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First, any article, editor or journalist who mentions the word “pressure” in the context of a celebrity profile is a hack. If I’ve listened to one unctuous junket whore ask an actor “how much pressure did you have to cope with?” and blah blah, I’ve listened to it 700 or 800 times. Second, until I glanced at this THR cover I wasn’t even thinking about The Girl in the Spider’s Web (Sony, 11.9)…not even a blip on the screen. Third, now that I’m mulling it over I’m asking myself if I even want to sit through it. Fourth, the last time I checked Foy’s performance as Neil Armstrong‘s hand-wringing wife (Janet Shearon) stood a reasonable chance of being nominated for Best Supporting Actress, but no mention of First Man in the cover copy? Fifth, I respect the fact that Foy’s freckly alabaster skin is a signature that she embraces, but if I were her I would steer clear of black nail polish.

For their Hud script, Irving Ravetch and wife Harriet Frank, Jr. were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, and won both the New York Film Critics Circle Award and the Writers Guild of America Award for same. Their other screenplays included The Long, Hot Summer (based on William Faulkner‘s “Spotted Horses”, “Barn Burning” and “The Hamlet”), Home from the Hill, The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, The Reivers, The Spikes Gang, The Cowboys, The Sound and the Fury, Norma Rae, Murphy’s Romance and Stanley & Iris. Ravetch passed in 2010; Frank is still with us.

Hud: “How much you take the boys for tonight?”
Alma: “Twenty dollars and some change.”
Hud: “You’re a dangerous woman.”
Alma: “I’m a good poker player.”
Hud: “You’re a good housekeeper. You’re a good cook. You’re a good laundress. (beat) What else are you good at?”
Alma: “At taking care of myself.”
Hud: “You shouldn’t have to, a woman looks like you.”
Alma: “That’s what my ex-husband used to tell me. Before he took my wallet, my gasoline credit card, and left me stranded in a motel in Alberquerque.”
Hud: “What did you do to make him take to the hills? Wear your curlers to bed or something?
Alma: “Ed’s a gambler. He’s probably up at Vegas or Reno, dealing at night, losing it all back in the daytime.”
Hud: “Man like that sounds no better than a heel.”
Alma: “Only thing he was ever good for was scratching my back.”
Hud: “Still got that itch?”

Originally posted on 9.19.15.

The Tribeca Film Festival reviews for Sam Boyd‘s In A Relationship (Vertical, 11.9) were pretty good, but the only thing the trailer tells you is that Michael Angarano is the charisma guy. Not by any kind of slick, uptown GQ standard. He’s short and unassuming in a kind of Lou Costello-meets-Peter Falk-meets-Jonah Hill way — part Millennial slacker, part ragdoll. But he has that stand-out thing, that quality that you want to watch. Character, eccentricity. A 21st century blending of Jim Belushi in the late ’80s and Jack Nicholson in the early ’70s. He’s 30 years old and looks at least 37, due to a prematurely weathered, lived-in face. By the time Angarano is 40 he’ll look 55. By the time he’s 55 he’ll look like Gabby Hayes.

I missed Lukas Dhont‘s Girl in Cannes last May, but I caught it last night at a special Peggy Siegal screening at the Quad.

Stop the presses — this Belgian submission for Best Foreign Language Film felt like the most assured, immersive and delicately effective drama about a transgender person that I’ve ever seen in my life, or am likely to see in the future. It’s the kind of film that could have conceivably been awful if it had been written or directed by the wrong kind of button-pushing American director (Dan Fogelman, say), but it feels deft, assured and totally right with Dhont at the helm.

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Author, critic, film professor and Orson Welles scholar Joseph McBride knows who Orson Welles was as well as anyone, and probably better than most. He recently wrote a Sight & Sound piece about Welles and his final film, The Other Side of the Wind. McBride was personally friendly with Welles, has written three books about him, and played a film critic in Wind.

Last night on Facebook a guy named Michael Karoly asked McBride if Welles liked the films of Jean-Luc Godard. McBride’s posted reply: “I’m not aware of anything he said about Godard. He didn’t see a lot of contemporary movies.”

HE reply to McBride: Wait…WHAT? What serious filmmaker ducked Godard back in the ’60s and ’70s, or for that matter missed “contemporary movies”? Welles was a big fan of the Shaft TV series (according to Todd McCarthy) but as of the late 60s or early 70s, or when you began your friendship with him, he didn’t see many films that were being made back then? During Hollywood’s experimental golden age? To me this indicates that Welles was partly living in a state of vague spiritual nostalgia and withdrawal and in some sense coasting on the fumes of the past.

To paraphrase a Cameron Crowe observation, Orson really was Brian Wilson — on fire and cooking with genius gas from his early to late 20s (mid 1930s to mid 1940s, Wells having been born in 1915) and then…well, then he lived the rest of his life. And there was nothing wrong with that.

From the mid 40s to his death in ‘85, Orson lived large. Ups, downs and all-arounds. Tirelessly creative, always industrious, always writing & pushing, a great gabber. But the creative incandescence happened early in his life (NY theatre, “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast, Citizen Kane, Magnificent Ambersons), and everything he did from the mid 40s on was noteworthy, commendable, European, aspirational, admirable, Shakespearean, etc. But it was basically an aftermath to his brilliant “touched by God, years of lightning” streak.

Just as Brian Wilson’s monumental hot streak lasted four years, or from ‘64 to late ‘67 — from age 22 to 25 or 26. Obviously Orson’s streak lasted longer but the analogy holds.

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Beto O’Rourke is going to lose to Ted Cruz in Texas next month, but that might work out because it’ll leave him in a position to run for president in 2020. I really think he should do it. The hour is getting late and the Democrats need somebody strong and flinty to run against President Trump, and the more I kick it around the more I realize it has to be Beto. The Texas Senate race has nationalized him in a positive light. He’s been a U.S. Congressman for five years. He has the moxie and the aura, and there’s no time like right now.

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Prior to last night’s London premiere of Suspiria Dakota Johnson flashed her partially unshaven armpits for photographers. Different grooming disciplines for different folks, I suppose, but we all know that the general tendency over the last 15 or 20 has been to trim, snip and shave. Among both genders, I mean. Dakota is an outlier. There’s no way wage-earning women are going to start walking around with bushy armpits…no way. Any more than they’re going to abandon the genital airstrip or chean-shaven aesthetic. When was the last time any woman or man went bushy in any respect? I forget how many years ago it was that Howard Stern spoke about using a razor all over, but he’s not alone.

A new Atlantic piece by James Fallows passes along a first-hand conspiracy story from Democratic strategist James Strother. The gist is that the late Republican torpedo specialist Lee Atwater (the guy behind the Willie Horton ad) confessed to Strother on his death bed in ’91 that he “set up” 1988 Democratic presidential candidate Gary Hart. The cancer-stricken Atwater, 39 years old, allegedly told Strother that “I did it!…I fixed Hart.” The whole Monkey Business episode with Donna Rice, Atwater meant, and that damning photo of Rice sitting on Hart’s lap. All of it a political trap.

Atwater somehow took advantage of and/or worked with Billy Broadhurst, the “political groupie and aspiring insider” who had taken Hart on the fateful Monkey Business cruise. Rice and another woman were invited to join the cruise, and the photo of Rice on Hart’s lap was planned and of course used after Hart suspended in his 1988 campaign. Fallows writes that there’s no proof of this other than Strother’s account.

As much as I admire Jason Reitman‘s The Front Runner, which is all about how Hart’s campaign was destroyed by allegations about a possible Rice affair, it would have been that much stronger a film if the Strother-Atwater story had been woven into the plot. Right now the movie has two hand-of-doom elements — Hart’s cavalier self-destructiveness in not hiding his indiscretions more covertly or skillfully, and the Miami Herald reporters who were tipped off about Hart’s affair with Rice. If the Strother-Atwater story has been used, it would have trumped both of these elements.

Did Hart have certain extra-marital tendencies before the Rice scandal? According to legend, yes. Would he have gotten into trouble with some other lust object if the Rice thing hadn’t happened? Possibly. But the Atwater confession certainly adds spice to the brew.

From the Fallows piece:

Strother and Atwater had the mutually respectful camaraderie of highly skilled rivals. “Lee and I were friends,” Strother told me when I spoke with him by phone recently. “We’d meet after campaigns and have coffee, talk about why I did what I did and why he did what he did.” One of the campaigns they met to discuss afterward was that 1988 presidential race, which Atwater (with Bush) had of course ended up winning, and from which Hart had dropped out. But later, during what Atwater realized would be the final weeks of his life, Atwater phoned Strother to discuss one more detail of that campaign.

Atwater had the strength to talk for only five minutes. “It wasn’t a ‘conversation,’ ” Strother said when I spoke with him recently. “There weren’t any pleasantries. It was like he was working down a checklist, and he had something he had to tell me before he died.”

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I’ve seen Doug Liman‘s new version of Fair Game (’10), which will hit digital platforms 10.23 and Netflix on November 1st. I loved Liman’s true-life political spy saga when I caught it eight and a half years ago in Cannes. I guess it doesn’t mean all that much that I’m also a fan of the new version, which is roughly six minutes longer. The 2010 version was just shy of 108 minutes; the newbie is 114 minutes.

Based on truth and an exceptionally smart script by Jez and John Butterworth, Fair Game is the story of how former CIA agent Valerie Plame (Naomi Watts) and her husband Joe Wilson (Sean Penn) were burned by Scooter Libby (David Andrews), the top aide of vp Dick Cheney, when Wilson publicly challenged the Bush administration’s claim that Iraq had secretly purchased carloads of yellow-cake uranium from Niger to fortify its alleged weapons-of-mass-destruction program, which the Bushies used to justify the 2003 Iraq invasion.

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The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg is reporting that Olivia Colman, who plays the role of Queen Anne in Yorgos Lanthimos‘ The Favourite, is officially campaigning for Best Actress. Despite fair assessments to the contrary.

Any straight-shooting, non-agenda-driven assessment of this admired period drama would conclude that Colman’s character is roughly analogous to Robert Shaw‘s Doyle Lonnegan in The Sting. For Queen Anne is a mark, which is to say a character being played or duped or exploited in order to serve the interests of others, which in this case are Rachel Weisz‘s Sarah Churchill and Emma Stone‘s Abigail Masham.

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The Wrecking Crew, The Killing of Sister George, Krakatoa, East of Java…really? To go by the 1969 marquees and posters in Quentin Tarantino‘s currently filming Upon Upon A Time in Hollywood, you could get the idea that ’69 was a moderately shitty year in movies.

But of course, Tarantino is deliberately emphasizing the dicey titles and avoiding the good stuff. For ’69 also saw the release of George Roy Hill‘s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, John Schlesinger‘s Midnight Cowboy, Dennis Hopper‘s Easy Rider, Paul Mazursky‘s Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, Henry Hathaway‘s True Grit, Larry Peerce‘s Goodbye, Columbus, Peter Hunt‘s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Vilgot Sjöman‘s I Am Curious (Yellow), Costa-Gavras‘ Z, Alan Pakula‘s The Sterile Cuckoo, Sydney Pollack‘s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and Sam Peckinpah‘s The Wild Bunch.

Actually Robert Aldrich‘s Sister George wasn’t too bad. One of the first mainstream lesbian films, unless I’m misremembering. Somber. Ground-breaking sex scene between Susannah York and Coral Browne.

All photos originally posted by Peter Avellino.

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