HE: “When I think of Yorgos Lanthimos‘ Poor Things (\Searchlight, 12.8), I think of a one-two effect. First I think of Frankenstein’s sexually vigorous daughter, and then a back-from-the-grave woman whose worldview evolves from wide-eyed wonderment into critical male-shirking wokeness. I also believe that Emma Stone has the Best Actress Oscar in the bag.”
Friendo: “When I think of Poor Things, I first think of a lurching, amusing and sometimes audacious [effort] that feels second-rate-ish at the end of the day. Then I think of the in-your-face woke design (Ms. Barbie Frankenstein in a world of angry, damaged, predatory men!), then I think of all that sex and how it’s really kind of gratuitous (unless this were 1972) but wow, it sure is going to help sell the movie!”
In a 5.7.07 interview with Future Movies‘ Adam Tanswell, Gambon was asked what went into playing Dumbledore in the Harry Potter films. He answered by discussing his approach to being an alleged character actor.
“I don’t have to ‘play’ anyone really,” Gambon said. “I just stick on a beard and play me, so it’s no great feat. I never ease into a role. Every part I play is just a variant of my own personality. I’m not really a character actor at all.”
In other words, Gambon’s characters in The Insider (’99) and Open Range (’03) — respectively Brown and Williamson CEO Thomas Sandefur and ornery Irish bully boy Denton Baxter — represented aspects of Gambon himself.
These, in any event, are my two favorite Gambon performances. He was a very fine stage actor, but you can have the Potter films and even The Singing Detective, which I found repellent (that awful skin condition) and never liked.
…for Al Pacino‘s big third-act crescendo speech in Scent of a Woman (’92), which won him a Best Actor Oscar. And especially for the author of that speech, the recently departed Bo Goldman.
Martin Brest‘s hefty-grossing, odd-couple, May-December relationship drama opened 30 and 3/4 years ago. It feels like yesterday.
I realize that during the ’90s Pacino’s acting style became more and more florid and bombastic, arguably reaching its apogee with another big crescendo speech in The Devil’s Advocate (’97). And I’m aware that soon after Scent‘s theatrical run “hoo-hah!” became as much of a Pacino signature as “you dirty rat!” was for James Cagney. I’m not 100% certain that Goldman didn’t write “hoo-hah!”, but I think it was a Pacino improv.
Joey, Jett’s 13 year-old pit bull, died late last night. Heart attack, gasping for air, agonizing. But he didn’t die alone. Jett and Cait sat close and let him know he was loved…”with” him to the end.
Postedseveralweeksago:
Since Thursday I’ve been dog-sitting in West Orange while Jett, Cait and Sutton are in Massachusetts for a weekend funeral. Joey, a pit bull with a bum hind leg, and Luna, a sausage beagle, are both older but they love me and I them.
But they insist on fairly close proximity and almost constant affection at all times, and after three days and nights I’m exhausted from lack of sleep due to sharing the guest room bed with these guys as they take up most of the mattress space. Three nights of bad sleep, mainly due to Joey.
Right now I’m trying to get a little extra shut-eye (I was up half the night from the sprawling bodies and dog farts, plus we just lost an hour to daylight savings) by locking Joey downstairs behind the plastic staircase gate.
And of course, Joey is whining and moaning and banging against the gate as we speak.
Update: Joey has somehow crashed or squeezed through the gate. He’s up here now with us, and of course he’s back on the bed. I love these guys but I’m getting sick of this — I’d like a little peace.
Newupdate: Lying on the couch and of course they have to sleep either right next to me or on top of my legs.
Jettscolding: “U trained them, dad. U give Joey too much love and attention and let him walk all over u. My [disciplined] way may seem cruel but it’s the only way to have any sanity.”
True Detective: Night Country: "As the endless winter darkness envelops Ennis, Alaska, it id discovered that eight guys who operated the Tsalal Arctic Research Station have vanished without a trace. To solve the case, Detectives Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) and Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis) will have to grapple with the gloom they carry in themselves and dig into the haunted truths that lie buried under the eternal ice," blah blah.
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Imagine if Martin Scorsese‘s Killers of the Flower Moon (Apple/Paramount, 10.20) had stuck to the original scheme by focusing on unambiguous, straight-ahead, white-guy FBI fortitude, and if the ads had used an image of Leonardo DiCaprio‘s TomWhite, the guy who headed up the Osage Murders investigation back in the 1920s…
Imagine if the Flower Moon one-sheet had mimicked the ads for Mervyn Leroy‘s The FBI Story with Dicaprio wearing the hat and firing the pistol instead of James Stewart…
Better still, imagine if Scorsese and Apple marketers had decided to (ironically?) re-use Max Steiner‘s main-title music from The FBI Story.
You can laugh if you want, but a “heroic FBI!…hooray for Leo and his team!” approach to this story would, I suspect, connect better with Joe and Jane Popcorn than the melancholy Native American guilt trip that the movie actually is…an approach that has, by the way, no particular point of view. It just catalogues what happened.
I’m imagining this because the original conception of Killers would have starred DiCaprio as Tom White. When Scorcese and screenwriter Eric Roth decided their adaptation of David Grann‘s non-fiction book needed a woke rewrite, Dicaprio decided to play yokel bad guy Ernest Burkhart while Jesse Plemons was tapped to play White.
Posted on 9.12.23: In a 9.12 Time cover story by Stephanie Zacharek, Killers of the Flower Moon director Martin Scorsese has confirmed what costar Lily GladstonetoldVariety‘s Zack Sharf nine months ago, which was that Flower Moon, a sprawling crime epic about the FBI’s investigation of the Osage Nation murders in 1920s Oklahoma, was given a woke rewrite — one that de-emphasized the FBI nailing the bad guys and emphasized the perspective of Osage Nation and the pain their community had endured.
“After a certain point, I realized I was making a movie about all the white guys,” Scorsese tells Zacharek. “Meaning I was taking the approach from the outside in, which concerned me.”
In a 1.20.23 article, Gladstone explained to Sharf, Variety‘s resident wokester lobbyist and spokesperson, that Scorsese had basically re-thought the 1920s saga, which had begun as a kind of “birth of the modern FBI” story.
It is Louis CK's opinion that Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut "doesn't touch earth...it takes place in an incredibly high-up, thin-oxygen world...it's not about anyone that anyone [in the audience] knows,,,the movie has this plodding tone and plodding pace, which is what [Kubrick] does here.,..if he was a comic book artist, people would say 'this is how the guy draws.' Kubrick was a masterful filmmaker, and [when I watch Eyes Wide Shut] I just say 'this is where he was at, and what his fucked-up brain was making.'"
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What if, God forbid, President Joe Biden experiences a Mitch McConnell freeze-up this year or next? Or, God forbid, falls off a bandstand like Bob Dole did at the relatively young age of 73? You think something in this realm won’t happen? If Biden wins re-election he’ll finish his second term at age 86. He’s a good capable man in relatively good shape for an 80-year-old, but we know what’s almost certainly coming.
Biden can barely handle himself now in interviews, and a day-old Axios piece reported that amid concerns about his age, Biden’s team is on a “don’t-let-him-trip mission.” And his second term, if he wins, won’t even begin for another 16 months, and it will end on 1.20.29. You think Joe’s going to…what, reverse the natural process and be in better shape when he takes the oath of office on 1.20.25?
Many of us with older parents know what coping with final-stage aging entails. At age 82 or 83 my father (who died in ’08) fell in his living room, hit his head on a coffee table and cut his upper lip all to hell. I visited a couple of days later and he was scowling and infuriated. Coping with body failure (primarily balance, not to mention Depends) is brutal.
It would be one thing if Biden was 65…fine. Or even Dole’s age during the ’96 campaign, but he’s seven years beyond that. Reality is knocking on everyone’s door right now, and most Democrats are going “oh, he’s fine and if he dies Kamala Harris will be a great president.” Good God!
Donald Trump is finished as a businessman in New York State, and he’s looking at a likely fine of $250 million when it’s all over. He’ll probably be forced to sell off key properties. Not to mention his astronomical legal costs regarding the numerous indictments, etc.