When it comes to bad-boy auteur Bertrand Blier, I’ve always been slightly more enamored of Going Places (’74) than Get Out Your Handkerchiefs (’78). If someone was dumb enough to remake Handkerchiefs in the Blier style, it goes without saying that the Robespierres would give them a fairly hard time.
It actually ran into some feminist criticism 40 years ago, primarily over Blier and the sexist-klutz characters played by Gerard Depardieu (so thin!) and Patrick Dewaere relentlessly objectifying or eroticizing Carole Laure.
Wiki borrow: After four ballots, the National Society of Film Critics named it the Best Film of 1978. A disapproving People critic called this decision “downright incomprehensible.” In early ’79 Handkerchiefswon the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.
Cohen Media Group will open a 40th anniversary 2K restoration at West L.A.’s Laemmle Royal on 4.19.19.
The Dead Don’t Die (Focus Features, 6.14) will obviously be fun, but it’s a departure and a half for Jim Jarmusch, the Godfather of east-coast, cool-cat, laid-back hipster autuerism. All I can figure is that Jarmusch decided that in the wake of Only Lovers Left Alive (which I loved) and Paterson (admired) that he wanted to make an actual hit movie for a change. The obvious template was Ruben Fleischer‘s Zombieland (’09). The cast is top-to-bottom Jarmusch types — Bill Murray, Adam Driver, Tilda Swinton, Chloë Sevigny, Steve Buscemi, Danny Glover, Caleb Landry Jones, Rosie Perez, Iggy Pop, Sara Driver, RZA, Carol Kane, Tom Waits. Allegedly locked for next month’s Cannes Film Festival.
“Captain Marvel might be the first blockbuster movie whose animating idea is fear. Every page of the script betrays terror of what people might say about the film on social media. Give Carol Danvers a love interest? Eek! No, women can’t be defined by the men in their lives! Make her vulnerable? OMG, no, that’s crazy. Feminine? What century are you from if you think females should be feminine?
“Toward the end of the movie, when a villain preparing for an epic confrontation with Carol, the fighter-pilot-turned-Superwoman, chides her that she will fail because she can’t control her emotions, there is no tension whatsoever. We’ve just spent two hours watching her be utterly unfazed by anything. Giving Carol actual emotions would, of course, lead to at least 27 people calling the film misogynist on Twitter, and the directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck are petrified of that.
“Just to be completely, unerringly, let’s-bubble-wrap-the-universe safe, Boden and Fleck decided to make Danvers stronger than strong, fiercer than fierce, braver than brave. Larson spends the entire movie being insouciant, kicking butt, delivering her lines in an I-got-this monotone and staring down everything with a Blue Steel gaze of supreme confidence.
“Superheroes are defined by their limitations — Superman’s Kryptonite, Batman’s mortality — but Captain Marvel is just an invincible bore. The screenplay by Boden, Fleck, and Geneva Robertson-Dworet, with a story by the three of them plus Nicole Perlman and Meg LeFauve, presents us with Brie Larson’s Carol being amazingly strong and resilient at the beginning, middle, and end. This isn’t an arc, it’s a straight line.” — from “Captain Mary Sue,” by Kyle Smith.
I am sick to death of superhero movies and origin stories in particular. I am sick sick to death of superhero movies and origin stories in particular. I am sick sick sick to death of superhero movies and origin stories in particular. Because they’re mostly the same flim-flam — the same synthetic, force-fed oatmeal.
I nonetheless saw a very sizable portion of Captain Marvel last night, and because I submitted for a full 80 minutes I think I deserve a pat on the back. Just as Yeshua of Nazareth so loved the human race that he submitted to their doubts and tortures and finally death on the cross, I sat through Captain Marvel out of dumb allegiance and devotion to the potential of movies to deliver something profound or thrilling or extra in some regard.
“Captain Marvel starts out awfully damn busy and time-shifty and flash-cutty,” I wrote last night, “teeming with characters who quip and deceive and spin riddles with the same dry-ironic, less-than-fully-invested tone that ALL superhero characters and villains have always trafficked in, and at the same time switching allegiances and adopting new identities and shape-shifting with ferocious conviction…where was I? Oh, yes, the subject of Captain Marvel vs. Hollywood Elsewhere.
“It finally settles down by going back to Los Angeles of 1995 (Blockbuster, Radio Shack) as Brie Larson‘s Carol Danvers teams up with a nicely CG youthified Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury (looking 36 or 37, smooth complexion, thinner, full head of hair)…at the same time Larson also runs into a grinning Stan Lee on a bus.
“80 minutes into this Deja Vu on top of another Deja Vu, a feeling of profound spiritual fatigue came over me…a voice that began to repeat over and over, ‘You have sat through this tightly sprung, time-trippy, CG-reliant action film before…well. a close relative of it with slightly less emphasis on progressive feminist attitude..it was called T2 and you saw it with your kids in Santa Monica back in ’91, except James Cameron did a better job with the script.”
This morning I am much more on the side of The Hollywood Reporter‘s Todd McCarthy than Variety‘s Owen Glieberman. McCarthy was basically bored while Gleiberman emerged in a respectful and even enthused frame of mind.
HE to Gleiberman: “The origin story as head game”? “Like someone trapped in a matrix,” Larson’s Danvers is “shaking off the dream of who she is in order to locate the superwoman she could be”?
Is the ability to enjoy superhero origin flicks some kind of hard-wired genetic thing? Were you into Marvel or D.C. comic books as a kid? I read comic books when I was nine, ten, eleven. I can remember my grandfather saying to my father, “It’s fascinating how they read these things…what do they see in them?” But then an amazing, life-transforming thing happened. I discovered movies and said to myself, “Wait…these are much better diversions!”
Last night’s death-reel sequence ran 4:21, but the cavalcade of faces only lasted for 3:29. It began with Susan Anspach at the 24-second mark and ended with Albert Finney at 3:43. The Academy had a little less than a minute’s worth of wiggle room. They surely could have fit in the great Stanley Donen, who passed the day before yesterday.
I know enough about editing and re-editing a video piece that adding a single visual element isn’t a big deal these days. If they had wanted to include Donen, theycouldhavedoneit. They were lazy, plain and simple.
And while they were at it, they could have included Andy Vajna, Gary Kurtz and R. Lee Ermey. I understand about omitting Carol Channing — she was a Broadway gal.
Sometime back in the ’90s or early aughts Las Vegas Review-Journal film and culture writer Carol Cling floated the idea of an old-fashioned Rat Pack casino on the Strip — a time-trip experience that would deliver the ’50s design, atmosphere and attitude of the Sands, which was located at 3355 Las Vegas Blvd (where the Venetian stands today). Old-fashioned coin slot machines, for example — the kind that would take nickels, quarters, 50-cent pieces and silver dollars, and when someone would win the bells and whistles would sound as the coins clattered onto those metal trays…great vibe!
Back in the days of Cinevegas I suggested a space-aliens casino — a kind of Star Wars meets Alien meets Forbidden Planet meets James Arness in The Thing meets Mars Attacks…flying saucers hovering above the main entrance, booze-sipping monsters at the cantina bar, concierge and hotel staff with green-sparkly faces and Ray Walston-styled insect antennae sticking out of their heads…a casino from another planet.
Has any human being, male or female, ever worn an uglier tuxedo than the one worn by Godfather producer Al Ruddy during the 45th Academy Award ceremony, which was held on Tuesday, 3.27.73?
The show’s producer was Howard W. Koch. There were four co-hosts that night — Carol Burnett, Michael Caine, Charlton Heston and Rock Hudson. The show aired on NBC, and the duration — hold on to your hats — was two hours and 38 minutes. Amazingly, they managed to keep it to this length while at the same time handing out Oscars for Best Cinematography, Film Editing, Live-Action Short, etc. (A friend reminds that the Makeup/Hairstyling category hadn’t been created at that point.)
Ruddy represented the heavy-hitter non-creatives behind The Godfather — himself, Robert Evans, Peter Bart, Charles Bluhdorn, Frank Yablans — but in various ways these guys made things hugely difficult for director Francis Coppola. Okay, maybe not Bart but certainly Evans and Bluhdorn, and to some extent Ruddy.
Five years ago a YouTube commenter wrote, “The Godfather producers were a bunch of assholes. They were against casting Brando and Pacino. They were against Nino Rota‘s score. They were against Gordon Willis‘ dark photography. They tried to have Coppola fired several times. If The Godfather is one of the best movies ever made, it is in spite of its producers, not thanks to them.”
There was more to it than just that, but the commenter is not wholly wrong.
According to Mark Seals‘ “The Godfather Wars” (Vanity Fair, March 2009), when Coppola announced that The Godfather “should not be a film about organized crime but a family chronicle, a metaphor for capitalism in America,” Evans’ reaction was “Is he nuts?”
On the other hand one of Evans’ earliest demands was that The Godfather would have to feel east-coast authentic, that audiences would be able to “smell the spaghetti.” And he did, according to some accounts, upbraid Coppola for initially submitting a shorter cut that lacked that spaghetti aroma, that de-emphasized the family stuff.
We’ve just begun the final year of the second decade of the 21st Century. Somebody on Twitter was asking this morning for lists of the bestfilmsofthelastnineyears, and so I might as well (a) re-post my long-game roster as well as (b) HE’s top ten from this period (2010 to 2018) at the very end:
Best of 2010: The Social Network, The Fighter, Black Swan, Inside Job, Let Me In, A Prophet, Animal Kingdom, Rabbit Hole, The Tillman Story, Winter’s Bone (10).
Best of 2011 (ditto): A Separation, Moneyball, Drive, Contagion, X-Men: First Class, Attack the Block (6).
Best of 2012: Zero Dark Thirty, Silver Linings Playbook, Amour, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Barbara, The Grey, Moonrise Kingdom (7).
Best of 2013: The Wolf of Wall Street, 12 Years A Slave, Inside Llewyn Davis, Her, Dallas Buyers Club, Before Midnight, The Past, Frances Ha (8).
Best of 2014: Birdman, Citizen Four, Leviathan, Gone Girl, Boyhood, Locke, Wild Tales. (7)
Best of 2015: Spotlight, The Revenant; Mad Max: Fury Road; Beasts of No Nation; Love & Mercy, Son of Saul; Brooklyn; Carol, Everest, Ant-Man; The Big Short. (10)
Best of 2016: Manchester By The Sea, A Bigger Splash, The Witch, Eye in the Sky, The Confirmation, The Invitation. (6)
Best of 2017: Call Me My Your Name, Dunkirk, Lady Bird, The Square, War For The Planet of the Apes, mother!, The Florida Project. (7)
Best of 2018: Roma., Green Book, First Reformed, Hereditary, Capernaum, Vice, Happy As Lazzaro, Filmworker, First Man, Widows, Sicario — Day of the Soldado. (11).
TOP TEN OF THE LAST NINE YEARS (totally arbitrary, partly whimsical, tethered to the moment): Manchester By The Sea, A Separation, The Social Network, Zero Dark Thirty, Call Me By Your Name, Son of Saul, The Wolf of Wall Street, Leviathan, The Square, Moneyball.
Producer Andy Vajna, the very model of a swaggering, cigar-smoking, Rolls Royce-owning, high-falutin’ producer during his ’80s and ’90s heyday, has passed at age 74. That’s kinda young to check out (was it the cigars?), but you can’t say the Hungarian-born Vajna didn’t live a full and robust life.
In a certain sense I “worked” for Vajna in ’85 as an employee of partnered publicists Bobby Zarem and Dick Delson. (We also worked for Sylvester Stallone). I was a bit surprised to learn that year that the bearded, barrel-chested Vajna, who looked like a guy in his early ’50s, was just shy of 40. He was nothing if not decisive, charming, tough, pugnacious. He was no pushover, and he never let you forget that he was Mr. King Shit.
As a distributor, producer or financier, Vajna (allied for a long period with Carolco partner Mario Kassar before starting Cinergi) enjoyed a 14-year flush period that began with First Blood in ’82 and ended with Evita in ’96. Vajna mostly made loud, high-impact audience movies, although he backed four prestige films — Evita, Jacob’s Ladder, Angel Heart and Nixon.
During the heyday Vajna produced or exec produced Rambo: First Blood Part II, Extreme Prejudice, Rambo III, Red Heat, Music Box, Total Recall, Air America,, Medicine Man, Tombstone, Renaissance Man, Color of Night, Die Hard with a Vengeance and Judge Dredd.
Vajna quit Hollywood in 2010 to move back to Hungary, where “he took over the country’s moribund film industry and made Budapest a destination for international film crews.”
A 2016 USA Today story (“Big Hollywood producer reaches for the stars in Hungary”) reported that “much of the action in Hungary’s movie industry can be traced to Vajna’s influence. Vajna was claimed that “foreign film expenditures in Hungary grew from $5 million five years ago to $280 million now.” Which wasn’t an empty boast — Hungary really did bloom as a production center due to his stewardship.
Vajna and Kassar in ’82 or thereabouts, in the wake of the huge success of First Blood
The legendary Carol Channing made it to age 97 — no sadness or tragedy in that. She was a Broadway star, of course (she costarred in one semi-significant movie — 1967’s Thoroughly Modern Millie), and hugely popular among stage mavens. But Channing was relatively unknown to movie and even TV audiences for the most part. To them Marilyn Monroe was and always will be Lorelei Lee in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and Barbra Streisand was and always will be the star of Hello, Dolly. And to me, Channing was always the pizazzy but somewhat older performer who always played younger than her years. Channing’s Lorelei was launched in the 1949 B’way production of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, when she was 28 or thereabouts. But her biggest role, that of Dolly Gallagher Levi in Hello, Dolly!, which opened on Broadway in 1964, happened when she was 43. Those eyes, those saucer eyes. And that gleaming smile.
8:26 pm: Bohemian Rhapsody beats A Star Is Born for Best Picture, Drama! Oh, joy and rapture! Bobby Peru, Bobby Peru, Bobby Peru…you know what just happened! And producer Graham King doesn’t even mention Bryan Singer???? Posted on 12.26.18: “Due Respect, But A Star Is Born Must Be Stopped.” We did it, kids! We did it! Oh, and Kris Tapley can kiss Hollywood Elsewhere’s ass.
8:16 pm: The glorious shutdown of A Star Is Born continues as Bohemian Rhapsody‘s Rami Malek wins for Best Actor! Hollywood Elsewhere is howling, whoo-hooing, rolling around the floor, slapping the thighs. “Thank you to Freddie Mercury!” But Malek didn’t thank Bryan Singer at all? Bohemian Rhapsody was Singer’s story, in a way. He channelled all of his life as a bad boy into Freddie’s character. It’s his mea culpa. It’s one thing to not mention an alleged sexual predator when you’re worried about losing, but after you’ve won…? Not even a minor mention?
8:05 pm: Lady Gaga HASN’T won the Golden Globe for Best Actress, Drama! The great Glenn Close wins instead! Amazing! Does this portend a corresponding Best Actor loss by A Star Is Born‘s Bradley Cooper? I’m hyperventilating, experiencing convulsions, having trouble breathing. Gaga has lost! Bobby Peru, this is for you!
7:56 pm: Green Book wins for Best Film, Musical or Drama. Are Robert Strauss and other like-minded critics red-faced and fuming as we speak? Maybe, maybe not. But I’d like to think so. Three Golden Globes for this very finely made film — a feel-good road dramedy that HE is proud to have praised and stood by through thick and thin. This is HE’s feel-good moment.
7:48 pm: HE’s own Olivia Colman (dead brilliant in Tyrannosaur) wins for Best Actress, Comedy or Musical for The Favorite. HE agrees, approves, applauds.
7:37 pm: Assassination of Gianni Versace wins for Best Limited Series or TV Movie. Fine. Never saw it. I will now.
7:35 pm: Sam Rockwell as Bob Fosse? Another awful Walmart commercial.
7:33 pm: Great iPhoneX commercial! Best commercial of the evening?
7:27 pm: Rachel Brosnahan, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Best Performance by an Actress, TV series, Comedy or Musical. And Chuck Lorre‘s The Kaminsky Method wins for Best TV series, Comedy or Musical.
7:17 pm: Harrison Ford presents the Best Director award to Alfonso Cuaron. Which is a good thing because (I know this is going to sound small and mean) at least Bradley Cooper didn’t win. But it is good, I think, that A Star Is Born isn’t sweeping because ASIB is not an original film that comes from the culture that we’re all living and struggling in. And (forgive me) it does seem to increase the possibility that Cooper won’t win for Best Actor. Be honest — Cooper didn’t look overjoyed when Alfonso won.
7:08 pm: El Duderino is given the Cecil B. DeMille award. The career reel covers everything, but was there a clip from Stay Hungry (’76), one of his all-time greatest? A special thanks is offered to Peter Bogdanovich, the Coen brothers, Scott Cooper, “the late great Michael Cimino,” etc. Great quote: “We’ve all been tagged….we’re all here, all alive!” 2nd Great Quote: “We’re all trim tabs! Tag…you’re it”
7:04 pm: I need to watch Games of Games. Colorful rollicking sadism, etc.
6:56 pm: Tyler Perry asks, “Are the people at the Golden Globes as drunk as they seem? Yes, they are.” Darren Criss wins for his performance in The Assassination of Gianna Versace. Verdict on that floral tux jacket he’s wearing?
6:52 pm: Alfonso Cuaron‘s Roma wins Best Foreign Language feature award. Fine & hearty congrats, but how is it that Pawel Pawlikowski‘s Cold War wasn’t even nominated?
6:44 pm: Christian Bale will win Best Actor award for his vp Dick Cheney portrayal in Vice. That British working-class accent. Here’s to Bale’s upcoming portrayal as the “charisma-free” Mitch McConnell!
6:41 pm: Sharp Objects‘ Patricia Clarkson wins for Best Supporting Actress, TV
6:32 pm: Mahershala Ali wins Best Supporting Actor for Green Book! HE agrees, approves, applauds. It would have also been nice if Richard E. Grant (Can you Ever Forgive Me?) had won but Green Book is close to my heart. And now the Green Book screenplay has won! So Green Book is going to win for Best Film, Comedy or Musical…great. I’d like to think that at least a few of the p.c. tyrants who went after Green Book on twitter are grinding their teeth and punching their refrigerator doors as we speak. Feels pretty good on this end!
6:24 pm: GG co-host Sandra Oh wins for Best Actress, TV Drama for Killing Eve. Overdoing the shock and surprise and oh-my-God? Naaah.
6:18 pm: Regina King wins Best Supporting Actress for If Beale Street Could Talk. So now she’s back in the Oscar conversation? The fact that she was absent from the SAG noms indicated otherwise. Regina pledges that everything she produces over the next two years is going to “be 50% women”…okay!
6:12 pm: I hate these Walmart commercials — hate, hate, hate. I generally avoid the Walmart experience like the plague, but now my determination to steer clear is doubled down. I kind of hate the Die Hard-ish Brooklyn Nine-Nine trailer also — no offense.
6:04 pm: Justin Hurwitz wins Best Original Score for First Man! HE approves, agrees, applauds. And of course, “Shallow” wins for Best Song. Don’t overdue the emotionally overwhelmed thing, Ms. Bluehair…everyone but everyone was predicting this. Due respect.
5:57 pm: The legendary Carol Burnett looks pretty good. Great pipes in her prime. Tribute reel is nicely assembled. I’d forgotten about Friendly Fire (’79). “How incredibly fortunate I was top be there at the right time…the cost alone…48-piece orchestra…so grateful for the chemistry we had…our producer, our choreographer, our writers….one big happy family for 11 years (’67 to ’78)….I’m so glad we had this time together.”
5:54 pm: “This is Crazy Rich Asians, a money-whore movie that made a ton of money…”
5:53 pm: Alien Pepsi commercial is self-inflated, cloying, generally repulsive.
5:45 pm: Escape at Dannemora‘s Patricia Arquette win for Best Actress, Limited Series. HE agrees, applauds. The incarcerated Joyce “Tilly” Mitchelldoesn’t agree or applaud. Arquette played off, her speech having gone on.
5:43 pm: Ben Whishaw wins for Best Supporting Actor, A Very English Scandal. Whishaw is always good, but he played such a dreary dad in Mary Poppins Returns.
5:20 pm: Am I expected to know or care about Richard Madden winning winning Best Actor blah-dee-blah for Netflix’s The Bodyguyard? I don’t. I never will. Well, probably not. FX’s The Americans win for Best TV series, Drama….zzzzz. Secret Life of Pets 2 trailer…I hate animation with such a grand and terrible passion. Image quality on the Roma trailer looks so much better than the film did at the Aero the other night.
5:20 pm: SpiderMan: Into the Spider-Verse wins for Best Animated Film. Who’s the woman with the extremely styled hair behind the winners? Former Sony chief Amy Pascal.
5:16 pm: Michael Douglas wins Best Actor, TV Series, Musical or Comedy, The Kaminsky Method. “Chuck Lorre thinks getting old is funny.” “This has to go for my 102-year-old father Kirk…”
5:13 pm: Sandra Oh: “This moment of change…I see you, I see you, I see you.”
5:08 pm: Hollywood Elsewhere apologizes for the modem fritzing out, killing the cable signal. It took about six or seven minutes for everything to boot up again.
In alphabetical order: James Gray‘s Ad Astra, Harmony Korine‘s Beach Bum, Mia Hansen Love‘s Bergman Island, Martin Scorsese‘s The Irishman, Taika Waititi‘s Jojo Rabbit, Rian Johnson‘s Knives Out, Dee Rees‘ The Last Thing He Wanted, Robert Eggers‘ The Lighthouse, Greta Gerwig‘s Little Women, Noah Hawley‘s Lucy in the Sky, Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Bong Joon-ho‘s Parasite, Melina Matsoukas‘ Queen & Slim, Josephine Decker‘s Shirley, Kore-eda Hirokazu‘s The Truth, Benny & Josh Safdie‘s Uncut Gems, Jordan Peele‘s Us, Benh Zeitlin‘s Wendy and Janicza Bravo‘s Zola.
Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time in Hollywood.