There was something so soulful and sensual (at least in my head) about Christine McVie‘s singing voice. And I always sensed something randy about her nature. She was hot and heavy with Dennis Wilson in ’73 or ’74…something like that. I used to fantasize about her now and then…sorry.
Of all the Fleetwood Mac hits McVie crooned, my all-time favorite is the melancholy “Did I Ever Love You?.” (Or “Did You Ever Love Me?” — one of those.) Co-written by McVie and Bob Weston, it’s about a relationship that’s no longer working, largely due to the guy behaving like an aloof dick for too much of the time.
Released as a single in ’73, the song didn’t track. “Did I Ever Love You?” is Fleetwood Mac’s only flirtation with steel drums, which obviously makes it sound kind of Jamaican.
‘
McVie passed today at age 79. I’m very sorry.
I’ve been working on launching a special industry-friendly film series at the renowned Bedford Playhouse, which is run by Dan Friedman. The program is called Bedford Marquee, and a 12.5 screening of Damien Chazelle’s Babylon will kick things off.
I’ll be offering a few observations (including some historical footnotes) a few minutes before the show begins at 7 pm.
Located within the Clive Davis Arts Center, the BP is one of the finest commercial screening facilities I’ve ever settled into — easily the technical equal of any upscale industry screening facility (including the Academy Museum theatre and/or the classic AMPAS theatre in Beverly Hills) in the U.S., Paris, Cannes or anywhere.
Esteemed restoration guru Robert Harris supervised the BP’s upgrade.
We’re also planning a special mid-January screening of the recently restored InvadersFromMars (‘53). The film was painstakingly restored by Scott MacQueen, who will present a master class about the film’s history and cultural influence.
Asprawling three-hour epic of 1920s Hollywood, Babylon opens nationwide on 12.23.
“The history of recorded images might be described as an incremental quest to master the building blocks of consciousness — first sight, then motion, then sound, then color. With Avatar (’09), Cameron revealed that human ingenuity could marshal even more: physics, light, dimensionality; the ineffable sense of an object being real; the life force that makes a thing feel alive.
“This is not to say that Avatar is good. The movie is basically a demo tape, each plot point reverse-engineered to show off some new feat of technology. The awe it inspires was not just about itself but rather the hope of new possibilities. It was easy to imagine someone in 2009 leaving the theater and asking: ‘What if we made more movies like this? What if we made good movies like this?’
“The year 2009 was a relatively optimistic one: Obama had just won on the audacity of ‘hope.’ Climate change still felt far away. The forever wars were going to end. Surely we would fix whatever caused the recession. Avatar pointed toward a widening horizon — better effects, new cinematic worlds, new innovations in 3-D technology. It did not yet seem incongruous to wrap a project based in infinite progress around a story about the perils of infinite growth.
“Avatar: The Way of Water (20th Century, 12.16) will emerge into an almost total deferment of that dream. Today, 3-D is niche (at best); digital effects are used to cut costs; home streaming is threatening the theater; and projects of ambitious world-building are overlooked in favor of stories with existing fanbases.”
I was told earlier today that the Gangs of New York Wikipedia page mentions a noteworthy piece by yours truly, posted in December 2001, that described the differences between a 1.37:1 work print version of Gangs that I saw on VHS vs. the final 2.39:1 release version. Here’s a link to the original article, and here’s a repost of it:
If Miramax Films and Martin Scorsese had decided to release a polished, cleaned-up version of the Gangs of New York work print they had in the can (or, if you want to get technical, that was stored on Marty and editor Thelma Schoonmaker‘s Avid) sometime in October ’01, we’d all be enjoying a better, more rewarding film than the Gangs that will open nationwide four days from now (12.20.02).
I’ve seen both versions and most of you haven’t, so I know something you don’t. The best Gangs of New York will not be hitting screens this weekend, and may never even be seen on DVD, given Scorsese’s apparent disinterest in releasing “director’s cut” versions of his films, or in supplying deleted scenes or outtakes or any of that jazz.
The work-print version is longer by roughly 20 minutes, and more filled out and expressive as a result, but that’s not the thing. The main distinction for me is that it’splainerand therefore morecinematic, as it doesn’t use the narration track that, in my view, pollutes the official version. It also lacks a musical score, with only some drums and temp music.
This leaves you free, in short, to simply pick and choose from the feast of visual information that Gangs of New York is, and make of it what you will. And if that isn’t the essence of great movie-watching, I don’t know what is.
It also points out what’s wrong with the theatrical release version, which I feel has been fussed over too intensively, compressed, simplified, lathered in big-movie music and, to some extent, thematically obscured.
Miramax and Scorsese had the superior work-print version in their hands 14 months ago. It’s a little rough around the edges, but it’s not tremendously different from the version being released on Friday. It is only missing Leonardo DiCaprio‘s narration, a musical score and some CG effects, which tells me it could have easily been prepared for a December ’01 release. But Miramax decided otherwise and pushed it back it until now. If you ask me their reasons for doing so were short-sighted and wrong.
I’ve always understood that Jones was born sometime around 1900, and so Ford (roughly 38 or 39 during the shooting of Raiders of the Lost Ark) will be inhabiting the 44 year-old archeologist in the forthcoming James Mangold film (Disney, 6.30.23).
Are we clear so far? In Indy 5 Jones will start out as a 44 year-old, or roughly six years older than he was in Last Crusade, which took place in 1938 and was released in 1989, when Ford was 47. Even I’m a bit confused.
The Indy 5 prelude is set in an old castle and involves Nazi antagonists. A blend of old footage plus anti-aging tech was used to make Ford look 44, or roughly how he appeared in Witness (’85) and The Mosquito Coast (’86). Ford was born in 1942.
Ford to Empire: “This is the first time I’ve seen [de-aging technology] where I believe it. It’s a little spooky. I don’t think I even want to know how it works, but it works.”
After the opener, Indy 5‘s story will advance 25 years to 1969, when Jones is supposed to be roughly 69. So Ford will be playing ten years younger than his actual age, which shouldn’t be a problem.
Back in the old days (i.e., seven or eight years ago and earlier) the Spirit Awards were known as the hip Oscars. Now they’re a secular award forum for the Woke Branch Davidians.
The Spirit Award nominations popped today, and what an inexplicable setback for The Whale‘s Brendan Fraser, who was expected to pick up an easy Best Lead Performance nom on his path to the Oscars.
If the Spirits were still adhering to gender categories, Fraser would have certainly been nominated for Best Actor.
But even under current gender-free system he still should have been nominated. Fraser plays a massively overweight gay guy (two woke points in one character) plus he has his emotional comeback narrative. What was the problem exactly?
On top of which the Spirit Davidians backhanded Danielle Deadwyler’s powerful performance as Mamie Till in Chinonye Chukwu’s Till. They brushed aside a major BIPOC performance in a film about the most searing incident in the 1950s and ’60s Civil Rights movement?
They also told James Gray‘s Armageddon Time to take a hike; ditto costar Jeremy Strong in the supporting category.
As things currently stand, the Spirit Davidians have announced ten nominations for Best Lead Performance, and only two honor male performances — Aftersun‘s Paul Mescal (a performance that I hated with a passion) and The Inspection‘s Jeremy Pope (which I still haven’t seen).
Here are the nominees along with HE’s boldfaced preferences in each category:
Best Feature:
“Bones and All” (MGM/United Artists Releasing)
“Everything Everywhere All at Once” (A24)
“Our Father, the Devil” (Resolve Media) “Tár” (Focus Features)
“Women Talking” (MGM/United Artists Releasing)
Best Director
Todd Field – “Tár”
Kogonada – “After Yang”
Daniel Kwan, Daniel Scheinert — “Everything Everywhere All at Once”
Sarah Polley – “Women Talking”
Halina Reijn – “Bodies Bodies Bodies”
Best Lead Performance
Cate Blanchett – “Tár”
Dale Dickey – “A Love Song”
Mia Goth – “Pearl”
Regina Hall – “Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul.”
Paul Mescal – “Aftersun”
Aubrey Plaza – “Emily the Criminal”
Jeremy Pope – “The Inspection”
Taylor Russell – “Bones and All”
Andrea Riseborough – “To Leslie”
Michelle Yeoh – “Everything Everywhere All at Once”
The opening scene of Damien Chazelle's Babylon (Paramount, 12.23) is set in a hilly section of Bel Air circa 1926. Except it doesn't look right. For 80 or 90 years Bel Air has been a flush and fragrant oasis for the super-wealthy, but in the mid '20s, according to Babylon, it was fairly dry and barren and desert-like -- no trees, no bushes, no grass and definitely no golf course. Almost Lawrence of Bel Air.
Login with Patreon to view this post
William Deterle's The Hunchback of Notre Dame ('39) was one of my father's favorite films. He took my mother to see it at a Norwalk revival house on their honeymoon. No one’s idea of a romantic gesture, and yet he may have been subliminally reaching out — he may been saying to my mother “will you be my Esmeralda?”
Login with Patreon to view this post
From Owen Gleiberman’s Variety riff on Daniel Craig’s dancing-around-Paris Belvedere spot: “If the new Belvedere Vodka commercial, starring Daniel Craig and directed by Taika Waititi, were a scene out of Craig’s latest film, it would be the best scene in the movie, or at least the one that everyone’s talking about. Then again, no one would mistake it for a movie scene.
“The commercial has a postmodern strike-a-pose viral aesthetic — it‘s two minutes of bliss frozen in time. As Craig saunters and dances through a swank hotel in Paris, it becomes the rare commercial in which a movie star isn’t being used to sell a product so much as he’s using the commercial to sell a shift in his own image.
“Yes, the extended spot is hawking vodka, and Craig probably got a paycheck that leaves most movie-star paychecks in the dust. Yet that’s all kind of beside the point. The commercial is Craig’s way of announcing who he is, or might be, now that he’s done with the role of James Bond.”
HE to Gleiberman: “Your Daniel Craig riff is very good. The ad is an inspired image makeover.
But it was a SERIOUS MISTAKE, I feel, for director Taika Waititi to send Craig into the interior of a glitzy-ass Kardashian Paris hotel. Because once inside that golden dungeon the endless organic glories and intrigues of Paris disappear. Because glitzy Kardashian hotels are the same boorishly vapid experience the world over…Paris, Milan, Moscow, NYC, Berlin, London, Seoul, Los Angeles, Dubai, Barcelona, Stockholm…exactly the same damn experience and atmosphere.
“And so the Belvedere ad fails in terms of spirit and imagination. And this failure, I regret to say, rubs off on Craig a little bit. It’s good but it could and should have been a lot better if it had been about silky Craig-as-Fat Boy Slim Chris Walken dancing and shuffling around several Paris nabes, it could have been ten or fifteen times better.”
From Mark Salisbury's "Burton on Burton": "Warner Bros. management disliked the title Beetlejuice and wanted to call the film House Ghosts. As a joke, Burton suggested Scared Sheetless and was horrified when the studio actually considered using it."
Login with Patreon to view this post
“Not happening…way too laid back…zero narrative urgency,” I was muttering from the get-go. Basically the sixth episode of White Lotus Thai SERIOUSLY disappoints. Puttering around, way too slow. Things inch along but it’s all “woozy guilty lying aftermath to the big party night” stuff. Glacial pace…waiting, waiting. I was told...
I finally saw Walter Salles' I'm Still Here two days ago in Ojai. It's obviously an absorbing, very well-crafted, fact-based poltical drama, and yes, Fernanda Torres carries the whole thing on her shoulders. Superb actress. Fully deserving of her Best Actress nomination. But as good as it basically is...
After three-plus-years of delay and fiddling around, Bernard McMahon's Becoming Led Zeppelin, an obsequious 2021 doc about the early glory days of arguably the greatest metal-rock band of all time, is opening in IMAX today in roughly 200 theaters. Sony Pictures Classics is distributing. All I can say is, it...
To my great surprise and delight, Christy Hall's Daddio, which I was remiss in not seeing during last year's Telluride Film Festival, is a truly first-rate two-hander -- a pure-dialogue, character-revealing, heart-to-heart talkfest that knows what it's doing and ends sublimely. Yes, it all happens inside a Yellow Cab on...
7:45 pm: Okay, the initial light-hearted section (repartee, wedding, hospital, afterlife Joey Pants, healthy diet) was enjoyable, but Jesus, when and how did Martin Lawrence become Oliver Hardy? He’s funny in that bug-eyed, space-cadet way… 7:55 pm: And now it’s all cartel bad guys, ice-cold vibes, hard bullets, bad business,...
