What are the best films in which the action occurs within two hours or less? (Which basically means movies told in real time.) HE picks are as follows:
1. Sidney Lumet‘s 12 Angry Men (’57) — 96 minutes
2. Stanley Kubrick‘s Dr. Strangelove (’64) — 94 minutes
3. Robert Wise‘s The Set-Up (’49) — 72 minutes
4. Richard Linklater‘s Before Sunset (’04) — 80 minutes
5. Fred Zinnemann‘s HighNoon (’52) — 85 minutes
6. Steven Knight‘s Locke (’13) — 85 minutes
7. Joel Schumacher‘s Phone Booth (’02) — 81 minutes
8. Tom Tykwer‘s Run Lola Run (’98) — 81 minutes
9. Alfred Hitchcock‘s Rope (’48) — 80 minutes
10. Louis Malle‘s My Dinner with Andre (’81) — 110 minutes
Out of the blue I sat through a pair of wowser thrillers last night, both mature and well-measured and absolutely not aimed at the popcorn hooligans, and one of them, surprisingly, was a formula-adhering Liam Neeson film.
There’s nothing like the pot high of suddenly seeing a good movie or two on an unexpected (or not necessarily anticipated) basis, and just feeling more and more ripped as they proceed. And you know that most of the low-lifes out there will ignore these films or give them short effing shrift.
These are just iPhone jottings…I’ll expand in a few hours.
Steven Zallian’s Ripley (Netflix, 4.4) is a stunning work of visual art — one of most beautiful monochrome films I’ve seen this century or ever. All hail dp Robert Elswit! I watched episode #1 last night. (Eight episodes in all.) Haunting, quietly eerie and creepy and deliciously atmospheric. A knockout performance by Andrew Scott, and fascinating cameo performance by Kenneth Lonergan. It’s a completely gourmet–levelserving, and I loved the careful attention to period detail. (It’s set around the time of Rene Clement’s Purple Noon, which opened in France in March 1960.)
Set during “the troubles” (‘74 or thereabouts), InTheLand of SaintsandSinners (which isn’t an especially good title) is a way-above-average Liam Neesonfilm. Restrained and solemn and well-plotted, and it gets better and better as it moves along. Directed by longtime Clint Eastwood producer Robert Lorenz, it follows the basic Neeson-flick formula but the writing and particularly the character-sculpting are of a very high calibre, and the magnificent Kerry Condon delivers one of the greatest female villain characters ever — a feisty, take-no-shit-from-anyone IRA firebrand. What an actress!
Although I’d regarded this guy as a great friend and an excellent human being for decades, he’d alarmingly turned into a wokester fanatic sometime in ’20 or ’21 or thereabouts. Goaded by his three Millennial-aged daughters, he’d decided I was suddenly allied with society’s bad guys and that I’d more or less become some kind of suppressive, anti-feminist, Harvey Weinstein-like figure.
I’ve seen red over a few things in my time, but my mind turned into molten lava when the Chance Brown condemnation came down. How fucking dare you?
I didn’t mention his name in the Village Market piece, but referred to him as “Strelnikov” as his chilly ranting reminded me of Tom Courtenay‘s communist enforcer in David Lean‘s Doctor Zhivago (’65).
I’m revealing Chance’s identity because (deep breath) he died last Friday afternoon from pancreatic cancer. His family requested radio silence at first, but Chance’s sister broke the news on Facebook a day or two later, and I’m figuring “okay, olly olly in come free.”
Here’s what I posted a day after his passing:
“The greatly talented, often joyful and widely beloved CHANCE BROWNE has left the earth and has merged with the infinite. He is now at one with legendary astronaut Dave Bowman at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, gazing down upon our blue planet with a certain childlike amazement.
“Chance passed yesterday afternoon (Friday, March 1st) around 1 pm. Taken down by pancreatic cancer, which he had only recently discovered.
“My heart is broken but what else can I or anyone else say? This is obviously a different deal than the passing of John Lennon (43 years and 2 months ago), and yet it feels emotionally similar in a certain way. To me at least. This sounds kinda silly but I thought Chance would just keep on Chance-ing forever. I really did. I thought he’d just keep going. I really thought we all had an eternal lease on life.
“I am shocked and thrown by this terrible waffle-iron…this feeling of having been clobbered on the side of my face or my head or whatever. I haven’t felt this shocked and thrown by the passing of a good and gentle soul in such a long time. But it’s happened. We may as well grim up and face it and join hands and ask ourselves who we are now and who we used to be, and where we’ve been and where we’re all going. We’re all getting there, no exceptions. Chance has simply left a bit earlier. He’ll almost certainly be waiting.”
Chance found out that he was more or less doomed a month and a half ago. On the afternoon of 1.17.24 he messaged a mutual friend, Mike Connors, as follows: “I have bad news, my brother. I just got diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer (!). I’m starting chemo tomorrow. I feel like dice must feel when they get shook up and thrown down the table. I may last another six months to a year or more with chemo. I love you and I’m sorry to leave the party too soon. I’ve got some time so we’ll talk.”
Alas, this never happened. This message was their last exchange.
Untimely passing cartoon, roughed out by Chance 11 or 12 years ago:
From Truman Capote‘s “The Duke In His Domain,” published in The New Yorker on 11.2.57…excellent writing, phrased just so, based on a Marlon Brando interview in Kyoto’s Miyako hotel during location filming of Sayonara:
“The maid had reëntered the star’s room, and Murray, on his way out, almost tripped over the train of her kimono. She put down a bowl of ice and, with a glow, a giggle, an elation that made her little feet, hooflike in their split-toed white socks, lift and lower like a prancing pony’s, announced, ‘Appapie! Tonight on menu…appapie.’
“Brando groaned. ‘Apple pie….that’s all I need.” He stretched out on the floor and unbuckled his belt, which dug too deeply into the swell of his stomach. ‘I’m supposed to be on a diet. But the only things I want to eat are apple pie and stuff like that.’
“Six weeks earlier, in California, [director Joshua] Logan had told him he must trim off ten pounds for his role in Sayonara, and before arriving in Kyoto Brando had managed to get rid of seven. Since reaching Japan, however, abetted not only by American-type apple pie but by the Japanese cuisine, with its delicious emphasis on the sweetened, the starchy, the fried, he’d regained, then doubled this poundage.
“Now, loosening his belt still more and thoughtfully massaging his midriff, he scanned the menu, which offered, in English, a wide choice of Western-style dishes, and, after reminding himself ‘I’ve got to lose weight,’ ordered soup, beefsteak with French-fried potatoes, three supplementary vegetables, a side dish of spaghetti, rolls and butter, a bottle of sake, salad, and cheese and crackers.
“’And appapie, Marron?’
“He sighed. ‘With ice cream, honey.’
“Watching him now, with his eyes closed, his unlined face white under an overhead light, I felt as if the moment of my initial encounter with him were being recreated. The year of that meeting was 1947; it was a winter afternoon in New York, when I had occasion to attend a rehearsal of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, in which Brando was to play the role of Stanley Kowalski.
“It was this role that first brought him general recognition, although among the New York theatre’s cognoscenti he had already attracted attention, through his student work with the drama coach Stella Adler and a few Broadway appearances — one in a play by Maxwell Anderson, Truckline Café, and another as Marchbanks opposite Katharine Cornell’s Candida — in which he showed an ability that had been much praised and discussed.
“Ten years ago, on the remembered afternoon, Brando was still relatively unknown; at least, I hadn’t a clue to who he might be when, arriving too early at the Streetcar rehearsal, I found the auditorium deserted and a brawny young man stretched out atop a table on the stage under the gloomy glare of work lights, solidly asleep. Because he was wearing a white T-shirt and denim trousers, because of his squat gymnasium physique — the weight-lifter’s arms, the Charles Atlas chest (though an opened ‘Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud’ was resting on it) — I took him for a stagehand. Or did until I looked closely at his face.
“It was as if a stranger’s head had been attached to the brawny body, as in certain counterfeit photographs. For this face was so very untough, superimposing, as it did, an almost angelic refinement and gentleness upon hard-jawed good looks: taut skin, a broad, high forehead, wide apart eyes, an aquiline nose, full lips with a relaxed, sensual expression. Not the least suggestion of Williams’ unpoetic Kowalski.
“It was therefore rather an experience to observe, later that afternoon, with what chameleon ease Brando acquired the character’s cruel and gaudy colors, how superbly, like a guileful salamander, he slithered into the part, how his own persona evaporated — just as, in this Kyoto hotel room ten years afterward, my 1947 memory of Brando receded, disappeared into his 1957 self.
This morning I watched portions of the new Titanic 4K UHD Bluray (12.5), and I was seriously impressed by the super-sharp detail, enhanced compositions and generally exquisite fine-grain clarity.
My eyes recall very clearly what the film looked like 26 years ago (I saw it five or six times), and James Cameron‘s classic looks appreciably upgraded. It’s relatively rare for a 4K disc to deliver this kind of bump, but this one qualifies. The downside is that they’re charging $30 but I’m thinking I might pop for it.
@DemetriosPatsiaris (12.11): “As someone who worked on the 2011/2012 restoration/stereo conversion of Titanic, I can tell you that the raw scans looked very clean and well preserved. This UHD accurately reflects what was there, but better.”
@rmn070 (12.14): “Every review has given it a perfect score, and I can’t wait to get my hands on it. As nitpicky as it sounds but I’m pretty disappointed that the changes made in 2012 have been carried over. That original sunset would have looked glorious on 4K, but looks like it will stay in SD for the rest of time. Preservation purposes, you know?”
Last night “Bob Hightower” posted an anecdote about director Mike Nichols. Residing in the comment thread for an HE article titled “Son of New York Theatre Stories,” it concerns the summer movie-house run of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolff? and particularly the behavior of a certain New York projectionist.
“When Nichols’s first film, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, opened in late June of ’66, he went to a theater in New York one afternoon to watch it with a paying audience.
“The film was out of focus. It kept being out of focus. And of course, no one in the audience complained.
“Nichols frantically ran out and up the stairs to the projection booth. He banged on the door. No one answered. He banged again. Nothing. So he pushed open the door and found the projectionist on the floor banging an usherette. Nichols crept out and left the theater. As Gregg Toland once said, ‘The projectionist is the ultimate censor.'”
HE correction: Toland probably meant to say “the projectionist is the ultimate arbiter.” Showing a film out of focus obviously doesn’t constitute censorship, but vandalism.
Mark Harris informs that the anecdote isn’t from his 2022 Nichols biography, but says “it certainly sounds credible.”
Well, I don’t find the story credible.
HE to Hightower #1: With the urgent knocking why wouldn’t the randy projectionist have gotten up and seen who it was, especially if the door was unlocked? He surely understood that women hate it when strangers burst into a room with intimate activity going on. If the projectionist wanted to keep things going with the usherette he would taken proper privacy precautions. It would have been one thing if the projection booth door was locked, but it obviously wasn’t. You can’t tell me he didn’t hear Nichols knocking.
HE to Hightower #2: Projection booth floors are made of hard plastic tiles or plain cement. Who would attempt to make love to an usherette on one of those awful uncarpeted floors? What kind of usherette would submit to this? Women like their romantic encounters to be nice and soft and candle-lit. I would expect that most projectionists and usherettes would avoid the floor and attempt the deed standing up. Or perhaps with the usherette bent over the reel-spicing table, say.
One thing that’s always bothered me about Virginia Wolff is that George and Martha’s young guests — George Segal‘s Nick and Sandy Dennis‘s Honey — arrive around 2:30 am. The four of them have already been to a previous faculty party which presumably started at 8 or 9 pm, and now it’s five or six hours later and they’re about to start drinking and chit-chatting again? Even at the height of my most rambunctious youth I never showed up anywhere — a friend’s home or a bar or anything — at 2:30 am. During my drinking days I might’ve crashed at 2:30 or 3 am, but I never partied until dawn killed the moon…never. And I was a wild man, relatively speaking.
Friendo: Was there ever an actress who graced more blockbusters but had less to show for it than Anne Archer? Adrien Lyne‘s Fatal Attraction. and Phillip Noyce‘s Patriot Games and Clear & Present Danger. Big hit movies, and she was even Oscar-nominated for her performance in Lyne’s thriller. But she never seemed to reap the appropriate benefit. Now 76, Archer was very talented, beautiful and quite likable, but was there finally just something a tad insubstantial going on?
HE to friendo: Archer was a classy and respected second-tier actress, and of course she peaked during her late ’80s to mid ’90s heyday. She’s been acting since the early ’70s, and at least she peaked during the Poppy Bush and Clinton eras! Plus she’s still with us at age 76 or thereabouts.
Archer was always a highly skilled actress, but there was always something a bit conservative and Fairfield County about her. I saw her in John Ford Noonan‘s “A Coupla White Chicks Sitting Around Talking” at a theatre across the street from the Public at Astor Place, and thought she was excellent. But she mainly seemed to play bland, nurturing wife-mothers who were married to corporate, upper-middle-class alpha-males.
Archer never played cold corporate types on her own steam or sexual dynamos or murdering bitches a la Glenn Close or action sidekicks or frosty district attorneys. Like almost every young actress of yore she performed in the requisite number of sex scenes, but nothing in the 9 1/2 Weeks realm.
Noyce and Lyne cast Archer in her most commercially successful films, but in so doing she kind of became known as the consummate classy wife. In a way these castings seemed to vaguely suppress her career. Or do I mean that she was too convincing as the classy homemaker, such that no one could see her as anything but?
Wiki excerpt: Since the 2000s, Archer has sporadically worked in acting. She appeared in the film Lullaby (2014) and made her stage debut as Mrs Robinson in the West End production of The Graduate in 2001. She played the eponymous actress in The Trial of Jane Fonda at the 2014 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and had recurring roles on television shows such as Boston Public (2003), It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (2006) and Ghost Whisperer (2006–2008).
Friendo to HE: Maybe JoBeth Williams is another of her ilk (and from roughly the same time period): Attractive and talented, but, as the producers and agents are fond of saying, “She’s just not a lead.” I’d love to have seen Archer playing an amoral Maddy Walker-type (i.e., Body Heat). Or someone whose warm, nurturing demeanor masked a heart of ice.
I saw Bradley Cooper‘s Maestro yesterday afternoon at Dolby 88, starting around 4 pm. 130-something minutes later I came out positively elated and humming…floating on a cloud. It’s one of the two or three best films of the year (right up there with Poor Things and The Holdovers, and may even possibly be the El Supremo), and is easily the most stylistically audacious film of the year.
It’s arty, man…fully and delightfully so. It uses “glancing, elliptical storytelling,” as a friend describes it. And, as I’ve noted, it leaves out loads of biographical material. No working on West Side Story, no composing the On the Waterfront score, no Radical Chic Black Panther party with Tom Wolfe taking notes.
Maestro is basically Scenes From An Unusual Marriage — Bradley Cooper‘s Leonard Bernstein and Carey Mulligan‘s Felicia Montealegre. Theirs is a real marriage as well as a kind of beard marriage with Lenny and Felicia siring and raising three happy kids under flush circmstances, but with Lenny mainly behaving like a happy gay guy, which he is outside the immediate homestead.
No miserable gay stuff, no Montgomery Clift-like conflicts. Lenny simply adores cock alongside his primary, lifelong passion for music (conducting, composing, teaching). At first Felicia is okay with this arrangement, but eventually she’s not. It starts to rankle and wound. It worsens.
Who knew how the film would play? So I went in expecting to possibly be underwhelmed or even appalled. Glenn Kenny has called it “weak tea”, after all, and there’s a male critic I won’t name who’s called it “terrible.” It’s generally been approved across the board, but it’s also fending off a small number of haters. Suffice that I sat down with guarded expectations.
So it started and almost right away I was watching a black-and-white sequence with a young Cooper bounding out of bed in 1943 and running straight into Carnegie Hall…running to the turbulent and percussive opening bars of Bernstein’s On The Waterfront score, and I was saying to myself “okay, wait…this is pretty good.”
15 or 20 minutes later I was watching a black-and-white dance rehearsal of 1945’s On The Town (three white-uniformed sailors performing vigorous ballet) and then Cooper became one of the sailors, and I was saying “hold on, this is really good.”
And around the 90-minute mark a mild-mannered writer I came with — sitting right next to me, a middle-aged straight guy, mature and not given to drinking, drug-taking or wacked emotional spillage — this dude was weeping over a scene that I won’t describe. And I’ll tell you this — before yesterday I hadn’t sat next to a weeping guy at a screening in my entire life. This means something,
So does this: If you feel as if you’re over-hearing intimate dialogue in a movie rather than listening to dialogue that’s been written and performed, you’re experiencing a different kind of film.
Plus roughly 90% of Maestro is framed within a 1.37 aspect ratio, and roughly a third or maybe 40% of that 90% is in monochrome. Only the very beginning and the very end are presented in what looked to me like a standard Academy aspect ratio (or 1.85).
I wasn’t just delighted with Maestro — I was levitating.
The first thing I did after the 4 pm screening ended was call a friend who knows the “it’s terrible” guy and suggest that he might want to think about submitting to some form of professional therapy. Then again Time critic Stephanie Zacharek is as high on Maestro as I am, I’ve been told, and right how it’s got an 84% Rotten Tomatoes rating, which is obviously pretty good.
Right now all I want to do is see Maestro again in a screening situation. I wouldn’t mind seeing it in a theatre, but Dolby 88 has an excellent sound system and I’d like to keep it on this level for a while.
Maestro will hit theatres on Wednesday, 11.22 (eyeball to eyeball with Napoleon and the 60th anniversary of JFK’s murder). It will begin streaming on Netflix just before Christmas — on Wednesday, 12.20.
The Gotham Award nominations were announced at noon today, and hoo boy…talk about an organization and a community that lives in a deep mine shaft within its own secular planet…nominations that represent an elitist bubble of urban progressive sensitivity that could choke a plowhorse…a mindset that frequently spits upon Joe Popcorn cinema and enforces a social prejudice agenda…diverse, convulsive, queer-friendly, gender-neutral, indie-favoring, right index finger inserted in rectum, down with older white guys, “we know what we know and if you don’t like where we’re coming from that’s on you because we represent the better angels of the human condition, in large part because we’re more highly evolved”…
Okay, I’m half on-board with a few of the acting nominations…some of them are fairly spot-on so the people who selected them aren’t knaves but perceptive, sensible types for the most part. But the Best Feature and Best International feature nominees…yeesh.
The five Best Feature nominees are Ira Sachs‘ Passages (forget it), Celine Song‘s Past Lives (the fix is in on this one, trust me), Tina Satter‘s not-half-bad Reality, Kelly Reichardt‘s Showing Up (a reasonably decent woke-lifestyles-in-Portland film) and A.V. Rockwell‘s A Thousand and One (not a chance).
The Best International Feature noms are All of Us Strangers, Anatomy of a Fall, Poor Things, Tótem and The Zone of Interest. Yup, that’s right — they’ve blown off the audience-friendly The Taste of Things (i.e., The Pot-au-Feu). I didn’t realize that Poor Things was a truly international production….whatever.
Outstanding Gender-Free Lead Performance noms: Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor in Origin, Lily Gladstone in The Unknown Country (peresumably a KOTFM stalking horse), Greta Lee in Past Lives, Franz Rogowski in Passages, Andrew “beard stubble” Scott in All of Us Strangers, Cailee Spaeny in Priscilla, Teyana Taylor in A Thousand and One, Michelle Williams in Showing Up and Jeffrey Wright in American Fiction.
Outstanding Supporting Performance noms: Juliette Binoche in The Taste of Things (obviously NOT a supporting performance), Penélope Cruz in Ferrari (yes!!), Jamie Foxx in They Cloned Tyrone (what about his knockout performance in The Burial?), Claire Foy in All of Us Strangers (very good performance), Ryan Gosling in Barbie, Glenn Howerton in BlackBerry (first-rate!), Sandra Hüller in The Zone of Interest, Rachel McAdams in Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (good performance), Charles Melton in May December (forget it), Da’Vine Joy Randolph in The Holdovers (best of the bunch or at least tied with Penelope Cruz!).
Back to the root elements: Remember Ray Walston in My Favorite Martian with the insect antennae popping out of his head? Many of the Gotham nominators are 2023 Walston variations…alien humanoids with a knowledgable, sophisticated, well-educated dweebo sensibility…Snidely Whiplash foo-foos who all drink from the same well or the same teapot…Justin Chang, K. Austin Collins, Jessica Kiang, Claudia Puig, Alison Willmore, Thelma Adams, David Fear, Jon Frosch, Wendy Ide, HE’s own Guy Lodge, plus Carlos Aguilar, Lindsey Bahr, Lovia Gyarkye, David Sims, Monica Castillo, Robert Daniels, Tim Grierson, Tomris Laffly…okay, I’m not 100% certain that each and every Gotham Awards nominating committee member is a “bad” person but many of them are, in my humble opinion.
Yesterday afternoon Jeff and Saha discussed the Barbenheimer Bait & Switch — the two films having been sold as one thing only to reveal their true colors during actual screenings.
Hey, maybe it’s me. I mean, maybe I’m a little fucked up or something. But yesterday’s HE comment thread consensus seems to be (a) yes, no film in Hollywood history has conveyed such a high degree of misandrist contempt for straight white dudes (men of color and mixed ethnicity being, of course, not only blameless but glorious), and yet (b) none of this matters because Barbie is a huge hit so all those grumpy misogynist dissers are the problem, not the film itself.
Do I have this right? Toxic gender-hate cinema is totally fine as long as it’s popular?