CNN This Morning‘s Don Lemon has never played the role of a straight-arrow, buttoned-down news anchor type. As an out gay man, he’s occasionally flirted with a somewhat nervy and even flamboyant demeanor at times, closer in spirit to Andy Cohen than Anderson Cooper.
But then he stepped into real shit on 2.16.23 when he declared that 51 year-old Nikki Haley isn’t in her prime. Women, he meant, are in their prime in their 20s, 30s and early 40s —- an obvious reference to their sexual peak, which is demeaning as hell when you’re talking about a Presidential candidate or any woman serving in any professional capacity.
Business Insider is reporting that Lemon is considering a possible lawsuit over Siegel’s takedown piece, which alleges that he has a history of demeaning and occasionally threatening and female colleagues including Soledad O’Brien, Kyra Phillips and Nancy Grace.
“[CNN has] known for years,” a media source has told the New York Post. “But Lemon is not going to sue because then they’d have to depose people and more stuff could come out.”
One thing in Siegel’s story is worded evasively. She reports that in 2014, Lemon “drew widespread condemnation when he told a Bill Cosby rape accuser that she could have stopped an attack by biting the comedian’s penis.” That implies that Cosby may have been trying to physically overpower or manhandle the victim. In fact the victim had told Lemon that Cosby was somehow forcing her to give him a blowjob. Lemon suggested that the victim could have stopped that activity right quick with her teeth.
It was a very Don Lemon-y comment, for sure. I can’t imagine any TV news anchor coming within 100 feet of this line of questioning. But Lemon has always been Lemon.
Last night I caught my second viewing of Air, and it seemed to gain somewhat. It certainly didn’t diminish. My third viewing will be with subtitles, and then it’ll really gain.
I especially loved how Matt Damon‘s eloquent emotional pitch to the Jordan family near the end is off-the-cuff, and in so doing echoes the second half of Martin Luther King‘s “I have a dream” speech, which was also largely improvised, and is discussed early in the film. This is called “refrain” — one of the most solid and dependable tricks in the book.
But one minor thing has stuck in my craw.
Director Ben Affleck‘s decision not to show Michael Jordan is an understandable one. “”He exists above and around the story, but if you ever concretize him, if you ever say, ‘Yes, that’s Michael Jordan,’ they’ll know it’s not, really..it’s fake,” Affleck explained in a People interview. I thought if they bring everything they thought and remembered about [Michael] and what he meant to them to the movie and projected it onto the movie, it [would work] better.”
And so Jordan stand-in Damian Delano in only seen from the rear, and Jordan’s voice is only heard once on a phone line (“hello”). The physical Jordan/Delano presence only happens toward the conclusion (i.e., during the afore-mentioned Nike pitch meeting plus one or two others). But here’s the thing — the camera’s avoidance of Jordan’s face and Affleck not even allowing us to hear a few words from the guy also feels “fake.” The dodge feels too conspicuous. It intrudes upon the reality of that climactic moment and the overall third-act flow.
I don’t know what the solution could have been or if one was possible, but if I’d been directing I would have persuaded the present-tense Jordan, 60, to record a few lines of dialogue. Maybe a few quips, maybe a pungent observation of some kind,. Hearing the Real McCoy certainly would’ve helped.
On the other hand would it have been that hard to find a young Michael Jordan look-alike? We all know that movies are fake from start to finish — what matters is conviction and bringing your best game to the table.
It could have been argued by the producers of The Longest Day (’62) that Dwight D. Eisenhower was too big of a historical figure and that people would instantly know that Henry Grace, the set decorator who played the nation’s 34th president in an early scene, was just some joker pretending to be Ike.
Of course audiences knew that, but the second that Grace’s face appeared on the big screen, it worked. Audiences appreciated the effort and approved for the most part. Grace’s voice was dubbed by voice actor Allen Swift.
It’s great that Mitchell is singing and playing guitar and sounding pretty good, particularly in the wake of having suffered a brain aneurysm in late March of 2015. She was in fairly bad shape after that tragedy, but she’s recovered (or at least is recovering) to a significant degree, and praise be to God for this.
The key question to me is “is Joni still smoking?” Because that’s almost certainly what helped to bring about her aneurysm. She initially lost her ability to speak and walk, and still needs a little help getting around as we speak.
I was so concerned about Mitchell’s well-being in the wake of the aneurysm that I once hand-delivered an admonishing fan letter to her Spanish home in Bel Air. I insisted I was one of her biggest fans and begged her to think about vaping instead of sticking with tobacco.
Mitchell may have decided that life isn’t worth living without the pleasure of unfiltered cigarettes, but maybe not. She once said in an interview that she began smoking at age 9 or 10 or something. At a certain point the body just can’t take the nicotine and the toxins and complications will manifest.
It’s wonderful, in any event, that Mitchell has regained (or is in the process of regaining) her singing and guitar-playing abilities. She’ll turn 80 on 11.7.23.
Posted on 3.31.15: I attended a short, smallish concert that Mitchell gave at Studio 54 in October ’82 to promote “Wild Things Run Fast.” The crowd was not huge, maybe 150 or so, and I was standing fairly close and pretty much dead center. No female artist has ever touched me like Mitchell**, and I was quite excited about being this close to her.
I was beaming, starry-eyed and staring at her like the most self-abasing suck-up fan you could imagine, and during the first song her eyes locked onto mine and I swear to God we began to kind of half-stare at each other. (Some performers do this, deciding to sing for this or that special person in the crowd.) Her eyes danced around from time to time but she kept coming back to me, and I remember thinking, “Okay, she senses that I love her and she probably likes my looks so I guess I’m her special fanboy or something for the next few minutes.”
Mitchell was dressed in a white pants suit and some kind of colorful scarf, and she sang and played really well, and I remember she had a little bit of a sexy tummy thing going on. Sorry but that had a portion of my attention along with the songs and “being there” and a feeling that I’d remember this moment for decades to come.
On 8.5.15 L.A. Times staffer Noah Biermanreported that Jerry Lewis had donated a copy of The Day The Clown Cried, an unfinished 1972 holocaust drama that Lewis had directed, written and starred in, to the Library of Congress.
It was stipulated, however, that the film couldn’t be screened “for at least ten years,” and only then with the permission of the Lewis estate. (Lewis passed on 8.20.17 at age 91.)
On 10.14.15 (or two months after the Bierman piece) I was informed by Mike Mashon, head of the Moving Image section on the LoC campus, that the embargo on TDTCC would be in place “for ten years,” and would therefore extend until 2025.
Although the LoC apparently intends to eventually screen The Day The Clown Cried at its Audio Visual Conservation campus in Culpeper, Virginia, curator Rob Stone has stated the LoC does not have a complete print of the film.
Posted on 6.15.16: I’m hardly an authority when it comes to Jerry Lewis‘s never-seen The Day The Clown Cried (’72), but to my knowledge an assembly of scenes from the finished film has never been shown to anyone.
This morning a friend passed along a 31-minute Vimeo file (posted two months ago but yanked on Thursday morning…sorry) that provides the first real taste of Clown, or at least the first I’ve ever sat through.
And you know what? I don’t see what’s so godawful about it.
Okay, the scheme is manipulative bordering on the grotesque — Lewis as a German-Jewish clown in a Nazi concentration camp who’s ordered in the final act to amuse a group of children being sent to the “showers” — but that elephant aside it didn’t strike me as all that agonizing or offensive. Really. Lewis’s performance seems more or less restrained as far as the writing allows, and the story unfolds in a series of steps that seem reasonably logical. The supporting perfs and period milieu seem decent enough.
When everyone finally sees The Day The Clown Cried in 2024 (or ’25) the verdict may be that it’s not a mediocre, miscalculated effort (or that it is…who knows?), but I didn’t smell a catastrophe as I watched this whatever-you-want-to-call-it. Plus it costars HE’s own Harriet Andersson.
Ari Aster’s BeauIsAfraid (A24, 4.21) was previewed yesterday (Saturday, 4.1) to a paying audience at Brooklyn’s Alamo Draft House (445 Albee Square, Brooklyn, NY 11201), and Variety’s Brent Lang was apparently theretoendureit.
Presuming that the synopsis is legit, Aster’s 179-minute “horror comedy” (set to open in select IMAX theaters on 4.14 before opening wider on 4.21) is apparently some kind of grotesque, audience–punishingfantasia — a surreal acid trip version of a 21st Century AliceinWonderland-meets-Homer’s TheOdyssey, except with a bloated, gray-haired, “twitchy and over-medicated” Phoenix in the Alice role — and not for the faint of heart.
A few excerpts from Lang’sarticle, which was filed late Saturday afternoon:
(1) Q&A moderator Emma Stone to Aster following the screening: “Are you okay, man?”
(2) The film features a paint-drinking, antagonistic teenaged protagonist (Kylie Rogers), an animated sequence, a “recurring gag involving Phoenix’sdistendedtesticles”, and “a sex scene with [the mid 50ish] Parker Posey that may rank among the wackiest ever committed to film.”
(3) “The [Draft House] crowd seemed to love it, although thegeneralpublicmayhaveatoughertime” with this “bladder–testingepic.”
(4) Aster comment during the Stone Q&A: “I want [the audience] to go through [Phoenix’s] guts and comeoutofhisbutt.”
(5) The black-garbed Phoenix attended the screening but chose not to participate in the Q&A.
It’s not the end of the world and the sun will come up tomorrow morning, but HE was rooting for Gwyneth Paltrow to lose the Deer Valley ski trial. That hasn’t happened. A Utah jury has bought her side of the story and that’s that. Time to move on.
I’ve just re-watched Steven Soderbergh‘s Kafka (’91), a half-spooky, half-gloomy noir that looks and feels like early 1920s German expressionism. It’s mostly and appropriately shot in black-and-white, but it’s such a downer to sit through that it almost feels euphoric when the film suddenly shifts into color during the last 15 minutes or so.
Written by Lem Dobbs and handsomely shot by Walt Lloyd, the Prague-set period flick (1919) fictionalizes the adventures of the fearful and paranoid Franz Kafka (Jeremy Irons) as he attempts to uncover the dark plottings of a creepy cabal of ne’er-do-wells who operate out of “the castle” that overlooks the city.
Kafka didn’t go down too well when it opened 31 years ago, and I can’t say it works any better today.
Irons overdoes the anxious, often terrified, bug-eyed thing. After a while you’re saying “Jesus, will you stop twitching and glaring and play it cool for a change?…channel some Lee Marvin and at least pretend to be a man.”
Okay, it’s not that bad. I was bored, yes, but I didn’t hate sitting through it. It’s just that my heart rate went down.
It’s a serious shame that an HD version isn’t streamable. The 480P version that I watched today looks awful…so soft and bleary at times that it almost seems out of focus.
Sometime in ’21 Soderbergh created a new version of Kafka, titled Mr. Kneff. Re-cut, re-imagined and dialogue-free with subtitles. It screened at the Toronto Film Festival that year, and was supposed to be released as part of a Soderbergh box set sometime in late ’21 or maybe sometime in ’22. It never happened, but I’m told the box set will show its face sometime…aahh, who knows? But maybe later this year.
The climactic final act of Kafka abandons black-and-white for color (which my eyes rather enjoyed) and becomes a kind of Indiana Jones film. Briefly.
Irons enjoyed a great big-screen run of A-quality films between the early ’80s and mid ’90s — roughly 12 or 13 years. The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Moonlighting, Betrayal, Swann in Love, Dead Ringers, Reversal of Fortune, Kafka, Damage, M. Butterfly, The House of the Spirits. In ’84 I saw Irons opposite Glenn Close in the first Broadway version of The Real Thing. He was the absolute king of the world back then.
I’ve enjoyed re-reading my second-hand (i.e., possibly inaccurate to some extent) story about Irons and temporary Kafka costar Anne Parillaud. The piece was initially initially posted in 2009.
Dead-center horizon lines are banal, agreed, but the best outdoorsy photos, paintings and cinematic compositions are about whatever works, depending on the ingredients…the mystical altogether, balance and intrigue…God’s eye is God’s eye, and horizon lines be damned. I’ve been snapping photos since I was 12 or 13 so don’t tell me, John Martin Feeney.
A highly unusual and disturbing thing happened in bucolic Wilton on the morning of Tuesday, 3.21, or five days ago. A 39 year-old married guy was stabbed to death by a 31 year-old nutbag neighbor. The victim’s name was Arinzechukwu “Red” Ukachukwu (tough pronounce), and the killer was and is Sebastian Andrews, a 31 year-old guy who was living with his father and an older brother on Wilton’s Indian Hill Road.
The victim and his wife, Alisha Lager, bought their home “after the pandemic,” according to a toothless story by Hearst Media Group’s Peter Yankowski. Lager is left to care for their two-year-old son.
I found an attractive, magic-hour photo of the couple on Lager’s Facebook page. The victim, the assailant and Lager — all Millennials.
Yankowski: “Born on 1.12.84, Ukachukwu was a creative entrepreneur, musician and a tech wizard. He was raised in Brooklyn by parents who were active in the Nigerian community. He attended private schools and then Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts. In 2005 he graduated from the University of Albany with a degree in economics.”
Fox61’s Matt Caronreported that at last Wednesday’s hearing Andrews asked to speak and was advised by his attorney, Kevin Black, not to say anything. The state’s attorney said that “there appears to be some sort of psychological issue involved.”
The arrest warrant reports that Andrews alleged that he found Ukachukwu “trespassing on [his father’s] property several times.” This appears to be an unsubstantiated claim.
Compounded with the “psychological issue,” facts suggests that the killing was some kind of bizarre racial hate crime, perhaps in a vein vaguely similar to the 2020 killing of Ahmaud Arbery. Who stabs a neighbor with a kitchen knife and then drags his body into a garage and then takes a shower and calmly waits for the cops to arrive?
The crime was reported by Andrews’ father, who saw the killing happen in real time. Nobody has spoken to him, nor has anyone explored if his now-jailed son had some kind of social media history. I poked around and found nothing.
In yesterday’s pan of the revolting and deplorable John Wick: Chapter Four, I should have mentioned my grudging respect for an extended, uncut overhead shot of Keanu Reeves going from room to room and blasting bad guys at every turn with the camera constantly maintaining its God’s-eye viewpoint.
In a 3.25 interview with TheWrap‘s Scott Mendelson, dp DanLaustsen (totally unpronouncable) explains that the scene utilized a set built on one of the Studio Babelsberg sound stages.
Laustsen: “It’s one crane shot and one spider cam shot where we are starting on the stairs and flying around. We did in eight or ten takes. The light must be outside the set. We see the whole set. That’s the challenge when your shots are wide and the entire set is in view.”
John Wick 4’s god’s-eye gunfight has been called the “Hotline Miami” scene but I was surprised to see Chad name an even more obscure indie game as inspiration
HONG KONG MASSACRE is Hotline Miami x John Woo, and JW4 beautifully adopts its top-down look & gargantuan muzzle flashes pic.twitter.com/hGU3A47icE
The “rules” of high-powered action films over the last 20-plus years is that there are no rules. Life is worthless, death is immaterial, nothing matters, nothing sticks and everything’s everything, baby. You can globe-hop at will and stage big set pieces and start fires and blast everything to bits and nobody blinks an eye…explode at will, kill dozens or hundreds of guys, jump out of three-story buildings, get hit by speeding cars, get shot two or three or eighteen times yourself…it’s all a bullshit cartoon. There are no humans with recognizable characteristics…no behavior that makes a lick of sense.
This is the cold, cynical, sick-fuck, android travel-porn world of Chad Stahelski, a former stunt man and a soulless visual composer, and the godforsaken John Wick: Chapter Four, which I just suffered through for 169 minutes. And the theatre lobby is like fucking Disneyland…family fun for dads, kids, moms, little girls. It’s surreal, sickening.
I saw Wick 4 because I was feeling good about life and I needed to re-pollute my soul…because I needed an injection of green Stahelski poison coursing through my veins. And because I wanted to revel in the Paris portions of this insane, rancid, ugly-ass film, which take up the last…oh, 45 or 50 minutes. And because I wanted to cheer the death of Keanu Reeves‘ John Wick, and I don’t mean an action-film tentpole death that doesn’t really mean anything (like the “death” of 007 in No Time To Die, which ended with a credit crawl pledge that said “James Bond will return”) but a real, honest-to-God, stick-him-in-the-ground death that doesn’t allow for rebirths or reboots. Because I half-liked the first Wick but have hated the expanding insanity that followed.
That’s why I caught a 3 pm show on Saturday, 3.25. As to whether or not my expectations were satisfied…I can’t answer that.
Filming started in June 2021, initially in Berlin and Paris before moving on to Osaka and New York City. They wrapped in October of that year.
The varied Paris locations are grand and beautiful, and scene to scene it’s all handsomely lighted and designed and shot with appropriate pictorial panache. I sat there like an Egyptian sphinx. I had my phone on the whole time, and when the boredom became too much you’d better believe I checked my texts and did some research.
I was pleased and comforted that Stahelski covered all the diverse casting bases…a studly Anglo-Hawaiian lead (Reeves), three Asian actors (Donnie Yen, Hiroyuki Sanada, Rina Sawayama), a young Swedish evil guy (the ice-cold Bill Skarsgård, aka “Pennywise”), three black dudes (Shamier Anderson, Lance Reddick, Laurence Fishburne), an action star in a fat suit who says “you shot me in the ass!” (Scott Adkins), a Chilean guy (Marko Zaror) and an aging British smoothie (Ian McShane).
Wick 4 is the first action film I’ve seen in which the guns don’t appear to shoot actual bullets. They shoot “ding” bullets, which is to say bullets that aren’t as lethal or damaging as they usually are. I’m not saying they’re high-powered beebee pellets, but some guys need to be shot three and four times before they go down for the count. Either way Reeves doesn’t have to worry because he never gets shot until…I’d better not say.
Posted on HE 11 1/2 years ago: “In 1987 Lethal Weapon used a funny jumping-off-a-building gag. Ragged-edge cop Mel Gibson is sent to the top of a four-story building to talk an unstable guy out of making a suicide leap. Gibson winds up cuffing himself to the guy and jumping off the building, and they’re both falling to their deaths…not. They land on one of those huge inflated tent-sized bags…whomp!…that cops and firemen use to save people. All is well.
“Flash forward to another jumping-off-a-building scene in Brad Bird and Tom Cruise‘s Mission: impossible 4 — Ghost Protocol (’11), which I saw last night. An American operative is being chased over a rooftop by baddies in Budapest. He fires some rounds, kills a couple of guys, and then escapes by leaping off the building, continuing to shoot as he falls four or five stories to the pavement below. He’s saved, however, when he lands on a modest air mattress that’s about one-tenth the size of Lethal Weapon‘s tent-sized bag.
“Where did this miracle air mattress come from? We’re not told. In what physical realm does a guy leap backwards four stories onto an air mattress that’s a little bit larger than a king-sized bed and live? I’ll tell you what realm. The realm of Mission: Impossible 4 — Ghost Protocol and its brethren.
From Glenn Erickson’s longish review of the new 4K Bluray of Damien Chazelle‘s Babylon, which streets today: “Babylon lives up to the crazy reports that accompanied its theatrical release last December — it’s a spectacular Hollywood history movie that ignores Hollywood history in favor of exaggerated orgies and drug use, as if Kenneth Anger’s bad gossip were just the tip of the scandal iceberg.
“In entertainment terms it’s a 188-minute gross-out that wants to be shocking but is mainly unpleasant. Anachronistic profanity is non-stop, but the dealbreaker comes in the very first scene with an enormous, diarrhetic elephant whose bodily eliminations rival Noah’s Flood. Margot Robbie is a dynamo and Brad Pitt as charming as ever, but the movie overall is ideal only for the curious and the masochistic.
“Babylon, in short, is oppressively off-putting, and no deep thought is required to explain why it wasn’t a hit. Word of mouth likely did the job, as most audiences would find it unpleasant at best and at worst intolerable. Personal tastes vary, but I know nobody who would think the movie’s excesses are entertaining. If I were to take a date to this picture, within three minutes I’d be telling the person, ‘it’s perfectly okay if you want to walk out right now.’ Babylon may do much better on disc and streaming than it did in theaters — a lot of moviegoers out there are curious.”
