I was a major fan of Richard Linklater‘s A Scanner Darkly and Waking Life, and sight unseen I’m totally down with Undone, an eight-episode half-hour Amazon Prime seres that begins on 9.13. Created by writer-producer Kate Purdy, executive produced by Raphael Bob-Waksberg and starring Rosa Salazar and Bob Odenkirk, it’s about a vaguely depressed woman, Alma, who’s suddenly able to talk to her dead father, Jacob, after enduring a traumatic car accident. Costarring Daveed Diggs, Siddharth Dhananjay, Constance Marie.

Two nights ago I watched the new Criterion Bluray of Alan Pakula‘s Klute (’71). For me this fascinating noir has always been a 50/50 thing — half about Jane Fonda‘s brave, naked, brilliantly anxious performance as Bree Daniels, a brittle, self-isolating call girl in a cold, predatory city save for the steady, somewhat doleful presence of Donald Sutherland‘s Pennsylvania detective, and half about Gordon Willis‘ smooth, swoony cinematography and particularly his mineshaft blacks…those inky shadows and crisp capturings just take me away, I’m telling you.

I was in hog heaven during those 114 minutes, and I could probably watch it again next weekend without the slightest hesitation. It’s so honest, believable, restrained, focused, whipsmart. And it was so hard to get right. Sculpting a good film is always an uncertain, touch-and-go process, and doubly or triply so, I imagine, when the final product is a masterpiece.

There’s a nicely written Mark Harris essay in the little booklet, “Trying To See Her,” but as far as Fonda’s journey of self-doubt and pain is concerned, I prefer this excerpt from the Klute Wikipage:

“To prepare for her role as Bree, Fonda spent a week in New York City observing high-class call girls and madams; she also accompanied them on their outings to after-hours clubs to pick up men. Fonda was disturbed that none of the men showed interest in her, which she believed was because they could see that she was really just ‘an upper-class, privileged pretender’. She had doubts about whether she could portray the role and asked Alan Pakula to release her from her contract and hire Faye Dunaway instead, but Pakula refused.

“Eventually Fonda turned to her memories of several call girls she had known while living in France, all of whom worked for the famed Madame Claude. Three had been sexually abused as children, and Fonda used this as an entry to her own character, and as a way to understand Bree’s motivations in becoming a prostitute.”

You’d think that the guy playing the titular character would be an essential part of the conversation, but Sutherland, steady and true as his performance is from start to finish, is fourth-ranked. He’s completely fine, but Klute is dominated by Fonda, Willis and Pakula, in that order.

The terrible envelopment of intractable dark fate, that horrible sensation of sinking into mud and unable to wade or climb out of it…this is how “The Iowa Circus“, Matt Taibbi‘s 7.26 Rolling Stone article about the Democratic contenders, makes you feel. It’s so disheartening, so depressing…it’s actually fucking awful:

“Traveling hundreds of miles across Iowa, passing cornfields and covered bridges, visiting quaint small town after quaint small town, listening to the stump speeches of Democrat after would-be Donald Trump-combating Democrat, only one thought comes to mind:

“They’re gonna blow this again.

“Imagine how it looks to Republicans. If that’s too difficult or unpalatable, just look at the swarm of 24 Democratic candidates in high school terms.

“The front-runner — the front-runner! — is septuagenarian gaffe machine Joe Biden, who started running for president in the eighties and never finished higher than ‘candidacy withdrawn,’ with a career delegate total matching John Blutarsky’s grade-point average, i.e., zero point zero. The summer’s ‘momentum’ challenger is California Sen. Kamala Harris, who spent all year sinking in polls but surged when she hit Biden with ‘I don’t think you’re a racist but…” on national TV.

“A third contender is Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a famed red-state punchline who already has 10,000 Pocahontas tweets aimed at her head should she make it to the general. Her ‘I have a plan for that’ argument for smarter government makes her a modern analog to Mike Dukakis — another Massachusetts charisma machine whose ill-fated presidential run earned him a portrait alongside the Hindenburg in a Naked Gun movie.

“A fourth challenger, Bernie Sanders, is a self-proclaimed socialist born before the Pearl Harbor attack who’s somehow more hated by the national media than Trump. A fifth, Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has never earned more than 8,515 votes in any election. The claim to fame of a sixth, Beto O’Rourke, is that he lost a Senate bid to the world’s most-hated Republican. It goes on.

“The top Democrats’ best arguments for office are that they are not each other. Harris is rising in part because she’s not Biden; Warren, because she isn’t Bernie. Bernie’s best argument is the disfavor of the hated Democratic establishment. The Democratic establishment chose Biden because he was the Plan B last time and the party apparently hasn’t come up with anything better since. Nothing says ‘we’re out of ideas’ quite like pulling a pushing-eighty ex-vice president off the bench to lead the most important race in the party’s history.”

In a 7.25 piece called “Tarantino Spoiler Policy”, I wrote that “I don’t know when it will be fair to start discussing the final 20 to 25 minutes” of Once Upon A Time in Hollywood “but I would think that an ‘olly olly in come free’ policy could be instituted as of…what, Monday morning? Is it realistic to expect that people will keep their yaps shut any longer than that?”

Actually the cat scampered out of the bag earlier today with Owen Gleiberman‘s 7.28 Variety think piece **, titled “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: Let’s Talk About That Ending“.

Owen basically says two things — that he doesn’t care for the ending at all, but that he also realizes that Quentin Tarantino had pretty much painted himself into an impossible corner when he decided to make this Hollywood-in-the-late-’60s, Manson-shaded film, and therefore understands why he did what he did. Because everyone would have been sickened by a recreation of what actually happened to Sharon Tate and her housemates on that horrible night, and that an alternative fantasy was necessary to make the film palatable.

I began predicting this narrative approach in early ’18, and in fact said the following in a 4.24.18 piece titled “Tarantino’s Not-Manson Flick Will Deal Escapist Cards“:

The first lost wallet story (which happened two or three weeks ago) is so embarassing I didn’t want to mention it, but Tatyana insisted. She thinks it’s hilarious. It makes me feel gloomy just to think about it, much less share it with the world. But what the hell.

[Click through to full story on HE-plus]

Yesterday Donald Trump called the Baltimore district repped by House Oversight Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess.”

Tatyana and I are north-of-Sunset Beverly Hills hikers. We like to start around dusk and finish up in the dark. Three or four times we’ve humped it up Angelo Drive and then hung a sharp right onto Cielo Drive (which offers access to the private drive where the Sharon Tate murder house once stood) and then back down Benedict Canyon. I’m presuming that a lot of lookie-lous are going to be roaming around this area for the next two or three weeks.

“Red House,” initially posted on 7.8.12: “I was on the scooter yesterday afternoon, buzzing along Mulholland and in and out the canyons and trails and cul de sacs between Beverly Glen to Laurel Canyon. And I found myself hanging a subconscious right onto Cielo Drive off Benedict Canyon south, and up to an area that used to be known as 10050 Cielo Drive.

“This was the site of Robert Byrd‘s now-demolished California ranch-styled home where Polanski’s late ex, Sharon Tate, and four others — Abigail Folger, Steven Parent, Voytek Frykowski and Jay Sebring — were murdered by the Manson family on August 9, 1969.

“I knew that Trent Reznor lived there for two or three years in the early ’90s, and that the place had been torn down in ’94 and that a nouveau-riche Moorish-Mediterranean monstrosity called “Villa Bella” was built in its place by producer Jeff Franklin (Full House). The original street number was also erased — the address is now 10066 Cielo Drive.

“I stood on the other side of the canyon and told myself that anyone who would trash the original single-storied structure, which had a nice homey vibe with a pool and a guest house and was painted red with white trim with huge trees on the grounds, and then cut down the trees and build a ghastly Uday Hussein-style Euro-mansion, must be a real animal.

All hail the new Shout Factory Bluray of Joseph Newman and Jack Arnold‘s This Island Earth (’55). I’ve never been a fan of this well-written if somewhat rickety programmer — it’s respectably intelligent rather than riveting. But the huge cranium belonging to Jeff Morrow‘s “Exeter” character is as much of an icon of ’50s sci-fi as James Arness‘s thorn-fingered “thing”, and Clifford Stine‘s color cinematography delivers a lush palette. And the new Bluray is worth its weight in gold because it delivers 4K scans of two aspect-ratio versions (1.85:1 and 1.37:1). The shots of Morrow’s super-tall forehead in the 1.37 version give new meaning to the term “headroom.”

“The progressives are the modern Puritans. The Massachusetts Bay Colony is alive and well on the Potomac and Twitter. They eviscerate their natural allies for not being pure enough, [but] the politics of purism makes people stupid. And nasty.

“My father stayed up all night the night Truman was elected because he was so excited. I would like to stay up ’til dawn the night a Democrat wins next year because I’m so excited to see the moment when the despicable Donald Trump lumbers into a Ma rine helicopter and flies away for good.

“But Democrats are making that dream ever more distant because they are using their time knifing one another and those who want to be on their side instead of playing it smart.

“The recipe for emotional satisfaction on the part of the progressive left is not a recipe for removing Trump from the White House.” — from Maureen Dowd‘s “Spare Me The Purity Racket,” N.Y. Times, 7.27.19.

I’m presuming that The Irishman director Martin Scorsese wanted to de-age Robert De Niro and others in a way that was significantly more realistic than the Michael Douglas de-aging in Ant Man and the Wasp.

I actually had no problems with the Douglas de-aging, but then I’m not really familiar with how good or exacting de-aging technology can be these days. It’s advanced significantly, I’m guessing, over the last five years.

BTW: A major film festival announcement regarding Scorsese and The Irishman is imminent. I’m not the only one who’s been presuming all along that Scorsese’s period crime film would premiere at the New York Film Festival (9.27 to 10.3) because of his longstanding friendship and alliance with NYFF honcho Kent Jones. But who knows? Perhaps another festival or two will figure into things. Just a matter of sitting tight.

This trailer for Amazon’s Modern Love doesn’t exactly exude depth. Or any semblance of truth. Seemingly cut from the Love Actually cloth, which is death to me. Give me stories about love affairs that don’t pan out, and spare me the happy vibes. Or play songs like Neil Young‘s “Only Love Can Break Your Heart,” Bob Dylan‘s “Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word,” Boy George‘s “Do You Really Want To Hurt Me?”, J. Geils‘ “Love Stinks” or Burt Bacharach‘s “I’ll Never Fall In Love Again”.

A few hours ago an attorney friend caught a 10 am showing of Once Upon A Time in Hollywood. He texted me an hour ago: “I liked it. Almost saw it twice.” Yesterday a name-brand post-production guy saw it and wrote that he “loved it!” And yet it has a B grade on Cinemascore. Thw downvoters are almost certainly your Millennial and GenZ ticket buyers. Half of them don’t know the 10050 Cielo Drive murder saga so the ending doesn’t work for them. Case in point: Those 20something women who were sitting next to me last night and talking on and off, apparently out of boredom. OUATIH is mainly for 40-plus viewers.