Posted on 8.22.07: It's too early to get into James Mangold's 3:10 to Yuma (Lionsgate, 9.7) which has a lot of good things going for it and will probably, I'm guessing, be widely liked. But if this film was an interactive video game with plastic pistols, I would have spent my whole time firing at Ben Foster's nutball bad guy. I wanted him dead -- morte -- as soon as he came on-screen. I almost mean Foster himself rather than the villain he plays.
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It is HE’s opinion that the extended unrated version of Barry Levinson, Warren Beatty and James Toback‘s Bugsy is a distinctly superior work.
The extended version runs 151 minutes, or 15 minutes longer than the original 136-minute theatrical cut.
And there’s still no HD version available, either streaming or on physical media. 16 and 1/2 years have passed since the extended version was released on DVD in mid December 2006. Somebody should do something about this.
I wrote about the Bugsy extended cut on 12.12.06.
I based my piece almost entirely upon what what Dave Kehr had written the same day in the N.Y. Times. I had, however, been told separately about the circumstances of the removal of the 15 minutes of footage by Toback; he also passed along the same story to Kehr.
Jim told me it was Medavoy who wanted it shorter. Kehr seemed to say it was either Medavoy or perhaps some sinister alternate force within Tristar.
It just seems vaguely indecent that the superior longer cut isn’t on HD streaming. A 4K disc would be nice but not necessary — just high-def would suffice. I really hate watching it on 480p.
Last night Hollywood Elsewhere sat down with Marc Turtletaub‘s Jules (Bleecker Street), a quiet little fable about a vaguely flaky, absent-minded old guy (Ben Kingsley) who gradually blooms emotionally and spiritually when a smallish flying saucer crashes into his backyard garden and a wounded, pint-sized, shiny-skinned alien (Jade Quon) crawls out and lies on his brick patio, breathing but in need of care.
Kingsley’s Milton, whose longish, carefully styled gray hair looks exactly like a professional-grade wig, is so timid and small-minded that he waits a day to start caring for the poor, dark-eyed thing, who doesn’t seem to have a gender. (Let’s use the female pronoun.) At first Milt drapes a plaid blanket over the little gal, and then takes her inside and begins offering sliced apples for sustenance, and then shows Jules the guest bedroom and invites her to chill and watch TV.
After Milt’s friend Sandy (Harriet Sansom Harris) drops by and begins to warmly relate, the alien is given the “Jules” moniker (as in Jules Pfeiffer or a nickname for Julia). Milt and Sandy quickly become Jules’ parents, and then in short order they’re being assisted by Joyce (Jane Curtin), a vaguely neurotic acquaintance who starts talking to Jules as if she’s her therapist, sharing stories of her colorful youth in Pittsburgh (“I used to be an item”) and, in an odd detour, performing Lynyrd Skynyrd‘s “Free Bird” a capella.
Immediately all kinds of E.T.-type questions pop into your head. You have to assume that with all those consumed apples that Jules would use the bathroom from time to time or at least take an occasional leak outside, but details are never shared.
In no particular order: Does Jules take showers? What does she smell like? She has a smallish mouth plus, one presumes, a tongue, teeth, lungs and vocal chords so why doesn’t she mimic Milt with a little alien English, or perhaps speak in his/her own native tongue? Why was she travelling alone? What was the point of visiting earth in the first place? Is she fundamentally a woke type or does she view the human condition with (God forbid) the mindset of a Trump supporter? Is she broken-hearted over the recent death of an alien husband or child?
All we learn is that the enterprising Jules is looking to repair her spacecraft, and that she needs a few dead cats to accomplish this. We also see that she cares a great deal for Milt, Sandy and Joyce, and woe to any scurvy characters who might threaten any of them (think David Cronenberg‘s Scanners).
On the night that Unforgiven won the Best Picture Oscar, which happened on 3.29.93, none of us had the slightest inkling that roughly two decades into the 21st Century (or 30 years hence) corporate Hollywood would be operating under the adhere-or-die principles of China’s Great Cultural Revolution, and that films that reflected the creative vistas, mindsets and inclinations of the dudes who were pretty much running things back in the early Clinton era would be all but suffocated.
Which isn’t to say that the moral, administrative and attitudinal changes brought about by wokester commandants starting around five or six years ago (post-Moonlight and post George Floyd BLM-ers, LGBTQ-ers, #MeToo) didn’t transform the Hollywood industry into a much more fair, just and humane thing. They did. These changes also ensured, however, that the kind of urgent, occasionally irreverent and sometimes super-bull’s-eye films that occasionally poked through between 1930 and 2015…those kind of films would, for the most part, never again be made for theatrical.
Because the Hollywood Maoist system (“Don’t offend Zoomers or Millennials!…don’t wink at or even acknowledge outmoded attitudes!…don’t allow any representations of the way life was on the planet earth before woke-ism came along…all casts must prominently feature women, actors of color and LGBTQs”) has largely outlawed this approach or aesthetic.
Just a reminder that seven and a half years ago HE was the first and only Hollywood column to post a fixed version of the climactic “noon train is approaching” High Noon montage in Fred Zinnemann and Stanley Kramer‘s High Noon (’52).
On 12.2.15 I posted Matthew Morretini‘s version of the montage, which is more metronomically correct than the original 1952 version, which was assembled by editor Elmo Williams.
“The famous High Noon tick-tock sequence has always bothered me slightly,” I wrote. “It was edited to match Dimitri Tiomkin‘s music, and so every cut was supposed to happen at the precise instant of the final beat…except it doesn’t quite do that. Today editor Matthew Morettini wrote to say the reason for my slight irritation is that the picture is four frames ahead of the music.
“But now Morettini has fixed it.
“‘I’m a professional editor and had a few minutes on my hands today and re-synced the clip the way I always felt it should be,’ Morettini wrote. “And guess what? It’s better. Each and every picture edit was exactly four frames early.”
Compare the Morettini version (top) to the Elmo Williams version (below) — the proof is in the pudding.
Matthew Morettini 2015 version:
Elmo Williams 1952 version:
Boilerplate commentary: Rio Bravo (’59) and High Noon (’52) don’t share a “general genre” as much as they share a fairly specific plot/situation, which is an honest lawman (or lawmen) preparing to do battle with a gang of bad guys who will soon arrive in town and are out for blood revenge.
The films, in fact, are pretty much peas in a pod. Rio Bravo was in fact dreamt up as a response to what director Howard Hawks and star John Wayne saw as the pessimism and wimpishness of Will Kane, the resolute small-town sheriff played by Gary Cooper.
Both films are about a community’s response to the threat of lawnessness and violence, and about the lawman’s (or lawmen’s) code of honor and self-respect.
In Rio Bravo‘s case, the chief villain is Nathan Burdette. In the matter of High Noon, it’s a recently sprung prison convict named Frank Miller.
Rio Bravo is more optimistic or positive-minded in that the community (Wayne, Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson, Walter Brennan, Angie Dickinson) bands together to fight the baddies; in High Noon the community hides or equivocates or otherwise declines to help Kane form a posse so they can meet Miller and his three gunnies head on. They all say no for their own reasons, and Kane is forced to stand up to the gang all alone.
According to The Guardian‘s Charlotte Edwardes, and more specifically Oppenheimer star Cillian Murphy, director Chris Nolan doesn’t have a telephone, an email address or a computer: “He’s the most analogue individual you could possibly encounter,” Murphy says.
About Oppenheimer itself, Murphy calls it “an extraordinary piece of work…very provocative and powerful…it feels sometimes like a biopic, sometimes like a thriller, sometimes like a horror. It’s going to knock people out…what [Nolan] does with film, it fucks you up a little bit.”
A journalist friendo knows a sketchy someone who’s claiming it’s “a bit dull.” (The source, I’m told, is not to be trusted.) Another journalist knows someone who saw Oppenheimer a few weeks ago, and this fellow has described it as “slightly pretentious but with a knockout 30-minute finale.”
On 3.21.23 I posted a warning…actually a feeling of anxiety and trepidation about Nolan’s sound mixing of Oppenheimer. Please God (or please Chris) — allow me to understand the dialogue in this upcoming film. Please don’t drive me crazy with the fucking mix…please. There is no one in the cinematic universe who would be more overjoyed than myself if the dialogue turns out to be audience-friendly.
The Empire Strikes Back climax with a Nolan sound mix:
An excellent exploration of the Nolan sound aesthetic going back to The Dark Knight:
There is no joy in Mudville over the sluggish response to Adele Lim‘s raunchy Joy Ride, which was produced by Point Grey Pictures’ Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg.
Deadline‘s Anthony D’Alessandro projected between $7 and $9M at 2,820 locations; now the weekend tally is looking closer to $6.5M. A $1,100,000 haul on Thursday, and $2,600,000 yesterday — $3,700,000 so far. Friday’s per-screen average was $922.
Although the film sent me into a black pit of depression and I only laughed once, I’m not personally delighted by this shortfall. Lim directs with urgency and vigor, and Cherry Cheva and Teresa Hsiao‘s well-structured script delivers heart as well as vulgarity. I’d decided by the finale that I didn’t completely hate it, and that ain’t hay.
But I knew the formerly titled Joy Fuck Club was a dead fish when I saw the B-minus CinemaScore rating plus that statement by David Poland that he’d returned for a second viewing with his wife and 13-year-old son. Yes — I’m referring to an adjunct of the Poland curse.
Initially posted on 9.19.21: As most HE readers know, I got “Scarlet Letter”-ed in March ’21 when Critics Choice honchos Joey Berlin and John DeSimio booted me out of their organization after being pressured by hysterical wokesters.
It all stemmed from my having posted a sentence written by someone other than myself — a statement which sat on HE for an hour or less before I took it down.
The sentence alluded to the Atlanta massage parlor killings (the victims of which were Asian woman, although Robert Aaron Long‘s motivation wasn’t racial as much as an “intersection of gender-based violence, misogyny and xenophobia,” according to state Rep. Bee Nguyen) and how this tragedy might have affected Oscar voter sentiments.
The sentence read as follows: “If there was one millionth of a chance in hell that Chloé Zhao and Nomadland weren’t going to win Oscars, the Atlanta massage parlor killings just snuffed out that chance.” Not my thought and or a view I believed in or cared about, but for one fleeting moment I thought “wow, that’s a hot-button statement that readers might want to kick around.” Throw him to the wolves!
Certain publicists who didn’t like me to begin with for my bluntly worded opinions seized upon the CCA eviction as an excuse to take me off their screening invite lists, etc. Six weeks ago I wrote Joey Berlin and John DeSimio a letter about this incident and gave them what-for.
Not long after the article appeared HE regular Bobby Peru posted the following:
I’ve pointed this out before, but three similar incidents (tragic news affecting Oscar fortunes) happened within the last nine years.
1. In Boris Kachka’s 2.25.14 Vulture piece about Oscar bloggers (in which I was prominently covered), THR‘s Scott Feinberg was referenced doing the same thing.
Kachka: “Every controversy is quickly spun into the 24-hour Oscar cycle. A few short hours after Dylan Farrow renewed her molestation charges [against Woody Allen], there was Scott Feinberg, The Hollywood Reporter’s tireless columnist (and this year’s most accurate predictor so far) authoring a piece titled “Dylan Farrow’s Op-Ed Targets Woody Allen, But Could Hurt Cate Blanchett More (Analysis).”
2. Right after the Ferguson Grand Jury report came out on 11.25.14, I tweeted that a possible “strike a match rather than curse the darkness” response to this otherwise tragic event might be a surge of industry Best Picture support for Selma. Yup — another instance of the wrong HE tweet at the wrong time. But all I said was that symbolically lighting a candle rather than lamenting the ugliness might be a good thing in the end.
The Twitter community didn’t dig it. I was all but roasted alive for saying this. Many people tweeted that I sounded like an insensitive asshole. How dare I suggest, after all, that there was (or might be) linkage between Ferguson and Selma‘s Oscar chances.
But at heart I had tweeted a positive sentiment. I was thinking, you see, of Martin Luther King’s words about how only love can eradicate hate. I was thinking that standing by a film about human dignity, compassion and human rights would serve as a positive response to the Ferguson situation.
3. A couple of days later Selma director director Ava DuVernay pointed out a direct connection between her film and what had happened in Ferguson.
She did so in an Eric Kohn Indiewire interview with herself and Fruitvale Station director-writer Ryan Coogler, the main subject being their support of the Black Friday Blackout.
For me, the stand-out portion was when Kohn asked DuVernay if she saw “any direct connections between today’s climate in the immediate aftermath of Ferguson in the story of Selma.” DuVernay responded as follows: “Yes, absolutely. It’s the same story repeated. The same exact story.
“An unarmed black citizen is assaulted with unreasonable force and fatal gunfire by a non-black person who is sworn to serve and protect them. A small town that is already fractured by unequal representation in local government and law enforcement begins to crack under the pressure. People of color, the oppressed, take to the street to make their voices heard. The powers that be seek to extinguish those voices.”
Feinberg, Kachka, DuVernay, Kohn…they saw a real-life tragedy in the real-news world, detected an Oscar-reflecting narrative and jumped right into it. And nobody said boo. I posted a real-lfe-tragedy-meets-Oscar-odds comment that someone else had written (and which I posted for a mere hour), and I was sent to the guillotine. If there was a God, my head would be seamlessly re-attached and others (many others) would be facing the kiss of steel in my place.
Yesterday we paid the River Country folks to go tube-rafting down the Delaware. A few miles south of Frenchtown. I wanted a Deliverance-type experience, but there were no canoes to speak of. Chumps on rubber tubes. On one hand it was quite peaceful and soothing, and on the other hand the current was barely there. Every now and then the current would accelerate slightly and you could imagine you were Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn cruising down the Mississippi. But most of the time we were drifting at the speed of a 92 year-old guy shuffling toward the bathroom at 3 am. So I just gave into the lethargy.
I never saw Alan Arkin in Enter Laughing or Luv on the Broadway stage, but for me he was the king of fickle neuroticism and glum irreverence for decades and decades, and for decades and decades I loved him like few others. And now the journey has ended. He was 89.
If I had to pick my favorite Arkin performances in descending order, I would restrict my list to four. I would begin with his grumpy but compassionate, heroin-snorting grandpa in Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris‘s Little Miss Sunshine (’06). In second place is Captain John Yossarian, the numbed-out pacifist Air Force bombardier in Catch 22 (’70). Third is his wonderfully anxious ands panicky dentist in Arthur Hiller‘s The In-Laws (’79), Fourth but not least is his moustachioed Russian submarine captain in Norman Jewison‘s The Russians Are Coming (’66).
Everyone remembers a concluding line in a certain Catch 22 conversation between Lt. Milo Minderbinder (Jon Voight) and Cpt. Yossarian. It wasn’t written by original novel author Joseph Heller but Buck Henry. Heller reportedly approved.
Minderbinder: “Nately died a wealthy man, Yossarian. He had over sixty shares in the syndicate.”
Yossarian: “What difference does that make? He’s dead.”
Minderbinder: “Then his family will get it.”
Yossarian: “He didn’t have time to have a family.”
Minderbinder: “Then his parents will get it.”
Yossarian: “They don’t need it, they’re rich.”
Minderbinder: (beat) “Then they’ll understand.”
I saw Dominik Moll‘s The Night of the 12th (Film Movement, 5.19) last night at the delightful New Plaza Cinema (35 W. 67th Street, NYC) — a modest but dedicated arthouse for discerning adults. I was so happy to be sitting in the front row of a theatre where I belonged, a Film Forum- or Thalia-like shoebox…whistle-clean, air-conditioned comfort, ample leg room and surrounded by older folks not eating popcorn.
The film is a mostly fascinating, vaguely haunting, Zodiac-like police investigation drama that won six Cesar awards (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adaptation, Best Supporting Actor, Most Promising Actor, Best Sound) last February.
It’s a shame, I feel, that almost no one in this country is going to pay the slightest amount of attention. It’ll eventually stream, of course, but it probably won’t attract anyone outside Francophiles and the fans of grim police procedurals, mainly because it doesn’t do the thing that most people want from such films, which is the third-act delivery of some form of justice or at least clarity.
Night is about a cold case — a prolonged and frustrating and ultimately fruitless investigation of a savage murder of a young girl in Grenoble, France…frustrating and fruitless unless you tune into the film’s forlorn wavelength, which is about something more than just whodunit.
It’s based on a fact-based 2020 novel by Pauline Guéna.
The victim is Clara (Lulu Cotton-Frapier), a beautiful, blonde-haired 21 year-old student who lives with her parents. After leaving a party in the wee hours and while walking down a moonlit street, she’s approached by a hooded wacko and set aflame — a horrible sight. The film is about two Grenoble detectives, played by Yohan (Bastien Bouillon) and Marceau (Bouli Lanners), as they interview and investigate several potential killers whom the casually promiscuous Clara had been sexual with at different times.
All of these guys are scumbags of one sort of another, and you start to wonder why she didn’t have at least one male friend or lover who wasn’t an animal. The digging goes on and on, but no paydirt.
The essence of The Night of the 12th is militant feminism mixed with intense grief. It’s saying there’s a subset of appallingly callous young men out there today…aloof, cruel, thoughtless dogs who sniff and mount out of raw instinct, and this, boiled down, is what killed poor Clara.
Last month in Cannes Martin Scorsese said that Killers of the Flower Moon wasn’t a whodunit but “a who-didn’t-do-it?”
Same with Night — Yohan concludes at the end that “all men” killed Clara, and so among the Cesar voters and the guilty-feeling industry fellows who felt an allegiance with their feminist collaborators… this water-table sentiment, an adjunct of the Roman Polanski-hating faction, is presumably what led to The Night of the 12th‘s big sweep.
By this measure Night isn’t about a “cold case” — it’s a kind of hot-flush case that points in all kinds of directions to all kinds of potential young-feral-dog killers…a limitless (in a sense) roster of bad guys.
In order to make this point about “all men” being at fault, the film necessarily can’t allow the Grenoble detectives to finally nab a single killer.
But of course, Clara’s curious attraction to bad boys and her generally impulsive nature was at the very least a significant factor in her fate. She was obviously flirting with this kind of snorting louche male for a deep-seated reason of some kind. Clara could have theoretically been a cautious or even withdrawn type, barely experienced in sex and sensuality and perhaps even prudish, and she still might have been torched by a sicko. But you’re not going to tell me that “playing with bad boys” wasn’t central factor.
Sensible women choose their lovers sensibly, and Clara didn’t roll that way. If you don’t use common sense in your romantic life, sooner or later the bad stuff will rub off.
So where did the bad-boy fetish come from? In The Limey (’99) we understood why Terrence Stamp’s daughter Jenny was attracted to dangerous men, but Clara’s dad (Matthieu Rozé) is a moderate mousey type and her mom (Charline Paul) is a diligent homemaker. So how and why did she develop the appetite?
The screenwriters (Moll and Gilles Marchand) don’t even toy with this emotional dynamic as they don’t subscribe to a belief that Clara might have flown too close to the flame. They seemingly believe that Clara was 100% innocent of any dangerous behavior by way of skunky boyfriends. I think that’s a dishonest attitude, and so I didn’t finally buy what the film was saying.
I saw the film with mostly older singles and straight couples, but there were at least two female pairs who were kind of sniffling and crushed at the end — the same emotional vibe I felt among women after a Toronto screening of Boys Don’t Cry.
I never saw any of Glenda Jackson‘s landmark performances on the Broadway stage — not her Nina Leeds in Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude (’85) nor her commanding titular turn in King Lear (’19) nor her Tony Award-winning perf in Three Tall Women (’18). And I never saw her perform anything in her 20s, and before this morning I’d never even noticed her bit as a partygoer in Lindsay Anderson‘s This Sporting Life (’63) when she was 26 or thereabouts.
It probably goes without saying that I paid very little attention to her political career, which lasted from ’92 to ’15.
All I ever knew and loved about Jackson came from her sweet-spot period, which primarily occured in the ’70s and lasted roughly a decade (’69 to ’80). It happened between her Oscar-winning performance as the eccentric and perversely feminist Gudrun in Ken Russell‘s Women in Love (’69), which was made when she was 32 or 33, and her second and final escapist comedy with Walter Matthau, Hopscotch (’80), when she was 43 or 44.
Jackson’s most emotionally relatable ’70s performance, hands down and no debating, was Alex Greville in John Schlesinger‘s Sunday Bloody Sunday (’71), a melancholy romantic triangle film that happens to be one of my all-time favorites.
Other performing highlight films from this period included The Music Lovers (as Peter Tchaikovsky’s doomed wife, Nina), Mary, Queen of Scots (as Queen Elizabeth), Bequest to the Nation, the sophisticated romcom A Touch of Class (which resulted in her second Best Actress Oscar), The Romantic Englishwoman (’75), Hedda, House Calls (her first comedy with Walter Matthau), Lost and Found (her second outing with George Segal, released in ’79), and the title role in Robert Enders‘ Stevie (’78), about the British poet Stevie Smith.
Jackson passed today (Thursday, 6.15) at her London home. She was 87.
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