“[60 Minutes exec producer] Bill Owens resigned Tuesday. It was hard on him and hard on us, but he did it for us and you. Our parent company, Paramount, is trying to complete a merger. The Trump administration must approve it [and so] Paramount began to supervise our [60 Minutes] content in new ways. Bill felt that he has lost the independence that honest journalism requires.” — Scott Pelley during the closing minute of last night’s 60 Minutes show.
What Pelley said wasn’t all that different from Al Pacino‘s Lowell Bergman argument inside Don Hewitt‘s office in The Insider (’99)..remember? A planned CBS merger with Westinghouse, the maneuverings of attorney Helen Caperelli and the concept of tortious interference apparently influencing the honesty of the Jeffrey Wigand / Brown & Williamson story. Don Hewitt: “Are you suggesting that she and Eric are influenced by money?” Lowell Bergman: “No, no, of course they’re not influenced by money. They work for free. And you are a volunteer executive producer.”
Or, for that matter, Howard Beale‘s rant about in the influence of CCA over the news division of UBS, the United Broadcasting System.
“This company is now in the hands of CCA, the Communication Corporation of America. And there’s a new chairman of the board, a man called Frank Hackett, sitting on the 20th floor. And when the 12th largest company in the world controls the most awesome goddam propaganda force in the whole godless world, who knows what shit will be peddled as truth on this network?” — Peter Finch‘s Howard Beale in Network (’76).
“Nobody in this corner is the least bit confused or thrown over Sinners. I’m not even occasionally scratching my head over the cultural currents that Ryan Coogler’s film has seemingly stirred. I know exactly and precisely what this super-expensive excursion into early 1930s rural Mississippi Blackitude is (an unabashedly heterosexual Samuel Z. Arkoff popcorn horror film with cunnilingus detours and transportational music sequences) and what it’s tapped into over the last two weeks. Rarely has an exploitationflick connected in such a primal, across-the-board way.” — HE comment-thread retort below yesterday’s “HasSinnersBecomeAnOnlinePolitical–CulturalMoment?”
“23 YEAR OLD ARTIST comes to LA for sound advice… What the fuck world does this happen in? I was 23 when I moved to LA with a suitcase full of TERRIBLE Tarantino ripoff screenplays, and I had to live in a Glendale DAYS INN for like six weeks while I got a job that would have direct deposit and insurance and benefits.
“What hot 23 year old chick is an ARTIST from NEW YORK CITY at 23 23 23, then comes OUT HERE and lives with rich people in SILVER LAKE?…I didn’t even know where the fuck SILVER LAKE was until about 2003…. When you come here you have to get a 30k desk job for a decade or two before you can work on your ART. ART. ART. ART.
“Who are these white arty people in LA anyway? Most white people I know work in transcription or dubbing tapes at some post house…they aren’t making SHORT FILMS AND DOCUMENTARIES for a living, and they don’t live in HOUSES — they live in ONE BEDROOMS in Valley Village. BLABABYABABAY BLAH FUCK IT ALL.”
Has anyone streamed this recently? And if so, what were your reactions?
HE review: Ry Russo-Young‘s Nobody Walks just finished screening at the Eccles, and my sense during the q & a was that relatively few audience members got much from it. Ray Pride has called it “a tactile, tensile, bittersweet bruise…a terrific Teorema riff”…naah. I couldn’t see how it meant much. Cute little girl with a pixie haircut fucks this guy and then this guy and that guy…uhhm, wow…okay, uhm, yeah.
Olivia Thirlby plays Martine, a 23 year-old Manhattan artist who comes to Los Angeles to get some technical help on the sound design of a black-and-white art film about insects (or partially about insects). She’s not only getting this help from sound guy Peter (John Krasinski) but also staying at his home along with his therapist wife (Rosemarie DeWitt) and their two kids.
And then (this is straight from the hilarious press notes) “like a bolt of lightning, her arrival sparks a surge of energy that awakens suppressed impulses in everyone and forces them to confront their own fears and desires.” Fuck, fuck, fuckity-fuck, fuck, fuck, etc.
I didn’t “hate” it but I never felt aroused or intrigued or anything like that. I just sat there and watched and waited and ho-hummed.
Okay, I responded to the sex scenes. Somewhat. But they were just sex scenes. There was nothing going on underneath other than “uhhm, you’re, like, kinda hot…wow…I’m kinda feeling…uhmm…uhmm…wanna fuck?” and then wham.
Nobody Walks “is a rather fluttery, aimless, meandering domestic drama about unruly, haphazard erotic attraction,” I tweeted just after it ended.
The best performances are from DeWitt and Justin Kirk as an amorous patient. I can’t say I found Thirlby’s performance all that interesting and/or attractive. Her mallspeak accent — “Umm…I…umm, yeah…do you, like, wanna…? Ummm” — was a bit of a problem. I was also put off by her boyish, oddly half-sexual and yet desexualized 1964 Paul McCartney soup-bowl haircut.
And I was persistently annoyed by Fall On Your Sword‘s overbearing soundtrack. Their music is all fluttery, oodly-doodly, boopity-boop, xylophone hipster-band shit.
Bill Belichick, second in all-time NFL wins and a six-time Super Bowl champion, talks with "CBS Mornings” Tony Dokoupil about his father's advice, Tom Brady, and his new book, “The Art of Winning.” https://t.co/SsQxUwmapepic.twitter.com/kSAt2pLKcq
Is Francis Coppola‘s The Godfather the all-time greatest American film ever?
I certainly wouldn’t argue against this notion. I’ve not only revered this 1972, epic-sized gangster drama for over a half-century, but I can quote much of the dialogue by memory. Plus I own three separate Bluray versions as well as The Godfather Saga on DVD so don’t tell me. If asked to sign a document stating that it is, in fact, the all-time greatest, I’d do it.
My own determination is that The Godfather ranks second to John Huston‘s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (’48), but it’s not worth arguing about.
I must take issue, however, with a Variety headline that quotes Steven Spielberg saying last night that The Godfather “is the greatest American film ever made.”
Again, no argument from this corner but that’s not what Spielberg said. Exact quote: “The Godfather, for me, is the greatest American film ever made.”
The words “for me” are major qualifiers, of course. They emphasize the subjective. They’re an admission that Spielberg is not speaking as some grand authoritative film pope, and that he’s basically just a movie lover shooting from the heart or the hip. This doesn’t devalue his respect and admiration for The Godfather — it just means “this is how I genuinely feel…this is my fully considered judgment in the face of God and my community. But I’m not the Big Kahuna.”
What I’m about to say hit me an hour ago. I was walking down a supermarket aisle when it slapped me down…whoa! And it’s this: among wokeys and progressive POCs, Sinners has become a kind of metaphorical battering ram against Trumpism.
Ever since Donald Trump beat Kamala Harris last November and the rightward shifting of political plates became evident in every corner and precinct, progressives and traditional liberals had been hunkering down…stunned, wind knocked out, state of shock…but now the younger progressives have this anti-white, anti-yokel, “feel that Delta blues joy” Sinners fantasy, and suddenly the fire in the belly has returned. No more fetal-tuck defeatism!
It’s become clear over the last several days that Sinners is something more than just a film…it’s been latched onto, I’m sensing, as a pushback totem…in the space of two weeks it’s become a thing to glom onto and hold high like some kind of cultural banner or community anthem…
For under-40 wokeys and especially younger POCs the anti-white Sinners narrative (evil Irish vampires, white yokel Klan members getting machine-gunned to death, the whole Mississippi Burning thing) has revitalized the argument against Trumpism…Sinners has become a miltant cultural cause…a shove against the Trump cultural turnover that began six months ago, and really kicked in after the January 20th inauguration.
Democrats have been pipsqueaking since Harris lost to Trump last November….gutted, powerless…while that feeling of assertive, progressive power that POCs have been proudly brandishing since the six-year-old 1619 Project, all the institutional DEI initiatives and the great awokening of 2020, not to mention the general progressive program (drag queens in elementary schools, the demonizing of white culture, the LGBTQ movement, the transy men-competing-in-women’s-sports thing, Lily Gladstone‘s 2023 and ’24 identity campaign for Best Actress)…
All of a sudden the woke shit began slowing if not screeching to a halt when Trump won a majority of voters, some of this having been strengthened by support from younger white dudes and a sizable percentage of POCs and Latinos.
Like it or not, the general post-election consensus across the country became widely understood as “we’re sick of this crazy woke DEI transy stuff and so fuck Biden” (and don’t tell me it was just the border and the economy…bullshit!)…
The ideological “party” was therefore suddenly over for identity fanatics and they knew it, but now Sinners has re-filled their progressive sails. It’s obviously not a 21st Century political film, but it’s certainly a cultural thing. You can feel the lit-up energy behind it. Thank you, Ryan Coogler, for re-lighting our fire! AOC for President in ’28!
Initially posted in 2011: “It was the early ’90s, and I was tooling along Santa Monica Blvd. on a nice, sunny afternoon in my relatively new but not quite super-hot Nissan 240 SX. But the car looked and felt pretty damn good, and I was in a pretty good mood. An atypical thing as I’m usually sullen, but every so often life feels like a sparkling proposition.
“A ’60s muscle car of some kind (a yellow ’65 Mustang convertible?) with whitewall tires pulled alongside. It had a 4 SALE sign without a number in the rear window. A very pretty…okay, hot girl was at the wheel, and her passenger window was rolled down.
“I pulled up at a red light, smiled at her and said, ‘How much?’ This sounded like a double-entendre, of course — I should have said ‘what’s the asking?’ Either way she took one look at me and my wheels, waited a beat or two, shook her head slightly and said, ‘Too much.’
“Fragile as this makes me sound, on a certain level I don’t think I’ve ever recovered from this…the most withering L.A. social putdown I’ve ever suffered in my life. That’s Los Angeles in a nutshell…the attitude that runs it. And the fact that I let that remark hurt me means that I’d bought into this mentality as much as she had. A 60-40 deal.”
The other day Sasha Stone asked for names of the all-time dishiest actresses. The ones who’ve inspired the most tumescent sexual fantasies, etc.
I’ve always had a thing for sleek blondes. The two most painfully unfulfilled relationships of my life, an achey-breaky high-school flirtation and an anguished sexual affair with a married People magazine co-worker, were with blondes. There was another hurting affair with a blonde filmmaker in ’12. So I didn’t hesitate in saying that Camilla Sparv (Downhill Racer, Dead Heat on a Merry Go-round, Mackenna’s Gold, The Greek Tycoon) was at the top of my list.
Sparv and the young Grace Kelly share the top slot, pretty much. Along with the young Ingrid Berman, Kim Novak in Vertigo and I-don’t-know-who-else. Elke Sommer in The Prize?
Still with us at age 81, Sparv landed only one truly interesting role — the delectable but elusive Carole (Robert Redford‘s Dave Chappellet falls for her but she eventually dumps him) in Michael Ritchie‘s Downhill Racer (’69).
In my humble opinion the young Sparv (26 when she made the Ritchie film) had the sparkliest eyes and most beautiful mouth…slightly upturned, tempting, exquisite.
I guess I’ve alays felt a vague kinship with Sparv because she was married in the mid ’60s to Robert Evans, whom I was on friendly terms with in ’94, ’95 and ’96.
Evans’ description in “The Kid Stays in the Picture“: “Her name was Camilla Sparv. The moment she arrived in New York, she was a star model. A tall, leggy blonde, she had a natural patrician quality money can’t buy.”
I’ll be arriving in Cannes roughly four hours before the screening, but I’m not especially enthused about attending the screening, to be honest. I’ve just re-watched the ’42 version and had seen it once before somewhere. That’ll suffice.
The Gold Rush was shot in late ’24 and early ’25, and premiered on June 26, 1925. Portions were shot in the snow-covered terrain of Truckee, California; the rest was shot on sound stages in Chaplin’s studio on La Brea Ave.
The New Year’s Eve “auld lang syne” scene is my favorite segment.
A kind of Roman Polanski-ish figure in his day, Chaplin had a thing for much younger women. Lita Grey, whom Chaplin began a sexual relationship with when she was 15 (are you reading this, Polanski pitchforkers?), had originally been cast as Georgia. But Grey was was replaced by the 24-year-old Georgia Hale after Grey got pregnant. Chaplin’s marriage to Grey “collapsed” during production of the film, largely because he’d taken up with Hale.
Hale didn’t marry Chaplin, but was on romantic terms with him (bip-bip-bip) in the late 1920s and early ’30s. She became wealthy through real estate investments, and died on 6.17.85.
“[Because] white people don’t have anything to say.”
Imagine if some inane TikToker was to say the same thing about POCs…imagine.
This is one more reason why I’m not on the Sinners train. It’s also a reason why some people voted for Trump. I voted for Harris, of course, but I loathe people like Daisy Dream.
@daisydreamlife Sinners is a movie with SOUL. It was made with intention and heart. It is a story of pain, love, grief, generational trauma, and friendship told through visual art (the costume design, the editing, the cinematography, etc…), music, and writing. I miss leaving a movie theater and feeling like my soul and my humanity merged and like the collective conciusouness expanded. Our world REALLY needs art right now — art with a purpose that opens doors and brings dreams to life. Art is the revolution and the stories that have been ignored need to be pushed into mainstream media now more than ever. #sinners♬ original sound – Daisy Dream
