“Few modern films are as riveting as Jonathan Demme‘s TheSilenceoftheLambs, which swept the 1992 Oscars and whose central villain (besides HannibalLecter) is the wannabe transsexual Jame Gumb (played by TedLevine) who happens to be a serial killer — a character, according to Demme, who simply hated himself and wished he was a woman.
“This brilliant and terrifying movie contained a handful of memorable movie characters (from Hannibal to ClariceStarling to Dr. FrederickChilton to U.S. Sen. RuthMartin to, yes, Jame Gumb) who are all in a swirling pitch-black thriller for adults and not starring in a public service announcement. It wasn’t concerned with ideology or representation (though in many ways it is a feminist movie), and its main focus was to simply tell a gripping story with everyone working at the peak of their craft.
“One gets the terrible feeling that this classic would never be made today, let alone win the Oscar, in our current culture where everyone is screeching about victimhood and inclusivity and representation and identity politics — all of which distort reality and have absolutely nothing to do with creating art.
In early July of ’76 my girlfriend Sophie and I were hanging in the back yard of a two-story Paris home on rue du Bac. It was the storied residence ** of Georges and Francois Raymond, a 40ish couple for whom Sophie has worked as au pair girl. A nice hot day, tall glasses of iced tea on a serving tray, relaxation all around.
Anyway we were taking turns shooting at a paper target with a heavy-duty, spring-loaded pellet gun, and as Georges was loading a part sprang loose and slammed into his abdomen. He had to be in awful pain, but Georges held his breath, clenched his teeth, didn’t make a sound. I remember thinking to myself, “Wow…tough material.”
That’s not me. I’m about to start my third day of godawful rib pain due to my falling accident in the Sierras last Sunday afternoon, and I’ve probably said “owww!” at least 30 or 40 times since the incident. I’ve also said “aagghh!” and “oh, God!” and “fuck fuck fuck!” a few times. I’ve also said “Jesus H. Christ!”
As much as I admire the Georges Raymond or Lee Marvin approach to pain (acknowledge but don’t succumb, no crying or moaning) I can’t live up to it. I’ll talk a tough game but when serious pain comes a callin’ I’m a wuss.
Every physical movement that requires the slightest use of back or rib-area muscles hurls me into the worst pain dungeon I’ve ever experienced in my life. Coughing is agony. Just raising my right arm can be murder. I’ve barely been able to sleep in the conjugal bed (no shifting positions, strictly on my back) but for some reason I’ve been able to nap on the couch in the wee hours. I can’t dress or undress without pain. I’ve had to ask Tatyana for help putting on jeans, slipping on socks, tying shoelaces, etc.
I was so distracted this morning I couldn’t make myself write. My adjustable cane is my constant companion, and it doesn’t help very much. I’ll be visiting a CVS later this afternoon to buy one of those supported rib-brace bandages. I’ve discovered a few Tramadol in my bathroom cabinet, which at least is something. Tomorrow I have a 2 pm appointment with a holistic chiropractor named Fernando Mata, whom I went to in ’13 after lifting heavy boxes up some stairs and screwing up my back big-time. There’s a strap-on heating pad arriving sometime this afternoon via Amazon. What else can I do?
Oh, to be where I was last Saturday, not a pain or care in the world, happy and speeding on a Nevada highway.
1:30 pm update: I’ve decided to go see a holistic chiropractor at 2 pm. A local guy, Santa Monica Blvd., takes some insurance but not mine.
** The Raymond home has a long tunnelled driveway right off rue du Bac, and this part of the home was used by the What’s New, Pussycat? people when they shot in Paris in ’65.
From the second half of a 2008 HE piece called “Obama 2.0,” posted on 8.25.08. It alludes to Beto O’Rourke and the notion that Presidential candidates have to be deeply experienced with the right kind of governmental background, etc.
“A guy on a Yahoo answer page wrote the following about two weeks ago, to wit: ‘Experience is evidently not a reliable measure. When judging presidential performance vs. their experience, it’s all over the map. No reasonable correlation between experience and performance exists.
“Of course, the same is true in business. For example, most of the computer companies that are now mega-corporations were started by kids in garages.
“I myself got hired by a very big, very famous company into a pretty important position with no experience, I just convinced them to do it. I wound up being one of their two top performing executives and brought very significant turnaround to several departments in the company. No experience.
“Nowadays, I hire people because of what they can do, not what they have done (or not).
“If experience was so important, then only the top senators would have a chance in elections, the ones that have been in the senate for 25 years or more. Has this been the case? Ever?
“Experience does not matter, either to performance nor to the American people. Because we’re smarter than that. Experience doesn’t guarantee a person — it just tells you about what type of person they are.”
Most of us, I suspect, are at least half-convinced that the alleged attack upon Empire costar JussieSmollett was performed and not real. Given the latest reports there doesn’t seem to be any way to dodge this tentative conclusion.
If things pan out as they seem to be panning out, this episode obviously indicates a worrisomepathology and a recklessstreak. Not to mention a lack of street smarts.
And yet no one was physically harmed and no real felonies were committed. It was basically a self-produced staging of livepoliticaltheatre.
My prevailing reaction is one of sympathy for the poor guy. To go to all this trouble and obviously risk his whole career…wordsfail. But I don’t believe in capital punishment. I believe in therapy and potential probation and temporary exile (i.e., Moses in the desert) and second chances.
I couldn’t stand Martin Scorsese‘s New York, New York when I caught it in mid-July 1977. It made me go numb. I’d fallen deeply in love with Scorsese and Robert DeNiro after seeing Mean Streets three or four years earlier, but New York New York was so bad that I thought they’d both done serious harm to their careers.
How could two gifted guys who understood the urgent, nocturnal culture of Manhattan and all the undercurrents that propel that…how did they manage to make such a busy, agitated, synthetic downer?
Everyone understood what Scorsese was going for — a dysfunctional love story within a deliberately glossy, sound-stagey tribute to flamboyant big-studio musicals of the ’40s and early ’50s.
There were no difficulties with Liza Minnelli‘s performance as gifted singer Francine Evans, and certainly none with the music or production design. The problem was that Robert DeNiro Jimmy Doyle, a saxophonist, is one of the most infuriating assholes in film history.
The other problem is that New York, New York was a cocaine movie — actually one of the most infamous coke films ever made. It’s all there, chapter and verse, in Peter Biskind‘s “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls.”
Posted almost exactly nine years ago: “HE reader Bobby Rivers has pointed out that during last night’s Martin Scorsese montage before he accepted his Golden Globe life achievement award, there was no clip from New York, New York, even though the band played the Kander & Ebb title tune as Scorsese walked to the stage.
“The reason, of course, is that very few people feel much affection for New York, New York.
It has, however, one electric scene — i.e., when De Niro is physically thrown out of a club that Minnelli is performing in, and he kicks out several light bulbs adorning the entrance way as he’s manhandled out by the manager and a bouncer. I would never buy the Bluray, but I would stream this calamity (which Pauline Kael called “an honest failure”) just to watch this bit again.
There’s a piece of it in the above trailer — it begins at 1:55.
Better late than never: I’ve finally watched Marshall Curry‘s A Night At The Garden, which is nominated for Best Documentary Short Oscar. It took me long enough — watch it below.
We’ve all read what it’s about, but these seven minutes of archival footage (which I wish had been colorized) are creepy and chilling all the same.
There isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between the flag-saluting American Nazis who filled Madison Square Garden 80 years ago, and those rural, under-educated redhats who always cheer at President Trump‘s hillbilly Nuremberg rallies. Jews were the villains back then; today it’s African Americans, Mexicans, LGBTQs and others who are looking to poison this country with their heathen-like views and traditions.
Curry: “It really illustrated that the tactics of demagogues have been the same throughout the ages. They attack the press, using sarcasm and humor. They tell their followers that they are the true Americans (or Germans or Spartans or…). And they encourage their followers to ‘take their country back’ from whatever minority group has ruined it.”
Ten years ago Hugh Jackman hosted the 81st Academy Awards, which aired on 2.22.09. He did a good enough job, I suppose, but God, that opening number. And the winners that year! I will never, ever watch Slumdog Millionaire again. I talked myself into thinking I liked it, but I didn’t actually. That game-show host drove me up the wall. The only part I really liked was the Bollywood number at the end.
I wasn’t all that delighted or levitated by any of the ’08 Best Picture contenders, to be honest — Frost/Nixon (good but calm down), The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (the idea of BradPitt as a man-child became more and more irritating), Milk (Sean Penn was/is too short to play Harvey Milk), The Reader (Harvey steamroller) and the Danny Boyle.
My favorite ’08 films: Che, Man on Wire, The Visitor, Gran Torino, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Burn After Reading, Tropic Thunder, The Wrestler, WALL*E, Doubt, Three Monkeys, Waltz With Bashir, I’ve Loved You For So Long, Rachel Getting Married.
Aching rib cages aren’t conducive to good writing. They play hell with your concentration, partly because you’re so fearful of the next acute pain spasm that…well, it’s hard to concentrate. See? I couldn’t follow through all that well on the premise of that second sentence.
Plus I was so afraid of the pain last night that I “slept” (if you want to call it that) on my back the whole time. Plus I’m using a cane to help me stand and walk around.
That said, I feel better now than I did last night. Well, somewhat. Maybe the recovery won’t take as long as I feared. Last night the pain was excruciating; today it’s merely grueling and oppressive. I don’t feel all that great but I’m half-sensing that recovery is just around the corner.
This morning a well-meaning commenter said I need to be more careful, etc. HE response: “I fell on slick ice and crashed into brutally hard ground yesterday and broke nothing. No stiff neck, no bruises, no cracked ribs, no sprained fingers…nothing. I have a painful condition now but I’ll be past it in a week or two. I slipped and fell on the ice in Park City four or five years ago and nothing happened that time either. I’m bionic, a battleship, nearly bulletproof…the biological exception to the rule.”
Congrats to Eighth Grade‘s Bo Burnham for winning the WGA’s Original Screenplay award, and especially to WGA members for collectively announcing that they don’t give a damn about channelling or predicting Academy thinking because — go for it! — Eighth Grade isn’t Oscar-nominated in this category.
“To the other nominees in the category, have fun at the Oscars, losers!’” Burnham said at the podium.
Congrats also to Can You Ever Forgive Me‘s Nicole Holofcener and Jeff Whitty for taking the WGA’s Best Adapted Screenplay award.
It was chilly and gently snowing as Tatyana and I trudged around a snow-packed area near a blocked-off road in the Sierras, south of Mt. Whitney. Took some nice shots, a good slow-pan video, satisfaction.
On the way back to the car I stepped on a harmless-looking patch of snow which had suddenly become icy. Total slip-out, feet in the air and a terrible crashing collision.
I literally heard a slight snapping or cracking sound as I hit the ground. I half-landed on my right arm and half on my right rib area. It hurt like a bastard plus my wind was knocked out. For five or ten seconds I whined and moaned like a candy-ass. If LeeMarvin had been there he would’ve been ashamed of me. Or for me.
I eventually got up and managed a brusque “I’m okay.” 100 feet later I fell again. Fucking 25 degree downward angle plus that icy snowfall. Then we couldn’t get the car out of the parking lot due to the same slick ice. After some struggling we figured it out. Jesus.
No broken wrist or broken arm, no leg bruise, 100% arm, hand, leg and neck mobility, no lung damage and just a couple of small cuts on my right hand. But my right rib cage acheslikeasonuvabitch.
As we speak Tatyana is driving me to a Cedars Sinai Urgent Care clinic on Wilshire near La Cienega. What are they gonna do if I have a cracked rib? Wrap my mid-section in one of those high-tension bandages? Prescribe some pain pills?
X–RayResult: No cracked ribs. But at the risk of sounding repetitive, it fucking hurts.
I’m harboring a deep and fundamental prejudice against Denis Villeneuve‘s Dune. I’ll see it, of course, and I’m naturally hoping it’ll be better than David Lynch‘s 1984 version, but as God is my witness I’m fearing the worst.
A part of me would actually prefer to avoid the Villeneuve altogether, which of course is not a real-world option on the table. Warner Bros. will open Dune on 11.20.20.
Last July screenwriter Brian Herbert said that a recent draft of the screenplay covered “approximately half” of Frank Herbert‘s novel, so it’ll probably wind up being a two-parter. Budapest filming will begin in the spring or early summer.
The following Villeneuve statement fills me with dread: “Most of the main ideas of Star Wars are coming from Dune so it’s going to be a challenge to [tackle] this. The ambition is to do the Star Wars movie I never saw. In a way, it’s Star Wars for adults.”
Timothee Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Dave Bautista, Stellan Skarsgård, Charlotte Rampling, Oscar Isaac, Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin and Jason Momoa…later.
If Dune turns out to be extra-formidable I’ll be able to recognize and proclaim that, but the honest truth is that I can’t wait to bring the hate.
Excerpt from a 10.10.14 assessment of David Ayer’s Fury: “The climactic situation comes when the weary Brad ‘Wardaddy’ Pitt and his four bone-tired men (Logan Lerman, Shia LaBeouf, Michael Pena and a revolting redneck animal played by Jon Bernthal) are stuck next to a country farmhouse with their tank temporarily disabled by a land mine. They soon after discover that 300 well-armed German troops are marching in their direction.
“Pitt has been ordered by his superior, Jason Isaacs, to protect a supply train, but five guys in a broken-down tank vs. 300 German solders is just suicide, plain and simple. They’ve no chance so why does Pitt decide to fight it out? To what end? They aren’t trapped. They could run for the trees and meet up with U.S. forces later and live to fight again. But no. You can call it bravery but I call it nihilism.
“I understand crazy courage and uncommon valor and all that. I choke up every time I think of Sam Jaffe climbing to the top of the temple so he can blow the bugle and warn the British troops of an ambush at the end of Gunga Din. And I understood the situation during the finale of Pork Chop Hill when 30 or 40 trapped U.S. troops have nothing to do but fight back against hordes of Chinese troops. And the ending of Platoon when U.S. troops were being overrun by North Vietnamese but they fight on regardless and even call in an air strike against their own position. And I certainly understand the Wild Bunch finale when William Holden and Ernest Borgnine and the other two decide that they’re getting old and their lives are over so why not go out in a blaze of gunfire?
“But the Fury finale is nothing like any of these scenarios.
Friendo: “That’s not how it went down.’
HE: “What do you mean that’s not how it went down’? That’s exactly how it went down. Pitt said ‘Nope, I’m gonna fight it out….you guys run for the trees if you want.’ Think about that decision for four or five seconds. It was utter suicide and for what?”
Friendo: “If they made a movie about guys who ran for the hills I don’t think it would be quite the same, would it?”
HE: “Not run for the hills but hide in the trees until the company passes by, and then regroup with the nearby American troops and fight on. What’s wrong with that?
“They weren’t fighting the enemy in order to give other Allied troops time to achieve some other objective — this wasn’t the Alamo. They weren’t ordered to protect a bridge at all costs, like the guys in Saving Private Ryan. This was April 1945 — the end of the war. Hitler would be dead in a couple of weeks. It didn’t matter. If Pitt and his homies had abandoned the tank and run like thieves I would have jumped out of my seat and said ‘Yes! Run for it! All right!'”
Friendo: “The Fury finale was analogous to those two cops in the mean streets of Los Angeles in Ayer’s End of Watch.”
HE: “Not the same thing at all. Sorry but you’re throwing out bad analogies. And that finale in End of Watch was ridiculous also. L.A. cop Jake Gyllenhaal is shot by gangbangers, what, 12 or 15 times and he’s attending the funeral of his partner in the next scene?
Friendo: “I will stand to the end of this thread defending my analogies just like Pitt did against the Nazis!”
HE: “During the big court-martial scene in Paths of Glory a French infantryman, Private Maurice Ferol (Timothy Carey), is asked by the prosecution why he retreated after his comrades had all been killed in an attack on the Ant Hill (i.e., a German fortification). The question is satirically re-phrased by Colonel Dax (Kirk Douglas), the defense counsel. ‘Why didn’t you attack the Ant Hill single-handed?’ Dax asks. ‘Single-handed? Are you kidding, sir?,’ Ferol replies. ‘Yes, I’m kidding,’ Dax says.
“Pitt and his crew going up against 300 German troops isn’t much different from Ferol vs. the Ant Hill, trust me.
“A soldier can’t go into battle saying ‘I don’t want to die…where can I hide?’ He has to go into battle saying ‘we have to man up and accomplish our objective.’ The chances of survival are never good but suicide is suicide. And as a moviegoer I can’t support a battle in which there’s no chance of the protagonists prevailing. There has to be at least a shot at victory.
“If it’s a choice between self-destruction and running for cover in order to live and fight another day, just call me Jeff ‘run for the treeline’ Wells.”
