slider

I am a typical “owl”. I find it incredibly difficult to fall asleep before midnight and even harder to wake up.

I usually wake up slowly, between eight and nine. I just lie there for five or six minutes. Then I stumble out to the kitchen to turn on the coffee maker. 99% of me is still asleep. Back to bed again. Three minutes later, a plaintive signal from the kitchen tells me the coffee is ready.

I take three or four sips right in the kitchen, and consciousness begins to activate. Back to bed, another sip or two. Open mail, news, messages. More coffee while trying to recall what day of the week it is, what my obligations are, and so on.

Half a cup of coffee means that 25% of me is awake. Finishing the cup brings me to 50%.

While I’m in the shower, strong black tea is brewed. A huge mug. Milk, honey. Drink, get dressed, down to the garage.

Do you think I am finally cheerful and vigorous? Oh, no! 20% to 30% of me is still asleep. I open the roof of my Beetle (for oxygen), pull into traffic. Only fifteen minutes later am I completely attuned and alive. Sometimes I refuel on coffee on the way.

This is my morning routine, each and every day. But today something went totally wrong.

I recently bought a multi-vitamin, which I always do the spring and fall. I also bought some organic sleeping pills. Both are in the shape of yummy bears. The sleeping pellets didn’t work properly after the first try. Their exposure time was supposed to start after 45 minutes, but for me that moment never came. So I put them aside in the kitchen, possibly to try again down the road. The multi-vitamins were placed on my bedside table.

Click here for the rest of the column at tatiana-pravda.com.

…for black-and-white widescreen cinematography than myself. Serious widescreen, I mean — 2.39:1.

Off the top of my head the most mouth-watering monochrome scope flicks are Woody Allen‘s Manhattan (dp Gordon Willis), Martin Ritt‘s Hud (dp James Wong Howe), Robert Rossen‘s The Hustler (dp Eugene Schüfftan), Jack Cardiff‘s Sons and Lovers (dp Freddie Francis), Jack Clayton‘s The Innocents (also Francis), Daryl F. Zanuck‘s The Longest Day (dps Jean Bourgoin, Walter Wottitz) and David Lynch‘s The Elephant Man (Francis again).

Eric Messerschmidt‘s black-and-white capturings in the Mank trailer look perfectly luscious. Monochrome dessert with whipped cream and a cherry on top. But for a period film already praised for casting an ultra-scrupulous eye upon the minutiae of 1940s Hollywood life, I’ve been wondering why Fincher and Messerschmidt chose to shoot Mank in an ultra-wide aspect ratio when 1.37 was the compositional norm back then.

Nobody except The Big Trail‘s Raoul Walsh and dps Lucien Andriot and Arthur Edeson had shot anything in black-and-white widescreen back then, and certainly nobody was thinking or dreaming in such terms, so why is a super-exacting film like Mank upsetting the apple cart of our common visual perception of that era?

I wouldn’t call this a huge concern of mine, but I’m wondering what the thinking might have been. My guess is that Fincher and Messerschmidt did some tests and decided that despite the historical incongruity, they’d simply fallen too heavily in love with widescreen scope to let it go.

Although I have to say I felt truly crestfallen when I heard Dave Chapelle say the following to David Letterman [listen below]: “I believe that God is in control….no matter what I worry about…I trust that this creation has a purpose….something perfect exists…we have to believe in something, otherwise why would you continue?”

HE reply: “God is in control”? Tell that to the millions who were marched into showers and gassed with Zyklon-B. Why did they continue despite many of them smelling or at least sensing their fate around the corner? Because they had no option but to live and strive and keep trying despite the odds. Because continuing is mandatory.

HE friendo: “Is Mank David Fincher‘s Ed Wood?  A passion project about a Hollywood legend shot in black and white that echoes the legend’s own film(s)?   Just as Ed Wood was shot to look like an Ed Wood film, Fincher has endeavored to make Mank look like a ’40s movie.”

The older I get, the more I adore Ed Wood. It’s a perfect film. I regard Johnny Depp‘s titular performance as his absolute career best. If Mank is even half as good, I’ll be very happy.

At age 92, producer-director James B. Harris is still with us. A longtime partner of Stanley Kubrick in the early days and a producer of Kubrick’s The Killing (’56), Paths of Glory (’57) and Lolita (’62), Harris also directed The Bedford Incident (’65), Fast Walking (’82) and Cop (’88).

And now comes disrepute — an allegation in a 10.24 Airmail piece by Sarah Weinman that Harris began an affair with Lolita star Sue Lyon when she was 14. Harris was 32 at the time.

The story was initially passed along by Mamas and the Papas singer Michelle Phillips, a childhood friend of Lyon’s. No one else has confirmed it. Weinman reached Lyon’s first husband Hampton Fancher, but he declined to comment. She also reached Harris but little came of it. Well, something did.

Weinman’s description: “Knowing I might not get another chance, I asked [Harris] straight out: Was he Sue Lyon’s first lover? ‘I’m just not going to talk about it,’ he said. It was a statement, without underlying emotion or self-reflection, not confirming but definitely not denying. Our conversation ended shortly thereafter.”

The allegation isn’t just that Harris crossed the perv line by having it off with a 14-year-old, but that the affair may have instilled a certain trauma in Lyon’s psyche.

Final paragraph: “There is no guarantee, with the level of mental illness in her family, that Lyon’s life would have stayed on course had she never made Lolita. But by doing so, Lyon became a clear example of art making a sucker out of a girl’s life, one whose price was too high to pay.”

Lyon money quote: “I defy any pretty girl who is rocketed to stardom at 14 in a sex nymphet role to stay on a level path thereafter.”

January 29, 2021 will mark my fourth anniversary of life in Los Angeles. Here are five aspects of L.A. life that fascinate me, and one that doesn’t.

1. WEATHER & NATURE.

Warmish weather all year round except for January, February and March, and the close proximity of the Pacific Ocean. I still don’t believe in such happiness. The beauty of the canyons is amazing. I stopped going to the gym because free hiking is a great alternative. Plus you get nature’s aesthetic pleasure, and wonderful fresh air.

2. FRIENDLY AMERICANS

Social behavior is tied to culture and education, of course, but 90% of the time people here sincerely smile and wish you a good day, or so my feelings tell me.

Not too long ago I was sitting in our black VW convertible, top down, at a traffic light on Melrose Avenue. A police car stopped on the right. A very cute police officer smiled and asked, “Wanna race?” I was slightly embarrassed and just smiled back. He smiled too and said, “Not today. I got it. Next time, right?”

Click here for remainder of column at tatiana-pravda.com

Three months ago Behind The Screenplay posted an unusual YouTube essay. It caught my eye today. The thesis is that Woody Allen‘s Celebrity (’98) is an “unheralded masterpiece.”

I admired several things about Celebrity. Sven Nykivst‘s black-and-white cinematography, of course. I occasionally felt amused and invigorated by Leonardo DiCaprio‘s manic superstar behavior (partly his character as written, partly drawing from his own post-Titanic popularity). Donald Trump‘s droll little cameo about tearing down St. Patrick’s Cathedral is a decent chuckle. A lot of stuff works. Woody keeps trying and trying.

I was never bored and was somewhat taken with the flavor of Allen’s screenplay (i.e, forlorn acidity), and everyone loved the last shot. But otherwise Celebrity is less than masterful.

If only Woody had taken Kenneth Branagh aside before shooting and said, “You’ve obviously developed a half-decent imitation of my way of speaking — I respect that, it’s pretty good — but play this role as yourself. Use your own British accent. Playing me is too on the nose, critics won’t like it for that, and I wouldn’t blame them”

This in itself would’ve improved things considerably.

The other problem is the deflating drift of the thing. The repetitive moralizing. Branagh’s Lee Simon could be wry and sharp and self-aware in a fleeting, in-and-out way, but it was clear within the first 20 or 30 minutes that he was also overly anxious, obsequious and stricken with a lack of self-awareness.

After a while you knew the film had no intention of doing anything more than making sure that Lee Simon wasn’t going to experience an epiphany of any kind…that a breakthrough wasn’t in the cards

Todd McCarthy called the film “a once-over-lightly rehash of mostly stale Allen themes and motifs,” and noted that “the spectacle of Branagh and Judy Davis doing over-the-top Woody impersonations creates a neurotic energy meltdown…Branagh is simply embarrassing as he flails, stammers and gesticulates in a manner that suggests a direct imitation of Allen himself…Celebrity has a hastily conceived, patchwork feel that is occasionally leavened by some lively supporting turns and the presence of so many attractive people onscreen.”

Read more

Ben Wheatley‘s Rebecca (Netflix, 10.21) is more colorful and definitely more carnal than Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 version. I’ll give it that much. Hitch’s film was shot in black and white and was fairly discreet depiction-wise. Not so the newbie.

There wasn’t a hint of a sexual current between Laurence Olivier‘s Maxim de Winter and Joan Fontaine‘s nameless protagonist in Hitch’s Oscar winner. All we see them do is briefly hug a couple of times. Olivier doesn’t even kiss Fontaine on the lips (or so I recall).

But in Wheatley’s version, the new Maxim (played with a muffled and unconvincing British accent by Armie Hammer) harpoons the nameless protagonist (Lily James) on a beach surrounding a Mediterranean cove. And in daylight yet. And in the 1930s, when nice girls the world over had been sternly instructed that sex happened only after marriage.

In both the Hitchcock and Wheatley versions, the nameless protagonist is later interrogated by an employer, a socially pretentious, middle-aged scold named Edythe Van Hopper, about her moral behavior. The line is the same in both films: “Tell me, have you been doing something you shouldn’t?”

In Wheatley’s version, the protagonist’s never-spoken answer could, in a more candid world, go something like “well, yes, I’ve been a bit naughty, I suppose…Maxim and I were at the beach a day or two ago, and we were lying on a blanket together…I won’t go into details but he hastily removed my bathing suit and ravaged me like a centaur.”

In Hitchcock’s version, Fontaine is offended that Mrs. Van Hopper would even ask such a thing, and it’s easy to believe that nothing whatsoever has transpired between she and Olivier.

The idea behind Wheatley’s film is to appeal to younger women who like hotsy-totsy romantic dramas, or the cinematic equivalent of Harlequin bodice rippers. That’s pretty much what the new Rebecca is. There’s nothing criminal about that. If younger women of a certain intellectual capacity enjoy Wheatley’s film, great.

I didn’t believe a second of it. Daphne du Maurier‘s original novel, published in 1938 and set in the mid ’30s, was very much of its time. You can feel the musty past in its pages, and you can certainly sense the conservative social norms and prim behaviors in Hitchcock’s film. The people who helped create the original Rebecca and especially those who performed in it were all part of that 80-year-old realm.

Read more

From “How Rudy Giuliani Got Caught Red-Handed With Borat’s Daughter,” a 10.21 Daily Beast piece by Matt Wilstein about the money scene from Borat 2:

“Posing as a conservative journalist in the mold of Tomi Lahren — albeit with a strong eastern European accent — Tutar Sagdiev (Irina Nowak) sits down with Giuliani in a Manhattan hotel suite for an ‘interview’ in which she mostly flatters him into creepily flirting with her. “I’ll relax you, you want me to ask you a question?” Giuliani says as she giggles in response. After blaming China for the coronavirus, he agrees to “eat a bat” with his interviewer, who repeatedly touches his knee to egg him on.

“[Sacha] Baron Cohen first interrupts the interview dressed as a sound engineer with a large boom mic, but leaves before it’s over. At that point, Tutar offers to ‘have a drink in the bedroom’ with Giuliani, who happily obliges.

“On what appear to be hidden cameras, we see Giuliani remove her microphone and ask for her phone number and address as he sits down on the bed. He starts patting her backside as she removes the microphone from his pants. Giuliani then lies down on the bed and starts sticking his hands down his pants in a suggestive manner.”

Speaking as a longtime advocate of Green Reeducation Camps, I understand the talk about establishing some kind of post-Trump Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

I love the idea of Donald Trump, Bill Barr, Mitch McConnell, Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, Jr. and other enabling scoundrels having to explain and defend their actions in a Nuremberg-like setting. The idea of some of these guys (Trump and Barr for sure) going to prison is delightful. They deserve to do time, preferably on chain gangs. You know they do.

More than 40 countries have established truth commissions, including Canada, Chile, Ecuador, Ghana, Guatemala, Kenya, Liberia, Morocco, Philippines, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, South Africa and South Korea.

Then again I’m not sure if wokester terror will become weaker or stronger in the wake of a Biden victory. Maybe it’ll calm down. I don’t know what’s in the cards. I do know that as much as I loathe and despise the Trumpanzees, the left community (which used to represent the honest, truth-telling good guys) has become equally terrifying. Wokester Orwellian oppression is real.

Read more

From Scott Eyman’s “Cary Grant: A Brilliant Disguise” (Simon & Schuster, 10.20), as excerpted in The Daily Beast:

“[Writer] Bill Royce and Grant even had a conversation about sex. After Royce unburdened himself about his affairs with both men and women, Grant responded by implying he had been basically gay as a young man, later bisexual, still later straight.

“[Randolph] Scott, he said, had seen their relationship as ‘locker-room playing around.’ It had nothing to do with how a man should lead his life. Besides that, at one point Darryl Zanuck had taken Randy aside and told him that enough was enough.

“Grant explained sexuality in terms of performance, of acting. He told Royce that to not completely explore one’s sexuality would be like an actor playing only one character for life. Everybody, he said, had more than one character inside them. He didn’t think homosexual acts were anything to be ashamed of, or, for that matter, proud of. They simply were part of the journey, not necessarily the final destination.

“I think Cary saw the searching I was doing and trusted me. He had been influenced by the Kinsey report and saw sex as a spectrum. Most people think it’s either/or. And there are men like that, but there are also men who are occasionally gay and occasionally straight. I remember one thing Cary said: ‘England is Victorian, but America is more Victorian than England.’

“My sense of it was that he found homosexual life unrewarding. As he got older, he wanted children, and he didn’t think he had any chance at a child as long as he was living that life.

“His conversation with Grant made Royce curious about Randy Scott. He was at the Beverly Hills post office one day when Scott came in to pick up some mail. He was dressed in tweeds, an ascot, had steel gray hair and sported a deep tan, just like Grant. Royce walked over and introduced himself. ‘Mr. Scott, my name is Bill Royce. I help Cary Grant with his place off Benedict and just wanted to thank you for your movies.’

“Scott smiled and said ‘Well, I haven’t seen him in a while. Tell Cary I said hello.’ Royce thought Scott was stunning; he went back to the house and told Grant about how Scott had looked. ‘Yeah, he was really something,’ Grant said, in a tone that combined esteem, fondness, and sadness.”

If you haven’t read Pauline Kael‘s “The Man From Dream City,” a 7.7.75 New Yorker essay, please take it for a spin.