I’ve always believed that Travis Bickle died on the couch after that East Village shoot-out. Everything that happens in the aftermath — the newspaper articles praising him for having murdered a couple of pimps, Iris’s parents writing to thank him for saving their daughter, Cybil Shephard looking at him dreamily after he drops her off at her Grammercy Park apartment — is Travis’s dying fantasy. And then in the last shot he’s driving along and looks into the rearview mirror with a slight look of alarm, apparently sensing that something’s wrong and then…zhhhoop! Bickle disappears. It seems obvious as hell, but no one has ever agreed with me.
I’ve been talking for a long, long time about how the bottom has fallen out of badness in movies. Basic levels of scriptwriting have been dropping, certainly when it comes to CG-driven tentpolers, for a good 10 or 15 years. Six or seven years ago I wrote that relatively few big-studio whammers are as well-ordered and “professionally” assembled as Abbott & Costello Meet The Mummy, as silly and inconsequential as that 1955 film was. Two days ago the great Devin Faracichimed in along similar lines, and with excellent drillbit phrasing.
“I think every movie should be ‘good.’ Especially really big, expensive ones that were worked on by thousands of people. And I don’t mean great, or perfect or transcendent or Oscar-worthy. When I say ‘good’ what I really mean is ‘competent.’
“Yet this bar, low as it is, is seen as excessive by some. Demanding basic competence — that a movie be adequately made on a fundamental level — is a sign of elitism. This bums me out [because] this tyranny of low expectations is why big movies can be, and often have been, so terrible. Why get the story right when the audience simply does not give a shit about it?
Last night a producer friend invited me to a birthday party being thrown in her honor. A two-stage affair, she explained. It’ll begin with a sit-down dinner around 8 pm and then a second wave of friends will arrive for a stand-around-and-drink party at 9:30 pm. A filmmaker friend is hosting, she said, but his home is not a McMansion so the dinner invitees will have to be restricted to ten or twelve. (There’s a concern about seating plus his ex-wife is coming.). She asked me to please drop by at 9:30 and bring my party hat. “So I’m a second-waver?,” I said. “On one level I don’t care but on another level it’s a wee bit insulting. Not horribly insulting — I’m an adult and it’s really not that big of a deal — but you are ranking me…you’re telling me that I rank below others and that casting-wise I’m a supporting player.” She said that’s the wrong way to take it, that she’s just going along with what the host told her, etc. “Can I make a suggestion?,” I said. “Invite the ten or twelve you had in mind for the dinner and leave it at that. Don’t invite the second wave. Because they’ll all feel vaguely, slightly insulted…trust me. It’s better not to invite them than to graciously label them as coach-class.” Thoughts?
Update: On 6.28 Joni Mitchell’s conservator, Leslie Morris, posted the following about Mitchell’s condition following a HuffPost quote from David Crosby that said (a) Mitchell had suffered an aneurysm and (b) was not able to speak. To my knowledge Morris never used the word “anuerysm” before Crosby mentioned it, and you could bet she wouldn’t have mentioned it otherwise.
“Joni did in fact suffer an aneurysm,” Morris’s statement says. “However, details that have emerged in the past few days are mostly speculative. The truth is that Joni is speaking, and she’s speaking well. She is not walking yet, but she will be in the near future as she is undergoing daily therapies. She is resting comfortably in her own home and she’s getting better each day. A full recovery is expected.”
“An air of Hitchcockian menace and free-floating sexual perversity is by now nothing new for Francois Ozon, but rarely has this French master analyzed the cracks in his characters’ bourgeois facades to such smooth and pleasurable effect as he does in The New Girlfriend. A skillfully triangulated psychological thriller about a woman who learns that the husband of her deceased [best friend] is harboring a most unusual secret, this delectable entertainment is as surprising for its continually evolving (and involving) dynamics of desire as for its slow-building emotional power, making for a warmer, more open-ended experience than the creepy Ruth Rendell tale from which it’s been ‘loosely adapted.’ Powered by beautifully controlled performances from Anais Demoustier and Romain Duris, Ozon’s Girlfriend should have willing arthouse escorts lining up worldwide.” — from Justin Chang‘s 9.10.14 Toronto Film Festival review.
Two days ago N.Y. Post critic Lou Lumenickcalled for a shunning of Gone With The Wind, not because it suddenly stinks but because its “undeniably racist” attitudes are no longer tolerable in our current socio-political climate, particularly in the wake of the Charleston massacre and Gov. Nikki Haley‘s decision to remove the Confederate flag from the South Carolina statehouse, and everyone else calling for a similar banning. So it’s not as if Lou is standing against the wind here.
There’s never been any question that David O. Selznick‘s epic ignores and sugarcoats the realities of 19th Century slavery, and that its Technicolor depiction of the Old South as a fair land of cavaliers and cotton fields makes it in some ways a dark and odious fantasy piece — the anti-12 Years A Slave. Consciousness does evolve and for all its elan and polish, Gone With The Wind has become more and more of an unsavory antique in some respects. No argument there.
Lumenick notes that GWTW “isn’t as blatantly and virulently racist as D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, which was considered one of the greatest American movies as late as the early 1960s, but is now rarely screened, even in museums,” but he’s suggesting that it may one day disappear from the cultural conversation and suffer a permanent downgrade when it comes to estimating the all-time great films.
Lumenick is not wrong, but I feel misgivings. I don’t believe it’s right to throw Gone With The Wind under the bus just like that. Yes, it’s an icky and offensive film at times (Vivien Leigh‘s Scarlett O’Hara slapping Butterly McQueen‘s Prissy for being irresponsible in the handling of Melanie giving birth, the depiction of Everett Brown‘s Big Sam as a gentle, loyal and eternal defender of Scarlett when the chips are down) but every time I’ve watched GWTW I’ve always put that stuff in a box in order to focus on the real order of business.
“It’s true, the flag did not cause these murders,” President Obamasaid during a eulogy in Charleston today for Rev. Clementa Pinckney and the other eight victims of Dylann Roof. “We all have to acknowledge the flag has always represented more than just ancestral pride. For many, black and white, that flag was a reminder of systemic oppression and racial subjugation. We see that now. By taking down that flag, we express God’s grace.”
Last night I paid $15 and change to see Seth MacFarlane’s Ted 2. I needed to see the damn thing for the column so I didn’t mind the expenditure, but I definitely felt soiled as I drove home. All in all MacFarlane’s mind has (a) made my life feel a tiny bit uglier, (b) sprayed a stinky after-smell around the room and (c) left faint grease streaks on my soul. MacFarlane seems like a sharp and amusing guy when he’s talking to Kimmel or Fallon or Conan, but the stuff he creates (Ted flicks, A Million Ways To Die in the West and “We Saw Your Boobs” on the Oscar show) is aimed at the lowest and laziest — those tens of millions of jocky, ESPN-watching, ball-scratching, aggressively unenlightened couch gorilla loyalists. MacFarlane fans are 21st Century Archie Bunkers, guy-guys who’ve probably loved watching Family Guy since ’09 or ’10 and love to sit around and get high and squat in their little dinosaur-brained realm. And because Ted 2 is so precisely tailored to the sensibilities of these dipsticks (who are really on the level of your typical 12 or 13-year-old parentally-abused sociopath) it’s not funny. Two or three goons sitting behind me were chortling but I was sitting there like a vacuum cleaner with the power cord ripped out. Ted 2 is pure drainage.
Okay, that’s not 100% true as I quite enjoyed the opening Busby Berkeley number. I was also amused by the Raging Bull kitchen-argument parody scene that happens around…what, the 10-minute mark? But the rest is shit on a stick. Let’s get high, dude. Wait…a pretty blonde attorney representing Ted in a human-dignity case (Amanda Seyfried) gets high in her law office? Down wit dat but why does she say “eff” Scott Fitzgerald…ya gotta problem with the guy? We don’t have a lot of income but we live in Back Bay. If you want the sperm of New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady so you can artificially inseminate your wife, you can’t ask Brady for a favor — you have to sneak into his bedroom and try to jerk him off without waking him up. And speaking of greatly impressive schtufenhaufers, every Google search is two clicks away from “black cock.”
You’ve read about Ted 2‘s big scene in a Boston sperm bank –i.e., Mark Wahlberg‘s John covered in splooge after tipping over a cart filled with dozens of samples from black guys with sickle-cell anemia, and Ted cracking that “you’re covered in rejected black guys’ sperm…you’re like a Kardashian.” I was shaking my head and going “what the fuck is this?” What kind of a baggy-shorts-wearing beefalo would find this remotely funny?
I distinctly remember that when I first heard this line in a Manhattan theatre it was greeted with laughter from three or four guys in the orchestra, me included. It felt close to home because I’d been half-flirting with the idea of being someone who might never quite get it together. Half-flirting and half-terrified. My would-be writing career was actually starting to come together at that point (’78) but I was so accustomed to things being semi-awful and anxious…a tough time. I’ve nonetheless loved this line ever since. Nobody seems to write dialogue like this any more, and if they are it’s not happening enough. Can you imagine a line like this being spoken in Avengers: Age of Ultron?
I’m irked that Universal isn’t opening Brian Helgeland‘s Legend until October 2nd. Who wouldn’t be? The period crime drama looks snappy and noirish and altogether delicious. You just know that Tom Hardy‘s dual performance as Ronald and Reginald Kray is going to ring a whole string of bells. A perfect antidote to the summer doldrums. But all we’ll get for the next three months are Legend trailers, Legend trailers and more Legend trailers. Pic might turn up at the Venice or Telluride festivals; it’ll certain play Toronto.
