slider

In response to the 11.26 death of Bernardo Bertolucci, New York critic David Edelstein shared a coarse and unwise sentiment — a flip joke, if you will — on Facebook. Along with a still of the Marlon Brando-Maria Schneider anal sex scene from Last Tango in Paris, he wrote that “even grief is better with butter.”

In a matter of hours Edelstein, who had quickly deleted and apologized for the post, became Satan’s spawn. Which was no surprise in our ongoing Salem-witch-trials-on-twitter climate. He was going for a tone of casual, hipper-than-thou impudence, I suppose, but in a social-media sense what he wrote was actually quite bone-headed. You don’t spit into the wind.

Actress Martha Plympton tweeted that she’d been avoiding Bertolucci’s passing “precisely because of this moment in which a sexual assault of an actress was intentionally captured on film.” (A dead wrong observation, by the way.) “And this asshole” — Edelstein — “makes it into this joke. Fire him. Immediately.”

Guardian contributor and Women in Hollywood founder Melissa Silverstein wrote that Edelstein “has been a sexist asshole for many years. Why is he still employed?”

Edelstein was soon after fired from his commentator gig on NPR’s “Fresh Air,” and yesterday afternoon, I’m told, he was disinvited from moderating a discussion with Private Life director Tamara Jenkins during a mid-day press luncheon at The East Pole on East 65th Street. (Edelstein didn’t reply when I double-checked with him last night.)

The stupidity factor aside, Edelstein was basically saying that the infamous Tango scene had left the strongest impression as he considered Bertolucci’s career-long imprint, just as when Steven Spielberg passes someone will tweet something about the primal impact of Jaws. But of course, Edelstein was also conveying a cavalier attitude about Schneider’s 2007 claim that the shooting of this scene was traumatic because she hadn’t been consulted by Bertolucci and Brando beforehand, and that she felt “a little bit raped.”

A couple of years ago hair-trigger types (Jessica Chastain among them) took this to mean that Bertolucci and Brando had sprung the rape scene upon Schneider and perhaps had even subjected her to an actual on-camera violation, but Schneider was clear in her ’97 interview that the sex was simulated. She maintained, however, that the anal-sex aspect “wasn’t in the original script,” and that “it was Marlon who came up with the idea,” and that “they only told me about it before we had to film the scene and I was so angry.”

This was strongly denied by Bertolucci two years ago. “I specified…that I decided with Marlon Brando not to inform Maria that we would [be using] butter,” he wrote. “We wanted her spontaneous reaction to that improper use [of the butter]. That is where the misunderstanding lies. Somebody thought, and thinks, that Maria had not been informed about the violence on her. That is false!

“Maria knew everything because she had read the script, where it was all described. The only novelty was the idea of the butter. And that, as I learned many years later, offended Maria. Not the violence that she is subjected to in the scene, which was written in the screenplay.”

In his apology Edelstein claimed he “was not aware of” Schneider’s experience on the film. But how could he have possibly missed that December ’16 twitter brouhaha? It got a lot of play and lasted a good two or three days.

The Edelstein thing is yet another illustration of the present-day fact that if you’re stupid enough to say the wrong thing, the mob will turn on you like that, and even your “friends” will run in fear of your evil aura. This is the ’50s blacklist scare all over again.

I’ve written before that everyone in the public spotlight should be entitled to at least a couple of “get out of jail” cards in the event of a haphazard tweeting of something idiotic. We should acknowledge that the ability to say something wrong and hurtful (as Plympton did when she tweeted that the Tango anal-sex scene was an “intentional capturing” of “a sexual assault of an actress” when in fact the scripted scene was about Brando and Schneider performing simulated sex) is in all of us.

I for one feel that Edelstein, a wise, seasoned and brilliant critic who has paid his dues and proved his critical mettle over decades, should not be seized by guards and taken out behind the building and shot in the head. He should be caned, okay, but also given a chance to speak and atone some more and perhaps share some related truths. But tell that to the twitter mob.

The passing of Bernardo Bertolucci…good God. The dying of such a man must be shouted, screamed…Bertolucci is dead! Bernardo Bertolucci of Rome lives no more!

There were five distinct Bertolucci eras or episodes — early, earthy, scruffy (The Grim Reaper, Before The Revolution), Glowing, Sensual, Perverse Perfection (The Conformist, The Spider’s Stratagem, Last Tango in Paris, 1900), The First Stumblings (La Luna, Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man), Return to Glorious Form (The Last Emperor, The Sheltering Sky) and the Long, Gradual, Modestly Respectable Downfall (Little Buddha, Stealing Beauty, Besieged, The Dreamers, Me and You).

For 90% of his followers, Bertolucci’s lasting glory stems from episodes #2 and #4 — the other three don’t count. If he had only made The Conformist, Last Tango in Paris, The Last Emperor and The Sheltering Sky, his world-class reputation would be assured.

Bertolucci talked like a Communist in the ’60s and ’70s but from the early ’70s on he loved going first class. He was a delirious sensualist, a colorist, a composer, a wearer of the finest clothing, a pageantist, and always a maestro of tracking shots. He and Vittorio Storaro, hand in hand, joined at the hip…brothers of the softest light and the most magical of colors (particularly amber).

If there’s one term or phrase that sums up Bertolucci’s spiritual or directorial signature, it would be “exquisitely composed decadent luxury.”

Remember that elegant party in 1900 when a huge white horse is led into a living room full of rich swells sipping champagne, and the owner tells everyone that the horse is named Cocaine? That was Bertolucci. He was every element in that scene…the guests, the horse, the cocaine, and certainly the audacity of leading a magnificent four-legged animal into a beautifully decorated living room and saying quite calmly “say hello to my gentle friend…for he is you and you are he and we are all together.”

Bertolucci was an absolute God between the releases of The Conformist, which opened stateside on 10.22.70, and Last Tango in Paris, which opened on 2.7.73. Two and a half years of being the absolute Zeus of filmmakers, and everyone on the planet was bowing down, including the lordly-at-the-time Norman Mailer.

If you want to taste a bit of what was going on after Tango opened, read this Mailer essay — “A Transit to Narcissus” — which appeared in the New York Review of Books.

Hugs and condolences to family, fans, friends, colleagues…this is a big one. And no, the ridiculous twitter outburst of 2016 over misinformation about shooting the Last Tango butter scene isn’t worth reviewing.

Read more

Adam McKay‘s Vice (Annapurna, 12.25) is a brilliant, slash-and-burn, hellzapoppin’ portrait of deliciously ruthless schemin’, schemin’, schemin’ like a demon. And it’s great rightwing fun for the most part — witty, wicked and wonderfully cruel. How we fucked ourselves and bought the WMD bullshit and murdered tens of thousands and bombed the hell out of Iraq and created ISIS in the bargain, etc.

The primary object of scorn and fascination, of course, is former vp Dick Cheney (fully inhabited and reanimated by Christian Bale, as you may have heard) but the film teems with a whole cavalcade of conservatives…a whole kill-or-be-killed universe of conniving super-serpents who’ve risen and slithered over the last half-century (George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Scooter Libby, Paul Wolfowitz, Antonin Scalia, Frank Luntz) along with Dick’s go-getter wife Lynne (Amy Adams) and their daughters Mary and Liz (Allison Pill, Lily Rabe).

Really and truly, the gang’s all here and it’s all fun, fun, fun. Or it was for me, at least.

Vice costar Amy Adams, director-writer Adam McKay following this morning’s screening at the SVA theatre on West 23rd street.

“Fun” in a downishly deadpan sort of way, of course, because we’re talking about the balls-out career of a really shitty, cold-blooded human being as well as the collapse of the twin towers, the imagining of WMDs and the invasion of Iraq and all the horrors and cold-cockings and focus-groupings and flat-out lying that followed. Not to mention the smirking and jaw-clenching.

And it’s all so precise and scalpel-like, so dry and cutting and laser-focused. It’s a movie that says “Dick, Dick…what a dick!” As well as “you guys out there, the ones eating the popcorn…you fucked yourselves and our country by electing these assholes…you know that, right?”

And stylistically Vice is all over the place so you don’t know where the hell to turn. It fully cops to being a “movie” from the get-go, offering a narrator while reversing and fast-forwarding, delivering a blatantly phony ending at the halfway mark, always smirking, full of self-regarding commentary, double-backing and hop-scotching around…it’s instructional with a bullwhip.

Bale will land a Best Actor nomination and deserves to win it, if you ask me. You can’t help but marvel at the voice, the attitude, the physical transformation…all of it. Bale sure as hell has done more than deliver a first-rate impression of Kris Kristofferson in the ’76 version of A Star Is Born, which is arguably what his principal competitor has been praised for.

Adams, count on it, will definitely be nominated for Best Supporting Actress. She glares, she snaps, she takes no shit.

Read more

Director Nicolas Roeg has passed at age 90. Hugs and condolences to all concerned. Then again he lived a long, colorful life (born in ’28) and enjoyed a good creative period as a cinematographer during the ’60s (Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, Petulia) as well as a flush directing streak in the early to mid ’70s. No sadness in that.

Roeg’s finest three films, of course, are Walkabout, Don’t Look Now and The Man Who Fell to Earth. And also, don’t forget, Performance, which he partly directed with Donald Cammell. I’m sorry but I was never down with the creepy Bad Timing or the twitchy Alaskan prospector flick, Eureka, which starred Gene Hackman. Nor was I into Insignificance, his light-hearted Albert Einstein movie.

I was, however, half-taken with Castaway, which I wrote the press notes for while working for Cannon publicity. My phone interview with Oliver Reed didn’t go well — I tried not to rub him the wrong way but I said something about his character being a bit of a lazy sod. Things went downhill from there on.

Clint Eastwood made his bones in the ’60s and ’70s with brutal, emotion-less dispensations of violence — by projecting a capability and willingness to drill the bad guys between the eyes without blinking an eye and certainly without giving it much thought. He wasn’t as much two-fisted as big-gunned, and he sure as hell blam-blammed a whole lot of guys during his “Man With No Name” meets Dirty Harry heyday, and with rightwing justifications, of course. “You fuck with me, you’ll pay the price.”

He was never anyone’s idea of a great or highly skilled actor, but he always knew how to deliver that silent, steaming-radiator thing and was certainly effective within his range. I think his Unforgiven performance (i.e., the snarly Bill Munny) was actually pretty close to great, partly because of (a) “helluva thing, killin’ a man,” “(b) “we all got it comin’, kid” and (c) how that final shoot-out scene draws upon our collective memory of the snarly guy he was in the Nixon, Ford and Carter eras.

But when we think of Eastwood we mainly sink into a soothing impression that took hold in the early to mid ’90s, which was when he suddenly became this exalted, almost mythical-level actor and director — one on hand with his aging, guilt-ridden secret service agent in Wolfgang Petersen‘s In The Line of Fire (’93) and on the other as the director who delivered the one-two punch of Unforgiven (’93) and The Bridges of Madison County (’95).

And at the same time his reputation as a likable, laid-back, salty-haired guy who always shot films fast and unfussy and who occasionally described himself as an Eisenhower Republican…all of that sunk in too. Even his briefly warming to Sarah Palin + talking to the empty chair thing…even that didn’t dispel the genial vibe.

And here we are on the 2018 home stretch and still no word of any Mule screenings, which reenforces suspicions that it’s probably nothing too special, even with Eastwood giving what may be his last performance…who knows?

I saw Disney’s 1994 animated-cartoon Lion King (decent enough but calm down), and then I took the kids to see the Lion King Broadway musical sometime in the spring or summer of ’98 (okay but enough already). Now I’m supposed to get excited 20 years later over yet another version of the ’94 original because the CG animation techniques are live-actiony?

The family crowd will pour into the plexes, but the “lion cub destined to be king of the animals gets banished by his evil uncle” story has always been ridiculous. Lions are predators who are out to fill their bellies so why the hell should various African species bow down to a killing beast who would just as soon eat them as look at them? Bambi made some kind of sense — this doesn’t.

Yeah, yeah…I get it. This is a movie about proud African heritage and manifest destiny — a talking-animal version of Black Panther.

Read more

So Steve McQueen’s Widows underperformed last weekend. On 11.15 The Hollywood Reporter‘s Pamela McClintock wrote that Widows was “tracking to bring in between $12 million and $18 million in its domestic launch.” It wound up making $12.3 million in 2803 theatres for a per-screen average of $4388, or something close to that. If it earns triple that amount in domestic theatres it’ll wind up with $37 million and change. It cost $42 million to make, not to mention the marketing.

I’ve said a few times that Widows is one of the best heist films I’ve ever seen and that Viola Davis delivers an award-calibre performance. But those numbers are disappointing. Who saw it last weekend, and what was the takeaway?

In an 11.19 Criterion essay on Some Like It Hot, Sam Wasson writes that director-cowriter Billy Wilder had relatively simple things on his mind. “[He] thought cross-dressing was funny. He thought Americans, dizzy in the rat race, were funny.” Like when Tony Curtis says to Jack Lemmon, “You’re a guy, and why would a guy want to marry a guy? and Lemmon answers “Security.”

“That’s Wilder capitalism speaking,” says Wasson. “Not love or lust or even man or woman.”

But then Wasson screws up. “Some Like It Hot isn’t Tootsie,” he declares. “It’s not interested in how the experience of being a woman can make men better men.” Nope — exactly wrong.

Curtis’s Joe is a rake and a cad — a “love ’em and leave ’em” type, a nookie hound, literally the kind of guy who might borrow money from a girlfriend in order to bet on horses.

Then, dressed as “Josephine”, he meets Marilyn Monroe‘s Sugar Kowalczyk on the train, and she tells him about her run of bad boyfriends, and how one threw cole slaw in her face and left her with a squeezed-out tube of toothpaste.

Undaunted, a couple of days later Joe cons Sugar into falling for him by pretending to be an oil millionaire (i.e., “Junior”). Another notch on the bedpost.

But when Joe and Jack Lemmon‘s Jerry are forced to lam it (Spats Columbo!), Joe feels badly about lowering the boom. He gives Sugar the diamond bracelet that Joe E. Browne‘s Osgood had given to “Daphne.” A couple of hours later Joe (dressed as Josephine) sees Sugar singing “I’m Through With Love” on the bandstand, and the guilt sinks in. Wilder’s camera holds a very long shot of Curtis feeling quite badly about breaking Sugar’s heart. So badly that he risks his life by walking up on stage and kissing her goodbye.

Saxophone Joe would’ve never risked his neck for a dame, but “Josephine” does. After playing the field and treating women like shit he’s seen “how the other half lives,” and becomes, you’d better believe, a better man for that.

HE to Wasson: Sydney Pollack got the above-referenced idea for Tootsie from Some Like It Hot.

The film-snob knives are out for poor Green Book, and what an experience it is to read what some of these politically correct assassins have to say…delightful!

God, what it must be like to live in their heads, to snort derisively at an old-fashioned buddy film that isn’t out to hurt or diminish anyone or to roll back the culture in any way, shape or form, and which — burn it at the stake! — deals dry, straight, under-stated cards.

Shadow and Act‘s Brooke Obie has called Green Book a “poorly titled white savior film,” and Slate‘s Inkoo Kang is more or less on the same page.

I don’t hold with the idea of anyone saving anyone else in this modest little flick, but if we must go there it’s Mahershala Ali‘s Don Shirley who rescues Viggo Mortensen‘s Tony Lip and not the other way around. I don’t personally think Peter Farrelly‘s film is about salvation as much as plain old respect, kindness and compassion. But that’s me.

[Click through to full story on HE-plus]

All through the season the Gold Derby no-accounts have refused to include Paul Schrader‘s First Reformed, easily and absolutely one of the year’s ten-best, on their Best Picture spitball lists. Worse, they’ve also declined to list Ethan Hawke‘s landmark performance as a projected Best Actor nominee. Both for the perfectly idiotic reason of isolating any film that opened before Labor Day as a non-starter.

And now their cavalier, herd-following way of thinking has been embraced by the 2018 Spirit Awards nominations with four or five nominations having gone to First Reformed. Which of course seals its Oscar fate.

From here on guild and Academy members will be saying to each other, “Yeah, Schrader’s film is obviously striking and quite the career comeback and Hawke may have delivered his career-best performance, agreed, but First Reformed is a Spirit Awards thing….not in our realm.”

Shame on the Gold Derby-ites for ghetto-izing this great Bressonian film and kicking it downstairs.

In case some Academy members haven’t noticed, mainstream theatrical fare has severely devolved over the past 15 years. Almost everything made by the big studios is aimed at families and submentals, and almost all adult material (except during Oscar season) has been shunted off to cable and streaming. So out of this desert comes (among other streaming companies) Netflix, which believes in backing ambitious, adult-level features…hooray!

Netflix has recently even caved on its standard financial scheme of streaming films right off the bat from day #1, to the extent that it won’t be streaming its prize Oscar pony, Alfonso Cuaron‘s Roma, until it’s played in select theatres for a couple of weeks. I’m sorry but that’s a highly significant concession for a company like this.

And some people are giving Netflix shit over this? Somebody actually accused their willingness to go theatrical of being a “con” because they’ll be four-walling?

Netflix is investing in real movies, for God’s sake. They’ve produced the latest Coen brothers film, which at the very least is diverting and handsome as hell to look at. They backed that problematic Orson Welles film, The Other Side of the Wind, and Morgan Neville‘s They”ll Love Me When I’m Dead. They may not be the most theatrical-minded people in the industry, okay, but we’re living in a streaming world now, for God’s sake…wake up! There’s a distinct shortage of good-guy outfits in the business right now, and Netflix is certainly one of them

I was inspired to post this by two recent irritating articles — Erich Schwartzel‘s 11.17 Wall Street Journal piece, “Netflix Sees Oscar Gold in Roma, but Hollywood Isn’t So Sure,” and Rebecca Keegan‘s 11.14 Hollywood Reporter essay, “How the Oscar Race Became a Referendum on Netflix.”

The across-the-board worshipping of the late Stan Lee and the corresponding corporate Marvel-ization of mainstream motion picture fare cannot be separated. Deny it or not, but these two things have happened due to an outgrowth of mass infantilization and the increasing influence of fanboy culture, which has been happening since the explosion of wide-release, teenage-catering entertainments (Jaws, Star Wars) in the mid ’70s.

It is therefore allowable for Bill Maher to have written what he wrote this morning about the Stan Lee effect. Just shut up and take it. We’re supposed to be be okay with differing opinions in our country so act that way.

“The guy who created Spider-Man and the Hulk has died, and America is in mourning,” Maher wrote. “Deep, deep mourning for a man who inspired millions to, I don’t know, watch a movie, I guess.

“Someone on Reddit posted, ‘I’m so incredibly grateful I lived in a world that included Stan Lee.’ Personally, I’m grateful I lived in a world that included oxygen and trees, but to each his own. Now, I have nothing against comic books — I read them now and then when I was a kid and I was all out of Hardy Boys. But the assumption everyone had back then, both the adults and the kids, was that comics were for kids, and when you grew up you moved on to big-boy books without the pictures.

“But then twenty years or so ago, something happened — adults decided they didn’t have to give up kid stuff. And so they pretended comic books were actually sophisticated literature. And because America has over 4,500 colleges — which means we need more professors than we have smart people — some dumb people got to be professors by writing theses with titles like ‘Otherness and Heterodoxy in the Silver Surfer‘. And now when adults are forced to do grown-up things like buy auto insurance, they call it ‘adulting’ and act like it’s some giant struggle.

“I’m not saying we’ve necessarily gotten stupider. The average Joe is smarter in a lot of ways than he was in, say, the 1940s, when a big night out was a Three Stooges short and a Carmen Miranda musical. The problem is, we’re using our smarts on stupid stuff. I don’t think it’s a huge stretch to suggest that Donald Trump could only get elected in a country that thinks comic books are important.”

HE context entry #1: Remember what Watchmen creator Alan Moore said nine years ago, to wit: “The average age of the audience now for comics, and this has been the case since the late 1980s, probably is late thirties to early fifties — which tends to support the idea that these things are not being bought by children. They’re being bought in many cases by hopeless nostalgics or, putting the worst construction on it, perhaps cases of arrested development who are not prepared to let their childhoods go, no matter how trite the adventures of their various heroes and idols.”

Read more