Posted on 11.20.07: I’d love to get into Denzel Washington‘s The Great Debaters, which I saw this evening, but it’s early yet. Discussions and terms await. But it’s essential to mention Nate Parker, who plays one of three African-American debaters (the other two played by Jurnee Smollett and Denzel Whitaker) from Wiley College in 1935 who wound up debating the Harvard University team, under the guidance of Washington’s Melvin B. Tolson.
Nate Parker
I’ve never seen Parker before, but he’s got it. Charismatic, good-looking…a “tan” Paul Newman (as Newman was in The Young Philadelphians) who looks people in the eye cool and steady, and perhaps has a slight weakness for women.
Parker has only been in the game since ’04. He’s acted only on TV and in crappy movies so far. (I missed his supporting performance in Pride, the swim-team sports movie with Terrence Howard and Bernie Mac that opened last March.) Worse, his next two are low-rent exploitation films — Tunnel Rats (directed by — yipes! — Uwe Boll) and Felon. The Great Debaters is Parker’s first and only A-level effort. He needs to build on it and move in another direction, or in five years he’ll be Dorian Harewood. It’s his call.
All I know is, Parker has a quality, a presence, a vibe. He could be another Denzel. A small group I spoke with after tonight’s screening agreed on this point, or at least that he’s Newman-esque. It’ll be intriguing to see what happens.
Two and a half months ago I ranted against the critics who’d posted thumbs-down reviews about Nick Jarecki‘s thoughtful, entirely sufficient Crisis. HE to RT & Metacritic gang: “You guys can’t give a 26% RT rating to a film that’s ambitious and moderately gripping and narratively efficient for the most part…it deserves a pass, for God’s sake! You can say it has an issue or two but nothing fatal…c’mon, it’s more or less fine!”
The same kind of unwarranted dismissals have greeted Phillip Noyce‘s Above Suspicion, which began streaming yesterday. It currently has a 29% RT rating, and a 48% over at Metacritic. And it doesn’t add up. We’ve all seen films that have earned low aggregate critic scores, and we know how they tend to feel and play out. Above Suspicion doesn’t fit this mold at all.
Trust me — this is a first-rate, redneck-love-affair-gone-bad flick that feels like it was made in 1977, and that in itself makes it something to savor on all kinds of levels.
Excerpt from initial HE review, “The Girl From Lonesome Holler”, 7.24.17: “Most people would define ‘redneck film’ as escapist trash in the Burt Reynolds mode, but there have been a small handful that have portrayed rural boondock types and their tough situations in ways that are top-tier and real-deal. My favorites in this realm are John Boorman‘s Deliverance, Billy Bob Thornton‘s Sling Blade, and Lamont Johnson‘s The Last American Hero.
“Noyce’s Above Suspicion is the absolute, dollars-to-donuts equal of these films, or at least a close relation with a similar straight-cards, no-bullshit attitude.”
Why have a majority of critics taken a dump on it? Some simply haven’t liked it — fine. Others may have problems with the social-cultural elements. Critics often give passes to mediocre films because of certain political ingredients. A story about a desperately unhappy trailer-trash wife losing her bearings and getting dumped by her FBI lover doesn’t exactly scream “seal of good wokeness” or “#MeToo-approved.” Some critics may also have a problem with a film reflecting the values and living conditions of rural rightwing backwater types. Most critics will deny it, but they know there are some films they can’t pan while there’s no downside to slamming a film like Above Suspicion. Do the math.
Another issue was the fact that this poor film was snared in distribution troubles for nearly four years, and to some that means “must be problematic.” The trouble had nothing to do with quality, and was caused, in fact, by a couple of cowboy producers.
Empire‘s Al Hornercalled it “an enveloping if stately paced thriller that doubles up as a portrait of a broken America: one where impoverished people fall into addiction, then into crime and finally into the witness stand, only to be failed by the people meant to protect and serve them.”
Deadline‘s Pete Hammond: “Noyce has captured the feel of a coal-driven small community and the darkness lying beneath the surface. A true-life saga, Above Suspicion benefits from a strong dose of authenticity anchored by a revelatory performance from Emilia Clarke, who nails the demeanor and accent of a doomed soul trying to escape a beaten life. The star’s Game of Thrones fans might find her virtually unrecognizable here, but it is a thoroughly accomplished performance.”
“Suspicion About To Pop Through,” posted on 4.1.21: “Noyce always delivers with clarity and discipline but this is arguably the most arresting forward-thrust action flick he’s done since Clear and Present Danger. Plus it boasts a smart, fat-free, pared-down script by Mississippi Burning‘s Chris Gerolmo, some haunting blue-tinted cinematography by Eliot Davis (Out of Sight, Twilight) and some wonderfully concise editing by Martin Nicholson.
“Above Suspicion damn sure feels like a ’70s film. I mean that in the most complimentary way you could possibly imagine. It’s about real people, tough decisions, yokel culture, corruption, Percocets, hot car sex and lemme outta here. There’s no sense of 21st Century corporate wankery. Adults who believe in real movies made this thing, and they did so with an eye for tension and inevitable plot turns and fates dictated by character and anxiety and, this being rural Kentucky, bad karma and bad luck.”
To be fair to the “nearly 40” students who hadn’t a clue, Elizabeth Taylor‘s career peaked between 1950 and ’51 (Father of the Bride, A Place in the Sun) and ’63 (Cleopatra). She’s remembered by older film buffs and the gay community, of course, but Joe and Jane Popcorn checked out at least a half-century ago, if not earlier.
I for one didn’t revisit Fatal Attraction on the occasion of its 30th anniversary, which happened three and a half years ago (9.16.17). But others have in the interim, and the #MeToo view is basically that even though Glenn Close‘s Alex Forrest was damaged and unstable and jumped the gun as far as Michael Douglas‘s Dan Gallagher was concerned, she was coming from a no-bullshit emotional place, and she had a point.
Gallagher, a married attorney, saw an opportunity for some hot recreational sex (the kind that married people generally don’t have as a rule) and a brief revisiting of his hormonal hound-dog past with an enticing woman while his wife was out of town, and he went for it.
But almost right out of the gate Forrest began asking him why he was cheating. In some corners the new thinking is “was Alex really so wrong to want something real from the guy? She wasn’t some predatory psycho — she was hurting and off-balance, agreed, but it was the mid ’80s, she was 36 years old and she didn’t want to be treated like a sex poodle. She was simply putting her cards on the table.”
Hollywood Elsewhere re-watched Fatal Attraction two or three nights ago, and here’s the basic deal, #MeToo or not.
Forrest was way out line to even fantasize that a weekend (36 hours, give or take) of great sex and spaghetti and opera and more sex plus a suicide attempt…she was way out of line to think that there was even a slight basis for a serious extra-marital affair between herself and Gallagher.
The rules are the rules, and everyone knows that the first night or two of sex between consenting adults is strictly about sensual abandon and intoxication…under the best of circumstances and with the right person the initial stages of a sexual escapade can be a glorious and ecstatic escape from the regular grind of living and working and carrying the weight of it all.
And this rule goes double if not triple if one of the parties is married. In such a situation there’s always an assumption that this is strictly a one-timer or a one-weekender…all sane adults understand this.
If, on the other hand, the affair continues and the married man or woman becomes more and more attached to the non-married lover or vice versa, then it’s cool for the unattached person to ask “what are we doing exactly? Because I’m not into recreational, gymnastic sex for its own sake…I’m interested in having a real-deal relationship with someone I truly care for so where are we exactly?”
That kind of conservation is completely normal and par-for-the-course after the affair has been going on a while. But you can’t broach the subject after only a night or two. That’s crazy — totally bonkers.
Which is why Gallagher froze and said “oh, shit” to himself at the 42-second mark in the above scene, or right when Forrest said “so what are you doing here?”
I’ve just watched these two scenes from Brian DePalma‘s Carlito’s Way (’93), and they seemed fresh as a daisy. Here’s the reason: I have excellent recall of the films I like and therefore want to recall. I’ve therefore remembered almost nothing about Carlito’s Way. I didn’t hate it, mind — I was “meh.”
I’ve seen it exactly once, and I remember two things about it — (a) Sean Penn‘s light brown frizzy Jewfro (i.e., Alan Dershowitz) and (b) Al Pacino hiding from the bad guys on an going-down escalator by lying down on a going-up parallel escalator.
From “De Palma Getting Gold-Watch Treatment,” posted on 9.10.15: “DePalma was a truly exciting, must-watch director from the late ’60s to mid ’70s (Greetings to The Phantom of the Paradise to Carrie), and an exasperating, occasionally intriguing director from the late ’70s to mid ’90s (Dressed To Kill, Scarface, The Untouchables, Carlito’s Way, Mission: Impossible, Snake Eyes).
“De Palma is one of the most committed and relentless enemies of logic of all time. For a great director he has an astonishing allegiance to nonsensical plotting and dialogue that would choke a horse. I tried to re-watch Blow Out last year — I couldn’t stand it, turned it off. The Fury drove me crazy when I first saw it, although I love the ending. I found much of Dressed To Kill bothersome when it first came out 35 years ago, and to be honest I haven’t watched it since.”
It’s been 13 months since I first saw Roman Polanski’s drop-dead masterpiece, and almost 20 months since it opened at the 2019 Venice Film Festival. To the best of my knowledge English subtitles were never available on the Gaumont Bluray, and English-speaking audiences still aren’t allowed to stream it with same because distributors are still fearful of potential #MeToo pushback. (And yet a December 2019 trailer has English subs!)
The path out of this situation is not difficult: The unfortunate history of a flawed artist is one thing, but the art itself is another. Suppressing public access to high-quality art is, to put it mildly, odious — a truly bad look.
From my 3.25.20 review: “J’Accuse has been crafted with absolute surgical genius…a lucid and exacting and spot-on retelling of an infamous episode…a sublime atmospheric and textural recapturing of 1890s ‘belle epoque’ Paris, and such a meticulous, hugely engrossing reconstruction of the Dreyfus affair…a tale told lucidly…a clue-by-clue, layer-by-layer thing.
“You know what J’Accuse is? A bedtime comfort flick — comforting because it’s so damned good.
“It’s my idea of a perfect film in every respect — Polanski and Robert Harris‘s brilliant screenplay, the ace-level production design by Jean Rabasse and art direction by Dominique Moisan, Pawel Edelman‘s naturally lighted cinematography, Alexandre Desplat‘s music…every single element is aces.
8:40 pm: Nobody expected the 2021 Oscars to be anything too special or riveting, but I was intrigued by what Soderbergh might do with it. Whatever he did, it sure as hell wasn’t like a movie. As the show finally turned out, it was just kinda “meh” and not funny or pizazzy enough and the only big surprise, really, was the Hopkins win. How did Viola Davis manage the Best Actress SAG win while losing the Oscar? The simplest answer is that SAG-AFTRA allegiance is not synonymous with Academy worship.
8:10 pm: Time for the keenly awaited Best Actress presentation — the big moment. And the Oscar goes to Frances McDormand! Okay, that’s a wee bit disappointing. But okay — Nomadland‘s third Oscar, and McDormand’s third also. “And I like work…hah-hah! Thank you for that.” And The Father‘s Anthony Hopkins wins for Best Actor! The show was jiggered to end on a big emotional note with Chadwick Boseman winning, and then Hopkins takes it and he doesn’t show up. And the show’s over. They managed to push the running time to 3:17 without songs or dancing or a jokey monologue.
8:01 pm: Wait…Rita Moreno is presenting the Best Picture Oscar now? Before the Best Actor and Best Actress presentations? Okay — the second Nomadland Oscar. I’m fine with this. We all expected it. It’s a well-made film. Fran’s coyote yell worked. That and “see this movie on the biggest screen,” etc. Who expects to see an IMAX version of Nomadland sometime this summer?
7:57 pm: The pace of the death reel was steady at first, then it went faster and faster, and then it slowed down at the end to acknowledge the passings of Sean Connery and Chadwick Boseman. They seemed to include everyone. I guess the show is going to last 3 hours and 15 minutes, something like that. No worries on this end.
7:37 pm: Zendaya presenting the Best Score Oscar, and the winner is Soul. Jon Batiste is cool. H.E.R. wins the Best Song Oscar for Judas and the Black Messiah — “Fight For You.” What’s with all the time-killing chit-chat…the padding? At least Glenn Close is getting into it.
7:27 pm: Tyler Perry accepting the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. “Refuse hate…don’t hate anyone,” he says, “because they’re black or white or Asian,” etc. How about wokesters not hating centrist types? How about not trying to destroy the lives of people who aren’t woke enough, or who might have tweeted the wrong thing ten years ago? Do they count?
7:18 pm: Time for the Best Editing Oscar. How is silvery Harrison Ford going to play Indiana Jones again? He seems a bit frail; sounds wheezy. Wait…Sound of Metal wins! Who saw that coming? Congrats!
7:07 pm: The Best Cinematography Oscar goes to Mank‘s Eric Messerschmidt! That’s a bit of a surprise, no? Friendo: “So now things get interesting. Will Nomadland only win Best Picture and Best Director? Will it win best Editing also? Will McDormand win through?”
7:05 pm: We’re now in the final hour (55 minutes to go), and Mank has won the Best Production Design Oscar…congrats! Why does this show have no clips?
6:56 pm: Brad Pitt hands the Best Supporting Actress Oscar to Yuh-Jung Youn, the spunky Minari grandma who burned the barn down. The first Asian actress to win in this category since Sayonara‘s Miyoshi Umeki, and the first Korean actress ever. She’s going on a bit. An elegant lady, nicely dressed, amusing…class act.
6:51 pm: The Visual Effects Oscar should go to Tenet, I feel, and it does!
6:40 pm: Time for My Octopus Teacher to win the Best Feature Documentary Oscar…right? Correct. What happened to “this show will feel like a movie?” I thought that meant that nominees and winners would perform snappy dialogue with the camera darting in and out. I thought that meant that some kind of light narrative would develop. Something along those lines. The winning Octopus couple is going on and on. Friendo: “Oh, for the days of Joe Pesci when a simple ‘Thank You’ was sufficient.”
6:35 pm: Best Documentary, Short Subject Oscar goes to Colette. I’m sorry but this show is just plodding along…it’s not zippy, funny, nervy, irreverent. The tone of sincerity mixed with “earnest” and “heartfelt” is almost suffocating. It feels like a meeting of kindly, friendly Trotskyites in formal wear.
6:26 pm: Reese Witherspoon reading off the Best Animated Feature nominees. I’m sorry but I hate animation. The Oscar goes to Soul — a film that I didn’t much care for. Excerpt: “Soul betrays its audience by (a) encouraging them to identify with and believe in Joe Gardner‘s long-denied dream about becoming a jazz musician instead of a frustrated middle-school music teacher, only to (b) pull the rug out on Joe’s dream in Act Three and end things with Joe feeling uncertain about what he really wants to do with his remaining time on earth. Possibly jazz, possibly teaching…who knows?”
6:15 pm: Two Distant Strangers wins for Live Action Short. We are reminded that cops will continue to shoot people of color on a disproportionate basis. The Best Animated Short winners (“If Anything Happens I Love you”) also deplore gun deaths at the hands of police.
6:12 pm: This show doesn’t feel “like a movie” at all. It feels like a dud-level Kiwanis Club awards event in a mid-sized restaurant. The vibe is pure Spirit Awards, but without the jokes. The most touching acceptance speech so far has been given by poor Thomas Vinterberg (what a terrible loss) — the others have been (here comes that word again) solemn.
6:08 pm: And the Best Sound Oscar, announced by Riz Ahmed, goes to Sound of Metal….thank you! Fully and completely deserved, if I do say so myself.
5:59 pm: The Best Directing Oscar goes to Nomadland‘s Chloe Zhao. Her hair is quite ungussied and un-styled — middle part, Pocahantas braids, large ears. She’s wearing a somewhat plain gold-champagne colored gown with white sneakers. Where’s the jean jacket?
5:47 pm: I have to be honest — the Soderbergh Oscar atmosphere feels a bit curious. Solemn, doleful, downbeat, no jokes. Emphasis on the solemn. In years and decades past, the Oscar elite (nominees, plus-ones, ticketed guests) were the usual Anglos with a smattering of Black, Latino, Asian, etc. Tonight the visuals are diverse-plus…mostly (am I allowed to notice this?) people of color, it seems, with a smattering of palefaces. Okay, more than a smattering but fewer, for sure. 60-40? Plus the absence of jokes and general mirth…what can I say? The words “fun” and “lively” will not be used to summarize this show after it’s over.
5:42 pm: Best Makeup and Hairstyling goes to Sergio Lopez-Rivera, Mia Neal and Jamika Wilson for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. And Ma Rainey‘s Ann Roth wins the Costume Oscar.
5:38 pm: I have to admit that those clips of Steven Spielberg‘s West Side Story (due eight months hence) are alluring. A little Robert Wise-y, but more arthousey. The cinematographer is Janusz Kaminsky, but the default milky desaturated thing has been put aside.
5:28 pm: Dern again, presenting the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor…Daniel Kaluuya, Leslie Odom, Jr., Lakeith Stanfield, Paul Raci, Sascha Baron Cohen…and Kaluuya wins, as predicted. I would’ve chosen Stanfield, as indicated previously. Kaluuya’s thick accent, fast slurring and murmuring, heavyish appearance, etc. He was too old to play the 21 year-old Fred Hampton, and didn’t resemble him otherwise. Nobody minded.
5:21 pm: Laura Dern announcing the winner of the Best International Film Oscar. HE is rooting against Another Round, due respect, and for Quo Vadis, Aida or Collectiv. Thomas Vinterberg‘s Another Round, an underwhelming film, wins. Vinterberg alludes to his (and more particularly his daughter Ida‘s) highway tragedy in 2019. Very sad….”Ida, this is a miracle that has happened, and you’re part of it…this one’s for you.”
5:08 pm: Despite the last-minute Bo Burnham switcheroo at the end of Promising Young Woman, Emerald Fennell wins for Best Original Screenplay. An omen that might indicate a Mullligan win later on? These origin-story speeches are definitely going on a bit. Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar about to be announced…and the Oscar goes to the co-writers of The Father, Christopher Hampton and Florian Zeller. Zeller, speaking from Paris at 2:14 am, is holding an Oscar statuette. Makes logistical sense.
5:04 pm: One Night in Miami‘s Regina King tracking shot through the sparsely attended Union Station festivities, and then up to the stage. First thing out of her mouth — this has been a painful year and people of color are not safe, or words to that effect — “This of this as a movie set…” Friendo: “Mentioning racial anxiety at the very beginning of the telecast…millions of Americans just switched to the other channel.”
2:42 pm: HE’s live-blog commentary on the lowest rated, most who-gives-a-shit? Oscar award ceremony in Hollywood history (although possibly the most inventively staged and written, courtesy of Steven Soderbergh) begins at 5pm Pacific / 8 pm Eastern. Tune in, turn on, check your tweets.
Here’s one reason why Hollywood Elsewhere has such a high regard for Spectrum service:
4:45 update: Signal issues persisted, so I downloaded the Spectrum app on my Apple TV box and am now using this — good to go.
“It’s not enough to succeed — one’s friends must fail.” — Somerset Maugham.
By the same token it’s vaguely or mildly satisfying to correctly predict Oscar winners, yes, but the real joy (or my real joy) comes from knowing that certain Oscar prognosticators or advocates got it wrong.
Like when Green Book won the Best Picture Oscar — a nice, emotionally poignant film about a parent-child relationship on the road had triumphed, fine, but the joy was in knowing that the Green Book haters (including Ingkoo Kang and Guy Lodge and the Indiewire wokesters) had been told by an Academy plurality to go fuck themselves.
The only Oscar moment that will deliver any kind of real suspense tonight is the Best Actress face-off between Viola Davis and Carey Mulligan.**
The bottom line is commonly understand all around: this is not a good year to be a white Oscar nominee, and so Viola, whose performance in Ma Rainey was, is and always will be a chore to sit through, probably has it in the bag. Unless Frances McDormand takes it, and that, no offense, will be a totally deflating “oh, God” moment if there ever was one.
But I’m hoping and praying for a Mulligan upset, not just because she and Emerald Fennell caught some kind of bottled lightning with the chilly but hardcore Promising Young Woman, and not just because I’ve been a Mulligan fan since I first saw her in An Education in January ’09, but also because — it almost makes me giddy to think about this — Variety‘s Clayton Davis has totally written Mulligan off.
So if Mulligan wins, great. But the real ecstasy will come from imagining the look on Clayton Davis’s face when and if Mulligan’s name is announced. I know it probably won’t happen, but a little voice in my chest is going “please please please please please.”
** Yes, I 100% concur that Andra Day gave the richest, most-lived-in lead-actress performance but it’s not in the cards for her, largely because The United States vs, Billie Holiday is no one’s idea of a good film.
Posted on 2.1.21: The tone of Mariem Pérez Riera‘s Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It is very “go, Rita… we love and cherish you”, etc. Which is great — it’s what every positive-minded doc about a long-haul, never-say-die actress should be like.
But it also plays the victim card over and over. It ignores the way things were when Moreno was coming up in the ’50s, and it tips in the direction of instructional 21st Century progressive feminism. It’s totally infused with “presentism” — judging the past by present-day standards.
It’s not about how Moreno’s life unfolded on a moment-to-moment basis when she was coming up and making her name and building her career, but about how badly she was treated and what assholes the various men were. Which they WERE, of course, but the ’50s were not a time of enlightenment as far as recognizing the full value of women in any realm was concerned. Moreno had a tough time because of that.
Yes, the film industry was sexist, exploitive, insensitive…unable or unwilling to see Moreno as a unique Latina with her own identity and contours. Yes, it was a bad place in many respects, but then again she was close to the top of the industry in the ‘50s.
How many dozens or hundreds of other Latina actress dancers were hungry to be cast in the roles that she landed? How many others were as talented? Or making as much money? (There was a reason that she got the Anita role in West Side Story rather than Chita Rivera, who played the spitfire character on Broadway.) How many Puerto Rican-born actresses were hanging out with Marlon Brando in the ’50s and early ’60s and running in that heavy company? Or attending the 1963 Civil Rights March? And having a side affair with Elvis Presley and rubbing shoulders with almost everyone who mattered back them?
Yes, she really got going as a stage and character actress in the ‘60s, ‘70s and beyond. Yes, she was on The Electric Company and Sesame Street and Oz. Yes, she’s costarring in the Norman Lear reboot of One Day At A Time, etc.
It’s a bit curious, by the way, that Riera has decided to ignore Moreno’s big scene with Jack Nicholson at the end of Mike Nichols‘ Carnal Knowledge (’71). It’s one of her hallmark moments, and yet Riera dismisses it because…you tell me. She also ignores Moreno’s Presley affair, which was basically about making Brando jealous.
The 4.25 Union Station Oscar telecast will have the visual look and atmospheric intrigue of a movie. The nominees and award presenters will be captured in various corners of the 83 year-old train station while speaking lines and sharing observations and who-knows-what-else? The usual approach — super-gala, stiff-necked, proscenium-arch behavior — is being jettisoned for something looser and jazzier and more thematically-driven. Perhaps an actual story might be told?
The camera operators will get a workout — I can tell you that.
“It’s not going to be like anything that’s been done before,” Soderbergh said during yesterday’s news conference. The pandemic and the Union Station venue has “opened up an opportunity to try something that hasn’t been tried.” The ceremony will be shot like an actual movie, with presenters “playing themselves, or at least a version of themselves
Plus longer acceptance speeches, Soderbergh promised. “We’re giving them space,” he said. “We’ve encouraged them to tell a story, and to say something personal.” I don’t want to be an alarmist but I fear what this kind of “personal” may unleash. I sense ariasofmyopichyperbole, otherwise known as wokester shit. Please.
Late yesterday afternoon Tatiana and I drove down to the Union Station complex to see what we could see. One, we saw nothing except barriers and fences and dead-faced security guards explaining the basics. Two, it was awful to hang around the rear regions and passages of a train station with no point or purpose…I felt small, lost, marginalized. For the time being I won’t see the grandiose art-deco showplace aspects of the station until everyone else does, eight days from now.
So we said “fine, fuck it,” drove up to Disney Hall to take some photos, and then pushed on to El Cholo for a light supper.
“The undercurrent of A Bigger Splash is gently mesmerizing, and that was enough for me. I can’t wait to see it again, or more precisely go there again. I felt like I was savoring a brief vacation. I’m not saying the dramatic ingredients are secondary, but they almost are.”
“You feel so nicely brought along by Yorick Le Saux‘s sun-speckled afternoon cinematography and Walter Fasano‘s disciplined cutting, and by the nostalgic Stones vibe (there’s a lip-synch dance sequence that made me fall in love all over again with ‘Emotional Rescue’) and especially by Ralph Fiennes’ giddy-ass, run-at-the-mouth, rock-and-roll madman performance that I was going ‘wow, I almost don’t even care what may or may not happen in this thing.’
“Well, I did as far as the plot unfolded. When the heavy-ass, third-act complications arrived I was…well, not uninterested. They’re definitely intriguing as far as they go, especially when the law steps in and starts asking questions. But I just liked being there.” — from “Much Better Splash Than Expected — Perverse, Noirish, High-Style, Sensual,” posted on 4.11.16.
“In short, Luca Guadagnino has made something rare and disconcerting: a genuinely pagan film. It rejoices not just in nudity, male and female, but in the classical notion of figures in a landscape, and of the earth itself demanding frenzied worship. That is why Harry (Ralph Fiennes), having put on a Rolling Stones LP, begins to dance to ‘Emotional Rescue’ and then, clearly fettered by interior space, bursts out onto the rooftop and continues his display under a scorching haze. Who would have thought that an Englishman, of all people, would prove to be such a natural Dionysian?” — from Anthony Lane’s 5.2.16 New Yorker review.
From HE’s John Heard obit, 7.22.17: I knew Heard slightly in the early ’80s. He wasn’t a friend but I was close at the time with Keith Szarabajka (Missing, Marie, A Perfect World, The Dark Knight, Argo) and he was genuinely friendly with Heard and so I kind of absorbed the camaraderie of that. (Szarabajka and I met while working as waiter-busboys at the Spring Street Bar & Grill in the late ’70s.)
I ran into Heard a few times at Cafe Central and The Allstate, another popular actor haunt on West 72nd Street. He had an off-and-on alcohol issue at the time, but he was a good egg and a seriously emotional guy.
In ’82 or thereabouts Heard experienced a momentary attraction to a woman I’d been involved with a few months earlier — i.e., photographer Sonia Moskowitz. He approached her at a bar one night with “you wanna get married?” But when I told him a day or two later that Sonia and I had gone out two or three months earlier, Heard apologized, as if he’d done something improper. “No, no, it’s cool, man…life moves on,” I said, but Heard was all “Jesus, man, I didn’t know…shit, sorry.”
In the spring of ’83 I saw Heard knock it hard and straight in Total Abandon, a courthouse stage drama written by Larry Atlas. Or so I recall. I certainly remember going up to Heard after the matinee ended and saying “Wow, man…that’s a tough role to play twice a day” and him smiling and shrugging and saying “naaah, just a workout.”
Heard’s Vin Makazian, a Newark detective with a gambling-slash-alcohol problem, was one of the most indelible Soprano characters.