…when whalebods were seen as sexy, healthy, and life-affirming in the most wonderful way imaginable? Ozempic and other crash-diet drugs put an end to that, thank God, and now it’s even okay for a semblance of the male gaze to make a slight comeback. Because a vibe shift (lo and behold) has happened, and the once-bullying woke Stalinists have fled into the forest.
Triggered by a recent CNN article about the return of the male gaze, “After Party”‘s Emily Jashinsky and Spencer Klavan, Associate editor for Claremont Review of Books and Author of “Light of the Mind, Light of the World”, on a recent CNN article on the “male gaze” and how mainstream outlets frame timeless human desires as outdated or problematic, contrasting the body-positivity era of 2020 with today’s renewed focus on fitness.
“Yeah, and a billion and a half dollars. And a built-in army of about 75 million people who’d vote for any human-adjacent life form that wasn’t Trump. But in ‘107 Days,’ nothing is ever Kamala’s fault.”
The Ankler‘s Richard Rushfield (10.1.): “This morning Jane Fonda — legendary actress, producer, activist and Oscar-winner — announced the re-launch of The Committee for the First Amendment, a group once led by her father, Henry Fonda, among other A-list Golden Age stars, including Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.”
“The Committee’s reformation was announced with the release of a statement signed by over 550 artists” — Bill Maher included! — “and members of the Hollywood community.”
The reformed Committee is, of course, a pushback against Donald Trump‘s autocratic bully-boy regime, and especially, one presumes, his recent quashing (through surrogates) of his late-night talk-show critics, Stephen Colbert and (for a few days) Jimmy Kimmel. Who’s next?
And yet Fonda’s committee did a little quashing of its own last year when THR‘s Rebecca Keegan posted that Sasha Stone hit piece — an article that seemed to pretty much torpedo Stone’s award-season ad income, although she’s since bounced back to some extent.
Here’s what Stone posted this morning in response to Rushfield’s piece:
It probaby wasn’t Fonda herself who said “get rid of Sasha Stone!” But it might have been Robin Morgan, co-founder of the Women’s Media Center.
41 years have passed since my first and only viewing. Directed and co-written by John Byrum, this Columbia release is probably the worst Bill Murray movie ever made, and was certainly the most ill-conceived.
From Janet Maslin’s 10.19.84 review: “As he prepares to tell his fiancee that he wants to postpone their wedding and is not yet ready to settle down, Bill Murray’s Larry Darrell says ‘let’s talk.’ Murray then adds ‘seal talk’ as he’s playing the scene in a swimming pool. And then he begins to arf.
“If The Razor’s Edge is Mr. Murray’s first ‘serious’ movie, he can hardly be accused of bringing an excess of seriousness to its central role.
“Nor does he exactly play Larry Darrell, the Chicagoan ‘dreamer of a beautiful dream’ who journeys to Paris and the Far East in search of enlightenment, for the laughs that are his trademark. Certainly Mr. Murray brings his familiar off-handed, wise-guy manner to the tale, as well as a complete indifference to the post-World War I time frame; his performance is both jokey and anachronistic, and the Parisian setting is little more than an excuse for him to show up in a beret.
“These touches might seem more jarring in a consistent and convincing version of Maugham’s novel. As it is, this Razor’s Edge is itself so disjointed that Mr. Murray, for all his wisecracking inappropriateness, is all that holds it together.”
I’ve chosen the voice of a male Englishman, but it’s just a placeholder. I’m not especially happy with this guy because he’s just a genteel robotic voice — he doesn’t seem to understand what he’s saying or, for that matter, the English language itself.
So I’m currently searching around for a TTS software platform that can deliver voices that do seem to understand the import of what they’re reading, and which know a little something about when to pause and which words to emphasize and what parentheses mean, etc. (Hume is one option — Revoicer is another.) My ideal voices would be (a) mid ’60s Lee Marvin, (b) early ’60s Richard Burton or (c) my own.
So let’s go back to July 2007…George Bush is president, Iraq is a mess, the arrival of woke terror is at least a decade away, the pandemic won’t begin for another 13 years, the greatest movie year of the 21st century is half over, and people are beginning to talk seriously about a certain Illinois senator with a funny-sounding name who’s running for president.
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Talk to any impassioned, ahead-of-the-curve film snob about classic westerns, and he/she will probably tell you that Howard Hawks‘ Rio Bravo (1959) is a much better, more substantial film than Fred Zinneman‘s High Noon (1952). More deeply felt, they’ll say. Better shoot-em-up swagger, tastier performances, more likable, more old-west iconic.
Many people I know feel this way. And now director Peter Bogdanovich is saying it again in a New York Observer piece — Rio Bravo is even better than you thought, High Noon doesn’t hold up as well, etc.
Something snapped when I read Peter’s article this afternoon. Goddamn it, the Rio Bravo cult has gone on long enough! Bogdanovich calls it “a life-affirming, raucous, profound masterpiece”…okay. But I’m going to respond politely and call that a reach. I’ve long admired admire Hawks’ movies and the whole Hawks ethos as much as the next guy, but it’s time to curtail this here and now.
High Noon may seem a bit stodgy or conventional to some and perhaps not as excitingly cinematic to the elites, but by any semblance of a classic understanding of what constitues high-quality cinema, it’s a far greater film than Rio Bravo.
It’s not about the Old West, obviously — it’s a metaphor movie about the Hollywood climate in the early ’50s — but it walks and talks like a western, and is angry, blunt, honed and unequivocal to that end. It’s about the very worst in people, and the best in a single, anxious, far-from-perfect man.
I’m not speaking so much about Gary Cooper‘s Will Kane as High Noon‘s screenwriter-producer Carl Foreman, who was being eyeballed by the Hollywood right for alleged Communist ties when he wrote it, and receiving a very tough lesson in human nature in the process. He wound up writing a crap-free movie that talks tough, cuts no slack and speaks with a single voice.
You know from the get-go that High Noon is going to say something hard and fundamental about who and what we are. It’s not going to poke along some dusty trail and go yippie-ki-yay and twirl a six-gun. It’s going to look you in the eye and say what’s what, and not just about the political and moral climate in some small western town that Gary Cooper‘s Willl Kane is the sheriff of.
Rio Bravo and High Noon are both about a lawman facing up to bad guys who will kill him if he doesn’t arrest or kill them first. The similarities pretty much end there.
High Noon is about facing very tough odds alone, and how you can’t finally trust anyone but yourself because most of your “friends” and neighbors will equivocate or desert you when the going gets tough.
Rio Bravo is about standing up to evil with your flawed but loyal pallies and nourishing their souls in the bargain — about doing what you can to help them become better men. This basically translates into everyone pitching in to help an alcoholic (Dean Martin) get straight and reclaim his self-respect.
High Noon doesn’t need help. It’s about solitude, values…four o’clock in the morning courage.
We’d all like to have loyal supportive friends by our side, but honestly, which represents the more realistic view of human nature? The more admirable?
The first 10 or 12 minutes of Rio Bravo, I freely admit, are terrific in the way Hawks introduces character and mood and a complex situation without dialogue. Let it be clearly understood there is nothing quite like this in all of High Noon. I also love the way John Wayne rifle-butts a guy early on and then goes, “Aww, I didn’t hurt him.”
But once the Duke and Walter Brennan, Martin, Ricky Nelson and Angie Dickinson settle into their routines and the easy-going pace of the thing, Rio Bravo becomes, at best, a somewhat entertaining sit-around-and-talk-and-occasionally-shoot-a-bad-guy movie.
More than anything else, Rio Bravo just ambles along. Wayne and the guys hang out in the jailhouse and talk things over. Wayne walks up to the hotel to bark at (i.e., hit on) Dickinson. It tries to sell you on the idea of the big, hulking, 51 year-old Wayne being a suitable romantic match for Dickinson, who was willow slender and maybe 27 at the time but looking more like 22 or 23.
Plus the villains have no bite or flavor — they’re shooting gallery ducks played by run-of-the-mill TV actors. Most of Rio Bravo is lit too brightly. And it seems too colorfully decorated, like some old west tourist town. It has a dippy “downtime” singing sequence that was thrown in to give Nelson and Martin, big singers at the time, a chance to show their stuff. Then comes the big shootout at the end, which is certainly okay but nothing legendary.
Does Rio Bravo have a sequence that equals the gripping metronomic ticking-clock montage near the end of High Noon? No. Is the dialogue in Rio Bravo up to the better passages in Zinneman’s film? No. (There’s nothing close to the scene between Cooper and Lon Chaney, Jr., or the brief one between Cooper and Katy Jurado.) Is there a moment in Rio Bravo that comes close to Cooper throwing his tin star into the dust at the end? No. Is there a “yes!” payoff moment in Rio Bravo that’s as good as the one in High Noon when Grace Kelly, playing a Quaker who abhors violence, drills one of the bad guys in the back? No.
Floyd Crosby‘s High Noon photography is choice and precise and gets the job done. It doesn’t exactly call attention to itself, but it’s continually striking and well-framed. To me, the black-and-white images have always seemed grittier and less Hollywood “pretty” than Russell Harlan‘s lensing in Rio Bravo, which I would file under “pleasing and acceptable but no great shakes.”
Dimitri Tomkin wrote the scores for both High Noon and Rio Bravo, but they don’t exist in the same realm. The Bravo score is settled and kindly, a sleepy, end-of-the-day campfire score. High Noon‘s is strong, pronounced, “dramatic” — so clear and unified it’s like a character in itself. And I’ve never gotten over the way the rhythm in that Tex Ritter song, “Do Not Forsake Me O My Darling,” sounds like a heartbeat.
Bogdanovich writes that Rio Bravo didn’t win any Oscars or get much critical respect, but “it was far more popular with audiences than High Noon.” He’s right about this. The IMDB says Rio Bravo earned $5,750,000 in the U.S. when it came out in ’59, and that High Noon brought in $3,750,000 in 1952 dollars. Big effin’ deal. High Noon whipsRio Bravo‘s ass in every other respect.
That said, there’s an intriguing Hawks assessment by French director Jean-Luc Godard in the Bogdanovich piece. Godard doesn’t argue that Rio Bravo is pretty much what I’ve described above, but says it’s still a better film than High Noon because — I love Jean-Luc Godard — the exceptionally good things in Rio Bravo can be ignored, and therefore may be unnoticable to a good-sized portion of the audience.
“The great filmmakers always tie themselves down by complying with the rules of the game,” Godard states. “Take, for example, the films of Howard Hawks, and in particular Rio Bravo. That is a work of extraordinary psychological insight and aesthetic perception, but Hawks has made his film so that the insight can pass unnoticed without disturbing the audience that has come to see a Western like all others. Hawks is the greater because he has succeeded in fitting all he holds most dear into a well-worn subject.”
Only 60 minutes before the press screening of JulianSchnabelIn The Hand of Dante so I must be brief:
The house in Kathryn Bigelow and Noah Oppenheim‘s A House of Dynamite (Netflix, 10.10 theatrically) is the world itself…the entire interconnected realm…everyone…all the countries, all the leaders…and no one, it turns out, is fully up to dealing with impending Armageddon…not technologically, not emotionally or psychologically…so the movie is a firehouse alarm…a serious warning…a reality check from holy-shitville.
We’re all living on the edge of terrible destruction, Bigelow and Oppenheim are basically saying. How close or imminent is it? Very close, closer than we think, and our ability to protect Chicago or Washington or New York City, not to mention retaliate against the suspected aggressor[s], who might be our friends in the DPRK, is not what anyone would call formidable.
Bigelow’s film is therefore not a 21st Century version of Sidney Lumet‘s Fail Safe (although it’s certainly Fail Safe-adjacent) or Stanley Kubrick‘s Dr. Strangelove without the laughs…because unlike these mid ‘60s thrillers, it doesn’t…well, I guess I shouldn’t spoil.
But it’s basically “you think there’s some kind of response to an incoming missile that might save us? Or at least allow for semblance of a future? Think again.”
…and its ghost-like, possibly non-existent cousin called the MC…yeah.
Since arriving at HE’s Venice pad early Monday evening, I’ve been trying to crack the elusive, almost DaVinci Code-ish, secret-society schedule of the vaporetto that travels from San Zaccaria to the Lido Casino, which is where the Venice Film Festival unfolds.
We’re basically talking about a mystery vaporetto or vaporettos, one called Line 20 (apparently the most reliable) and another called MC (Mostra Cinema) and, at the same time, Line 2. But their existence is mostly in the realm of rumor and hearsay.
Could I go so far as to call these vaporetto lines mythical? Is their legend based on the stuff that dreams are made of? You tell me.
Where to board Line 20 at the San Zaccaria stop, as there are THREE yellow-painted stations for embarking and disembarking at this location? Beats me. People “say” stuff but nobody knows nuthin’. You can ask and search and poke around and explore all you want, but it just gets away from you.
Firstshowing.net’s Alex Billington, a valuable ally and a good hombre, says “dock B” is the way to go. And maybe he’s right.
But last night there were NO signs at ANY of the San Zaccaria stops that said ANYTHING about Line 20 or Line MC.
Info is scant because the MC and 20 lines are temporary or seasonal, and it’s all smoke and haze and shadows. Nothing is clear.
Have demons (hooved beasts with pointy tails and horns on their heads) posted information about these two lines with a deliberate intention of sewing pique and confusion?
Why do I feel, vaporetto-wise, like I’ve been took, hoodwinked, led astray, taken to the cleaners, boondoggled, flim-flammed, hog-tied, sold a bill of goods, led down the garden path, and had a tin can tied to my tail?
What is wrong with Gavin Newsom talking bluntly and defiantly about the authoritarian schemings of Donald Trump? What isn’t 100% right with such rhetoric? Who else is standing up like this? Who else is saying “wake up” and “this…is…happening”?
Terence Stamp‘s Willie Parker to John Hurt‘s Braddock in Stephen Frear‘s The Hit: “Why should I be scared? Death is just a stage in the journey. We’re here, and then we’re not here. And we’re somewhere else. Maybe. And it’s as natural as breathing.”
Why is the quality of this clip so shitty? Criterion has had a 1080p Bluray version out for several years now.
