We’ve all considered the Candle in the Wind aspect of Marilyn Monroe‘s sad tale. Then again she knew how and why her career bread was buttered. It’s hard to recall episodes in Monroe’s life in which she didn’t generate flashes of eros and sexuality to stoke the fires. Especially during the making of Some Like It Hot, Let’s Make Love, The Misfits and Something’s Got To Give. Not to mention the photo sessions, including the famous 1962 one with Bert Stern at the Hotel Bel Air.
Desta says that because Monroe was sexually exploited throughout her career, it might be a good idea not to let anyone see the scene in question. Why re-boot that old cruel karma of ogling a naked but very sad movie star who died of an overdose at age 36?
Hollywood Elsewhere will understand if the scene never hits YouTube. Let it be, keep it in the drawer, etc. Then again why did Charles Casillo, author of “Marilyn Monroe: The Private Life of a Public Icon,” mention the discovery if he wasn’t planning to leak it?
Monroe resented the public’s leering interest, of course, but in film after film she never stopped winking at it. She knew what she was doing, and there were suggestions and peeks aplenty in The Misfits. Okay, I’ll admit it — I want to see the scene. But I’ll survive if I can’t.
Vanessa Gould‘s Obit, a doc about the lives and aspirations of a team of N.Y. Times obituary writers (editor William McDonald + Bruce Weber, Margalit Fox, William Grimes, Douglas Martin, Paul Vitello), has been playing in New York and Los Angeles. It’s not about death but life, perception and celebration, but then you’ve probably read that. It’s also about humor, perspective, devotion and the art of clean, concise writing.
When Bert Stern died on 6.26.13 I was the one who informed the Times obit guys, and then supplied contact info for Shannah Laumeister, Stern’s wife and director of Bert Stern: Original Madman. It was a sad moment, of course, but I remember thinking “hmm, this is intriguing…I’m delivering historical news to the Times obit guys, contributing to an obit that everyone will read.”
Jacob Kornbluth‘s Inequality For All (Radius/TWC, 9.27) , which I first saw nine months ago in Park City, is easily one of the smartest and most articulate docs of 2013. A profile of economist and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, it explains with cool clarity how the game has become more and more rigged by the rich since the Reagan era, and why so many wage-earning middle-classers (including Tea Party lowlifes) are feeling so shafted and angry these days. Everybody knows the dice are loaded. Everybody knows the fight is fixed. The poor stay poor, the rich get rich. That’s how it goes. Everybody knows.
(l to.r.) Inequality For All director Jacob Kornbluth, The Newsroom creator Aaron Sorkin, Inequality star Robert Reich at last night’s post-premiere gathering in Manhattan. (Photo: Shannah Laumeister.)
On 7.25 Indiewire contributor Matthew Hammett Knott posted a piece called “Heroines of Cinema: The 10 Most Exciting Young Female Directors in the World Today.” Actually not that young — most of the women mentioned are their mid to late 30s. Anyway, in addition to Sally El-Hosaini (My Brother The Devil), Miranda July (The Future), Celine Sciamma (Tomboy), Lucia Puenzo (Wakolda), Dee Rees (Pariah), Mia Hansen (The Father Of My Children), Lena Dunham (Girls), Haifaa Al-Mansour (Wadjda), Sarah Polley (Take This Waltz, Stories We Tell) and Ava Duvernay (Middle of Nowhere, the forthcoming Selma), I would add Shannah Laumeister, director of the elegant and admirably ballsy Bert Stern: Original Madman, Circumstance director Maryam Keshavarz and Sam Taylor-Johnson (a.k.a., Sam Taylor-Wood), director of the forthcoming 50 Shades of Grey.
I always file less whenever I have an event to attend. (Naturally.) When I have two events within six or seven daylight hours I’m barely able to post more than a story or two. Yesterday was the Gandolfini funeral plus a press conference at the Crosby Street Hotel for The Way Way Back. Plus there was such an avalanche of bile and toxicity in response to the Gandolfini thing that I felt as if I’d been infected by a flu virus of some kind.
The poison that coarses through men’s souls! All I did was soberly and respectfully attend the funeral of an actor whose performances I worshipped. My hands were clasped and I said my amens and I took Holy Communion and even gave a hug to two people sitting nearby, but because I had the temerity to use the term “funeral crasher” and talk about Altoid mints I was all but stoned to death. I love you too, guys. Fucking piranhas.
I don’t give a shit if the public was invited. I wrote and asked the right people about attending and they didn’t fill me in. All I know is that there was a platoon of black-clad women checking names at the door when I came in, asking for spellings and whatnot. And then I faced another group of women wanting to know what my deal was. Okay, so as a result of my crashing I was seated farther forward than the hoi polloi and I didn’t have to wait as long to go inside. You think Paulie Walnuts would have given a shit one way or the other?
This morning I attended a memorial service for the great Bert Stern, and during the service I behaved in exactly the same way as I did yesterday at the Gandolfini thing. I’m not a friend of the family so I wasn’t “invited” per se, but it too was open to the public and I’m a rapt admirer of Bert Stern: Original Madman and so I felt compelled to drop by.
On Thursday, 2.28, the 35 year-old Eli Rothposted the following paragraph at the end of a longish passage on his MySpace blog, to wit:
“I was having drinks with a friend at the Beverly Hills Hotel the other night, and Lindsay Lohan walked by our booth with a girlfriend, checking us out. She then went out to the bathroom, turned around, came back and walked by us again, and mumbled to her friend ‘too old‘ and kept walking. Now, she’s absolutely correct but it was still pretty fucking hilarious. Especially since we were in the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel where the average age is 97. If you look too old in there you’re fucked! Time to hit the Botox!”
The irony is that Lohan looked like she was at least 46 or 47 in those Marilyn Monroe-like Bert Stern photos in that New York magazine spread a while back.
Legendary photographer Bert Stern has re-shot his 1962 Marilyn Monroe nude photo session with Lindsay Lohan substituting. The shots appear in the current (2.18) issue of New York. Intriguing shots — okay, alluring — but why did the session happen? Obviously because Lohan is trying to get back into it somehow. She’s trying to launch a new impression of herself that might sink in and shift attitudes.
Her career was considered all but finished after the last drunk-driving incident. The box-office disappointment of Georgia Rules and the total wipeout of I Know Who Killed Me seemed to destroy the myth of her box-office heat, if she ever had any. The last thing she did of any note was get randy with three guys while she attended the Capri Film Festival. What else is there to do except resuscitate the ghost of Marilyn Monroe and similar ploys?
In his 11.19.80 review of Michael Cimino‘s Heaven’s Gate, N.Y. Times critic Vincent Canby wrote that the film “fails so completely that you might suspect Mr. Cimino sold his soul to the Devil to obtain the success of The Deer Hunter, and the Devil has just come around to collect.”
I’m not saying that Satan arranged for Bong Joon-ho‘s Parasite to win the 2019 Best Picture Oscar, but it does seem as if some kind of some kind of reverse karma invaded BJH during the writing or filming of Mickey 17.
No distributor opens a film by an Oscar-winning director in late January, and if they do it’s close to a guarantee that there’s something very, very wrong.
The word on Mickey 17 hasn’t been good since it was announced on 2.20.24 that Warner Bros. had decided to release it on 1.31.25.
And now some Mickey 17 preview footage has been shown at Cinemacon, and Jeff Sneider smells a tank.
Sneider: “The trailer is set to ‘Ain’t That A Kick In The Head’, and what a kick in the head it is, playing out like a comedic version of Edge of Tomorrow with Pattinson’s Mickey dying over and over in service of some larger mission. Until, I guess, Mickey 18 wakes up to find that Mickey 17 never died…or something…giving us twice the #PattinsonPower.
“Yes, the star of The Batman plays dual roles here, but you won’t be talking about seeing double after this trailer. No, you’ll be talking about Pattinson’s [Joe Pesci-like] voice, which is…a choice. A bad one. How could Bong have allowed Pattinson to do that voice?”
I knew that Bong was part baloney — a sloppy scenarist — after watching that notorious Parasite scene in in which the drunken con artist mom lets the fired maid into the house during a huge rainstorm. That scene injected a kind of virus into BJH’s bloodstream, I believe, and now he’s paying the piper.
Just as there is a long list of films that I can watch over and over again, there are also those that I will never again submit to. Near the top of this list is Michael Cimino‘s The Deer Hunter.
I’m not talking about a film I don’t care for. I’m talking about a film that I wouldn’t watch again if someone shoved a snub-nosed .38 into my ribs, or offered me a sizable cash bribe. Would you sit through Star Wars: The Phantom Menace for $20 bills? Would you watch A.I. or Always again? The Cannonball Run II? Sylvester Stallone‘s Cobra?
I’ve stayed away from this simultaneously audacious and godawful film for the last 45 years, and I’m not about to break my streak.
Memories of my first and only viewing in a Manhattan screening room (late November ’78) are branded on my brain tissue. That idiotic Russian Roulette device. Those working-class townspeople singing a wedding song like practiced professionals in a Russian opera. The relentlessly cloying and obnoxious (i.e., overly performed) working-class camaraderie. Those absurdly majestic Northwestern mountain peaks that happen to be in rural Pennsylvania.
And especially Christopher Walken‘s idiotic Russian roulette death…no lead character in a serious film has ever died for a dumber reason than Walken did in The Deer Hunter.
Politically and culturally TheDeerHunter is one of the most full-of-shit films about the American proletariat ever made. The way it simultaneously used and ignored the Vietnam War was sickening.
Posted by Peter Biskind soon after Cimino’s 7.2.16 death: “The politics are execrable, and were widely denounced at the time for turning the war inside out. Clearly, filmmakers who make features ‘based on’ reality take liberties with their material, and the truth vs. art debate is one that will probably go on forever, encompassing films like Triumph of the Will, On the Waterfront, Birth of a Nation, etc., etc. But I think we can make some distinctions.
“First, ironically, although The Deer Hunter is certainly not a documentary, Cimino took great pains to replicate documentary footage his researchers had uncovered. Even the Russian roulette sequences were mean to evoke the famous still photograph of the Saigon police chief shooting a prisoner at point blank range with a pistol to his head.
“But more to the point, there are so many perversions of the truth in The Deer Hunter, all seemingly intended to make the same ideological point — i.e., the Vietcong were evil Orientals — while the Americans were no more than naive victims. There’s a lot more going on here than mere creative license.
“And finally, if I may be indulged, the film is centrally about male bonding and friendship among Americans, with the war as a backdrop and the Vietnamese reduced to stick figures with guns. In my opinion it’s really disgraceful!”
…but then it finally turns fierce and riveting in a holy-shit way during the last 40 minutes, and then it ends with a “yes!…oh, yes!” moment that I can’t and won’t describe, but it felt so good my eyes were almost damp with joy.
You can criticize me all you want, but this last scene delivered the kind of emotional satisfaction that I hadn’t experienced since the home-invasion finale in ZeroDarkThirty.
During the first 65% I was saying to myself “this is pretty good dystopian stuff but not as good as Children of Men.” Then it finally got into gear.
Yes, it’s about journalists (Kirsten Dunst, CaileeSpaeny, Wagner Moira, Stephen Henderson) covering a brutal civil war between (a) fatigue-wearing nativist whites with Trumpian, anti-POC mindsets (the fascist, Trump-modelled U.S. President is played by Nick Offerman) and (b) secessionist Western Forces (a California + Texas alliance that’s well-armed and helicoptered and determined to wipe out every last Offerman follower…shoot ‘em down like dogs)…an army that seems to be mostly composed of left-progressive whites, blacks, Asians and Hispanics…
Boil the snow out and we’re basically talking about a blues-vs.-reds Armageddon.
And yes, CivilWar is obviously a slaughterhouse metaphor for the extreme left-right polarization that we’ve all been enduring for last 20-plus years but especially since Trump was elected in ‘16.
But don’t let the critics fool you into thinking it’s more about combat journalism than combat (although it’s told from a journalist perspective), and that it takes some kind of centrist, non-committed view of the war between the cultures…fiercely separate tribes despising each other to such a degree that nobody has any humanity left…it’s been burned and blown out of everyone.
And don’t let the critics fool you about which side this film is on. The journalist characters are just devices — if not distractions then certainly window-dressing and not the real subject (at least in my opinion).
Civil War is a blistering war-is-hell saga, yes, but there’s no dodging the fact that director Alex Garland sides with the lefties.
A24 and the critics have pooled forces in order to sell two deceptive descriptions — i.e., that the film is kind of neutral by not taking sides, and that it’s about combat journalism and not the war they’re covering.
And please understand that the second half of the following paragraph, excerpted from a 3.26.24review by Empire’s John Nugent, is bullshit:
There is dying bravely and honorably (like Ralph Meeker died in PathsofGlory or like Harris Yulin died in Scarface…”fuck you!”) and there is dying like a whimpering dog (like Robert Loggia died in Scarface, two minutes before Yulin). Trust me — CivilWar makes a very clear statement about the latter.
And let’s not forget Winston Churchill’s famous statement that “nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.”
There are three things that a film has to do in order to qualify for eternal blue-ribbon, Mount Olympus status and the simultaneous allegiance of Joe and Jane Popcorn along with your elitist, dweeb-level, ivory-tower elites.
One, it has to deliver the plain, honest truth (or undercurrent of truth) about a given world or situation — along with a little entertainment value, okay, but without undue exaggeration, no shallow exploitation, not too much sugar or vinegar, and no blatant bullshit of any kind. (This requirement in itself leaves out at least 80% of commercial cinema.)
Two, it has to persuade audiences to emotionally invest in it — to trust what it’s doing and where it seems to be going.
Three and most importantly, it has to put you into a kind of alternate-reality mescaline dream state…a place that you want to stay in and never leave, or at least make you want to return to frequently — a realm that feels so inviting or stylistically transporting that you want to live in it, even if it seems a bit dangerous.
Yes, of course — all movies are dream states in a way. The better ones always lead to a certain primal feeling of alteration or discovery (the film has taken you to an entirely new but seemingly straightforward place) or emotional comfort and reassurance. But the ones that hit the jackpot are the ones that tell you what this or that slice of life on planet earth (or life aboard an intergalactic space cruiser) is basically like …how it really is…the full, honest, non-delusional truth of things.
Which of the 2024 Best Picture nominees did you want to literally move into and live in, or at least visit for a few weeks?
I hated the claustrophobic world of Oppenheimer…university classrooms, government inquisition rooms, meeting rooms, Los Alamos residential shacks. If a magical bearded wizard came up to me last summer and said “I can fix it so you can literally time-travel back to J. Robert Oppenheimer’s world…back to 1930s England, 1940s bomb-blast Los Alamos and 1950s paranoid America….would you like to go?”….I would scrunch my face up and say to that fucking wizard “are you fucking kidding me?”
I was mildly intrigued by the Oklahoma world of Killers of the Flower Moon during my first viewing, but the second viewing was hell…I was stuck in that godawful fucking world, watching and listening to those 1920s roadsters chugging along those muddy streets…those awful damp ditches where the bodies were dumped…studying Leonardo DiCaprio‘s dumbfuck facial expressions, stuck with Lily Gladstone‘s dreary, Native American passivity and Robert De Niro‘s pinched expressions and midwestern drawl…hate it, hate it…escape!
I loved visiting the trippy, furious-jumping, sound-stage world of Poor Things. but I didn’t want to actually live in it. Because it’s skewed and unreal and more than a bit arch — no offense.
I’m too much of an average, well-educated, moderate-minded white dude to want to live in the satirical, male-despising, super-feminized world of Barbie….sorry.
I felt completely comfortable with the 1970 realm of The Holdovers. If that same wizard offered me a chance to time-trip back to ’70, I would go if I could journey there as a young lad with twenty grand in my wallet…cool. I would love that.
The realm of American Fiction is a wise and intelligent one…my kind of place except all the whiteys are woke moron suck-ups. Not my cave, bruh.
I loved certain aspects of the dream-world of Maestro, but I hated the casual cruelties forced upon poor Carey Mulligan.
Past Lives was an under-energized drag, and it always will be — I would never want to hang with those three dull people.
Anatomy of a Fall? No thanks. I now associate Grenoble with stifling vibes and constipation
Would I want to live in the nicely tended home in The Zone of Interest, right next to the walls of Auschwitz? I need to answer this?
I will forgive a film for not being an inviting place to hang in or visit if it’s being relentlessly honest about itself and the world it’s depicting. But the best kind of film tells the truth and offers an extra-cool hang in terms of environment, style, vibes.
There is no bullshit and nothing but truth in The Bicycle Thief (notice that I didn’t call it The Bicycle Thieves), North by Northwest, East of Eden, Mean Streets, Repo Man, Election, The Hospital, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, David Fincher‘s Mindhunter series, Gunga Din, Some Like It Hot, Two Women, La Strada, Zero Dark Thirty, Vertigo, Fellini Satyricon, Manchester By The Sea, Paths of Glory, Vertigo, Nomadland, Only Angels Have Wings, Collateral and 12 Years A Slave.
I have a feeling that Sam Peckinpah’s 1969 western classic is closer to the hearts of boomers and GenXers, and that under-40s are kinda “meh” if not altogether disinterested. Too sexist (all the women are depicted as disloyal and whore-ish), too violent (especially for Zoomer candy-asses), too fatalistic and end-of-the-roadish. At least it’s not racist.
“Simply the finest film ever produced between these American shores. The masterpiece of masterpieces. Film achieves its highest calling: art, incitement, revelation, challenge, elegy, physical redemption of reality that sets a bar no one else, including Peckinpah, ever reached. Yeah. I kinda like it.” — Steven Gaydos, 8.27.19.
Ditto: When The Wild Bunch opened it was regarded as the last revisionist wheeze of a genre that had peaked in the ’50s and was surely on its last legs. It was also seen, disparagingly, as a kind of gimmick film that used ultra-violence and slow-mo death ballets to goose the formula.
Now it’s regarded as one of the best traditional, right-down-the-middle westerns ever made. This kind of writing, acting and pacing will never return or be reborn. Lightning in a bottle.
“What Citizen Kane was to movie lovers in 1941, The Wild Bunch was to cineastes in 1969,” Michael Sragowwrote, adding that Peckinpah had “produced an American movie that equals or surpasses the best of Kurosawa: the Gotterdammerung of Westerns”.
“After a reporter from the Reader’s Digest got up to ask ‘Why was this film even made? I stood up and called it a masterpiece; I felt, then and now, that The Wild Bunch is one of the great defining moments of modern movies.” — from 9.29.02 article by Roger Ebert.
Vincent Canby on William Holden‘s performance as Pike Bishop, from 6.26.69 N.Y. Times review: “After years of giving bored performances in boring movies, Holden comes back gallantly in The Wild Bunch. He looks older and tired, but he has style, both as a man and as a movie character who persists in doing what he’s always done, not because he really wants the money but because there’s simply nothing else to do.”
Edmond O’Brien: “They? Why they is the plain and fancy ‘they’…that’s who they is. Caught ya, didn’t they? Tied a tin can to your tails. Led you in and waltzed you out again. Oh, my, what a bunch! Big tough ones, eh? Here you are with a handful of holes, a thumb up your ass and big grin to pass the time of day with.”