Every person reading this post needs to sit down, take a breath and ask themselves this question: Deep down, am I a CODA bro? Do I place a higher value upon movies that deliver strong emotional goods (i.e., that warm feeling of empathy that spreads throughout your system) than films that feel more intellectually-focused...more brainy-ish?
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“Pleasure Of His Perversity,” posted on 11.22.11: “I had a brief sitdown last Friday afternoon with A Dangerous Method director David Cronenberg. We had about twelve minutes, if that. Our last interview was a little over 30 years ago (’81) when the subject was Scanners.
“I still remember the intensity of that discussion and saying to myself as Cronenberg delivered his points, ‘Whoa, this guy doesn’t fool around…no digressions, no bullshit.’
“There’s always some kind of twisted perversity in Cronenberg’s films. Which is what most of us, I gather, look forward to when a new one is about to be shown. It’s there in A Dangerous Method, for sure, but in a spotty, paint-dabby fashion.
“Keira Knightley definitely ‘brings it’ in those shrieking, belt-whipping scenes with Michael Fassbender, but the film, it must be said, is somewhat dryer and more cerebral than anything Cronenberg had made before, and this requires, I feel, an adjustment of expectations.
“A Dangerous Method is well-acted but extremely cool, aloof, studied and intellectually driven to a fare-thee-well. You just have to be ready for that, and saying this is not a criticism.
The talkiness plays better the second time. You go in knowing what it is and accepting that, and you settle into Christopher Hampton‘s script like an easy chair.
“My strongest feelings are still about about Knightley’s highly agitated, face-twitching performance., which is fascinating but hard to roll with at times, particularly during the first 20 minutes to half-hour.
“Cronenberg told her to go for it in terms of facial tics and flaring nostrils and muscular spasms, etc. She does a jaw-jutting thing that hasn’t been seen since John Barrymore played Dr. Jekyll in the 1920 version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. At the same time Knightley brings a thrilling sexual intensity to the all-too-brief fucking and belt-whipping scenes with Fassbender.
“All in all Knightley is quite a handful — she throws you and pulls you in at the same time. It’s a high-wire, risk-taking thing, and Method really needs to be seen for this alone.”
…are not, I would say, “impressive” in their appearance. Not by any conventional standard.
The percentage of serious standouts by average go-getter criteria —- people who seemed unusually attractive or were exceptionally cool dressers or possessed of a certain X-factor special-tude — seemed miniscule. Most of them looked like Ukrainians who’d been living through bombings. Plain, drained, unexceptional, stressed, diminished, haggard…in some instances like the ragged end of nowhere.
Very few looked like Tom Verlaine, Patti Smith, Darren Aronofsky, Lady Gaga, young James Cagney, young Walter Matthau, Harvey Keitel’s “Sport” in Taxi Driver, Lou Reed, Rosario Dawson, Jim Carroll, Ben Gazzara, Sidney Lumet, Luís Guzman, Alan King, young Joe Dallesandro, Hilly Kristal, Liev Schreiber, etc.
I spent most of Sunday afternoon eyeballing people on First, Second and Third Avenues, mostly south of 12th Street and north of 4th Street, and mostly I was muttering to myself “these people don’t look like finalists or dynamic achievers or upper-echelon types…the older ones look like stooped-over schlubs and the 20somethings seem older than their (apparent) years.”
And fairly horribly dressed for the most part — dreary shorts, nothing T-shirts, sandals and slip-ons…an absence of style, normcore drab. And relatively few looked like workout Nazis…bulky, scrawny, pudgy, drinker bods.
Okay, it was warm and humid and, Sunday being Sunday, nobody was trying to look their best but still…
Mick Jagger ‘78:”To live in this town, you must be tough tough tough tough tough tough tough.” Jeffrey Wells ‘23: “Lower East Siders look creased and worn to the nub nub nub nub nub nub nuhb.”
I’m comparing Lower East Siders to rank-and-file residents of West Hollywood, where I lived for nearly 40 years, and Venice, where I lived for three years, and Westfield, where I grew up, and Wilton, where I went to high school and where I currently live. I’m sorry but the people of these towns all looked (or currently look) better — healthier, less hassled, good genes, a certain spiritual buoyancy, etc.
Sorry but these were my impressions.
One of the finest observations I've ever read about Brian Wilson is contained in a review of Love and Mercy, written bv Los Angeles magazine's Steve Erickson. Two sentences in particular. One in which Erickson describes Wilson's post-Pet Sounds, Smile-era comedown in which "the celestial sounds in his head turned on him, and became the screams of angels falling from heaven." The second alludes to Wilson's music-creating process: "Great artists create in circles, not lines, in the ever-bending curl of the wave rather than in its rush to the shore’s conclusion." Great writing!
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I re-watched my 4K UHD Apocalypse Now Bluray last night, and I wasn’t totally happy. I saw this 1979 classic at the Ziegfeld theatre two or three times in August and September of ’79, and the big-screen presentation (we’re thinking back almost 44 years) blows the 4K disc away. Aurally and visually, but especially in terms of sharp, punctuating fullness of sound.
Apocalypse Now was presented at the Ziegfeld within a 2:1 aspect ratio, which Vittorio Storaro insisted upon through thick and thin. The 4K disc uses what looked to me with a standard Scope a.r. of 2.39:1.
And the general sharpness of the image on that big Ziegfeld screen just isn’t replicated by the 4K. It looks “good”, of course, but not as good as it should.
As we begin to listen to The Doors’ “The End” while staring at that tropical tree line, John Densmore’s high hat could be heard loudly and crisply from a Ziegfeld side speaker. Before that moment I had never heard any high-hat sound so clean and precise. But it doesn’t sound nearly as pronounced on the 4K disc, which I listened to, by the way, with a pricey SONOS external speaker.
Remember that “here’s your mission, Captain” scene with G.D. Spradlin, Harrison Ford and that white-haired guy? When that scene abruptly ends, we’re suddenly flooded with electronic synth organ music…it just fills your soul and your chest cavity. Filled, I should say, 44 years ago. But not that much with the disc.
When Martin Sheen and the PBR guys first spot Robert Duvall and the Air Cav engaged in a surfside battle, Sheen twice says “arclight.” In the Ziegfeld the bass woofer began rumbling so hard and bad that the floor and walls began to vibrate like bombs were exploding on 54th Street…the hum in my rib cage was mesmerizing. Not so much when you’re watching the 4K.
As Duvall’s gunship helicopters take off for the attack on a Vietnamese village (“Vin Din Lop…all these gook names sound the same”), an Army bugler begins playing the cavalry charge. It was clear as a bell in the Ziegfeld — less so last night.
Several years ago a guy suggested that a miniseries based on Steven Bach‘s “Final Cut: Dreams and Disaster in the Making of Heaven’s Gate” could be great. A sprawling, dialogue-driven, slow-motion calamity flick, set mostly in Hollywood and New York with occasional detours to the shooting set with fascinating, whip-smart dialogue and one of the most unusual villains of all time — director Michael Cimino.
The instant I heard this my brain spun around, clicked its heels and said “yes!” I’m still high on the idea. A sprawling six-episode Max or Netflix or Amazon series, I’m thinking.
I’m aware of what a complete friggin’ nightmare it can be to produce films about the making of this or that classic film/play/anything if any of the principals are alive. I don’t know if getting the rights to Bach’s book (which of course was legally cleared when it was published 30 years ago) would lessen difficulties or not, but I’m dead certain that the entire world would stop whatever it’s doing to watch a miniseries about this catastrophic Hollywood saga. I got so high on the idea that I ordered a paperback version of Bach’s book — I haven’t read it in over three decades.
If you haven’t seen Michael Epstein‘s Final Cut: The Making and Unmaking of Heaven’s Gate (’04), here it is. Well ordered, smart as a whip, 78 minutes, narrated by Willem Dafoe.
[Posted twice before — 6.25.11, 3.10.18] You can make fun of the San Francisco touch-down scene in William Wellman‘s The High and the Mighty (’54), and particularly Dimitri Tiomkin‘s choir-of-angels music, etc. You can call the Christian symbolism tacky, I mean, but I went through something similar once in a private plane as we landed in St. Louis under heavy fog, and it looked and felt exactly like this.
It happened in the mid ’70s. I had hitched a ride across the country (Van Nuys to LaGuardia) in a four-seat Beechcraft Bonanza. The pilot was a Russian pediatrician named Vladimir, and he agreed to take me and a guy named Gary in exchange for gas money. We left in the early morning, stopped for gas and lunch in Tucumcari, New Mexico, bunked in a St. Louis airport motel that night, flew out the next morning and arrived at LGA by the early afternoon. Anyway…
The fog was so thick as we approached St. Louis that the air-traffic-controller had to talk us down. I was sitting shotgun and the air was pure soup, and I quickly fell in love with that soothingly paternal, Southern-accented voice, telling us exactly what to do, staying with us the whole way…”level off, down 500, bank right,” etc. When we finally got close to the landing strip the fog began to dissipate and the landing lights looked just like this, I swear. And the feeling was the same.
Talk about the welcoming glow of Christianity. It was almost enough, during that moment and later that night as I thought about it, to make me think about not being a Bhagavad Gita mystic any more and coming back to the Episcopalian Church.
Just after noon eastern on Sunday, IndieWire‘s David Ehrlich fiddle-faddled with my 2.26 reaction piece to Saturday night’s PGA Awards (Shattered Into Shards“), which sadly made the Best Picture crowning of Everything Everywhere All At Once seem all but inevitable.
I’m not understanding why Ehrlich decided to highlight the paragraph that mentioned Russia’s attempted Ukraine takeover. I was simply alluding to clarity of mind. If you understand the moral dynamic within the Ukraine-vs.-Russian situation, you should be able to divine what an infuriating crock EEAAO is — simple.
Key paragraph: Either you understand that Everything Everywhere All At Once represents not just an aesthetic pestilence but a terrible forced banality…a film that’s a good deal less about verse-jumping and spiritual dreamscapes and a lot more about pulp Marvelism and the relentless drumbeat of identity politics (Asian + queer), or you don’t. Or you do get this and you don’t care, in which case we’re all fucked anyway.
Should have posted this yesterday: Last Saturday (2.11) I posted a “go, Maverick!” piece called “Lightning Can Strike Again.” The first four paragraphs read as follows:
“A while back I tried to sell my Paramount homies on a special Top Gun: Maverick HE advertorial. The idea had already been written and posted on 1.13.23 — I just wanted to repeat it with a little Paramount dough behind me. The piece was titled ‘A Film That Saved Hollywood Could Also Save The Oscars.”
“It seemed like the right pitch, and if you ask me this was underlined by the fact that Paramount recently launched a billboard ad campaign that echoed what my piece said.
“At a time when the old energy current between Hollywood and mainstream audiences seemed to be dropping left and right, Top Gun: Maverick had pumped new life into the spirit of things, and should be roundly celebrated for reaching out and connecting…for making something actually happen in theatres at a time when too many films seemed to be limping along.
“A Best Picture Oscar for a movie that had not only restored faith in exhibition but in Hollywood itself.”
Steven Spielberg tells Tom Cruise that “you saved Hollywood’s ass and you might have saved theatrical distribution. Seriously, ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ might have saved the entire theatrical industry.” pic.twitter.com/nPWR5BqiUV
— DiscussingFilm (@DiscussingFilm) February 14, 2023
Yesterday afternoon The Hollywood Reporter‘s James Hibberd reported about an overheard conversation between Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise during Monday’s Academy luncheon, and a highly significant one at that. Spielberg told Cruise that Top Gun: Maverick had “saved Hollywood’s ass” and might, in fact, have “saved the entire theatrical industry.”
I’m certainly not claiming authorship of this sentiment (a lot of people feel grateful about what Maverick accomplished) but it’s fair to say that I posted it first.
Five years ago Hollywood and especially exhibition struck a slow-moving iceberg (Covid, streaming, older audiences forsaking the cineplex habit) and began to sink. The freezing sea water was almost up to the main-deck railing, and then along came the RMS Carpathia…I’m sorry, Top Gun: Maverick to at least temporarily save the day. “The industry doesn’t have to die!”, said Maverick. “All we have to do is stop churning out castor oil woke movies and give Joe and Jane Popcorn what they want…films that actually engage and entertain.”
This is why Top Gun: Maverick deserves the Best Picture Oscar — not because it’s better than Tar or Banshees of the hellish and godforsaken EEAAO, but because it stood up and pumped new life into the spirit of moviemaking and movie-exhibiting.
“We’re supposed to hate Jaws now?” He was responding to “Did These Chinatown Viewers Understand?” And I replied by summarizing Peter Biskind’s “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls” as follows:
The huge primal successes of Jaws (6.20.75) and Star Wars (5.20.77) slowly bland-ified the moody, anti-establishment ‘70s thing that had permeated Hollywood…the New Experimental Anti-Conventional Hollywood Party Era that began with Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate and The President’s Analyst (all released in ‘67).
Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, the directing maestros behind Jaws and Star Wars, pretty much killed the cool kidz party by injecting (a) a win-really-big greed jackpot virus into the Hollywood bloodstream and (b) a strain of thematic infantilization into movies in general.
These guys didn’t didn’t suck the creative oxygen out of the room deliberately or maliciously, but the massive success of their historic blockbusters gradually introduced the idea of “high concept” and suppressed the commercial intrigue factor among industry folk and audiences alike for adult movies like Night Moves, The Conversation, The Outfit, The French Connection, Z, Easy Rider, Mean Streets, Rosemary’s Baby, Raging Bull, Scarecrow, Get Carter, The Day of the Jackal, Dog Day Afternoon, Godfather I & II, That’ll Be The Day, Stardust, Sunday Bloody Sunday, Chinatown, The Hospital, Network, Prince of the City, The Ruling Class, Quadrophenia, The Last American Hero, Performance, Don’t Look Now, etc.
I’m very sorry about the death of David Crosby, 81, but he enjoyed one of the most amazing, up-and-down-and-back-up-again runs of any legendary rock star-slash-troubadour-slash-crazy man. I loved his truth-telling with all my heart. Sail on, brother.
Posted on 1.27.19: After catching yesterday afternoon’s screening of A.J. Eaton and Cameron Crowe‘s David Crosby: Remember My Name, I sent the following email to Crowe:
“Triple grade-A doc…the antithesis of a kiss-ass, ‘what a great artist’ tribute, but at the same time a profoundly moving warts-and-all reflection piece…hugely emotional, meditative, BALDLY PAINFULLY NAKEDLY HONEST…God! There’s a special spiritual current that seeps out when an old guy admits to each and every failing of his life without the slightest attempt to rationalize or minimize…’I was a shit, I was an asshole, how is it that I’m still alive?,’ etc. Straight, no chaser.
“And this isn’t because I’m partial to boomer nostalgia flicks or because so many are being shown here, or because I grew up with the Byrds (12-string twangly-jangly), Joni Mitchell, Crosby, Stills and Nash and that whole long lyrical–frazzled history. It’s about the tough stuff and the hard rain…about addiction and rage and all but destroying your life, and then coming back semi-clean and semi-restored, but without any sentimentality or gooey bullshit.
“For me David Crosby: Remember My Name has EASILY been the most emotional experience of the festival thus far. Not to mention [Crowe’s] best creative effort since Almost Famous.”
Crowe: “SO HAPPY you were there, thrilled at your reaction. How amazing that Crosby got up there [after the screening] and shared his total shock at what we’d put into the movie. Such a real moment. He was emotionally devastated up there for a good three minutes — I don’t know if you could see that. Felt like the audience wrapped their arms around him at that point, and then he was okay. Amazing.”
From Steve Pond’s Wrap review: “As much as the film celebrates Crosby’s creativity and gazes unflinchingly at his failings, it also functions as a valedictory, almost a requiem of sorts. Think of it as the film version of the final albums made by Leonard Cohen and David Bowie, who made wrenching final statements that they likely knew would be their last.”
I'm suddenly in the mood to watch some HD versions of those rude, gritty New York City flicks of the late '60s, '70s and '80s. Klute, Panic in Needle Park, The French Connection Serpico, Death Wish, Mean Streets, Dog Day Afternoon, The Taking of Pelham 123, Dog Day Afternoon...that line of country. A version of New York City that no longer exists...gradually replaced starting around 30 years ago...a few remnants here and there but mostly wiped from the hard drive.
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