I’m looking very much forward to seeing Malcolm Washington’s The Piano Lesson (Netflix, late ‘24). Because the writing will be excellent —- that I know. An adaptation of August Wilson‘s revered 1987 play, pic stars John David Washington (who also starred in a 2022 Broadway revival of same) and was directed and co-adapted by Malcolm, his brother. Denzel Washington and Todd Black have produced.

I’m presuming The Piano Lesson will screen at Telluride before playing Toronto.

John David Washington needs a leg up as performance-wise he hasn’t really connected thus far. If you ask me he was fairly blah or so-so in Spike Lee‘s Black Klansman (’18). Chris Nolan‘s Tenet (’20), which wasn’t an acting platform for anyone, offered no acceleration. Then JDW suffered a one-two punch with his mac-and-cheese wolfing scene in Malcolm & Marie (Netflix, 1.19.21), followed by another flat performance in David O. Russell‘s Amsterdam (’22), which caused me great anguish.

From my Malcolm & Marie review:

Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes, which began streaming yesterday on Max, is an attractive, watchable gloss that plays it safe and tidy at every turn. It’s a valentine — nothing funny or nervy or the least bit impudent. No Larry Fortensky jokes. No clip of John Belushi‘s “Liz choking on chicken bones” skit. Not so much as a glance at Ron Galella‘s Fat Liz photo.

Director Nanette Burstein deserves a certain kind of cynical credit for sanding every possible edge off the legend of La Liz. So much material has been ignored. Too damn friendly.

Even the brief mention of Taylor’s suicide attempt during her marriage to Eddie Fisher feels somehow soft, mainly because it doesn’t make sense.

Sometime in ’79 or ’80 I saw Elizabeth Taylor in the flesh. She was standing about ten or twelve feet away in a dense crowd of guys at an after-party at the Roxy, the popular Manhattan roller disco on West 18th. I managed a glimpse or two of her eyes, and was slightly surprised to discover that they really were as beautiful as I’d been told. I was mesmerized. I think I actually said out loud, “Wow.”

I’d been looking at Taylor in film after film all my life, of course, but those real-life peepers had an extra-glistening, pools-of-passion, send-your-hormones-to-the-moon quality that I’d never quite gotten from a live female before. And they actually did seem to be violet colored, as legend had it.

The once-legendary Taylor hit her career peak between ’51 (A Place in The Sun) and ’60 (Butterfield 8). This was also when she seemed the most erotically enticing.

I heard and read a lot about her over the decades, and gradually became persuaded that she was tough and real and super-loyal to her friends…although I never understood why she befriended that freak known as Michael Jackson.

I had read once that Taylor saved Montgomery Clift‘s life just after his 5.12.56 car crash by extracting a dislodged tooth that had been stuck in his wind pipe. By all accounts she was a good person to know and share time on the planet with, and also that she was feisty and steady and reliable and no fool. And she liked to drink and have fun and laugh through it all….hah!

I think, in short, that she might have been a better person than she was an actress.

I’m not dismissing her very good ’50s performances in A Place In The Sun, The Last Time I Saw Paris, Giant, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Suddenly Last Summer and Butterfield 8. But she was seriously miscast in the lusciously miserable Cleopatra, and with the exception of her brilliant, possibly all-time best performance in Mike Nichols‘ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, she stopped getting the good roles after that and just wasn’t a very interesting presence in the ’60s and ’70s.

Taylor was pretty much out of the game by the early 80s.

Her golden time was the 1950s, period, and she was at her hottest back then also. She started to put on weight after Butterfield 8 (i.e., after she hit her early 30s), and the hard truth is that she looked vaguely plump in Cleopatra, and that roundish, slightly boozy and besotted look never went away after that. I’m sorry but that’s how it pretty much was. But those eyes of hers were givers of rapture and splendor.

My only other first-hand connection with La Liz came with my numerous sleepovers at the Nicky Hilton-Elizabeth Taylor house on Route 102 in Georgetown, Connecticut, as the guest of the late cartoonist Chance Browne. It’s a small cottage where Hilton and Taylor stayed for a period in 1950 during their brief rocky marriage before she sued for divorce (she complained of spousal abuse) — local legend says Hilton threw Taylor out a window during one of their drunken fights.

There’s really not much feeling in Burstein’s film. It’s too admiring, too subservient to generate anything that truly hits home.

It’s possible, I suppose, that a few old biddies will be shocked to learn that Doug Emhoff, Kamala Harris’s attorney husband of ten years, cheated on ex-wife Kerstin in 2009 with nanny + elementary school teacher Najen Naylor, who was 32 at the time.

The prospective First Gentleman has admitted to the episode. Even the N.Y. Times has reported on the matter.

Big deal, right? Professionally prominent husbands blowing up their marriages by fucking the family nanny…isn’t that a cliche in the annals of affluent domesticity? Didn’t Arnold Schwarzenegger do the same with housekeeper Mildred Baena?

Naylor and Baena both got pregnant and gave birth, but Naylor apparently didn’t keep the child.

Fucking the help is, of course, a passive-aggressive way of dissolving a marriage as the betrayed wife will inevitably sniff things out sooner or later.

Boiled down, Emhoff has been exposed as having been an imperfect human specimen 15 years ago…an average, sexually frustrated fellow who succumbed to temptation, got busted, apologized, accepted responsibility and moved on.

Emhoff met Harris on a blind date in 2013; they were married the following year.

This matter obviously has no bearing upon Harris’s presidential campaign. We all understand that men in their frisky prime (Emhoff was 45 when the affair occurred) are fundamentally dogs.

What I personally find surprising is the fact that Kerstin, the 57 year-old chief of a “creative think tank” called PRETTYBIRD, is clearly a hotter number than Naylor. My first thought after glancing at a recent photo of the 47-year-old Naylor (posted by the Daily Mail) was that whomever or whatever she may have been at age 32, the last 15 years have taken their toll.

Top photo (l. to r) : Kerstin Emhoff, daughter Ella, Doug Emhoff.

Middle photo: Najen Naylor (recently)

Bottom photo: Naylor in 2008 or thereabouts.

[Initially posted six years ago — 8.12.18]

If there’s one thing film twitter wants you to abandon, it’s your comfort zone. Be brave, step over the fence and experience the exotic, uncertain, challenging realms that exist outside of your little piddly backyard. Of course!

Hollywood Elsewhere agrees that people who refuse to step outside of their c.z. are missing so much and absorbing so little in the way of life-giving nutrients or eye-opening realizations. I’ve been in rooms with people who don’t want to see what they don’t want to see, and it’s not pretty. The wrong kind of vibe.

On the other hand I’ve always defined “comfort zone” in a different way. To me a comfort movie is one that presents three basic things.

One, semi-recognizable human behavior (i.e., bearing at least some resemblance to that which you’ve observed in your own life, including your own something-to-be-desired, occasionally less-than-noble reactions to this or that challenge).

Two, some kind of half-believable story in which various behaviors are subjected to various forms of emotional or psychological stress and strain. (This should naturally include presentations of inner human psychology, of course, as most people tend to hide what they’re really thinking or scheming to attain.)

And three, action that adheres to the universal laws of physics — i.e., rules that each and every life form has been forced to submit to since the beginning of time.

The physics thing basically means that I can enjoy or at least roll with superhero fantasy popcorn fare, but on the other hand these films have a way of delivering a form of profound irritation and even depression if you watch enough of them.

There are, in short, many ways of telling stories that (a) contain recognizable human behavior, (b) engaging stories and (c) adhere to basic laws of gravity, inertia and molecular density.

I’m talking about tens of thousands of square miles of human territory, and movies that include Her, Solaris, Boyhood, Betrayal, Children of Men, Leviathan, Thelma and Louise, Superbad, Cold War, Across 110th Street, Shoot the Piano Player, Them!, A Separation, The Silence, Se7en, Holy Motors, Silver Linings Playbook, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, Hold That Ghost, The Miracle Worker, The Wolf Man, Ikiru, Crossfire, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Duck Soup, Moonlighting, What’s Up, Tiger Lily?, the better screwball comedies of the ’30s, The Blob, First Reformed, Ichi the Killer, The Equalizer 2, Adaptation, Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days, Punch Drunk Love, Out Of the Past, Danton, Some Like It Hot, The Big Sky and God knows how many hundreds or thousands of others.

But if a movie presents human behavior that I regard as completely unrecognizable or nonsensical, that insists on ignoring the way things are out there (or “in” there), I tune out. And if you don’t like that, tough.

A movie about tomatoes, carrots, apples and cucumbers longing to experience more exciting or fulfilling lives or at least looking to avoid being picked, cooked and eaten by humans….fine. But a movie about supermarket hot dogs, hot dog rolls and other processed foods having the same human dimensions and desires…get outta here.

Another way to explain my c.z. concept is a series of concentric-circle realms that I use to measure and calibrate.

The innermost realm is my own life story, my own limitations and weaknesses, the forces and personalities that I’ve personally known and dealt with (or have run away from).

The second realm is defined by the experiences of others — friends and family, characters I’ve read about or come to know in movies or plays, anything that has crossed my radar screen and/or intruded into my turf that has seemed to make at least some kind of basic sense.

The third realm is one of odd happenstance or surreal imaginings or derangements or mystical wonder — anything weird or extra-spiritual or wackjobby or beyond-rational that doesn’t “add up” but is nonetheless an aspect or outgrowth of our life on this planet (or other planets…what the hell).

Anything that comes from the fourth, fifth or sixth realms (don’t ask me to define them) may or may not work for me. I’m theoretically open to these realms, but I’m only human and am therefore partial to the first three. This is one reason why I have a problem with films directed by Michel Gondry. Sorry.

What does it mean when the mere idea of posting a well-crafted sentence or two feels like agony…a steep hill that I can barely think of climbing?

When you feel exhausted and depleted with your muscles slightly aching?

But you can’t sleep more than four or five hours and the “sleep” you’re experiencing is barely worth the name, and that’s after popping half an ambien.

I’ve had full-blown Covid twice so I know the symptoms.

I’ve had six or seven Covid vaccine shots (the most recent administered in March or April) so that’s probably a modifying factor in what I’m going through.

My Covid infection periods have all lasted 48 to 52 hours.

Can’t sleep, no hunger or thirst, not much energy, can’t concentrate, a constant feeling of the gas tank being mostly empty.

A close friend says a fresh wave of Covid is ”going around.”

HE response: “So it’s like we’re all back in ‘20 and ‘21? Covid is roaring away and causing all kinds of trouble and sickness? And vaccines haven’t diminished the effects or the pace of recovery?”

David Mamet: “I say no to that. I refuse to submit to a Covid siege mentality.”

The only thing I really like about John Stahl‘s Leave Her To Heaven (’45) is Leon Shamroy‘s color cinematograohy and Lionel Newman‘s musical score. Otherwise not so much. Gene Tierney‘s pyschotic femme fatale is confounding and affected.

Just to make things “fair” in the same way that Imane’S fight against Italian boxer Angela Carini was “fair.” Just for the fun of it, I mean.

This photo of the 87-year-old Robert Redford (born on 8.18.36) is fake.

His hair isn’t snow white, the sagging wrinkles are exaggerated, etc.

In fact Redford has always tried to look a bit younger. Copper hair tint, perhaps a Prague-style touch-up or two. HE approves of this. I want him to hang on to that older, seen-better-days-but-still-good-looking thing, dammit.

Big-name marquee guys are expected to look 10 or 15 years younger than what the calendar says they are. It’s their responsibility. Redford was one of Hollywood’s best-looking movie stars throughout the ‘60s, ‘70s, 80s and even the ‘90s, and now…well, you can’t stop what’s coming. I get this.

I’ve never tried to look absurdly younger than my years. What I’m trying to do now is look like I’m 47 or 51 or something close to that.

Hang on to a bit of that Brubaker thing, Bob! All the way with Bill McKay! By getting shot to ribbons in his 30s, Butch Cassidy was at least spared the ravages of time.

Speaking as a mellow, Lee Marvin-ish, X-factor, sensible centrist whitey, I’m sensing a contradictory undercurrent — celebrative but discreetly judgmental — in the “White Dudes for Harris” movement. The hint or implication is that many older, white-assed guys harbor sexist and racist attitudes. Which many of them, especially your rural bunblefucks, certainly do.

Imagine a more bluntly-worded alternative.

Arguably among the greatest actors of our time….has been since Next Stop, Greenwich Village.,..”I think about dialogue very much in terms of rhythm and music…looking for a rhythm, something harmonious.”

In ’74 or thereabouts I happened to run into David Janssen at LAX arrivals. The luggage carousel, I mean. Late in the evening. I didn’t gawk or try to strike up a conversation, God forbid, but I couldn’t help but feel a certain familiarity with the man. Who didn’t back then?

I walked out to curbside to wait for a friend, and noticed Janssen as he strolled out of the terminal and especially the extremely subtle way that he hailed a cab. He didn’t raise his arm or wave or ask a uniformed taxi commandant to do it for him. It was just the slightest hand gesture, and right away a cabbie flashed his lights to signal acknowledgment. I remember saying to myself, ‘Now that is a cool way to hail a cab!”

Janssen’s life and career peaked with the four-year, 120-episode run of The Fugitive (fall of 1963 through August ’67) in which he played the wrongly convicted Richard Kimble, the doctor who didn’t kill his wife and wound up lamming it for four years before finally nailing the the guilty party, a one-armed man with a grim, gorilla-like face (played by Bill Raisch).

Janssen was only 32 when The Fugitive began filming, and 36 when it wrapped during the summer of love.

It always seemed as if Janssen lived with serious anxiety and ambivalence about…well, everything. Who smokes four packs a day with any expectation that he’ll live a long and healthy life? Plus he drank like a fish. Janssen’s heart gave out at age 48…he didn’t even make it to 50!

HE: “Thomas Alva Edison is not wrong, and many billions of earthlings have found the idea of lights-out finality intolerable and terrifying and have therefore constructed comforting mythologies to fend off the sense of devastation that many philosophers have used to describe contemplations of The Big Sleep. And yet…

“I experienced a seminal and transformative LSD trip when I was 19, and at that moment and forever after I knew that as indifferent and scientific or mathematical as the universe could be defined in the minds of your average wannabe Albert Einsteins out there, it was nonetheless magnificent and unified and sublime and finally spellbinding in the George Harrison lotus position sense of that term.

“I knew that an eternal hum of profound cosmic perfection hovered above, within and without my mortal coil.

“Einstein himself spoke endearingly of a sense of soul-soothing tranquility that permeated when he, without dropping a tab of Orange Wedge or sipping from a ground-up Carlos Casteneda broth of peyote buttons and whatever else, had sailed into the mystic. He wasn’t expecting to flutter around on angel wings or hover over the earth like Dave Bowman at the end of 2001, but he felt profoundly settled and comforted by the infinite eternal-ness of it all.”

Franny P to HE: “What the heck are you saying? Sounds like you’re still on LSD.”

HE to Franny: “That’s because when you finally slip into the mystical, it never leaves you. So in a sense I am still on LSD, or swimming in the spiritual waters that my long-ago LSD awakening introduced me to.

“I’m saying that the eternal perfection of the cosmic scheme of things has been in place for eons and will remain in place for eons, and if you, Franny P., don’t want to tune into the altogether because it doesn’t interest you or because you feel too constrained by logical rules and regulations, then that’s on you and go with God. I’m okay and you’re okay.

“Travelling into the mystic means giving up thought and reason and boilerplate logic and just ‘letting it in.’ Read the Bhagavad Gita or listen to ‘Tomorrow Never Knows‘….it’s all there.”