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I never know how to react to showbiz hagiography docs, which always seem to explore and celebrate the life of a famous person in the same way. They all say “this person didn’t lead an easy life and endured his/her share of challenges, sorrows and setbacks, but he/she was nonetheless fascinating and lovable and certainly admirable, hence this tribute doc about what an vivid and nourishing life he/she led…nourishing for all of us, really.”

I’m not saying that Being Mary Tyler Moore (Max, 5.26), a two-hour doc about the beloved star of The Mary Tyler Moore Show in the early to mid ’70s and costar of The Dick Van Dyke Show in the early to mid ’60s, is dishonest or banal or sugar-coated — it’s a somewhat open-hearted, reasonably honest piece of polished portraiture as far as it goes. But it sure plays and feels like dozens of other such docs that I’ve seen over the years.

The intention is to make the longtime fan feel good about Moore’s life, and to reassure them that the person she seemed to be (or that she had been reported to be) all those years was more or less genuine, and confirm that the typical fan’s emotional investment in Moore was sensible and sound.

It succeeds in this effort, and I was more or less fine with the final import. I didn’t believe some of it. I knew it was downplaying the dark and thorny and emphasizing the sunny side-up, but that’s what docs like this do. But I believed a fair amount of it, and that was enough.

From my 1.25.17 obit: Poor Mary Tyler Moore has passed at age 80. Nine people out of ten will fondly recall her 16-year run (with a three-year gm my 1.25ap) in two hugely popular TV sitcoms, first as Laura Petrie on The Dick Van Dyke Show (’61 through ’66) and then Mary Richards in The Mary Tyler Moore Show (’70 through ’77). She was especially perfect in the latter series, doing that sunny, wholesome and vulnerable thing to full perfection and winning three Lead Actress Emmy awards in the bargain.

But to me Moore will always be Beth Jarrett, the emotionally frigid mom of Timothy Hutton and wife of Donald Sutherland in Robert Redford‘s Ordinary People (’80) — one of the greatest screen villains in history and surely Moore’s finest role. If she had never done anything before or since, her portrayal of Beth the bitch (which resulted in a Best Actress nomination) would entitle her to a place of eternal honor in the annals of American cinema.

Feature-wise, Ordinary People was pretty much Moore’s career peak. She costarred in the not-so-hot Six Weeks (’82) and then Just Between Friends (’86). But then she rebounded as another high-strung bitchy type in David O. Russell‘s Flirting With Disaster (’96). Moore also costarred in Elvis Presley‘s last scripted film, Change of Habit, in which she played a work-clothes-wearing nun who allowed herself to develop romantic stirrings for The King.

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Snapped at Moorcest on 2.26.28, the below photo was taken on the wedding day photo of movie director Kenneth Hawks (younger brother of Howard Hawks) and actress Mary Astor.

Kenneth was born on 8.12.98, and was therefore, believe it or not, 29 when this photo was taken.

Kenneth reportedly gave Astor a new Packard as a wedding gift. They soon moved to a home on Lookout Mountain in Laurel Canyon. Less than two years later he was dead.

Initially a writer, editor and supervisor at Fox Films Corporation, Kenneth began directing films for Fox in ’29 — a year or so after his marriage. On 1.2.30, the 31-year-old was traumatically killed while directing aerial scenes for Such Men Are Dangerous. He and nine others were instantly destroyed following a mid-air plane crash over the Pacific Ocean. The planes that smashed into each other were identical Stinson SM-1F Detroiters. Sun glare was listed as probable cause.

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My final Cannes ’23 screening will be Alice Rohrwacher‘s La Chimera, which screens at the Grand Lumiere at 3:30 pm.

Pic costars Josh O’Connor and Isabella Rossellini. Filming began in Tuscany roughly 15 months ago. Dictionary definitions of “chimera” seem elusive: (a) “A fire-breathing female monster with a lion’s head, a goat’s body, and a serpent’s tail,” and (b) “a thing which is hoped for but is illusory or impossible to achieve.”

Packing and cleaning up this evening, and then catching a train back to Paris at 11:24 am.

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!

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…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.”

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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.

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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.