Do The Right Thing -- Stand Up For Excellence
September 25, 2024
I Would Have Preferred A More Challenging...Okay, A More Insulting Tone
September 25, 2024
Opposite Peas in Polish Travel Pod
September 25, 2024
Like any stable, decent, caring parent, Marcia Gay Harden, 63, recently emphasized her support of her three kids, and particularly their orientation or persuasion or however you want to put it.
This is what I would say if my kids had chosen this path. Compassionate, fair-minded parents have no choice but to embrace their children and show respect for their preferred orientation and/or identities.
Harden: “My eldest child is non-binary, my son is gay [and] my youngest is fluid.”
Harden’s Wiki bio reports that daughter Eulala Grace Scheel (born September 1998) is her eldest, and that twins Hudson Harden Scheel (born a bio-male) and Julitta Dee Scheel (born bio-female) were born on 4.22.04. Harden and the kids’ father, prop master Thaddaeus Scheel, divorced in February 2012.
All queer, in short, and yet Harden seems to be drawing distinctions between non-binary, gay and fluid. I honestly wouldn’t know how to define those distinctions.
For decades I never felt the slightest affection for Terner's Liquor (SW corner of Sunset and Larrabee). It was always just a common, overlighted liquor store with clerks who'd absolutely never been to college. I visited from time to time, but I always wanted to bolt as soon as possible. (I've been in liquor stores that had nice settled vibes...places that I felt vaguely soothed by.) Terner's was a soiled establishment.
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A couple of nights ago I was sitting through (i.e., not exactly watching) The Towering Inferno, and the truth of it hit me. When you break that film down there are three basic elements that make it work -- the lead performances by Steve McQueen and Paul Newman and the score by John Williams. Every other element is weak or annoying in some way. Too many explosions, unlikely complications, You could even call the film tawdry, but Williams score gives it a veneer of class. Williams had to know that The Towering Inferno was pricey pablum, but he pulled himself together, manned up and did the job. He sold it.
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World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy is conducting a critics poll of the preferred greatest films of the 1960s.
It not only broke my heart but caused great physical pain to not include The Hustler, Blow-Up, Rosemary’s Baby, Easy Rider, Breathless, Shoot The Piano Player, L’Eclisse, Cool Hand Luke, To Kill A Mockingbird, The Apartment, Repulsion, Psycho, A Hard Day’s Night, The Train, Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid, The Magnificent Seven, Bullitt, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round, Point Blank, etc.
It’s completely infuriating, but when you have to choose ten you have to be brutal, and ithurtssobadly.
HE’s top ten of the ’60s: 1. Dr. Strangelove, 2. Midnight Cowboy, 3. The Manchurian Candidate, 4. L’Avventura, 5. Bonnie and Clyde, 6. 2001: A Space Odyssey, 7. This Sporting Life, 8. The Wild Bunch, 9. The Graduate, 10. Lawrence of Arabia.
What am I really, actually looking forward to at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, which kicks off a week from tomorrow (5.16)? I’ve put asterisks next to 14 films (below), but when you get right down to it and get past the films you believe that you should see but probably aren’t actually hot to see, the list is shorter.
HE’s serious Cannes hotties (in order of preference): Martin Scorsese‘s Killers of the Flower Moon, Steve McQueen‘s Occupied City, Jonathan Glazer‘s The Zone of Interest, Todd Haynes‘ May December, James Mangold‘ Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Kore-eda Hirokazu‘s Monster, Jessica Hausner‘s Club Zero, Wes Anderson‘s Asteroid City, Alice Rohrwacher‘s La Chimera. (9)
COMPETITION (9):
* Club Zero, Jessica Hausner
* Asteroid City, Wes Anderson
* The Zone of Interest, Jonathan Glazer Fallen Leaves, Aki Kaurismaki Les Filles D’Olfa (Four Daughters), Kaouther Ben Hania Anatomie D’une Chute, Justine Triet
* Monster, Kore-eda Hirokazu Il Sol Dell’Avvenire, Nanni Moretti
* La Chimera, Alice Rohrwacher About Dry Grasses, Nuri Bilge Ceylan
* L’Ete Dernier, Catherine Breillat The Passion of Dodin Bouffant, Tran Anh Hung Rapito, Marco Bellocchio
* May December, Todd Haynes Firebrand, Karim Ainouz
* The Old Oak, Ken Loach
* Perfect Days, Wim Wenders Banel Et Adama, Ramata-Toulaye Sy Jeunesse, Wang Bing
OUT OF COMPETITION (3):
* Killers of the Flower Moon, Martin Scorsese The Idol, Sam Levinson Cobweb, Kim Jee-woon
* Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, James Mangold
* Jeanne du Barry, Maiwenn
MIDNIGHT SCREENINGS:
Omar la Fraise, Elias Belkeddar Kennedy, Anurag Kashyap Acide, Just Philippot
SPECIAL SCREENINGS (2):
Retratos Fantasmas (Pictures of Ghosts), Kleber Mendonca Filho
* Anselm, Wim Wenders
* Occupied City, Steve McQueen Man in Black, Wang Bing
Posted on Facebook late this afternoon, the subject being Pauline Kael’s 1965review in McCall’s:
I don’t agree that I need to explain to that little woke-ass weenie (i.e., Byrne) that the cultural atmosphere of 1965 (Dr. Zhivago, Cat Ballou, Darling, the Voting Rights Act, the aggressive escalation of the Vietnam War, Rubber Soul) was, like, a teeny bit different from the current Stalinoid terror climate of 2023. And that people who were smart and crackling and flexing their biceps in ‘65 couldn’t possibly be expected to anticipate the state of mental identity derangement that we’re currently experiencing.
Laurence Olivier‘s Othello (1965) is a capturing of the National Theatre Company’s 1964-65 staging of Shakespeare’s classic tragedy. Directed by Stuart Burge. It stars Olivier, Maggie Smith, Joyce Redman and Frank Finlay; Derek Jacobi and Michael Gambon made their film debuts in it.
“Olivier’s Othello is history already; it’s something to remember. And Othello isn’t even much of a ‘movie’. Just a reasonably faithful (one assumes) record of a stage interpretation. After thirty-five years in movies and masterpiece upon masterpiece acclaimed in the theatre, Olivier still could not raise the money to do a real movie version of his Othello. And of his Macbeth, acclaimed as the greatest since [something], we have not even a record.
“Olivier’s greatness is in his acting; as a movie director, he is merely excellent and intelligent.
“Yet his Shakespearean performances deserve — at the minimum — the kind of movie he or other talented directors might do, what he brought to Henry V, Hamlet, Richard III. It is a scandal, an indictment of Anglo-American civilization and values, that eight million dollars can go into a spy spoof, twelve into a comic chase, twenty-seven into a spectacle, and for Olivier in Othello, we and history must content ourselves with a quickie recording process.
“And yet the joke is on the spoofs, chases and spectacles. For Othello lives.
“Olivier is the most physical Othello imaginable. As a lord, this Othello is a little vulgar — too ingratiating, a boaster, an arrogant man. Reduced to barbarism, he shows us a maimed African prince inside the warrior-hero, Iago’s irrationality has stripped him bare to a different kind of beauty. We are sorry to see it, and we are not sorry either. To our eyes, the African prince is more beautiful in his isolation than the fancy courtier in his reflected white glory.
“I saw Paul Robeson‘s Othello [for the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford in April 1959], and he was not black as Olivier is; Frank Finlay can hate Olivier in a way Jose Ferrer did not dare — indeed did not have the provocation — to hate Robeson. Possibly Negro actors need to sharpen themselves on white roles before they can play a Negro. It is not enough to be: for great drama, it is the awareness that is everything.
“Every time we single out the feature that makes Olivier a marvel — his lion eyes or the voice and the way it seizes on a phrase — he alters it or casts it off in some new role, and is greater than ever. It is no special asset, [but] the devilish audacity and courage of this man.
“Olivier, who, for Othello, changed his walk and talk, is a man close to sixty who, in an ordinary suit in an ordinary role, looks an ordinary man, and can look even smaller in a role like Archie Rice in The Entertainer. What is extraordinary in Olivier is what’s inside, and what is even more extraordinary is his determination to give it outer form.” — from a Pauline Kael essay that appeared in McCall’s in March 1966.
By the way: I found it odd that Meriem Perez Riera‘s Rita Moreno: Just A Girl Who Decided To Go For It (Roadside, 6.18.21) didn’t even mention Moreno’s cameo in Carnal Knowledge, presumably because Riera didn’t approve of Moreno playing a prostitute… But of course, Moreno’s character, ‘Louise,” has the power in this scene. She’s indulging Jack Nicholson’s need for pathetic fantasy in order to have a decent erection — she’s going along with the act, of course, but obviously finds it ridiculous and a little bit sad.