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As a Santa Monica College film student, Tatiana is taking a Coen Bros. appreciation course. She’s in the midst of watching a long list of their films for preparation, and I’ve watched two or three with her. Unfortunately this immersion has reminded me of some aspects of their films that I don’t like all that much any more. Certain strategies or indulgences that I found captivating or delightful 20 or 30-plus years ago have lost some of their intrigue.

For the most part Blood Simple (’84) has lost none of its deliciously manipulative, film-nerd brilliance. The dying M. Emmet Walsh (as the sleazy gumshoe) looking up at that tiny glob of sink water and waiting with a mixture of apprehension and panic for it to drop onto his face is one of my all-time favorite closing sequences. Brilliant! But I also found myself irritated by the none-too-bright behavior of John Getz‘s “Ray” and especially his unquestioned and unexplored assumption that Frances McDormand‘s “Abby” killed her husband (Dan Hedaya‘s “Marty”), and his decision to make sure Marty is dead and then bury his body. I’ll accept a certain amount of stupidity on the part of a central character, but when he/she crosses the line I’m out.

I found myself doubling down on my hate for Raising Arizona (’87). I wrote last March about a friend slipping me a draft of the script in early ’86, before they began filming. I loved the dark humor, the flirting with absurdity, the Preston Sturges-like tone. But I was envisioning a film that would work against all that with a tone of low-key naturalism.

When I saw the finished film I was horrified. It was pushed way too hard — too pedal-to-the-metal. And I hated, hated, HATED John Goodman‘s Gale and William Forsythe‘s Evelle.” Simon Pegg once described Raising Arizona as “a living, breathing Looney Tunes cartoon” — that’s precisely what I hated about it.”

Then we watched Barton Fink (’91), which I hadn’t seen since…I forget but sometime in the mid to late ’90s. My first reaction was that the various horrors experienced by John Turturro‘s impossibly pretentious screenwriter (based, I’ve always assumed, on Clifford Odets) are a metaphor for a terrible case of writer’s block and the feeling of suppressed panic that takes over when you’re unable to make an idea or some kind of writing challenge “work” — to put it down on the page in a way that feels right and true and perhaps even profound. Hell, the inability to write anything along these lines and the self-doubt that creeps into your system the longer the blockage lasts.

This time I was filled with more and more irritation for Fink’s general arrogance and stupidity — his obstinate mindset, his inability (i.e., the Coen’s refusal) to share his thoughts, the refusal to watch a few Wallace Beery films or peruse some scripts for research, his inability to at least type out a few random ideas or at least write stuff on napkins. Once I succumbed to this negativity I started focusing on his ridiculous Eraserhead haircut, and the way his bare feet looked and the awful cut of his thick tweed suit and the fact that he travelled all the way from New York to California with some kind of overnight suitcase with room for maybe a shirt or two, a couple of boxer shorts and a couple pairs of socks but that’s all.

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Culturally and landmark-wise, the eye-catchy, partly neon sign at Astro Burgers (7475 Santa Monica Blvd., West Hollywood, NE corner of Gardner and S.M. Blvd.) is one of my favorite spots in this town. Because it conveys an old-time feeling of 1950s and ’60s kitsch, and Lord knows there’s damn little of that left. As I said a couple of weeks ago, it would be that much cooler if they re-named the place Mojo Burger. I’m sorry but Mojo kicks Astro’s ass.

The only wrinkle is that the joint is less than…actually I’m not sure how old it is. 35 or 40 years? Less? An Astro Burger opened at 5601 Melrose in ’74, but who knows when the WeHo site launched? The original Astro Burger, a Greek-style operation (“Cheeesburger! Cheeseburger!), was launched in Salt Lake City in ’82 by John and Soula Lyhnakis. I’m not really sure if the WeHo outlet is contractually descended from the Utah operation. The website says that John and Soula’s three sons, Vasili, George and Michael, grew up in the business and helped their parents open two more stores, one in South Jordan in 2002 and another in Draper in 2006. For all I know Roger Durling (aka “Nick the Greek”) owns the WeHo branch.

Astro Burger is the only WeHo place where you can get a decent-tasting hot dog. (Pink’s is technically not in West Hollywood.) Or at least the only one I know about.

Imagine being at last night’s Rose Bowl drive-in screening of Nomadland. Imagine all the usual distractions — small-looking screen if you were parked in the middle section, not-bright-enough image, people roaming around, ambient sounds.

Now add a guy parked in front of you who decided to watch the film with his air-conditioning on, which of course meant keeping his engine on for two hours straight and thereby bothering nearby viewers with (a) his bright red parking lights (i.e., the drive-in equivalent of twitter-surfing during a theatrical screening) and also (b) the gentle spewing of exhaust. Thanks, homey! The temperature was around 70 so no real need for a.c. Alas, some people want what they want when they want it.

I heard William S. Burroughs say “some people are shits” during a Madison Square Garden appearance about 40 years ago. It always stayed with me.

Chloe Zhao‘s Nomadland is a moody, mesmerizing bulls-eye — a 21st Century Grapes of Wrath minus the simmering anger of Tom Joad and the villainy of random predators.  Like John Ford and John Steinbeck‘s 1940 classic, Zhao’s film is pure Americana, set against a backdrop of brusque fate and heartless capitalism, shaded with angst and no shortage of adversity and yet sustained by a certain persistence of spirit, both in front of and behind the camera. 

It’s a masterful, painterly portrayal of the American dispossessed, and a fascinating, character-rich study of a roaming vagabond and a constantly evolving community of weathered, mostly retirement-age homeless victims of a cruel economy (it’s set in the wake of the ’09 recession). 

I respected Zhao’s previous film, The Rider, which, like Nomadland, is about a sympathetic character who’s stuck in a tough situation with no apparent way out.  But I didn’t love it for the rigid scheme and an ending that was mostly about resignation.

Nomadland is on another level.  Within five minutes I knew it was a much better, more ambitious film — quietly somber and yet grander in scope, gentler, sadder.

A Best Actress nomination is absolutely locked and loaded for Frances McDormand and her performance as Fern, a sturdy 60something, widowed and close to broke and living out of a van and with no interest in settling. She’s an iron-willed survivor coping with extreme vulnerability; amiable and attentive and yet closed off or at least resistant to emotional attentions on a certain level, self-described as “house-less” as opposed to homeless, moving from job to job, camp to camp, parking lot to parking lot.  Inscrutable and yet scrutable. 

Nomadland, trust me, is going to be Best Picture nominated.  Obviously. Zhao will be Best Director nominated.  Joshua James Richard‘s magic-hour cinematography will also lasso a nom. But not, I’m told, Ludovico Einaudi‘s haunting piano score, because it wasn’t composed for the film.

A friend told me that Nomadland, which he felt had shortchanged him due to a lack of some of the usual usuals (carefully-plotted story, second-act pivot, decisive ending), would’ve been better as a half-hour short.  I strongly disagree due to the incontestable fact that it grows and deepens and adds more detail with each and every scene.  It’s a portrait piece.  

By the end you’re left with a full understanding of an industrious but somewhat closed-off woman who doesn’t want to invest in anything but her own discipline, and is curiously resistant to any overtures that verge on the intimate.  She can only live in the unstable now, in her own hard but not quite miserable life.

Thank fortune for Fern as well as the audience that Nomadland is full of humanist grace notes…charity, kindness, confessions, helping hands.

Shot in 2.39:1 (which none of the critics so far have even mentioned), it’s all character and atmosphere and mood — “tone poem” is the most favored term thus far.  The enhancements are, in this order, (a) McDormand McDormand McDormand, (b) a winning supporting turn by David Straitharn as a kindly, would-be romantic partner, (c) a steady supply of brief turns by real homeless folk, (c) the painterly images…gently dusky and soft and glowing, (d) Zhao’s crisp, urgent editing and especially (e) Einaudi’s score, which pulls you in you right away and captures exactly the right meditative tone.

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Ammonite star Kate Winslet to Vanity Fair‘s Julie Miller: “It’s like, what the fuck was I doing working with Woody Allen and Roman Polanski? It’s unbelievable to me now how those men were held in such high regard, so widely in the film industry and for as long as they were. It’s fucking disgraceful.

“And I have to take responsibility for the fact that I worked with them both. I can’t turn back the clock. I’m grappling with those regrets but what do we have if we aren’t able to just be fucking truthful about all of it?”

In other words, having worked with Polanski in 201l’s Carnage, which was shot a year after Polanski’s controversial 2009 arrest in Switzerland in concert with a U.S. extradition attempt (or roughly a decade ago), Winslet has suddenly decided that this wasn’t cool, apparently because making Ammonite has strengthened her #MeToo convictions.

Obviously a little Johnny-come-lately but okay, that’s how she feels.

But to equate Polanski and Woody Allen in terms of alleged crimes and offenses is just forehead-slapping ignorant. Moreover, it was derelict of Miller not to ask Winslet about the mountains of evidence, indications and public statements that indicate Allen is completely innocent.

I’m so tired of having to refute kneejerk anti-Woody slander by obstinate or under-informed persons, but here, for what feels like the 28th or 29th time, is what any reasonable person would regard as the irrefutable truth of things:

(1) There is no evidence to support Dylan Farrow’s claim. But there’s a fair amount of evidence and ample indication that Mia Farrow, enraged by Woody’s romance with Soon-Yi Previn, made it all up to “get” Woody during an early ’90s custody battle, and as part of this determination coached Dylan to make the claims that she did. I happen to personally believe this scenario. There’s simply no rational, even-handed way to side with the “I believe Dylan Farrow” camp.

(2) If after reading Moses Farrow’s 5.23.18 essay (“A Son Speaks Out“) as well as Robert Weide’s “Q & A with Dylan Farrow” (12.13.17) and Daphne Merkin’s 9.16.18 Soon-Yi Previn interview…if after reading these personal testimonies along with the Wikipedia summary of the case you’re still an unmitigated Dylan ally…if you haven’t at least concluded there’s a highly significant amount of ambiguity and uncertainty in this whole mishegoss, then I don’t know what to say to you. There’s probably nothing that can be said to you.

(3) Excerpt from Yale–New Haven Hospital Child Sexual Abuse Clinic report (issued in 1993): “It is our expert opinion that Dylan was not sexually abused by Mr. Allen. Further, we believe that Dylan’s statements on videotape and her statements to us during our evaluation do not refer to actual events that occurred to her on August 4th, 1992.

(4) “In developing our opinion we considered three hypotheses to explain Dylan’s statements. First, that Dylan’s statements were true and that Mr. Allen had sexually abused her; second, that Dylan’s statements were not true but were made up by an emotionally vulnerable child who was caught up in a disturbed family and who was responding to the stresses in the family; and third, that Dylan was coached or influenced by her mother, Ms. Farrow. While we can conclude that Dylan was not sexually abused, we can not be definite about whether the second formulation by itself or the third formulation by itself is true. We believe that it is more likely that a combination of these two formulations best explains Dylan’s allegations of sexual abuse.”

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The great Diana Rigg has passed from cancer at age 82. She lived a radiantly full life and enjoyed a long, vibrant career (her first professional gig happened in 1957 at age 19, performing in the RADA production of Bertolt Brecht‘s The Caucasian Chalk Circle), and I felt a genuinely poignant pang when I learned of her death this morning.

I understand that I’m obliged to celebrate (a) her Emma Peel role in The Avengers, (b) her wife-of-James-Bond turn in In Her Majesty’s Secret Service (’69) and (c) her ongoing performance as Olenna Tyrell in Game of Thrones. But for me Rigg’s sincere but sardonic performance as Barbara Drummond in Arthur Hiller and Paddy Chayefsky‘s The Hospital (’71) was her absolute finest moment.

The fact that Rigg was a pack-a-day smoker for 53 years straight (1956 until 2009) probably had something to do with her passing, but then again that was her choice. Quality over quantity, she probably felt. How anyone could believe that inhaling foul cigarette smoke for decades on end constitutes quality is beyond me.

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I’m sorry but my interest in Woody Allen‘s Rifkin’s Festival has just…well, kind of plummeted.

Due respect but casting Wallace Shawn as a dismayed romantic protagonist (a cuckold) is not what anyone would call audience-friendly. Shawn has always been a brilliant wit and an amusingly thinky performer, but he’s 77 years old, for heaven’s sake. By any semi-realistic biological standard he’s “out of the game.”

And in the film he’s married to an attractive looker (played by Gina Gershon, whose real age is discoverable but who appears to be somewhere in her late 40s). It would be one thing if, say, Allen had cast the 75-year-old Steve Martin in the role. But not a bald Bilbo Baggins.

Yes, Shawn’s character would naturally feel wounded and disoriented by Gershon’s temporary infidelity, but it’s all but impossible to relate to Shawn in this context. My first reaction was “this is almost like John Huston casting Lionel Barrymore in the Humphrey Bogart role in Key Largo.”

41 years ago Allen used Shawn’s appearance as a sexual joke. In a fleeting Manhattan cameo, Shawn played Jeremiah, a sexually dynamic ex-boyfriend of Diane Keaton‘s “Mary” character. Allen: “Well, you certainly fooled me. This is not what I expected.” Keaton: “What did you expect?” Allen: “Well, you said that he was a great ladies’ man and that he opened you up sexually, and then this little homunculus…” Keaton: “He’s quite devastating.”

But now we’re supposed to take Shawn seriously as a husband with a saucy wife and certain amorous capabilities?

A tale of a risky affair between a high-school teacher (Lindsay Burdge) and a teenaged student (Will Brittain), Hannah Fidell‘s A Teacher was a buzzy title at Sundance ’13. (Here’s my review.) The following year HBO announced a plan to turn the film into a limited series with Fidell again directing. Now it’s an FX project with Kate Mara in the Burdge role, and Nick Robinson as her 16-year-old lover. (Okay, maybe 17.)

May I ask something? When it comes to affairs between scampy teachers and male students (in real life as well as dramas), why do things always have to end in shame and prosecution? Why can’t they fall in love like French president Emmanuel Macron and Brigitte Macron did when he was a 15 year-old student and she was a 39-year-old teacher? Or what about a story about an inappropriate relationship that just comes to a gradual, no-big-deal end without the cops and the school principal getting involved?

My mother warned me once or twice about predatory women when I turned…oh, 15 or 16. I used to pray I’d get hit on. If I’d been lucky enough to connect with one of my attractive teachers when I was that age…well, my God! I would have dropped to my knees and given thanks to God the Father Almighty.

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This isn’t a color-filtered video — it’s San Francisco an hour or two ago, straight from the shoulder. From ABC7news: “Why is the sky orange in the Bay Area? There is smoke in the air from the Bear Fire near Chico, but the marine layer is protecting us, so the sky is red, yellow or orange even where air quality is good. On Tuesday, we had the wind to blame for those smoky skies — and lack of a smoky smell. The smoke was coming in from the August Complex Fire near Mendocino National Forest, but high winds were keeping the smoke at a high altitude, instead of settling near the surface.”

People really don’t know what to do right now. Everyone on the Embarcadero is stopping to record the sky and chit chatting in a way I haven’t seen since pre-pandemic @sfchronicle pic.twitter.com/ueKQ4g7WTD

— Jessica Christian (@jachristian) September 9, 2020

As I mentioned yesterday, the Dune trailer (which I saw last Friday in a Flagstaff multiplex) is somewhat impressive. Timothee Chalamet seems to be doing his own Paul Atreides. I recognize that the arc of Paul’s story in Frank Herbert‘s Dune trilogy is about more than fulfilling a head-spinning destiny and achieving heroism, but involves a gradual descent into a Messianic psychology. But that’s the second part, no?

The basic message of the Dune trailer is “here we go again with a story of a young lad imbued with a certain specialness, and discovering super-powers and carrying the old Joseph Campbell torch on a difficult path to greatness…leading a rebellion, defeating evil, ultimate triumph. Oh, and spices.”

In short it’s more or less the same old same old, and I’m astonished how the fanboys continue to cheer this musty, time-worn fable.

That aside, Greig Fraser’s subdued palette seems agreeable. And Chalamet’s costars appear to hold up their end — Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Josh Brolin, Stellan Skarsgård, Dave Bautista, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Zendaya Coleman, David Dastmalchian, Chang Chen, Sharon Duncan-Brewster, Charlotte Rampling, Jason Momoa and Javier Bardem.

Due respect, but I can’t wait to suffer through this thing. Seriously.

Earlier today I happened upon some YouTube clips from Alfred Hitchcock‘s Dial M for Murder (’54). To my delight and astonishment they’re presented within a “boxy” aspect ratio (1.37:1), which I happened to see theatrically during a special engagement at Manhattan’s Eighth Street Playhouse in ’80 or thereabouts.

The higher, boxier image doesn’t include unnecessary air space or superfluous material. No dead spaces or boom mikes. Director of photography Robert Burks frames each shot with immaculate balance.

Thanks to Bob Furmanek and the 1.85 fascist cabal, the only high-def version you can watch today (via the 2012 Warner Home Video Bluray or the streaming component) offers a cleavered 1.78:1 aspect ratio — the original with the tops and bottoms chopped off.

Eight years ago Furmanek posted an explanation or rationale for the cleavered version — I’ve posted it after the jump.

Yes, you can still watch the boxy version if you get your hands on a 2006 WHV DVD. But that’s in 480p, of course, which looks fairly weak by today’s standards. It would be so wonderful if HBO Max would present the boxy version in HD, as they recently did with Stanley Kubrick‘s Full Metal Jacket. Here’s hoping, at least.

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While contemplating the below images, consider “The Battle Over Biscuits and Gravy at the 11-Worth Cafe,” a 9.5 N.Y Times report by Dionne Searcey.

It’s about an old-time Omaha diner for Average Joes that was forced to close a couple of months ago, because of a furor over a gravy-covered sausage patty sandwich called the Robert E. Lee. Wokesters were enraged by the obviously racist allusion and demonstrated against the 11-Worth and its longtime owners, the Caniglia family. The Caniglias apologized and offered to remove the name of the dish, but somehow this wasn’t enough and negotiations broke down. Now the diner is history. A shame — I love unpretentious, down-home eateries like this.

Observation: The tweet from the Washington Post‘s Frederick Kunkle about D.C. wokesters “blocking the media from filming their demonstration, shining lights into a reporter’s face, blocking shots with umbrellas and following like minders” is a strong indication that they know the media narrative has begun to turn against them.