slider

Remember when Buzz Gunderson (Corey Allen) explained the knife-fight rules to Jim Stark (James Dean) in Nicholas Ray‘s Rebel Without A Cause? “Now there’s no stabbing,” Buzz said. “Just a little sticking.”

A half day ago Rolling Stone published “The Trouble With Johnny Depp“, which is subtitled “Multimillion-dollar lawsuits, a haze of booze and hash, a marriage gone very wrong and a lifestyle he can’t afford — inside the trials of Johnny Depp.” It was written by the smooth and silky Stephen Rodrick. Less than exacting but a hugely skilled writer, Rodrick is no assassin. But he likes to “stick” his subjects with little cuts.

I know because he profiled me in a 2009 Los Angeles piece titled “the Blog Whisperers.” He implied something that struck me as unfair, and there were three or four inaccuracies. Rodrick also stuck it to Bill Maher, slightly, in a 2017 Esquire profile.

I could’ve told Depp to watch out before agreeing to Rodrick visiting his home in London. I’m not suggesting Rodrick hasn’t reported exactly what he saw and heard. Depp is almost certainly the louche, vaguely ruined fellow described in the piece, a guy who lives in his own psychological realm and who slurps red wine like it’s going out of style.

I love this early passage:

“Depp is dressed like a Forties gangster, jet-black hair slicked back, pinstripes, suspenders and spats. His face is puffy, but Depp still possesses the fixating brown eyes that have toggled between dreamy and menacing during his 35-year career.” Technically 34 years — Deep’s first film was Wes Craven‘s A Nightmare on Elm Street (’84), made when he was 20.

“‘So are you here to hear the truth?’ asks Depp as [his chef] Russell brings him a glass of vintage red wine. ‘It’s full of betrayal.’

“We move to the dining room for a three-course meal of pad thai, duck and gingerbread with berries. Depp sits at the head of the table and motions toward some rolling papers and two equal piles of tobacco and hash, and asks if I mind. I don’t. He pauses for a second. ‘Well, let’s drink some wine first.’

“This goes on for 72 hours.

Read more

If you search Rotten Tomatoes for “Cold War,” you’ll find seven titles. But there is only one Cold War — the latest Pawel Pawlikowski masterpiece, destined to win the Best Foreign Language Feature Oscar, HE’s favorite Cannes film by a country mile. Jewel-perfect, exquisitely photographed, tight as a drum.

Amazon will release Cold War on 12.21.

5.19 HE blurb: “Cold War is so perfectly composed, a masterwork on every level. Pawlikowski’s story-telling instincts couldn’t be more eloquent or understated. Every plot point is always conveyed in the most discreet and understated terms, but you’ll never miss a trick. And the economy! A story that spans 15 year sis handled within 84 minutes, and you never sense that you’re being rushed along.”

On 6.2.18 I posted my latest best-of-2018 piece — i.e., “Ten Serious Winners.” I was restricting myself to films that have commercially opened. If I were to include the Cannes entries, my list would read as follows: Cold War, First Reformed, Hereditary, A Quiet Place, The King, You Were Never Really Here, Filmworker, Happy as Lazzaro.

A 5.23.19 IMDB comment from “Lucywalkercats“: “There is perhaps no greater example in recent memory of a film that so successfully makes the political personal and vice versa. It is moving without ever once feeling contrived. This deserves the next Foreign Film Oscar by a longshot.”

Read more

I’ve posted a few times about Matt Tyrnauer‘s Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood (Greenwich, 7.27), a 98-minute doc about Scotty Bowers, the amiable, formerly unsung go-between who wrote about servicing Hollywood’s gay and bisexual community during the ’40s, ’50s and beyond. His six-year-old memoir is called “Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars.”

I will once again share what I came to believe during the watching of it, which is that Bowers, whose tell-all book has been challenged and mocked and who’s been described here and there as highly imaginative, isn’t lying about anything.

For most of Tyrnauer’s surprisingly intimate, low-key, non-gossipy film is about old Scotty — a 90something, white-haired pack rat who owns two or three homes in the Hollywood hills and lives with a good-natured, seen-and-heard-it-all wife who loves him — and only intermittently about the mostly gay and bi movie stars and celebrities (Cary Grant, Spencer Tracy, Walter Pidgeon, Vivien Leigh, Charles Laughton, Vincent Price, Katharine Hepburn, Noël Coward, James Dean) who regarded Scotty as a trusted pimp and pleasure-giver who could and did set them up with same-sex lovers.

After studying Bowers for 98 minutes and listening to him talk about how terrifying things were for gay and bi actors in the intensely homophobic big-studio era, and considering the affection he has for his old gay friends and the strong feelings and immense respect they have for him…after the film is over you’ll probably be convinced, as I was, that Scotty is no bullshitter.

Read more

Next week Fox Home Entertainment’s Schawn Belston and James Finn are presenting a special 70mm screening of James Cameron‘s The Abyss (’89). I asked if they’re showing the original 140-minute theatrical version or the 171-minute special edition (i.e., the version that ends with shots of huge tidal waves) — no answer thus far.

I began to recall The Abyss in detail after receiving the invite. I can’t attend due to a screening conflict (the Sicario: Day of the Soldado all-media in Burbank) but even if I could I’m not sure I’d be all that enthused. It’s been 29 years, but I have two strong recollections: (a) The first two thirds are fairly riveting but (b) the last third drops the ball, especially when Mary Elizabeth Mastrontonio is brought back to life by Ed Harris after clearly drowning, and especially that dippy ending with the aquatic alien butterflies.

There’s never been a Bluray of either version of The Abyss, and you can’t stream them in high-def. Abyss Wikipage: “In July 2016, while promoting the 30th anniversary Bluray release of Aliens at Comic-Con, Cameron confirmed that he was working on a remastered 4K transfer of The Abyss and that it would be released on Bluray for the first time in early 2017. ‘We’ve done a wet-gate 4K scan of the original negative, and it’s going to look insanely good,’ Cameron said.” Okay, but something kept this from happening.

Read more

The main thing about Eugene Jarecki‘s The King is that it’s less of a “rise and fall of Elvis” film than a meditative road-trip essay about the cultural decline of the U.S. of A. over the last…oh, call it 60 years. But with doses of music and feeling and irony and currents of straight talk. It’s a stirring musical sermon. How did we get here? Then vs. now. The bloat, the denial, the loathing…a nation arguably more at war with itself than at any time since the Civil War. Paul Simon rewrite: “We’re empty and aching and don’t know why.”

Well, actually we do. The same forces that gradually enveloped that young and jumpy Memphis rocker who exploded in the South in ’55 and then nationally in 1956 with a blend of rockabilly and white-boy soul…the musical-spiritual aura that defined him gradually dispersed, and then selling out became the be-all, the chimes of irrelevance…shitty movies, Las Vegas gigs instead of touring the country, Dr. Feelgood medication, endlessly beholden to Colonel Tom Parker, huddling with the Memphis mafia behind Graceland gates. A flamboyant, increasingly perverse, go-for-the-dough lifestyle that pretty much drained and ate him.

13 year-old country blues singer Emi Sunshine, who takes a ride in Elvis’s silver Rolls Royce and sings some tunes in Jarecki’s doc, and Mr. Jarecki himself — Tuesday, 3.6, following screening at UTA.

It can’t hurt to repost the official synopsis: “A musical road trip across America that explores how a country boy lost his authenticity and became a king while his country lost its democracy and became an empire.” 27 words. Marketers would say trim it down. “A half-musical, all-visual poem about how the Las Vegas aesthetic swallowed America in the same way it swallowed Elvis Presley.” Still too long?

As noted everywhere, The King itself was trimmed after its world debut at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, when it ran 117 minutes. Now it’s around 97.

My first viewing of The King happened three and a half months ago inside United Talent Agency headquarters. In a HE piece that posted on 3.6 (“King of Drain“), I said I was “pretty close to knocked out — touched and shaken to the depths of whatever — and I’ll eat my black Kenneth Cole desert boots if it doesn’t become a Best Feature Documentary nominee next January. It’s that good, that bell-ringy, that profound.”

Now the hour is nigh — The King (Oscilloscope) opens on 6.22.

The King isn’t the least bit grim or draining or forlorn — as you watch there’s a feeling that all the cultural threads and fibres have been woven just so. Not an Elvis doc, not an Elvis doc, not an Elvis doc…but a telling of his story (which most of us know backwards and forwards) in a way that expands and deepens and makes you lean forward.

Every talking head has two or three sage things to say: Greil Marcus, James Carville, Chuck D, Alec Baldwin, Roseanne Cash, Ethan Hawke, Emmylou Harris, Van Jones, Ashton Kutcher, Mike Myers, Dan Rather, Luc Sante, David Simon, Linda Thompson. My favorites are Hawke, Jones and Public Enemy’s Chuck D.

I was actually a tiny bit sorry when The King ended.

Read more

The last time I posted this true story, about an event that happened in ’81, I was accused by some of having lacked scruples. That wasn’t the thing. I’m going to try it again with extra wording — maybe this time it’ll be understood. The original title was “My Own Llewyn Davis Moment“:

For a good portion of ’81 I was living in a sublet on Bank Street west of Hudson, almost exactly opposite HB Studios. The rent was around $350 per month. (Or so I recall.) The sublessor was a 40something guy who lived in Boca Raton, Florida. The landlord, who knew nothing of this arrangement, was one of those tough old New York buzzards in his ’70s.

Anyway the landlord got wind and told me to vacate as I was illegally subletting. He naturally wanted a new fully-approved tenant who would pay a bigger rent, but he wouldn’t consider my own application as I was a shiftless scumbag in his eyes. I hemmed and hawed and basically refused to leave until I could find something else. And then one day I came home to find my stuff (clothes, IBM Selectric typewriter, small color TV, throw rug, framed American Friend poster) lying in a big pile in the hallway with the locks on my apartment door changed. The buzzard was playing rough.

When you’re looking at sleeping on the sidewalk, you man up and do what you have to do to avoid that by any reasonable means necessary. Which is what I did. There was no point in paying any rent at that point as I was a marked man who would have to leave the place fairly soon. The sublessor’s actual rent was $185 or something like that so he’d been making a monthly $165 profit from me. I figured once the buzzard started playing rough by (a) refusing to consider my application for a legit lease and (b) changing the locks and moving my stuff into the hallway that all bets were off and it was a game of habitat survival at all costs until an alternative presented itself.

Read more

“You asked me before about perjury, about 20 times in court. I don’t know why you people don’t understand the system. You wanna convict ’em but you’ve got these stupid search and seizure laws. And wiretap [laws]. Case #1 never got made without an illegal wiretap. And nobody’s ever gonna get convicted if a cop don’t commit perjury. You want the big dealer out of business? The only way I know how to push him outta business is to steal his cash. Otherwise somewhere down the line, he’s gonna buy out. He’ll buy himself a bondsman, a D.A., a judge. The scumbag dealer’s back on the street before the arresting officer. The only way I know how to stop him is to steal his cash.”

Read more

Billy Crystal is alive and crackling as we speak, obviously, but there’s no denying he had a great run in the early ’90s. A five-year period from ’89 to ’93, specifically. When Harry Met Sally… (’89) kicked things off. The came the near-great. enormously well-liked City Slickers (’91), which opened right smack dab in the middle of Crystal’s four-year-run as the Oscar host (’90 to ’93), which cemented his top-of-the-worldness. (Crystal also Oscar-hosted in ’97, ’98, ’00, ’04 and ’12.)

Things slightly downshifted for Crystal over the next five or six years — City Slickers 2, Mr. Saturday Night, Forget Paris, Hamlet, Deconstructing Harry, Fathers’ Day, My Giant. But he rebounded big-time with Harold Ramis‘s Analyze This (’99). Then he directed ’61, which I re-watched recently and has aged very well. And then he delivered a beautiful eulogy for Muhammud Ali two years ago. And he’s got the book. But the early ’90s!

I’d honestly forgotten that 10-year-old Jake Gyllenhaal played Crystal’s son, Danny, in City Slickers.

Read more

From Philip Lopate’s N.Y. Review of Books essay on Joseph McBride‘s “How Did Lubitsch Do It?” (Columbia University Press, 561 pp., $40.00): “McBride has set out to write not a biography (no need for that, since Scott Eyman’s ‘Laughter in Paradise’ is so satisfying) but an in-depth ‘essayistic investigation’ of the entire oeuvre. What has been lacking until this critical study has been a sustained, systematic, fully integrated overview of both Lubitsch’s German and American work. Without seeing his career as a single, unified whole, it cannot be fully understood or appreciated.”

Excerpt from “The Masters’ Master: Ernst Lubitsch and The Marriage Circle,” a McBride essay posted on brightlights.com, itself excerpted from “How Did Lubitsch Do It?”: “The name Ernst Lubitsch stood for the epitome of sophisticated humor and romance in what we now regard as the Golden Age of Hollywood. As fellow producer/director Mervyn LeRoy said when presenting him with an honorary Oscar on March 13, 1947, seven months before Lubitsch’s death, ‘He had an adult mind and a hatred of saying things the obvious way. Because of these qualities and a God-given genius, he advanced the technique of screen comedy as no one else has ever done.”

“[The German-born helmer’s] approach to style and theme was widely celebrated as ‘the Lubitsch Touch,’ a virtually indefinable yet almost tangible concept embodying an ever-fresh, delightful, tantalizing, slyly witty blend of style and substance. It combines a characteristic joie de vivre in the actors with an elegant visual design that conveys its meanings largely through sophisticated innuendo.

“But the phrase was something of a marketing cliché, like calling Hitchcock ‘the Master of Suspense,’ and Lubitsch himself was apt to joke about it. When people would ask him what it meant, he would say with a grin, ‘I would like to know myself…you find out and tell me, maybe?’ And he said, ‘I cannot give you a definitive answer because, fortunately, I’m not conscious of it. If I ever become conscious of it — Heaven prevent — I might lose it.’”

Read more

Speaking as the business affairs simpleton that I basically am, wouldn’t it be better for Comcast to buy 20th Century Fox rather than Disney? Because then Fox, a studio that had a fairly grand history from the 1920s until a decade or so ago, would continue to exist and generate its own material instead of being folded into Disney. That would be preferable, no? At the very least from a spiritual standpoint. Keep blaring that Fox fanfare!

I’m trying to imagine some kind of professional acrimonious situation in which I would actually try to harm another journalist’s livelihood — his or her access to screenings or festivals, let’s say — or diminish his or her advertising revenue. I’m trying to imagine even considering this kind of ugly behavior, but I can’t. It’s not in me. I’ve never tried to interfere with a fellow journalist trying to find work or generate this or that form of income. I’ve never whispered in an editor’s ear, “Don’t hire this or that critic”…ever.

Are there a few journalist-critics whom I don’t personally like all that much? Sure, a few, but I’ve never tried to harm them professionally. Ever.

This is how I was in high school, actually. I would never put anyone down, or at least no one who hadn’t put me down first. I would never huddle with the weasels in my clique and sneer at some other kid because we didn’t like cut of his jeans. People do this in high school all the time, of course, and then they go on to do it in the workplace. People talking shit about others is a national pastime. Some people can be real vipers when they put their minds to it.

Have I ever acted in an ugly or unbecoming fashion? Yes, I’ve slipped a few times, and I sincerely apologize for this. But I’ve never tried to hurt a fellow journo in the pocketbook. Ever.

I’m mentioning this because a couple of critics tried to do this to me last weekend. They actually called or wrote this or that publicist or film festival or distributor and said, “Please help us snuff this guy out…we don’t like him and we want him dead.” They actually did this. Because they dislike me personally. Which, in and of itself, is fine with me. I don’t like them either, but that’s where it stays.

Worse, there’s one distributor whose ad director, based on my correspondence, may have actually said to one of these would-be assassins, “Sure thing, we hear you, we’ll join your cause.” Words fail.

Read more

Boiled down, the Donald Trump “make America white again” nightmare — fascistic bully-boy mindset, Putin-suckling, dismantling of democracy, catering to the stupidest sector of the electorate, attacks on press, Charlottesville, anti-immigrant policies, trade-tariff wars, Scott Pruitt‘s destruction of the environment — was ushered in by the failure of Hillary Clinton to run an effective presidential campaign.

Every day I wake up shattered by the spreading Trump miasma, but I also curse Hillary’s name — every damn day. She did this to us. She and her centrist, Democratic-establishment cronies.

I voted for Hillary like any sane person, but she lost because she was a testy, dislikable, highly conflicted candidate without that natural charisma, but more specifically because of nine factors:

(a) The James Comey letter, (b) that awful secretive nature which led to the private email server, (c) nodding with approval as DNC honcho Debbie Wasserman Schultz schemed, rigged & plotted against Bernie Sanders, (d), that entirely justified, 100% accurate “deplorables” comment, (e) fainting during that World Trade Center memorial service, (f) that cackle, (g) those eye bags, (h) choosing Tim Kaine as her VP rather than Bernie or Elizabeth Warren, and (i) failing to campaign more aggressively in Wisconsin and Michigan.

But the biggest killers were the Comey letter, the fainting, the “deplorables,” the plotting-against-Bernie thing, choosing Kaine and the personal-style trifecta — that awful cackle, that braying voice and that testy substitute-teacher vibe combined with the eye bags.

She did this — she allowed the most odious, fiendish, openly fascistic and wantonly destructive president in the nation’s history to seize power and take us all down in the process.

Speaking of unrelated nightmares: https://hollywood-elsewhere.com/2017/08/brief-nightmare/