The more I hated the hyper jackhammer insanity of Uncut Gems (’19), which wasn’t so much “directed” as mainlined by the crazy hypodermic Safdies, the more I fell in love with the memory of Karel Reisz and James Toback‘s The Gambler (’74) — a film that considers the gambling-junkie pathology in tragic-poetic terms.
I can rent a high-def streaming copy any day of the week, but I’d love to own a first-rate Bluray as a keepsake. An Imprint Bluray is out on 5.26.21, at a cost of $34.95, Isn’t that a bit much? And isn’t the orange packaging a stopper? It sure is on this end.
Seasoned Filmmaker to HE: “I’ve come to strongly believe that Promising Young Woman is hitting the 60-plus White Male Academy voters (which still constitute the majority) in a sweet spot, and that for this reason Emerald Fennell‘s film is bound to be the upset Best Picture winner that Parasite was last year. Trust me — Promising Young Woman is the film that ALL my voter colleagues in LA and overseas are raving about.”‘
HE to Seasoned Filmmaker: “Really? Huh. And what do your friends think of Nomadland?”
Seasoned Filmmaker to HE: “Non-urgent admiration for Nomadland.”
HE to Seasoned Filmmaker: “I feel the same way about Nomadland but at least it doesn’t have a glaring error like Promising Young Woman — it has more overall integrity and a unity of purpose.
“But can you tell me why older white guys are so taken with Promising Young Woman?
“It’s a dry, arch & acrid indictment film of not most but ALL young males on the prowl. It doesn’t say most of them are indecent predators (a harsh but arguably valid point of view) but ALL of them are, as even Bo Burnham’s nice guy pediatrician boyfriend is revealed at the end to be a friend and apologist of a rapist.
“On a certain level I admire Fennell’s boldness of vision (however extreme) because this is how strong social-vision directors have tended to operate from Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel onward. But pulling the rug out on audiences during the last 15 minutes by suddenly identifying Burnham as just another bad guy is a mark of mediocre writing — a capitulation to an industry-wide rule that a last-minute twist is required of all scripts.”
Seasoned Filmmaker to HE: “So many Older White Male Academy members have a skeleton in their closet. Younger Academy men do as well. Moonlight and Parasite allowed the Academy to atone for #OscarsSoWhite. Right now Academy members want more than anything to not be caught on the wrong side of Cancel Culture. Promising Young Woman is this year’s Parasite.”
HE to Seasoned Filmmaker: “Okay, got it — Promising Young Woman has a possible edge on the Best Picture Oscar because of the Woke Terror factor. It’s the culturally safe choice — a kind of ‘get out of jail’ card to be used in case of an emergency.”
Seasoned Filmmaker to HE: “It’s all in the mind…but yes.”
A day or two later I watched a KL companion disc — a Bluray of Feldman’s In God We Tru$t, a 1980 anti-religion, anti-corporate satire that proved to be Feldman’s undoing.
The film contained a brief riff that insulted Universal/MCA by comparing it morally to the Ku Klux Klan. Feldman was told to remove the bit but he refused, contractually fortified as he was with final cut. In so doing he effectively terminated his five-film deal with Universal.
Plus InGodWeTru$t wasn’t very funny. Not a total wash (it’s an inventive effort and carefully assembled) but that mescaline-in-the-blood feeling was in low supply.
Spencer’s commentary is just as first-hand candid and knowledgable as his Beau Geste shpiel, but the God We Tru$t saga is basically a downer. I’m sorry but it’s hard to feel intrigued, much less turned on, by a story about a comic genius who simultaneously killed himself (Feldman smoked five to six packs of cigarettes per day) and deep-sixed his career at roughly the same time. It’s an emotional tale from Spencer’s perspective, but tinged with a wasteful residue.
Feldman died of a heart attack in a Mexico City hotel in 1982, while filming Yellowbeard.
Our favorite Sunday hiking path…Whittier Drive and Lexington, north to Bridle Lane and then left on Angelo Drive and up, up, up and winding like a snake, right on Davies Drive, up and down and winding down to Cielo Drive and down to Benedict Canyon south, right on Roxbury and back to Lexington. Roughly a two-hour journey including breathers.
I wouldn’t watch Godzilla vs. Kong under any conditions…not for free, not if you offered to pay me $50 or $100, not if you offered to pick me up at my home in an SUV limo…nothing would suffice.
Excerpt #1 from David Rooney’s 3.29 THR review: “The pinhead, pear-shaped figure and tiny hands perhaps inevitably mean Zilla will always be runner-up in both the beauty and personality portions of the pageant.”
There are many ways of describing the physique of Fatzilla, but “pear-shaped”? Okay, we get it. Critics can’t be too careful these days.
“In the sometimes laborious franchise-crossover tradition of Moneymaker 1 vs. Moneymaker 2 — think Freddy vs. Jason, Alien vs. Predator, and ugh, Batman v Superman — Godzilla vs. Kong is a worthy enough match, and definitely a giant leap forward from their first battle, in the 1963 Toho production.
“If only it had the wit of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.”
HE add-on: Hell, if only it had the wit of Abbott and Costello Meet The Mummy.
Jett, Cait and I had a great time in Hanoi in mid-March of 2016 — a year and three-quarters before the launch of wokester terror. Why am I mentioning this now? Because Facebook brought it up…
Three and three-quarter years ago a few friends joined Tatiana and I in celebrating our June 2017 marriage at The Little Door, a Parisian-style brasserie.
We returned to that Third Street establishment last night for a light dinner. We love the cozy vibe, the blue paint, the fireplace and the candlelight, and the food is always pretty good. And the conversational levels are low so you can actually hear each other.
We had a nice, peaceful 60 or 70 minutes, but then a group of seven or eight Zoomers came along and sat down near us, and before long they started shriek-laughing…good God. We knew it was time to leave.
It’s okay for Hollywood Elsewhere to post opinionated headlines and somewhat slanted stories because this is an attitude-and-opinion site — I yam what I yam. But the trades, like your mainstream news sites (N.Y. Times, WashPost, TheWrap, USA Today, Daily Beast), are obliged to present a fair-minded, pseudo-balanced front.
Alas, in stories about the CBS Sunday Morning/Paramount + interview with Woody Allen that began streaming today, Variety and The Hollywood Reporter haven’t even attempted to offer a semblance of even-toned coverage. Neither publication is making the slightest effort to seem “fair” about anything — their editors are clearly Allen haters and in the tank for Dylan Farrow, and they don’t care if anyone gets that impression or not.
It is particularly egregious, I feel, that Variety‘s headline states that in the Paramount + interview Allen “Rehashes Old Arguments” in his defense of himself regarding the 1992 sexual abuse allegation.
Imagine if, say, a witness to last May’s George Floyd murder were to offer recollections of what he/she saw and heard to 60 Minutes, say, and a mainstream newspaper were to report the next day that the witness had “rehashed old observations.” The editors and perhaps the publisher of that newspaper would be forced to resign within 48 hours, and the paper itself would thereafter be regarded as inherently racist. There would be calls to shut it down or at least change the name.
An absorbing, unusually candid video essay is included in Kino Lorber’s All Night Long Bluray (5.26.20), which I only just watched last night.
Titled “All Night Wrong,” it’s a recollection from screenwriter W.D Richter (Slither, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Brubaker, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai) about why the film didn’t really work.
I happen to disagree. I think All Night Long is a decent half-and-halfer. Directed by Jean-Claude Tramont and costarring Gene Hackman and the curiously miscast Barbra Streisand, it’s a dry, somewhat quirky romantic comedy that ambles along, doesn’t grossly offend and occasionally kicks into gear by way of irreverence or what-have-you.
All Night Long screenwriter W.D, Richjter as featured in Kino Lorber video essay, “All Night Wrong.”
Richter wrote a low-key, European-toned screenplay that was intended to resemble a Mike Leigh film. It originally costarred Hackman and Lisa Eichorn. But the hoped-for chemistry between Hackman and Eichorn didn’t happen, and so Eichorn was jettisoned after a week of shooting and Streisand, of all people, stepped in at the urging of her hotshot agent, Sue Mengers, who was married to Tramont.
Streisand didn’t demand any rewrites or pull any big superstar moves — she just played the Eichorn role as written. But it was an odd fit. And Tramont, unfortunately, decided to throw in a lot of crude slapstick business that really didn’t work, and so the film felt tonally off-balanced.
All Night Long is great when it cleaves to Hackman’s middle-aged insouciance — his character’s loathing for middle-class conventionality. And Streisand isn’t half bad. But the best part of the Bluray package is the Richter essay — I found it much more engaging than the film.
…to live with a light sleeper with extra-sensitive hearing, a woman who can be woken up by damn near anything. And who chews you out when this happens.
Sleeping modes differ, of course. Some (like me) sink to the bottom of the pond and can’t be aroused by anything less than a 7.0 earthquake, and others (like the CEO of Tatiana, Ltd.) float on the surface of the pond. And I’m telling you that the slightest little piddly-tinkly-twinkly noise…a fork falling off a plate onto our glass-top coffee table, the accidental dropping of an iPhone battery, the mere snapping of a twig…wakes her up, and when that happens it’s like getting reamed out by Vladimir Putin.
I like to watch an old film to settle down with, and I always do so with wireless headphones. My movie time starts when Tatiana dozes off, around 10:30 or 11 pm. From that point on it’s “observe Moscow Rules or die.” If I want to get up for anything (a bottle of water, an ice pop, feed the cats) I’m careful to step extra-gently without shoes and only on the balls of my feet…I’m an angel walking on cotton balls. But that’s not good enough for General Strelnikov because if I walk on top of certain sections of wooden floor a slight groaning or creaking sound results…”you woke me uhhhp!!”
My name is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and I live in the Gulag Archipelago.
Respect for the late Jessica Walter, who passed yesterday at age 80. Walter achieved screen immortality when she portrayed Evelyn Draper, the estranged younger sister of Don Draper (kidding!) and the original psycho-nutso girlfriend in Clint EastwoodPlay Misty For Me (’71).
After a single night of great sex with Carmel disc-jokey Dave Garver (Eastwood), Walter/Draper grasped and stalked and terrorized and wound up wielding a large kitchen knife. Audiences cheered when she met her doom at the finale.
16 years later Walter became the second most psychotic and terrifying figure in this realm with the arrival of Glenn Close‘s Alex Forrest in Adrien Lyne‘s Fatal Attraction (’87).
Alex caused blood to instantly drain from the faces of tens of millions of straight American male dilletante infidels…husbands and boyfriends who had once or twice slithered into a little involvement on the side without getting caught. Or had dreamt of this.
The idea with both Evelyn and Alex was that if you become intimate with them just once or twice, for a single night or over, say, a 24-hour period, you need to devote your life to them forever…leave your girlfriend, get divorced, invite her to live with you and become her lifelong partner as she prepares for a coming child, etc.
Walter’s peak feature-film period ran from the mid ’60s to early ’70s — Lilith, Grand Prix, The Group, Bye Bye Braverman, Number One, Play Misty for Me, etc. She kept working and hung in there and won an Emmy or two (she was oh-my-God-so-fucking-great in Arrested Development!…aaagghh wonderful!) all the way to the end. And don’t forget her voice work in Archer.
Solemn condolences and melancholy tidings in the matter of Bertrand Tavernier, who has passed at age 79. A great director (Coup de Torchon, Round Midnight, A Sunday in the Country, Let Joy Reign Supreme, Life and Nothing But, In The Electric Mist, The Princess of Montpensier), a brilliant fellow, French to the core but an internationalist, an avid cineaste and warm acquaintance to journalists the world over.
Monsieur Tavernier was simply a magnificent human being and a consummate Renaissance man — warm, gentle-mannered, passionate, knew everything and everyone. I was transported when I realized about 15 years ago that Tavernier was an HE reader, and doubly if not triply elevated when I met him at a journo gathering in Cannes a year or two later. We first chatted at the Algonquin Hotel in ’81 or ’82, during a press interview for Coup do Torchon. Quite the occasion.
We last met almost exactly a decade ago (3.9.11), during a French Consulate press encounter for The Princess of Montpensier, which might be my favorite Tavernier of all. Right now I can hear Bertrand whispering to me from heaven, telling me to stand tall and hold fast against the demonic Twitter jackals (I don’t know for a fact that he hated wokesters but I’m 98% certain of this) and to keep the cinema-love faith.
