“She’s Been Weinsteining Me!”

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During the 2010 Sundance Film Festival I was half-appalled and half-delighted by Chris Morris‘ Four Lions, a black comedy about group of British Muslim jihadi martyrs. That film was co-written by Morris, Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain. Bain is the sole author of the screenplay for Patrick Brice‘s Corporate Animals (Screen Media Films, 9.20). I’m also impressed by the cannibalism aspect as well as the use of “Weinstein” as a verb.

“Corporate Animals is a character sketch in search of a plot,” wrote Variety‘s Amy Nicholson. “In the first act, fatuous guide Brandon (Ed Helms) gets the gang trapped in an underground cavern large enough for people to slink off to the bathroom or seduce each other behind a rock. Even before the first person gets filleted, we’re grateful the film isn’t in Smell-O-Vision.

“Yet most of the brutality is verbal. There’s a gleeful shiver when the employees finally feel free to speak their minds. Who cares about getting fired when one employee is writing a will to clarify who gets to eat her butt cheek? Given the lack of narrative options once the group is stuck passively waiting for rescue, attacking each other is the only way to pass the time.”

Politically Correct Scales

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Three days ago Guy Trebay posted a N.Y Times “Critics Notebook” piece called “Naked Came the Strangers.” Without delving too much into the ins and outs of the article (which is subtitled “How our nudes have changed in the last 50 years”), please consider a portion of the seventh paragraph.

“In 1969, Americans were, it would appear, much thinner — men and women equally,” Trebay writes. “As it happens, this superficial impression is borne out by the available data, since in 1971 the average 19-year-old man weighed just 159.7 pounds, according to figures compiled by the National Center for Health Statistics, and the average woman 131.”

Given the “Americans were much thinner” line, you’d think Trebay would follow this up with statistics about how much heavier the average 19 or 20-year-old is today. But he avoids such comparisons.

The reason, I’m guessing, is that N.Y. Times editors wouldn’t want to offer an impression that the paper is taking any sort of dim view of the average weight of today’s young Americans, as that might constitute an oblique form of fat-shaming.

And so Trebay runs for cover by stating an obvious, uncontested fact — that older people are heavier than their younger selves. “A hippie now at Woodstock 50 — if such existed and if a planned anniversary concert had not fallen apart — would have added an additional 14 pounds to his frame and a woman another 20,” he states. (When Trebay says “a hippie at Woodstock 50”, he obviously means an old hippie as young hippies don’t exist outside of Deadheads.)

My reading of that meter tells me that many older guys (55-plus) are a lot more than 14 or 15 pounds heavier than their 19 year-old selves. Try 25 or 30 pounds heavier, and I’ve seen a lot worse.

By Trebay’s statistics (currently 14 pounds heavier than 159 pounds) the average 69 year-old guy is 173 pounds.

Last December a National Health Statistics Reports PDF stated that “the average American man between 20 and 39 years [of age] weighs 197.9 pounds, and that the average waist circumference is 40.2 inches, and the average height is just over 5 feet 9 inches (about 69.1 inches) tall.”

In other words the average younger to middle-aged guy of 2019 is 38 pounds heavier than 20-year-olds were in 1971, or 48 years ago.

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Festival Fatigue

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A couple of weeks ago I said I was looking forward Pedro Almodovar‘s Pain and Glory for the second time at the Telluride Film Festival. Because Almodovar’s films are always worth a second look. And who knows — maybe I’ll come away with a greater degree of enthusiasm this time. Antonio Banderas won the Cannes Film festival’s Best Actor prize, after all. Respect must be paid.

Well, I wound up seeing it for the second time last week, and it played a lot stronger. I felt a certain delicacy and poignance from the film that somehow didn’t penetrate as much in Cannes. A richer, sadder, more particular meditation. Especially the scenes with Penelope Cruz, who plays the mother of Antonio Banderas‘ Salvador Mallo character, and Julieta Serrano, who plays a 70something version of Cruz. My Cannes reaction was positive but qualified — respectful but somewhat muted. This was partly due, I think, to being exhausted by the 16-hour days. I was rested and ready when I saw it four or five days ago, and it made all the difference.

Fatigue gets in the way of a lot of things, if you’re not careful.

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Rambo in Bulgaria

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I don’t know what to do with this. It’s pretty much all one color. I would love to see a Rambo movie that’s as good as Tony Scott’s Man on Fire (’04)…impossible. Or as good as the 37-year-old First Blood, or at least as good as the first 60 or 70 minutes’ worth.

Rambo: Last Blood seems awfully similar to Mel Gibson‘s Blood Father (i.e., dad protects daughter from malicious drug dealers), which was pretty good on its own terms. I’m thinking that was enough — don’t need to see Stallone’s version.

“Full-On Metastatic Malignancy”

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The working-for-Trump experience “is sort of, to me, bizarre, but I’m not a psychiatrist so I can’t diagnose it. But everyone goes through the same [experience]. They’re trying to figure out a way to like him. There’s a gregariousness and a charm to his personality so you attach to those things. And then you realize there’s a level of malignancy, and by the time you get there it’s a little bit too late because there are a lot of brush fires going on. [If unchecked, the Trump effect] will essentially be non-recoverable. It’s one thing to have a recession. That is a bone break. But it’s another thing to rip up the social fabric of the United States. That’s a full-on metastatic malignancy, and it may terminate [the] patient. This guy is causing a major amount of damage to the country.” — Anthony Scaramucci interview on CSPAN, 8.19.19.

This?

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How exactly does No Time To Die, the just-announced title of Bond #25, differ in terms of meaning from Die Another Day (’02), the Lee Tamahori-directed installment with Pierce Brosnan? I’ll tell you how it differs. It doesn’t. They both mean “put off dying or kick the dying can down the road because I have pressing shit I have to deal with, first and foremost being survival itself.”

So No Time To Die is basically a “blah blah, our lids are drooping, we couldn’t think of anything else so we settled on a retread” title. It’s like calling a Bond film Silverfinger or Doctor Moe or Thunderclap or Black Ink: Octosquid.

Exception To Usual Usual?

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What’s the first association when I think of antlers, above and beyond moose, elk and bucks of the forest? Those creepy stick-branch-and-twine sculptures in the first season of True Detective, which foretold the realm of Carcosa and the whole “Yellow King” thing. So right away “antlers” connotes nightmare stuff.

Scott Cooper and Guillermo del Toro‘s Antlers (Fox Searchlight) is co-written by Nick Antosca and C. Henry Chaisson, and based on Antosca’s short story “The Quiet Boy,” which appeared online seven months ago.

Cooper detouring into horror is a little surprising, but Jonathan Demme went there and look what happened. Cooper and Del Toro are both gifted, extra-measure filmmakers so here’s hoping.

Four Words I’ve Never Said

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And those words are “we need to talk.” Not once in my life! Because they’re a code phrase, for openers. They don’t mean “we need to talk.” They mean “I’ve had it up to here with your selfishness and evasions and procrastinating bullshit, and so we need to figure something out because I don’t know how much more of this I can take.” That’s what “we need to talk” means.

It means “I’m losing patience with your lack of progress…you’re not improving according to my plan.” It means “are you gonna shape up? ‘Cause if you don’t I’m thinking of shipping out.” It means “you, sir, have been fucking up, and so ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-changes or else…incoming!”

Like anyone else I have my issues, but in the matter of relationships rule #1 has always been “whatevs, turn the other cheek, let it go, don’t pick fights, no ultimatums.” Which essentially means arguments are over-rated, fly under the radar, do your best, keep the gas tank filled, clean up, buy a good vacuum cleaner and take the garbage out before going to bed.

Reactions? To the trailer, I mean.

Swarthy Beardo

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Earlier today Paul Schrader posted the below photo on Facebook, and with a question: “Who is this?” Answer: An approximate representation of the features of Jesus of Nazareth, based on knowledge of facial bone structures of ancient Judeans and passed along by “British scientists, assisted by Israeli archeologists.” The portrait was revealed in a January 2015 issue of Popular Mechanics.

HE reply to Schrader: You know who he looks like? Seriously? Akim Tamiroff in Sam Wood’s For Whom The Bell Tolls.

Where did he get his hair done? Definitely a choppy brush cut due to a lack of good sharp scissors. As if his hair had been trimmed with a sheep herder’s knife of some kind. I’m guessing that most poor guys got a once-a-year haircut back then. Maybe there was a shepherd with a knack for giving such haircuts, which constituted a side business. A guy known to Yeshua and the disciples, I’m thinking. Maybe they all went to him at the same time and got a group rate.

A day or two ago I saw a guy in the Beverly Center Apple store who looked a lot like this, I swear to God. Faded red hoodie sweatshirt, madras shorts, sandals. He was checking out iPads. The Second Coming?

A sizable segment of right-wingers (i.e., the Mike Pence, Megyn Kelly crowd) still believe that Yeshua of Nazareth looked like a handsome, blue-eyed Anglo Saxon linebacker for the University of Michigan. Only with long, flowing, freshly shampooed honey brown hair.


Akim Tamiroff in For Whom The Bell Tolls.

Dean and Cronkite

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It was announced almost three weeks ago that Chris Pine, 39, will play Walter Cronkite in Newsflash, a real-time drama about how the trusted CBS anchorman and various CBS staffers handled the incoming news of JFK’s assassination on 11.22.63.

I’m presuming Pine will have to either gain weight or wear chubby-face makeup in order to resemble the 47 year-old Cronkite, who was rounder and older-looking on that day, even by the standards of the early ’60s, and with a face, unlike Pine’s, that wasn’t especially handsome or chiselled.

But at least Pine will make for a better Cronkite than Seth Rogen would have…good God, that would’ve been terrible! Responsible parties (including director David Gordon Green) actually wanted Rogen to play the legendary newsman.

I’ve read a draft of Ben Jacoby‘s Newsflash script. I found it steady and convincing — smoothly written, well-researched, not brilliant but very decent. Cronkite is the stalwart, steady-at-the-tiller hero, of course. CBS honcho Jim Aubrey is the villain of the piece.

I don’t know when Newsflash will shoot (probably not for a while) but Pine will also portray former White House attorney and Watergate whistle-blower John Dean in an Amazon feature.

A script for the Dean film apparently hasn’t been written yet.

Variety‘s Matt Donnelly: “The film will follow the life and political saga of Dean, who served as White House counsel for President Richard Nixon from July 1970 through April 1973.

The Dean film will probably turn out to be a more interesting project than Newsflash, if for no other reason than the built-in dramatic conflict (i.e., a young believer in Nixon and the Republican cause experiences an agonizing re-appraisal when the Watergate shit hits the fan).