I was raised to understand that life is generally not a breeze or a bowl of cherries, and that you won’t experience much in the way of fulfillment or security without putting in a lot of hard work and also applying a fair amount of discipline and caution at all times, at least during weekdays.
I was also brought up on the idea that the best women work just as hard as men, and that the best marriages — the ones that work out, at least — are partnerships based on two ideas. One, life is nothing without joy, kindness, caressings, imagination, optimism and healthy diets. And two, neither party can lean too much on the other and that both have to contribute what they can and pull their own weight, etc. What’s past is past, and it’s best to look forward.
Throughout my 20s I had a fairly low opinion of shrinks (i.e., psychologists, psychiatrists). And for good reason, I felt. It had to do with my assessment of a certain suburban therapist — a chilly, officious guy in his 40s whom my parents arranged for me to see on a weekly basis when I was 17.
I had a regular weekly appointment with this asshole on Tuesday or Wednesday evenings at 7 pm, and as it happened one of my meetings came right after suffering a brutal beating from my dad. Our fight had erupted in the kitchen during dinner and had resulted in a gash on the side of my head and a good amount of blood soaking my shirt.
The passing of Bernardo Bertolucci…good God. The dying of such a man must be shouted, screamed…Bertolucci is dead! Bernardo Bertolucci of Rome lives no more!
There were five distinct Bertolucci eras or episodes — early, earthy, scruffy (The Grim Reaper, Before The Revolution), Glowing, Sensual, Perverse Perfection (The Conformist, The Spider’s Stratagem, Last Tango in Paris, 1900), The First Stumblings (La Luna, Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man), Return to Glorious Form (The Last Emperor, The Sheltering Sky) and the Long, Gradual, Modestly Respectable Downfall (Little Buddha, Stealing Beauty, Besieged, The Dreamers, Me and You).
For 90% of his followers, Bertolucci’s lasting glory stems from episodes #2 and #4 — the other three don’t count. If he had only made The Conformist, Last Tango in Paris, The Last Emperor and The Sheltering Sky, his world-class reputation would be assured.
Bertolucci talked like a Communist in the ’60s and ’70s but from the early ’70s on he loved going first class. He was a delirious sensualist, a colorist, a composer, a wearer of the finest clothing, a pageantist, and always a maestro of tracking shots. He and Vittorio Storaro, hand in hand, joined at the hip…brothers of the softest light and the most magical of colors (particularly amber).
If there’s one term or phrase that sums up Bertolucci’s spiritual or directorial signature, it would be “exquisitely composed decadent luxury.”
Remember that elegant party in 1900 when a huge white horse is led into a living room full of rich swells sipping champagne, and the owner tells everyone that the horse is named Cocaine? That was Bertolucci. He was every element in that scene…the guests, the horse, the cocaine, and certainly the audacity of leading a magnificent four-legged animal into a beautifully decorated living room and saying quite calmly “say hello to my gentle friend…for he is you and you are he and we are all together.”
Bertolucci was an absolute God between the releases of The Conformist, which opened stateside on 10.22.70, and Last Tango in Paris, which opened on 2.7.73. Two and a half years of being the absolute Zeus of filmmakers, and everyone on the planet was bowing down, including the lordly-at-the-time Norman Mailer.
This shot (taken by whom?) is an instant classic — right up there with that horrific shot of Phan Thi Kim Phuc (i.e., the Vietnamese “napalm girl“), taken by AP photographer Nick Ut in 1972. This image is stamped upon Donald Trump‘s legacy — he’ll own it for the rest of his life, and just as certainly it will own him.
Adam McKay‘s Vice (Annapurna, 12.25) is a brilliant, slash-and-burn, hellzapoppin’ portrait of deliciously ruthless schemin’, schemin’, schemin’ like a demon. And it’s great rightwing fun for the most part — witty, wicked and wonderfully cruel. How we fucked ourselves and bought the WMD bullshit and murdered tens of thousands and bombed the hell out of Iraq and created ISIS in the bargain, etc.
The primary object of scorn and fascination, of course, is former vp Dick Cheney (fully inhabited and reanimated by Christian Bale, as you may have heard) but the film teems with a whole cavalcade of conservatives…a whole kill-or-be-killed universe of conniving super-serpents who’ve risen and slithered over the last half-century (George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Scooter Libby, Paul Wolfowitz, Antonin Scalia, Frank Luntz) along with Dick’s go-getter wife Lynne (Amy Adams) and their daughters Mary and Liz (Allison Pill, Lily Rabe).
Really and truly, the gang’s all here and it’s all fun, fun, fun. Or it was for me, at least.
Vice costar Amy Adams, director-writer Adam McKay following this morning’s screening at the SVA theatre on West 23rd street.
“Fun” in a downishly deadpan sort of way, of course, because we’re talking about the balls-out career of a really shitty, cold-blooded human being as well as the collapse of the twin towers, the imagining of WMDs and the invasion of Iraq and all the horrors and cold-cockings and focus-groupings and flat-out lying that followed. Not to mention the smirking and jaw-clenching.
And it’s all so precise and scalpel-like, so dry and cutting and laser-focused. It’s a movie that says “Dick, Dick…what a dick!” As well as “you guys out there, the ones eating the popcorn…you fucked yourselves and our country by electing these assholes…you know that, right?”
And stylistically Vice is all over the place so you don’t know where the hell to turn. It fully cops to being a “movie” from the get-go, offering a narrator while reversing and fast-forwarding, delivering a blatantly phony ending at the halfway mark, always smirking, full of self-regarding commentary, double-backing and hop-scotching around…it’s instructional with a bullwhip.
Bale will land a Best Actor nomination and deserves to win it, if you ask me. You can’t help but marvel at the voice, the attitude, the physical transformation…all of it. Bale sure as hell has done more than deliver a first-rate impression of Kris Kristofferson in the ’76 version of A Star Is Born, which is arguably what his principal competitor has been praised for.
Adams, count on it, will definitely be nominated for Best Supporting Actress. She glares, she snaps, she takes no shit.
“This is not my cup of Starbucks Via, but I’ve been hearing buzz about New Line’s The Curse of La Llorona. It’s scheduled for an April 19th release. James Wan producing, written by Mikki Daughtry and Tobias Iaconis, directed by Michael Chaves.” — an agent friend.
Jim Cavender by way of Jim McBride, 11.24 Facebook post: “I suppose it was inevitable, but President Trump got his grubby little mitts on Elvis Presley (and rock ‘n’ roll generally) by posthumously awarding him the Presidential Medal of Freedom for being ‘the true king of rock ‘n ‘roll’ — a phrase he clearly meant as a dig at African Americans and anyone else who may feel otherwise.
“[The] media commentary I’ve run across seems to acknowledge this. It’s also why Trump chose to recognize Babe Ruth and Roger Staubach, as a ‘remember when white people were in charge?’ dog whistle. But I’ve also picked up an undercurrent of sneering contempt that indicates the commentators can’t imagine any other reason for the recognition. I find it bewildering and ironic that Elvis has been turned into this buttress for reinforcing the racial barriers he set out to obliterate. Any thoughts?”
HE to Cavender: It’s a shame that Presley’s memory has been used by Trump as a dog-whistle thing, but remember also that Presley never set out to “obliterate racial barriers,” to use your phrase. Presley adopted blues and gospel singing styles that he picked up in Tupelo, and thereby became the “white guy singing black music” that Sam Phillips, the Sun Records honcho, had dreamt of and was able to sell. Presley’s debt was obviously huge, but he never stood up for the civil rights movement — not even when Hollywood liberals attended the August ’63 March on Washington en masse.
And of course, Presley became a hippie-deriding, protestor-hating conservative in the early ’70s. If he’d lived he almost surely would be a Trumpster today, so Trump’s Medal of Freedom tribute sadly correlates.
This is all in Eugene Jarecki‘s The King, one of the great 2018 docs.
The guy whose memory and legacy I feel badly for is Babe Ruth. He may not have been a paragon of virtue in all respects, but he was still Babe Ruth. Now he’ll be forever linked as a symbol of white pushback.
Richard Curtis‘s Love Actually opened 15 years ago, and I’ve read some happy tweets about this. Hence this four-year-old riff about this Universal release, which made $246 million worldwide. I recall enduring this thing like it was yesterday.
People are obviously entitled to love what they love and share their enthusiasm, but I immediately despised the dipshit sentimentality.
“I believe that Curtis has done more to sugarcoat and suffocate the romantic comedy genre than any other director-writer I can think of,” I wrote in 2013. “If there’s someone else who has injected his films and scripts with more mirth, fluttery-ness and forced euphoria, I’d like to know who that is.”
I remember recoiling at an early voice-over line that mentioned how people on the hijacked 9/11 planes called their significant others, families and lovers to say “I love you.” This didn’t sound to me like an affirmation of love as much as an expression of the panic anyone would feel in this situation.
“Curtis has no discernible interest in ground-level reality,” I continued. “When writing romantic material he seems interested only in those first-surge-of-hormonal-excitement moments when an attractive man and a dishy woman can finally let their true feelings out and look into each other’s eyes, etc.”
As Bill Maherpointed out last FebruaryLove Actually is almost entirely about older guys hitting on their underlings. It certainly wouldn’t pass muster with the #MeToo crowd.
Curtis can turn his life around starting today and write and direct nothing but masterpieces henceforth (he’s currently working on an untitled Beatles-related film with Danny Boyle), but he will never atone for Love Actually.
Director Nicolas Roeg has passed at age 90. Hugs and condolences to all concerned. Then again he lived a long, colorful life (born in ’28) and enjoyed a good creative period as a cinematographer during the ’60s (Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, Petulia) as well as a flush directing streak in the early to mid ’70s. No sadness in that.
Roeg’s finest three films, of course, are Walkabout, Don’t Look Now and The Man Who Fell to Earth. And also, don’t forget, Performance, which he partly directed with Donald Cammell. I’m sorry but I was never down with the creepy Bad Timing or the twitchy Alaskan prospector flick, Eureka, which starred Gene Hackman. Nor was I into Insignificance, his light-hearted Albert Einstein movie.
I was, however, half-taken with Castaway, which I wrote the press notes for while working for Cannon publicity. My phone interview with Oliver Reed didn’t go well — I tried not to rub him the wrong way but I said something about his character being a bit of a lazy sod. Things went downhill from there on.
I’ll never be happy with Criterion’s decision to cleaver their Some Like It Hot Bluray down to 1.85 (i.e., slicing the tops and bottoms off the slightly boxier 1.66 version). I’ve said this two or three times; I really hate it.
But I watched the Criterion disc last night and I have to report that the 4K remastering is the stuff of Bluray orgasms. The 2011 MGM Bluray is wonderful also, but the Criterion is…how to put it? Blacker, a bit more detailed (Pat O’Brien‘s checked overcoat has to be seen to be believed), cleaner, crisper, more glistening, more sugary. I could watch it again right now. Congrats to everyone involved and particularly Sony restoration guy Grover Crisp, who presided over the re-do.
Vice costar Amy Adams, director-writer Adam McKay following this morning’s screening at the SVA theatre on West 23rd street.
