The Spanish section of Jonathan Glazer and Jeremy Thomas‘s Sexy Beast (’00) was shot in Agua Amarga, a small village in the Almeira region on the southeastern coast. The large, white, three-bedroom cliffside home that was occupied by “Gal” Dove (Ray Winstone) and his wife DeeDee (Amanda Redman) is located on Calle Ferrocarill Minero (04149), and is called “El Palmeral“. I can’t tell if rooms inside the home are renting for $164 nightly or if the entire place rents for some other figure.
If you’ve seen Sexy Beast, you’ll appreciate this Google Maps photo of the home and the mention of a certain character just south of the residence (i.e., the swimming pool).
Vampire Rudy, 76, has tested positive for the coronavirus. But you knew that, of course, and we all know how this will turn out. Rudy will most likely be given the same super-medications that Trump was given during his brief bout with the disease, and will be more or less out of the woods within two or three weeks, if not sooner.
Who’s dying from the virus then? Those suffering from frail constitutions, obesity (although that didn’t stop former New Jersey governor Chris Christie), respiratory issues (cigarette smoking), a lack of Vitamin D, etc. And those with threadbare health insurance.
“In the early aughts screenwriter William Goldman (Marathon Man, All The President’s Men, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) explained what a ‘drop-out’ moment is — i.e., when something happens in a film that just makes you collapse inside, that makes you surrender interest and faith in the ride that you’re on. You might stay in your seat and watch the film to the end, but you’ve essentially ‘left’ the theatre. The movie had you and then lost you, and it’s not your fault.” — from “Drop-Out Moments,” posted on 4.11.17.
After too much delay, Hollywood Elsewhere sat down last night and consumed the first three episodes of Scott Frank‘s The Queen’s Gambit. Now I know why it’s so popular. Then again three fucking hours on the couch and another four to go.
I don’t like binge-watching unknown quantities as a rule, although I’ll gladly and happily gorge myself on a longform series if I know and admire the creators (like with Joe Penhall and David Fincher‘s Mindhunter). Yes, I’ll definitely be watching the remainder of The Queen’s Gambit. And yet (and this is important) with reservations.
I went with it for the most part, and especially when chessmaster Anya Taylor-Joy began to defeat all those presumptuous and in many cases arrogant male opponents. It hooked me good and proper, partly because I love watching geniuses dominate the also-rans while re-ordering the known universe. I don’t like alcoholism or drug-addiction stories for the most part because they’re all the same thing, but I’ll tolerate them if the addicted protagonist is brilliant or clever or inventive enough.
But I dropped out at the very end of episode #1, and as a result stopped investing. And so my current attitude is “I like The Queen’s Gambit but I don’t trust it.” Because the stealing-the-sedatives scene is completely ridiculous.
As a young teenager, Taylor-Joy’s Beth Harmon may be emotionally uncertain or naive but she’s obviously a strategic genius in terms of outwitting her opponents. And yet we’re asked to believe that Beth is the world’s stupidest and clumsiest thief when it comes to ripping off handfuls of green-and-white pills from a locked office inside the orphanage.
She decides to make her move while kids and staffers are watching a 16mm showing of Henry Koster‘s The Robe (’53), which lasts 135 minutes. Beth may not know the exact running time, but most films are between 95 and 115 minutes, and any idiot looking to steal drugs during a movie knows that the smartest time to slip out would be around the halfway mark, at which point the audience is fully engaged (unless the film stinks) and less interested in the whereabouts of a young girl who’s gone to the bathroom.
So does Beth make her move around the one-hour mark? Of course not. She waits until the very last scene, when Richard Burton and Jean Simmons are being sentenced to death by Jay Robinson and the 16mm spool of film has nearly run its course.
You can say “but Beth is so addicted to sedatives that she’s lost her mind and all powers of reasoning.” Bullshit. Smart people might act foolishly or irrationally, but they never behave like morons. Addicts value getting high more than anything else in the world, and will use every clever gambit and connivance they can think of to score a good supply of whatever.
And then it gets even crazier. When Beth finally gets her hands on the big jar she wolfs down several pills (at least 10 or 15) while stuffing her pockets. And then she collapses from an overdose less than a minute later, even though it always takes at least five or ten minutes for drugs to enter your bloodstream. And then she drops the glass jar and it shatters on the floor and blah blah.
The scene is just absurd, and it told me that as good as the series is for the most part, Frank and co-creator Allan Scott are willing to fiddle around and flim-flam for the sake of fleeting impact, and so I couldn’t watch the rest with any sense of faith. And when faith goes, belief goes. And when belief goes, caring quickly dissipates. And that leads to alienation.
“William ‘Dollar Bill’ Mersey spent hours with Epstein inside New York’s notorious Metropolitan Correctional Center in his role as an ‘inmate companion’ while the multimillionaire was on suicide watch. Mersey served a year at MCC in lower Manhattan after pleading guilty to federal tax evasion for under-reporting income from his escort advertising agency. He was released in early November last year.
Mersey quote: “Epstein didn’t brag about his lifestyle but knew everybody [who] mattered, so I did ask him one time, ‘Jeffrey, give me one anecdote that’s emblematic of the essence of Donald Trump.’
“Epstein thought about it and then said, ‘Donald and I are flying in my private jet to Florida and I have a French girl with me. Donald says to me, why don’t we land in Atlantic City so I can show your friend my casino?
“[Epstein] said, I’m not landing in Atlantic City…it’s all white trash down there. So the French girl goes, what does white trash mean? I don’t understand. And Trump says, ‘It’s me without money.'”
The doomed passengers on Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 — 176 in all — were mistakenly murdered, it turns out. The jet was hit by a Russian-built Tor-M1 (SA-15) surface-to-air missile system operated by the Iranian military. Businessinsider: “Pentagon officials told Newsweek that the incident was probably an accident, as anti-aircraft systems were likely active at the time of the crash early Wednesday.”
Nat Faxon and Jim Rash‘s Downhill (Fox Searchlight, 2.14.20) is an English-language remake of Ruben Ostlund‘s Force Majeure (’14). The Downhill trailer suggests that while the feature has been slightly massaged to allow for a dab or two of humor, it’s almost an exact copy of the original.
Ostlund’s film basically asks “who are we deep down?” It suggests that some of the noble qualities we all try to project aren’t necessarily there.
The inciting incident is a massive, fast-approaching snowslide that threatens to bury several vacationers sitting on an outdoor terrace at a pricey ski resort, and specifically a husband and father named Tomas (Johannes Bah Kuhnke) who succumbs to instinct and decides to run for his life as the wall approaches.
After the danger passes wife Ebba (Lisa Loven Kongsli) resents what she regards as Tomas’s cowardice and betrayal. Tomas should have either (a) embraced her and their two kids and hunkered down in the hope that the landslide wouldn’t smother and kill them, or (b) quickly leapt to his feet, grabbed her and the kids and yanked them all from their seats and into the relative safety of the resort’s interior. Or…you know, something other than just try to save his own terrified ass.
Will Ferrell plays the chickenshit dad; Julia Louis Dreyfuss plays the resentful wife.
HE viewpoint: Blind instinct tends to rule when a person feels threatened by imminent death. Most of us would hightail it when a mountain of snow is approaching, I think. Any guy who says “in this horrible situation I would hug my wife and kids in the last few seconds we have before being smothered to death”…anyone who insists they would not try to escape suffocation is almost certainly lying.
You can bet that if I were, say, ten years old and I saw an avalanche coming while sitting outdoors with my dad, mom, sister and brother, I would definitely run for cover. Dads aren’t expected to do this, I realize, but human nature is human nature.
Jennifer Kent‘s The Nightingale opened yesterday. It has a 79% Rotten Tomatoes rating, but that number should be in the 90s. It’s a difficult sit but a very worthy and highly respectable film. The only problem is that it drops the ball around 15 or 20 minutes before the ending. Reactions?
Except I saw The Nightingale three or four days ago and didn’t think it was quite as horrific as Sydney festivalgoers did. Rough stuff, yes, but delivered with a kind of stylistic restraint.
Set in 1825 Tasmania, the film is a rough-round-the-edges revenge drama in which Clare (Aisling Franciosi), a young Irish convict, is determined to pursue a cruel British officer (Sam Claflin) and three underlings after they rape her and then murder her husband and baby. Clare hires Billy (Baykali Ganambarr), an Aboriginal tracker, to guide her through the island’s jungle-like wilderness on the trail of the killers.
The audience complaints were about two scenes in which Clare is savagely raped, the second time in gang fashion. Her infant child is also killed in the latter scene.
Give all this negative build-up, I was surprised by how much I admired and respected The Nightingale, the awful cruelty and brutality notwithstanding. Kent is a very scrupulous and well-focused director, and she’s simply incapable of delivering over-the-top violence for its own sake. Start to finish The Nightingale feels well-honed and exacting. It depicts terrible things, but it’s not a wallow. It conveys a sense of justice and appropriate balance.
But there’s also a point in The Nightingale in which which everything changes and it all kind of falls apart — the story tension vanishes. It happens somewhere around the 75% or 80% mark when Clare loses her nerve in her quest for revenge. From that point on it doesn’t work. Because the film has delivered what William Goldman used to call a “drop-out” moment -— i.e., when something happens that just makes you collapse inside, that makes you surrender interest and faith in the ride that you’re on. You might stay in your seat and watch the film to the end, but you’ve essentially “left” the theatre. The movie had you and then lost you, and it’s not your fault.
Mayor Pete Buttigieg is allegedly in big trouble with African American voters (not just in South Bend but all over) because he didn’t personally step into the 6.16 confrontation between South Bend Police Sgt. Ryan O’Neill and the late Eric J. Logan. Or because he’s had the temerity to run for President and therefore wasn’t home in South Bend where he should have been at the time of the shooting.
The O’Neill-Logan shooting happened around 3 am, which suggests that if Buttigieg had been in South Bend he probably would have been home sleeping. Nonetheless, the African-American community mantra is “dilletante Mayor Pete has to face the music!”
O’Neill’s account of the shooting of Logan is admittedly curious. Logan, who apparently had been breaking into cars, either came at O’Neill with a knife or “threw” it at him. What kind of a drooling idiot threatens a cop with a knife when the cop is holding a loaded gun and saying “drop it!”? It’s obviously problematic that O’Neill didn’t turn on his bodycam, and so the African American community is assuming O’Neill is flat-out lying, and that he may have plugged Logan without reasonable cause.
But I’ve also read that (a) today’s high-end bodycams can be automatically activated when a police offer removes his/her weapon from his/her holster, and that (b) South Bend chose instead to purchase manually-operated bodycams, which are cheaper.
I know I’m just a typically smug and clueless white guy sitting in West Hollywood, but how likely is it that a 19-year veteran of a big-city police force who rose in the ranks…hired in 2000, promoted to sergeant in 2015…how likely is it that O’Neill would just shoot Logan in cold blood? It’s possible, sure, but how likely?
A 6.18 account of the incident by South Bend Tribune reporters Greg Swiercz and Christian Sheckler states the following:
(a) “Investigators…found six vehicles [that] had been broken into — two on William [Street], two on Taylor Street and two in the Central High parking lot. A purse, a wallet and a knife — the same knife that was found at the scene of the shooting — were stolen from the various vehicles, according to South Bend prosecutor Ken Cotter .”
(b) Cotter and Metro Homicide commander Michael Grzegorek said that “shortly after O’Neill drove into the Central High Apartments parking lot, he saw a person’s legs sticking out of a Honda Civic. O’Neill stopped his cruiser, stepped out and asked the man if the car was his. The man said ‘yes’ but O’Neill spotted a purse wedged in his clothing. The man then emerged from the car with knife in his right hand.”
(c) “Logan is said to have ignored multiple orders to ‘drop the knife’ and then approached O’Neill with the knife raised. O’Neill, backing up toward his vehicle, fired two shots. One shot struck Logan in the right side of his abdomen, while the other struck the opened door of the car. Logan ‘was coming toward (O’Neill) at roughly the same speed that Sgt. O’Neill was retreating,’ Cotter said.”
Legend has long had it that sometime in late ’65 the once-friendly Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs had a falling out. While riding around Manhattan in a long black limousine, Dylan, who was into his “uptown Bob” phase, played a new unrecorded song for Ochs (reportedly “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?“) and the latter, who had gradually developed a view that Dylan’s post-1963 material was too vague and mercurial and not political enough, told Dylan he didn’t like it.
I haven’t listened to “Window” in ages, and it’s a lot better than I’d remembered. I’m not saying Dylan was justified in giving Ochs the boot, but I understand why he might have succumbed to an angry impulse. It’s a good song. Ochs was wrong.
Dylan will turn 78 later this month. I don’t like to say or even think stuff like this, but he’s a year and a half older than effing Joe Biden. Like DeNiro and Scorsese, I wish Dylan could somehow stop aging and be allowed to remain on the planet earth forever.
I loved Alexandre O. Philippe‘s Memory — The Origins of Alien, which I saw last night at 10 pm. It digs down, re-explores and triple-dip examines each and every aspect of Ridley Scott’s 1979 classic…an absolutedelight. It has everything, delivers everything…you leave completely sated, satisfied and well fed.
Please pay no attention to David Ehrlich’s pissy Indiewire review, to wit: “Philippe’s feature-length analysis of the roots and repercussions of RidleyScott‘s horror masterpiece, seems determined to reconcile its two fundamental truths. The first is that every successful movie reveals something profound about the time when it was made. The second is that great art taps into a collectiveunconscious as old as time itself, tracing a direct line from ancient mythologies to modern pop culture.” — correct.
“At the very least, Philippe’s entertaining but frustratingly incomplete documentary confirms that Alien did both of those things, and it did them well. [But it’s] far more interested in exploring where the Xenomorph came from than it is in contextualizing why it was born in 1979 (and continues to grow inside of us today)” — and I didn’t care.
“Caught somewhere between a genealogy project, an oral history, and an in-depth video essay about the iconic scene that seared Alien into our imaginations, it reaffirms the film’s basic power without probing deeply enough to achieve any power of its own” — bullshit.
Guillermo del Toro is going to worship Memory, and tweet his ass off about it.
We all know what Aaron Sorkin meant three days ago when he said (a) he really likes “the new crop of young people who were just elected to Congress”, but (b) “they now need to stop acting like young people, okay? It’s time to do that.” We know what he meant.
Sorkin meant that Democrats have to start conveying to Middle American bumblefucks that they’re not entirely about advancing the agendas of POCs, LGBTQs and Twitter lefties, and that they don’t necessarily believe that “white person” is an epithet, and that whiteys are not necessarily evil on a genetic basis.
We’re living in such an insane, loop-dee-loop world right now that the previous half-sentence (beginning with “they” and ending with “basis”) will, in the minds of some, be taken as proof that I’m a bad person. In fact I just don’t believe in necessarily demonizing Anglo Saxons as Satan’s emissaries on earth, which is pretty much what the SJW twitter wing of the Democratic party has come to accept as a given.
“I think there’s a great opportunity here, now more than ever, for Dems to be the non-stupid party, to point out the difference,” Sorkin said. “”We [have to convey that we] haven’t forgotten the economic anxiety of the middle class, but we’re going to be smart about this. We’re not going to be mean about it.”
From “Americans Strongly Dislike PC Culture,” an October 2018 Atlantic article by the Harvard-affiliated Yascha Mounk: “On social media, the country seems to divide into two neat camps: Call them the woke and the resentful.
“Team Resentment is manned — pun very much intended — by people who are predominantly older and almost exclusively white. Team Woke is young, likely to be female, and predominantly black, brown, or Asian (though white ‘allies’ do their dutiful part). These teams are roughly equal in number, and they disagree most vehemently, as well as most routinely, about the catchall known as political correctness.
“Reality is nothing like this. As scholars Stephen Hawkins, Daniel Yudkin, Miriam Juan-Torres and Tim Dixon argue in a report published Wednesday, ‘Hidden Tribes: A Study of America’s Polarized Landscape,’ most Americans don’t fit into either of these camps. They also share more common ground than the daily fights on social media might suggest — including a general aversion to PC culture.”
Starting in ’02 and sporadically from then on, I’ve been listening to “Nothing Man” — replaying over and over at first, presently now and then, sometimes forgotten or put aside but never entirely gone. It’s like a friend, this song. Something I trust and rely upon from time to time.
Springsteen’s lyrics and vocal delivery are on the opaque side; the hook aspects have more to do with the “duh-doo-doo-doo-doo” choir at the end plus the French horn plus the modified, low-register cymbal crash it begins with.
Above and beyond the allusion to 9/11 horror (“misty cloud of pink vapor”), it resonates, I think, because everyone feels wiped out or hollowed out at one time or another — alive and focused as far as it goes but without much inside, at least for the time being.