And the more pearl-clutching, ashen-faced Scott Menzel types who come out of the woodwork next month, the better.
Repeating: One way or another JLaw needs to save herself from what’s been happening to her career for the last seven or eight years. No Hard Feelings might do the job. The new trailer (which isn’t the least bit offensive) can only be watched on YouTube
“Rendezvous with Quentin Tarantino”, a special event at Theatre Croisette (home of the Directors Fortnight program), began at 4:22 pm. QT was introduced, stepped on stage to vigorous applause, and announced that John Flynn’s Rolling Thunder (‘77) would be the secret screening — a 35mm print, he proudly announced — and that a fun discussion would follow.
The film began at 4:35, and I’m sorry but it looked and sounded like shit. A faded, half-pink print. Smothered in dirt and scratch marks during the first two or three minutes and never looking or sounding all that clean. To me the dialogue was weak and whispery and barely audible, especially with the soundtrack humming and popping and crackling.
I hadn’t seen Rolling Thunder in 45 or 46 years, and if it hadn’t been for the French subtitles (which helped here and there) I would’ve been totally lost about some of the plot particulars.
You’d expect that for an event like this Tarantino would’ve gotten hold of a decent print, or relaxed his purist 35mm aesthetic (I know…heresy!) and shown a DCP. I’m sorry but I haven’t watched a film in this kind of ghastly condition in ages. We’re all accustomed to old films being restored or upgraded these days. Rolling Thunder is streaming on Amazon Prime.
QT’s affection for this Vietnam War-era revenge film is genuine, and the last thing I want to do is rain on his parade. I was really looking forward to a Thunder session but if you can’t hear a good portion of the dialogue what’s the point?
HE’s hand-held iPhone footage, captured around 10:15 pm on a Saturday evening (1.23.16) at Park City’s Eccles Theatre — the Sundance Film Festival launch of Kenneth Lonergan‘s Manchester By The Sea.
Casey Affleck was asked by an audience member how playing Lee Chandler had affected him personally, and one of his first reactions was “that’s a good question” — which meant he was unsure about how to best answer it.
Amazon/Roadside wouldn’t open the film for another ten months (11.18.16), but when you’ve got an absolute winner nobody worries about starting too early. Everyone knows it works, and they can’t wait to share it.
Manchester opened a year before the first stirrings of the woke plague, and today, seven and one-third years later, early ’16 seems like such a tranquil or even a magical moment. We didn’t know what we had until it all began to slip away.
Early this morning a friend sent along his “top ten films of the 1960s” list, and it’s certainly a decent roster for the most part. Okay, better than decent. But he put The Guns of Navarone (’61) in his third-place slot, and that, I replied, is a definite no-go.
The first 45-50 minutes of J. Lee Thompson‘s WWII adventure thriller are terrific (the main title sequence + Dimitri Tiomkin’s score are bull’s-eye), but after the commandos reach the top of the cliff the film becomes rote and lazy and even silly.
How many Germans do they kill? Four or five hundred?
Two scenes are top-notch during the second half — (a) the S.S./gestapo interrogation scene with Anthony Quinn moaning and rolling around all over the floor and (b) the killing of Gia Scala for treachery. But the believability factor is out the window.
The more I watch this film, the more I’ve resented Anthony Quayle‘s “Roy” and his idiotic broken leg. Mission-wise Roy is a total stopper — an albatross around everyone’s neck. I don’t agree with Quinn’s assessment — “One bullet now…better for him, better for us” — but I almost do.
And the older I’ve gotten the more I’ve become sick of David Niven‘s demolition expert, who’s mainly an effete selfish weenie and a huge pain in the ass. Gregory Peck: “And what about the men on Keros?” Niven: “I don’t know the men on Keros but I do know Roy!” God, what an asshole!
…the Williamsburg one has it all over the Los Angeles one, although they’re both mildly amusing.
The key to the humor, obviously, is willy-nilly crude labelling…fuck sensitivity…no tippy-toeing. It follows that wokesters (i.e., Jeremy Fassler types) are generally turned off by the implied racism, or at least in their little nickle-and-dime, pearl-clutching minds.
Mort Sahl: “The cruelest jokes are always the funniest.”
Hannah Gadsby, needless to say, disagrees…the best jokes embroider or advance the generic moral-ethical progressive narrative, and they certainly don’t channel what Gadsby regards as Dave Chappelle’s toxicity…either you’re on Hannah’s wavelength or you’re not, and she feels sorry for you if you’re in the latter category.
HE’s favorite Williamsburg neighborhoods: (a) “PROBABLY JEWS”, (b) “assholes,” (c) “ADIOS AMIGOS,” (d) “STUPID HAIRCUTS”, (e) “FRIENDS YOU DON’T TRUST,” (f) “shady” and (g) “Ended up at a party here once.”
HE’s favorite Los Angeles neighborhoods: (a) “MEH”, (b) “BOTOXED COUGARS IN LUXURY CONODS,” (c) “NOUVEAU RICHE DICKS,” (d) “SOMEWHAT LESS SCARY AREA,” and (e) “GANG-O-RAMA.”
For 30 years my West Hollywood pad was smack dab in the middle of “DOUCHEBAGS ON COCAINE” AND “GAYS.”
After debuting at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, Christian Mungiu‘s R.M.N. is finally starting to play commercially. It’ll open Friday (5.5.) at HE’s own Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville, where I’ll be catching a 7:30 pm show.
From HE’s paywalled review, “Do Bears Shit In the Woods?“, posted on 5.22.22: The meaning of the title of R.M.N., the latest film by the great Romanian auteur Cristian Mungiu, is never revealed, or it wasn’t to me during last night’s Salle Debussy screening.
The Wiki page says that Mungiu “named the film after an acronym for rezonanța magnetica nucleara ** (‘nuclear magnetic resonance’) as the film is ‘an investigation of the brain, a brain scan trying to detect things below the surface.'”
So the film is basically about scanning the small-town minds of the residents of Recia***, a commune located in Transylvania, which most of us still associate with Dracula.
But the underlying focus isn’t vampires but racist xenophobes who fear Middle Eastern immigrants and more specifically two gentle fellows from Sri Lanka who’ve been hired to work at a local bakery.
It takes a while for the racism to emerge front and center, but a metaphorical representation is the nub of it — a phantom that lurks in the surrounding woods and more particularly within.
The phantom manifests three times — (a) in the opening scene in which the small son of Matthias (Marin Grigore), an unemployed slaughterhouse worker, is spooked by its off-screen presence while walking in the woods, (b) in the third act when a significant characters hangs himself (also in the woods), and (c) at the very end when four or five bears are spotted by Matthias after nightfall (ditto).
R.M.N. is a meditative slow-burn parable that you’ll either get or you won’t, but there’s no missing the brilliance of a one-shot town hall meeting in which the locals are demanding that the Sri Lankans be expelled from the community.
The shot lasts for roughly 17 minutes, and it’s all fast, bickering dialogue, simultaneously burrowing into the ignorance of the townies while building and deepening and man-oh-man…it’s so fucking great that I said to myself “this is it…this is what my Cristian Mungiu fixes are all about, and thank the Lords of Cannes for allowing me, a traveller from the states, to absorb this in my well-cushioned theatre seat.
The build-up narrative is about Matthias and his mute son Rudi (Mark Blenyesi), his resentful ex-wife Ana (Macrina Bârlădeanu) and Csilla, a passionate, kind-hearted bakery manager and cello player (Judith State) whom Matthias has an undefined sexual relationship with. He never says he actually “loves” her although he keeps returning to her home for solace and whatnot.
Secondary characters include the bakery owner, Mrs. Denes (Orsolya Moldován), and the local priest, Papa Otto (Andrei Finți), and a sizable gathering of anxious, agitated citizens who are basically the local reps of the Mississippi Burning club.
I was going to throw a little snark by alluding to Gene Wilder’s description of the townspeople of Blazing Saddles — “Simple people, people of the land, common clay…you know, morons.”
One of the finest observations I’ve ever read about Brian Wilson is contained in a review of Love and Mercy, written bv Los Angeles magazine’s Steve Erickson. Two sentences in particular.
One in which Erickson describes Wilson’s post-Pet Sounds, Smile-era comedown in which “the celestial sounds in his head turned on him, and became the screams of angels falling from heaven.”
The second alludes to Wilson’s music-creating process: “Great artists create in circles, not lines, in the ever-bending curl of the wave rather than in its rush to the shore’s conclusion.” Great writing!
Thrice-told Brian Wilson story: I was living in an upstairs one-bedroom apartment at 948 14th Street in Santa Monica, doing nothing, working as a tree surgeon…my lost period. (I began my adventure in movie journalism the following year.) Right below me lived a guy named Eddie Roach and his wife Tricia. At the time he was working with the Beach Boys as a kind of staff or “touring” photographer. Dennis Wilson fell by two or three times and hung out a bit, and one time I was part of a small group that played touch football with him at a local high-school field. Dennis mocked me that day for being a bad hiker, which I was. (But Dennis was a dick… really. Insecure machismo, didn’t like him, felt nothing when he died.)
Anyway it was a cloudy Saturday or Sunday afternoon and I was lounging in my living room when I began to hear someone tooling around on Eddie’s piano downstairs. It sounded like the beginnings of a song. It began with a thumping, rolling boogie lead-in, complex and grabby, and then the spirited vocal: “Back home boogie, bong-dee-bong boogie…yay-hah…back home boogie, bong-dee-bong”…and then he stopped. One of the chords wasn’t quite right so he played a couple of variations over and over, and then again: “”Back home boogie, bong-dee-bong boogie yay-hah!” and so on. Then another mistake and another correction.
Then he stopped again and started laughing like a ten year-old drunk on beer: “Hah-hah, heh-heh, heh-heh!” and then right back into the song without losing a beat. Really great stuff. Who is this guy?
I grabbed my cassette recorder and went outside and walked down the steps to Eddie’s place, and I laid it down on one of the steps and started recording. I must have captured two or three minutes worth.
Then I decided to knock on Eddie’s door and pretend I needed to borrow a cup of milk or something. I had to know who the piano guy was. Eddie opened the door and I said “hey, man,” and in the rear of the living room stood a tall and overweight Brian Wilson. He was dressed in a red shirt and jeans and white sneakers, and was cranked and excited and talking about how great some idea might be, gesturing with his arms up high. Then he saw me and almost ran over to the doorway.
Kelly Reichardt‘s Showing Up (A24, 4.7) “opened” in some fashion about a month ago. I reviewed it at the close of last year’s Cannes Film Festival. Now that it’s out and about it can’t hurt to repost.
My 5.27 review, titled “The Pigeon of Crocville,” began with a riff about Crocs. This triggered a complaint from “Bob Hightower” about the appropriateness of such an approach. HE reply: “Yes, it’s a film review that mentions how Crocs, in a certain light, seem representative of the rural northwestern Reichert universe.”
Actual review: “An awful lot of people (i.e., at least two and possibly three) wear Crocs in Kelly Reichart‘s Showing Up, and I don’t mean the Balenciaga kind. And their presence in this quiet, sluggish but not-overly-problematic film represented…well, a slight problem.
To me Crocs are just bad — bad omens, everything I hate, unsightly, bad all over. And every time I saw one of Reichart’s characters walking around in these rubber swiss-cheese loafers it gave me a bad feeling. I didn’t cringe every time, but a voice inside went “aw, shit.”
Michelle Williams wears Crocs in this thing, and yet (significantly) this didn’t interfere with my liking, relating to and even enjoying her character — “Lizzie Carr”, a 40ish figurine sculptor who lives in a rented home in the Portland area, and who is preparing for a showing of her art in a nearby storefront-slash-salon.
Lizzie regards almost everyone and everything with an air of subdued consternation or vague resentment or sardonic resignation…my general spiritual territory.
I can’t say that Lizzie (or any other character in Showing Up) is involved in an actual story. For Reichart is naturally adhering to her familiar scheme of avoiding narrative propulsion like the plague. She’s into women and laid-back men and mulchy atmospheres and odd, low-energy behavior and whatnot. There are no second-act pivots in a Reichart film because there are no first, second or third acts, or at least not the kind that I recognize.
The only thing resembling a story in Showing Up is the plight of a wounded pigeon. The poor bird is mauled by Lizzie’s Calico cat, and left with a broken wing. Lizzie and her landlord, Jo Tran (Hong Chau), put the pigeon in a shoe box and take turns looking after it. During Lizzie’s art show at the close of the film, the pigeon is unwrapped and set free and off it goes into the wild blue yonder.
The Portland-set Showing Up is, of course, concurrently set in deep Wokeville. To an anti-wokester like myself, it’s like watching a film set in Communist East Germany in the ’60s, ’70s or ’80s. The very notion of a film about Wokeville women and the inconsequential, low-energy men in their lives (ex-husbands, beardos, dads, brothers, laid-back co-workers)…a social satire set in this organic, unhurried, arts-and-craftsy environment could be an opportunity for something alive and biting. But not with Reichardt at the helm.
Showing Up has been described as a comedy, although it didn’t strike me as such. It has a vagueiy slouchy observational attitude. Every 10 or 15 minutes it elicits a subdued titter.
This is because the focus is entirely on vaguely morose Lizzie, whose general outlook is not, shall we say, bursting with optimistic expectation. She’s in a kind of a downish place start to finish. This is partly due to Tran’s lazy reluctance to fix the hot-water heater.
One of the best moments happens when Lizzie, fuming over her inability to take a hot shower, beats up a couple of plants in Tran’s small front-yard garden. Please…more or this! But that’s the end of it.
That’s all I have to say about Showing Up. It’s not bad by Reichardt standards…oh, wait, I’ve already said that.
…the pitchforkers will sulk and scowl all the more.
Instagram photo credit: David Geimer.
There’s a moment in Martin Scorsese‘s After Hours (’85) when Griffin Dunne‘s miserable lost soul eyeballs a graffiti drawing of a guy’s schlong getting chomped on by a shark.
That’s the one transcendent, pure-light moment in this dark, hard-to-swallow situation “comedy” about how a thirtysomething Manhattan male gets swallowed up by a predatory vortex of Soho hostility.
But After Hours isn’t really about the vortex as much as Dunne’s feelings of panic, helplessness and self-loathing. Why does this guy refuse to man up and figure his way out of a difficult but far-from-insurmountable situation? And why have we paid to watch a film about this wormy?
All the hipsters and know-it-alls swear by After Hours, but it’s not very good..it really isn’t.
In the same sense that Parasite slit its own throat when the drunken con artist mom allowed the fired maid into the home of the rich family, After Hours never even tries to sell the idea that Dunne would visit Soho to see about trying to fuck Roseanna Arquette with a lousy $20 in his pocket (just under $60 in 2023 dollars), or that the $20 would somehow fly out of the taxicab window, or that Dunne believed he was actually stuck and stranded in Soho when all he had to do was hop the turnstile and catch a subway back home.
If he was too chicken to hop the turnstile all he had to do was scrape together 90 cents, which is what a subway ride cost at the time. 90 cents!
Criterion will release a 4K and 1080p Bluray combo of After Hours on 7.11.23. Why would anyone want to pay $40 for this?
I re-watched my 4K UHD Apocalypse Now Bluray last night, and I wasn’t totally happy. I saw this 1979 classic at the Ziegfeld theatre two or three times in August and September of ’79, and the big-screen presentation (we’re thinking back almost 44 years) blows the 4K disc away. Aurally and visually, but especially in terms of sharp, punctuating fullness of sound.
Apocalypse Now was presented at the Ziegfeld within a 2:1 aspect ratio, which Vittorio Storaro insisted upon through thick and thin. The 4K disc uses what looked to me with a standard Scope a.r. of 2.39:1.
And the general sharpness of the image on that big Ziegfeld screen just isn’t replicated by the 4K. It looks “good”, of course, but not as good as it should.
As we begin to listen to The Doors’ “The End” while staring at that tropical tree line, John Densmore’s high hat could be heard loudly and crisply from a Ziegfeld side speaker. Before that moment I had never heard any high-hat sound so clean and precise. But it doesn’t sound nearly as pronounced on the 4K disc, which I listened to, by the way, with a pricey SONOS external speaker.
Remember that “here’s your mission, Captain” scene with G.D. Spradlin, Harrison Ford and that white-haired guy? When that scene abruptly ends, we’re suddenly flooded with electronic synth organ music…it just fills your soul and your chest cavity. Filled, I should say, 44 years ago. But not that much with the disc.
When Martin Sheen and the PBR guys first spot Robert Duvall and the Air Cav engaged in a surfside battle, Sheen twice says “arclight.” In the Ziegfeld the bass woofer began rumbling so hard and bad that the floor and walls began to vibrate like bombs were exploding on 54th Street…the hum in my rib cage was mesmerizing. Not so much when you’re watching the 4K.
As Duvall’s gunship helicopters take off for the attack on a Vietnamese village (“Vin Din Lop…all these gook names sound the same”), an Army bugler begins playing the cavalry charge. It was clear as a bell in the Ziegfeld — less so last night.
Friendo: “This never would’ve happened if Logan Roy was still with us.“
Theories as to why Tucker Carlson has suddenly left Fox News? One presumes that it has something to do with the recent Fox-Dominion settlement, but what exactly could have been the trigger?
Wildcat theory: Carlson might conceivably throw his hat into the 2024 Presidential race.
Here was the end of what turned out to be Tucker Carlson's final Fox News show last Friday. Certainly no indication that he didn't expect to be on the air tonight. In fact Tucker's final words are, "we'll be back on Monday." pic.twitter.com/F9R5MpWHDK
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 24, 2023
