World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimyreports that he’s been “assured” that Martin Scorsese‘s Killers of the Flower Moon will “indeed” be a 2022 release. Good to hear, but will it open in November or December? We all understand that an Oscar contender has to be screened no later than Thanksgiving and preferably earlier.
We all assume that Marty and Thelma Schoonmaker are working their fingers to the bone. They’ve been editing since the fall of ’21, then came the extra shooting, and now they’re back at it. How could they announce in good conscience “we can’t finish until ’23”? Where would be the honor in that?
Some may find it odd that handicappers are calling Lightyear (Disney, 6.17) dead meat despite earnings of $152 million worldwide and $88.7 million domestic. But you have to look at the details, and detail #1 is that Lightyeardropped 65% last weekend, earning a lousy $17.5 million after pulling down $50.5 million on opening weekend.
The Ankler‘s Sean McNulty is calling this the “worst-ever drop for a PIXAR film (not counting Covid-impacted Onward)….with Minions arriving on Friday, [Lightyear] was just a misfire. And cue the ‘PIXAR isn’t the same without Lasseter’ pieces in 3, 2… Just remember to include the reasons why Lasseter was ousted.”
Two days ago N.Y. Post columnist Kyle Smithspeculated that Lightyear was hurt by general audiences being fed up with films that secrete woke instruction. Not the brief lesbian kiss but a suggestion that Lightyear might have a hidden lecture or two up its sleeve.
“Hollywood was founded by, and for generations run by, pure showmen who were fanatically devoted to giving the audience what it wanted,” Smith wrote. “Today Hollywood’s message is, ‘Let us entertain you! But first, a brief lecture on what’s wrong with you, the audience…’
“One reason Top Gun: Maverick is such a huge success — the biggest movie of Tom Cruise’s career and probably the biggest movie of this year — is that it simply ignores all quarrelsome real-world issues. Maverick seeks merely to entertain, not to persuade you that the people who made it are virtuous.”
Remember hang-ups? In the ’60s accusing a person of being hung up was a fairly serious put-down. Hang-ups were a key definer of middle-class neurotics — people who were into guilt and maintaining appearances, who embraced shallow concerns and inhibitions — people who believed in scrubbing kitchen floors and mowing their lawns on Saturdays, who did’t get high or drop acid or listen to Bob Dylan or attend the Newport Folk Festival.
I’m not saying that people who did get high and wear buckskin fringe jackets and listened to Dylan and so on weren’t hung-up, but the cliche prevailed — strictly embraced middle-class values and lifestyles and prohibitions were seen as a kind of prison.
I’m asking because I haven’t heard anyone accuse anyone else of being hung-up for decades. Excluding Republicans and conservative psychos like Lauren Boebert, are people hung-up about anything these days?
I think they are, yeah.
The first Urban Dictionary definition of “hung-up” reads as follows: “When all you think about is one person, and you can’t stop thinking about them.” The fourth definition: “Stereotyped, repetitive and seemingly purposeless movements. Compulsive fascination with and performance of repetitive, mechanical tasks, such as assembling and disassembling, collecting, or sorting household objects.”
Here’s another definition: “When you’re locked into processing the world according to (I’m sorry to mention this but it just came to me) wokedoctrine….when all you can think about is whether this or that person or activity or political position is on the right side (i.e., yours)…when delivering or creating social justice for oppressed or less fortunate people and/or punishing their oppressors is pretty much everything.”
As it happens two of 2022’s finest films so far, Chloe Okuno‘s Watcher and Audrey Diwan‘s Happening, begin streaming tomorrow — Tuesday, 6.21. Both directed by women, of course, and both, coincidentally or not, are IFC releases. These films are X factor — they stick to your ribs. Plus Watcher is a ’60s or ’70s Roman Polanski film.
I can’t fully convey…I can’t even half-convey what a pleasure it’s been to watch Lightyear (a) piss off traditional fans (Chris Evans…what happened to Tim Allen?), (b) inspire a Toronto theatre manager to post a warning, (b) trigger homophobes with a harmless lesbian kiss and then (d) open to a lousy $51 million domestic — a good $25 if not $30 million short of what handicappers had projected. And I never even saw the damn thing…that’s the best part!
The article is not very kind to the efforts of ATPM‘s late screenwriter William Goldman, but Hornaday did a ton of research (including in-depth discussions with producer-star Robert Redford and Bob Woodward, co-author of the same-titled book that the film was based upon), and this is how the chips fell.
The invisible subtitle is “How Everyone Involved In This 1976 Film Except William Goldman Saved It From Goldman’s Initial Drafts, Which Were On The Glossy and Rapscallion Side and Less Than Genuine.”
This despite Hornaday acknowledging that Goldman’s earliest drafts of All the President’s Men “included most of the key beats that defined the early stages of the Watergate investigation.”
Goldman, whom I came to know moderately well over a few lunches at Cafe Boloud in the early to mid Obama years, reported in his Adventures in the Screen Trade account that he had done much if not most of the heavy lifting.
During a meeting with Bob Woodward, Goldman “had asked him to list ‘the crucial events — not the most dramatic but the essentials — that enabled the story eventually to be told,” Hornaday summarizes.
“When Woodward named them — the break-in, the arraignment, his combative collaboration with Bernstein, his late-night meetings with confidential source DeepThroat in an Arlington parking garage, his and Bernstein’s interviews with such key figures as Hugh Sloan, and their work together on an article about a $25,000 check written to CREEP Midwest finance chairman Kenneth Dahlberg — Goldman, according to his account, looked at what he’d written and saw that he’d included every one.”
A key passage in Hornaday’s piece: “The journey of All the President’s Men from mediocrity to triumph tells an alternately sobering and inspiring truth about movies: The great ones are a function of the countless mistakes that didn’t get made — the myriad bad calls, lapses in taste and bouts of bad luck that encase every production like a block of heavy, unyielding stone.”
As noted, the piece presents a case that many if not most of the “mistakes” were Goldman’s. If Goldman is reading this piece in heaven, he’s most likely howling and shaking his fist and punching his refrigerator door.
Hornaday: “This is the story of how producer-star Robert Redford and director Alan Pakula, and the cast and crew they assembled, bullied Goldman’s flawed but structurally brilliant script into art. It’s the story of a perfect movie and imperfect history, a cautionary tale whose lessons — about impunity, abuse of power and intimidation of the press — have taken on new urgency nearly 50 years after its release.
“It’s the story of how what was intended as a small-bore black-and-white character study featuring unknown actors became one of the finest films of the 20th century, one that marked the end of a cinematic era, changed journalism forever and — for better or worse — became the fractal through which we’ve come to understand the dizzyingly complicated saga known as Watergate.”
Later today and for the very first time, HE will attend a Juneteenth celebration. Fairfield County-styled, I should add…food, music, exurban vibes. And down in the wilds of New Jersey, Jett Wells (along with Cait) will celebrate his very first Father’s Day as Sutton savors the aged-wine experience of being seven-months old — born seven months and two days ago, to be precise.
Jett Wells during hike in the area of Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland — almost exactly ten years ago.
FriendotoHE (received last night, 6.18): “I noticed you did not mention today what would have been Roger Ebert’s 80th birthday. Today is also Paul McCartney’s 80th.”
HEtofriendo (sent this morning): “Yeah but I don’t want to cherish the past too much. It sends the wrong message in a cosmic, God’s eye, wheel-of-time sense, and it gives Millennials and Zoomers one more reason, etc.
“For every riff or recollection about the in-and-out cinematic glory days (late ‘30s to 2008) I try to summon at least one daily acknowledgement that things are better (or at least could be better) than they sometimes appear.
“Remember the nostalgia for the ‘30s and ‘40s between the late ‘60s and mid ‘70s (Chinatown, Dillinger, BonnieandClyde, CrazyMama, BoundforGlory, Play ItAgainSam, TheGodfather, The Way We Were, Gable&Lombard, DayoftheLocust) and those somewhat gaudy, emotionally needy celebrations of ‘40s and ‘50s Hollywood musicals (That’sEntertainment! + NoNoAnnette on Broadway)? And the concurrent grim despair & paranoia of the Nixon years?
“Roger was an excellent writer and a wise, ballsy, first-rate critic but let’s not forget that he could be & in fact was overly generous at times, especially during the last 10 or 15 years of his life. Kindness doesn’t always age well. And at the end of the day, Roger wasn’t a God soaring above us on gossamer wings.
“McCartney turning 80….good health & long life to a guy I’ve loved all my life but 80 bums me out a bit…’will you still need me, will you still feed me when I’m 80?’ doesn’t have quite the same ring.
“You can’t stop the gradual graying and withering of gifted people or the eternal process that necessitates a million daily sparks of light and birth and creation (Sutton’s arrival on 11.17.21 was one such spark) along with the necessity and brutality of death…but if it’s all the same I’d prefer to ignore the exact present-tense numerology of Paul McCartney…a bit of a “holy shit” moment, if you don’t mind me saying.
“Remember the shock of John Lennon’s murder 40-plus years ago and how an entire generation was suddenly hit with the slap of cruel happenstance and random destruction and that NoCountryforOldMen moment when Barry Corbin told Tommy Lee Jones that “you can’t stop what’s comin’”?
“Macca turning 80” is an uh-oh out of that same hymnbook.
“The metaphor of dead leaves lying in heaps on those well-manicured northeastern suburban lawns and how those tidy, old-time curbstone neighborhoods in Virginia, Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, Long Island and throughout New England (especially during the fossil-fuel eras of Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ & Nixon) used to smell of burning leaves in the fall months, as dusk and then nightfall settled in…that’s all fine but Macca turning 80? Not so much.”
Two baseball moments happened over the weekend — one that made me feel like an over-the-hill weakling, and another that made my heart swell a bit and even brought me to the edge of tears.
Moment #1 was having a catch with Jett in a Montclair park. To my surprise and horror I discovered that my throwing arm is stiff and more out-of-shape than usual. The first few throws were actually painful — I cried out John McEnroe-style with each toss. I gradually limbered up but for a while there I was crestfallen.
Moment #2 happened when I saw Sean Mullin‘s It Ain’t Over, an affectionate, unexpectedly emotional Yogi Berra doc that’s playing at the Tribeca Film Festival.
Speaking as one who grew up in the tristate area (New Jersey, Connecticut, Manhattan) and managed to attend a grand total of two Yankee games and no Mets games that whole time, I’m not what you’d call a diehard baseball fan. But I certainly knew and admired Berra (1925-2015), a legendary Yankee catcher (18 seasons), power hitter, “bad ball” hitter and shoot-from-the-hip philosopher whose peak years were in the ’50s and early ’60s.
Yogi Berra is one of the greatest sounding baseball names of all time, right up there with Moose Skowron, Goose Gossage, Miller Huggins, Ty Cobb, Bobo Rivera, Ryne Duren, Hoyt Wilhelm, Duke Snider and Mookie Wilson. (Berra’s birth name was Lorenzo Pietro Berra.)
There was always something simian about Berra’s size (he stood 5’7″) and facial features, but what a magnificent athlete. Named the American League’s Most Valuable Player Award three times, an All-Star player 18 times, played in 10 World Series championships (more than any other player in MLB history), a career batting average of 285 (struck or thrown out 7 out of 10 times — Mickey Mantle ended up with .298), caught Don Larsen‘s perfect game in Game 5 of the 1956 World Series, etc.
And what a TV pitchman! Yoohoo chocolate drink, Camel cigarettes, Florida Orange Juice, Kinney Shoes, Miller Lite, etc.
What does Mullin’s doc do with all this? Nothing miraculous but it always satisfies. Mullin just lays it out, decade by decade, straight and plain, St. Louis childhood to World War II to years of Yankee (and later N.Y. Mets) glory and into the coaching years, and always with an emotional gloss or spin of some kind.
Is it par for the course and familiar as fuck to share various affectionate, awe-struck observations from players, commentators and family members who were Berra fans over the years (Billy Crystal, Derek Jeter, Bob Costas, Vin Scully, Joe Torre, Don Mattingly, Joe Garagiola, Roger Angell, Bobby Richardson, Whitey Herzog, Tony Kubek, Willie Randolph, Ron Guidry and the Berra family — Dale, Tim, Larry, late wife Carmen and granddaughter Lindsay Berra)? Yes, but it works here. Of course it does…you want it.
Does the doc feature a villain? You betcha — Hannah-Barbera’s Yogi Bear, a revoltingly cheerful cartoon character who came along in 1958, and was hated by Berra and everyone else over the age of ten. Thank God the doc doesn’t feature “Yogi,” a 1960 pop tune by the Ivy Three.
The personal Yogi stuff puts the hook in. The 65-year marriage to Carmen (1949 to her death in 2014). Home life in Montclair. The TV pitchman career. The D-Day heroism. Yogi’s long feud with Yankee owner George Steinbrenner after the latter fired him as manager (and by proxy yet). Dale Berra sharing the intervention moment when Yogi and his brothers confronted him about cocaine addiction.
I’ve decided to devote a separate piece to the better-known Yogi-isms — poorly worded sayings that don’t sound right at first, but start to sound right the more you repeat them or think about them.
There’s no other way to put it — Facebook film maven W.T. Solley is fooling around — i.e., impishly trying to provoke reactions — by listing, of all films, Alfred Hitchcock‘s The Paradine Case (’47) in fifth place on his All-Time Great Movies list. To which I have no choice but to say, “Will you cut it out, please?”
“The Paradine Case is a straightforward portrait of obsession and downfall,” I wrote on 12.16.15. “It’s a carefully measured, decorous, stiff-necked drama about a married, middle-aged attorney (a too-young Gregory Peck) who all but destroys himself when he falls in love with a femme fatale client (Alida Valli) accused of murdering her husband.
“A foolish love affair is one thing, but Peck’s exists entirely in his head as Valli isn’t the least bit interested and in fact is in love with Louis Jordan, whom she was seeing before her husband’s death. Not much of an entry point for a typical moviegoer, and not a lot to savor.
“It’s essentially a romantic triangle piece (Peck, Valli, Jordan) but you can’t identify or even sympathize with Peck as Valli is playing an ice-cold monster. But I’ve always respected the tragic scheme of it. By the second-to-last scene Peck’s humiliation is complete and absolute.”
Everyone knows about the myth of John Lennon‘s “lost weekend” — an allegedly boozy, party-animal, bachelor-on-the-loose period which lasted from the summer of ’73 until early ’75. Separated from Yoko Ono, living in Los Angeles with short-term girlfriend May Pang, romping around with Harry Nillson, Alice Cooper, Keith Moon and Micky Dolenz, collectively known as the Hollywood Vampires.
You’d presume that a documentary about this 18-month chapter, especially one actually called The Lost Weekend, would…I don’t know, catalogue the wild times and over-the-top-shenanigans and cocaine snorts and whatnot, and perhaps convey…oh, perhaps a meditation about the decline and fall of this ’60s wind-down, Hotel California, rich-rocker mentality, and how this sense of gradual drainage finally bottomed out and led to the birth of punk in ’75, or something along those lines.
Most deflating passage: “Pang insists the celebrated Troubadour incidents — where John was thrown out of the iconic Hollywood club for heckling the Smothers Brothers and then for putting a sanitary napkin on his head — were anomalies in Lennon’s stay in Los Angeles, where he was relentlessly egged on by sidekick Harry Nilsson in particular.
“’John was drinking, but that was overblown in retrospect,’ says Pang. ‘The press keeps repeating the same stories over and over.'”
Second most deflating passage: “I decided it was time to reclaim my own history,” says Pang, 72. “It’s my version. I figured, if there was going to be a film about my life, I should be involved. Who better to tell the story than me? I lived it. These are my memories. No one experienced it like I did. Why should I let somebody else talk about my time with John?’”
