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.
One year ago, more or less…
Friendo to HE (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.”
HE to friendo (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, Bonnie and Clyde, Crazy Mama, Bound for Glory, Play It Again Sam, The Godfather, The Way We Were, Gable & Lombard, Day of the Locust) and those somewhat gaudy, emotionally needy celebrations of ‘40s and ‘50s Hollywood musicals (That’s Entertainment! + No No Annette 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 No Country for Old Men 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.
There’s a Tribeca Film Festival screening tonight of Eve Brandstein, Richard Kaufman and Stuart Samuels‘ The Lost Weekend: A Love Story, and what a disappointment to learn from Roy Trakin’s 6.9 Variety article that it’s primarily a May Pang recollection-of-a-love affair thing and that it doesn’t really dig into the madman stuff.
Okay, maybe it does but Trakin’s piece discourages.
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?’”
I own 10 or 15 4K UHD Blurays. And yes, the format is relatively young. But the thrill is gone.
I’ve watched 4K UHD discs of Lawrence of Arabia, Apocalypse Now, The Revenant, both Godfather films, Vertigo, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Ten Commandments, Jaws, Jerry Maguire, T2: Judgment Day, Rear Window, Psycho, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The Sting, The Bridge on the River Kwai and so on. And every time I pop one in I’m vaguely bothered by the fact that the images, while looking very rich and dense and more film-like than the 1080p versions…I’m vaguely bothered by the darkness.
And while I’m happy that I’m watching these films with much higher pixel density, my inner peon keeps asking me “why do the 1080p versions seem a bit more satisfying to the eye?” I’ll tell you why. Because the 1080p images are not only sharp and robust and well-mastered, but also less murky and shadowed.
The fact is that 4Ks are darker looking — there’s no ignoring that reality. This is because “4K high-pixel density blocks the backlight more than lower resolutions,” according to Home Theatre Academy. “4K screens have four times more pixels than 1080p, thus making it harder to illuminate the image. Most TV and monitor screens use an LED backlight to illuminate the pixels that form the image. Since a 4K screen has a high pixel count, it’s hard for the backlight to illuminate the image effectively.”
Continuing: “4K can look super dark next to a 1080p or a 720p screen, if all other specs are the same. After all, there are four times as many pixels in the same size screen, but the backlight isn’t any stronger. If your new 4K TV or monitor has an HDR mode, it’ll be even darker.
“It’s worth noting that not all screens use standard LED screens with backlights. Most modern smartphones and even some high-end TVs and monitors often use OLED. Instead of a backlight, the pixels both illuminate and create the image that shows up on the screen. However, OLED screens are significantly dimmer than LED displays. The resolution doesn’t really affect the brightness of OLED screens.”
“4K HDR is so dark because HDR is trying to achieve a higher contrast between dark and bright scenes. HDR stands for high dynamic range. Since HDR makes dark places look even darker, it tends to become too dark to see anything. Additionally, 4K is harder to illuminate than HD in general.
“The whole purpose of HDR is to make movies, videos, and games appear more true-to-life. It gives the image more depth. With HDR enabled, caves actually look like dark, creepy caves, for instance. Unfortunately, an inherent quality of HDR is that the overall image appears much darker than in SDR (standard dynamic range).
“HDR on a 4K TV can make everything look darker than it really is. Disabling HDR is an effective workaround.”
So you know what? I respect what 4K distributors are offering but I don’t care that much about it. I’m basically a 1080p guy. Every time I’ve watched a 4K movie** I’ve gone “okay, very nice, wonderful resolution, I’m glad that the image harvest is much greater in terms of pixels and whatnot, but the hell with it. I’ll just stick with 1080p, thanks. Because, being a peon, 1080p makes me happier.”
** The 4K Dr Strangelove looks a little fuller and richer and more cinema-like to my eye than the 1080p, but what do I know?
A smart, seasoned, socially attuned Washington Post journalist re–tweets a demeaning joke about women, and he doesn’t realize that he’s poking a hornet’s nest and literally asking to be harshly disciplined? How does this happen?
How could the respected Dave Weigel (who looks like an overweight member of a Moody Blues tribute band) not understand that if you say or do the “wrong thing” these days (i.e., if you offend or agitate college-educated Millennial & Zoomer-aged #MeToo wokesters in a business environment) that you stand an excellent chance of being professionally assassinated?
Weigel immediately apologized to the initial complainer, Felicia Sonmez, both on Twitter and Slack, and had earlier defended Sonmez in a dust -up over a condemning Kobe Bryant tweet immediately following his death…and it doesn’t matter. The Post has suspended Weigel for a month without pay.
Weigel is only 40 (DOB: 9.26.81) and therefore technically a Millennial, but he looks like a guy who over-indulges and, as noted, the moustache conveys a Justin Hayward in the late ‘60s identification of some kind. A boomer in a Millennial’s body. If Weigel looked like Neil Patrick Harris the Post probably would have only suspended him for a week.
What did Michelle Pfeiffer’s Elvira say when she first saw Tony Montana’s “cream puff” — a beige Cadillac convertible with zebra-striped upholstery? “It looks like somebody’s nightmare,” she said.
For her and husband Seth Gabel’s Los Angeles home, Bryce Dallas Howard has approved an interior design that complements her own redhead colors — pastel pinks, light greens, creamy beiges. Her house, her design, her call.
But c’mon…what kind of dude would live in this girly-girl’ed, dollhouse environment? Ernest Hemingway would scoff at such a proposition. Where are the empty beer cans and half-eaten bags of pretzels? Where’s the man-cave? Where’s the HD flatscreen tuned to ESPN?
Having missed the Sundance ’15 debut of Robert Egger‘s The Witch, I didn’t see it until a year later. Boy, was I won over! For me, the film’s critical praise and box-office success ($40 million gross vs. $4 million budget) crystalized my understanding that elevated horror had become a thing — a respectable sub-genre as well as an assurance that not all horror films needed to be aimed at primitives.
A year earlier Jennifer Kent‘s The Babadook had defined the 21st Century template; in 2018 Kent’s The Nightingale and Ari Aster‘s Hereditary fortified things, followed in 2019 by Aster’s Midsommar.
I have this idea that elevated horror was launched by the German expressionists (Robert Wiene‘s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, F. W. Murnau‘s Nosferatu) in the early 20s. Was Val Lewton‘s Cat People the first American-made flick to suggest creeps rather than show them? The prize for the best E.H. flick of the ’60s was split between Jack Clayton‘s The Innocents (’61) and Robert Wise‘s The Haunting (’63). The most explosively popular E.H. of all time, of course, was William Friedkin‘s The Exorcist (’73).
Anyway, last night I re-watched The Witch, and this time with subtitles. From my original review: “I’m very much looking forward to the subtitle option when the Bluray comes out. Ralph Ineson, blessed with one of those magnificent deep voices with a timbre that can peel wallpaper, was the only one I fully understood on a line-for-line basis. To my ears everyone else spoke 17th-Century dithah-moundah-maaaysee-whatsah.”
Now that I’ve “read” Eggers’ script, so to speak, my respect for The Witch‘s period-authentic language is greater.
More review excerpts: “This little creeper (which was projected last night at a 1.66:1 aspect ratio!) is set on an isolated farm in 17th Century New England, when the lore of witches and sorcery was at an all-time high. I was seriously impressed by the historical authenticity and the complete submission to the superstitious mythology of evil in the early 1600s and the panicky mindset of those God-fearing Puritans who completely bought the notion that demonic evil was absolutely manifest and waiting in the thicket.
I’ve had it up to here with the standard narrative about The Horse Soldiers being one of John Ford‘s lesser efforts. I know this sounds like heresy, but it may be my favorite post-1945 Ford film. I know that She Wore A Yellow Ribbon and The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance are widely regarded as more substantial and therefore “better”, but I don’t like watching them as much as The Horse Soldiers, and anyone who doesn’t like that can shove it.
A Civil War drama based on Grierson’s Raid of 1863, The Horse Soldiers is steady, solid, midrange Ford — well-produced and well-acted with good character arcs and flavorful Southern atmosphere. Plus it gets extra bonus points for being set in the South (green trees, green grass, plantations, swamps, bridges, rivers) and not in godforsaken Monument Valley.
Handsomely shot by William H. Clothier in a 1.66 aspect ratio, its very easy to watch — every time I pop it in I feel comfortable and relaxed. Partly because it has a minimum of Ford-bullshit distractions. My only real problem is a scene in which rebel troops are heard signing a marching tune exactly like the Mitch Miller singers. I also don’t like a scene in which a furious John Wayne throws down eight or nine shots of whiskey in a row — enough to make an elephant pass out.
There’s a scene in which a boys’ military academy is asked to attack Wayne’s Union regiment — a scene in which a mother drags her 10-year-old son, Johnny, out of a line of marching troops, only to lose him when Johny climbs out of his second-floor bedroom window to rejoin his fellows. It reminds me of that moment when Claudette Colbert collapses in a grassy field as she watches Henry Fonda marching off to fight the French in Drums Along The Mohawk.
I also love that moment in Newton Station in which Wayne senses something wrong when costar William Holden, playing an antagonistic doctor-surgeon, tells him that perhaps a too easily captured Confederate colonel (Carleton Young), an old buddy, isn’t the submissive, easily captured type — “He’s West Point, tough as nails…the man I knew could lose both arms and still try to kick you to death.”
Kino Lorber’s new 4K version of this 1959 film (which lost money, by the way, partly due to exorbitant salaries and producer participation deals) streets on 6.14.22
In a perfect world, how much should it cost to make a film out of Don DeLillo‘s “White Noise“, a nearly 40-year-old satire of academia (or, in the present context, deranged wokesters) and a general meditation about the inevitability of death?
We’re talking, of course, about the Noah Baumbach film (directed and written by) that was shot last summer and fall in various Ohio college towns (including Oberlin), funded by Netflix and starring Adam Driver as perturbed Hitler Studies professor Jack Gladney and Greta Gerwig as his neurotic wife Babette. It costars Raffey Cassidy, Alessandro Nivola, André Benjamin, Jodie Turner-Smith and Don Cheadle.
If I was to spitball the budget, I would guess (especially given the tendency of Netflix films to cost more than anyone might expect) something in the range of $40 million plus, maybe a touch higher. But it appears as if White Noise might be an ’80s period piece**. I’m basing this on a set photo of Gerwig wearing big ’80s hair. Shooting period (clothes, cars, signage) is always costly.
If you know anything about Baumbach’s films and more particularly his writing and shooting style, White Noise most likely will be medium close-ups of dialogue, dialogue, dialogue and more dialogue. White Noise‘s big visual element is a depiction of a big train accident that spreads toxic waste all over the place; there’s also a car accident scene involving a lake or pond in which the car sinks. But it mainly sounds like a boilerplate Baumbach talkathon.
I’m asking because there’s a Twitter rumor (linked to last night by World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy) that the White Noise tab is over $100 million, and perhaps as high as $140 million.
The latter figure comes from a film-set worker named “Saul Atreides” (a Jewish nom de plume inspired by Paul Atreides). This calls for a serious trade-reporter inquiry, because as the above headline states, “Noah Baumbach” and “$100 million budget” are a serious contradiction in terms.
On top of which Driver has been made up to look late 40ish or early 50ish, and to this end Baumbach has given him a prominent pot belly. Is it prosthetic or did Driver do a “Robert DeNiro as Jake LaMotta” by going to Italy and tanking up on pasta?
Ruimy: “How does a budget on a smallish, intimate drama, set on a Midwestern college campus, balloon to $100 million plus?! This is madness. I liked Marriage Story and Kicking & Screaming, but this isn’t a guy with a big enough name or following to justify that kind of spending. It’s no wonder Netflix is cutting back now — they’ve been spending like drunken sailors for about a decade now.”
HE’s all-time favorite Baumbach film is still Greenberg (’10), but I wouldn’t like it as much if it had cost $100 million.
Paul Kolas: “It was a fool’s errand to even attempt to make a movie out of White Noise. It may be a brilliant novel, but an apt metaphor would be Ahab chasing the White Whale, and if this turns out to be Baumbach’s Heaven’s Gate, l can just see critics calling it Noah’s Flood.
“I want this to be a great movie, do I ever, but this news is most distressing. Notice that Netflix is not promoting it, or Blonde, and focusing on more commercial audience-friendly films like The Gray Man and Knives Out 2. And look at the way they are already promoting the living daylights out of Maestro, which you know will be their biggest Oscar bait movie to date, and we’ll most likely have to wait until October-November-December of next year to see it. I don’t know what the budget is on Maestro, but I seriously doubt it’s anywhere near $140 + million. No wonder Netflix is in a panic.”
** If White Noise is, in fact, an ’80s period thang, we can obviously scratch the “deranged campus wokester” angle.
