Bernie Sanders announced his White House candidacy almost exactly a year ago, on 4.30.15. He didn’t make it but oh, did he change the conversation. For the first time since the 1930s, it’s now completely legitimate and accepted to openly question the validity of balls-out Darwinian capitalism, which until recently was seen as being a hallowed, God-given system that has worked hand-in-hand with American democracy. The Sanders message has basically been that democracy is vital but not so much rapacious, blood-in-the-water Wall Street game-playing, which over the last ten years has led to many getting the shaft while favoring the very few. Who today would argue that analysis with a straight face?

European socialist democracies, Sanders has said time and again, deliver more fairness, more compassion and a better quality of life for a broader spectrum of people. It’s all there, chapter and verse, in Michael Moore’s Where To Invade Next?. The U.S. of A. is not #1 — we’re down in the middle of the list, at best. Which is entirely due to unbridled, unregulated market forces, which have been manifesting since the ’80s in the form of elite corporate gangsterism, plain and simple.

And it took a Jay Bulworth figure, a white-haired guy whose candidacy was initially regarded as eccentric and boutique-y, a guy whom the pundits said had almost no chance of even competing strongly against Hillary Clinton, to slip that message into the mainstream conversation.

Read more

A new trailer for Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow‘s DePalma (A24, 6.10.16) popped the other day. A24 is beginning to show it in screening rooms — a Manhattan viewing on Friday, 4.29, and an L.A. showing on Tuesday, 5.3, for openers. Neither of these fits with my travel schedule as I leave for New York on Friday night. I’ve been asking the A24 guys if I could have a looksee before I leave for France on Thursday evening, 5.5. (I like to acclimate in Paris for three days before training down to Cannes.) A lot of people are leaving for Cannes soon so I suspect I’m not alone. It would all be so simple if there was a willingness to allow for online viewings, but alas, not yet. There’s always early June when I return but…well, I’m jumpy, I guess.

A 5.6.16 Newsweek story says that Italian neurosurgeon Sergio Canovery is set to perform (no fooling) a human head transplant procedure. The guy whose head will be attached to a new body and thereby gain a new lease on life is Valery Spiridonov, a 31-year-old Russian software development manager who’s suffering from Werdnig-Hoffman disease, a muscle-wasting disorder.

Will the operation succeed? Perhaps not but then the next neurosurgeon will try it, and then the next and the next. And then one day head transplants will become routine. And then we’ll have vanity head transplants — old people looking to acquire a great new body so they can start all over. The possibilities! My head is spinning.

The procedure, which may happen next year, is the first real-world attempt in this vein. No one is likely to ever graft two heads on a single body, but the fact is that medical technology has actually begun to catch up with The Thing With Two Heads, a 1972 AIP film in which Roosevelt Greer and Ray Milland shared the same body (i.e., Greer’s). I confess to having had a couple of nightmares in which my head was removed and then re-attached…horrible. Canovero’s head transplant will be performed as a two-step procedure — a head anastomosis venture followed by a subsequent spinal cord fusion. This not a put-on — it’s real.

Read more

Park Chan-wook, the South Korean Brian DePalma, strikes again with The Handmaiden, a competition entry at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival. Everything in the trailer has that extra-mad-sauce quality — underlined, emphasized, drilled. The source is Sarah Waters‘ “Fingersmith“, a 2002 historical crime novel set in Victorian-era England. The newbie is set in 1930s colonial Korea. It costars Ha Jung-woo, Kim Min-hee, Cho Jin-woong and Kim Tae-ri.

Yesterday’s big discussion topic was a N.Y. Times Magazine story, “How Hillary Clinton Became a Hawk,” by Mark Landler — a concise, well-researched examination of Hillary’s aggressive foreign policy views. It complements Oliver Stone’s 3.30 HuffPost piece about how Clinton’s instincts are “steeped in the traditional post-World War II, Atlanticist, NATO-domination of the universe.” Landler’s piece is adapted from his book, “Alter Egos: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and the Twilight Struggle Over American Power” (Random House).

Read more

Vanity Fair has essentially become a well-written women’s magazine. Okay, for women, gays, metrosexuals and frillies. And, I regret to say, for people like me. I can’t fully let it go, but on the other hand a magazine that seems to be about fashion, style and attitude first and then whatever else fits, is anathema to me. So I’ve been making an effort over the last year or so to wean myself off it, but…but! I sometimes find it hard to resist the covers. This month I’m going to experiment by not buying the Amy Schumer issue and see how it goes. It wasn’t Schumer but the appearance of another Jackie Kennedy article that tore it. Okay, I’ll be flying between now and June 1st so maybe not, but next month for sure.

Posted on 10.8.15: “I’ve been buying Vanity Fair for 30 years now. I can’t precisely pinpoint when I stopped reading it, but sometime within the last couple of years. The articles have begun to seem a little less substantial with more of an emphasis on girly, frothy, fashiony stuff. Or people I can’t stand to look at. I know that I hate the all-fashion issue. Anything that tries celebrate or instill a fascination with wealth and fashion and loaded people who are spending their money on increasingly peculiar or arcane things gets a down vote.”

In the first Telluride spitball piece of 2016, Variety‘s Kris Tapley muses about which films might show up at that elite, four-day Colorado gathering, which is only 17 or 18 weeks off.

Tapley rightly acknowledges that it’s too early to predict, but writes the following: “Sundance films rarely play Telluride due to the festival’s North American premiere restriction, it might be difficult for the fest to pass up Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation, particularly given Fox Searchlight’s commitment to a presence there in recent years.”

I’ll go along with that, but I would add another exciting Sundance premiere — Amazon/Roadside’s Manchester by the Sea.

Previous Sundance-Telluride repeaters include Lone Scherfig‘s An Education (’09) and Tamara Jenkins‘ The Savages (’07)

Chris Pratt on Passengers: “And due to some malfunctions in the hibernation pod, we both wake up.” Oh, yeah? Either Pratt, a good soldier, is repeating the company line, or Jon Spaihts‘ script was rewritten before shooting began. I can roll with either scenario.

The 2016 Cannes Film Festival jury was announced this morning. With director George Miller having been named jury president several weeks ago, the jurists (four actors, one producer, one director) are as follows: director Arnaud Desplechin (My Golden Days), Kirsten Dunst, Valeria Golino, Mads Mikkelsen, director Laszlo Nemes (Son of Saul), Iranian producer Katayoon Shahabi, Donald Sutherland.

Cannes juries have made perplexing calls at the conclusion of the last two festivals (’15 and ’14), and so the question is whether or not this year’s jury will prove to be as indifferent or hostile to consensus favorites as before. Someone noted last year that juries have lately tended to vote against the film with the greatest heat as they don’t want to seem too populist or accomodating.

The 2014 jury (led by Jane Campion) prompted widespread forehead-slapping when they gave Nuri Bilge Ceylan‘s Winter Sleep, a highly respectable character study, the Palme d’Or when Andrey Zvyagintsev‘s Leviathan was the clear favorite of the cognoscenti. And the decision by last year’s jury (the one headed by the Coen brothers) to hand the Palme d’Or to Jacques Audiard‘s entirely decent Dheepan resulted in some consternation as most know-it-alls felt that Son of Saul or Carol should have won.

I’m cynically presuming that this year’s jury will probably follow suit by confusing or pissing people off about one or more of their award decisions.

First-hand recollection of shooting of The Shining by some electrician who came to know Stanley Kubrick and even played chess with him: “Some people were scared of Kubrick because he could make or break a career. But not Jack [Nicholson]. Jack called him Stan to wind him up. You could call him Stanley, Mr. Kubrick or Guv, just not Stan. But they liked each other.

“One time Jack said he had done his back in and needed a few days off. That’s a lot of time when you’re shooting a big film, but Stanley said okay. The next day we were in the sparks room watching Wimbledon when Stanley walks in. He asks what we’re up to and as he turns to look at the telly, there he is: Jack Nicholson sat in the crowd with a girl on either side. Stanley went mad.”

Read more

Six years ago Marshall Fine’s Robert Klein Still Can’t Stop His Leg, an altogether fascinating and highly engaging doc about one of the greatest anguished Jewish comedians of all time, disappeared into the maw of the Weinstein Co. bankruptcy of 2017.

Lo and behold, Fine’s Robert Klein doc is now available to stream on multiple platforms for the first time ever.

Roughly a year before the Weinstein disaster I saw Fine Robert Klein Still Can’t Stop His Leg, and I fully concurred with all the then-current praise.

From “Speaking As An Honorary Anguished Jew, I Relate To Smart Docs About Authentic Specimens,” posted on 4.24.16: “Yes, I’ve been friends with Fine for a long time and yes, I’ve admired Klein since I was a kid but this is a fine (sorry) doc that imparts wisdom, feeling, perspective and smarts.”

“It serves as not just a personal look at Klein, but as something larger,” Showbiz 411‘s Roger Friedman wrote on 4.20. “It’s a real piece of history. What Fine and Klein have done here is make an excellent companion piece to the very good Joan Rivers doc of a few years ago, A Piece of Work. Since Alan King died rather young and abruptly, and nothing’s been done on Stiller and Meara, there is very little documentary record of the great Jewish comics who launched from the Ed Sullivan Show era.

“The doc is also very funny. Klein is incredibly endearing and corny, while at the same time maintaining an edge. That’s why he made 40 appearances on Letterman. I hope The Weinstein Company can give Still Can’t Stop His Leg a good release in major markets before VOD or Netflix. Like a Robert Klein show, the film is intimate and hilarious.”

In the late ’70s a smart Jewish friend and fellow cineaste told me I had more Jewish guilt than he. That was the beginning of my honorary Jewhood, which thrives to this day.