Steve McQueen‘s Blitz (Apple, 11.1 in theatres) has just been announced as the closing-night attraction for the 2024 New York Film Festival — Thursday, 10.10, Alice Tully Hall.

McQueen’s film is principally a mother-son relationship drama set against the ghastly German bombing of England, generally known as The Blitz, which began on or about 9.7.40 and lasted until 5.11.41.

There’s a sentence within the NYFF Biitz page that gives me concern: “McQueen’s dazzling film offers a multicultural portrait of 1940s London, [one] too infrequently seen on screens.”

A “multicultural” London in 1940 and ’41 suggests that the film includes POC cast members other than just Eliott Heffernan, who plays George, the nine-year-old son of Saoirse Ronan‘s Rita, a working-class gal.

It’s one thing to consider the idea of Rita, a white woman, giving birth to a light-skinned POC son in the city that London was 93 years ago (1931). Life is always full of oddities and exceptions, of course, but this is obviously a stretch by historical social standards.

According to Wikipedia, in 1939 (a year before the bombing began) the total population of England was something in the vicinity of 38,084,321.

An IWM (Imperial War Museums) web page states that “before the first American troops arrived in 1942, the black population of Britain [was] around 8,000 to 10,000 people.” Let’s call it ten rather than eight.

In other words, in 1939 England there was one person of color for every 3800 palefaces. And yet two years after the start of the worldwide Great Depression with everyone scraping to survive, Ronan’s Rita zeroed in and mated with a POC fella within a nearly all-white culture that didn’t shrink from racist sentiments.

Okay, perhaps she adopted George but why?

I’m sorry but how can a rational, semi-informed moviegoer not conclude that casting-wise Blitz sounds like another case of presentism?

“I’m envisioning some kind of high-end prostitute finishing school tucked away in Lausanne, Switzerland…an ivy-covered, brick-facade institute where they learn all the proper sailing knots, how to ride English and western saddle styles, learn about 19th and 20th Century art movements, study the histories of ancient Greece and the Roman Empire, write essays about Benjamin Disraeli, etc.” — “NotImpressed1Yet“, posted in response to a 3.14.09 Bernie Madoff piece called “In His Shoes“.

The piece itself…

Unless he somehow manages to commit suicide, Bernie Madoff is going to die in jail. That seems appropriate to me, but I’m wondering why he didn’t just run for it when he had the chance. He knew the Feds were on his tail and it was just a matter of time. I’m asking because something in me can’t help but sympathize with a caged bird, especially when he/she is looking at life in the slammer.

If I was Madoff I would have prepared for my escape and disappearance during my ponzi-scam days. All criminals need to face the fact that sooner or later they’ll be forced to lam it. I would have socked away massive amounts of cash in a few Swiss, Cayman Islands and Venezuelan bank accounts under fake names, with debit and credit cards attached to each account. And I would have hired pros to create several sets of first-rate fake IDs and fake passports. And I would have arranged in advance for plastic surgery with a first-rate specialist based in Moscow.

I would have slipped out of Manhattan before the Feds arrested me. I would have taken a private plane to northeastern Canada and then another to Iceland, and then a third to Belgium. I would then enjoy a leisurely car trip to Russia, my pockets and briefcase stuffed with several hundred grand in Euros, ready to bribe whenever necessary. I’d meet my plastic surgeon somewhere in Ukraine — haven’t decided where.

After the operation I’d move to Tartu in Estonia and recover for six or seven weeks. Then I’d drive down to Moscow and hire myself a team of four elite bodyguards — two guys, two women — and invest in the finest electronic security systems and outfit all my homes with them.

Then I’d make my way to Vietnam. I’d probably build myself a high-security home in the Central Highlands and live in it for two or three months — no more. The eventual plan would be to have several “safe houses” but never stay in any one for very long. Always moving, never sleeping with more than one eye closed, “like Yassir fucking Arafat.”

I’d buy a 100-foot sailing craft and move around from port to exotic port like a wandering character in a Joseph Conrad novel. I’d hire three full-time prostitutes to travel with me, but they’d have to be prostitutes who know how to sail. I might smoke opium from time to time. I’d pay for even more hookers to drop by on weekends, but they’d have to be highly educated and well-read. No booze, no cigarettes. But I’d chill out with quaaludes from time to time.

I’d volunteer with Red Cross organizations to help the poor. I’d move to Darfur and try and use my money to try and purchase some level of comfort or protection for the poor who live there. I’d move the operation to the Amazon jungle from time to time. I’d see about getting to know Hugo Chavez (although he might not want to know me). I’d travel to the South Pole and then to South Africa, and then take a ferry to Madagascar.

I’d catch plays in London twice a year. I’d buy a studio in Montmartre that I’d visit every four or five months for a week or two. I’d always stay inside days, reading and watching movies on my 52″ LCD flatscreen, and working out on a treadmill. I’d go out to dinner and for walks in the evenings, wearing shades and a fishing hat.

I’d eventually get pinched, of course. Sooner or later somebody would sell me out or spot me (even with my altered appearance). But I might stay free for two or three years, and at least I’d have a great adventure under my belt and many things to remember before spending the rest of my life in miserable confinement.

The late Fredi Washington (1903-1994) is best known for her pivotal suppporting role of the light-skinned “Peola” in John M. Stahl‘s Imitation of Life (’34), which I’ve never actually sat down and watched. (I’ve only seen the 1959 Douglas Sirk-Lana Turner version.)

But I just saw Washington in Dudley Murphy‘s Black and Tan (’29), a 19-minute short in which she plays a beautiful dancer who’s married to the 30-year-old Duke Ellington, but who suffers from a tragic heart ailment.

The twentysomething Washington is obviously quite the spirited and vivacious actress. Right away I said “wow, she’s happening.” During the nightclub performance section she wears a fetching harem-flapper costume that made me sit up in my chair.

Wiki excerpt: “Moviegoers sometimes assumed from Washington’s appearance — her blue-gray eyes, pale complexion and light brown hair — that she might have passed [for white] in her own life. In 1934, she said her Imitation of Life role did not reflect her off-screen life, but ‘if I made Peola seem real enough to merit such statements, I consider such statements compliments and makes me feel I’ve done my job fairly well.'”

Biden: “There’s no possibility of my being completely candid with you…it’s simply beyond the realm of my own personality and psychological makeup to explain why I did a 180 last weekend by deciding to abandon my presidential campaign…a major pivot after insisting there was no argument or force short of Almighty God that could persuade me to quit. How did that happen? Was it my wife, Doctor Jill, whom some of you have compared to Lady Macbeth? Did she keep me in a bubble where I wouldn’t hear more open and honest assessments?

“The truth is that I was determined to tough it out no matter what…I said this over and over in various unyielding, mule-stubborn ways…even if it meant losing and taking the whole Democratic ship and crew with me, all of us swirling down to Davy Jones locker…

“The bottom ine is that I didn’t quit out of selflessness or personal sacrifice or any of that lofty, noble, Patrick Henry stuff…I was finally told there was no path to winning, and was therefore finally persuaded that in the eyes of history my name would be mud if I let that happen…and that was it…in order to save my legacy, to avoid the utter shame of self-ruin I was shoved out, plain and simple…and I fought this like a dying wolverine…snapping and snarling and screaming…I decided to fold my tent under extreme Irish duress…and I mean I was howling and spitting and punching my refrigerator and baring my fangs and kicking and even shitting my pants. It wasn’t pretty.

“Nor will I mention the fanatical cult mentality of the super-woke, left-progressive community that has overtaken and flooded the Biden White House since early 2021, and how we’ve all bent the knee…everyone in the Biden White House has shown rapt allegiance to woke cultism…some of you thought that when you elected me in November 2000 you elected a sensible old-school, forward-thinking liberal…think again!….we’ve all joined the cult and there’s no way to reverse course on this…identity, gender, the celebration of non-white people, the open expression of gay sexuality….dicks, dicks, dicks, dicks….career cancellations as fierce punishment for incorrect viewpoints and behaviors…believing all women, all accusations, discouraging due process…dissing all white guys who’ve been accused of anything bad….anything that might rub wokesters the wrong way, anyone who may seem insufficiently deferential to the theology of trans and hormone blockers…surgical removal of male genitalia and nice breasts or the augmentation of new breasts….the joy of slicing young men’s dicks off…commmitted people of color looking to replace or downgrade or even eject straight white guys for they need to be scolded and slapped around so they will know what it’s like to feel oppression.

“I can’t mention this stuff because average folks won’t understand it or relate to it, but this is who we are and what we are, and what Kamala’s team will probably be if she’s elected….we all know what equity and social justice mean…it means Left Stalinism…everyone must be a POC or gay or trans or pro-immigration without limits, or at the very least deferring to same…all qualified people of color must be favored, and all straight white males must be disfavored or disciplined and made to sit in the back of the bus, for this is the new way, the way of the woke West Wing cult that has flourished under my term as your president.”

The promise of Bob Dylan soul and salvation has saved 2024 in terms of movie voltage…poppa-poppa-poppa-ooh-mow-mow-poppa-oooh-mow-muh-mow.

Up until now 2024, hobbled by the strikes, had been regarded as something of a weak sister. No longer! A Complete Unknown to the rescue!

I feel really great about this morning’s news that James Mangold‘s Bob Dylan biopic (which will obviously cover the span of 1961 folkie scruff to the 1966 motorcycle accident and not just the electric transformational shift at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival and which should have been titled Ghost of Electricity) will open in December.

This is an obvious shot in the arm in terms of Oscar schematics…Best Picture (duhh), Timothee Chalamet for Best Actor (he delivers an exceptionally spot-on Dylan singing voice), Best Director (Mangold) and so on. Millions of boomer-aged Dylan fans have just dropped to their knees.

I’m much more of an ornery X-factor cosmic pushbacker than a “boomer” (disgusting, despicable term) but my eyes are leaking as we speak…

This has been a seriously amazing three or four days — Droolin’ Joe finally drops out, Kamala Harris immediately ignites and A Complete Unknown is locked in for a December release….all within the span of 72 hours, give or take.

Besides pushing for the title change (Ghost of Electricity over A Complete Unknown), I’ve been urging a late ’24 release for many months, and certainly since last March.

All I can say is that after whispering the words “my weariness amazes me” over and over and over since I was knee-high to a grasshopper, this is a joyous moment. Right now, I mean. It may or may not be joyous when the film begins to screen, but here’s hoping.

Hey, Mangold…how about cutting together a 20-minute product reel and screening it at Telluride? Rocky mountain orgasm!

It is a measure of my magnanimous and forgiving nature (seriously) that I’m wishing and hoping that A Complete Unknown fulfills its potential in every way imaginable, despite Mangold having royally fucked me 17 years ago when he forwarded that 15-paragraph letter I’d emailed him (late summer of ’07) to Lionsgate marketing wiz Tim Palen, who in turn sent it along to the late Nikki Finke, who used it to embarass and trash me several months later.

It was a truly filthy episode all around, but I’ve since let it go. Well, mostly.

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Kamala Harris‘s first presidential campaign launched on 1.21.19 and lasted 10 and 1/2 months,

Prior to and during her presidential campaign an online informal organization using the hashtag #KHive formed to support her candidacy and defend her from racist and sexist attacks.

On 12.3.19, Harris withdrew from seeking the 2020 Democratic nomination, citing a shortage of funds.

But now, opposing Trump, Harris has the Prosecutor vs. Felon narrative to run on, and that may work out,

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Passed along late this afternoon. Any thoughts, additional info, disputes, Doubting Thomases, etc.?

Telluride Premieres (10):

Babygirl (Nicole Kidman, A24)
Conclave
Angelina Jolie‘s Maria
Jason Reitman‘s SNL 1975
Nickel Boys
The Piano Lesson
The End
Better Man
Don’t Let the Dogs Go Out Tonight
Piece by Piece

CANNES/VENICE carry-overs (6):

All We Imagine As Light
Anora
A Different Man
Emilia Perez
Misericordia
The Seed of the Sacred Fig Harvest

…to listen to off-the-cuff remarks by the leading Democratic presidential candidate and not have to listen to that mumbling, bent-over, coughing, croaky-voiced rickety old goat who, as Bill Maher said last weekend, appears to be “one gentle breeze away from death.”

I’ve never liked Kamala Harris‘s voice — that thin, nasally, reedy, sharp-toned, half-squeaky quality — but it’s so wonderful to know that she’s capable of crafting and expressing complete sentences, and that Droolin’ Joe is finally out of the game and that I’ll never be obliged to listen to him again.

I realize Kamala is basically a selling-point figurehead who will presumably energize lefties and independents of all shapes and sizes, and that if she’s elected on 11.5.24 the West Wing advisers and staffers will be the ones handling the actual nuts-and-bolts. But…

Strange as this may sound, I’ve been feeling semi-enthused about the identity factor. I actually kinda like the DEI boost — first woman president, first African + Jamaican-descended president, first partly Asian president.

Plus I’m starting to think she may win after all. Americans like new stuff, new faces and voices, etc. Plus she’s under 60!

I’m not surprised that Joker: Folie a Deux (Warner Bros., 10.4) won’t be playing Telluride, but I’m still saddened by its absence. Because I know it’s extra-good….I can feel it.

Venice Film Festival topper Alberto Barbera:

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I’m sorry but while sitting in my third-row seat at the Museum of Moving Image last Saturday evening, I would have been a much happier camper watching John Ford‘s The Horse Soldiers instead of The Searchers.

The former, released in 1959, has never been accused of being a great film — two years ago I called it steady, sturdy mid-range Ford — but it’s very watchable and oddly comforting, and it has no racism or bizarre atmospheric concepts (a family living alone in a water-less, soil-free Monument Valley) or anything that prompts strong disbelief.

That scene in which John Wayne‘s Union troops are hiding in a forest alongside a sizable-sized river as they listen to some Confederate troops sing a marching song, and doing so with the vocal expertise of the Mitch Miller singers and in harmony yet…gets me very time.

HE commenter “brenkiklco”: “Brilliant in patches but quite slight. The action is perfunctory. The charge at Newton Station is rather lamely staged. And there’s scarcely any climax at all. Ford reportedly just wanted to wrap the thing up after a stuntman died on the set. The romance is unconvincing. Most of the performances have that Fordian quality of slight, theatrical exaggeration. A hint of Victorian barnstorming that you either go with or you don’t. But Wayne and Holden make good frenemies, and there are several enjoyable scenes.

Posted on 6.4.22: I’ve had it up to here with the standard narrative about The Horse Soldiers being one of John Ford‘s lesser efforts. I know this sounds like heresy, but it may be my favorite post-1945 Ford film. I know that She Wore A Yellow Ribbon and The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance are widely regarded as more substantial and therefore “better”, but I don’t like watching them as much as The Horse Soldiers, and anyone who doesn’t like that can shove it.

A Civil War drama based on Grierson’s Raid of 1863, The Horse Soldiers is steady, solid, midrange Ford — well-produced and well-acted with good character arcs and flavorful Southern atmosphere. Plus it gets extra bonus points for being set in the South (green trees, green grass, plantations, swamps, bridges, rivers) and not in godforsaken Monument Valley.

Handsomely shot by William H. Clothier in a 1.66 aspect ratio, its very easy to watch — every time I pop it in I feel comfortable and relaxed. Partly because it has a minimum of Ford-bullshit distractions. My only real problem is a scene in which rebel troops are heard signing a marching tune exactly like the Mitch Miller singers. I also don’t like a scene in which a furious John Wayne throws down eight or nine shots of whiskey in a row — enough to make an elephant pass out.

There’s a scene in which a boys’ military academy is asked to attack Wayne’s Union regiment — a scene in which a mother drags her 10-year-old son, Johnny, out of a line of marching troops, only to lose him when Johny climbs out of his second-floor bedroom window to rejoin his fellows. It reminds me of that moment when Claudette Colbert collapses in a grassy field as she watches Henry Fonda marching off to fight the French in Drums Along The Mohawk.

I also love that moment in Newton Station in which Wayne senses something wrong when costar William Holden, playing an antagonistic doctor-surgeon, tells him that perhaps a too easily captured Confederate colonel (Carleton Young), an old buddy, isn’t the submissive, easily captured type — “He’s West Point, tough as nails…the man I knew could lose both arms and still try to kick you to death.”

Kino Lorber’s new 4K version of this 1959 film (which lost money, by the way, partly due to exorbitant salaries and producer participation deals) streets on 6.14.22

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“The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.” — Thomas Wolfe, “God’s Lonely Man.”

“I am alone…I’m not lonely.” — Robert Niro‘s Neil McAuley in Heat (’95).

Taxi Driver is one more in a long list of 20th Century movies that could never be made today. The woke commissars would never allow a 13 year-old actress to play a street prostitute. Not a chance in hell.

In Paul Schrader‘s original Taxi Driver screenplay, the pimp (eventually played by Harvey Keitel) was black and in the final reel shoot-out, Travis killed only black people.

“In the original script, it was just a racist slaughter,” Schrader recalls. “There was genuine concern. [The producers] came to me and said, ‘We’ve really got to change this. There could be a riot.’ It would have been socially and morally irresponsible if we had incited that kind of violence.” — from a 7.6.06 Guardian interview piece.

“Bickle Died in Shootout…Again,” posted almost exactly three years ago:

Strangely, curiously, there are still those who don’t understand (or refuse to accept) that Tony Soprano was whacked while sitting in that family restaurant booth in the final episode of The Sopranos. I’ve come to understand that these very same people have also fought against the obvious interpretation of the aftermath of that tenement shootout scene in Taxi Driver (’75).

For the 17th or 18th time, here’s the damn explanation (and there’s really no arguing this):

At the end of the Taxi Driver shootout sequence and just after the bleeding and mortally wounded Travis Bickle, sitting on that blood-spattered couch, pretends to shoot himself in the head as he goes “bawshhhh!…bawshhhh!”, director Martin Scorsese switches to an overhead crane shot of Bickle on the couch and the two cops standing at the doorway with guns drawn. Looking downward, the camera slowly tracks along the ceiling, over the cops and down the hallway and into the street.

Most would say this is just a cool overhead tracking shot and let it go at that. But it’s just as legitimat to call it the path of Bickle’s spirit as he leaves his body and prepares to merge with the infinite finality…remember Jeannot Szwarc‘s similar spirit-rising-out-of-the-body shot at the end of Somewhere in Time? Same basic idea.

What half-reasonable person could ever buy the denouement of Taxi Driver? Everything in this sequence screams “this is bullshit!” In what world would Bickle, suspected by at least one Secret Service Treasury guy as a potential assassin (“Henry Krinkle”) who nearly killed Sen. Charles Palatine…in what world would Bickle be portrayed as a hero by the media for shooting a corrupt cop and two pimps in an East Side tenement building? The idea is insane.

And this shooting in some way helps the parents of Jodie Foster‘s Iris to find her and bring her back home to Indiana? (Iris will never be restored as a normal Indiana teenager…she’s been ruined and corrupted forever.)

And then Cybil Shepard gives Travis a come-hither look in the rear-view mirror when he gives her a ride in his cab?

It’s all Travis’s death fantasy…the stuff he imagines would happen in a perfect world as he sits on that tenement couch, bleeding profusely and eyeballing the cops and slowly drifting off the mortal coil, etc. The very last shot in Taxi Driver is of a seemingly startled Travis looking into his cab’s rearview mirror, and then whoosh…he’s gone. No reflection. Because Travis isn’t actually there.

Are there really people out there who think that the denoument is somehow real? Yes, there are.

“I am McLovin’s fat dad, and no, I have no problem with wearing a black baseball cap and black shorts. Okay, I helped raise him so I guess I’m partly responsible. Yeah, I bought the weapon that he used to try to kill Trump with and left it lying around so I’m also responsible for that, I suppose. I knew he was a lonely strange kid and that he had been bullied and whatnot….yeah, I knew that. So a lot of what happened is my fault…I admit it, all right?

“No, I’ve never seen Superbad but I’m going to watch it soon.” — Matthew Crooks, father of deceased Trump shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks.

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