For tonight's main event, a pair of family movies that invest in and reflect upon lasting, spirit-sustaining values about family and community -- Frank Capra's It's A Wonderful Life ('46) vs. Francis Coppola's The Godfather (‘72)
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Whenever someone passes at too young an age or due to some tragic mishap or a stroke of bad luck, someone always says that the recently departed “loved life.” Which I would call a nice but imprecise sentiment. It’s so vague it’s almost meaningless.
HE’s definition of a lover of life would be the Kinks guy who loves living adjacent to Waterloo Station.
I’m actually a lover of the splendor and symphony of all great European train stations. Ditto the great cities and towns — Paris, Rome, Munich, Hanoi, Hoi An, Milan, Prague, Venice, Arcos de la Frontera, Caye Caulker, portions of Key West, the Berkshires, Monument Valley, Lauterbrunnen — and the tens of thousands of beautiful pastoral vistas all over. Ditto my cats, my granddaughter Sutton and her parents Jett and Cait and Sutton’s Uncle Dylan, black Volvo wagons, BMW rumblehogs, heavy leather jackets, Indian or Italian dishes, vinyl record albums, cookies & cream gelato, Italian suede lace-ups, etc.
The only negative that comes to mind amidst all this joy and nurture and rapture, the only aspect of life on planet earth that I consistently have problems with and which generally darkens my worldview are…well, people. Not everyone, of course. The majority are fine. I can just can’t with the three-toed sloths.
Yesterday an HE reader named Michael2021, who strikes me as a possible antagonist, suspiciously asked “X-factor (white) guy“…what exactly is this supposed to mean?”
HE reply: I’m white because of my ancestral heritage. As much as I’d like to do something about that (as it would win me points with the fanatics), I can’t. But the X-factor thing…
X-factor people are leftie (or, in the current atmosphere of woke political terror and dread, formerly leftie) iconoclasts who tend to sidestep the usual usual in terms of attitudes and behaviors. Semi-original, in some cases quirky or vaguely oddball types (but not too oddball…think Bill Murray-type weirdos) or against-the-grain thinkers, and in many cases serious creatives.
No age requirements, although there seem to be more over-40 X-factors than under-40s. (Go figure.) X-factor fellows never wear flip-flops and generally despise man-toes as a rule. Luca Guadagnino, Cate Blanchett, Phillip Noyce, Tilda Swinton and Willem Dafoe are X-factor; conspicuously wealthy types like Lizzo, Reese Witherspoon, Kanye, Jennifer Aniston, Will Smith and Kim Kardashian are almost certainly not.
We’re otherwise talking folks who prefer Hotel Paisano in Marfa over Houston’s DoubleTree. Or, if you will, Point Pleasant over Atlantic City, Villas Altas Mismaloya or the Thompson Zihuatanejo over Puerto Vallarta or Acapulco, Prague over Geneva, Caye Caulker over Ambergris Caye. Or a narrow, old-school hotel in Old Town Hanoi over a tourist-friendly Sofitel. And Lauterbrunnen any time of the year.
People who usually prefer to drive classic mid-century Mustangs rather than big fat SUVs with built-in wifi. Or who prefer to wear Italian suede lace-ups or even saddle shoes rather than Gucci loafers or white Converse or Nike footwear. Or who wear cowboy hats instead of Kangol berets and head warmers in the winter. Those who generally march to the beat of a subdued and slightly different drummer. Or (one more travel analogy!) those who tend to avoid the San Marco district when visiting Venice, and tend to stick to Dorsoduro.
Answer: I would safeguard the lottery ticket by locking it inside a safe and secure place with thick steel walls, but first I would take photos of myself holding the lottery ticket along with a print edition of that day’s N.Y. Times. I would then make color copies of the lottery ticket. And of course hire a smart attorney to learn how to best proceed.
And then I would (a) give Jett and Cait the money they need to pay off their student loans and home mortgage, and then encourage them to buy a sizable colonial with a guest house in Westchester or Fairfield County that I would crash in from time to time; (b) give my son Dylan funding for a company or creative project of his own choice; (c) launch a motion picture production company, base it in lower Manhattan, decorate the offices just so, and hire smart people in their 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s; (d) invest in some kind of promising green technology; (e) launch a pet care company that offers affordable spaying for people with limited income; (f) become a major financial supporter of the Telluride and Santa Barbara film festivals; (g) find some younger people (late 20s, early 30s) who are smart and creative but teetering and need a little stability in their lives (which I needed in the ’80s) and try to help their situations; (h) consider other investment opportunities that might make the world a better place; (i) secretly hire a team of Mission: Impossible guys to murder Vladimir Putin and his henchmen; (j) buy a loft in Lower Manhattan along with a BMW rumblehog scooter that I’d park in a nearby garage; (k) buy a nice three-bedroom apartment on rue Saintonge in Paris plus a BMW rumblehog scooter that I’d park in a nearby garage; (l) find an Asian supplier of gooey, high-grade opium; (m) buy a loft in Hanoi along with a BMW rumblehog scooter that I’d park in a nearby garage; and (l) buy a farmhouse in Tuscany along with a BMW rumblehog scooter that I wouldn’t have to park in a nearby garage because it’s Tuscany.
Posted on 6.7.12: Whether in Prague. Cannes. Hanoi** or Rome, I have my New York attitude about crossing streets. If traffic is heavy and somewhat aggressive then don’t be an idiot. But if you can make it across a street without getting clipped or causing anyone to slam on their brakes, fine. If a car stops to let you cross, fine. If nobody stops and you have to duck and weave and dodge like a rabbit, fine.
I don’t expect traffic laws to protect me because some people are nuts when they drive. I’ll take what comes, play what’s dealt. For I am lithe like a cat plus I tread the line between truth and insult like a mountain goat. And when you know that, nothing else matters.
** Crossing busy streets in Hanoi is actually a whole different deal. You just have to trust drivers not to hit you. Ignore the traffic…just inch your way across. Go slowly, keep a close watch, but keep moving and don’t worry about being hit.
Posted by HE comment-threader “Kit Latura”: “I wish more pedestrians had Jeff’s attitude about this. More specifically, I wish ANY PEDESTRIAN in Los Angeles would have a shred of awareness that “pedestrians have the right of way” doesn’t mean “slow down to a turtle’s pace and make a line of seven cars miss their fucking light so your otherwise active Angeleno ass can walk like a slow-ass JUST to piss off the cars.” Because LA pedestrians ABSOLUTELY do this. They’re just DARING someone to get out of their car and shoot them.”
A couple of weeks ago I saw Robert Weide‘s Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time (IFC Films, 11.19), a decades-in-the-making portrait of the late beloved novelist, whose novels Weide fell for a long time ago. And then he met Vonnegut and bonded with him, and began filming the doc back in the early ’80s (or something like that), and now, 40 years hence, it’s finally done.
I’m a Vonnegut fan and therefore partial, but Weide’s film is an intimate and devotional portrait of a fascinating, very special Great Depression and WWII-generation writer…a guy who became an inspirational cult figure for God-knows-how-many-hundreds-of-thousands of youths in the late ’60s and ’70s and beyond the infinite and all the way to Tralfamadore.
I’ve almost always been “somewhere else”, all my life. Hence the name of this column.
At any given moment I’m back in Paris or Prague or Hanoi, or in junior or senior high school or suffering through my tweener years, or tapping out a piece on my IBM Selectric in either my West 4th Street or Bank Street apartment, or hitting the Mudd Club in the early ’80s, or getting bombed or doing drugs with my friends in the early to mid ’70s or listening to David Bowie‘s “Beauty and the Beast” on a friend’s bedroom stereo in the late ’70s. Or traipsing around a wintry Park City during the hey-hey Sundance years (’95 to ’15).
Occasionally I’ll pay attention to people I’m talking to or events I happen to be witnessing or places I happen to be, but most of the time I’m Billy Pilgrim.
Two weeks shy of Halloween and it’s beach weather — 85 degrees in West Hollywood. People in easy moods, shuffling around in T-shirts and flip-flops, basking in the warmth and no loud, coarse workmen singing their hearts out to ranchero music. And the cloudless sky is a pure bright blue.
Why am I seemingly the only person in WeHo wearing a high-thread-count T-shirt, faded slim jeans and Beatle boots? I can’t answer that, but I can state without hesitancy that it’s 68 degrees in Manhattan, 49 degrees in Paris and 67 degrees in Hanoi. Life is good if you turn your mind off and float downstream and forget about people like LexG and Glenn Kenny.
Tatiana wanted to go out for dessert and coffee, and the Bel Air Hotel is one of her favorite haunts. We arrived sometime around 8 pm, and right away it felt wrong. As we walked over the stone bridge there was a huge outdoor dinner party (90 or 100 guests) happening to our left with sparkly white lights, and a live four-piece band playing obnoxious Middle-Eastern or Turkish music. It was awful, and you could just sense that the general clientele weren’t casual X-factor types like myself (I was wearing jeans, my brown leather motorcycle jacket and black-and-white saddle shoes) but Kardashian wannabes with something to prove.
The low-lit bar area has some nice mini-sofa seating, but the Wolfgang Puck dessert menu…I don’t know why I’m complaining given the locale and pretensions, but something in me recoiled when I saw they were charging $18 for a single chocolate chip cookie and a gluten-free snickerdoodle. I was muttering to myself, “I will not order an $18 cookie and this is not my scene…I don’t need to do this. I’ve hung loose in some of the coolest, most casual-vibe cafes and bistros in the world…Paris, Rome, London, Hanoi, Berlin, Belize, Savannah, San Francisco, Cannes, Munich, Prague and lower Manhattan…and the Bel Air Hotel just isn’t cool…everyone is trying too hard and the vibe feels like that of an overpriced hotel in Dubai. And that godawful music from the dinner party wouldn’t quit.
Hell is other people, particularly those wearing black designer sweat suits and white designer-label sneakers.
A couple of nights ago I was chatting with a New York journalist friend at Enzo’s Pizzeria in Westwiood, and it was 15 times cooler and more enjoyable because the place has character and personality and nobody gave a shit.
What makes us feel happy or at least comfortable or semi-content about things? Apart from discovering satori or enlightenment, I mean. (I happened to find this realm at age 19 by way of LSD and the Bhagavad Gita, but most many people haven’t a clue about this.) So what makes us feel reasonably good and assured about things?
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Morgan Neville‘s Roadrunner, a doc about the late Anthony Bourdain, will open in theatres on 7.16. The world premiere happens on June 11 at the Tribeca Film Festival.
Posted on 6.8.18: “I am stunned and appalled that Anthony Bourdain, a sensualist and an adventurer whom I admired like few others, a guy who adored sitting on a plastic stool and eating Bun Cha in Hanoi as well as scootering through rural Vietnam as much I have, a late bloomer who’d lived a druggy, dissolute life in the ’70s and ’80s but had built himself into great shape and had led a rich and robust life in so many respects…I am absolutely floored that Bourdain has done himself in.
“Bourdain was right at the top of my spitball list of famous fellows who would never, ever kill themselves because he seemed so imbued with the sensual joy of living, who had found so much happiness and fulfillment in so many foods and kitchens, in so many sights and sounds and aromas and atmospheres, travelling and roaming around 250 days per year and inhaling the seismic wonder of it all.
“Bourdain apparently suffered from depression, or so it’s being said this morning. He was 61, and by all indications was at the absolute peak of his personal journey. Like me, Bourdain’s life didn’t really take off until the late ’90s, when he was in his early 40s. But when everything finally fell into place and he became famous and semi-wealthy, he seemed to revel in the feast but without losing his head. He always kept his sanity and sense of modesty.
“In a perfect world Donald Trump would hang himself in his White House bedroom and Bourdain would go on living and travelling and taping episodes of Parts Unknown until he was 98 and perhaps beyond.
I have to be myself — the sum total of genes and upbringing and opportunities missed and seized, the small percentage of movies I’ve seen (hundreds as opposed to thousands) that are truly bracing or soul-soothing or a combination of both, fortunate good health (genes again), a flood of cultural and political (not to mention sensual, sexual, musical and spiritual) influences, a life of dreams and longings and drudgery and occasional adventure, decades of struggle and hand-to-mouth survival, the “stink of L.A. in your bones” (Charles Bukowski line) and the aromas of Paris, Hanoi, London, exurban Fairfield County, Prague and Savannah, endless car tune-ups and repairs and public transportations, mostly hard work and little slivers of leisure, the stink and horror of Twitter, ups and downs, Italian fashion and European restaurant solace, highs and lows and earphones…it is what it fucking is. A poor thing perhaps, but mine own.
So if the HE package doesn’t rock the rafters of this or that movie-savoring clique or tribe or realm with certain specific agendas and world-views, there’s probably not much I can do about it.
Vincent Hanna: “So you never wanted a regular type life?”
Neil MacAuley: “What’s that, barbecues and ball games?”
Hanna: “Yeah.”
The blessing of tapping out a daily column 10 or 12 hours daily (if you include watching films at home) and generally running around and hitting film festivals (obviously pre-pandemic) was that it didn’t include life’s usual-usuals — okay, maybe an occasional barbecue or a ball game (although the last time I attended a game at Dodger Stadium was sometime in the late ‘90s) but generally it was about operating my own steam engine and living off the fumes of that.
That all came to a crashing halt 11 months ago, of course. And now, in the words of Martin Sheen’s Cpt. Willard, “I wake up and there’s nothing.”
I don’t know why I just wrote that. The column isn’t nothing. The daily discipline and discovery and occasional tumult of Hollywood Elsewhere is damn near close to everything. Without it the emptiness would eat me whole like a blue heron swallowing a live chipmunk.
But the current, indisputable fact is that the special joys of this kind of life — the fun, the surge and the Don Logan bolt and buzz of it all…the laughs and encounters, the luscious flavors and intrigues, the traveling and the airports and cavernous European train stations, the occasional set visits, cool parties, subway intrigues, Academy screenings, small screenings, all-media screenings, press junkets, visiting the homes of friends near and far, noisy restaurants, walking the crowded streets of Rome, London, Paris and Hanoi, writing in crowded cafes, hitting the occasional bar with a pally or two, the aroma of exotic places and the hundreds upon hundreds of things that just happen as part of the general hurly-burly (including the generally ecstatic idea of a world without masks)…all of that is fucking gone now, and it probably won’t come back for another eight to twelve months, if that.
Plus there’s the terror of wokester culture and the notion that there are more than a few people out there who wouldn’t mind slipping a blue plastic bag over my head.
I haven’t felt this consumed by ennui and despair since junior high school. But at least I still have the daily grind, and for this I feel very lucky. And so this NY Times article about the serious pitfalls of letting your work overwhelm or dictate your life…my immediate reaction was “are you kidding me?”
My favorite line in the whole piece:
For 35 or 40 years my basic response was, I felt, nicely phrased by William Holden’s Pike Bishop in The Wild Bunch: “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
Now I’m not so sure. No roller coaster, no life. Well, I have a “life” (Tatiana’s persistent faith and disciplines and laughter, getting chewed out for my endless failings, restful nights, good stuff to stream, old films that look and sound great, our two cats and the comfort and assurance of the day-to-day) but the thrills and adventure are all but gone.
Ray Liotta’s Henry Hill: “These are the bad times.”
But at least Trump is finished and the vaccines are starting to give people a slight sense of hope, or at least an idea that life in this long dark tunnel will eventually open up, oxygen and sunlight-wise.
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