Posted on 9.27.07: Easily the most soulful and influential female poet-composer-performer of the late 20th Century (as well as the most emotionally arresting, elegantly phrased, bravest and saddest), Joni Mitchell spat out the blunt truth when Vulture‘s Tim Murphy asked why she’d recorded no new tunes since the days of the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

“I was angry at the politics. Especially [at Bush]. Angry at the American people. At Christians. At theology — the ignorance of it. And I didn’t want to write about it. I removed myself from society and painted. It was a method of avoiding the anger, not addressing it.

“I couldn’t listen to music for ten years, I hated it all. It all pissed me off. Music just became grotesquely egocentric and made for money. It wasn’t music — there was no muse. Music requires a muse. The producer is not a muse. He’s a manufacturer. Contemporary music made me want to punch people. I couldn’t stand any of it. The whoring, the drive-by shooting of it all. I don’t care how well crafted it is. America is in a runaway-train position and dragging all the world with it. It’s grotesquely mentally ill.”

Mitchell’s reputation as a world-class phraser, searcher and sufferer will last for the next several centuries. She’s a heavy cat among kittens. Nobody has recorded a more touching and transcendent version of “Unchained Melody” than Mitchell. Her early ’70s to early ’80s stuff was perfection, completion. Especially The Hissing of Summer Lawns and Hejira. Those “six white vapor trails across the bleak terrain” and “the hexagram of the heavens.” That “poppy poison-poppy tourniquet [that] slithers away on brass like mouthpiece spit.” I’ll take these lyrics with me into the next life.

Posted on 3.31.15: Joni Mitchell, 71, was rushed to the hospital this afternoon after reportedly being found unconscious, She was said to be alert in the ride down to a hospital (presumably UCLA or Cedars), but is reportedly in intensive care. I’ve spoken to a friend who was with her last week, and he said he sensed that all was perhaps not entirely well. Mitchell, he said, had called for “a healer” to drop by and lay on hands or help out in some kind of shamanistic way.

Mitchell has been an unrepentant smoker all her life, beginning at age nine. My friend mentioned that there’s been some discussion (and perhaps an intention) of switching to electronic cigarettes but after six decades of reportedly heavy smoking…God help her.

Obviously everyone wants her to recover and push on, but at a certain point the body just can’t take the nicotine and the toxins and complications will manifest.

Sidelight: I attended a short, smallish concert that Mitchell gave at Studio 54 in October ’82 to promote “Wild Things Run Fast.” The crowd was not huge, maybe 200 or 250, and I was standing fairly close and pretty much dead center.

No female artist has ever touched me like Mitchell **, and I was quite excited about being this close to her. I was beaming, starry-eyed and staring at her like the most self-abasing suck-up fan you could imagine, and during the first song her eyes locked onto mine and I swear to God we began to kind of half-stare at each other. (Some performers do this, deciding to sing for this or that special person in the crowd.) Her eyes danced around from time to time but she kept coming back to me, and I remember thinking, “Okay, she senses that I love her and she probably likes my looks so I guess I’m her special fanboy or something for the next few minutes.”

Mitchell was dressed in a white pants suit and some kind of colorful scarf, and she sang and played really well, and I remember she had a little bit of a sexy tummy going on. Sorry but that had a portion of my attention along with the songs and “being there” and a feeling that I’d remember this moment for decades to come.

4.20.12: Variety‘s Jeff Sneider reported about that ludicrous notion of casting Taylor Swift as Mitchell in a film version of Sheila Weller’s 2008 book, “Ladies Like Us.” Swift was said to be “circling” the Mitchell role.

The Katie Jacobs-directed film was going to be shot under the aegis of Sony and Di Bonaventura Pictures. But last fall it was reported that Mitchell had killed the Swift casting. (She told a Sunday Times interviewer that “I squelched that…I said to the producer, ‘All you’ve got is a girl with high cheekbones.’” She added that the screenplay “is just a lot of gossip… you don’t have the great scenes.”) It was “an appalling idea,” I wrote, “because Mitchell’s manner and speaking style always conveyed the churning soul of a poet and artist, and Swift looks and talks like a none-too-introspective, looking-to-please pop personality. Mitchell is a world-class lady with oceans, rivers and tributaries within; Swift is a pond.”

** My beloved Patti Smith ranks a close second.

During the first two-thirds of a 39-minute “Awards Chatter” interview, Hollywood Reporter columnist and podcaster Scott Feinberg and legendary rock star David Crosby seem to hit it off. But then Crosby starts to lose patience with Feinberg’s questions, which he regards as overly generic, simplistic and boilerplate.

Crosby seems particularly irked by Feinberg’s questions about Joni Mitchell, whom Crosby has known for over 50 years, first as a musical admirer, then a lover, then a creative partner, and then as an off-and-on friend. Crosby visited Mitchell after her 2015 stroke and was the first person to say anything substantive about her condition, or so I recall.

Things begin to go wrong around the 26 and 1/2 minute mark. And then during the last three or four minutes Crosby shifts into outright hostility, calling Feinberg “a dumb guy,” “an asshole”, a “dipshit”, an “idiot” and so on. Feinberg understandably wasn’t at all charmed by this. He also understands, I’m sure, that you can’t win ’em all. All interviewers try to get along with charm and intelligence, dealing the usual cards (upfront, polite, deferential), but some people are like oil and vinegar. You just have to shrug it off when this happens.

I think this was was actually a fascinating interview. Hundreds upon hundreds of podcast chats are posted on a regular basis these days, and for the first 25 or so minutes Feinberg vs. Crosby was just another amiable discussion that was ostensibly about promoting a film (i.e., David Crosby: Remember My Name). And then came the thorns and abrasions.

The first stirring of trouble happens at the 26:55 mark when Feinberg begins asking particulars of Crosby’s relationship with Joni Mitchell, which began in late ’67 or early ’68 (or something like that). Here are some roughly transcribed portions of the discussion — words and phrases are omitted but the gist of the interview is, I feel, fairly represented.

Crosby: I have to ask…are we going to go through my entire history, week by week?
Feinberg: No, no, no…
Crosby: Tell me what we’re doing here.
Feinberg: Well, what would you like to do?
Crosby: I’d like to talk about the last four records in a row that I just made.
Feinberg: Well, we have an hour so…
Crosby: Okay, we’re creeping along here. Uhm, I had already been living in Laurel Canyon.
Feinberg: Everybody knows retroactively what Laurel Canyon scene was about, but at the time was it known as a kind of artists’ community?
Crosby: No, hell no. We just trying to get above the smog. I had lived in L.A. and knew how bad the smog was. I had already been living in Laurel Canyon when I came back from Florida with Joni. We were just trying to get above the smog. You go up into the hills and there’s a smog line. I was born and raised in Los Angeles, could’t afford Beverly Hills, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to live downtown so…
Feinberg: It’s just that there are such differing recollections about you three guys initially got together.
Crosby (under his breath): Oh, God.
Feinberg: What [unintelligible]?

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Last Monday I did a phoner with Cameron Crowe, the director-screenwriter who did double duty as producer and off-camera interviewer for A.J. Eaton‘s David Crosby: Remember My Name (Sony Pictures Classic, 7.19).

An interviewer usually knows if a q & a is going well while it’s happening. This was one of those occasions, but I realized later on it was a bit more. A nice conversation with a nice give-and-take flow.

HE: “This movie has an extraordinary candor factor. I’ve seen it three times, and you get the same contact high from listening to Crosby spill his guts, just spilling it all. It’s almost like a religious current. You say to yourself, ‘If Crosby can be this calmly candid about his failings, about his past…whom he used to be and who he is now…you say to yourself, ‘Gee, I’d like to go out and talk to my friends this way’…you know? I’d like to be this really candid, deeply honest person…it feels cleansing, you know?”

Crowe: “Totally, totally agree. Crosby just said something like that [during the junket], and I’d never heard him say it. Exactly what you said. It was just ‘get the load off me…just say it and get it out there’…and I’d never heard him say this but he said he felt lighter. That’s what I love about him. That kind of exposure. He said about the movie that it’s really hard to watch that guy. But on another level he’s getting off on the dump truck unloading his head.”

Crowe on the still-festering resentments between Crosby and ex-CSNY bandmates Stephen Stills, Neil Young, Graham Nash: “They’ve hurt each other a lot. Sometimes it’s been about women…about David shooting his mouth off about Neil’s [wife Daryl Hannah]. Sometimes it’s been about credit. Sometimes it’s been about money. They’re used to doing this. I think they just got really tired of each other.”

I’ve posted the above video two or three times, but look at it again. It happened in Park City after the film’s very first screening on 1.26.19. Crowe told me that when the film ended he wasn’t sure if Crosby would be angry or sullen or what. But the crowd melted him down.

At the 31-second mark the obviously shaken and humbled Crosby looks up, feels the applause and emotion, and leans back against the curtain as if to say, “I don’t know if I can even stand up after what I’ve just seen and been through, and what I’m feeling now.”

Crosby: “It’s about being fragile. And you know that a catharsis will take place. You’re watching your life, and you learn stuff, and I’ve been there.” At 1:18 he looks at Eaton with moisture in his eyes and says, “And it really caught me.” In response to which Eaton pats Crosby on the shoulder.

“At least twice I was gonna cry, and one time I did cry,” Crosby goes on. “And you guys did a good goddam job. And Eaton says, ‘No, you did a good job.” Crosby: “Very emotional. A lot of pain.”

From “Pete Buttigieg Is Still Figuring This Out,” a N.Y. Times Sunday magazine piece by Mark Leibovich:

“Some of Buttigieg’s giddier supporters and profilers have likened him to Barack Obama, not just in his appeal to a new generation of political consumers but also in his intent to create a new way of thinking and discussing politics. He is the next level of anti-politician politician, quintessentially political but running against what he sees as the counterproductive outrage that seems to have taken hold in American politics, particularly in the Trump era. ‘Our response is going to be to model something completely different,’ Buttigieg told me.

“And indeed, he possesses an Obama-like ability to wield cool detachment — impassioned and remote at the same time, calmly in a rush. Even his execution of the necessary and grubby candidate activities, like fund-raising, has an earnestly above-it-all air. ‘Hey,’ he began a blast email appeal to his supporters on the eve of the last Federal Election Commission fund-raising deadline. ‘You know that we don’t subscribe to inauthentic urgency here at Pete for America. That’s not why we’re here. We are here to build trusted relationships.’ He then hit up his ‘trusted relationships’ for donations.

“’You can seek to do the right thing,’ Buttigieg said in the wake of the South Bend Eric Logan shooting, ‘and be reasonably confident you made the less bad choice and get your ass handed to you all the same.’

“’I see Pete Buttigieg as more of a healer-warrior, and there’s an absence of vitriol with him,’ Dave Dvorak, a Minneapolis physician, told me. ‘And maybe that’s what we need.'”

For what it’s worth, this is the funniest Good Boys trailer yet. Assembling an effective trailer for an R-rated tweener comedy requires a certain finesse — timing, cutting, pacing, the right kind of English. The Universal marketing guys got it right this time. Pic opens on 8.16.

“A little too imitative of Superbad with the minor tweaks of three (rather than two) even-younger male protagonists, more swearing, and a lot more drug references, Good Boys lacks that film’s wit and heart. It’s a lively, slick package, yet crude and obvious at every turn, unlikely to attract either the critical or word-of-mouth favor that might create a sleeper hit for Universal’s planned August release.” — from Dennis Harvey’s SXSW Variety review, filed on 3.12.19.

“Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky‘s Good Boys script is packed wall-to-wall with jokes, to the point that this critic missed lines that were drowned out by the roars of laughter from the packed house at [Austin’s] Paramount Theatre. Having written on a string of sitcoms and helmed episodes of The Office, Stupnitsky brings a finely honed skill for punchline pacing to his feature directorial debut. [Except] it’s mostly the same jokes over and over: cute kids cursing and not understanding sex stuff.

“Initially, it’s jolting fun to see these baby-faced boys dropping F-bombs or mistaking a cache of BDSM gear for ‘weapons’ and a sex doll for a CPR dummy. (‘It’s sticky.’) But as the boys run screaming through the second act, these bits offer diminishing returns. The foul language becomes a bit numbing. Thankfully, the third act’s comedy becomes more focused on character than crudeness, which gives its climactic montage a needed oomph.” — from a Guardian review by Kristy Puchko, also filed during SXSW.

My attitude before seeing Ursula Macfarlane‘s Untouchable was “what will this doc tell us about Harvey Weinstein‘s misdeeds and the landmark reporting that brought him down…what will it tell us that isn’t already part of the conversation, and which might move the needle forward?” The answer is that it isn’t so much about Harvey (certainly not in terms of examining his psychology) as several of his victims, and that getting to know who these women are and what they went though in their own words…all I can say is that it matters a great deal, and that their stories, one upon another and then another, make you feel the deep-down rage and melancholy. At the end of the day it’s not so much a prosecutorial indictment (although it obviously is that) as a broken heart movie. It says “this happened and now what?”

The poster for Untouchable is excellent, by the way.

“I wasn’t surprised to hear so many people expressing fear that the racist, divisive, climate-change-denying, woman-abusing jerk who is our president was going to get re-elected, and was even seeing his poll numbers rise.

“Dear Democrats: This is not complicated! Just nominate a decent, sane person, one committed to reunifying the country and creating more good jobs, a person who can gain the support of the independents, moderate Republicans and suburban women who abandoned Donald Trump in the midterms and thus swung the House of Representatives to the Democrats and could do the same for the presidency. And that candidate can win!

“But please, spare me the revolution! It can wait. Win the presidency, hold the House and narrow the spread in the Senate, and a lot of good things still can be accomplished. ‘No,’ you say, ‘the left wants a revolution now!” Okay, I’ll give the left a revolution now: four more years of Donald Trump.” — from 7.16.19 N.Y,. Times column by Thomas L. Friedman, titled ‘Trump’s Going to Get Re-elected, Isn’t He?’

So Friedman is saying what? That only Typewriter Joe will do? AOC is not running for President.

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In reportedly agreeing to play King Triton in Disney’s forthcoming live-action CGI remake of The Little Mermaid, Javier Bardem is merely playing his cards like an adult. This is the world in which we live, and paycheck roles in tentpole films (digital Disney remakes, Marvel and Star Wars franchise flicks) is where the money is. Not to mention “the artistic thrills”, to quote Rosemary’s Baby protagonist Guy Woodhouse (John Cassevetes).

The only headscratcher is that Ariel is being played by Halle Bailey, which would suggest that Triton, her dad, should be played by an actor in the realm of Samuel L. Jackson, Cuba Gooding or Jeffrey Wright…right? Perhaps the actress cast as the late Queen Athena will complete the portrait.

The Bardem casting was reported Wednesday by Deadline‘s Amanda N’Duka. Rob Marshall is directing the CG feature from a script by David Magee. Harry Styles is reportedly in talks for the role of Prince Eric. Previously announced cast includes Melissa McCarthy as Ursula, Awkwafina as Scuttle and Jacob Tremblay as Flounder.

In William Wyler‘s Ben-Hur, Pontius Pilate (Frank Thring) attempts to explain to Judah Ben-Hur (Charlton Heston) the way of the world as defined by Rome. If Pilate were to comment on the Bardem casting, he would put it thusly:

“Where there is greatness, great government or power, even great feeling or compassion, error also is great. We progress and mature by fault. Disney has stated time and again it is endeavoring to shape our cultural life in a great cinematic future. Perfect freedom has no existence. A grown man knows the world he lives in, and for the present, the world is Disney. Javier Bardem has simply chosen to cash a fat check rather than fight.”

Yesterday The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg seemed to draw an analogy between Tuesday’s Emmy nominations, which ignored many performances by well-known movie stars, and a February ’18 Vulture assessment of certain Academy nomination preferences by the “New Academy Kidz.”

It would seem, in other words, that changes within the TV Academy (new members, new rules, new thinking) are affecting the nominations.

“Emmy categories were announced on Tuesday, recognizing virtually every aspect of the TV business,” Feinberg began. “One thing, though, was noticeably missing from this year’s list that has been a staple of previous years: a large presence of movie stars (or, at least, people who first established themselves on the big screen before moving to the small).

“The TV Academy’s performers peer group took a pass on a host of A-list and/or Film Academy-knowledged actors and actresses who were thought to be in serious contention, including Catch-22‘s George Clooney; Homecoming‘s Julia Roberts; Maniac‘s Jonah Hill, Emma Stone and Sally Field; Grace and Frankie‘s Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin; Kidding‘s Jim Carrey; Who Is America‘s Sacha Baron Cohen; Yellowstone‘s Kevin Costner; King Lear‘s Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson; Ray Donovan‘s Jon Voight and Susan Sarandon; Knightfall‘s Mark Hamill; The Deuce‘s James Franco and Maggie Gyllenhaal; Shameless‘ William H. Macy; The Widow‘s Kate Beckinsale; and Live in Front of a Studio Audience: Norman Lear’s All in the Family and The Jeffersons‘ Jamie Foxx, Woody Harrelson, Marisa Tomei, Kerry Washington and Will Ferrell.”

“New voter” quote from Vulture‘s “We Polled New Oscar Voters: How Are They Changing the Way the Academy Thinks?” by Kyle Buchanan [now with N.Y. Times], Stacey Wilson Hunt and Chris Lee:

“’In general, it just feels like there is a feeling that we have to award people who have maybe been overlooked before. It’s about not wanting to award people who they have been rewarded a lot in the past. Maybe we need to give someone else a chance. I definitely think, whether [it’s] conscious or subconscious, [this is] happening.”

Consider again a quote from HE reader “filmklassik” in a 1.24.18 piece called “New Oscar Bait Hinges on Tribal Identity“:

“It’s a bit cheeky to say ‘never ever again’ (because who the hell knows), but yeah, in this particular cultural moment it is all about Tribal Identity. And what’s disturbing is, we have a whole generation now for whom tribal representation is, to use one critic’s word, numinous. The under-40 crowd has invested Race, Gender and Sexuality with a kind of cosmic significance. It doesn’t mean a lot to them — it means everything to them. Indeed, much of their conversation and writing seems to always come back to it.”