..sez that Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu (Focus, 12.25) sorta kinda blows a bit, and especially that Lily Rose Depp’s lead performance doesn’t cut the mustard.
I’ve spoken to a friend who feels this way, and at least one just-posted trade review agrees; another doesn’t argue all that strenuously. Any Eggers film is a must-see, of course, but this one sounds dicey.
Blurry but funny. Peter O’Toole was 74 at the time. This was taped sometime in early December of ’06, the subject being Roger Michell‘s Venus. O’Toole passed in 2013 at age 81. The great Peter Finch (aka “Finchy“) died in ’77 at age 60….heart attack.
I don’t think often about the fun I occasionally had during my drinking days, but every now and then I do.
“If you’re going to look like this, you’ll have to settle for the fat-girl parts.” — a drama teacher to Kate Winslet when she was in her mid teens, according to Winslet’s account during a 60 Minutes essay that aired yesterday (12.1).
By “like this,” the drama teacher meant not slender or rail-thin, a physical state that all competitive actresses aspire to whether they want to admit it or not.
What the drama teacher also meant, I suspect, was that Winslet wasn’t so much “fat” as zaftig (curvy, fleshy, wide-hipped). During the filming of Titanic James Cameron allegedly referred to Winset as “Kate weighs-a-lot.” I’ve personally never said an unkind word to any woman’s face for the misdemeanor of being a bit hefty or bulky, but I’ve held critical thoughts about such qualities for nearly my whole life. Everyone has.
Catherine Breillat made a film about a French obese teen and called it Fat Girl. Was that a size-ist slur or a statement of fact?
Things have changed over the last 30-plus years, but women of size and bulk are still not generally regarded as being in the 8, 9 or 10 categories…be honest. Nobody wants to be so impolite or coarse to put such women down for this, and it’s certainly permissible if this or that guy finds “big girls” attractive…knock yourselves out.
It’s noteworthy that the 60 Minutes interviewer (Cecilia Vega, who blends ardent feminism with standard obsequiousness) didn’t ask Winslet to explain or reiterate her own statement of self-condemnation for the crime of having worked with Woody Allen (Wonder Wheel) and Roman Polanski (Carnage).
Winslet: “It’s unbelievable to me now how those men were held in such high regard, so widely in the film industry and for as long as they were. It’s fucking disgraceful.”
I’ll tell you what was disgraceful back in ’21 — knee-jerk #MeToo Stalinist sentiments from Johnny-come-lately, trying-to-curry-favor activist actresses.
Jane Mayer’s 12.1 New Yorker expose, based on a Concerned Veterans for America whistle-blower report from 2015, all but certifies that Fox and Friends weekend cohost Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s Defense Department nominee, is the new Matt Gaetz.
Edward Berger’s Conclave finale was cooked up by author Robert Harris in 2015 (the book was published in ‘16), or well before the trans wokey thing (another factor that tarnished Biden and helped to ruin Harris in the eyes of bumblefuck voters) kicked into gear in the early ‘20s.
I feel soul-sick myself but the Great Woke Legend is that straight men are generally broken and corrupted and bad news, and that it’s time for women (and in one particular situation a cardinal with a uterus) to step in and call the shots.
Obviously a slight majority of voters disagreed with that scenario on 11.5, and so here we are…totally fucked as a nation and about to endure the pains of MAGA fascism.
I blame the wokeys. I really do. They brought this about. Right now they’re understandably searching for tall grass.
And I solemnly believe it would be wrong, wrong, wrong for John M. Chu’s handsome, uber-industrial pile-driver of a musical to take the Best Picture Oscar. Because if you put aside the musical numbers it has no great scenes.
Some Facebook dude wrote this:
But you’re a black sheep and a wrong one, and you fucked up repeatedly so ya gotta do the time, man. Really. No skating. It’ll build character. You’ll be a better, tougher person at the end of your sentence. It’s a growth opportunity.
HE comment: I think President Biden pardoned his bad-seed son Hunter out of resignation and despair.
Joe’s inner dialogue: “Obviously I’m reversing myself but my reputation is in the toilet anyway. Future generations will be taught to despise me as I’m the obstinate old coot who surrendered our nation to MAGA fascism because I wouldn’t collapse my ill-conceived campaign for a second term until it was way too late.
“You might be horrified by the return of Donald Trump but I’m the deluded scumbag who blew open the border and ushered in his second term so what difference does it make? History hates me now and will certainly hate me going forward.
“At the end of the day I’m defaulting to an age-old sentiment when it comes to broken-down fathers and weak sons: ‘The heart wants what it wants.’”
Cheryl Hines posts video of RFK Jr in the shower to promote her line of “MAHA” branded candles, body sprays, and creams. pic.twitter.com/jd4DwQFOmL
— PatriotTakes (@patriottakes) November 30, 2024
One of the sexiest dance moves ever, and then they stroll out of the joint with ultra-rightwing Walter Brennan carrying the bags.
I’m sorry but Martin Scorsese and Dave Tedeschi’s Beatles ‘64 (Apple +, now streaming) is decent at best and shortfally at worst. It never quite rides the whirlwind.
The 106-minute doc tries to convey or suggest the spiritual-emotional endorphin highs that were surging through the fans in February ‘64, and it achieves that here and there, yes, but mostly it feels likes a spotty, half-assed, catch-as-catch-can affair. A catchy quote or an energy surge every now and then, but then it peters out. A bit lazy.
I own a mid ’90s DVD of the original Maysles tour doc, and we’ve all seen various snippets before, of course. So I wanted more, better, extra…something new that would get me going.
I wanted a gleaming, straight-from-the-lab, totally grain-free enhancement of the 60-year-old footage, but what I saw looked merely acceptable…nothing to jump up and down about. I wanted a stronger music track with heightened thrompy bass lines….nope. I wanted footage from the Saturday rehearsal session at the Ed Sullivan Show…nope.
No mention of the bizarre fact that the Beatles’ sets (in February ’64 they played inside a boxing stadium in Washington D.C. and at Carnegie Hall) were only about 20 or 25 minutes or so.
I wanted to hear about what surely went on between the lads and those few girls who were shrewd or persistent enough to penetrate security and meet them…stuff that nobody reported about back then, but c’mon…are you telling me nothing happened?
I have a vague recollection of a rogue photo taken during the August ’64 tour. I can’t find any evidence of it, but I recall the photo having appeared in Confidential or some like-minded scandal sheet. It was a flashbulb shot of a laughing, seemingly drunken John Lennon prowling around on his hands and knees and playing horsey to some floozy in black underwear…riding him like a stallion, riding crop in hand. You can accuse me of imagining this and maybe I did, but an inner voice says otherwise. **
Being especially receptive to the delicacy of Sutton these days, my heart went out to all those excited, screaming, jumping-up-and-down girls in their mid teens who surrounded the Plaza hotel (Beatles bunker) like General Santa Anna’s troops surrounded the Alamo. I wouldn’t have wanted them to be riding Lennon or anyone else. I just wanted them to get home safely.
You know what would have been far more interesting? An in-depth doc about the Beatles August ’65 tour (8.15.65 to 8.31.64), which happened right smack in the middle of their drug-experimentation heyday. This doc could’ve included the fellas hanging with Bob Dylan at the Warwick, not to mention the Peter Fonda encounter in Benedict Canyon when everyone was tripping (“I know what it’s like to be dead”).
At 5’8″ or thereabouts, Ringo Starr was the shortest of the fab four. But Beatles ’64 includes recent color footage of him speaking to producer Martin Scorsese, and Ringo is significantly taller.
Beatles ’64 is an honorable effort, but the Disney + marketing was better than the film itself. It doesn’t quite capture that cultural earthquake feeling. Not altogether. And the Disney + honchos had the audacity to pop in commercials! **
Three months ago Edward Berger‘s Conclave played at Telluride Film Festival’s Werner Herzog theatre (8.30.24)…glorious. I sat in the second or third row…elated, throttled, tumescent. Now I’m watching it with headphones on my 15″ Macbook Pro…parked inside an under-heated food court cafeteria on the northbound 95 in Darien. I love it no less and am very happy that I own the Amazon digital file, but you know Berger is quietly weeping as he reads this.
Before last night I’d never watched Holiday Inn (’42), the Bing Crosby-Fred Astaire romantic musical that introduced “White Christmas” and “Happy Holiday.” I found it a wee bit silly and even boring at times, but then the Abe Lincoln minstrel show sequence began.
My jaw fell on the floor. Has to be seen to be believed.
Wiki excerpt: “Beginning in the 1980s, some broadcasts of Holiday Inn entirely omitted the ‘Abraham’ musical number, staged at the Inn for Lincoln’s Birthday, because of its depiction of a blackface minstrel show incorporating racist images and behaviors.
“Turner Classic Movies nonetheless screened the film with the ‘Abraham’ number intact; AMC also aired the film intact before it became an advertiser-supported channel.”
