In a short video released today, Joe Biden has condemned the “needless violence” in Kenosha, Wisconsin in the wake of police shooting Jacob Blake. “Protesting brutality is a right and absolutely necessary, but burning down communities is not protest — it’s needless violence. Violence that endangers lives, violence that guts businesses and shutters businesses that serve the community…that’s wrong.”
“Steely, Dead-Eyed Trouper”
“It seems like just yesterday when I was plagiarizing Michelle Obama‘s speech at our 2016 convention…”
I actually thought that Melania Trump‘s Cuban military get-up was half-decent. I sort of admired her determination to step outside the usual red and robin’s egg blue dresses that Republican women often wear, and embrace a kind of stylish guerilla outfit. Some said it reminded them of Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS, but Melania hasn’t the aggressive and conniving temperament to be a sadistic dominatrix. She’s not the only gold-digger, opportunist and fascist ornament out there — she just has a bigger pedestal.
Melania did seem vaguely terrified as she delivered her remarks (“…theese terrible pandemic in theese difficult times”), and God knows her eyes were glaring with some kind of extreme emotion. As Virginia Heffernan wrote in a 4.27.18 L.A. Times piece, “She appears desperate but never sheds a tear.”
But I have nothing but condemnation for her wanton destruction of Jackie Kennedy‘s Rose Garden, ripping out the crab apple trees and making it look like some kind of cemetery….good God.
“Tenet” Travels
There will no Tenet press screenings this week or even next week in Los Angeles. (Or so I understand.) The earliest way for Los Angeles-based journos to see Chris Nolan‘s film is to drive to Las Vegas and catch an early access commercial screening at one of plexes, with the first showings beginning at 5 pm. As it happens Team Hollywood Elsewhere will be in Flagstaff that day, but catching a 5 pm showing won’t work within the schedule. We’ll try and catch it in Flagstaff the following weekend.
"Can you tell us what Tenet is about?" https://t.co/6zUsuQ5Zf7
— Alex Billington (@firstshowing) August 24, 2020
Young Blondes Can Stir Rancor
The Peasants, a respected novel by Wladyslaw Reymont tells the hard-knocks story of a peasant girl named Jagna forced to marry a much older, wealthy farmer, Maciej Boryna, despite her love for his son Antek. Jagna eventually becomes the object of envy and hate with the villagers and must fight to preserve her independence.
Set in the Polish countryside between the 19th and 20th centuries, the story is fused with the changing seasons, back-breaking labor in the fields, and the traditional local holidays.
The Peasants was originally adapted in 1973 by director Jan Rybkowski — it was actually a geature film version of a 1972 TV series called Chlopi.
The forthcoming, all-painted The Peasants, directed by Polish filmmaker Dorota Kobiela (The Flying Machine, Loving Vincent). The screenplay by Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman is also based on the Reymont novel. Pic is expected to surface in 2022.
Bookends
The album should be called “Strange Days”, and their performing name should be JoeKam. And the below copy should read IF THIS WAS AN ALBUM COVER…
Cruise and McQuarrie Catch “Tenet”
Is this London? The theatre looks to me like the Odeon BFI MAX but what do I know? Mission Impossible 7‘s Tom Cruise and director-writer Chris McQuarrie plus camera crew. Mission: Impossible 7 will open on 11.19.21. A sequel, also directed by McQuarrie, will be released on 11.4.22.
Thanks, Kenosha Protestors!
Will Joe and Kamala man up, stand up and tell the destruction junkies, store-looters and BLM-ers that small businesses shouldn’t be torched because the bulls shot Jacob Blake seven times in the back? Of course not. They’re not allowed to. They can only voice support. Stop systemic racism by destroying the stores of small-time, hard-working merchants!
HE Accessory Slogans
I’m being gently pressured to come up with some choice quotes to be used for HE merchandise — mugs, iPhone cases, COVID masks, bumper stickers. (And no T-shirts.) “Boxy is beautiful,” “Don’t tell me,” that line of country. If anyone has any suggestions…my brain has stalled.
Elizabeth Taylor Did It
I’m not sure I saw Guy Hamilton‘s The Mirror Crack’d back in’80, but I probably attended the all-media. I wouldn’t watch it now with a knife at my back. Most of the cast looks trapped. They like the money but deep down they hate themselves, and yet they can’t escape it so they have to put their best foot forward.
Kim Novak and Tony Curtis look relatively content but everyone else seems miserable. Look at poor Edward Fox — he looks like he wants to kill himself. By today’s measure Rock Hudson looked at least 65 — he was actually 55.
Elizabeth Taylor‘s face had a puffy, boozy look, but at least she’d modified her appearance compared to that infamous Ron Galella “fat Liz” photo, snapped outside Studio 54 on 5.21.79. But she looked terrific in ’88 after following her own diet regimen (“Elizabeth Takes Off”).
Shooting happened in Kent between 5.12.80 and 7.18.80. The Mirror Crack’d opened on 12.19.80.
From Vincent Canby’s 12.18.80 review: “Who did it? If you haven’t figured that out by the time the second murder happens, you should be sent to bed without your warm milk.”
The Kino Lorber Bluray pops on Tuesday, September 1st.
Standing In The Corner
Whenever I hear about something odd that falls outside my own experience, I try and think of a film that depicted same. Yesterday’s oddball thing (8.24) was Aram Roston’s Reuters story about the seven-year sexual arrangement between Jerry Falwell Jr., his wife Becki Falwell and “pool boy” Giancarlo Granda.
The arrangement began when Ganda was 20. He told Roston that for years he had sex with Becki while Jerry, former head of Liberty University and a staunch supporter of Orange Plague, looked on from the corner.
Right away I flashed on a scene from Paul Schrader‘s American Gigolo (’80). Richard Gere‘s Julian Kaye drives out to Palm Springs to attend to the wife of a wealthy financier named Rheiman (Tom Stewart). Rheiman asks Julian to have rough sex with his wife Judy (Patricia Carr) while he watches.
(l.) Judy Rheiman (Patricia Carr) and Julian Kaye (Richard Gere) during an ominous bedroom scene in American Gigolo (’80).
Standing in the corner just like Falwell allegedly did, the financier barks out orders….”slap that bitch!” or something equally repellent. Julian, sitting on the bed with Judy under a sheet, turns and gives this 50something creep a look that says “Jesus, man, who are you?”
Roston: “Granda says that he met Jerry and Becki Falwell while working as a pool attendant at the Fontainebleau Miami Beach hotel in March 2012. Starting that month and continuing into 2018, Granda told Reuters that the relationship involved him having sex with Becki while Jerry looked on.
“Granda showed Reuters emails, text messages and other evidence that he says demonstrate the sexual nature of his relationship with the couple, who have been married since 1987.
“’Becki and I developed an intimate relationship and Jerry enjoyed watching from the corner of the room,’ Granda said in an interview. Now 29, he described the liaisons as frequent — ‘multiple times per year’ — and said the encounters took place at hotels in Miami and New York, and at the Falwells’ home in Virginia.”
Feminist Holmes Fantasy for Girls
Let me guess…it turns out that 14 year-old Enola Holmes (Millie Bobby Brown) isn’t just a chip off the old block but in some ways smarter than her significantly older brothers Sherlock (Henry Cavill) and Mycroft (Sam Claflin).
It would appear that Enola Holmes (Netflix, 9.23) is a blending of Barry Levinson‘s Young Sherlock Holmes (’85) and Guy Ritchie‘s Sherlock Holmes (’09) but through a 21st Century female prism, and with the usual injections of arch attitude and ironic popcorn fantasy.
Based on Nancy Springer‘s Enola Holmes Mysteries, and directed by Harry Bradbeer (Fleabag, Killing Eve). Costarring Helena Bonham Carter, Fiona Shaw, Adeel Akhtar, Frances de la Tour, Louis Partridge and Susie Wokoma.
“She Sells Sea Shells By The Seashore”
I posted my first Ammonite riff (“Here We Go Again“) on 2.19.20….pre-COVID masks.
Observation #1: A close relation of Celine Sciamma‘s Portrait of a Lady on Fire, once again set near a beachy coastline in the distant past (Dorset in the 1840s), and once again about a lesbian love affair between tightly-corseted, socially restricted women who wear their hair in buns.
Observation #2: A bit of a May-December romance with 43 year-old Winslet (now 44) as the real-life fossil-searcher and paleontologist Mary Anning, who was born in 1799 and died in 1847. 26 year-old Saoirse Ronan (25 during filming) plays geologist Charlotte Murchison, whose husband, Roderick Impey Murchison, paid Anning to take care of her for a brief period.
Except the 1840s romance that allegedly occured wasn’t a May-December thing. Murchison was actually 11 years older than Anning, having been born on April 18, 1788. She was therefore in her early 50s and not, as the film has it, in her mid 20s. Furthermore Roderick Murchison wasn’t, as the film indicates, some kind of patronizing sexist twit who regarded his wife as a fragile emotional invalid who needed looking after. The Murchisons were actually partners in their geological studies; they travelled all over Europe together.
Charlotte Murchison lived to age 80; poor Mary Anning passed from breast cancer at age 47 or 48.
Ammonites are the extinct relatives of sea creatures that lived during the Jurassic and Cretaceous eras.
Ammonite will play at the Toronto Film Festival (so to speak) on 9.11.20.