[Posted on 9.19.11] Last night Jett, his roommate Sonya and I caught a 7:50 pm screening of Drive at Brooklyn’s UA Court Street Stadium plex. My second viewing. Great film.

I hit the smallish bathroom after it ended. Two urinals and a toilet stall with six or seven guys lined up. I should have bailed right then and there, but I was looking for a little sit-down action and wasn’t sure of my alternate options.

A guy left the stall and a 30something black dude took ownership and, like, didn’t come out. Three, four minutes. Five minutes. Six. Could he be undergoing self-administered surgery? Filling out a mortgage application?

Then, still on the pot, he began talking to his girlfriend on his cell, flirting with her, settling in. “How ya doin’? Movie’s over…yeah. You wanna eat somethin’?,” etc.

If I had any balls I would have knocked on the stall door and, just like Tom Cruise in Collateral, said, “Yo, homey!” I didn’t, of course. I just stood and waited like a sap, listening to this jerkoff go on and on. The idea of showing consideration to others simply hadn’t occurred to him.

Around the seven- or eight-minute mark I gave up and went outside and used the facilities at a nearby Barnes and Noble.

It’s simply a matter of culture and manners. Let’s face it — some people are low-lifes.

I’ll be attending an invitational screening of George Clooney‘s The Ides of March at the Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday. If I happen to hit the bathroom after it ends I can absolutely guarantee that nobody will sit in a toilet stall for several minutes, ignoring the fact that several others are waiting, while chit-chatting with a girl. I’ll put $100 on this right now. I’ll bet anything.

And yet Vanessa Redgrave didn’t play the lead role or main protagonist — Jane Fonda (as playwright Lillian Hellman) fulfilled that task, and was Oscar-nominated for Best Actress. Fonda wound up winning a BAFTA and a Golden Globe, but not an Oscar.

For her titular performance as Julia, an anti-Nazi activist (and later martyr) who was Hellman’s close friend and who experiences traumatic surgery at the hands of the Nazis, Vanessa Redgrave was campaigned by 20th Century Fox for Best Supporting Actress, and she won.

By the same token, Zoe Saldana plays the lead role in Jacques Audiard‘s Emilia Perez — a frustrated Mexico City attorney, Rita Moro Castro, who’s persuaded to assist a Mexican cartel leader, Juan “Manitas” Del Monte, as he undergoes sex reassignment surgery, partly to evade the authorities and partly to become “Emilia Perez”.

Real-life trans person Karla Sofia Gascon plays the cartel leader and Perez, but it’s not a lead role — it’s a strong supporting thing as she’s clearly not the main protagonist plus Gascon doesn’t have a huge amount of face time in Audiard’s film, certainly not compared to Saldana.

The identity fanatics (i.e., the same folks who insisted that Killers or the Flower Moon‘s Lily Gladstone was a deserving recipient of a Best Actress Oscar) will be playing the same tune on behalf of Gascon.

She won’t win, of course, but Netflix will get to run a big identity campaign on behalf of Gascon ane the trans community, and that’s what they mostly care about.

Which of HE’s top 21 films released in 1999 have I re-watched more than a couple of times? Just four — Election, The Limey, The Insider and Malkovich. I re-watched Lola in an AMC plex a couple of months ago…loved it. I’ve actually re-watched American Beauty three times, come to think. I’ve re-watched Al Pacino’s “ inches” speech from Any Given Sunday 17 or 18 times.

Quentin Tarantino smoking a Sherlock Holmes pipe…actually a Hans Landa pipe…either way.

QT: “It’s a situation, I think…I’m being fair enough to say that the armorer, the guy who handles the gun, an armorer is 90% responsible for everything that happens when it comes to that gun. But, but, but, but, but, but…the actor is 10% responsible. The actor is 10% responsible.”

Near the end of their chat, Tarantino and Maher are clearly drunk and high. Words and phrases slurred here and there. That’s the fun of it.

Non-truths flood our communal atmosphere, not because we’re compulsive liars but because of our disrespect for various parties.

Nobody’s 100% honest with their bosses or supervisors; ditto their wives or girlfriends. Familiarity breeds contempt, and with that a willingness to dispense occasional evasions and half-truths.

Very few parents are 100% honest with their tweener and teenaged kids. Almost no drivers are honest with traffic cops. If I truly respect and fully trust you, I’ll be as honest as the day is long. But we live in a universe full of short days.

This goes double or triple from a celebrity’s perspective. Pretty much every famous person lies through his or her teeth when it comes to public statements. Not blatantly but in a mild, sideways fashion.

But that’s okay because they’re well motivated. They’re lying because they despise the gossip-driven media and feel that dealing with a corrupt and disreputable entity means all bets are off.

I think I understand the ethical system they’re embracing because it was explained in a couple of respected ’60s westerns.

Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch is one of them. I’m thinking of a scene in which William Holden’s Pike Bishop expresses moral support for Robert Ryan’s Deke Thornton because he gave his “word” to a bunch of “damned railroad men,” and Ernest Borgnine’s Dutch Engstrom defiantly argues, “That ain’t what counts! It’s who you give it to.”

Burt Lancaster says the same thing in The Professionals when he discusses flexible ethics with Lee Marvin. When Marvin reminds Lancaster that he’s given his ‘word’ to Ralph Bellamy’s J.W. Grant, a millionaire railroad tycoon, Lancaster replies, “My word to Grant ain’t worth a plug nickel.”

Tom Cruise was J.W. Grant-ing, in effect, when he told Oprah Winfrey he was in love with Katie Holmes and wanted to marry her and so on. He was saying, “This is what you’re going to get from me, and if you don’t think I’m being honest then too bad because my life is my own and you guys don’t rate the real truth because you’re scumbags who pass along tabloid fairy tales.”

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I can’t recall if my pitch was emailed or typed-out and sent via snail-mail, but Esquire bit right away…assignment! Those were the days when it could take as long as two or three months between suggesting an article and seeing it in print. The other freelance piece [after the jump] was about private Hollywood poker games. It was either for GQ or Outside magazine; I honestly don’t remember.

Best idea I pitched that nobody wanted to run: A Playboy parody article called “The Girls of Bumblefuck.” The premise was that (a) the myth of the devastatingly attractive farmer’s daughter bailing hay in Podunk, Arkansas, was bullshit and (b) that beauty always follows wealth and power, hence the dishiest women are almost always found in big cities while women from one-horse, out-of the way trailer-park towns tend to be…well, not in the Ava Gardner or Angelina Jolie realm.

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From “She Stoops to Firefight,” posted in mid-May of 2021:

….starts up again in Telluride, let’s get a couple of things straight.

(1) It’s nothing if not audacious but there’s no believing the central conceit and so IMHO it falls short of being a knockout musical masterpiece, as some have called it, and…

(2) Karla Sofia Gascon, who plays the titular character, gives a striking supporting performance. If she campaigns for a Best Actress Oscar, fine, but it won’t result in a win. Identity campaigns (like Lily Gladstone’s) get a lot of attention from wokester journos, but rank-and-file industry types are less taken with the razzmatazz.

With the Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez relationship having decisively hit the rocks and taken on water a second time with relatively few of us understanding the whys and wherefores or even caring all that much…

Richard Burton wanted fulfillment and perhaps even transcendence within the craft of acting while lunging for Herculean heights, but he also loved and needed the big-dough lifestyle and was irrresistably drawn to “Miss Tits,” a simultaneously dismissive and worshipful term he once threw at Elizabeth Taylor, whom he married twice.

About to sit through this, but not happy about it. Grim up. Another deranged, mostly non-human predator…a symbol of today’s socially and psychologically adrift incel misogynists…another hostile demon-dude out to psychologically torture and murder a young terrified lass…the umpteenth variation upon Stanley K.’s “Jack Torrance out to chop up Wendy and Danny”, etc.

If the following 17 films are screened at Telluride 2024, I’ll be a mostly pleased attendee. It all starts six days hence. I’ll be arriving in town by early Wednesday evening.

Highest Anticipation Levels: Anora (D. Sean Baker). Conclave (d: Edward Berger). Emilia Perez (d: Jacques Audiard). The End (d: Joshua Oppenheimer). All We Imagine as Light (d: Payal Kapadia). The Piano Lesson (d: Malcolm Washington). Nickel Boys (d: RaMell Ross). Saturday Night (d: Jason Reitman). Misrecordia (d: Alain Guiraudie). Piece by Piece (d: Morgan Neville). Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight (d: Embeth Davidtz). Disclaimer (d: Alfonso Cuaron). Better Man (d: Michael Gracey). Maria (d: Pablo Larrain). The Friend (d: Scott McGehee, David Siegel). No Other Land (d: Basel Adra). The Apprentice (d: Ali Abbasi).