I’m sorry about the death of Diva helmer Jean-Jacques_Beineix, who was 75. And I can’t quite believe it opened in France 41 years ago (March ’81) and in the States 13 months later. Rave reviews led to Diva becoming the hottest big-city film anywhere (did it even play in rural areas?). I remember with absolute clarity that it was essential to see Diva as soon as possible after it caught on. Color, design, black humor, wonderful Parisian atmosphere. One of the images that has lingered over the decades is the stressed interior of the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord (37 bis, boulevard de la Chappelle, 18th arrondissement, near Gare du Nord).
In his latest [1.13] Substack rant David Poland went after Peter Kiefer and Peter Savodnik‘s “Hollywood’s New Rules,” which was posted on Bari Weiss‘s Common Sense Substack. It was excerpted in a 1.11.22 HE article titled “Hollywood Is A Woke Prison Colony.”
HE comment #1: Weiss is not part of what Poland calls the “right-wing managerie.” She is a sensible centrist, which is very slightly to the right of a sensible left-leaning moderate, which is what I call myself. Poland knows that today’s rightwing menagerie is a complete insane asylum, and that Weiss’s anti-woke postures hardly qualify as right-wing credentials. Sensible people of all beliefs and persuasions despise wokesters. The right has tried to adopt or co-opt woke loathing as their own brand, but they’re just hitching a ride.
HE comment #2: Poland allows that Keifer and Savodnik are correct to a certain degree. That is because, as Poland writes, “there is a thing going on” in this town, and “a lot of anxiety among the previously and currently empowered” and “there is a lot of scarlet lettering going on, especially [on] Twitter.” Gee, David…no shit? By “scarlet lettering” Poland means cancelling and Donald Sutherland banshee-shrieking and Robespierre finger-pointing — i.e., “the terror.” Poland knows full well that this same exact shit happened in Paris between 1793 and ’94, and in Hollywood during the red scare period of the late ’40s and ’50s. He knows this as well as you or I do, and he prefers to call it “scarlet lettering.” Nice tippy-toeing, ya candy-ass.
HE comment #3: I admire the frankness of this comment.
HE comment #4: And I admire the fundamental human decency conveyed in this portion of Poland’s piece. It follows that no one should hold his or her breath while waiting for this to happen. Not in this fucking town.
HE to Kino Video regarding upcoming Touch of Evil 4K Bluray (streeting on 2.22.22): As you guys presumably recall, England’s Masters of Cinema / Eureka Video released two versions of a Touch of Evil Bluray in two aspect ratios — 1.85 and 1.37 — roughly a decade ago.
A Kino Lorber spokesperson has confirmed that their forthcoming 4K version will be formatted only in 1.85.
In November 2011 Eureka Video released a Bluray of Orson Welles‘ Touch of Evil (1958) with five different versions of the film.
We’re actually talking three versions of the film, two of which are presented in both 1.37 and 1.85 aspect ratios and one (the 1958 pre-release version) presented in 1.85 only. The 1998 reconstructed version, running 112 minutes, that was put together by Walter Murch, Bob O’Neil and Bill Varney, is presented in 1.37 and 1.85.
Two aspect ratios for both versions is so hardcore, so film-nerdy…your heart goes out to people with this much devotion.
But the orange jacket-cover backdrop is, for me, a problem. To advertise a revered classic film taking place in a Mexican border town and shot in the gritty environs of Venice, California, Eureka chose one of the most needlessly intense and eye-sore-ish colors in the spectrum? A color that says traffic cones and prison jump suits?
…or will the world finally catch a break? Probably not. The only chance of Democrats not getting murdered in November would be to grow spines and stand up like persons of principle and (a) completely renounce the progressive nutter Robespierre woke wing and (b) announce a commitment to sensible, practical, fair-minded liberalism.
Only shallow hormonal idiots go out on New Year’s Eve to get bombed and yell ‘YeaaAAAGGGHHHHH!” when the big moment arrives.
3:10 pm Pacific: Ten minutes ago the clock struck twelve in Paris. No fireworks due to Omicron, but once again I’m feeling all nostalgic about Jett, Dylan and I watching the Eiffel Tower fireworks display from the same vantage point, 22 years ago exactly.
Almost all big-time gangsters go down in flames sooner or later -- imprisoned, expelled from the U.S., blown away like Tony Montana or Tony Soprano, found stuffed inside a garbage can.
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I knew Sterling Hayden personally. Not well but somewhat. I ran into him here and there in the late ‘70s, interviewed him once or twice. I was a fan and a friend as far as it went. His manner was a bit odd and curious but only because there was so much going on inside. I actually loved that about him. At times peaceful and reflective, at other times anxious or even turbulent, I could always feel — sense — where Sterling was at. He was like a surly uncle with a kind heart and a beautiful half-smile that he only revealed in rare moments.
I watched him act in two locations during filming of Frank Pierson’s “King of the Gypsies” in ‘77. He was happiest as a roamer, a wanderer. He once lived on a river barge in Paris — a life for me if I could’ve managed it! Sterling was magnificent in “The Asphalt Jungle” and “Dr. Strangelove.” and “The Long Goodbye” and Bertolucci’s “1900.”
Quote: “Fasting is the precise opposite of debauch. I’m always torn between the two. The hard thing is to hold that middle ground, hold that middle ground.”
Hayden reminded me of my big, tall, eccentric paternal grandfather, although he wasn’t that far from my father, age-wise. A nearby resident of Wilton, CT. He used to take long morning walks. He was a great writerly fellow, like a character out of Melville. A writer, a dreamer, the soul of a poet, Wonderful Zeus-like gray beard, walking stick, Irish tweed cap. Deep purring voice, and occasionally a bellower when irate. Enjoyed an occasional hash pipe. Loved his Johnnie Walker Red.
Hayden was one of the most spiritual actors I’d ever had the pleasure to know or speak with.
There are the rote facts of life, the plain material truth of things, and then there are the currents within. The singing angels, the demons, the fireflies, the banshees, the echoes, the dreams…the vague sense of a continuing infinite scheme and how we fit into that. Every last one of us can define our lives as a constant mixing of these two aspects, but the charm and final value of a person, for me, is about how much he/she seems to be cognizant of and dealing with the interior world, and how much he/she comments and refers to those currents and laughs about them, and basically lives on the flow of that realm.
Some go there more frequently or deeply than others, and some are just matter-of-fact types who let their spiritual side leak out in small little droplets from time to time.
Sterling Hayden, by my sights, was almost entirely about those currents. He never just said, “I’d like a little sugar in my coffee” and let it go at that. Well, he would…but if you asked him to expand upon that notion he would just take off and you’d just sit back and marvel. Hayden knew various coffees and coffee growers and had walked through coffee plantations in the Caribbean at dawn and he knew all about how sugar was refined and would speak metaphorically about the sweetness of sugar being the enticement but coffee being the reality of it all, the bean from the earth, the bean that needed to turn brown and then be ground down and prepared just so, and then he’d be off on some tangent that took the coffee-vs.-sugar metaphor and ran with it, or took it and jumped off a cliff as it were.
Hayden was a fascinating, hungry and obviously vulnerable man, Proud but insecure and ridden with guilt about naming names in the ’50s, jolly or surly depending on the time of day, very singular, a great contentious bear of a man, unsettled, always the thinker, certainly a poet or a man trying all the time to be one, a man of the sea and a boy in some ways. He and Patti Smith would have gotten along famously. He loved getting high. And (I’ve already said this) he loved his Johnnie Walker Red.
We were once speaking about his role as the farmer in Bernardo Bertolucci‘s 1900 and he started to talk about his final line in the film, which he wrote, but I said it before he did — “I’ve always loved the wind”. Sterling loved that. He chuckled and patted my knee and said “God love ya.”
Posted on 9.15.13: Manhattan life is plagued by many irritations. I hate the fact that subway car doors frequently don’t open for several seconds after the train stops at a station. (In Paris you can manually open the doors yourself with that silver latch handle thing.) But the biggest drag these days (for me anyway) are the slowpokes on the street and especially in the subways.
I’m not saying they have to race around like crazy rats, but what’s wrong with walking with a purposeful stride? Very few do this, it seems, and the ones that are really slow are always blocking the sidewalks in groups of five or six or more. I was going to say it’s the tourists but I’m starting to think it’s almost everyone these days except for X-factor types. For me walking around Manhattan is exhilarating exercise, especially if you walk with a little bounce in your step; for the vast majority it’s apparently something to be endured by reducing energy expenditure as much as possible and shuffling around like 80somethings.
So basically when you’re walking around Manhattan half the game is spotting the “blockers” before you’re stuck behind them and have to sidestep their ass. The ones to watch out for in this respect are couples of any age, older women, heavy middle-aged men and especially urban females of girth.
I first mentioned this eight years ago: “Out-of-towners always seem to walk the streets without the slightest hint of spunk or urgency in their step, like they’re making their way from the bedroom to the refrigerator at 2 ayem in their pajamas and nightgowns. And they’re always wearing those dead-to-the-world expressions. (Writer Fran Leibowitz has described the shuffling gait of tourists as the ‘mall meander.’)
“Every day I’m walking along at my usual spirited pace and these Jabbas and sea lions are always walking ahead of me in self-protecting groups or, worse, three abreast. The idea that they might be blocking people, much less defying the basic transportation law of going with the flow, doesn’t seem to occur to them. Then again, the flow in Jabba tourist areas (Times Square, Rockefeller Center) is very zombie-paced so it probably feels right from their perspective.”
A forthcoming limited series about the making of Bernardo Bertolucci‘s Last Tango in Paris is in the works from CBS Studios and Greg Silverman’s Stampede Ventures. Variety‘s Naman Ramachandran reports that the series, written by Jeremy Miller and Daniel Cohn, will span the 18 months before, during and after the production of Tango, and will be told through the lens of those at the center of the events — stars Maria Schneider, Marlon Brando and Bertolucci.”
Ramachandran gets it dead wrong, however, by stating that Bertolucci “admitted” that the film’s infamous anal rape scene film “was not consensual” as far as Schneider was concerned. I repeat — DEAD WRONG. Bertolucci never said that the scene itself (which was scripted) was non-consensual — the only surprise or non-consensual aspect was the use of butter as a lubricant.
In a 12.3.16 Variety piece by Seth Kelley, Bertolucci said that “I had been, in a way, horrible to Maria because I didn’t tell her what was going on” — i.e., by not telling her about the butter. And yet, the late director added, he didn’t regret shooting the scene. “I didn’t want Maria to act her humiliation, her rage. I wanted Maria to feel, not to act, the rage and humiliation. Then she hated me for her whole life.”
Two days after the Kelley interview, on 12.5.16, Bertolucci clarified to Variety‘s Nick Vivarelli:
“I would like, for the last time, to clear up a ridiculous misunderstanding that continues to generate press reports about Last Tango in Paris around the world,” Bertolucci stated. “[Three] years ago at the Cinematheque Francaise someone asked me for details on the famous butter scene. I specified, but perhaps I was not clear, that I decided with Marlon Brando not to inform Maria that we would [use] butter. We wanted her spontaneous reaction to that improper use [of the butter]. That is where the misunderstanding lies.
“Somebody thought, and thinks, that Maria had not been informed about the violence on her. That is false!”
Bertolucci explained that “Maria knew everything because she had read the script, where it was all described. The only novelty was the idea of the butter.”
The sexual penetration of Schneider by Brando was simulated, of course.
Yesterday afternoon I finally saw Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World, the justifiably acclaimed Norwegian relationship drama that led to star Renate Reinsve winning the Best Actress trophy at last July’s Cannes Film Festival.
A side observation shared by Tatiana and myself was that Reinsve bears an unusual resemblance to HE’s own Svetlana Cvetko (Show Me What You Got, the forthcoming One Nation Under Earl). They’re of different generations, of course, but with Svetlana being a younger-looking ex-model type you might almost think “older sister-younger sister” if they were to stand side by side at a cocktail party.
Reinsve will be in town soon for interviews and industry schmoozers, and I’m determined to at least try and get the two of them to pose before HE’s iPhone 12 Max Pro.
Here are some comparison shots — one of the Reinsve snaps was taken during an accidental fire alarm intermission at the Soho House screening room; the others were taken in Cannes. The Svet shots (wearing a cap, accepting an award at the Messina Film Festival, etc.) speak for themselves.
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.
Standing room access is filling up, but the super-pricey white floor seats are maybe 30% filled, if that. Okay, 35%. The sound is imprecise, echoing and bouncing all over the place, like artillery shelling outside of Damascus…a joke. The video screens for the opening act, The Glorious Sons, look like twin postage stamps from section 430. And the John Gotti-level criminals running the SoFi parking lot are charging $80 per car.
I’ve seen the Rolling Stones twice — once in Madison Square Garden, once in Paris (“Les Rolling Stones aux Abbatoir”), and the MSG show was okay — big but visually and aurally palatable. I’m telling you that so far the SoFi stadium viewing experience (70K seating vs. 20K in MSG) feels like a ripoff — all about fuck-the-chumps greed. The players on the stage look like fleas on my cat.
8:45 pm update: The joint is pretty much filled. Video screens are much bigger for the Stones. Sound seems of a higher quality. “Street Fighting Man”,”All Down The Line”…”be my little baby for a while.” Energy spike…”19th Nervous Breakdown”, “Tumbling Dice,” “Beast of Burden.” The new drummer is really good, but he’s wearing too much bling. Okay, I feel better now. Mick Jagger’s smile is more than about happiness. It’s about warmth, ecstasy.
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