How do you whittle down the greatest-ever movie decade into a list of 15 films?
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Michelle Wu‘s victory means that a new Boston attitude has begun to take hold, and to HE that feels like an interesting and exciting thing.
You could go so far as to say that the old clam chowder-and-saltine crackers Boston is slipping away. The Irish Boston of whiskey-drinking legend. The Boston captured in The Friends of Eddie Coyle. The Tip O’Neill, Honey Fitz, lunch-at-Locke-Ober’s Boston. The Boston that The Verdict‘s Paul Newman lived and worked in. The Boston that Matt Damon and Ben Affleck grew up in. The Boston that Jack Nicholson‘s Whitey Bulger character exploited and terrorized.
If Wu is smart, she’ll steer clear of C.R.T. advocacy in Boston-area schools.
During the summer of ’20 I happened to notice a minor Facebook thing — a long-distance photo of an odd-shaped cloud that looked like Godzilla from, like, a distance of six or seven miles. Since that time literally hundreds of thousands (or it is millions?) of idiots have decided that this cloud had some kind of religious significance. That thread is still going today, and if you ask me it’s a metaphor for how stunningly stupid and delusional religious people can be when they put their minds to it. In a way, the fact that so many saw Jesus in a Godzilla cloud shape explains why Donald Trump is still an influential figure. Among the mouth-breathers, I mean.
“This life’s hard, man, but it’s even harder if you’re stupid.” — Steven Keats‘ “Jackie Brown” character in Peter Yates‘ The Friends of Eddie Coyle (’73).
In Peter Yates‘ The Hot Rock (’71), the fourth and final attempt to steal a huge diamond involves the surreptitious hypnotizing of a safe-deposit box security officer for a Park Avenue bank. The hypnotist, a woman called Miasmo, tells the officer to obey any person who says the words “Afghanistan Bananistan.” Co-conspirator Robert Redford, having rented his own safe-deposit box in the same bank, enters the vault and says the words. His expression as he waits to see if the hypnosis scheme has worked is, in my humble view, priceless. He does it just right.
I’ve been telling myself over and over that I wouldn’t buy Criterion’s The Friends of Eddie Coyle Bluray because the DVD version is perfectly fine. And then I weakened last night during a visit to Amoeba, and before I knew it I traded it for some Blurays I didn’t want and then I drove home and popped it into the Oppo around 10:30 pm. Wow…this is really, really much better than the DVD. Much. The added detail is so fresh and eye-filling that you just want to dive into it. It looks like a perfect, un-projected print delivered by the lab a few hours ago. The colors are much more vibrant and life-like. I still resent that Criterion cropped it at 1.85:1 when it’s obvious from the 1.66:1 opening credit sequence that a good amount of information has been cleavered for no good reason, but this is magnificent work. Cheers to the Criterion team. This is the best Coyle I’ve ever seen or will see for the rest of my life.
We all know that Moe Greene took a bullet in the eye in the final moments of The Godfather, but now he’s really dead. Poor Alex Rocco, the deep-voiced character actor who played urban goombahs for nearly four decades (from ’67’s The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre until Sidney Lumet‘s Find Me Guilty), died yesterday at age 79. But honestly? The only other Rocco performance that I genuinely enjoyed besides Moe Greene is/was Jimmy Scalise in The Friends of Eddie Coyle (’73). Even his mafia don performance in Find Me Guilty was a little underwhelming. Let’s just say Rocco peaked with The Godfather and Eddie Coyle and let it go at that. Friend: “You obviously never saw The Famous Teddy Z.” Me: “Who?” Friend: “One of the great unheralded TV sitcoms of all time. It didn’t last a season on CBS yet Rocco’s performance as an agent won him an Emmy.”
Why would I shell out for a Criterion Bluray of Peter Yates‘ The Friends of Eddie Coyle (’73) when I already have the 2009 DVD, which looks totally delectable on my 60-inch Samsung plasma? Coyle isn’t meant to be a splendorific visual experience. It’s just a modest ’70s noir with some wonderfully authentic performances and great George V. Higgins dialogue. Honestly? I’m tempted to buy the Bluray anyway but that’s because I have a neurotic weakness for improved resolution. But if I buy the damn thing and I don’t get my Bluray “bump”, trouble will follow.
Escapism of the calibre of Peter Yates‘ The Hot Rock (i.e., smart, low-key, character-driven humor delivered by name-brand actors) doesn’t happen very much these days. That aside, this mostly delicious scene has a huge flaw. When “Chicken” (i.e., Ron Leibman in disguise) throws Paul Sand off the platform and into the elevator shaft, we should of course hear an impact sound. This absence almost kills the gag. Why Yates, a first-rate craftsman who had directed Bullitt three years earlier and would pilot The Friends of Eddie Coyle two years hence, would overlook something this basic and obvious is beyond me.
I’ll be shelling out to see Michael Roskam‘s The Drop again this evening. I couldn’t understand roughly a third of the dialogue when I saw it at Toronto’s Princess of Wales theatre the weekend before last. And don’t tell me it’s my hearing — another Toronto-visiting critic agreed with my complaint about the POW’s murky tones on top of which The Theory of Everything composer Johann Johannsson told me he found the sound substandard. I’ll be seeing The Drop this evening at the Landmark, which I know has excellent sound. But it pisses me off regardless. The Drop is fine but without the sound issue I would have waited for a Vudu HDX availability. I called it “an earnestly above-average, Friends of Eddie Coyle-ish crime drama…well-acted, agreeably flavorfu…one of those low-key neighborhood personality soup bowls.” I was especially taken by the “always impressive Tom Hardy as an unassuming, seemingly-none-too-bright barkeep named Tom who surprises the audience but particularly Matthias Schoenaert‘s bullying bad-guy character in Act Three,” etc.
Pete Hammond‘s rundown of the Toronto Film Festival highlights isn’t too far off the mark. Apart, that is, from his mystifying admiration for Rahmin Bahrani‘s 99 Homes (which I vivisected in a 9.2. post-Telluride review) and his too-kindly assessment of Jennifer Aniston‘s chances of getting into the Best Actress derby with her performance in Cake. Everyone agrees that James Marsh‘s The Theory of Everything achieved the biggest Best Picture splash, and that Eddie Redmayne‘s portrayal of Stephen Hawking is a lock for Best Actor accolades. (I’m not as certain about Felicity Jones for Best Actress but it’s entirely possible.) Julianne Moore‘s Still Alice performance (i.e., first-stage Alzheimers) seemed to generate a fair amount of Best Actress talk toward the festival’s end, but I didn’t want to see it and I still don’t — I’m going to have to force myself. Morten Tyldum‘s The Imitation Game won the Grolsch People’s Choice Winner for favorite TIFF film, but then the rave responses out of Telluride told us it would be a hit with Joe and Jane Popcorn types. So far the preferred Best Picture choice among hipper, more cultivated types is Birdman, of course.
I’ve slightly overslept (i.e., seven instead of five hours) but the schedule demands that I catch Jason Reitman‘s Men, Women and Children at 9:15 this morning instead of at a 6 pm public screening at the Ryerson…always see ’em sooner rather than later. I next have a 12 noon showing of Theodore Melfi‘s St. Vincent, a.k.a., the Bill Murray dramedy. The point is to clear the decks so I can see Noah Baumbach‘s While We’re Young at 7 pm rather than wait for a Monday press screening. It’s bad when things start piling up but it’s worse if you just slump and succumb. This is a metaphor for life and survival. Man up or get eaten.
Yesterday I re-saw Wild Tales for the fun and pleasure of it (yes, I indulged…sorry). Then came Michael Roskam‘s The Drop, a low-key neighborhood crime drama which struck me as agreeably flavorful and well-acted , especially by the always impressive Tom Hardy as an unassuming, seemingly-none-too-bright barkeep named Tom who surprises the audience but particularly Matthias Schoenaert‘s bullying bad-guy character in Act Three. It’s a somewhat…no, earnestly above-average, Friends of Eddie Coyle-ish crime drama that I’m looking forward to seeing a second time with subtitles as I was able to catch maybe 60% or 70% of the dialogue. Strongly accented Jersey-speak + slightly whispery, miscalibrated sound system at the Princess of Wales = give it another shot.
Dan Gilroy‘s Nightcrawler was the somersault head-turner of the evening. The Reitman screening starts in 33 minutes so I’ll just re-post the tweets. It’s a chilly, highly original urban psychodrama about a beyond-creepy sociopathic news video shooter who fits right in. The brazen, reckless, manic-wacko quality of Nightcrawler is what makes it cool and cultish — I was fascinated, appalled, thrilled. It’s strikingly soul-less, cold, creepy…and quite respectable for that. A news-video thriller with ice in its veins. Jake Gyllenhaal plays a modern-day antithesis of Travis Bickle on adderall. An uber sociopath, triple creepy, manic and very, very controlled and controlling. And yet Bickle had a lot of soul and sadness while Gyllenhaal’s cranked madman, by contrast, hasn’t a kernel of common humanity.
There’s a line spoken by Steven Keats in The Friends of Eddie Coyle (’73): “Life is hard, man, but it’s harder if you’re stupid.” (Here‘s the mp3.) By the same token it’s hard to make a half-decent crime film but it’s really hard to enjoy it if the leads are drop-dead stupid.
I don’t mean characters who could use a few more brain cells or are slow on the pickup. I mean characters who haven’t the common sense that God gave monkeys. This is a problem. I have to find a way to bond or empathize with characters if I’m going to spend a couple of hours with them, or at least make some sense of their motives. I’d like to able to roll with people who aren’t as smart as giraffes or wildbeests, but it’s not in me.
Imagine a couple of wildebeests, a male and a female who are….well, maybe a little impetuous but definitely crazy in love with each other. One afternoon they leave their herd and trot over to a shaded area where a family of lions are taking an afternoon snooze. For whatever dumbfuck reason they start taunting the lions, spitting and kicking and defecating. At first the lions are too bewildered to respond, but they eventually get up and tackle the wildebeests and eat them. Now that‘s a tragedy!
If someone were to make a documentary about this event, the copy line would be “those wildebeests might have done a dumb thing but they were so in love with each other!”
Raymond De Felitta‘s Rob The Mob (Millenium, 3.18 in NY, 3.25 in LA) is a fact-based story about those wildebeests. Crazy, irrepressible animals who lived in Ozone, Queens in 1992. Their names were Thomas and Rosemarie Uva (played by Michael Pitt and Broadway stage enchilada Nina Arianda). They had criminal records, drug issues (at least on Thomas’s part) and hell-bent inclinations, and so they decided to augment their income as bill collectors by knocking off a series of mafia social clubs. Insane behavior. Death wish.
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