A day or two ago I was inquiring about my iPhone 15 at the local Apple store. It was only a couple of minutes after opening, and there were maybe nine or ten store reps in their royal-blue T-shirts, all looking at me and ready to help.
You never know in advance if the person you’re about to speak to is a tip-top brainiac. Most of them are reasonably bright and always generous in spirit but they rarely know everything, and more often than not they’ll pass along information that they “think” is probably correct, often adding “let me check…hold on.” And that’s fine.
But I knew I’d lucked out when I began talking to a 20something store rep with a knitted skull cap. First of all guys who wear skull caps tend to be ultra-focused in a nerdball way. But I knew this dude was a genius because he pointedly didn’t make eye contact. Right away I said to myself “that’s an Asperger’s thing…this guy is Albert Einstein-y.”
And he pretty much was, as it turned out. Not once did this guy even glance in the direction of my pupils. The whole time he was looking at the tabletop or the belt on my jeans or the fringe tip of my wool scarf. And he was fucking brilliant. It was hugely pleasurable to converse with him.
The vast majority of people in customer service focus on smiling and nicey-nice-ing and emotional caressings, and that’s fine. But when a slightly dysfunctional Genius Bar-type guy comes along, I smile inside and say a little prayer of thanks.
I was looking at this Gone With The Wind overture clip, and I found myself curiously melting down over Max Steiner‘s music. Because it’s gentle and sad and lamenting, and because it conveys a sentimental longing for things — customs, attitudes, climates, cultural atmospheres — that are gone and never to return.
I’ve written five or six times that GWTW is not a film about slavery or the antebellum South or even, really, the Civil War. If it was just a Civil War epic or a Southern plantation drama or a marital misery piece it would have faded many decades ago.
It’s basically a parable about hard times and terrible deprivations, and most people (apart from the terminal wokeys) understand that today. It’s about (a) a struggle to survive under ghastly conditions and (b) about how those with brass and gumption often get through the rough patches better than those who embrace goodness and generosity and playing by the rules.
Yes, David O. Selznick‘s 1939 film is an icky and offensive thing here and there, but (I’ve said this also a few times) you can’t throw out the second half of part one…the shelling of Atlanta, the struggle, the crowd scenes, the panic, the burning of Atlanta, the anguish, the soldiers groaning and moaning, Scarlett’s drooling horse collapsing from exhaustion, the moonlight breaking through as she approaches Tara, the radish scene plus Ernest Haller‘s cinematography…you just can’t throw all that out.
Obviously the film’s unfortunate racial attitudes, which were lamentably par for the course 85 years ago, are now socially obsolete. And I wouldn’t argue with anyone who feels that portions of it are too distasteful to celebrate, but it just doesn’t seem right to lock all of that richness inside some ignoble closet and say “no more, forget about it, put it out of your minds.”
Legendary filmmaking is legendary filmmaking, and Steiner’s music is just too affecting, too transporting.
Steiner’s greatest scores: King Kong, The Informer, Slim, Jezebel, Gone with the Wind, Sergeant York, Casablanca, Since You Went Away, The Big Sleep, Key Largo, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, White Heat.
One of the most horrifying Orwellian wokethink images mine eyes have ever beheld…I’m serious, I was there and I fucking snapped this photo…a N.Y. Times video ad inside the Washington, D.C metro, which first appeared in February ’22. Only two years ago, and one reason why Biden has reason to fear the wrath of the electorate.
In my two-day-old review (2.29) of Dune: Part Two, I wrote the following: “If you can put aside the Frank Herbert story and just tune in to the other-worldliness, it’s quite a feast for the eyes — a major league art film. Stunningly exotic and quite original…quite the aural-visual knockout.”
Friend to HE: “Yes, but how can you put aside the Frank Herbert story? The car-wreck horror of Herbert’s storytelling is front and center. He’s the worst storyteller in the history of the planet. Dune: Part Two actually makes J.R.R. Tolkien seem interesting. I wouldn’t say that the movie has a bad script. I would say that it doesn’t have a script.
“I dug all the visual stuff you were talking about — the sandy colors, the moody grandeur of the fascist imagery. I’m not immune to that sort of visual-atmospheric pizzaz.
“But I still wanted to shoot myself. The film felt nine hours long to me. If you told me I have watch Dune: Part Two again, I would jump off a bridge instead.
“Some of the violence was good, and I really liked Austin Butler psycho baldie. But I did not think this was a good Chalamet performance. During the last act when he started shouting and asserting dominance, he started to remind me of Nicolas Cage.
“I’m just shocked that you got swept up in it…”
HE to Friendo: “I did so by deliberately ignoring the story particulars and large portions of the script. I was only interested in the acting and the design and atmosphere and cinematography and editing. I was totally bored by all that Fremen vs. Harkonnen bullshit. I could sense early on that I would soon feel tortured if I tried to follow the story. I decided instead to just turn on the phone and read the synopsis on Wikipedia.
“I didn’t care about the story, but I liked everything else about the film. It looks and feels really cool and exotic and unlike anything I’ve seen in this kind of dense fantasy realm…it’s a world unto itself, and the creation of it all is truly fascinating.”
Friendo to HE: “To me that’s like saying you liked everything about a restaurant — the look, the vibe, the service — except for the food.”
HE to Friendo: “I’ve never felt that a script is the primary supplier of the ‘food’ in a film. A script is obviously necessary in terms of exposition and expressing themes and providing basic story structure, but as Stanley Kubrick famously said, the payoff we get from most films is more from the emotional mood supply. The hook of a good film isn’t so much from the think of it but the feel of it.
“That said, I’ve actually felt this way about some restaurants. I’ve adored the lighting, the decor and design, the cultured vibe, the tablecloth and lighted candles, the conversation with the person or persons I’m eating with, the excellent service, the upscale bathrooms, etc. Sometimes the food is phenomenal and sometimes it’s just okay. But regardless of how good the food is, I tend to value the other things as much as the food and sometimes more than.
“There’s a restaurant in Paris that I’ve been to six or seven times, called Le Coupe Chou. When you walk downstairs to use the facilities there’s a door that leads to some kind of sub-cellar or subterranean tunnel that leads God-knows-where, and the rank aroma from inside that tunnel is astounding…it smells like Paris from the 15th or 16th Century, and you can’t sample that kind of aroma anywhere in North America, I swear…it’s strictly an ancient European city smell. This in itself sold me on Le Coupe Chou, regardless of how good the food is.”
My initial reaction (posted on 2.28.24) was that “nobody and I mean nobody can ‘play’ Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Starr. No matter who Mendes chooses to hire, it simply won’t work. Their faces and voices are too deeply embedded in every corner of our minds to convincingly replicate or even half-replicate in a narrative format.”
I’m nonetheless intrigued by the ambition behind the Mendes-Beatles project, particularly the idea of releasing all four films in tandem in 2027. You can’t accuse Mendes and Sony chief Tom Rothman of undue caution or timidity.
I was actually too generous in calling it “a marginally effective, vaguely muffled chick-flick account of Lennon’s teenage years in Liverpool, circa 1956 to ’60.
“I’m not calling it dull, exactly, but Nowhere Boy‘s somewhat feminized, all-he-needs-is-love story just didn’t turn me on.
“Matt Greenhalgh‘s script is based on a memoir called ‘Imagine This‘ by Lennon’s half-sister Julia Baird.
“I understand that this love and rejection were key issues in Lennon’s youth, but the film didn’t sell me on this. It seemed to be frittering away its time by focusing on it. Lennon’s anguish was primal enough (‘Mother, you had me but I never had you’) but my reaction all through it was, ‘Okay, but can we get to the musical stuff, please?’
“Nowhere Boy boasts a relatively decent lead performance by Aaron Johnson. He doesn’t overdo the mimicry and keeps his Liverpudlian accent in check. And yet it’s a somewhat overly sensitive, touchy-feely rendering of a rock ‘n’ roll legend who was known, after all, for his nervy, impudent and sometimes caustic manner, at least in his early incarnations.
“I didn’t believe the hurting look in Johnson’s eyes. All those looking-for-love feelings he shows are too much about ‘acting,’ and hurt-puppy-dog expressions don’t blend with the legend of the young Lennon (as passed along by biographies, articles, A Hard Day’s Night etc.) Emotionally troubled young guys tend to get crusty and defensive when there’s hurt inside, and this was certainly Lennon’s deal early on.
“And Johnson is needlessly compromised, I feel, by a curious decision on Taylor-Wood’s part to create her own, reality-defying physical version of Lennon. She ignores the fact that he had light brown, honey-colored hair by allowing Johnson to keep his own dark-brown, nearly-jet-black hair. Nor did she have Johnson wear a prosthetic nose — one of the oldest and easiest tricks in the book — in order to replicate Lennon’s distinctive English honker. Where would the harm have been if they’d tried to make Johnson look more like the real McCoy?”
HE commenter #1: “This portrait of Lennon seems to be far too cuddly to be credible. From what I’ve read, he had a mile-wide cruel streak, was more than a bit of a brawler and, if Albert Goldman is to be believed, almost beat another man to death for making a pass at him.
HE commenter #2: “Actually I think the movie makes Lennon look like the world’s biggest twat. Which he may have been, but when you remove all the context of who he becomes, then it’s just an annoying, unpleasant watch. There’s very few redeeming qualities about this film, and Johnson’s noxious portrayal didn’t help things.”
I don’t hate my VWPassat (love the sound system, the shiny black color) but I’m starting to grow truly weary of the constant problems. It won’t stop costing me more and more money for repairs (labor, parts).
The latest migraine is a leak in the heatercore, which warms up the car interior. This mechanism circulates and heats up the coolant inside the round plastic reservoir container and thereby creates warm air, but the coolant has been leaking out and forcing me to re-fill it every 10 to 14 days.
I could let this situation passively ride along by simply replacing the coolant every couple of weeks, but if I want to seriously fix the problem it’ll set me back aminimumof $1800 and possibly a bit more.
Early this morning my local mechanic (Georgetown Shell) told me I need to replace the leaking heater core plus a gasket that goes with it. Cost: $315.
Soon after the official VW Danbury mechanic rep estimated that removing the leaker and installing the brand new heater core will take five hours at $289.00 per hour = $1445.00 + $315 + tax and whatnot for a total of roughly $1775.00. And what if it takes a bit longer?
I can’t drop almost $2K so I’m going to have to hire Vinnie, the mellow Bridgeport freelancer, to do the installing. Vinnie is my idea of a good hombre with reasonably good skills, but he hasn’t delivered like those VW Danbury guys, or at least he hasn’t so far. But I like and respect him.
I also bought some K–Seal, some gloop that you pour into the circulatory system that finds leaks and seals them. With the engine purring I poured it into the plastic reservoir and said a little prayer.
Plus it was really cold and extra windy today, and along with a general sense of uncertainty and anxiety I was feeling slightly more downhearted than usual.
As I was entering a Danbury Auto Zone store around 11:30 am I was flinching and slightly wincing and shuddering and glancing at my reflection in the store window and muttering stuff like “I’m in hell…my life is hell to some extent…it didn’t feel anywhere near this oppressive during the the 2006-to-2018 heyday….it really felt kinda wonderful during that 12-year run.”
I don’t mean actual hell. I mean that every so often my life feels like brimstone and treacle. I truly love my movie-driven life and the rigors of writing the column each and every day, but the idea of sitting through Dune: Part Two this evening fills me with absolute dread.
I don’t care what everyone else has been saying. Denis Villeneuve and I have never really gotten along. If it turns out to be better or even much better than expected, great. But my gut tells me it almost certainly won’t be.
I would love to live a nice, car-free life in Paris, and just take the Metro around town and do a lot of walking. A free man in Paris, unfettered and alive.
Major acting awards should be about major effing delivery…grand-slamming it…soul, gravity, reaching deep inside. Not this time. Congrats to the architects of Lily Gladstone‘s identity campaign. The Best Actress Oscar is now almost certainly hers, and everyone in the room knows the meaning…the final value of this.
SAG-AFTRA awards voters have been lowering industry property values for years…onward!
Two days ago I saw RoseGlass’s LoveLiesBleeding (A24, 3.8), and tonight [Thursday, 2.22] I watched Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke’s Drive–AwayDolls (Focus Features, now playing).
Both are quite dykey — hungrily, aggressively sexual. The Coen-Cooke is mildly crazy in a nervy, farcical way (vaguely recalling the tone of RaisingArizona, the 1987 Coen Bros. film) while the Glass is like a volcano that spews more and more lava. And from my surprised perspective, both are moderately approvable.
This is not what I expected. I was a little bit afraid that both would piss me off in some way or would at least be annoying, and neither did that. Neither film is truly double grade-A but at the same time neither has anything to apologize for. And the Coen-Cooke is often fleet and clever, and it ends perfectly with a reaction shot from a peripheral character…bingo!
Glass’s film, which really uncorks the madness during its final third, is subversive in a way that I didn’t see coming.
The Coen-Cooke is deadpan droll — much lighter and goofier than the melodramatic Bleeding, which deals straight cards until the end and never fools around — although with a fair amount of violence. But you also know it’s basically comedic and is therefore going to observe boundaries.
Maybe it’s me but both films seem determined to be as provocative as they can be with the sex scenes. A lot of slurping and smooching and fingering and muff-diving, and the Coen-Cooke even goes in for sizable wang prosthetics toward the end.
I flinched a bit when the Glass went in for some light toe-chewing — sorry but the toes in question struck me as too thick and knobby. A voice inside went “eeeww, no…too much.”
Call me full of it if you want, but I have this impression that U.S. filmmakers aren’t allowed these days to make sexually graphic hetero-love-affair films. They can only dive into hot sex if it’s from a gay or lesbian serving tray. The prohibiting of LastTangoinParis-level presentation is understood in every progressive corner of the industry (you certainly couldn’t make a film about a couple of saucy women who love to get fucked by Glenn Powell-type guys and are totally into hungry blowjobs, not in today’s environment) and you can sense that Glass and Coen-Cooke knew they had carteblanche approval and that now (i.e., last year) was the time to go for it and pull out the stops.
Last night I re-watched John Carpenter‘s Assault on Precinct 13 (’76). I do so every couple of years. I first caught it at the Museum of Modern Art in ’78 or ’79. I’ve seen it at least eight or nine times since, and I don’t even want to think about the 2005 Ethan Hawke-Larry Fishburne remake.
There are two reasons why I keep coming back to this hardboiled, Howard Hawksian, Rio Bravo-ish seige film, which is basically about nihilistic gang members looking to murder a small band of defenders inside an all-but-abandoned police precinct in the fictional rathole town of “Anderson”, a stand-in for any one of those parched and blighted burghs in South Central Los Angeles that most of have never visited and will almost certainly avoid visiting for the rest of our lives.
Reason #1 is that Carpenter’s film is a much leaner, tighter and more finely crafted film than Rio Bravo (’59) or the other two Hawks films that use the same sheriff-defending-the-jailhouse plot, El Dorado (’66) and Rio Lobo (’70).
Assault is really a masterpiece — taut, tense, boiled down, brilliantly shot and edited, and occasionally quite funny.
Reason #2 is Darwin Joston‘s dead-perfect performance as the terse, hard-bitten and rather romantic Napoleon Wilson, an allegedly dangerous killer on his way to prison who ironically turns out to be a first-rate hombre when the chips are down.
It’s not a rumor: Wilson is one of the greatest tough-guy characters ever created for the screen — calm, steady, sardonic, an embittered philosopher, a tender fellow with a lady (Laurie Zimmer‘s “Leigh”), a soul man with a sense of acrid black humor, and a guy you can totally trust with a shotgun…100% dependable when the heat is on and the odds are damn near insurmountable.
I’m dead serious here — Napoleon Wilson (Carpenter wrote the character with Joston in mind) is one of the greatest and most iconic action-film heroes ever written or performed, right up there with Al Pacino‘s Vincent Hanna in Heat, Robert Redford‘s Sundance kid, Robert Mitchum‘s Jeff Markham in Out of the Past, Humphrey Bogart‘s classic trio (Sam Spade, Richard Blaine, Fred C. Dobbs), Walter Matthau‘s Charley Varrick and anyone else you’d care to name.
And poor Joston, who passed in 1998 at the age of 61, never landed another role even half as good. Tragic.
A sampling of Napoleon Wilson’s classic lines:
“I believe in one man.”
“Chains is all I’ve got to look forward to.”
“Can’t argue with a confident man.”
“In my situation, days are like women — each one’s so damn precious, but they all end up leaving you.”
“It’s an old story with me. I was born out of time.”
Tapping out yesterday’sriff about three approvable Taylor Hackford flicks (TheIdolmaker, AnOfficerandaGentleman, AgainstAll Odds) led to a re-watch of Odds (‘84), and good God…I humbly apologize!
It’sbeenalmost exactly 40yearssincemyinitial late Februaryviewingatthegood oldAcademyauditorium(Wilshire&LaPeer), and I guess I just wasn’t perceptive enough back then.
Eric Hughes’ plot (loosely based upon 1947’s OutofthePast) and especially the dialogue (or good-sized portions of it) are chores to sit through, and Jeff Bridges’ painfully unsubtle performance as main protagonist Terry, an aging, none-too-bright football player, gave me a splitting headache.
Young Bridges was often too emotionally emphatic and actor-ish, and in this thing he’s certainly too childish. I was starved for the adult attitude that permeates OutofthePast. Fortified by Daniel Mainwaring and Frank Fenton’s tart dialogue, laconic Robert Mitchum knew how to play this kind of material. Which is to say a bit cooler.
I was nonetheless okay with the opening 20 or 25 in Los Angeles (love the ridiculous hot-dogging on Sunset Blvd. at 80 mph) and especially that hot, flavorful lovers-in-Yucatán section (Terry blissing out with Rachel Ward’s Jessie), but when Alex Karras interrupts their lovemaking inside a ChitchenItza temple the whole thing suddenly turns bad, and then it stabs itself in the chest by returning to L.A. for the final 40 or 45 minutes, which are mostly atrocious.
Ugly people behaving horribly…sullen, scowling, sneering, snorting blow. You can all go fuck yourselves.
The exception is a Century City office sequence in which the excellent SwoozieKurtz, playing a secretary to Saul Rubinek’s odious sports agent, does Terry a great favor by stealing a trove of incriminating documents, and with a hostile Doberman growling and breathing down her neck.
Lessonlearned: If you have fond memories of a Taylor Hackford film you saw when young, don’t re-watch it decades later. Leave it there.
The original OutofthePast is a shining, gleaming city in the hill…a much, much better film.
The N.Y.Times is reporting that Vladimir Putin’s most vocally outspoken and high-profile political foe, the imprisoned but until recently very much alive and relatively young Alexei Navalny, 47, is dead…just like that.
The story is that Navalny, whom Putin henchmen irrefutably poisoned and nearly killed in 2020, suddenly lost consciousness and died after taking a walk inside the Arctic prison compound to which he was transferred late last year.
Navalny was somehow iced by Putin henchman, of course, and it’ll take a long time to prove it, of course, if it can ever be proved at all.
Perhaps Tucker Carlson could be persuaded to return to Russia and launch a no-holds-barred investigation?
It’s been understood for years Putin is a murderer, plain and simple. The Navalny hit is just another notch on his belt. Do I have incontrovertible proof that Navalny died at Putin’s behest? No, I do not. But we all “know.”
Navalny had been serving a trumped-up, bullshit 19-year prison sentence on extremism charges. He has been behind bars since he returned from Germany in January 2021, serving time on various charges that he rejected as a politically motivated effort to keep him imprisoned for life.
U.S.-based Putin-fellating righties will sidestep or otherwise ignore this killing, but the same MAGA fanatics who’ve either supported Putin’s Ukraine invasion or have at least lobbied against the U.S. support of the war…this cabal of serpents will not be mourning Navalny’s death with any passion. In my opinion they share a certain degree of responsibility for what has happened to Navalny.
I feel so enraged about this, I almost feel sick.
If there’s any kind of anti-Putin, pro-Navalny demonstration in NYC this weekend, I’ll be there with bells on. It won’t accomplish a damn thing, of course, but I can feel molten lead in my veins. I’m on fire.