Delicious, Demonic Otto Gross

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For me, A Dangerous Method (2011) is David Cronenberg‘s tastiest and wickedest film — intense, sexually upfront and occasionally arousing and yet highly cerebral, dramatically complex and certainly perverse.

I watched it again last night, and whoa, mama…Vincent Cassel‘s Otto Gross (1877-1920), a real-life Austrian psychoanalyst and sensualist outlaw, is easily the most fascinating character.

Not to take anything away from the carefully calibrated performances of co-leads Michael Fassbender (Carl Jung), Keira Knightley (Sabina Spielrein) and Viggo Mortensen (Sigmund Freud), but they’re made of earnest dramatic fibre. Cassell’s Gross is a pure groin rebel, and serving of dessert.

Cassel to Le Soir: “The character of Otto Gross is special, a kind of trap…a kind of Trojan Horse! That is to say, we send him for something and he does something else. I find my character very modern. It’s a bit like the manager of the Rolling Stones finding himself dropped into a period film. And, above all, he has very good lines. So, all in all, I couldn’t refuse. I had to play this role.”

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Comment Thread Tyranny

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Friendo: “Your ‘Wouldn’t It Be Amazing?‘ piece (Saturday, 6.1) was fucking great. Right on the money. And yet when you post this objectively true observation, the HE commentariat yawns and shits all over it.

“What most of them were saying, in essence, was that that films reflecting the experiences and yearnings of the vast majority of Americans are now passe. Old news. Stories that have been told enough. ‘Put a sock in it, white man!’

“Mutaman wrote that prior to 2010 ‘there were like a zillion movies like this and they all sucked.’ Right. The Graduate, Rushmore, Bottle Rocket, American Graffiti, Loving, I Love My Wife, Ordinary People, Risky Business, Falling Down, Blue Collar, Ghost World, Hardcore, Breaking Away, The Stepdad, Match Point, Parenthood, Juno, The Kids Are All Right, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Little Miss Sunshine, The Squid and the Whale, Heathers, Dead Poet’s Society, Up In The Air, Clueless, Dazed and Confused, A League of Their Own, Falling in Love, Kramer vs. Kramer, The Verdict, Slapshot, Manchester By The Sea, Boyhood, Thirteen, This Boy’s Life, Superbad, Napoleon Dynamite, Almost Famous, Rebel Without A Cause, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, No Down Payment, Hud, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Field of Dreams…none woked-up, all sucked ass.

“And if you want to watch films that aren’t driven by SJW agendas, you’ll be covered by the Hallmark Channel or explicitly religious filmmakers.

“This is madness. I’m not kidding. Some of your commenters are out of their fucking minds.

“Unfortunately, woke lunatics (including the HE variety) are having an outsized influence on the wider culture.

“You can see it in movies, TV, theatre, journalism…it’s nuts. And seriously depressing.”

Shiloh Jolie-Pitt, Apparently Persuaded That Dad Brad Is Evil Incarnate, Wants To Legally Drop Name

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Brad Pitt has been sober for nearly eight years, but because he lost his alcoholic temper during that infamous chartered flight (on 9.14.16) and was physically abusive to Maddox, one of the six Jolie-Pitt kids…because he was a belligerent drunken dick that one time, at least two of his daughters, Shiloh Jolie-Pitt, 18, and Vivienne Jolie-Pitt, 15, are convinced that he’s a living embodiment of Satan and want the Pitt struck from their last names.

Shiloh has in fact filed legal papers to change her name to a Pitt-less Shiloh Jolie. Perhaps Vivienne will follow suit when she turns 18.

We all understand teens who feel estranged from their parents (I was one), but who goes into court and says in effect “strike my father’s last name from my legal history!…he doesn’t exist, his name is anathema!…I judge him damned with the devil and condemn him to molten-lava hell with all the other fallen angels, where he will writhe in terrible pain for all eternity.”

What kind of nutbag daughter thinks this way?

Why is the divorce initiated by Angelina Jolie against William Bradley Pitt still ongoing and unresolved eight years later? Sane exes don’t behave this way as a rule.

Trust me — I’m not the first person on planet earth to rhetorically ask “what exactly is Angelina’s basic psychological malfunction?”

Then again I may be thinking too narrowly. Perhaps Pitt is the devil incarnate, and therefore deserves to be hunted down with clubs and spears and burned like Joan of Arc or Oliver Reed’s Father Grandier from Ken Russell’s The Devils?

Wouldn’t It Be Amazing…

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…if a movie about a struggling family dealing with a life-is-no-picnic situation…wouldn’t it be amazing if such a film wasn’t named after or didn’t focus on a character with special needs or a special affliction? Or who wasn’t strugglng with his or her sexuality and wasn’t an immigrant or a person of color or an aspiring 10-year-old drag queen or a kid dealing with his queer parents’ unhappy marriage due to one of them being in transition and the other committed to his/her natural biological cards…?

Wouldn’t it be amazing, in short, if an occasional family- or community-related movie came along that wasn’t about any of this SJW-minded, attention-demanding, vaguely woke-driven bullshit and was just about…you know, an average kid dealing with normal difficult shit…difficult because nothing is easy for kids in their early to late teens and yet the problems are more or less par for the course?

Example: What if a family movie was about an average non-homophobic straight teenaged male whose parents are reasonably stable and decent types…and who (fasten your seat belts!) likes girls but whose grades aren’t very good and who lives a life of random distractions and daydreams but at the same time is a bit of a lady-killer, a bit of an Alfie…God in heaven!! Call out the Strelnikovs!!

“Hit Man” vs. “Stakeout”

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In general terms, Richard Linklater‘s Hit Man (Netflix, 6.7) is about Gary (Glenn Powell), a 30something guy who works for a big-city police department (New Orleans) in an undercover capacity.

The story kicks in when Gary falls in love with Maddy (Adria Arjona), a beautiful Latina woman who’s been involved with a not-so-nice guy named Ray (Evan Holtzman) and is also kind of a target of the police, except Gary can’t tell Maddy for procedural and security reasons that he’s with the fuzz.

The story tension is about when and how Gary will come clean with Maddy, and how her troubled relationship with Ray will be resolved (i.e., come to an end) so that she and Gary will have some kind of chance together.

Without divulging what I felt about Hit Man, I need to mention how much it reminded me, in certain ways, of John Badham‘s Stakeout (’87), which was a kind of cop sitcom thriller with a strong emotional pull.

The lead character was Chris (Richard Dreyfuss), a 30something detective who works for a big city police department (Seattle). He and partner Bill (Emilio Estevez) are assigned to spy on Maria (Madeleine Stowe), a beautiful Latina woman who’s been involved with a not-so-nice guy named Stick (Aidan Quinn). Stick has recently escaped from prison and, cops suspect, may be visiting Maria soon.

The story kicks in when Chris falls in love with Maria, but can’t tell her for procedural and security reasons that he’s with the cops. Plus he’s doubly deceived her by pretending to be a phone company technician so he can plant a bug in her phone.

The story tension is about when and how Chris will come clean with Maria, and how her troubled relationship with Stick will be resolved (i.e., come to an end) so that she and Chris will have some kind of chance together.

The storylines of Hit Man and Stakeout don’t line up precisely and diverge in significant ways, but the above described similarities are legit.

Again without tipping my hand about Hit Man, which I caught yesterday afternoon, I have to say that I liked Stakeout a lot more when I saw it…Jesus, 37 years ago? Yeah, it was. Reagan times, Iran-Contra, etc.

I Lit Up Inside

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When I was young I didn’t like the way elderly types smelled. I was tutored by a 70something retired guy when I was 11 or 12 or thereabouts (my grades when it came to math and science were always poor as I cared only for English and history) and I recall sitting in his study and wondering “what’s up with this guy?” He smelled like something spicy and withered and mildewy. Like rotting bread. Plus he had bony, crinkly, liver-spotted hands.

On top of which I didn’t like him personally — he was snappy and brittle-mannered. I only lasted three or four sessions with the guy, partly because he was soon letting me know that he found me slow on the pickup and therefore irritating. Except the main reason I wasn’t paying close attention is that I couldn’t stop thinking how funny he smelled and how much I wanted to get out of there. Eff you, gramps.

Ever since Sutton came along in mid-November of ’21, the aroma thing has been my greatest fear. I’m terrified that she’ll think of me the way I thought about that bent-over, white-haired scold who smelled like an attic. I’m therefore always careful to wash scrupulously when I’m visiting her, and to always wear white musk cologne or Aqua Velva after-shave in her presence.

Hence my feeling of enormous relief and elation last weekend when I was carrying Sutton in a recreational park and she said, “Poppa, I like your hair.” The color or the texture, I presumed she meant, but perhaps also the scent. It was one of the best compliments I’ve ever gotten in my life…wow!

One of my earliest girlfriends (the summer after graduating from high school) told me she loved my eyes, and a certain Manhattan girlfriend told me back in ’79 or thereabouts that she liked my washboard abs and to never let my mid-section get flabby. But until last weekend nobody had ever complimented my hair. I’ll never forget this.

Queer for “Virginia Wolff” Color Snaps

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Posted on 11.27.23: “One thing that’s always bothered me about Virginia Wolff is that George and Martha’s young guests — George Segal‘s Nick and Sandy Dennis‘s Honey — arrive around 2:30 am. The four of them have already been to a previous faculty party which presumably started at 8 or 9 pm, and now it’s five or six hours later and they’re about to start drinking and chit-chatting all over again?

“Even at the height of my most rambunctious youth I never showed up anywhere — a friend’s home or a bar or anything — at 2:30 am. During my drinking days I might’ve crashed at 2:30 or 3 am, but I never partied until dawn killed the moon…never. And I was a wild man, relatively speaking.”

When Fat Jokes Were Allowed

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A friend has sent me a Reddit link to the entire risque John Belushi-Fat Liz SNL bit from ’78. I thought it had been scrubbed from existence. It wasn’t a long sketch, but it involved Elizabeth Taylor choking on a chicken bone and giving herself a Heimlich maneuver…cruel but hilarious.

John Belushi as Elizabeth Taylor (11-11-1978)
byu/SeekingTheRoad inLiveFromNewYork

@itsjohnbelushi Belushi channels his inner Taylor… #johnbelushi #snl #fyp ♬ original sound – JOHN BELUSHI