Posted seven and a half years ago:

Most of yesterday afternoon was about hiking in Sullivan Canyon, a leafy, horse-trail community just west of Mandeville Canyon.

We defied the posted warnings and parked on Old Ranch Road, about 1/2 mile north of Sunset. We walked up a cloppy horse path to Sullivan Canyon trail, which goes on and on. By the time we were back to the junction of Sunset and Old Ranch we’d hiked five miles.

We also checked out Diane Keaton’s super-sized, industrial-chic home, which was written about last October in Architectural Digest. Keaton also published a book about it — “The House That Pinterest Built.”

We only scoped out the exterior, of course. It’s magnificent and exacting, so beautifully textured and all of a piece in so many ways, but at the same time (here it comes) so immaculate that it feels more like the workspace of an enlightened, forward-thinking company (it reminded me a bit of J.J. Abrams‘ Bad Robot headquarters) than what most of us would call a “home.”

Homes need to feel imperfect and lived in and just a little bit ramshackle — a tad sloppy and messy with the scent of white clam sauce and sliced lemons, and maybe a hint of cat poop. A good home always has magazines and books and vinyl LPs all over the place, not to mention flatscreens and blankets draped over couches and at least three or four cats and dogs hanging around.

Keaton’s place might feel homier inside, but the exterior seems a bit too precise.

Oh, and there’s hardly any tree-shade in the front yard of Keaton’s place. Warren Beatty once said that great-looking hair constitutes 60% of a woman’s attractiveness; by the same token a great-looking home needs great trees (sycamores, jacaranda, lemon eucalyptus, pin oak) to drop a few thousand leaves and shade the place up.

6:15 pm update: I just ran into Warren Beatty and Annette Bening at Le Pain Quotidien on Melrose…honest! I told him I loved the quote about hair constituting 60% of a woman’s beauty or appeal, and he said, “I don’t think I ever said it.” Huh. “You read this somewhere?,” he asked. Yeah, I said. In an article about Diane Keaton or about her home, and just this morning. I definitely didn’t invent it, I emphasized, but I love the observation regardless.

Diane Keaton’s spacious, self-designed home, just around the corner from Old Ranch Road and exactingly designed like nothing you’ve ever seen.

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From Woody Allen’s Free Press piece on Diane Keaton(10.12):

Gutslammy, power-punchy, fleet-of-mind-and-foot and masterfully crafted as it is, Paul Thomas Anderson‘s One Battle After Another has been defeated in the ongoing online argument over the last two weeks or so, at least as far as the Best Picture category is concerned.

It has lost the verbal battle because everyone realizes it’s a vessel of extreme-left POC girlboss agitprop, and that the rave reviews are basically about fuck-yeah political agreement first and artistic-cinematic admiration second.

Plus it goes against the expanding realization that hard-left wokey wackos have all but destroyed the Democratic party’s profile among middle-of-the-road voters, and that it’s time to pull back on that shit right now and for the wokeys to flee into the forest and stay there.

We all know that Christian Toto made a fair point a couple of weeks ago when he claimed that if OBAA had been about rightwing activists engaged in shootings, robbings and hiding out under fake identities, it would have been totally assassinated by the Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic gang.

So Best Picture-wise it’s over, okay? Forget that category and move on.

PTA’s film will be nominated in eight or ten or even twelve categories, of course (Leonardo DiCaprio for Best Actor without question, Best Director, Cinematography, Best Adapted screenplay + Chase Infiniti‘s category-fraudulent, phoney-baloney Best Actress campaign will probably snag an actual nom), but a Best Picture win is simply not happening.

The top finalists are a pair of emotionally riveting, deeply penetrating family dramas — Chloe Zhao‘s Hamnet vs. Joachim Trier‘s Sentimental Value, which blew the roof off and triggered a standing ovation after a Hamptons Film Festival screening yesterday afternoon at Guild Hall. (Bill McCuddy was there — he saw it, heard it, felt it.)

Hamnet is favored to win, yes, but Value clearly has the stuff to aggressively compete and heel-nip like a sonuvabitch, and it seems to be gaining ground.

Diane Keaton first began to pop through on stage, initially in Hair (‘68) and then, the following year, as Woody Allen’s object of demure devotion in Play It Again, Sam.

Her big-screen dramatic breakthrough, of course, was her pained and conflicted Kay Adams in the first two Godfather films (‘72 and ‘74).

And then, concurrently at first, came the six-film Woody streak — 1972’s celluloid Play It Again, Sam (not as good as the play) plus Sleeper (‘73), Love and Death (‘75), Annie Hall (’77), Interiors (‘78) and Manhattan (‘79).

Looking for Mr. Goodbar (a dud) came out the same year as Hall but nobody much cared.

Then came the final six films of the Keaton peak — Reds (‘81), Shoot The Moon (‘82), The Little Drummer Girl (‘84 — a bust), Mrs. Soffel (‘84), Crimes of the Heart (‘86 — an over-acted headache movie), and Baby Boom (‘87).

From ‘88 on Keaton was fine or fun or earnestly mannered or perky or bothered or flaky-eccentric in some agreeable or interesting way, but the heavyweight era was over.

Especially in the matter of Martin Scorsese ‘s The Last Temptation of Christ (’88), which, for me, delivers the most transportational, mystically-imbued, heart-melting death scene in the history of cinema.

Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman has called Bradley Cooper’s Is This Thing On? (Searchlight, 12.19), which I saw last night at Alice Tully Hall, “a feel-good divorce film”.

That’s a fairly accurate description — it’s a kinder, warmer, far-less-hostile Marriage Story, and the general behavioral drift is amiable. It’s superbly acted all around, but it also has a bit of a flabby belly. For my money it’s way too happy, too mellow, too easygoing, too turn-the other-cheek. No real conflict, no real challenges, no “drama”, no heavy pivots.

Set in the flush environs of Manhattan’s West Village and a handsome home in Westchester County, it’s mainly about Alex and Tess (Will Arnett and Laura Dern), a 40ish husband and wife with two ten-year-old boys (they’re called “Irish twins” due to having been born less than a year apart).

The key situation is that Alex and Tess have decided to call it quits because…well, because they’ve been written this way. The dramatic engine, if you will, is basically about Alex dipping his toe into the waters of Manhattan stand-up comedy as a form of therapy, using his personal saga for material. It’s also about personal renewal.

But the film, directed and co-written by Cooper, is also about gliding and sliding and loping along without pushing any of the usual emotionally fraught buttons.

It’s obvious early on that Cooper has decided to steer clear of Noah Baumbach territory and the usual “we’re getting divorced and boy, it’s pretty hard to do this with kids”, not to mention zero interest in the usual dramatic devices and considerations (lawyers, alimony, etc.)

But mainly it reminded me of a French ensemble relationship dramedy, except these French films (we’ve all seen dozens over the decades) tend to throw in more in the way of plot surprises, goofball humor, narrative curve balls.

For those who haven’t had the repeated pleasure, French ensemble relationship movies are defined by their complex, character-driven narratives that explore the messy, intertwined lives of a group of friends or family.

I can’t imagine anyone hating or even disliking Is This Thing On?, but it’s not meaty or nervy or risky enough to inspire anything more than easy smiles and shoulder–shrugs.

Is This Thing On? is the kind of film that a loaded, well liked actor-director makes when he has several reasons to be feel pumped and happy about things…a guy who feels abundantly massaged and tickled by his more-or-less fantastic life.

Compare Cooper’s film with another NYC dramedy about four highly perceptive, financially comfortable, middle-aged marrieds coping with divorce — Woody Allen’s Husbands and Wives. That 1992 film has always been aces on its own terms, but compared to Is This Thing On? it’s an earth-shaking Chekhovian classic.

It’s worth noting that Alex and Tess are living flush, bordering-on-financially-opulent lives without the movie even glancing for a split second at where all this money-from-heaven is coming from. (Alex, we’re told, is in “finance”…pretty vague.)

Alex’s reasonably spacious West Village pad rents for, I’m guessing, at least $6K or $7K a month, if not more. Compare Alex’s living situation (he owns a car and probably pays $1500 or $2K a month for the garage-space rental, and yet, early on, he doesn’t want to pay a $15 cover charge at the comedy cellar)…compare Alex’s place to Chris Evans’ appallingly grungy Brooklyn-bro share or even Dakota Johnson’s slightly modest 1 bdr. apartment in Materialists.

If Arnett and Dern were in their early to mid 40s, it would be one thing in terms of the lore of Alan J. Pakula‘s Starting Over (’79) and middle-aged crazy and hormonal activity and whatnot. But Arnett is 55 and looks it (dyed hair, salt-and-pepper whiskers, not rail thin) and Dern is 58.

That said, I reveled in one of the most vigorous and glorious sexual affairs of my life when I was past my 50s so who am I to talk, right?

Gleiberman: “It’s an observant, bittersweet, and highly watchable movie, yet there’s a softness to it, a slightly pandering quality. It’s like a James L. Brooks movie with hipper camerawork. Arnett, who has the look and demeanor of a less energized Michael Keaton, is a likable enough actor in a rather mopey way, but he’s done a lot of sitcom work and it shows. Arnett seems, in essence, to be playing Alex as a sitcom dad — sharp-tongued yet benign, lost in his daze of self-interest, with an essential quality of harmlessness that’s the opposite of movie-star danger.”