HE also supports Congressperson Porter‘s recently-announced campaign to fill Sen. Dianne Feinstein‘s U.S. Senate seat in 2024. She knew she’d get a lot of attention for (a) pretending to ignore the Kevin McCarthy House Speaker vote by reading Mark Manson‘s “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck” and (b) for wearing an orange dress that matched exactly the shade of orange on the Manson book jacket.
After arguing with Ari Aster about the length of his latest film (three or four hours? Two and a half?), A24 has decided to release the anxious, mondo bizarro, wimpy-sounding Beau Is Afraid on 4.21.23. I’m sorry but this WTF pre-Cannes release date tells us damn near everything.
It tells us first and foremost that Beau Is Afraid is a problem film. Obviously. No distributor releases an epic-lengthed, major-league auteur film in late-April unless they’re totally confused and off-balance and scared shitless about what it is or how to sell it.
If A24 had any balls they would open Beau Is An Old, Terrified, Mommy-Traumatized Candy-Ass on the Cote d’Azur, but no — they’re too chickenshit! Afraid of what the international critical community (especially the Brits) might say!
Aster wanted to release a four-hour version, remember. Imagine watching a four-fucking-hour version of this trailer. You know Beau is going to be a slog….you know it.
It would be one thing if this surreal, memory-injected old man’s psychological horror film was 110 or 120 minutes, but you know that at 179 minutes Hollywood Elsewhere is going to be flailing around on the floor and howling and hyperventilating and possibly shrieking. David Ehrlich will probably call Beau is Afraid a perverse masterpiece but he’ll bend over for almost anything nervy or provocative. Amy Ryan will probably receive the NYFC’s Best Supporting Actress trophy.
It’s either Ari Aster‘s Synecdoche (a tip of the hat to World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy for coming up with this brilliant analogy) or an angry, terrified old man’s Wizard of Oz saga, complete with a wicked-ass witch (his own mom, played by Amy Ryan). Every character in this film (except for the kid version of Joaquin) is some kind of smooth ghoulish predator.
Beau Is Afraid (formerly Disappointment Blvd.) is probably going to have its big debut at South by Southwest, a festival that is committed before-the-fact to giving a warm, giddy embrace to any oddball film that premieres there. I’m not kidding about that alternate title: Beau Is An Old, Terrified, Mommy-Traumatized Candy-Ass. HE to A24: Seriously, give this some thought.
Initial texted comments: “So Phoenix is wearing balding, old-fart, liver-spots makeup throughout the whole thing? What happened to Beau being some kind of dynamic entrepeneur or whatever? Now we know why A24 was unhappy with the length.”
At one point Aster described Beau is Afraid on the IMDB page as “a sickly, domestic melodrama in the vein of Douglas Sirk.” That settles it — Glenn Kenny and Richard Brody are going to do cartwheels in the lobby. These two are Maynard G. Krebs in reverse. When Maynard heard the “w” word, he went “work!” When Kenny and Brody hear the name of Hollywood’s most celebrated German-born director of lavish ’50s soap operas, they go “Sirk!” except they mean it lovingly.
You can never trust trailers but my God, the new Renfield trailer looks magnificent! Could the film itself be as good? Could this be the definitive vampire comedy that will unseat Love at First Bite and present one of Nicolas Cage‘s greatest-all-time performances?
If the film turns out as good as the trailer I’m seriously in favor of Cage being Oscar-nominated for Best Actor…trhe campaign would become a career tribute thing, and he could win. Look at him, for God’s sake! Listen to that enunciation! The crescendo of his career!
Directed by Chris McKay and written by Ryan Ridley (based on an story by Robert Kirkman), Renfield is about a toxic, dysfunctional relationship between Renfield, the apprentice vampire played by Dwight Frye in Tod Browning‘s original 1931 Dracula and played in Renfield by Nicholas Hoult. Awkwafina plays Renfield’s traffic-cop girlfriend.
Universal will open Renfield on 4.14.23. Possibly the first excellent film of 2023!
Condemn and cancel the following persons for creating this obviously deranged and predatory serving of erotic titillation — a scene that more or less gives a pass to all would-be rapists and gun fetishists: Robert Redford (alive), director George Roy Hill (passed in 2002), screenwriter William Goldman (died in 2018), actress Katharine Ross (because she went along with it!). Who else?
From D.C. maven Jester Bell (aka Theresa Campagna):
YouTube commenter #1 (Masked Panther): “The joker is supposed to be a respected dangerous lunatic. Not some pregnant man. So sad the direction D.C. is going / allowing.”
YouTube commenter #2 (Harley Quinn): “If this doesn’t show how dead DC is then [I don’t know] what will.”
A forerunner of North by Northwest, Alfred Hitchcock‘s Saboteur (’42) is about an innocent man (Robert Cummings‘ “Barry Kane”) suspected of arson, espionage and manslaughter, and is on the run from the bulls as he darts from one location to another.
Early on the handcuffed Kane shows up at a mountain cabin occupied by “Phillip Martin” (Vaughan Glaser), a blind but kindly and obviously wise and well educated older fellow. (Phillip’s distant European cousin was the blind, bearded hermit who showed kindness to Boris Karloff‘s Frankenstein monster in The Bride of Frankenstein.)
Phillip’s niece Pat Martin (Priscilla Lane) shows up, spots Kane’s cuffs and concludes he’s the alleged arsonist the cops are after. She takes Phillip aside and warns him about the “dangerous” Kane.
Phillip patiently explains to Pat that his blindness has left him with heightened perceptions, and not just in terms of touch, hearing and a sensitivity to aromas. He knew Kane was wearing handcuffs from the get-go, he tells her, because he could hear their slight clinking, but more importantly he can sense when a person is innocent or good of heart, and he knows without question that Kane is no saboteur.
In fact, several people whom Barry encounters during the first half of Saboteur not only believe in his innocence but help him to elude capture — the mother of a deceased burn victim, a cheerful truck driver, a troupe of circus performers.
Saboteur was shot between December 1941 and February 1942. Roughly two months after finishing principal photography, the big premiere happened in Washington, D.C. on 4.22.42. It opened in New York City’s Radio City Music Hall on 5.8.42. Here’s Bosley Crowther’s review.
Obviously Ronan Farrow owns his own history, biology and style choices, but my very first thought upon seeing this vacation photo (seemingly taken on the beach in Baja California) is that he looks a lot like Tatiana. Tell me I’m wrong.
Tatiana agrees: “Haha, yes, there is something :-))”
I would never dispute that Andrew Dominik‘s Blonde isn’t a serious art film. It’s intensely dislikable but completely, paradoxically respectable. It can be accused of exaggerating the dark aspects in Norman Jean Baker‘s life, as Joyce Carol Oates’ 22 year-old source novel did, as well as inventing some out of whole cloth. But it was all of a piece — a pitch-black downer.
Will I ever watch Blonde again? I can say with absolute assurance that I will not. But I will gladly watch this clip of Marilyn Monroe‘s visit to The Jack Benny Show in September 1953. It sells the bullshit, of course, but she’s a total pleasure to watch and listen to. She wasn’t inwardly happy, of course, but she convinced the public otherwise. Look at her expression when the audience is loving her and laughing at the humor, etc. She was happy in a certain sense!
HE to Blonde spoiler whiners: This post discusses the August 1962 death of Marilyn Monroe, which is what Andrew Dominik‘s Blonde (Netflix streaming, 9.28.22) ends with.
HE to friendo #1: “Yesterday I slogged my way through Andrew Dominik‘s Blonde, which I regard as artful torture porn. And then I happened upon a Matt Lynch tweet that analogized Blonde and a landmark 1988 film, and the instant I read it I said ‘yes!'”
“I’m thinking not just of the incessant dismissals and degradations and spiritual uncertainties, but the anguished and agonized relationship between the main protagonist and the elusive ‘father.’
“Just as Willem Dafoe sips a goblet of sacramental wine before submitting to his final fate, Norma Jean swallows alcohol and barbiturates before her final episode of passion at her Fifth Helena Drive abode (the delivery man, the fuzzy tiger, the shattering note). And like Dafoe’s Jesus, a spectral Marilyn smiles and separates from death, and greets the immortality that she still enjoys today a la Andrew Dominik.”
Has anything changed as far as the Best Picture Oscar death of Everything Everywhere All At Once is concerned? Since last Friday morning, I mean? Unless I’m missing something, I don’t think so. THR‘s Scott Feinberg killed its chances last Thursday (12.29) when he listed Top Gun: Maverick as the #1 likeliest winner. That was it, end of story, guillotine drop.
The following morning we hashed it all out. Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone and myself, I mean. Here it is, all 43 minutes worth.
I’ve been told that Broadway’s diversified, woked-up stage musical of Some Like It Hot isn’t doing so well commercially. No stars to speak of is one reason. Overly woke-icized may be another.
The show ignores the basic scheme of the Billy Wilder’s 1959 classic, making more than half the characters black with the Jerry/Daphne character (played by Jack Lemmon in the Wilder film) embracing transgenderism and yaddah yaddah. And the show buries the film’s final line — “nobody’s perfect.” Of course it does!
Directed by Casey Nicholaw and featuring Christian Borle (Joe/Josephine), J. Harrison Ghee (Jerry/Daphne), Adrianna Hicks as Sugar (called Sugar “Kane” Kowalczyk when she was played by Marilyn Monroe) and Kevin Del Aguila as an Latino Osgood, Some Like It Hot opened just under three weeks ago — 12.11.22.
HE reader Des McGrath: “The Jack Lemmon character has been rewritten to discover that he is a trans woman over the course of the story.
“The immortal final line? Gone. Instead of Osgood Fielding responding ‘Nobody’s perfect’, he tells Daphne ‘You’re perfect just the way you are’ (or something like that).
“And the Marilyn Monroe character is no longer a dumb blonde but a strong black woman, who sings about how as a child growing up in a small town in Georgia she liked to go to the movies, but ‘could only use the balcony. Like the movies, life could be that black and white.’
“So now she wants to break the color barrier in Hollywood.”
HE to McGrath: “Like the film, the show is set in 1929. Sugar wants to break Hollywood’s color barrier in nineteen-twenty-fucking-nine? The new Some Like It Hot, in short, is another exercise in presentism — transposing the woke sensibilities of today to the jazz age.”
If the kid (actor Philip Tanzini) had been, say, 12 or 13 or even 14, I might not feel altogether comfortable watching Demi Moore (19 at the time) give him a hot-mama kiss. But 15 is cool. Plus he was a showbiz kid. Plus he looked like a nerd — that doesn’t mean he wasn’t ready to slam ham at the drop of a hat.
Plus it was 1981 — the dawn of the tits ‘n’ zits era of movies (Losin’ It, All The Right Moves, Risky Business). Everybody knew the score, and the era of woke prudery was several decades off. Tanzini is now 56 years old and probably melting down over the memory.
I was 15 once, and my hormonal surges were like bodily volcanoes…Krakatoa, East of Java. I would’ve dropped to my knees, gotten out a hymn book and praised God if a hotsy-totsy 19 year-old actress had kissed me like that.
I was taking sneaky Saturday trips into Manhattan when I was 15, remember, and occasionally getting goosed by 40ish, creepy-looking gay guys on 42nd Street, and I more or less shrugged that shit off.
One day when I was 15 my mother told me to watch out for older women who might try to take advantage of me, and my only thought was “please…please, God…arrange for an older foxy woman to try to bring thoroughly immoral, anti-Christian sexual rapture into my life!”
Needless to add, Hollywood Elsewhere stands with the 32.9% of Twitter responders who have no problem with this.
Actress Demi Moore being especially “friendly” to a 15 year old kid. pic.twitter.com/HwmJRFhGBw
— Ian McKelvey (@ian_mckelvey) December 28, 2022
There’s something hugely joyful about reuniting with my mail-order John Wayne Red River brass belt buckle. The fact that I’m happy to once again have it in my possession means, of course, that I’m just as much of a racist swine as Wayne was during his lifespan, and has nothing to do with my loving the 1948 Howard Hawks western (which, as the buckle points out, was actually shot in ‘46).
