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Strangely, curiously, there are still those who don’t understand (or refuse to accept) that Tony Soprano was whacked while sitting in that family restaurant booth in the final episode of The Sopranos. I’ve come to understand that these very same people have also fought against the obvious interpretation of the aftermath of that tenement shootout scene in Taxi Driver (’75).

For the 17th or 18th time, here’s the damn explanation (and there’s really no arguing this):

At the end of the Taxi Driver shootout sequence and just after the bleeding and mortally wounded Travis Bickle, sitting on that blood-spattered couch, pretends to shoot himself in the head as he goes “bawshhhh!…bawshhhh!”, director Martin Scorsese switches to an overhead crane shot of Bickle on the couch and the two cops standing at the doorway with guns drawn. Looking downward, the camera slowly tracks along the ceiling, over the cops and down the hallway and into the street.

Most would say this is just a cool overhead tracking shot and let it go at that. But it’s just as legitimat to call it the path of Bickle’s spirit as he leaves his body and prepares to merge with the infinite finality…remember Jeannot Szwarc‘s similar spirit-rising-out-of-the-body shot at the end of Somewhere in Time? Same basic idea.

What half-reasonable person could ever buy the denouement of Taxi Driver? Everything in this sequence screams “this is bullshit!” In what world would Bickle, suspected by at least one Secret Service Treasury guy as a potential assassin (“Henry Krinkle”) who nearly killed Sen. Charles Palatine…in what world would Bickle be portrayed as a hero by the media for shooting a corrupt cop and two pimps in an East Side tenement building? The idea is insane.

And this shooting in some way helps the parents of Jodie Foster‘s Iris to find her and bring her back home to Indiana? (Iris will never be restored as a normal Indiana teenager…she’s been ruined and corrupted forever.)

And then Cybil Shepard gives Travis a come-hither look in the rear-view mirror when he gives her a ride in his cab?

It’s all Travis’s death fantasy…the stuff he imagines would happen in a perfect world as he sits on that tenement couch, bleeding profusely and eyeballing the cops and slowly drifting off the mortal coil, etc. The very last shot in Taxi Driver is of a seemingly startled Travis looking into his cab’s rearview mirror, and then whoosh…he’s gone. No reflection. Because Travis isn’t actually there.

Are there really people out there who think that the denoument is somehow real? Yes, there are.

There were slight concerns about Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth having been turned down by at least one major festival, but now the sun is shining with the black-and-white, shot-on-a-sound-stage version of William Shakesperare‘s classic melodrama of bloody greed and ambition booked to open the 59th New York Film Festival on Friday, 9.24.

Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand will play long-of-tooth versions of the titular Scottish character and his scheming “out damned spot” wife. The only costar names I recognize are Brendan Gleeson and Stephen Root.

We all understand that films chosen to open a major film festival are usually audience-friendly, as in a wee bit soft or milquetoasty or at least not overly edgy. It would appear that The Tragedy of Macbeth may be an exception to this tradition, given the NYFF’s decision to apply the term “anguished” in their official description.

NYFF press release: “A work of stark chiaroscuro and incantatory rage, Joel Coen’s boldly inventive visualization of The Scottish play is an anguished film that stares, mouth agape, at a sorrowful world undone by blind greed and thoughtless ambition.”

If NYFF honcho Eugene Hernandez manages to land Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Soggy Bottom, that’ll be two significant feathers in his cap.

A24 will release The Tragedy of Macbeth theatrically before it streams on Apple or Apple +.

Roman Polanski‘s Macbeth (’71) will always be my favorite version.

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Denis Villeneuve‘s Dune (Warner Bros., 10.22 stateside) will have its world premiere at the 2021 Venice Film Festival, and not, significantly, as the opening-night attraction (which usually indicates that a film in question is not triple-A quality). The 155-minute Dune will screen on Friday, 9.3, or two days after the festival begins on Wednesday, 9.1.

Dune is playing out of competition, true, but Warner Bros. honchos wouldn’t have submitted it to Venice if they didn’t know for sure that it’s a cut or two above decent. They’re obviously confident that a sizable portion…okay, a majority of Venice critics will approve.

Jesus, I’ve almost talked myself in believing that Dune might turn out well. I might actually like it. Yeah, right.

World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy has posted a fairly persuasive projection of the 2021 Venice Film Festival, as well as a scoop about Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Soggy Bottom (UA Releasing, 11.21) probably aiming to debut at the ’21 New York Film Festival. A source has told him that NYFF director Eugene Hernandez is close to locking down the world premiere of PTA’s Los Angeles-set period film.

Just to be thorough I checked with Hernandez myself this morning…crickets.

Ruimy is calling Soggy Bottom, which has something to do with a San Fernando Valley high-school student becoming an actor in the early ’70s, “the most anticipated movie of the year, without a doubt.”

Maybe, but I don’t think PTA is cooking with the old high-test these days. To me the PTA show peaked somewhere between Punch-Drunk Love and There Will Be Blood and started to gradually lose the mojo with The Master (’12), Inherent Vice (’14) and Phantom Thread (’17).

I’m sorry but we all experience peaks and valleys. Sometimes we bounce back — it happens in rare cases.

Take me, for example. The column-writing is going great, but I sure as shit am not peaking these days in other respects. Not since the wokester shitheads put out a contact on me starting in ’18 and ’19, followed by a special boosted contract put out last March over that idiotic hoo-hah about a single paragraph’s worth of commentary that I didn’t even write.

The only other things that people know about Soggy Bottom is that (a) Bradley Cooper plays a Jon Peters-resembling hotshot (and possibly Peters himself), and that (b) Benny Safdie will portray real-life politician Joel Wachs.

Here’s Ruimy’s Venice Film Festival spitball rundown:[NOTE: IMPROVED LIST POSTING TONIGHT]

Dune, d: Denis Villenueve
Blonde, d: Andrew Dominik
Madres Paralelas, d: Pedro Almodovar
The Power of the Dog, d: Jane Campion
The Card Counter, d: Paul Schrader
The Hand of God, d: Paolo Sorrentino
Spencer, d: Pablo Larrain
Decision to Leave, d: Park Chan-wook
The Eternal Daughter, d: Joanna Hogg
Driftwood, d: Michel Franco
Il buco, d: Michelangelo Frammartino
Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon, d: Ana Lily Amirpour
Official Competition, d: Gaston Duprat, Mariano Cohn
Freaks Out, d: Gabrielle Mainetti

Every July and especially August, Michael’s Telluride Film Blog gets more and more attention. Because for 13 or so years Michael Patterson has been doing a reasonably good job of speculating which films would constitute the annual Telluride Film Festival situation, a task that always involves a mix of rumor-chasing, spitballing, sniffing around and sensible deduction.

Telluride lineups aren’t that mysterious when you factor in each year’s Venice and Toronto lineups and apply a basic industry calculus, and when you consider the tendency of Telluride toppers Tom Luddy and Julie Huntsinger to invite and re-invite certain favorites, just like Cannes honcho Thierry Fremaux has his own special roster.

We’re all presuming that Paul Schrader‘s The Card Counter (Focus, 9.10) and Jane Campion‘s The Power of the Dog (Netflix) will be Telluride highlights. I’m hoping, naturally, that Asghar Farhadi‘s A Hero, which split the Grand Prix prize at the just-concluded Cannes Film Festival, will also be included.

Patterson is speculating that Guillermo del Toro‘s Nightmare Alley (Searchlight, 12.3) might be featured. Ditto Pedro Almodovar‘s Madres Paralelas (Parallel Mothers).

About a month ago Deadline‘s Pete Hammond, wrote that he’d heard that Netflix will have at least four films at Telluride “if things work out”, and that Warner Bros might have a film [in] Telluride as well, likely one of its awaited fall titles like David Chase’s Sopranos prequel The Many Saints of Newark, Clint Eastwood’s Cry Macho or even November title King Richard with Will Smith.

He added that a couple of Searchlight films, Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch or Michael Showalter’s The Eyes of Tammy Faye, are possibilities.

I’m just starting to pay attention to The Power of the Dog. Set in 1920s Montana and based on Thomas Savage‘s same-titled novel, it’s about a strained relationship between two bachelor brothers, the closeted Phil Burbank (Benedict Cumberbatch) and his brother George (Jesse Plemons), both of whom are ranch-dwellers. Their relationship goes south when George marries a widow named Rose (Kirsten Dunst), and Phil adopts a hostile, bullying attitude. Or something like that. HE’s two cents: Given Campion’s exalted rep. I’m naturally looking forward to this. Plemons is a fascinating, well-respected actor, but he always plays creeps. I’m hoping to find my way around this concern.

The general Cannes response to Mia Hansen-Love‘s Bergman Island seemed to indicate dismay or disappointment, for the most part. The consensus about Todd Haynes‘ The Velvet Underground doc is that it focused too much on John Cale and not enough on Lou Reed.

Patterson has mentioned Ali or Muhammad Ali, a multi-part doc directed and produced by Ken Burns, David McMahon and Sarah Burns. It’s apparently slated for broadcast between 9.19 and 9.22.

Other Patterson possibles: Where Is Anne Frank?, Paris 13th District, Blonde, Cow, House of Gucci, The Last Duel, Mothering Sunday.

The thing I’ve always loved about the young Grace Kelly isn’t just her ice-queen beauty, but the blend of her Philadelphia blue-blood lineage and refinement with the many stories (however true or untrue) that suggest she was seriously promiscuous.

Am I allowed to say that Kelly was slutty, or at least that I love the stories that suggest she was? I don’t mean it in a derogatory way — I mean it in the most delicious way imaginable.

Kelly’s father, John B. Kelly, was a hound and so, apparently or reputedly, was she. No shame. It has been my experience that very few women are Grace Kelly-like — they might be randy but they lack the looks and breeding, or they have said qualities but are hesitant and ambivalent when it comes to this or that opportunity. Kelly was reputedly focused and fearless.

I’m not suggesting anything new here. We’ve all read the stories. Whatever the actual truth of things, Kelly is believed to have been right up there with the voracious Tallulah Bankhead, Elizabeth Taylor, Mary Astor, Gene Tierney and Lupe Velez, and the mostly older (and mostly married) fellows Kelly allegedly got down with were all famous, wealthy, top-of-the-line…Frank Sinatra, Gary Cooper, Ray Milland, Clark Gable, Marlon Brando, Bing Crosby, William Holden, (allegedly) JFK, Oleg Cassini.

There were almost certainly more, or at least I hope so.

If you’re delighted by the idea of Kelly tearing at the belt buckles of almost every older guy she costarred with during her five-year film career (between ’52 and ’56), you don’t want to read Donald Spoto‘s “High Society: The Life of Grace Kelly” (’09), as he pours water on just about every sexual allegation and anecdote anyone’s ever shared about her. You start to get the idea that the more stories about Kelly’s sexual life that Spoto is able to debunk, the better he feels. He doesn’t seem to like the idea of catting around in the slightest.

Whatever the truth of it, Robert Lacey‘s “Grace” (’94) delivers what I want to hear. During a discussion of Kelly’s affair with the married Ray Milland during the shooting of Alfred Hitchcock‘s Dial M For Murder, Skip Hathaway, wife of director Henry Hathaway, who directed Kelly in Fourteen Hours, a 1951 suicide-watch drama, says the following:

“Grace Kelly was a conniving woman. She almost ruined my best friend Mal’s [i.e., Muriel Frances Weber, Milland’s wife of many decades] marriage. Grace Kelly fucked everything in sight. She was worse than any woman I’d ever known.”

Please. Yes. More of this. God.

And yet it appears that Kelly didn’t have it off with her To Catch A Thief costar Cary Grant, or her Rear Window leading man James Stewart. It doesn’t add up but there it is.

Kelly starred or costarred in 11 films between Fourteen Hours (’51) and High Society (’56). Six of them are good — High Noon, Dial M for Murder, Rear Window (her best overall effort), The Country Girl, The Bridges at Toko-Ri and To Catch A Thief.

But you can’t really count Toko-Ri as Kelly’s screen time in that 1954 Korean War film comes to only 12 or 14 minutes, or something in that realm.

In a 7.15 New Yorker article titled “A Haunting New Documentary About Anthony Bourdain,” Helen Rosner has revealed that director Morgan Neville resorted to a sophisticated voice-editing or voice-replicating process that some on Twitter are tut-tutting about.

It involved the audible creation of passages not actually spoken by Bourdain but written by him. Neville created a deepfake or A.I. replication of Bourdain’s voice, assembled from vowel and consonant splices and fragments of legit Bourdain recordings. And so we hear Bourdain “reading” the passages even though he didn’t actually say them.

Get it? The passages that we hear Bourdain reading were definitely 100% written by him, and the voice we hear reading them is definitely Bourdain’s. But he didn’t actually speak these passages and wasn’t actually recorded saying them. Neville created a highly convincing simulation.

Does someone have a problem with this? Not I because nothing substantive was fabricated. Bourdain wrote the words and passages in question, and Neville’s simulation of Bourdain’s voice reading them is “real” as far as it goes and it’s all straight from the horse’s mouth. So what’s the problem?

If Neville had faked or invented passages that Bourdain hadn’t written, a fully justified ethical scandal would’ve erupted…but he didn’t. The words and thoughts are Bourdain’s.

If Neville had hired a Bourdain-sounding actor to read the passages and then revealed this ruse in the closing credits, nobody would’ve said boo.

But because Neville used Bourdain’s own voice instead of an actor’s, some are calling this an ethical foul. Except there was nothing wrong or even shady about what Neville did. Sophisticated, obviously, but so what? Should Neville have admitted to this in the closing credits of the film? Yes, he should have. But it’s not that big of a deal.

Canadian entertainment reporter David Friend: “The new Anthony Bourdain documentary didn’t have audio of him reading emails, so they created a fake A.I. model of his voice…and didn’t bother disclosing that in the film. We need a serious check on ethics in documentary filmmaking.”

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In his 7.15 review of Morgan Neville‘s Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain (opening Friday), Wall Street Journal critic Joe Morgenstern notes that the film “has been criticized for what some see as a sexist and reductionist implication that Bourdain’s failed relationship with his last girlfriend, the Italian actress and filmmaker Asia Argento, was the cause of his suicide.

“Argento figures significantly toward the end of the film, as she did in its subject’s life,” Morgenstern writes. “But she’s a latecomer in a documentary that evokes, and makes sense of, the full sweep of Anthony Bourdain’s gifts, charms, successive careers, sustaining passions and bedeviling obsessions. A film of fitting energy and complexity, it’s a stirring account of an astonishing life.”

I’m sorry but that’s just not honest or true. After seeing Neville’s film a month ago I tried to explain the Bourdain suicide thing as plainly as possible (6.16). Here it is again for good measure:

“The first 80 to 90 minutes of Roadrunner are just okay. At times they almost feel a bit boring. But during the final 30 or 40 minutes the film dives into the ‘what happened during the final few weeks of Bourdain’s life, and why did he fucking hang himself?’ section.

“By the end the viewer has been left with a clear impression that Bourdain’s relationship with the notoriously edgy and prickly Asia Argento was a giddy, obsessive thing that intensified Bourdain’s hot plate and probably jarred his sense of emotional equilibrium.

“I’m not saying that Argento ‘killed’ him in some way — Bourdain sadly did that all to himself — but she definitely shook him up and rattled his composure and apparently brought him to the edge of something or other.

“Bourdain was a moody, free-associating, nakedly honest fellow with a tendency to occasionally fall into caves of depression, and it appears that he swan-dove into the Argento relationship without the slightest sense of measured, step-by-step gradualism. Frank Sinatra once sang “let’s take it nice and easy…it’s gonna be so easy.” Bourdain definitely didn’t do that with Argento.

“There’s a stocky guy from Bourdain’s camera crew who tells Neville that Anthony was ‘a lifelong addictive personality, [and at the end he was] addicted to another person [i.e., Argento]. He didn’t understand he would drive her away if he didn’t stop talking about [how great she was]…you could see her pulling back and he just wouldn’t stop.’

“So in a way Bourdain was apparently smothering Argento to some extent, and so just before his death she performed that public affair in Rome with Hugo Clement. Her apparent intention was to say to Bourdain ‘back off, don’t smother me, let me be free.’ She and Bourdain had an open relationship, but if Argento had been a tad more considerate she would have indulged herself with Clement more discreetly.

In the doc, Parts Unknown director Michael Steed says he checked on Bourdain after the Argento-Clement photos appeared online, and that Bourdain was not cool about it, mentioning that “a little fucking discretion” would have been nice on Argento’s part.

He meant that if you have an open relationship you fuck around in the shadows — you don’t push it in your partner’s face.

Argento didn’t push Bourdain off the cliff — he jumped of his own accord. But had it not been for their relationship and his extreme immersion in that bond, Bourdain might be alive today. Maybe. Who knows? Possibly. This is definitely what the film leaves you with.

This will be of little interest, I realize, to anyone except for aspect-ratio fanatics like myself. But within the past month I’ve watched Amazon rentals of Billy Wilder‘s The Spirit of St. Louis (’57) and John Guillermin and Irwin Allen‘s The Towering Inferno (’74). And neither made me happy.

Both films were shot within a standard widescreen a.r. (2.39:1), but for reasons of pure laziness and indifference are being presented to Amazon renters with flat aspect ratios of roughly 1.78:1 or 16 x 9, which is the dimension of a standard widescreen HD TV.

The difference between the two screen shapes (comparison below) is obvious — the 1.78 version chops the sides off. It’s just as obvious that certain parties (most likely on the Amazon end) involved in the presentation of these films couldn’t care less about showing them correctly.

I’ve been watching The Spirit of St. Louis for years so why did I pay to rent it on Amazon? Because the 1.78 version is presented in HD, and the 2006 DVD is obviously available only in 480p.

All of a sudden there’s a surge of Cannes oogah-boogah, generated by three recently-screened titles. Things are happening, the communal blood is up, buzz is buzzin’, etc.

The craziest of the three is Julia Ducournau‘s Titane, an extreme wackazoid auto-erotic midnight movie (“very violent”) made for critics who love embracing the outer behavioral limits as a way of asserting their anti-bourgeois credentials.

The most quietly absorbing and perhaps the saddest and most compelling is Asghar Farhadi‘s A Hero, a reportedly subtle, solemn and very well made Iran-based drama about an indebted man, on a brief furlough from prison, trying to do the right thing only to suffer the ravages of social media.

And an impressive blend of scurviness, small-town desperation and humanist compassion is reportedly delivered by Sean Baker‘s Red Rocket, a small-time loser drama about an aged-out porn star (Simon Rex) flopping on his mother’s couch in Texas City, Texas (an oil-refinery suburb of Galveston) as he tries to somehow regenerate his life by finding a hot young lassie who might be interested in a porn career and may have the stuff that will strike sparks with the Los Angeles porn industry

Which of these films will most likely penetrate the thick gelatinous membrane of the American moviegoing consciousness (or at least movie-watching distraction)…which show will animate the attention span or activate the den of drooping cultural depression?

Obviously Baker’s Red Rocket (the term, by the way, is slang for a dog’s erection) because it’s American and involves banal oozy sex and general small-town, what-the-fuck depravity — familiar topics for many younger Americans these days.

Farhadi’s A Hero will travel with Farhadi fans (and that would include yours truly) and that in itself should suffice.

And Ducournau’s Titane is obviously made for the wackos and weirdos…have at it!

…but it wasn’t. Because Amazon decided early on to campaign Small Axe, the Steve McQueen anthology series that began on British TV and which included Mangrove, a brilliant Chicago 7-like courtroom drama, for Emmy awards. This decision was greeted with shock and surprise by award-season handicappers because of the high regard in which Mangrove and Lover’s Rock, another portion of Small Axe, were held.

This 12.22.20 HE piece explains the reasoning behind Amazon’s decision fairly thoroughly.

And today the whole Amazon strategy collapsed like a house of cards with the Emmy nominations almost totally snubbing Small Axe, except for a single nomination — best cinematography in a limited/anthology series.

This is a major forehead-slapper. Had McQueen’s film been theatrically released and somehow qualified for a Best Picture nomination, it might well have beaten Nomadland. Or at least, it should have in the eyes of the Movie Godz, being a significantly better film and all.

Repeating for extra emphasis: The entire Small Axe anthology was entirely shut out by the Emmys. Why? What the hell happened? What do Amazon execs have to say about all this? Talk about a nonsensical wipe-out.

“Late To Brilliant Mangrove“, posted on 12.7.20:

Yesterday I finally saw a good portion of Steve McQueen‘s Small Axe quintet — specifically Mangrove, Red White and Blue and Lover’s Rock. (I’ve yet to watch Alex Wheatle, which I’m been told is the least of the five, and Education.) I was delighted to be finally sinking into the Big Three. McQueen is such a masterful filmmaker. He elevates material simply by focusing, framing and sharpening. His eye (visual choices) and sense of rhythm are impeccable. This, I was muttering to myself, is ace-level filmmaking…this is what it’s all about.

I was hugely impressed by all three, but especially by Mangrove, a gripping, well-throttled political drama which echoes and parallels Aaron Sorkin‘s Trial of the Chicago 7.

Both are about (a) landmark trials involving police brutality in the general time frame of the late ’60s and early ’70s, (b) activist defendants and flame-fanning media coverage, (c) an imperious, disapproving judge (Alex Jennings is McQueen’s Frank Langella), (d) a passionate barrister for the defense (Jack Lowden as a kind of British Bill Kuntsler), and (e) a decisive verdict or narrative aftermath that exposed institutional bias.

Mangrove (Amazon, currently streaming) is primarily about the late Frank Crichlow (Shaun Parkes), the owner-operator of a neighborhood-friendly Notting Hill restaurant that served spicy food, attracted a cutting-edge clientele (locals, journalists, activists, Jimi Hendrix) and became a kind of community nerve center for political hey-hey.

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Earlier today on Twitter PopCulture.com staff writer Daniel S. Levine (@dsl899) enthused about Criterion’s recently released Bluray of Frank Borzage‘s History Is Made At Night (’37). The film is proudly bannered as a restored 4K digital transfer. Levine called it “great.”

What this Bluray seems to provide, based on frame captures, is another lovingly restored grainstorm experience — a hazy, soft-focused relation of Criterion’s Bluray of The Awful Truth (released on 4.7.18). Borzage’s 1937 film probably looks as good as it ever will on Bluray, agreed, but it’s certainly not the stuff of profound visual transportation. Not in my book, it isn’t.

So I asked Levine what exactly is so “great” about the Criterion Bluray in question. Not only did he decline to reply, but he blocked me.

If I was Levine I would’ve manned up and said something like “this is the most lusciously rendered version of this classic Borzage film ever savored in HD…the heavy-mosquito-swamp atmosphere is not a problem but a beautifully detailed, other-worldly immersion…Jean Arthur, Charles Boyer and Colin Clive covered in hundreds of trillions of micro-mosquitoes…it’s glorious!”