m Just Ken” Oscar moment, which was only a few weeks ago…life can switch around like that.

I’m half-enraged and half-heartsick over the apparent likelihood that Donald Trump will win the election next November.

Average Joe rage against the Gaza campus occupiers and Biden failing to project a tough-enough image…this is analogous to middle-class Americans recoiling at the Grant Park chaos during the 1968 Democratic Converntion.

Biden is almost certainly going to lose and I’m sick over this…spitting on the sidewalk, punching the refrigerator.

Biden did it to himself, of course, and to us by deciding on a hard progressive approach to the Presidency rather than a moderately sensible liberal-centrist course. In his hubris Biden decided that only he could defeat Trump and thereby refused to step aside.

Then Merrick Garland set the stage by essentially giving us a second Trump term by doing nothing about Trump for 22 months, waiting to appoint special prosector Jack Smith on 11.18.22. Nearly two years of wimping out.

The memory of these two will live in absolute infamy.