Let’s further suppose that the screenwriter in question has an interest in continuing to work and thrive in the business. So he can pay his mortgage, afford a car, start a savings account, travel, take his pets to a vet when needed…stuff like that. Let’s presume all this.
What kind of manic looney-tune nutjob doesn’t say to himself, “Let’s see…I’ve been acting like a seriously abusive asshole with women and sooner or later I’m going to have to pay the piper, especially given the current social-political climate out there. So…I don’t know but maybe I should think about possibly getting help, maybe seek treatment for my alleged cyclothymia affliction, issue apologies, commit myself to some kind of 24-hour care facility….something that might allow for a slightly better future than if I just wait for the hammer to come down, which it will sooner or later?”
There’s a phrase I’ve been hearing since I was three or four years old. The phrase is “actions have consequences.” It’s amazing how some people develop an idea that they can somehow duck this.
Last night I finally watched episode #1 of Nicholas Winding Refn‘s Too Old To Die Young (Amazon, 6.14). I have nine more episodes to go, but I’ll tell you right now I’m not much of a fan.
I “respect” the noirish-arthouse atmosphere (solemn, menacing, gates-of-hell atmosphere) and the slow, snail-like pacing. By which I mean that I’m okay with Refn’s decision to shoot it this way as, you know, a stylistic “look at me” signature thing. But I didn’t find it involving. Like, at all. It’s basically about ugliness, evil, malevolence, posing, slowness, dark lighting, irony, set design, death, perversity.
“This is not human behavior as I know it,” I kept saying to myself. “This isn’t even noir behavior. In the first scene it takes…what, 15 minutes for a cop to hassle and interrogate a young woman that he’s pulled over and apparently wants to take advantage of in some fiendish way? Less? Feels like 15. They talk and talk and talk and talk…what is this?”
If human history progressed at this pace we’d still be back in the heyday of the Roman Empire. I’d be wearing a toga and sandals and writing for the Foro Romano Gazette. Everyone takes too damn long to speak or do anything, for that matter. I asked myself again, “Why the fuck am I watching this?”
To be honest, I watched TOTDY because I’d heard it was a problematic slog and I wanted to see Miles Teller struggle. I’ve had it in for this fucking guy ever since that 2014 Hollywood-Highland escalator episode (“Don’t be a pervert, man”).
“This is not going to add to my understanding of or appreciation for the wonder of God’s universe,” I went on. “This isn’t going to turn me on or make me laugh and drop to my knees like I’m watching the second coming of Michelangelo Antonioni. It’s just going to irritate me so you know what? Fuck this series. Okay, I’ll probably watch a few more episodes.”
I’m frankly not delighted about Hauser playing Jewell, mainly because he’s played so many low-rent scumbags that he’s convinced me that he might not be acting on a certain level. Hill would’ve been a slamdunk, but I’m not sure I can get engage with Hauser, root for him, identify with his plight.
Hauser, 32, alluded to this perception last year during a BlacKkKlansman red-carpet interview:
“Unfortunately because of how I look, a chubby, slightly awkward white dude, [I’ve gotten] cast as a lot of scummy dudes lately, and I play a real scummy dude in BlacKkKlansman. [Also] I Tonya…anytime I’m on a sitcom I play a doofus or an ayehole, but you know, those [roles] are fun to play, somebody’s got to do it, I’ll do ’em.”
The conservative-minded Eastwood is doing The Ballad of Richard Jewell, of course, because of the anti-news media narrative.
In Jewel’s case the narrative (which unfolded over 88 days from late July to late October of ’96) was earned and then some. Several reporters and commentators (including the Atlanta Constitution‘s Kathy Scruggs and NBC’s Tom Brokaw) fingered Jewell as the likely Atlanta bomber without having all the facts.
Jewell’s tragedy nonetheless feeds into Trump’s fake news mythology, and Eastwood’s film, you bet, will almost certainly strike a chord in America’s heartland or, you know, with the same ticket-buyers who flocked to Clint’s American Sniper and chortled along with Grant Torino‘s Walt Kowalski.
Full disclosure: Hollywood Elsewhere loved Gran Torino from the get-go. I also liked the geriatric drug-smuggling thing, The Mule. I wasn’t much of a fan of American Sniper, in part because Bradley Cooper looked too fat and also because of that fake animatronic baby scene.
Three and a half years ago I had the honor of briefly speaking with Ryuichi Sakamoto at a Golden Globes after-party. At that point I’d been playing his Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence theme in my head for 30 years, but I was especially knocked over by his Revenant score. He was dealing with a health threat at the time; I gather he’s doing better now.
Criterion is preparing a 2k digital restoration Bluray of Bill Forsyth‘s Local Hero. As the disc will pop on 9.24.19 and it’s mid-June now, I’m guessing there’s time to fix the sound mix on the last shot before the credits.
Play the below YouTube clip — the shot I’m speaking of begins at 1:59 and ends at 2:15. When we hear Ferness’s only pay phone ringing we know it’s Peter Reigert calling from Houston — a classic bittersweet moment. Actually one of the saddest, loneliest moments in cinema history.
But you can’t really hear the phone ringing all that clearly. You can “hear” it (I listened three times with headphones) but only barely, and Mark Knopfler‘s swirly-guitar-echo score is too loud. The Criterion guys have to turn down the Knopfler and bring up the sound of the telephone a notch or two — make it pop just a little bit more.
Please don’t fuck this up, Criterion…please. The ending totally depends upon the audience being able to clearly hear that faint tinny jingle.
With the 80-year-old Gone With The Wind more or less culturally discredited for its unfortunate racial content and D.W. Griffith‘s The Birth of A Nation all but erased from common memory for its horrid depictions of the KKK amid other racial affronts, it’s not entirely surprising that the reputation of Lillian Gish, the star of Birth of a Nation as well as arguably the greatest actress of the silent era, is also being trashed by the forces of p.c. cleansing.
MassLive’s Ray Kelly is reporting that “more than 50 prominent artists, writers, and film scholars are calling for the restoration of Gish’s name to the BGSU theater. Among those signers: Martin Scorsese, James Earl Jones, Helen Mirren, George Stevens Jr., McBride, Malcolm McDowell, Lauren Hutton, Larry Jackson and Joe Dante.”
McBride confesses to “mingled disbelief and outrage” after hearing that Gish has become “the latest victim of political correctness run amok.” Here’s the link.
“The Directors Guild of America in 1999 provoked a similar controversy by removing Griffith’s name from its career achievement award,” McBride reminds. “Director Robert Wise, one of the DGA board members at the time and a past president of the guild, provoked a further controversy when he told me in a subsequent interview that he thought the guild was wrong to dishonor Griffith and had overreacted to pressure. (Bowling Green cited that DGA precedent as one of its justifications for stripping Gish’s name from its theater.)
I’ve written a few times about the four different kinds of film scores — (a) old-school orchestral, strongly instructive (telling you what’s going on at almost every turn), (b) emotional but lullingly so, guiding and alerting and magically punctuating from time to time (like Franz Waxman‘s score for Sunset Boulevard), (c) watching the movie along with you, echoing your feelings and translating them into mood music (like Mychael Danna‘s score for Moneyball), and (d) so completely and harmoniously blended into the fabric of the film that you’ll have a hard time remembering a bridge or a bar after the film ends.
We all understand that the era of classic film scores — composed by Miklos Rosza, Bernard Herrman, Waxman, Max Steiner, Maurice Jarre, Alex North, Dimitri Tiomkin, Bronislau Kaper, Ennio Morricone, Leonard Rosenman, Nino Rota, Elmer Bernstein, Alfred Newman, Hugo Friedhofer and Jerry Goldsmith — is over and done with. Their work (i.e., the artful supplying of unmissable emotional undercurrents for mainstream, big-studio films that peaked between the mid 1930s and late ’70s) belongs to movie-score cultists now. It’s sad to contemplate how one day these awesome creations will be absent from playlists entirely.
But I’ve always enjoyed these movie symphonies the most because their composers — most of them classically trained and European-born — didn’t just write “scores” but created non-verbal, highly charged musical characters. They didn’t watch the film in the seat beside you or guide you along as most scores tend to do — they acted as a combination of a Greek musical chorus and a highly willful and assertive supporting character.
These “characters” had as much to say about the story and underlying themes as the director, producers, writers or actors. And sometimes more so. They didn’t musically fortify or underline the action — they were the action.
If the composers of these scores were allowed to share their true feelings they would confide the following before the film begins: “Not to take anything away from what the director, writers and actors are conveying but I, the composer, have my own passionate convictions about what this film is about, and you might want to give my input as much weight and consideration as anyone else’s. In fact, fuck those guys…half the time they don’t know what they’re doing but I always know…I’m always in command, always waist-deep and carried away by the current.”
Eight and a half years ago I wrote the following about Rosza in a piece called “Hungarian Genius“: “Rosza sometimes let his costume-epic scores become slightly over-heated, but when orgiastic, big-screen, reach-for-the-heavens emotion was called for, no one did it better. He may have been first and foremost a craftsman, but Rosza really had soul.
“Listen to the overture and main title music of King of Kings, and all kinds of haunting associations and recollections about the life of Yeshua and his New Testament teachings (or at the least, grandiose Hollywood movies about same) start swirling around in your head. And then watch Nicholas Ray’s stiff, strangely constipated film (which Rosza described in his autobiography as ‘nonsensical Biblical ghoulash’) and it’s obvious that Rosza came closer to capturing the spiritual essence of Christ’s story better than anyone else on the team (Ray, screenwriter Phillip Yordan, producer Samuel Bronston).”
One of the complaints about Robert Wise‘s West Side Story (’61) was that here and there the Upper West Side slums of Manhattan looked too lush and pretty. Wise cleaned up the milieu, painting the tenement alleys bright red and de-rusting the fire escapes, and Daniel Fapp‘s cinematography, following Wise’s lead, made it seem as if much of the film was happening on a Hollywood back lot.
Kaminski did the same thing to the Washington Post newsroom in The Post — he grayed and grimmed it up, certainly compared to the newsroom captured by dp Gordon Willis in All The President’s Men.
MisheardHElyric: “With a click, with a shock, phono jingo dorro knock…”
Ever respectful and always affectionate, Jett called to wish me Happy Father’s Day today. This was snapped sometime around late ’91 or early ’92. Jett was four; Dylan had just turned three. We’re looking at a video feed of ourselves.
After that somewhat disappointing Booksmart tally ($19.7 million after 24 days compared to $121 million domestic for Superbad) and Late Night‘s slow showing ($5.5 million after two weekends), the question is when will a woke + younger women movie break through and become the next The Devil Wears Prada ($124 million domestic)?
Maybe $25 million-plus grosses just aren’t in the cards for this kind of fare. Is it permissible to say that woke-minded scripts seem to be appealing to a fairly narrow slice of the viewing public? And that this slice tends to get narrower when you…forget it.
Donald Trump to chief of staff Mick Mulvaney: “My God, man…can you control yourself or what? I’m doing an interview with George Stephanopoulos and you cough? I’m talking about my taxes and you fucking cough? Are you a child? Coughing is a sign of nervousness and uncertainty — ask any Broadway producer. Next time you’re seized by an urge to cough while I’m doing an important interview, please leave the room. Only men are allowed in this room. If you’re going to behave like a 12 year-old with the sniffles, you have to leave.”
Except I saw The Nightingale three or four days ago and didn’t think it was quite as horrific as Sydney festivalgoers did. Rough stuff, yes, but delivered with a kind of stylistic restraint.
Set in 1825 Tasmania, the film is a rough-round-the-edges revenge drama in which Clare (Aisling Franciosi), a young Irish convict, is determined to pursue a cruel British officer (Sam Claflin) and three underlings after they rape her and then murder her husband and baby. Clare hires Billy (Baykali Ganambarr), an Aboriginal tracker, to guide her through the island’s jungle-like wilderness on the trail of the killers. The audience complaints were about two scenes in which Clare is savagely raped, the second time in gang fashion. Her infant child is also killed in the latter scene.
Give all this negative build-up, I was surprised by how much I admired and respected The Nightingale, the awful cruelty and brutality notwithstanding. Kent is a very scrupulous and well-focused director, and she’s simply incapable of delivering over-the-top violence for its own sake. Start to finish The Nightingale feels well-honed and exacting. It depicts terrible things, but it’s not a wallow. It conveys a sense of justice and appropriate balance.
But there’s also a point in The Nightingale in which which everything changes and it all kind of falls apart — the story tension vanishes. It happens somewhere around the 75% or 80% mark when Clare loses her nerve in her quest for revenge. From that point on it doesn’t work. Because the film has delivered what William Goldman used to call a “drop-out” moment -— i.e., when something happens that just makes you collapse inside, that makes you surrender interest and faith in the ride that you’re on. You might stay in your seat and watch the film to the end, but you’ve essentially “left” the theatre. The movie had you and then lost you, and it’s not your fault.
