If you’re going to mount plywood over your display windows for fear of an election riot, do it with style and flair.
Marlon Brando and friends sometime around ’71. Same appearance and hair length as he displayed in The Nightcomers and Last Tango in Paris. The woman is Jill Banner (The President’s Analyst), whom Brando met during the filming of Christian Marquand‘s godawful Candy (’68). Banner died in a Ventura Freeway auto accident in August ’82.
A pair of clear plastic masks arrived today. Much better than common masks. You can breathe more easily, for one thing.
Larry Karaszewski’s “A Handful of Worms” was a decent album for a first-time effort. Alas as we all know, Larru abandoned music and, to our general benefit, turned to screenwriting.
Most appallingly dressed generation in American history, and perhaps in the history of the world.
“He was my father…not in life but in Indy 3. You don’t know pleasure until someone pays you to take Sean Connery for a ride in the side car of a Russian motorcycle bouncing along a bumpy, twisty mountain trail and getting to watch him squirm. God, we had fun. If he’s in heaven, I hope they have golf courses. Rest in peace, dear friend.” — Harrison Ford to Variety‘s Elizabeth Wagmeister.
I love “if he’s in heaven”…very few tributes step out of the usual realm.
In hindsight, Ford would probably agree that the motorcycle chase sequence is lively but somewhat routine, but the revolving fireplace barrier bit is a classic. Like almost everything in this 1989 film, it was perfectly choreographed and filmed, and cut just so. Tip of the hat to dp Douglas Slocombe and editor Michael Kahn.
“Oh, yeah, he’s definitely going to leave. The secret about people like [Trump} is, a lot of bluster and a lot of overcompensation, but most boys are actually cowards. And I can tell you the President does not like personal confrontation. He’ll tweet at you, but then if he sees in you in person, like was with Chris Wallace last summer, he tries to act lovey-dovey.
“It’s very typical, that middle-school bullying behavior…he’ll leave. The Secret Service and the Marines have already talked about the idea of him not leaving and who’s going to escort him out of the White House. There’s no chance that’s gonna happen. The defeat, the electoral defeat…he’ll be the third U.S. President in the last 120 years to only serve one term. That’ll be humiliating enough. I don’t think he wants to be physically escorted out of the White House by the U.S. Secret Service.
“His personality is bluster and saying things, but he really isn’t a doer that way. I think he will blow out. He’s a showman, but he actually hates the fucking job. Barack Obama has him read perfectly. [“He’s a bullshitter.”] He doesn’t like the arduous nature of the job. He doesn’t like the pain in the ass [stuff].” — former White House Communications Director, all-around New York financial hotshot and gregarious media gadfly Anthony Scaramucci, speaking with The Sun‘s Henry Holloway.
Sean Connery, the coolest, studliest and most commandingly masculine 007 of all time (especially in the first two Bonds, the mostly tech-free Dr. No and From Russia With Love) and a bald man among men when he cast aside the toupee and carved out a formidable (if spotty) post-Bond career with firmly grounded performances in The Hill, The Man Who Would Be King, The Wind and the Lion, The Untouchables, The Name of the Rose, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and The Rock…beautiful Sean Connery has risen from terra firma and is now hovering with angels.
A part of me feels a bit glum and forlorn, but then again the Scottish-born Connery had an amazing 90 years on the planet — 25 or 26 years of struggling to become a reputable actor, a bit less than 35 years at the top of the heap (Dr. No to The Rock) and the last 15 in luxurious retirement on New Providence Island in the Bahamas, in the flush Lyford Cay neighborhood.
Connery’s best Bonds (in descending order): Dr. No, From Russia With Love, Goldfinger, Thunderball, Never Say Never Again. (I’m sorry but I rewatched You Only Live Twice a while back and it hasn’t aged well.)
Finest post-Bond films: The Hill, The Red Tent, The Molly Maguires, Zardoz (a respectable failure), The Wind and the Lion, The Man Who Would Be King, Robin and Marian, A Bridge Too Far, The First Great Train Robbery, Five Days One Summer, The Name of the Rose, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, The Hunt for Red October, The Russia House, First Knight, The Rock.
Mixed-bag Connery-Hitchcock outlier: Marnie, an interesting film if not exactly a good one.
Connery stinkers (in ascending order): Medicine Man, Finding Forrester, Rising Sun, Wrong Is Right.The Anderson Tapes, Family Business, Meteor.
Temperamentally Sean was rarely…well, not always a day at the beach. Nor did he need to be. He came from a working-class, rough-and-tumble background, and could flash a serious temper when riled. I’ve also heard he had quite the libido. Around the time of Wrong Is Right I heard a story about an impulsive sexual matinee with a journalist in a hotel room. I know nothing, just loose talk.
The wham-slam-bam train compartment fight he had with Robert Shaw in From Russia With Love is one of the greatest hand-to-hand bouts in cinema history.
Connery will always be remembered for dressing down Nic Cage in The Rock with the following line: “Your best? Losers always whine about their best. Winners go home and fuck the prom queen.”
Director-screenwriter Jonathan Hensleigh (Armageddon, Die Hard With A Vengeance, the forthcoming Ice Road) confides that the “prom queen” thing was “one of the earliest lines contributed by Ian La Frenais and Dick Clement, when they came in at Sean’s request to polish his dialogue.”
At that juncture Hensleigh “was working literally day and night to smooth out all the plot wrinkles required when Sean insisted that his character, SAS Captain John Patrick Mason, be re-imagined as a British national, thus requiring the almost overnight invention of the ‘aging James Bond’ character buried away in Alcatraz by the CIA and MI6.
“It’s a sad day,” Hensleigh remarks. “I loved Sean. He was difficult and demanding and made my life hell for six months, but [The Rock] was his comeback role and believe me, he knew it. I loved working with him.”
I agree with the alleged Facebook/Twitter suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop corruption story, whatever that may actually amount to. I don’t give a damn about Hunter’s alleged ickiness and neither does anyone else. Joe is the guy on the ticket, right? And not Hunter?
Will it come to light one day that Joe is faintly or moderately corrupt in some Ukraine- or China-related way? Maybe, and right now nobody gives a shit. The Hunter thing is a desperate, last-minute attempt to generate a Trump surge in the polls, and it’s not working.
Matt Taibbi has written that “attempts to squelch information about a New York Post story may prove to be more dangerous corruption than whatever Hunter Biden did with a crooked Ukrainian energy company.” Really? I don’t think so, and neither does anyone else.
Glenn Greenwald, who would love to spill battery acid on the Biden campaign, has quit The Intercept because “the news website he helped found [has] refused to publish an article he wrote on Biden unless he removed sections that were critical of the Democratic presidential nominee.” Good!
Agreed — Hunter Biden is/was a bad egg (or at least a formerly drug-addicted one) who profited from his father’s name and power and connections. This or that sundry maneuver (possibly revealed or alluded to on the infamous Hunter Biden laptops), and a lotta Ukrainian or Chinese dough in the mix.
All-too-standard stuff when it comes to problematic sons and daughters of famous wealthy guys. Icky, corrupt, not cool or admirable, etc. It doesn’t always come with the territory, but if often does.
So that’s one significant uh-oh on Biden’s side of the ledger. One.
How many Hunter Biden-level corruptions and worse (i.e., as in much, MUCH worse) are on Trump’s side of the ledger? Two or three dozen? Two or three hundred? The rank crimes and corruptions of Orange Plague are piled so much higher and are spread is so many different waya…the man’s lies and deceptions and shady deals aren’t just countless but breathtaking, and seemingly without end. C’mon, man!
On top of which the alleged odiousness of Hunter’s shenanigans have been roundly dismissed or at least deemed highly suspicious. Anyone can find the links, if they want to read the arguments.
As a friend says, “Even given that the Hunter Biden story is legitimate and should not be censored by the woke media, whatever transgressions did occur, in terms of what Joe Biden did, pale a thousand times next to the myriad documented transgressions of our president.
“Yes, the media, in recent weeks, has tried to bury the Hunter Biden story, along with QAnon and other things (and for the record: I’m not for burying any of that), but the contrast with Trump is the real story here.
“If Biden’s (lone) transgression matters so damn much, then why don’t Trump’s hundreds of transgressions matter more?”
Just a reminder that Adam Wingard‘s Godzilla vs. Kong, which wrapped almost a full year before the pandemic enfolded everything and everyone last March, is still planning to open on 5.21.21. Pic stars Alexander Skarsgård, Millie Bobby Brown, Rebecca Hall, Brian Tyree Henry, Shun Oguri, Eiza González, Jessica Henwick, Julian Dennison, Kyle Chandler and Demián Bichir.
Then again Dr. Fauci said today that the world probably won’t be achieving a semblance of normal until 2022. The U.S. will have a vaccine in the next few months, he said, but there’s a chance a “substantial proportion of the people” won’t be vaccinated until the second or third quarter of 2021. Remember last spring (i.e., “the good old days”) when everyone was saying the pandemic probably wouldn’t start to lift until the late fall of ’20?
On the set of 1962’s King Kong vs. Godzilla, director Ishirō Honda confers with Shoichi Hirose (guy inside Kong suit) and Haruo Nakajima (guy inside Godzilla suit).
So Neo’s wearing a tennisball cut in Lana Wachowski‘s currently filming The Matrix 4. I realize I’ve never conveyed anything in the way of specific, adult-level reasoning, but there’s just something about a tennisball coif that rubs me the wrong way. Part of my concern in this instance is the fact that Keanu Reeves‘ follicles are a little too sparse.
And why make another Matrix movie at all? After the dual debacles of The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions, which opened and collapsed 17 years ago to moans of regret and embarassment, where’s the honor in dredging it all up again? What are the odds that the newbie restores even a fraction of the mystique of the original The Matrix, which opened on 3.31.99? I’ll never forget catching it for the first time at a commercial screening at the Beverly Connection plex. I came out levitating.
Keanu Reeves was 33 or 34 when The Matrix was filmed in ’98. The film suggested that he was 25 or 26, somewhere in that realm. Neo would therefore be in his mid 40s in The Matrix 4. I’ll allow that Reeves appears to be in fairly good shape these days. He’s lost that beefiness that he’s been sporting in the John Wick films. But he’s kept the scraggly whiskers.
Project Ice Cream began principal photography in San Francisco on 2.4.20. Shooting was halted on 3.16.20 due to Covid. Shooting resumed in Berlin sometime last August. The Matrix 4 is expected to open on 12.22.21.
“I am reserving judgment on Mank until I see it, as I always do with films. I am glad to know David Fincher and Eric Roth evidently have reworked Jack Fincher’s 1994 script, which was factually inaccurate about Orson Welles’ contribution to the screenplay of Citizen Kane.
“Film historian Robert Carringer’s research into the seven drafts of the screenplay in his 1978 Critical Inquiry essay ‘The Scripts of Citizen Kane‘ — the kind of research Pauline Kael did not bother to do — proved that the screen credit is correct: ‘Original Screen Play / Herman J. Mankiewicz / Orson Welles.’
“However, I am dismayed that Herman’s grandson Ben Mankiewicz continues to be allowed by TCM and CBS to spread lies about the script, denigrating and minimizing Welles’s contribution. I guess they don’t have fact-checkers, but then the fabled New Yorker fact-checking department fell down on the job when the magazine published Kael’s article (‘Raising Kane’) in 1971.
“[Kael] called me the day it first appeared to discuss it, and I wrote a response in Film Heritage, ‘Rough Sledding with Pauline Kael.’ Andrew Sarris wrote that I was the first scholar to study Mankiewicz’s contribution in detail, in an appendix to my essay on Kane in my 1968 book ‘Persistence of Vision: A Collection OF Film Criticism.’
“I am very, very tired of writing about this controversy over the script credit, having done so for the last 49 years, and I hope I won’t have to do it again but am concerned that I may be doing so for another 49 years.
“My role in this mishegoss has always been to try to keep the historical record accurate, as Carringer and others have also done. Perhaps the final version of Mank will handle the matter fairly; at least I hope so. In the meantime, I refer readers to my essay on the subject, ‘The Screenplay as Genre,’ in the 2009 Harvard University Press book ‘A New Literary History of America’. edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors, and to Carringer’s research on the subject.
I am a typical “owl”. I find it incredibly difficult to fall asleep before midnight and even harder to wake up.
I usually wake up slowly, between eight and nine. I just lie there for five or six minutes. Then I stumble out to the kitchen to turn on the coffee maker. 99% of me is still asleep. Back to bed again. Three minutes later, a plaintive signal from the kitchen tells me the coffee is ready.
I take three or four sips right in the kitchen, and consciousness begins to activate. Back to bed, another sip or two. Open mail, news, messages. More coffee while trying to recall what day of the week it is, what my obligations are, and so on.
Half a cup of coffee means that 25% of me is awake. Finishing the cup brings me to 50%.
While I’m in the shower, strong black tea is brewed. A huge mug. Milk, honey. Drink, get dressed, down to the garage.
Do you think I am finally cheerful and vigorous? Oh, no! 20% to 30% of me is still asleep. I open the roof of my Beetle (for oxygen), pull into traffic. Only fifteen minutes later am I completely attuned and alive. Sometimes I refuel on coffee on the way.
This is my morning routine, each and every day. But today something went totally wrong.
I recently bought a multi-vitamin, which I always do the spring and fall. I also bought some organic sleeping pills. Both are in the shape of yummy bears. The sleeping pellets didn’t work properly after the first try. Their exposure time was supposed to start after 45 minutes, but for me that moment never came. So I put them aside in the kitchen, possibly to try again down the road. The multi-vitamins were placed on my bedside table.
…for black-and-white widescreen cinematography than myself. Serious widescreen, I mean — 2.39:1.
Off the top of my head the most mouth-watering monochrome scope flicks are Woody Allen‘s Manhattan (dp Gordon Willis), Martin Ritt‘s Hud (dp James Wong Howe), Robert Rossen‘s The Hustler (dp Eugene Schüfftan), Jack Cardiff‘s Sons and Lovers (dp Freddie Francis), Jack Clayton‘s The Innocents (also Francis), Daryl F. Zanuck‘s The Longest Day (dps Jean Bourgoin, Walter Wottitz) and David Lynch‘s The Elephant Man (Francis again).
Eric Messerschmidt‘s black-and-white capturings in the Mank trailer look perfectly luscious. Monochrome dessert with whipped cream and a cherry on top. But for a period film already praised for casting an ultra-scrupulous eye upon the minutiae of 1940s Hollywood life, I’ve been wondering why Fincher and Messerschmidt chose to shoot Mank in an ultra-wide aspect ratio when 1.37 was the compositional norm back then.
Nobody except The Big Trail‘s Raoul Walsh and dps Lucien Andriot and Arthur Edeson had shot anything in black-and-white widescreen back then, and certainly nobody was thinking or dreaming in such terms, so why is a super-exacting film like Mank upsetting the apple cart of our common visual perception of that era?
I wouldn’t call this a huge concern of mine, but I’m wondering what the thinking might have been. My guess is that Fincher and Messerschmidt did some tests and decided that despite the historical incongruity, they’d simply fallen too heavily in love with widescreen scope to let it go.
Although I have to say I felt truly crestfallen when I heard Dave Chapelle say the following to David Letterman [listen below]: “I believe that God is in control….no matter what I worry about…I trust that this creation has a purpose….something perfect exists…we have to believe in something, otherwise why would you continue?”
HE reply: “God is in control”? Tell that to the millions who were marched into showers and gassed with Zyklon-B. Why did they continue despite many of them smelling or at least sensing their fate around the corner? Because they had no option but to live and strive and keep trying despite the odds. Because continuing is mandatory.