More than a few 21st Century films have driven me crazy in the sense that I knew they were absolutely brilliant and breathtaking — bull’s eye, honed to a fine edge, diamond drill — and yet the ticket-buying public and a sizable portion of the critics were either oblivious, ho-hum, dismissive or haters.
I’m not talking about films I merely believed in or which meant something special to me personally (although I did and they did) — I’m talking about films that I knew were gold standard — films that the Movie Godz and generations to come would eventually wake up to and almost stand by for decades to come. Except in some cases they didn’t.
I didn’t feel as if I was standing alone on an island but I certainly didn’t feel as if enough people agreed with me. I was basking in the molten glow of these films and couldn’t figure (and still can’t figure) why others couldn’t feel the same heat. If my tortured saga had been made into a Twilight Zone episode, the title would have been “What’s Wrong With Everyone?” and it would have starred Earl Holliman.
A new Atlantic piece by James Fallows passes along a first-hand conspiracy story from Democratic strategist James Strother. The gist is that the late Republican torpedo specialist Lee Atwater (the guy behind the Willie Horton ad) confessed to Strother on his death bed in ’91 that he “set up” 1988 Democratic presidential candidate Gary Hart. The cancer-stricken Atwater, 39 years old, allegedly told Strother that “I did it!…I fixed Hart.” The whole Monkey Business episode with Donna Rice, Atwater meant, and that damning photo of Rice sitting on Hart’s lap. All of it a political trap.
Atwater somehow took advantage of and/or worked with Billy Broadhurst, the “political groupie and aspiring insider” who had taken Hart on the fateful Monkey Business cruise. Rice and another woman were invited to join the cruise, and the photo of Rice on Hart’s lap was planned and of course used after Hart suspended in his 1988 campaign. Fallows writes that there’s no proof of this other than Strother’s account.
As much as I admire Jason Reitman‘s The Front Runner, which is all about how Hart’s campaign was destroyed by allegations about a possible Rice affair, it would have been that much stronger a film if the Strother-Atwater story had been woven into the plot. Right now the movie has two hand-of-doom elements — Hart’s cavalier self-destructiveness in not hiding his indiscretions more covertly or skillfully, and the Miami Herald reporters who were tipped off about Hart’s affair with Rice. If the Strother-Atwater story has been used, it would have trumped both of these elements.
Did Hart have certain extra-marital tendencies before the Rice scandal? According to legend, yes. Would he have gotten into trouble with some other lust object if the Rice thing hadn’t happened? Possibly. But the Atwater confession certainly adds spice to the brew.
Strother and Atwater had the mutually respectful camaraderie of highly skilled rivals. “Lee and I were friends,” Strother told me when I spoke with him by phone recently. “We’d meet after campaigns and have coffee, talk about why I did what I did and why he did what he did.” One of the campaigns they met to discuss afterward was that 1988 presidential race, which Atwater (with Bush) had of course ended up winning, and from which Hart had dropped out. But later, during what Atwater realized would be the final weeks of his life, Atwater phoned Strother to discuss one more detail of that campaign.
Atwater had the strength to talk for only five minutes. “It wasn’t a ‘conversation,’ ” Strother said when I spoke with him recently. “There weren’t any pleasantries. It was like he was working down a checklist, and he had something he had to tell me before he died.”
I’ve seen Doug Liman‘s new version of Fair Game (’10), which will hit digital platforms 10.23 and Netflix on November 1st. I loved Liman’s true-life political spy saga when I caught it eight and a half years ago in Cannes. I guess it doesn’t mean all that much that I’m also a fan of the new version, which is roughly six minutes longer. The 2010 version was just shy of 108 minutes; the newbie is 114 minutes.
Based on truth and an exceptionally smart script by Jez and John Butterworth, Fair Game is the story of how former CIA agent Valerie Plame (Naomi Watts) and her husband Joe Wilson (Sean Penn) were burned by Scooter Libby (David Andrews), the top aide of vp Dick Cheney, when Wilson publicly challenged the Bush administration’s claim that Iraq had secretly purchased carloads of yellow-cake uranium from Niger to fortify its alleged weapons-of-mass-destruction program, which the Bushies used to justify the 2003 Iraq invasion.
Fivethirtyeight says there’s a 21% chance that Beto O’Rourke beats Ted Cruz on 11.6. The current forecast shows Cruz taking 51.8% of the votes compared to O’Rourke’s 46.6%. Out of an estimated 17,600,000 eligible voters, Fivethirtyeight expects less than 7 million — 39.5% — to actually vote. Even though Texas is more Republican than the nation overall and even though Republicans have consistently won Senate seats there over the last 28 years, O’Rourke could win if the apathetic, lazy-ass under-30s were to vote. But nope, can’t do it, doesn’t matter…right, guys?
“Trump wants to call Elizabeth Warren ‘Pocahontas’ because he’s a racist, wants to appeal to racists, and his cult-like following so ignores everything bad he does that they think that had she lied — she didn’t — this (this!) would be worse than anything Trump has done. Process that.
“If you’re online trying to convince a Trumpist of anything — I mean anything — stop right now. The Trumpists’ reaction to Warren’s DNA test — a cacophony of fact-free insanity about race and DNA and even just the bare facts of what happened — tells you you’re wasting your time.
“I don’t see the point in baiting Trumpists, or insulting them, or calling attention to their madness on a daily basis. These people are fundamentally unserious about truth, discourse, and anything resembling a community of ideas. So (1) ignore them — completely and (2) vote — always.” — Author (“Proof of Collusion“) and Hollywood Reporter correspondent Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson), 10.16.18, around 5 pm.
Any one of them could defeat Donald Trump if they ran for President, and none of them have the stones and the courage to do it. The discussion about who could “beat the beast” begins at 6:10. God love and embrace Elizabeth Warren (I’ll vote for her! She’s a smart, impassioned change agent!), but a little voice is telling me she may not make it….God help us.
From a 10.15 Politico piece about how Elizabeth Warren’s Presidential campaign is taking shape: “Something approaching a 2020 campaign slogan is beginning to take shape: ‘Persist.’ Her political team rolled out a nationwide ‘PERSIST Project‘ campaign on Facebook this past June, hawking free state-specific ‘Persist‘ bumper stickers. At the progressive conference Netroots Nation in August, Warren’s team distributed signs with the single word to the audience to wave during her speech. The front page of her website currently includes a mosaic slideshow of supporters wearing ‘She Persisted‘ T-shirts.”
Just as I held my nose and voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, I will roll my eyes and say “whatever” when I vote for Elizabeth Warren in 2020. If she wins the Democratic Presidential nomination, of course. Because she’s obviously a much better human being than Orange Cheeto (smarter, more mature and pragmatic, more compassionate), and she’ll certainly be a more practical and constructive chief executive. But I’m really, really concerned about her ability to beat that asshole. I really wonder if those pot-bellied, gun-loving, lizard-brain voters will vote for Ms. Finger-Wagging Granny Schoolmarm.
It seems to me that “persist” is something you say when you’re the underdog, when the odds are against you, when things aren’t going as well as they could, when you’re fighting with the insurgents. Raising your rifle and crying “persist, comrades!” indicates that you’re wearing faded jungle fatigues, that you don’t really expect to take power, that you know you’re in for a bruising, difficult fight. Slogan-wise, it doesn’t sound right.
I apologize for getting caught up in roughly six hours of bullshit errands, things to do, forms to submit, stuff to pick up, arrangements to make. A hair salon, car wash, gas station, etc. I began at 10 am; the next thing I knew it was six and a half hours later. Not every day can be dazzling and well-ordered. Every so often the runner stumbles.
Hollywood Elsewhere is looking for succinct dismissals — films seen or released within the last 12 months that fall short, aren’t good enough, don’t make it, can’t cut the mustard.
Keep the posts short and tight. State the title and explain what the basic problem is, and nothing more than that.
Example: Early on ChloëZhao‘s TheRider paints itself into a narrative corner (head injury, no more rodeo-riding) and thereafter has NOWHERE TO GO, and at the same time it refuses to resolve this central problem in the manner of DarrenAronofsky ‘s TheWrestler. This is why it’s an IXNAY and a NO-GO.
Give the Motion Picture Academy credit for at least respecting Psycho enough to nominate Alfred Hitchcock for Best Director. That was a fairly nervy statement for a relatively stodgy era and mindset. Oscars and Oscar nominations generally went to prestige-level dramas and spectacles, and never before to a stark black-and-white horror film that involved knives, nudity, lunch-hour “matinees”, cross-dressing and a mummified corpse.
Yes, Academy members were essentially saluting Hitch for Psycho‘s huge impact on film culture and for making a lot of money, but still…
57 and 1/2 years have elapsed since the 1960 Oscars were handed out on…good God, 4.17.61. Once again, HE considers whether the top-ranked winners were appropriately feted or over-praised.
“Peter Jackson [has] combined cutting-edge special effects with impeccable curatorial instincts to bring the First World War to life in a way that outmatches and outclasses even the best efforts of movie fiction (from All Quiet on the Western Front in 1930 to last year’s Journey’s End). Gifted with more than 600 hours of archive footage from Imperial War Museums, Jackson has sculpted a fly-on-the-wall documentary (a Great War reality show, if you like) that is, at times, intensely moving just as it is relentlessly eerie.” — from Kevin Maher’s Times review, posted on 10.16.
They Shall Not Grow Old opens commercially in the U.K. today (10.16). Doc will also be distributed to all of Britain’s secondary schools after release. Surely someone on this side of the pond is trying to secure distribution rights.
