Always Wanted To Tell This to Paul Newman

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Remember the Cool Hand Luke sand-shovelling scene on that hot country road? When Paul Newman inspires his chain-gang homies to cover the tar with sand as fast as they can, and they all get into it and shovel so quickly that the tar truck runs out and drives off, and the prisoners have nothing to do but relax for a couple of hours?

In the mid ’70s I worked as a tree-trimmer in Connecticut (ropes, saddles, chains saw, pole saws), and a couple of times I tried to apply the Cool Hand Luke approach to some jobs. The salesman (always an easy-going smoothie in a nice car) would point to a couple of trees and explain what we had to do, and then he’d say “I’ll be happy if not surprised if you can finish by the end of the day.” Then he’d take off, telling us he’d return by 3:30 or 4 pm.

As soon as he left we’d say to each other (me and the other climber and the clean-up crew), “Hey, let’s get this done fast so we can relax the rest of the day.” So we’d all double down and get the job done ahead of schedule, sometimes even shaving an hour by skipping lunch. We can do this!

The salesman would return at 3:30 pm and say, “Whoa…you’re done already? You guys are amazing!” And then he’d think it over and say, “Jesus, we’ve got another couple of hours. Let’s load up and head over to the next job!” Me: “Wait, whoa…the next job? You said if we finished this job here we’d be good for the day.” Salesman: “Yeah, but we can’t just sit around so c’mon, put the stuff on the truck and follow me.”

So after this happens a couple of times you learn. Never work fast, never exceed expectations, don’t drag ass but always work at an even keel.

I knew where Newman’s house was located in Westport back then, and I occasionally imagined that I’d run into him and tell him this story and he’d laugh and say, “Yeah, if only life was like the movies.”

Telluride Frown Factor

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Obviously I’ve been in the tank for Luca Guadagnino‘s Call Me By Your Name since last January’s Sundance premiere, but no more than any of the other big HE favorites in recent years — Manchester By The Sea, 12 Years A Slave, Zero Dark Thirty, A Separation, Birdman, Silver Linings Playbook, et. al. Naturally I’ve been expecting to see this landmark film play the Telluride Film Festival. Everyone regards TFF’s annual offerings as pretty much the finest distillation of early-to-mid-fall smarthouse or award-friendly cinema, so how could Guadagnino’s film not begin its award-season adventure there?

If a really good film starts its journey in Telluride or for that matter Venice (like Alexander Payne‘s Downsizing will), it will automatically radiate a special tingle vibe or savory aroma throughout the season. A Telluride debut is a gold-seal thing whereas a Toronto premiere is…well, lively and certainly welcome but without that special aromatic lift.

Which is why I went into a state of catatonic shock yesterday when I learned that Call Me By Your Name has been heave-ho’ed by Telluride’s Tom Luddy and Julie Huntsinger. Not due to a lack of admiration or respect (or so I gather) but because of organizational egos and politics. CMBYN‘s apparent sin was having had its world premiere at Sundance ’17 plus a European premiere the following month at the Berlinale. Telluride has screened only three Sundance debuts in its entire history, I’m told.

Yes, Manchester By The Sea was shown at Telluride ’16 eight months after debuting at Sundance, but that was because Telluride mounted a special tribute to Casey Affleck. The Affleck tribute, of course, was just an institutional ploy to sidestep Telluride’s own edict or disinclination to show Sundance films. Had they been so inclined Tom and Julie could have easily justified screening CMBYN by running a special Luca Guadagnino tribute.

Festival politics can be such bullshit.

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Allegedly Great or Highly Noteworthy Films I Haven’t Seen

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I’ve watched Henry Hathaway‘s North to Alaska at least 10 or 12 times, but I’ve never seen Irving Thalberg‘s Grand Hotel. I’ve never seen D.W. Griffith‘s A Birth of a Nation, and I don’t think I want to either. (See, p.c. banshees? I can dismiss a film for being having grotesque racial attitudes as well as you can.) I’ve never seen Andrezj Wajda‘s Kanal, but I’d like to. I’ve never sat down with George Cukor‘s The Women or Sylvia Scarlett.

I tried watching None But The Lonely Heart but I couldn’t get through it, so you might as well say I’ve never seen it. All my life I’ve avoided almost every film starring Claudette Colbert, the exception being It Happened One Night, Cleopatra and Since You Went Away. I’ve caught just about every film Robert Duvall was ever in, but I’ve strangely never seen The Apostle. I’ve never seen Ernst Lubitsch‘s Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife. Nor have I ever seen Francois Truffaut‘s The Wild Child. I wouldn’t watch Parnell, the 1937 Clark Gable film, with a knife at my back.

I’ve never seen Jerry Schatzberg‘s Puzzle of a Downfall Child or Johnny Depp‘s The Brave (which costarred Marlon Brando), but I’m very, very sorry that I saw Don Coscarelli‘s Bubba Ho-tep.

Rather than ask for films that readers haven’t seen, how about switching the topic to strange attractions — i.e., films you know are shallow or not very accomplished or certainly marginal, but which you’ve seen numerous times over the years because there’s something fundamentally likable or comforting about them? One of my guilty pleasures would be North to Alaska — what’s yours?

Filmstruck Fudge

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One thing I’m having trouble determining about Filmstruck and Criterion Channel, which are now finally available on the Roku player. Is it safe to assume that any film shown on Filmstruck / Criterion Channel will stream in 1080p hi-def, or are there some titles (like, for example, Andrzej Wajda‘s Kanal, which was offered on a 2003 Criterion DVD at 480p but doesn’t appear to have been remastered in high-def) being shown only in musty 480p? I’ve searched and searched this vaguely infuriating site and have found nothing that answers this question in a clear, concise and unambiguous way. Postscript: I’ve inquired about this through official channels, but whenever I ask about anything the least bit technical (Ultra HD 4K vs 1080p vs. 480p resolution, say, or anything to do with aspect ratios) p.r. spokespersons always say “uhhm…I’ll get back to ya.”

So What’s The HE Community Verdict?

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Is Matt Reeves‘ War For The Planet of the Apes as good as the critics (myself included) have been saying it is? Does it in fact traverse the realms of smart summer tentpole, masterful art-film composition and epic storytelling at a high emotional pitch? Is it as satisfying for the snoots as the slovenlies? Is it an emotional tour de force, a band-of-brothers film, a ferociously realistic war movie, and a kind of Great Escape rolled into one? Is Reeves a rightful successor of the kind of achievement that Peter Jackson and George Lucas managed in decades past? Is it the most satisfying trilogy of its kind since the original Star Wars threesome (A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi), or is it better?

Thanks But No Thanks

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The new Wrinkle In Time trailer begins with Chris Pine asking “what if we are here for a reason? What if we are part of something truly divine?” HE answer: Don’t be tedious. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Okay, you could call the relentless, never-ending cycle of creation, destruction and renewal a divine thing if you want, but the only reason any of us are here boils down to mere chance. In other words, we got lucky. Ava DuVernay and Jeffrey Wells were born on this blue planet for exactly and precisely the same reason that a certain blade of grass sprouted on a large fairway at the Bel Air Country Club last March. Why did this particular blade of grass happen to punch through the soil? Because God has a plan.

Seriously, this teaser feels like a mystical mumbo-jumbo hodgepodge. It gave me a stomach ache. In part because Oprah Winfrey plays Mrs. Which, Reese Witherspoon plays Mrs. Whatsit and Mindy Kaling plays Mrs. Who. (The latter is rumored to be the great granddaughter of Who, the baseball player from the Abbott & Costello “Who’s On First?” routine.)

“The Hateful Family”

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I’ve put quotes around the above headline because it came from Variety critic Owen Gleiberman during a back-and-forth we had this morning about Quentin Tarantino‘s Manson Family movie. The subject was Gleiberman’s 7.15 essay about same — “Quentin Tarantino Does Manson? That’s News That Should Thrill Cinema Lovers.”

The 12th paragraph gets to the nub of it: “Tarantino wants to tell a story about how the age of free love morphed into something horrific — a transformation that still has disturbing implications today. Will he play it straight or Tarantino-ize it? My instinct (or maybe it’s just a hope) is that Tarantino can’t reduce the Manson story to another of his concoctions. I mean, he can, of course, but it wouldn’t feel right, and it wouldn’t be inspiring cinema.”

 
 

HE opinion: As intriguing as this project sounds, Tarantino is incapable of playing it even semi-straight. He’s not a docu-dramatist — he’s a creator of alternate Quentinworld fantasies. His last three films have mined the past — Inglourious Basterds, Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight — and each time he’s reimagined and re-dialogued history in order to transform his tales into his own brand of ’70s exploitation cinema. Why should QT play his cards any differently with the Manson family?

Gleiberman said this morning that location-wise he wants Tarantino to deliver an exact duplicate of everything we know about the Manson geography (Spahn ranch, Haight-Ashbury, etc.) but “make it feel new.”

“Alas, Tarantino is not a realist,” I replied. “Never has been, never will be. His Paris neighborhood set in Inglorious Basterds looked exactly like that — a phony sound stage realm. And remember that he reimagined an anti-Semitic, Jew-hunting Nazi Colonel as a witty talk-show showoff who loved to giggle at his own jokes. Remember also that in the same film Tarantino gave a French country farmer the name of ‘Bob.'”

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Happiness Pills

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Daisy Ridley gives the best quote about Rian Johnson‘s Star Wars: The Last Jedi: “Rian has written a story that is unexpected but right. Some of the stuff that happens, people are going to go ‘oh my God!’ Even though everybody knows it’s the second in a trilogy, it’s its own thing. I’m sure that if Cary Grant were still with us, he’d strongly approve.”

Can you feel the joy and the warmth from this teaser? The Last Jedi may or may not deliver unforeseen plot complexities or unexpected gravitas or sobering undercurrents a la The Empire Strikes Back. But to judge by this behind-the-scenes smorgasbord one thing’s for sure, and that’s that everyone involved in principal photography — cast, crew, craft services, drivers, gophers — channeled alpha vibes start to finish. They were in such states of alpha bonhomie that a couple of them actually levitated. They smiled so much that their facial muscles began to ache.

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Downsizing For Telluride…Right?

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With today’s announcement that Alexander Payne’s Downsizing will open the 2017 Venice International Film Festival on 8.30, there’s a 95% chance that Payne and his cast (Matt Damon, Kirsten Wiig, Laura Dern, Christoph Waltz, Jason Sudeikis) will fly to the Telluride Film Festival a day or two later. In my recently posted Telluride spitball piece, I wrote that Downsizing looked like a nope — “Too late in the year, too much FX tweaking, too much finessing and re-editing.” And I was wrong. That happens from time to time.

After watching several minutes of footage from Downsizing last March at Cinemacon, I wrote that “the undercurrent felt a teeny bit spooky, like a futuristic social melodrama in the vein of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

“In its matter-of-fact portrait of middle-class Americans willing to shrink themselves down to the size of a pinkie finger in order to reap economic advantages, Downsizing doesn’t appear to be the sort of film that will instill euphoric feelings among Average Joes. It struck me as a reimagining of mass man as mass mice — a portrait of little people buying into a scheme that’s intended to make their lives better but in fact only makes them…smaller. A bit like Trump voters suddenly realizing that their lot isn’t going to improve and may even get worse.

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Handsomest Betrayal Dupe In Decades

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A little more than two years ago I noted that David Jones‘ Betrayal (’83), a note-perfect adaptation of Harold Pinter’s 1978 stage play, was still not available via Bluray, DVD or streaming. At the time (5.30.15) the only way you could see it start to finish was to watch a murky version on YouTube. But on 6.4.17 a Russian woman named Alexandra Alexandrova uploaded a visually tolerable version (1.37 aspect ratio, probably taken from a musty CBS Fox Video VHS) to YouTube. Who knows how long it’ll last before the lawyers pounce so if you’ve never seen a passable copy, now’s your chance. Why the rights holders have refused for 30-plus years to license this brilliant infidelity drama to distributors is beyond me.

Scorsese’s Last Goombah

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Martin Scorsese‘s The Irishman, a gangster saga about the guy who allegedly iced Jimmy Hoffa, will begin shooting next month. I’m not expecting the 74 year-old Scorsese to retire any time soon, but given his appetite for varied subjects it’s all but certain that The Irishman will be his last urban crime film featuring goombah types. By my book Scorsese has directed four goombahs — Mean Streets (’73), Raging Bull (’80), Goodfellas (’90) and Casino (’95). The Departed (’06) is urban crime but with Boston micks. The Wolf of Wall Street (’13) is obviously an urban crime flick minus goombah street seasoning, and the 19th Century Gangs of New York ain’t goombah at all.

The Irishman, which will costar Robert De Niro (as Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran), Al Pacino (Jimmy Hoffa), Bobby Cannavale (Joey Gallo), Joe Pesci (Russell Bufalino), Harvey Keitel (Angelo Bruno) and Ray Romano (Bill Bufalino), will begin shooting later this month. With DeNiro, Pacino, Pesci and Keitel in their ’70s and Romano turning 60 in December, I’m calling this Oldfellas until further notice.

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