In Contention‘s Kris Tapley, currently in London and working in some capacity for the Times Online, has assembled some of the better Sydney Pollack tribute pieces that came out within the last 24 hours.
Christmas is a vibe about caring, giving, compassion for the lessers. The spirit of this holiday may not be a tangible reality until you find yourself giving five bucks to a guy begging for gas money (as I did last night — he was probably a practiced con artist) or your car is stuck in a snowstorm and two guys jump out of their cars to give you a push (which happened to me three nights ago), but when real life comes up short a semblance of this is somewhat evident in this and that film.
Few films capture this better than John Ford‘s The Grapes of Wrath. Yes, I’m thinking again of that diner scene I wrote about a week ago. Other films with genuine humanitarian compassion: Joseph Losey‘s The Boy with the Green Hair, Todd Browning‘s Freaks, Peter Davis‘s The War at Home.
The only bona fide Christmas film that exudes a portion of this is the 1951 British-made Scrooge (a.k.a., A Christmas Carol) with Alistair Sim.
True Christmas spirit is less evident in the standard holiday classics — It’s a Wonderful Life, Miracle on 34th Street, A Christmas Story, Home Alone — that movie authorities bring up each and every year.
I tried re-watching It’s a Wonderful Life (i.e, the latest restored DVD) a few weeks ago, and found it very hard to stay with. I needed time-outs, pauses, walks around the block. Talk about a film that is chock-full of treacly speed bumps. Is there a more toxic poison than yellowed sentimentality? I hate — hate — the way those bank examiners begin singing “Hark, the Harald Angels Sing” with everyone else at George Bailey’s home at the very end. It is time to shut this movie down and keep it down.
It’s a Wonderful Life‘s popularity is due to its touching central theme, which says that no one with friends is a failure. That’s a true statement if you’re talking about real friends and not just good-time, fair-weather drinking buddies, which are easier to come by. I’ve known many people in my life whose definitions of friendship are on the flexible side. A fair-sized percentage of those who believe that this 1946 Frank Capra film is touched by greatness are, I suspect, among this group.
I’ve always hated Bob Clark‘s A Christmas Story. (Wait…am I allowed to say this?) A Miracle on 34th Street is a passable thing, at least as far as Edmund Gwenn‘s Kris Kringle is concerned. I know that I’ve found it less offensive than It’s a Wonderful Life over the years. I probably need to see it again.
Thanks to George Prager for supplying this glorious SNL piece about the “lost ending” of It’s a Wonderful Life. Perfect…hits the spot.
I heard this morning about the massive heart attack that poor Andy Jones, the colorful journalist, E! columnist and Film Stew contributor, suffered last night at Hollywood’s Arclight plex during a press screening of A Mighty Heart. (Not funny, don’t go there). And I spent three fruitless hours this morning trying and failing to get a reliable read on his condition — people either didn’t pick up or they dummied up or they didn’t know anything.
Andy Jones
There’s no solid confirmation of anything, but L.A. Fish Bowl reported at 11:50 am that Jones has passed away.
I knew Andy fairly well and liked him alot for his ireverent humor and his bluntness. I’m obviously sorry and saddened if this is true. But anyone who really knows something should bite the bullet, step to the plate and say what happened. (David Poland wrote at 12:50-something that Jones has indeed died.)
A Paramount Vantage spokesperson confirmed that the tragedy happened during the Mighty Heart screening, and a manager at the Arclight told me that Jones had been taken away in an ambulance, but he wouldn’t say any more over “privacy” issues. I called the cops, a couple of ambulance services, three hospitals, Film Stew‘s Sperling Reich, Ted Casablanca at E!, Joey Berlin at the BFCA…and nothing came of any of it.
I called Andy’s home and all I heard was this message, which was apparently recorded as a favor to Jones by voiceover legend Don LaFontaine.
I could mention some stuff I know about Andy’s work history and personal issues, particularly some things I was told this morning by a colleague who knew Andy fairly well. But I don’t want to do a Bob Clark again. I just hope that somebody confirms or denies what Fishbowl is reporting. I’m presuming the worst but it’s obviously better to stick to known facts.
I saw the first two installments of HBO’s final Sopranos season last night, and as usual, they’re fantastic and brilliant and darkly funny and all the other superlatives, but there’s not much in the way of any pulverizing story turns — nothing decisive or darkly threatening at all regarding the fate of Anthony J. Soprano, his immediate family or associates.
Okay, a prominent character — a rival — meets his ultimate fate but not at the hand of an assassin or lawman, and yes, tensions between Tony and two of his closest family allies come seeping to the surface, but we’re all familiar with how producer- creator David Chase like this series to play and feel. Aroma, character, emotional undercurrents and karma simmering over a low flame in a kitchen in a big fat New Jersey McMansion. The series always hits home and sinks in, but rarely in the way of Shakespearean high drama.
There sure as shit isn’t anything at all in the way of a narrative toboggan ride in episodes #78 (“Sopranos Home Movies”) and #79 (“Stage 5”), I can tell you. But I loved every minute. I was in pig heaven. In fact, I watched the second installment twice.
You wouldn’t think that a longish scene about four close family members (Tony, Carmela, Bobby, Janice) playing Monopoly at a vacation house on a big lake could result in dramatic fireworks, but the one in the first episode does. (Actually, the way a person plays Monopoly is character-revealing. I noticed that about my kids when we played when they were eight and nine.)
Does anything “happen” in this episode? Not really, but it’s hard to tell with this series. Maybe some kind of plot seed is being planted….maybe. Wherever they’re going, Chase and his writers are certainly in no hurry.
The second episode is about Christopher Moltisanti’s slasher movie, Cleaver, and about a certain party dealing with illness and possible death. I’m not going to get into it any further except to say that director Sydney Pollack is superb as an orderly in a prison hospital who was put in jail for killing his wife and two others. (Has Pollack ever given a performance that didn’t feel absolutely grounded and believable? He was easily the best thing in Husbands and Wives, Changing Lanes, Eyes Wide Shut, etc.)
I don’t sense a bullet in Tony’s future — I just don’t see it. Chase is not a black- and-white moralist who needs his sinners to pay up. Besides, the pressure must be enormous to keep the boss alive in case someone wants to try and shoot a feature-film version down the road. I don’t know anything and I can’t smell anything either (not with this series), but if anyone’s going to get whacked it’ll be Bobby or Christopher or Phil Leotardo…one of those guys. But I really don’t know anything.
One thing about The Sopranos is the way people turn around and suddenly the furies are upon them. In a way, Bob Clark‘s death was like a Sopranos plot turn. Out for a dinner or some kind of good time with his son, some asshole coming the opposite way is getting a blowjob from his girlfriend, the car veers to the left and wham…over, lights out, eternity. Ya never know what’s comin’.
I just want to say that I went out for a moonlit walk last night (i.e., after watching the first two final-season-of-The Sopranos episodes on DVD) and thought long and hard about all the haters bashing me for delivering my honest opinion of Bob Clark‘s movies in the same piece in which I reported the terrible news of his death. Obviously the consensus among 90% of the readership is that it is foul and diseased to be render any kind of mixed or negative verdict on a person’s work concurrent with their death announcement. That’s how I’m reading it, and maybe the haters are right.
In deference to this, I hereby pledge that when the next film artist dies, I will wait…uhm, 24 hours before running negative comments about their work. Is that long enough or should I wait for 48 or 72 hours? Or should I wait a bit longer? A week, a month…you tell me. How about six months or a year? Or should I refrain from ever saying anything critical or contrary about their work once they’ve passed on? How about a general law that says once a person has died, everything they did merits respect and, if at all possible, a certain retrospective positivism?
I’m trying not to be snide. I just felt badly about Clark’s passing and reported it, and then I thought, “Well, do I say anything about his work?” and figured I probably shouldn’t because I didn’t like his films, but then I considered that all obituaries include some kind of assessment about how the deceased and/or his work was generally regarded, and that would mean acknowledging that Clark was a two- time Razzie winner who made Turk 182, one of the worst films of the 20th Century, and then I thought if I’m going to acknowledge that general line of critical thinking I might as well be honest and mention what I personally think…and it went from there.
I’ve long felt that the only thoroughly decent Christmas film is the 1951, British-produced, Alistair Sim-starring A Christmas Carol (or Scrooge). Because it feels genuinely Dickensian, for one thing. Everything else I can think of has a problem of one sort of another — forced, tonally one-note, one too many cute kids, oppressively sentimental, etc.
All the films directed by Bob Clark need to be permanently dust-binned, of course, and that necessarily includes A Christmas Story. The older I get the less comfortable I am about sitting down with It’s a Wonderful Life (the town-rallies-round, happy-ever-after finale is just too effusive), although the moment when James Stewart screams out that he wants to live again still gets me. Has there ever been a really superb Xmas film? Nothing’s coming to mind.
In today’s Wall Street Journal, John Lippman reports that about three and a half weeks ago Warner Bros. agreed to pay $17.5 million to a group of people “who held rights related” to the Dukes of Hazzard TV series. The payout involved a collossal mistake: Warner Bros. and the producers of the upcoming Dukes of Hazzard feature (opening August 5th) never secured the movie rights. The Hazzard TV series itself “was based on a 1975 United Artists film called Moonrunners,” Lippman recounts. “Producer Bob Clark acquired [the Moonrunners] script by Gy Waldron, which Waldron also directed. In 1978, Warner Bros. acquired the rights to make Moonrunners into the Hazzard TV series. But according to Mr. Clark’s lawsuit, the studio never acquired the movie rights.” The $17 million payout represents about a third of the film’s original budget of $55 million.
The article is not very kind to the efforts of ATPM‘s late screenwriter William Goldman, but Hornaday did a ton of research (including in-depth discussions with producer-star Robert Redford and Bob Woodward, co-author of the same-titled book that the film was based upon), and this is how the chips fell.
The invisible subtitle is “How Everyone Involved In This 1976 Film Except William Goldman Saved It From Goldman’s Initial Drafts, Which Were On The Glossy and Rapscallion Side and Less Than Genuine.”
This despite Hornaday acknowledging that Goldman’s earliest drafts of All the President’s Men “included most of the key beats that defined the early stages of the Watergate investigation.”
Goldman, whom I came to know moderately well over a few lunches at Cafe Boloud in the early to mid Obama years, reported in his Adventures in the Screen Trade account that he had done much if not most of the heavy lifting.
During a meeting with Bob Woodward, Goldman “had asked him to list ‘the crucial events — not the most dramatic but the essentials — that enabled the story eventually to be told,” Hornaday summarizes.
“When Woodward named them — the break-in, the arraignment, his combative collaboration with Bernstein, his late-night meetings with confidential source DeepThroat in an Arlington parking garage, his and Bernstein’s interviews with such key figures as Hugh Sloan, and their work together on an article about a $25,000 check written to CREEP Midwest finance chairman Kenneth Dahlberg — Goldman, according to his account, looked at what he’d written and saw that he’d included every one.”
A key passage in Hornaday’s piece: “The journey of All the President’s Men from mediocrity to triumph tells an alternately sobering and inspiring truth about movies: The great ones are a function of the countless mistakes that didn’t get made — the myriad bad calls, lapses in taste and bouts of bad luck that encase every production like a block of heavy, unyielding stone.”
As noted, the piece presents a case that many if not most of the “mistakes” were Goldman’s. If Goldman is reading this piece in heaven, he’s most likely howling and shaking his fist and punching his refrigerator door.
Hornaday: “This is the story of how producer-star Robert Redford and director Alan Pakula, and the cast and crew they assembled, bullied Goldman’s flawed but structurally brilliant script into art. It’s the story of a perfect movie and imperfect history, a cautionary tale whose lessons — about impunity, abuse of power and intimidation of the press — have taken on new urgency nearly 50 years after its release.
“It’s the story of how what was intended as a small-bore black-and-white character study featuring unknown actors became one of the finest films of the 20th century, one that marked the end of a cinematic era, changed journalism forever and — for better or worse — became the fractal through which we’ve come to understand the dizzyingly complicated saga known as Watergate.”
Kasi Lemmons' I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Sony, 12.21), a cradle-to-grave biopic of the late Whitney Houston, was screened last night in Las Vegas, and the word (I spoke to two viewers) is definitely on the approving side.
Login with Patreon to view this post
Earlier today I spent a few hours reading this and that portion of Quentin Tarantino‘s “Once Upon A Time in Hollywood” paperback. I have to say that I relished almost all of it.
QT’s prose isn’t quite on the level of the great Elmore Leonard, but it reads straight and clean and without a hint of hesitance or snazziness for its own sake. Page by page it doesn’t fuck around, and delivers all kinds of ripe flavor and embroidery in terms of the various characters and their backstories, and overall you just fly through the chapters.
The book, which I bought last night at the New Beverly for $11 and change, is somewhat “better” than the film, to be honest, and the more I read the more I wished that OUATIH had become a ten-part Netflix series, using each and every line in this 400-page novel. Just go for it…just sprawl it all the fuck out.
I was especially taken with a two-page scene between a red-kimono-wearing, half-bombed Rick Dalton and the real Steve McQueen, the latter sitting behind the wheel of his car outside the gate to the Polanski-Tate home and kind of half-dismissing Dalton but at the same time half-listening to him. Then they reminisce how they once played three pool games (okay, two and a half) at Barney’sBeanery back in ’62.
Not in the movie, of course…
I also love a chapter called “The Twinkie Truck” (pgs. 156 to 175). It’s mostly about the adventures, ambitions and psychology of one Charles Manson, who really wanted to be a rich and famous rock star and knew deep down that all of his spiritual guru sermons and posturings were more or less a bullshit side activity.
This is real-deal history according to QT and common knowledge, and it’s fascinating to consider some of the particulars about Manson’s interactions with Dennis Wilson, Terry Melcher, Candice Bergen and Mark Lindsay, and how one night Manson even jammed with Neil Young.
There’s another chapter called “Misadventure”, and it basically focuses on Cliff Booth‘s half-accidental murder of his needling, boozy wife, Billie, with a “shark” gun (whatever the hell that is) and the ins and outs of that episode. Again, you’re asking yourself “why wasn’t some of this material used in the film, and if it couldn’t fit why didn’t Tarantino shoot it anyway and create a 10-hour version down the road?”
Excerpt: “No one really knew for sure if Cliff shot her on purpose. It could have been just a tragic mishandling of diving equipment, which is what Cliff always claimed. But anyone who had ever seen a drunken Billie Booth berate Cliff in public in front of his colleagues didn’t buy that.
“How did Cliff get away with it? Easy — his story was plausible and it couldn’t be disproven. Cliff felt real bad about what he did to Billie. But it never occured to him not to try and get away with murder.”
Excerpt #2, pg. 167, focusing on Sharon Tate: “She liked the bubble-gum hits she heard on KHJ. She liked that song ‘Yummy Yummy Yummy’ and the follow-up song by the same group, ‘Chewy Chewy.’ She liked Bobby Sherman and that ‘Julie’ song. She loved that ‘Snoopy vs. The Red Baron’ song.
World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy is polling critics on the five best films of 2021.
HE’s favorite film of the year thus far, hands down, is Thomas Anders Jensen’s RidersofJustice: A truly original stand-out with a deliciously skewed, deadpan sense of humor. On 5.21 I insisted that violence wasn’t funny or certainly couldn’t be sold as such, and I was dead wrong. Riders’ dry, low-key comic tone is really something. I wasn’t expecting anything as original feeling as this. It’s quite the discovery. I’m actually intending to watch it again this weekend.
My second favorite is Jasmila Zbanić‘s Quo Vadis, Aida?, which played at last year’s Venice and Toronto festivals before opening stateside on 3.15.21. It’s a blistering, horrifying, you-are-there account of the 1995Srebrenicamassacre — 8000 Bosnian men and boys murdered in cold blood by Serbian troops under the command of Ratko Mladic. For me it ranks alongside other Bosnian brutality-of-war dramas like In The Land of Blood and Honey, Welcome to Sarajevo and No Man’s Land. Not a suspense piece or a classic war drama but a mother’s perspective saga that asks “who if anyone will survive the coming massacre?” You can feel it coming from around the corner. Devastating.
Third is Simon Stone‘s The Dig (Netflix, 1.15.21). I called this tale of the famous Sutton Hoo dig of 1939, which uncovered a sixth-century Anglo Saxon burial site, generally pleasing as far as this kind of modest and unassuming British period drama goes. I loved Ralph Fiennes‘ performance as real-life archeological excavator Basil Brown — his gutty working-class accent is note perfect, but the performance is in his eyes…at various times determined, defiant, sad, compassionate. And Carey Mulligan‘s Edith Pretty…talk about a performance at once strong, heartbreaking (as in sadly resigned) and resilient. I admired it despite an idiotic subplot about a married Lily James wanting to schtup the daylights out of a young, good-looking fellow, Rory (Johnny Flynn), whom she meets on the dig.
HE’s #4 is Phillip Noyce‘s Above Suspicion. On 4.1 I called it a jug of classic, grade-A moonshine — a brilliant, tautly paced, perfectly written action thriller (i.e., rednecks, drug deals, criminals, lawmen, murder, car chases, bank robberies) that plays like an emotional tragedy, and is boosted by an ace-level performance from Emilia Clarke. Most people would define ‘redneck film’ as escapist trash in the Burt Reynolds mode, but there have been a small handful that have portrayed rural boondock types and their tough situations in ways that are top-tier and real-deal. My favorites in this realm are John Boorman‘s Deliverance, Billy Bob Thornton‘s Sling Blade, and Lamont Johnson‘s The Last American Hero. Noyce’s entry is the absolute, dollars-to-donuts equal of these, or at least a close relation with a similar straight-cards, no-bullshit attitude. And it revives the strategy of William Holden‘s narration of Sunset Boulevard.
My fifth favorite is, despite its financial failure, Jon Chu and Lin-Manuel Miranda‘s In The Heights. On 6.8 I called it “good, grade-A stuff — engaging, open-hearted, snappy, well-composed, catchy tunes, appealing performances, razor-sharp cutting. One character-driven vignette after another. Dreams, hopes, identity, hip-hop, neighborhood vibes, community, self-respect…all of it earnestly feel-good. There’s no fault in any of it except for the minor fact that I was quietly groaning. Okay, not “groaning” but half-in and half-out. Admiring but disengaged. There isn’t a single moment in which I didn’t appreciate the effort, the professionalism, the heart factor, Alice Brooks‘ vibrant cinematography…all of it is fine and commendable, and I must have checked the time code 10 or 12 times, minimum.”