I just tapped these out off the top of my head, and when I get back to Connecticut I’ll probably add several more…I’m just roughing this out as I go along:
There are many, many female characters and performances that I will always treasure, but let’s start with Jessica Chastain in Zero Dark Thirty. And then…aww, hell: Carey Mulligan in Suffragette, An Education and She Said. Rachel McAdams in The Wedding Crashers. Jean Arthur in Only Angels Have Wings and Shane. Greta Gerwig in Greenberg and Frances Ha, Amy Adams in The Fighter, Teresa Wright in The Best Years of Our Lives. Katy Jurado and Grace Kelly in High Noon. Katharine Hepburn in The Lion in Winter, Bringing Up Baby, The Philadelphia Story. BarbraStreisand in Funny Girl and What’s Up, Doc. Sally Field in Places of the Heart. Faye Dunaway in Bonnie and Clyde, Network and Mommie Dearest. Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce and Johnny Guitar. Katherine Ross and Anne Bancroft in The Graduate. Frances McDormand in Fargo, Almost Famous and Nomadland. Jodie Foster in The Silence of the Lambs. Charlize Theron in Monster and Mad Max: Fury Road. Sigourney Weaver in Alien (1979) & Aliens (1986).
Critical Drinker’s disdain feels pushed in this instance. He’s not wrong to feel angry and turned off by Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny but I suspect that most ticket buyers will be fairly comme ci comme ca about it.
“If you pay to see it with that understanding in mind, it’s ‘fun’ as far it goes, largely, I would say, because it also feels oddly classy…a well-ordered, deliciously well-cut exercise in which Mangold does a better-than-decent job of imitating Spielberg’s psychology, discipline, camera placements, cutting style, easy-to-follow plotting and generally pleasing performances.
“For most of the 142-minute running time I felt placated by this big, noisy, unsurprising, handsomely shot old-schooler — an imitation Steven Spielberg tentpole film that feels like it could have been made in 1992 or ’95 or ’01 if 2023-level CG had been available, and if 80-year-old Harrison Ford had been (duhh) 30 years younger, which wouldn’t have gotten in the way of anything plot-wise.”
Are you a fan of super-expensive, dutifully plotted, follow-the-formula, steady-as-she-goes tentpole reboots? The kind of flamboyant, highly energized, basically bullshit popcorn fantasies that most of us are cool with on occasion. And if not, do you at least feel a fondness for wackazoid, over-the-top, throw-out-the-rulebook, crazier-than-fuck endings? If so, you’ll most likely have a place in your heart for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (Disney, 6.30), which I managed to see this morning at 8:30 am.
Does Dial of Destiny have a soul? Does it move and breathe with something other than mere technical expertise and the relative comfort of a massive budget? The answer is “yeah, kinda” in the sense that imagination-wise it jumps off a cliff at the very end, and that, in itself, constitutes a kind of agreeable, Jesus H. Christ craziness that only screenwriters who’ve done psychedelic drugs could have come up with. (The writers are Jez Butterworth, John-Henry Butterworth, David Koepp and director James Mangold.)
I was obliged to sit in heaven (near the top of the Grand Lumiere balcony, which is angled at 45 degrees) and there was no leg room to speak of. For most of the 142-minute running time my knees were screaming. But I felt diverted and occasionally amused and…I don’t know, placated by this big, noisy, unsurprising, throughly whorish and very handsomely shot old-schooler — an imitation Steven Spielberg tentpole film that feels like it could have been made in 1992 or ’95 or ’01 if 2023-level CG had been available, and if 80-year-old Harrison Ford had been (duhh) 30 years younger, which wouldn’t have gotten in the way of anything plot-wise.
The pans that broke last night were written by soreheads. It is what it is, and it delivers the hand-me-down goods in a way that very few will find bothersome or underwhelming.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is a mega-budget serving of silly, rousing, formulaic, high-energy, fuck-all Hollywood wankery. If you pay to see it with that understanding in mind, it’s “fun” as far it goes, largely, I would say, because it also feels oddly classy…a well-ordered, deliciously well-cut exercise in which Mangold does a better-than-decent job of imitating Spielberg’s psychology, discipline, camera placements, cutting style, easy-to-follow plotting and generally pleasing performances.
In his 5.18 review, Irish Times critic Donald Clarke writes that “nobody with a brain in their heads will compare Dial of Destiny favorably to the first three films.” He’s right about that, but it’s definitely better than 2008’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. That may not sound like much, I realize, but at least it has this distinction.
The plot is basically another “Indiana Jones vs. frosty, cold-blooded Nazi fiends in search of a priceless archeological artifact” thing. Ford is steady, restrained and solemnly earnest in a gruff (okay, grumpy-ass) sort of way. Mads Mikkelsen is the chief German baddy-waddy, Phoebe Waller-Bridge is Indy’s younger half & partner in adventure and derring-do, Ethann Isidore is the new “Short Round” (the spunky Temple of Doom character, played by a young Ke Huy Quan) and so on.
One minor HE complaint: Waller-Bridge’s feisty-grifter character, Helena Shaw, is said to be the daughter of Toby Jones‘ Basil Shaw. There is, of course, no way on God’s good, green, chromosonal earth that the short, pudgy, gnome-like Jones (who stands 5’5″) could be the biological dad of the leggy, wafer-thin PWB (who stands just under 5’10”). No way in hell. I bought the crazy ending in a “is this really happening?” sort of way, but not this.
My first and only submission to Michael Rsadford‘s 1984 (20th Century Fox) happened in the late summer or early fall of ’84. A private viewing at the Samuel Goldwyn Co., where I was freelancing as a press kit writer. Myself and the whole crew at the time (including Samuel Goldwyn Jr. himself, Larry Jackson, Jeff Lipsky, Laurette Hayden).
The screening-room mood was funereal, to put it mildly. Radford’s film certainly delivered the chilly Orwellian dread, but it also made you feel narcotized. A discussion session followed. They all conveyed the same cautious, qualified opinions: “Somber…okay, downish but very well made…excellent John Hurt…good reviews assured…Richard Burton on his last legs…a possible awards contender,” etc.
I can’t recall if I expressed my own view during that meeting or later in an inter-office memo, but I’m pretty sure I the only one to share how this gloomy dystopian vision of British totalitarianism had actually made me feel. Six words: “It’s a movie FOR DEAD PEOPLE.”
1984 opened in Europe in late ’84, but the U.S. opening didn’t happen until 3.22.85.
Dr. Phil: “In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Oceania came in and said ‘we’re gonna tell you what words you can use, and what words you can’t use.’ Right now…what Oceania, 1984’s government, was doing, we’re now doing to each other.”
Bill Maher: “I understand. I couldn’t agree more.”
I re-watched my 4K UHD Apocalypse Now Bluray last night, and I wasn’t totally happy. I saw this 1979 classic at the Ziegfeld theatre two or three times in August and September of ’79, and the big-screen presentation (we’re thinking back almost 44 years) blows the 4K disc away. Aurally and visually, but especially in terms of sharp, punctuating fullness of sound.
Apocalypse Now was presented at the Ziegfeld within a 2:1 aspect ratio, which Vittorio Storaro insisted upon through thick and thin. The 4K disc uses what looked to me with a standard Scope a.r. of 2.39:1.
And the general sharpness of the image on that big Ziegfeld screen just isn’t replicated by the 4K. It looks “good”, of course, but not as good as it should.
As we begin to listen to The Doors’ “The End” while staring at that tropical tree line, John Densmore’s high hat could be heard loudly and crisply from a Ziegfeld side speaker. Before that moment I had never heard any high-hat sound so clean and precise. But it doesn’t sound nearly as pronounced on the 4K disc, which I listened to, by the way, with a pricey SONOS external speaker.
Remember that “here’s your mission, Captain” scene with G.D. Spradlin, Harrison Ford and that white-haired guy? When that scene abruptly ends, we’re suddenly flooded with electronic synth organ music…it just fills your soul and your chest cavity. Filled, I should say, 44 years ago. But not that much with the disc.
When Martin Sheen and the PBR guys first spot Robert Duvall and the Air Cav engaged in a surfside battle, Sheen twice says “arclight.” In the Ziegfeld the bass woofer began rumbling so hard and bad that the floor and walls began to vibrate like bombs were exploding on 54th Street…the hum in my rib cage was mesmerizing. Not so much when you’re watching the 4K.
As Duvall’s gunship helicopters take off for the attack on a Vietnamese village (“Vin Din Lop…all these gook names sound the same”), an Army bugler begins playing the cavalry charge. It was clear as a bell in the Ziegfeld — less so last night.
There's a passage in TomWolfe’s "The Me Decade and Third Great Awakening", which I happened to re-read a couple of days ago, that put the hook in. It says that Ingmar Bergman's Scenes From A Marriage ('73 -- recently remade for HBO with OscarIsaac and JessicaChastain) "is one of those rare works of art, like ErnestHemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, that not only succeed in capturing a certain mental atmosphere in fictional form...but also turn around and help radiate it throughout real life."
Login with Patreon to view this post
My motive is speaking to Ross was to try and persuade her to tell me a bit more about Farrow’s personal life and maybe answer a couple of other dangling questions that the doc hadn’t really gotten into. Alas, Moss was more into verbal volleying for its own sake. So we just kind of chatted and danced around. Cool.
I haven’t had a chance to read her Farrow book, but Moss seems to know nearly everyone and everything…she’s really been around. And her literary credentials are impressive — author of “Raoul Walsh: The True Adventures of Hollywood’s Legendary Director” (2011) and “Giant: George Stevens, a Life on Film (2004). In 2021 the Criterion Collection released her 2019, feature-length documentary, The True Adventures of Raoul Walsh, on Blu-ray. Moss is a former film and television critic for The Hollywood Reporter and Boxoffice Magazine.
Married for 20-odd years to Maureen O’Sullivan while constantly catting around, the Roman Catholic Farrow sired seven children, including Mia Farrow.
Co-directors Claude Gonzalez and Frans Vandenburg have delivered a respectable effort, often edifying if less than fully satisfying, for reasons I’ll try to explain.
The sage talking heads include Australian directors Phillip Noyce, Bruce Beresford and Philippe Mora, plus film critics Todd McCarthy, David Thomson, David Stratton, Margaret Pomeranz, Imogen Sara Smith and Farran Smith Nehme. Hollywood biographer Charles Higham and Farrow’s wry look-alike son, John Charles Farrow, also participate.
I’m not a serious Farrow devotee but I respect his assurance and sense of polish and control, and his extra-long takes are Scorsese– or Coppola-level.
I’m as much of a fan of The Big Clock as the next guy. Vincent Price’s performance in His Kind of Woman is one of my all-time camp favorites of the ’40s, and Five Came Back (’39), a crashed-in-the-jungle survival story with Lucille Ball, is a keeper. I’m trying to recall if I saw Farrow’s 1956 remake, Back From Eternity. And the 3-D, John Wayne-starring Hondo is pretty good.
I understand why producer Mike Todd fired Farrow off the direction of Around the World in 80 Days (i.e., Todd wanted a less headstrong director, someone he could push around) but why exactly did Farrow lose the King of Kings gig? The filmmakers couldn’t explore that? This is one of the issues I wanted Moss to explain.
Farrow losing two high-paying 1950s prestige gigs in the space of five years is odd. It alludes to an imperious, uncooperative manner.
Was Farrow’s 1963 heart attack a genetic thing? Was it due to alcohol abuse? Farrow was only 58 when he passed — a relatively early departure for a man who wasn’t overweight.
How many years ago was this doc shot? The answer seems to be “not recently.” Three, four years ago for the most part? More?
The other day James Mangold told Collider‘s Steve “Frosty” Weintraub that his endlessly delayed Bob Dylan biopic will begin shooting five months hence, or sometime in August. Star Timothee Chalamet, primed and pumped, will do his own singing.
Imaginary hypothetical: Imagine that you’re Bob Dylan, and that you have final approval over who directs this film, which has been referred to as Going Electric and A Complete Unknown but ought to be be called Ghost of Electricity. You’ve been told there are five practical choices, given scheduling issues and whatnot — (1) Ridley Scott (this is theoretical), (2) Control‘s Anton Corbijn, (3) Alejandro G. Iñárritu, (4) Robert Eggers and Mangold, whose artistic vistas currently include Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, a forthcoming Stars Wars origin film and an all-new Swamp Thing flick.
Dylan pauses, exhales, furrows his brow and says “definitely the Swamp Thing guy.”
It’s great that Mitchell is singing and playing guitar and sounding pretty good, particularly in the wake of having suffered a brain aneurysm in late March of 2015. She was in fairly bad shape after that tragedy, but she’s recovered (or at least is recovering) to a significant degree, and praise be to God for this.
The key question to me is “is Joni still smoking?” Because that’s almost certainly what helped to bring about her aneurysm. She initially lost her ability to speak and walk, and still needs a little help getting around as we speak.
I was so concerned about Mitchell’s well-being in the wake of the aneurysm that I once hand-delivered an admonishing fan letter to her Spanish home in Bel Air. I insisted I was one of her biggest fans and begged her to think about vaping instead of sticking with tobacco.
Mitchell may have decided that life isn’t worth living without the pleasure of unfiltered cigarettes, but maybe not. She once said in an interview that she began smoking at age 9 or 10 or something. At a certain point the body just can’t take the nicotine and the toxins and complications will manifest.
It’s wonderful, in any event, that Mitchell has regained (or is in the process of regaining) her singing and guitar-playing abilities. She’ll turn 80 on 11.7.23.
Posted on 3.31.15: I attended a short, smallish concert that Mitchell gave at Studio 54 in October ’82 to promote “Wild Things Run Fast.” The crowd was not huge, maybe 150 or so, and I was standing fairly close and pretty much dead center. No female artist has ever touched me like Mitchell**, and I was quite excited about being this close to her.
I was beaming, starry-eyed and staring at her like the most self-abasing suck-up fan you could imagine, and during the first song her eyes locked onto mine and I swear to God we began to kind of half-stare at each other. (Some performers do this, deciding to sing for this or that special person in the crowd.) Her eyes danced around from time to time but she kept coming back to me, and I remember thinking, “Okay, she senses that I love her and she probably likes my looks so I guess I’m her special fanboy or something for the next few minutes.”
Mitchell was dressed in a white pants suit and some kind of colorful scarf, and she sang and played really well, and I remember she had a little bit of a sexy tummy thing going on. Sorry but that had a portion of my attention along with the songs and “being there” and a feeling that I’d remember this moment for decades to come.
It took me a couple of attempts to get through John Scheinfeld‘s What The Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat and Tears?, but I finally did. My basic impression is that it’s an odd tale — a curio — about a strange detour that BS&T, a hugely popular jazz-rock fusion group, took in ’70 when they went on a State Department tour of three Soviet bloc countries in Eastern Europe (one being Romania). The tour was frowned upon by rock culture cognoscenti, and seemed to underline a general impression that BS&T was an MOR group favored by squares.
They also played a big gig at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, which was even more unhip than performing to Eastern Europe. And they appeared on The Andy Williams Show…Jesus. And then came that hokey track from their third album, “Lucretia McEvil“…later.
There’s nothing “wrong” with being MOR or appealing to people with vaguely schmaltzy taste in music and…you know, it takes all sorts to make a world and all that.
And I’m not saying that Scheinfeld hasn’t assembled a reasonably absorbing, pro-level film with flavor and feeling — he has. But unlike my all-time favorite Scheinfeld doc, Who Is Harry Nilsson (And Why Is Everybody Talkin’ About Him?, it doesn’t have a lot of emotional resonance. You come out of it and it’s like “okay, not bad…diverting as far as it went.”
But then I read Owen Gleiberman’s 3.27 Variety review, and a paragraph about David Clayton-Thomas, BST’s lead singer from mid’68 onward (not counting an attempted solo-career detour)…this paragraph just hit the spot, man. I don’t mean to sound flip or cruel, but it almost gave me more pleasure than Scheinfeld’s doc, to be perfectly honest….not that there’s anything especially lacking or derelict about the film. It just didn’t get me high.
“The rock-‘n’-roll-ecstasy-meets-relax-the-’70s-are-here duality of Blood, Sweat & Tears was incarnated by the contradictory charisma of David Clayton-Thomas,” Gleiberman writes. “He favored skin-tight shirts with tie-dye stripes and leather pants, but he was no hippie. With his longish receding hair and sultry eyebrows and trucker’s build, he was like Joe Don Baker reborn as Elvis’s surly, sleazy bruiser brother, and he sang in an insinuating Mack-truck blues growl, like a wilder Tom Jones with a hint of Jim Jones. He was mesmerizing.”
We all know what it means to be a “surly, sleazy bruiser type” — it means that underneath the facade you’re a sniffing, panting, four-legged dog on the prowl for poontang. It means that you’re into compulsive muff-diving and getting blown in hotel rooms at 3 am and whatnot. A guy who summons notions of being the ornery bad brother of Elvis suggests a gauche, hormonally-unbridled truck driver with low-rent appetites.
Does anyone remember that photo of Jim Jones‘ corpse after he shot himself, sprawled on the ground of that big tent with that big pot belly poking out? Charismatic cult leaders always had the pick of the litter, or so the cliche goes, and we’ve all read stories about Jones being a brooding sexual conquistador and all that, and then you throw in an early ’70s image of Joe Don Baker, still best known for playing the baseball-bat wielding Buford Pusser…throw it all together and it seems as if the doc should have focused on DCT rather than BS&T…whaddaya think?
I’m not saying that Gleiberman’s description reflects who DCT actually is, mind. In recent interviews the 81 year-old seems like a mellow, moderate, likable guy. I am saying, however, that good writing flips a switch.
Sydney Pollack and Robert Redford collaborated on seven commendable films over a 24-year period -- This Property Is Condemned ('66), Jeremiah Johnson ('72), The Way We Were ('73), Three Days of the Condor ('75), The Electric Horseman ('79), Out of Africa ('85), Havana ('90).
Login with Patreon to view this post
“Not happening…way too laid back…zero narrative urgency,” I was muttering from the get-go. Basically the sixth episode of White Lotus Thai SERIOUSLY disappoints. Puttering around, way too slow. Things inch along but it’s all “woozy guilty lying aftermath to the big party night” stuff. Glacial pace…waiting, waiting. I was told...
I finally saw Walter Salles' I'm Still Here two days ago in Ojai. It's obviously an absorbing, very well-crafted, fact-based poltical drama, and yes, Fernanda Torres carries the whole thing on her shoulders. Superb actress. Fully deserving of her Best Actress nomination. But as good as it basically is...
After three-plus-years of delay and fiddling around, Bernard McMahon's Becoming Led Zeppelin, an obsequious 2021 doc about the early glory days of arguably the greatest metal-rock band of all time, is opening in IMAX today in roughly 200 theaters. Sony Pictures Classics is distributing. All I can say is, it...
To my great surprise and delight, Christy Hall's Daddio, which I was remiss in not seeing during last year's Telluride Film Festival, is a truly first-rate two-hander -- a pure-dialogue, character-revealing, heart-to-heart talkfest that knows what it's doing and ends sublimely. Yes, it all happens inside a Yellow Cab on...
7:45 pm: Okay, the initial light-hearted section (repartee, wedding, hospital, afterlife Joey Pants, healthy diet) was enjoyable, but Jesus, when and how did Martin Lawrence become Oliver Hardy? He’s funny in that bug-eyed, space-cadet way… 7:55 pm: And now it’s all cartel bad guys, ice-cold vibes, hard bullets, bad business,...
