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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

…in well over a decade. You can’t stream it for some reason. So I bought a Canadian Bluray a week or so ago. It arrived today…162 minutes! I began watching a half-hour ago, and it’s all just flooding back in. It’s glorious, perfect, a gift. The day is saved.

Sometime in the late ’70s a girlfriend and I caught a Mort Sahl set on the North Shore. I forget the name of the club but it was in Revere, Swampscott, Lynn…one of those towns. We arrived 15 minutes before showtime, and my heart stopped — the room was one-third filled, if that. I felt so badly for the poor guy, but you know what? Sahl came out and did his show as if he was playing to a packed house at Carnegie Hall. Which deeply impressed me. As I sat and listened and laughed, I was thinking “wow, nothing but class…this is how a professional plays to a nearly deserted room.” Grace under pressure, never say die, the show must go on.

Perhaps the Motion Picture Academy should consider the Mort Sahl example in the face of Oscar killjoys like Washington Post columnist Alyssa Rosenberg and The Ankler‘s Richard Rushfield.

They’re both saying that the Academy needs to deepsix the 4.25 Oscar telecast, primarily because there won’t be enough viewers because theatres are closed and because streaming doesn’t have that schwing and because there won’t be enough in the way of serious Oscar contenders.

They need to say that to Chloe Zhao, David Fincher, Michelle Pfeiffer, Gary Oldman, Anthony Hopkins, Frances McDormand, Delroy Lindo, Aaron Sorkin, Sascha Baron Cohen, etc. Go ahead, Alyssa and Richard — write or call or text these guys and say “Sorry, bruhs, but we think the Oscars should be cancelled because almost everyone will be watching your work via streaming, which makes us feel uneasy because this isn’t the way it’s always been, and because…well, we don’t want to sound callous but we don’t think your work is good or significant enough to merit awards attention.”

Image totally stolen from Sasha Stone’s Awards Daily.

Rushfield: “The question isn’t, Should they cancel the Academy Awards? The question is: What the hell can they possibly be thinking [by] not canceling it?

“The reason why,” he says, is “BECAUSE THERE ARE NO MOVIES [THAT] MORE THAN A HANDFUL OF PEOPLE HAVE SEEN! How do you have a celebration of movies when there are no movies?

“You may have noted over the past few years that Oscar’s transformation into a celebration of quirky and independent films only seen by a handful of people hasn’t exactly done wonders for the viewership. This drift has succeeded in chasing away a giant swath of Oscar’s audience, which is roughly half of its peak 20 years ago.

“Given that, how do you suppose the viewership will react when they put on a show not only celebrating films seen by a small number of people, but films seen by no one?”

HE to Rosenberg and Rushfield: Because I went to sleep dreaming life was beauty, and I woke up knowing that life is duty. Grownups aren’t allowed to go “waahhh” when things are tough. You don’t get to pull the plug on a 92-year-old annual awards show because it’s raining outside or there aren’t enough movies or there aren’t enough people in the room. You do it because you need to hold your head high and make the best of whatever the situation is…period. The torch must be held aloft. Think of the eternal flame that’s been burning over JFK’s grave for nearly 57 years. Allowing it to go out is unthinkable. The general attitude about the Oscar telecast should be no less steadfast.

Okay, maybe the lineup isn’t so hot this year for obvious reasons. Yes, it’s unfortunate that Deep Water, Dune, The French Dispatch, In the Heights, The Many Saints of Newark, No Time to Die, Top Gun: Maverick and West Side Story have been withdrawn and bumped into ’21. But only about a third of these titles, if that, had any real shot of being Oscar-nominated in whatever category.

2020 will always be remembered as a weak year, the Covid plague year…agreed. But it is what it is, and many excellent films are being streamed and shown at drive-ins, and let’s face the fact that streaming is the way things are these days and where a good portion of the business is going. Do I love this? No, I’m a theatre-and-popcorn guy, but it’s how things are.

Consider the wise words of Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone, in a 10.12 piece called “Cancel the Oscars? How About We Reimagine Them?” In a nutshell: “The Oscars are representative of the year in film. This year that means film via streaming, but it’s still the year in film. This is an opportunity to test that out because streaming is the future, like it or not. It’s also a good chance to award some women and women of color, since that also has to be dealt with. It’s also the last year where they don’t have to name ten films so it also fits in that way. They only need five.”

Variety‘s Clayton Davis has also spoken eloquently about this — the piece is called “Why Moving Ahead With the Oscars Is the Right Thing to Do.”

Thanks to Neon and Acme for inviting Hollywood Elsewhere to last Friday’s invitational drive-in screening of Alex Gibney, Ophelia Harutyunyan and Suzanne Hillinger‘s Totally Under Control. It happened at the Vineland Drive-In in the City of Industry, which I’d never once visited in all my years here. And why the hell would I?

Under the best traffic conditions a late-night drive between West Hollywood and Industry would take 35 to 40 minutes. Alas, the screening was at 7:30 pm. We left around 6:20 pm. It took us about 90 minutes to get there. Mostly stop-and-go misery. Obviously we asked for it.

I had assured Tatiana that Gibney always delivers first-rate docs, and that visiting Industry might be a kind of exotic adventure. I can’t say that it was. Tatiana respected the film, but didn’t seem as engaged as I was. Screen-content aside the coolest thing about the screening was the close proximity of railroad tracks and watching a couple of double-decker Amtrak trains roll by.

Next time I’m invited to the Vineland, I’ll probably say “thanks but no thanks and all the best.”

I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen John Irvin‘s City of Industry (’97). Harvey Keitel, Timothy Hutton, Stephen Dorff, Famke Janssen, et. al.

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Earlier today Variety contributor Nick “Action Man” Clement mentioned an oddball thing about Retroplex, a Starz-owned movie channel that shows only older films (’80s and earlier). Before the film the Retroplex guys labelled it “OC“, which stands for “Outdated Cultural Depiction.”

This is a presumed reference to a scene in which Richard Pryor paints Gene Wilder‘s face with brown shoe polish in order to allow him to pass as a fly black dude. Wilder then does a suitably coarse (i.e., funny) impersonation, etc.

Clement: “The fact that anyone would need to be reminded that this is a joke is absolutely pathetic, and very much emblematic of the douchebaggery that’s ruining our country. We’ve become SUCH WIMPS. Alas, some stooge thought it was problematic and here we are.”

HE to Clement: “Why wouldn’t Retroplex designate OUTDATED CULTURAL DEPICTION as OCD? Yes, I know — same acronym for obsessive compulsive disorder. Nonetheless OC aka ‘outdated cultural’ seems odd.

“There must be a SHITLOAD of OC admonishments mentioned by Retroplex in their listings, no? I tried to find their site and/or app. Unsuccessfully. I may have accidentally signed up for STARZ last year via Amazon, but I’ll be damned if I can recall my STARZ username and password. When I tried to access the RETROPLEX site I had to provide STARZ info…dead end.

Clement to HE: “Up until yesterday, I’d never seen the OC designation in any of the ratings blocks, on any premium movie channel. I thought it was odd, but considering the p.c.-fication of our society, I am not surprised.”

…of running even slightly afoul of the militant #MeToo crowd, I would say that Michelle Pfeiffer, who’s been on the planet since April ’58, looks really terrific. But I’d better not say that for fear of being called all kinds of names. I enjoyed about 15 minutes of face time with Pfeiffer in May of ’82 (she had just turned 24) during a press schmoozer for Grease 2. I’ve just been sent access to her latest film, Azazel Jacobs‘ French Exit (Sony Pictures Classics, 2.12.21). The surreal comedy will premiere at the New York Film Festival on 10.11.20.

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