Moron Erases Cloud Music Library, Then Recovers It
April 20, 2025
I was Going To Re-Watch Soderbergh's "Black Bag"
April 20, 2025
No Accounting For Low-Rent Taste
April 20, 2025
George Clooney‘s blackish-brown Edward R. Murrow hair looks wrong. Like a vampire with a bad hairdresser.
If you don’t like an overabundance of gray hair, you have to color your thick locks just so. Don’t use too dark of a color (a nice medium brown), and always let some healthy gray shoot out from the edge of the temples, and never color the sideburns.
I’ve seen the 20th Century Fox / Henry King movie of Carousel two or three times, and while it’s not a great or even an especially high-grade film in a dramatic sense, the finale always melts me down.
But the deepest emotional depth charge, for me, has always come from Frank Sinatra‘s rendering of “Soliloquy,” which he recorded for the film’s soundtrack on 8.16.55
Sinatra sang at least two songs (“Soliloquy” and “If I Loved You”) that day for the 20th Century Fox / Henry King movie. The session happened on a Fox soundstage on Pico Blvd. The orchestra was conducted by Alfred Newman.
On the first day of shooting in Booth Bay, Maine, Sinatra was told he’d have to shoot his scenes twice, once in 35 millimeter and again in Cinemascope 55, a large format process similar to VistaVision and Todd-AO.
Stunned by this news, Sinatra said “no dice” and quit on the spot. He was replaced by Gordon MacRae. The finished film opened on 2.16.56.
“We’d like an authoritative chronicle of everything that happened [during Madonna‘s struggle to make it], since Madonna intersected with as many notable figures as Zelig. And Michael Ogden, the director of Becoming Madonna, churns through these years in a slipshod way.
“The film keeps tossing out stray bits of information, like the fact that Madonna just about moved into The Music Building, the graffiti-strewn beehive of a studio rehearsal fortress several blocks south of Times Square.
“Yet it leaves out so much lore! Like the fact that Madonna studied under Martha Graham, or that she worked as a hat-check girl at the Russian Tea Room, or that she was sexually assaulted at knifepoint, or that she had a relationship with Jean-Michel Basquiat, or the pivotal way that she recruited ‘Jellybean’ Benitez to remix her first album.
“And though it’s part of Madonna’s legend that she pestered the DJs at Danceteria to play her demo tracks, it would have been nice if the movie filled in that chapter instead of just…mentioning it.”
Does anyone remember my 12.16.16 HE piece that praised Elyse Hollander‘s BlondeAmbition (“Popstar Bitch is Born”), a still-unproduced script that explores Madonna’s tough Manhattan years (’81 through ’83)?
I hereby pledge to send a PDF of Hollander’s script to anyone who’d like to read it.
Just about every visiting industry pro said “why did a film that generated zero festival conversation win the top trophy? What is wrong with the Toronto residents who voted for it? Are they saps? Why didn’t they show a little more taste?”
THR‘s Scott Feinberg on 9.15.24: “The Life of Chuck may be a lovely film, but it had virtually no profile coming in to the fest [and] generated virtually no discussion at the fest.”
An adaptation of a Stephen King novella, the “genre-trippping” feature costars Tom Hiddleston, Jacob Tremblay, Chiwetel “Chewy” Ejiofor, Karen Gillan, Mark Hamill (73 going on 94), Annalise Basso, Mia Sara and HE fave Nick Offerman narrating.
Neon will open Chuck stateside on 6.6.25 with a nationwide expansion a week later (6.13).
It was unnecessarily invasive and even cruel of Santa Fe authorities to release video of a cop examination of the Santa Fe residence of the late Gene Hackman and wife Betsy Arakawa.
Okay, they blurred out the bodies but c’mon…this is humiliating.
That said, why were several rooms in their sprawling home such a revolting mess? It looks like a home occupied by alcoholics or druggies…people with no discipline or any sense of sanitation.
Why did they allow their home to become infested by rats? Is this an age thing? Do old folks just give up and surrender to chaos because it’s somehow more comfortable to do so rather than maintain order and cleanliness?
And the size of the place….Jesus. It looks like a sprawling hotel or a sporting lodge of some kind…at least twice as large as any reasonable older couple might require. What couple would choose to live in a place this cavernous?
Ryan Coogler’s Sinners is a popcorn movie…a cheeseball thang…half-promising, half-wallow, aimed at the schmoes. And you’d better believe it’s been overpraised. I suspected as much when the first reactions broke, and now I know.
At first it’s a Mississippi folklore comic-book fable (great music, ecstasy dancing, sweaty sex, good cunnilingus), and then Coogler flips a switch and it becomes an ultra-violent schlock vampire flick that hits too hard and just bleeds, howls, groans and sweats all over the place.
Sinners is peddling comic-book country lore…actually impactful, storied, mythical and nothalfbad during the semi-realistic first 40%, but once the X-treme vampire stuff kicks in it’s basically coarse, bloody, gut-punch schlock. Crimson geysers, ragged bite wounds, wooden stakes, burnt flesh. Primitive slop.
Young Miles Caton is a gifted Delta Blues singer-guitarist — Robert Johnson reincarnated. And hangin’ with 89 year-old Buddy Guy at the very end is a treat. The musical sequences in the juke joint are joyful and jumpin’. And yes, the sight and sound of a chorus of Irish vampires singing Irish folk tunes under the moonlight as the bloody-faced Jack O’Connell dances an Irish jig is wonderful (O’Connell is probably doomed to play surly villains from here on) — the most bizarre spectacle I’ve ever seen or heard in a monster film.
And the buffed-up Michael B. Jordan, playing twin criminal brothers from Chicago, is straight and sturdy enough. He also gets laid twice, or rather the brothers make out separately, one with Hailee Steinfeld (turning 30 next year), another with Wunmi Mosaku.
But the second half is just crude vampire mulch. Much of the drawlin’ dialogue is unintelligible…so slurry and mumbly that I knew early on that I had no choice but to resort to the Wiki synopsis. Skim through this sucker….Eugene O’Neill, it ain’t…crazy, cartoonish gruel…pulp mythology.
And Autumn Durald Arakawa’s cinematography is way too dark. That or the Westport AMC’s projector lamp is close to death.
Yeah, there’s an obvious racial current or metaphor…Coogler sprinkles in a few Klanners, fat rednecks and dumb crackers straight out of Mississippi Burning, and they all meet with just desserts. Jordan filling them with hot lead a la Billy Wilder‘s St. Valentine’s Day massacre is part of the grand finale…yeah!
Sidenote for fanatical bully contingent:
I’m a deepwater cinephile with the usual exacting standards…the standards met and fulfilled by thousands of filmmakers throughout the 20th and early 21st centuries.
All the Metacritic and RT critics know there’s virtually no upside to slamming (or partially slamming) an ambitious Ryan Coogler movie that deals with deep-south racism and plays like a grindhouse flick from Sam Arkoff, and so they all put on their ballerina shoes before reviewing it.
I’ve begun to read Zach Dean‘s script of Day Drinker, a frothy thriller currently filming in Spain with a gray-haired Johnny Depp, 61, as an alcoholic named Kelly.
I’m only up to page 15, but it’s pretty clear that Kelly will either end up sober or a lot less shitfaced.
Dean’s story cruises around on a private yacht. Madelyn Cline, 28, plays the proverbial hottie; Penelope Cruz portrays a criminal of some sort.
Wikipedia says director Marc Webb (who always directs lightweight stuff) has actually been filming on the Canary Islands (Santa Cruz de Tenerife)
Depp’s Kelly is a friendly, enjoyable rogue…a charming fellow who needs to be sipping something at all times.
Dean’s script has a jaunty feel — I’ll give it that much. It ends with a twist,.
Nobody is a more passionate fan of Olivia Colman than myself, but she’s just not young or hot enough to play Benedict Cumberbatch‘s wife in The Roses (Searchlight, 8.29).
The 51-year-old Colman is only a year and a half older than Cumberbatch, but she looks…okay, not like his aunt but his slightly older attorney or business partner. She doesn’t look wifey-wifey.
When it comes to marriage, men who are doing well professionally always choose someone younger and hotter (i.e., arm-candy factor). Okay, some marry women their own age but if they do, the women are always significantly more attractive than the man, according to boilerplate male hotness standards. Regardless of age, the wife never looks older and is always hotter than the husband.
This was true of the dynamic between Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner in the original The War of the Roses (’89). Turner was and is a decade younger than Douglas, and pretty much looked like her Body Heat self in that Danny DeVito-directed 20th Century Fox release.
The discussion of “InconvenientStatsThatJournosWouldBeWiseToIgnore” (4.15) was apparently shut down by socially concerned persons within the WordPress matrix. This may have been incited by the posting of 2022crimestatistics from the City of London website. Or not…I wouldn’t know. I know it wasn’t me.
I’m posting this because I used to be way behind the eight ball when young…I’ve forgotten some of the psychological particulars, but it was murder. Talk about being “misplaced inside a jail”…yeesh.
However you slice or strategize it, the 2025 Venice Film Festival (8.27 through 9.6) will likely constitute a much richer assortment of films than the Cannes Film Festival, which unfurls three and half weeks hence. Here’s a list of 2025 films that are somewhere between fairly and somewhat likely choices for the Venice gathering.
HE’s dream roster includes the Guadagnino, the Bigelow, the Cooper, the Nemes, the Aronofsky, the Berger, the Cianfrance, the Corbijn, the Greengrass, the Baumbach, the Assayas, the Schnabel and the Gibney…13 in all.
Not the Safdie, not the Lanthimos, not the Zhao, not the Fastvold, not the Winocour.
21. WIZARD OF KREMLIN / d: Olivier Assayas (a film adaptation of Giuliano da Empoli‘s 2022 book, directed by Olivier Assayas and starring Paul Dano, Alicia Vikander, Jude Law, Zach Galifianakis and Tom Sturridge with Dano playing Vadim Baranov.)
“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,...