From Alan Spencer‘s Trailers From Hell riff on Peter Yates‘ Bullitt: “Bullitt is cool because it’s an educational movie. You can learn how to handle women from it. His girlfriend has lots of problems with him, but he doesn’t say anything — he just listens. And that’s the secret. Women just want to be heard. So if you’ve got a great-looking girlfriend, shut your mouth, let her talk and you can hit happy hour after.” One very small thing: It’s parlance (i.e., “in your parlance, you blew it”), not parlance. At least as far as Robert Vaughn‘s pronunication is concerned.
I became a serious Will Smith fan 24 1/2 years ago, after seeing Fred Schepisi and John Guare‘s Six Degrees of Separation. He was pulsing in that film, going for it; I sang his praises high and low. As it turned out Six Degrees was the only film he ever made that was aimed at people like me. 16 months later the first Will Smith popcorn movie — Michael Bay‘s Bad Boys — opened in plexes, and that was all she wrote. He thereafter became a showboater who was only in it for the popularity.
Posted on 12.6.08: “Beware of all Will Smith manifestations, now and forever. The man’s smile is too quick to appear. Smith is too engaging, too eager to charm, too emotional, too funny, too likable, too coddled and way too insulated. He seems incapable of simply ‘being’ because he’s too hungry for affection. He can’t not perform. Such men may not be dangerous in the Shakespearean sense of the term, but you sure as hell can’t trust or believe them.
“As Charles Bukwoski once wrote, “Beware of those constantly seeking love and approval from a crowd — they are nothing alone.”
“And double-beware any big-name actor who asks a film-series moderator for a hug, as Smith did a couple of days ago with Pete Hammond.
Eric Anderson‘s Awardswatch pallies have somehow divined (possibly by reaching in and exploring the recesses of their anal cavities) that Todd Haynes‘ Wonderstruck is the hottest Best Picture contender of 2017. The dual-era drama will play in competition later this month at the Cannes Film Festival.
Also highlighted are Denis Villenueve‘s Blade Runner 2049 (Warner Bros, 10.6), George Clooney‘s Suburbicon (Paramount, 11.3), Darren Aronofsky‘s mother! (Paramount. 10.13), Richard Linklater‘s Last Flag Flying (Amazon), Martin McDonagh‘s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (Fox Searchlight, 10.13), The Current War (Weinstein Co, 12.22), Get Out (Universal, 2.24), The Greatest Showman (20th Century Fox, 12.25) and Michael Haneke‘s Happy End (Sony Pictures Classics)
HE’s Oscar Balloon projections are more or less in line with Awardswatch’s, save for the inclusion of Lean on Pete. So far I’m not getting the thing about that.
It Comes At Night (A24, 6.9) looks and sounds like a standard-issue backwoods creeper about a predator of some kind, but it’s presumed to be of a higher calibre because it was directed and written by Trisha‘s Trey Edward Shults. It just had a “secret” screening at the Overlook Film Festival. Joblo.com‘s Chris Bumbraysays it left the audience “in a state of shock, but without resorting to cheap scares or gore. It does something more sinister [by putting] you right in the shoes of good people forced to do monstrous things in order to survive, [and thus] illustrating one of the great truths of genre cinema — the greatest threat comes from other people.”
Three years ago I mentioned the necessity of being able to see a high-def version of Ken Russell‘s The Music Lovers (’70), his Tchaikovsky biopic with Richard Chamberlain as the closeted Russian composer. (Russell’s pitch: “A homosexual married to a nymphomaniac.”) Douglas Slocombe‘s luscious widescreen photography demands this, if not as a Bluray then at least via HD streaming. Back then it was only viewable now as a 2003 MGM Home Video DVD; now it’s also viewable in standard-def (480p) streaming.
The Music Lovers was the third of Russell’s five biographical films about classical composers. Elgar (’62) and Delius: Song of Summer (’68) came before it, and then Mahler (’74) and Lisztomania (’75).
Remember when House of Cards was something everyone had to see? Delicious, cunning. I did a weekend binge-watch of season #1 and season #2, but when season #3 began I said to myself “yeah, I know, good show and all but when will it end? Because I see a series that’s continuing so that the creators and actors can continue to earn dough.” Now we’re facing season #5. Will Kevin Spacey‘s Frank Underwood finally go down or will this thing just keep trudging on and on and on? It pops on 5.30.17.
Sidenote: Spacey deserves respect for saying “twenty-sixteen, twenty-twenty, twenty-twentyfour,” etc. We’re 17 years into the 21st Century and a sizable chorus of newcasters and politicians are still referring to the year as “two-thousand-something.” I’ve been reminding the realm for 15 years that it’s wrong. Everyone said “two thousand” when 1999 was over, of course, but after that I blame the template of Stanley Kubrick‘s 2001: A Space Odyssey. I presumed people would get past the absurdity and start saying “twenty-something” within a few years or certainly by 2010, but they didn’t.
Name three semi-respected films that are really worth seeing for their first and second acts, but which collapse and sink when their third act kicks in. I could assemble a list but the ’62 Mutiny on the Bounty would be at the top of it. It’s pretty good all through Part One and up to the mutiny in Part Two. But the film turns anemic when Trevor Howard and his allies are put into the long boat, and then it completely dies when Marlon Brando and the mutineers reach Pitcairn Island.
Please name others. There must be hundreds. I would try to think of more but I have to drive out to IKEA again.
Posted on 7.12.11: “Say what you will about the ’62 Bounty — historical inaccuracies and inventions, Marlon Brando‘s affected performance as Fletcher Christian, the weak final act. The fact remains that this viscerally enjoyable, critically-dissed costumer is one of the the most handsome, lavishly-produced and beautifully scored films made during Hollywood’s fabled 70mm era, which lasted from the mid ’50s to the late ’60s.
Once you start wandering through the Burbank IKEA store, the best you can hope for in terms of finding what you want is to follow the arrows on the floor and pray to God that the sections will be numbered in sequence. But don’t fog out and just start wandering. I can say for sure that once you’re in the bowels of that store it’s not easy finding the checkout section or any kind of exit sign. I tried and tried and finally begged an employee to show me the way out. The owners of this store want you to stay in the maze. They want you to become a shopping zombie. Because they know that people who come to the store to purchase a certain thing will often succumb to impulse buys.
I saw Reservoir Dogs during my very first visit to the Cannes Film Festival, or in May 1992. I remember giving a “yo dude” to 29 year-old Quentin Tarantino a gathering for the film in the Majestic Hotel ballroom. Dogs played out of competition, not even under Un Certain Regard, which screened Abel Ferrara‘s Bad Lieutenant and Jonathan Demme‘s Cousin Bobby that year. The competition attractions included Basic Instinct, Howard’s End, Simple Men and The Player. I was on fire during the festival. Everything was new and exotic, but it all worked out perfectly. I figured it all out, brought a tuxedo with me, got into the right events. Billie August‘s The Best Intentions won the Palme d’Or.
“Jonathan Demme was a man for small towns and back roads. He liked those pockets of America where there was fun to be had, at a bargain price, and weakness to be gently laid bare. Hence his penchant for Melvin Dummar, a near-loser with a wish list of hopes, and for the tallness of Melvin’s tale. Whether the Howard he came across, that night in the desert, really was Howard Hughes, as legend insists, was not the sort of conundrum to bother Demme, and I doubt if he gave a damn whether the infamous ‘Mormon will’ — in which, years later, Hughes allegedly left more than a hundred and fifty million dollars to Melvin in gratitude for his Samaritan deed, like a mega-Magwitch rewarding Pip — was the genuine article or a fake.
“What Demme knew for certain, because his grip on our everyday fears and fancies was so secure, is that we want to believe Melvin, and that Melvin, the poor dope, wants to believe himself. The stories that we tell, in other words, may not always be true, and yet they are true of us, and that will have to do. The loss of Jonathan Demme is a sad surprise, for the films that he bequeaths to us remain, to an uncommon degree, the work of a good man.” — from Anthony Lane‘s “The Loss of Jonathan Demme,” 4.29.17, The New Yorker.
No Melvin and Howard Bluray as we speak, and no high-def streaming version either. Just a DVD, and who wants to watch a movie at 480p?
Yesterday’s Radio City Music Hall showing of the The Godfather and The Godfather, Part II, produced by the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival, was undoubtedly a moment. Not to mention the post-screening discussion with Francis Ford Coppola, Al Pacino, James Caan, Robert Duvall, Diane Keaton, Talia Shire and Robert De Niro. I’ve watched these films repeatedly over the decades, 15 or 20 viewings each. Yes, it would have been exciting to walk into the RCMH and feel the tingly excitement as that Godfather trumpet theme is heard in the dark, but after that it would just be The Godfather again. It opened 45 years ago. I own it on Bluray. I know the dialogue by heart. I know every shot, every cut. Ditto The Godfather, Part II. I am Senator Pat Geary. I am Moe Green. I am Hyman Roth. I am Turnbull.