Esquire has posted excerpts from Brian Abrams‘ “Party Like A President” that tell tales about about JFK bacchanalia. The reporting feels a bit sloppy here and there. I’m not aware that there were “occasions when JFK spent weekends at Frank Sinatra’s place in Palm Springs,” certainly not when he was President. Abrams includes that old story about Kennedy telling British Prime Minister Harold McMillan he got headaches if he went without a conquest for three days. (I’ve read a different version with JFK telling McMillan that he didn’t feel as if he’d “really had a woman unless I’ve had her three ways.”) The surprise is reading that Kennedy allegedly “smoked three marijuana cigarettes with Mary Pinchot Meyer, the ex-wife of a CIA official and a Kennedy mistress who often visited the White House when Jackie was out of town. When offered a fourth joint, the president begged off. ‘Suppose the Russians did something now,’ wondered the bloodshot-eyed leader of the free world.”

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Sam Taylor-Johnson and E.L James‘ Fifty Shades of Grey (Universal, 2.13), which I saw last night at the Arclight in a theatre that was attended by a few media types but mostly by people you wouldn’t want to have dinner with if given a choice, is a sterile experience, to put it mildly. It’s faintly amusing and even titillating during the first hour, but it eventually narcotizes and then freezes your soul. It offers a few mildly arousing, tastefully shot sex scenes (ice cubes, lashes, blindfolds), but it lives inside its own restricted, barren, super-regulated realm. There’s no “life” in its veins. Watching it is like visiting an overly policed bondage & discipline museum with uniformed guards stationed every 15 feet…no heart, no blood, no humanity, no jazz, no off-moments. It’s a cold, ritualized girl movie about fantasy sex with a well-mannered, hot-bod billionaire who rams like a stallion and gives lots of oral.

Henry Miller would definitely not approve. He would say “perversion, okay, but where’s the heart? You need to put a little heart into sex or what’s the point?” I’ll tell you what the point is. The point is that the sense of eros coveted by and written about by Miller 80 years ago is a thing of the distant past, and that we now live in an age of Seriously Perverse Franchises, which are a manifestation of what I would call the New Sterility coupled with the New Cluelessness on the part of young, anxious, under-educated women.

If you come away delighted with Fifty Shades of Grey then you are definitely on the clueless side of the equation, but don’t let me stop you. This movie is critic-proof. The none-too-brights are going to see this thing in droves, and then they’re going to talk things out at a nearby bar and drink wine and start squealing with laughter after the second glass. And guys like me are going to look in their direction and give them the stink-eye.

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A new manifestation of the “Surreal or Misheard Song Lyrics” riff I bring out from time to time. Last night I was listening to Bob Dylan‘s She Belongs To Me and decided that “the law can’t touch her at all” isn’t as good and certainly not as primal as “Ma can’t touch her at all.” You can define “Ma” as the proverbial family authority figure or some kind of tough, cigar-chomping butch boss in the tradition of Ma Barker or Maureen Dowd‘s “Ma Clinton.” I only know that “Ma” rules while “the law” mitigates. If representatives of “the law” can’t think of some way to mess with her mind and slow her down then so what? But if she stands up to Ma while wearing her sparkling Egyptian ring, that’s something else.

Therefore: “She never stumbles / She’s got no place to fall / She never stumbles / She’s got no place to fall / She’s nobody’s child / Ma can’t touch her at all.”

5:30 pm Update: NBC management has suspended NBC anchor Brian Williams for six months, the idea being to symbolically send Williams into the desert to meditate while everyone waits for the media attack mob to move on to something or someone else. Earlier: Brian Williams didn’t embellish in ’03 but he recently embellished on Late Night with David Letterman. For this he’s probably a dead man. Probably doomed to become some kind of internet news guy and possibly “wander the wilderness of National Public Radio.” But he’s not the new Dan Rather, who didn’t go down over an apparent character flaw but over a story that was strongly challenged (and which may have been wrong), resulting in political pressure and his being severed from CBS News. Either way I respect Bill O’Reilly for his fair-minded remarks about Williams, which were shared last might with Jimmy Kimmel.

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“Doggone, you wabbit…waaaahaaaah!” Elmer Fudd was one of my first impressions. I wasn’t great at it but I wasn’t bad. I was just remembering that one of the first big laughs I got from classmates was when I recounted a chat with a 7th-grade substitute teacher, whose name was Mr. Hilse. He was Swedish- or German-looking…slim, fair-haired, medium height. He was kind of a dweeby type. Had a reedy, crackly voice and a very slight speech impediment — he had trouble with the letter “r.” Anyway the kids in Hilse’s class were all walking down the stairs one day and I decided to hop down. Hilse: “Walk like a human being and not like a rabbit.” Later that day I entertained my pallies by doing Hilse as Fudd: “…and not like a wabbit.” This was one of the most glorious moments that happened to me in seventh-grade, as I was pretty bad at paying attention or getting decent grades, and I was a complete failure with girls. I had begun to find my voice. Diminish authority figures with derision, jokes…anything that made them seem small or petty.

I will always be wary of any review by Variety‘s suspiciously dweeby Guy Lodge, but his Berlin Film Festival reaction to Anton Corbijn‘s Life, a feature about the relationship between Life photographer Dennis Stock (Robert Pattinson) and James Dean (Dane DeHaan), is somewhat encouraging. Life is “an engaging, elegiac portrait of a legend in the making,” Lodge writes, and “a loving valentine from photographer-turned-helmer Corbijn to his name-making profession.” But the most profound aspect, he says, is the “peculiarly moving, even subtly queer friendship between the two men” along with “gorgeous production values.” On top of which DeHaan, he says, delivers a “magnetic” capturing of Dean. The Hollywood Reporter‘s David Rooney disagrees. He’s calling Life a “letdown” that “doesn’t deliver on its promise,” and describing DeHaan’s performance as “more studied than inhabited.”

Robert Pattinson, chunky-faced Dane DeHaan in Anton Corbijn’s Life.

But of course, one look at the set photos tells you DeHaan is actually playing a Dean who never existed, a Chris Pratt-styled Dean who’s at least 10 pounds heavier than he was in real life. All Corbijn needed to do was say to DeHaan before filming, “Uhhm, you need to drop at least 10 pounds, man…stop drinking, hit the treadmill.” Too hard! A slightly fuller-faced Dean will have to do.

The Real McCoy on Manhattan streets in winter of 1955.

I’m gradually succumbing to the idea of buying the forthcoming Studiocanal Region 2 Bluray of John Schlesinger‘s Darling (’65), mainly because of a belief (actually a hope) that Kenneth Higgins‘ black-and-white cinematography will seem extra-vivid and super-detailed in the usual silvery shimmery way. I’ve only seen Darling on the tube, VHS and DVD, which means I’ve never really “seen” it at all. Swinging London was really happening in July 1965, when Darling opened…early LSD adventures, Rubber Soul not yet recorded, etc. It was filmed, of course, in ’64. Julie Christie‘s big break-out, quickly followed by Doctor Zhivago. Warren Beatty pounced during 1967 filming of Petulia. Schlesinger reportedly urged Christie to steer clear of Beatty, whom he described as a serial womanizer who “goes through women like a businessman through a dozen oysters.” Dirk Bogarde, Laurence Harvey, Roland Curram, Alex Scott, et. al. The Bluray pops on 3.30.15.

Earlier today The Independent‘s Antonia Molloy reported that Fifty Shades of Grey (Universal, 2.13), which will screen this evening at Hollywood’s Arclight, “is a bit of a slow burner.” An early review in the Sun (which you can’t read without a paid subscription) claims “there’s no sex at all for the first 40 minutes, and only 11 minutes of raunchy scenes” during the entire 125-minute film. It’s not how much sexy footage you use but the kind of sexy footage and how intense it is. How much coupling was in Last Tango in Paris? Maybe five minutes’ worth, if that. One stand-up schtupper with overcoats on, one anal-butter scene, another anal thing in the bathroom…that’s it. The Sun review reportedly says that “early scenes of the movie rely more on sensuality and tension between the couple, played by Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson, rather than full-on sex. [But] it makes every one of those 11 minutes count with boobs, bums and even a glimmer of Jamie’s junk.” Sam Taylor-Johnson and E.L. James‘ adaptation will have its official premiere at the Berlin Film Festival on Wednesday. L.A. reviewers has been told to hold off until Wednesday morning Pacific.

F. Gary Gray‘s Straight Outta Compton (Universal, 8.14) is about the rise and fall of the the Compton-based N.W.A. — Eazy-E, Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, MC Ren and DJ Yella. If Paul Giamatti is in it, you know it’ll be pretty good. You know who grew up in Compton? Kevin Costner. Sometime in the late ’50s through mid ’60s, when the city’s racial demographic was starting to shift. Two nights ago Costner was talking about his first sight of a big movie marquee, when he was four years old. A big biege-colored marquee with huge, bright red letters that spelled Ben-Hur. Costner was in his parents’ car in the back seat, and he learned back and saw the marquee and went “whoa.”

I’m trying to compile a list of villains who turn out to be not entirely bad at the end of a film. Bad, aggressive guys who you feel sorry for or otherwise semi-redeem themselves at the end of a film. Rutger Hauer‘s Roy in Blade Runner. Alan Ladd‘s assassin in This Gun For Hire. Tom Cruise‘s Vincent in Collateral. 10 and 1/2 years ago I described Vincent as “diamond-like — hard and sharp and full of glints and reflections,” adding that Cruise’s performance “burns through not because of some forced intensity, but an artful hold-back, cold-steel strategy. The character is a monster and a cripple, but at the same time a kind of tough-love therapist. By the end of the film he’s saved the life of Jamie Foxx as surely as if he’d taken a bullet for him. The more you think about Tom/Vincent, the more the ironies accumulate. Deftly played by a guy known for his own hard-wired intensity, this gray-suited assassin seeps through as a fairly sad figure despite Cruise barely revealing his emotional cards. Sad but oddly charitable, almost.” Who else needs to be on the list?

Leon de Aranoa‘s A Perfect Day is some kind of Balkan-set dramedy about aid workers (Tim Robbins, Benicio del Toro, Olga Kurylenko, Melanie Thierry) trying to keep a dead body from spoiling the local water supply. It played at the AFM but apparently has no U.S. distributor. So why has the trailer popped online? I’m mentioning it because with the exception of Jimmy P: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian, I respect Del Toro’s judgment.

Variety‘s Brent Lang posted a lulu of an analysis piece earlier this afternoon. It basically said Lana and Andy Wachowski‘s Jupiter Ascending tanked this weekend because it was too original. What? It’s basically a rehash of a hundred…okay, dozens of other adventure tales about a young nobody (Jim Hawkins, Luke Skywalker…whomever) who discovers a special destiny when he/she is plucked from obscurity and embraced by eccentric good guys and thrown into a dangerous high-stakes adventure involving kings and knaves and tyrants. I was literally feeling nauseous from the rubber-stamp sameness of Jupiter Ascending within minutes. Characters with wolf and deer ears, awful dialogue, over-acting, Mila Kunis screaming and falling, floating celestial super-cities, super-evil baddies with effete-dandy gestures, loop-dee-loop air-bike chases around Chicago in which good and bad guys fire thousands of rounds at each other and Channing Tatum takes only one wound in the gut…? This is a movie that screams familiarity at every turn but Lang believes Jupiter paid the price for not being familiar enough. One of us is on mescaline and I don’t even drink wine.

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