Posted on 2.16.17: Paris is probably the greatest aroma town I've ever sunk into. A feast wherever you go -- Montmarte, Oberkampf, Montparnasse, Passy. The Seine at night, outdoor markets (especially in the pre-dawn hours), the aroma of sauces and pasta dishes coming from cafes, warm breads, scooter and bus exhaust, strong cigarettes, strong coffee, Middle Eastern food stands (onions, sliced meats, spices), gelato shops, etc.
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The smartest way to figure out the winners of Sunday night’s Golden Globe awards (CBS, 1.7, 8 pm eastern / 5 pm Pacific) is to consider the primary mission.
Mission #1 is to give Paul Giamatti a Golden Globe award for his Holdovers performance. That’s the priority, the main thing…nothing else matters.
Two years ago the old Hollywood Foreign Press Association had been condemned and ostracized for being racist or insufficiently woke or generally bad news. Now that it’s Penske-owned and operated (i.e., the “Golden Penskes”) the impetus, obviously, will be to lean diverse whenever feasible to make up for alleged past sins.
The other presumption is that many if not most of the winners will align with the preferences of the dumbest, shallowest and least edge-minded voters.
Best Motion Pic / Drama / Anatomy of a Fall, Killers of the Flower Moon, Maestro, Oppenheimer, Past Lives, The Zone of Interest.
HE pick: Maestro (easily the most dynamic and transporting film among the nominated six.). Safest default choice: Oppenheimer. Likeliest woke winner: Killers of the Flower Moon.
Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy / Air, American Fiction, Barbie, The Holdovers, May December, Poor Things
HE pick: Poor Things. Safest default choice: The Holdovers. Likeliest woke winner: Barbie.
Best Performance in a Motion Picture – Drama, Actor / Bradley Cooper, Maestro, Leonardo DiCaprio, Killers of the Flower Moon (not a chance!), Colman Domingo, Rustin (not happening!), Barry Keoghan, Saltburn (get outta town!), Cillian Murphy, Oppenheimer (alien from Tralfamadore!), Andrew Scott, All of Us Strangers.
HE pick: Cooper for Maestro. Safest choice: Murphy for Oppenheimer. Likeliest winner: toss-up between Murphy and Cooper.
Best Performance in a Motion Picture – Drama: Actress: Annette Bening, Nyad; Lily Gladstone, Killers of the Flower Moon; Sandra Heller, Anatomy of a Fall; Greta Lee, Past Lives; (no way) Carey Mulligan, Maestro (yes!); Cailee Spaeny, Priscilla (not a chance)
HE pick: Mulligan in Maestro. Safest choice: Mulligan. Surprise winner: Bening in Nyad.
Best Performance in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy: Actor: Nicolas Cage, Dream Scenario, Timothée Chalamet, Wonka, Matt Damon, Air, Paul Giamatti, The Holdovers, Joaquin Phoenix, Beau is Afraid, Jeffrey Wright, American Fiction.
Should & will win: Paul Giamatti in The Holdovers.
Best Performance in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy: Actress / Fantasia Barrino, The Color Purple, Jennifer Lawrence, No Hard Feelings, Natalie Portman, May December, Alma Pöysti, Fallen Leaves, Margot Robbie, Barbie, Emma Stone, Poor Things.
HE pick, obivous winner, hands down: Emma Stone, Poor Things
Best Director / Bradley Cooper, Maestro; Greta Gerwig, Barbie; Yorgos Lanthimos, Poor Things; Christopher Nolan, Oppenheimer; Martin Scorsese, Killers of the Flower Moon (no!), Celine Song, Past Lives .
HE picks: Cooper, Lanthimos. Likeliest winners: Christopher Nolan, Oppenheimer or Greta Gerwig, Barbie.
Best Supporting Performance in a Motion Picture: Actor / Willem Dafoe, Poor Things; Robert De Niro, Killers of the Flower Moon (no!), Robert Downey Jr, Oppenheimer; Ryan Gosling, Barbie; Charles Melton, May December (no!), Mark Ruffalo, Poor Things.
HE pick: Nobody…I feel nothing. Likeliest winner: Downey in Oppenheimer.
Best Supporting Performance in a Motion Picture: Actress / Emily Blunt, Oppenheimer; Danielle Brooks, The Color Purple; Jodie Foster, Nyad; Julianne Moore, May December; Rosamund Pike, Saltburn; Da’Vine Joy Randolph, The Holdovers (yes!!)
Should win, will win: Randolph in The Holdovers.
I feel too fagged and shagged to predict any of the other categories.
Yesterday Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson posted an interview with Killers of the Flower Moon screenwriter Eric Roth, and in so doing passed along, for what seemed like the umpteenth time, the story of how Roth and Martin Scorsese‘s 209-minute period melodrama began as one thing (a traditional investigative crime drama) and then became something else (a sprawling white-guilt wokester saga about the the ache of the Osage murder victims in the early 1920s, and particularly the evil of the white Oklahoma yokels).
Leonardo DiCaprio had initially been set to play the intrepid Bureau of Investigation agent Tom White, the guy who ultimately indicted three of the killers but was unable to bring many other killers to justice. (Leo excitedly told me this during a 2019 party at San Vicente Bungalows.) But sometime in early 2020 and perhaps during the beginning of Covid, Leo had a change of heart.
He didn’t want to play White because — let’s be honest — the woke movement had taken hold in progressive Hollywood circles and he didn’t want to be attacked or sneered at for playing a heroic white savior — a politically uncool thing in the Hollywood climate that was then unfolding.
Leo instead wanted to play the none-too-bright Ernest Burkhart, who became complicit in the murders of certain Oklahoma Osage natives by way of his fiendish uncle (Robert De Niro‘s ‘King” Hale), and who also came close to murdering his own Osage native wife, Mollie Burkhart (Lily Gladstone).
“At the beginning, Scorsese and Roth embraced a real John Ford Western,” Thompson writes.
Roth: “The early versions of the KOTFM screenplay were as much about Tom White as they were about the crime and everything else, and in that sense they were closer to the book. So it wasn’t a mystery in that sense.
“But then Marty began to express a bigger thing, which he’s so right about. It’s not a ‘who done it’ — it’s ‘who didn’t do it.’ As a social comment.”
God save Joe and Jane Popcorn from “social comment”, or more specifically social instruction.
Marty and Leo’s idea, in other words (allow me to offer an interpretation), was that we’re all guilty…all of us…back then and today.
In the same way that Randy Newman, in his 1970 song “Rednecks“, expanded the concept of racist attitudes and behaviors from the rural south to the entire country (“We don’t know our ass from a hole in the ground”), Killers of the Flower Moon would essentially serve as an indictment of white racism all over, in every nook and cranny of the country…we’re all dirty and guilty and reprehensible as fuck.
There’s no way the wokesters would come after Marty, Eric and Leo if they made a movie like this, the thinking presumably went, but if they made a “hooray for Tom White” flick, they might be indicted or semi-cancelled for being old-fashioned or blind to the new woke enlightenment or whatever.
Sometime in early ’20 or thereabouts, Roth got a call from Scorsese. “Are you sitting down?” Marty said. “Because Leo has a big idea.”
Roth: “Leo didn’t want to be the great white savior. Very smart. And the more complicated part was the husband [Ernest Burkhart] and complicated for many reasons, but probably the most interesting is somebody who’s in love with somebody and trying to kill them.
“We always embraced [Mollie] as the centerpiece of the movie.” [HE to Roth: Why? She doesn’t say anything or do anything — she’s completely passive.] “We had many, many things that dealt with the Osage, the Osage customs, the Osage world.”
What?
In fact Leo’s decision to submit to woke sensibilities (and Marty and Eric’s decision to go along with this) ensured that Killers of the Flower Moon would become a long, half-mystifying, eye-rolling, ass-punishing slog — a guilt trip movie without any story tension to speak of.
And here we are now, unlikely to bestow any top-tier awards** upon KOTFM except, most likely and very depressingly, the Best Actress Oscar to Gladstone for basically playing a passive victim of few words, a sad-eyed lady of the oil-rich lowlands who sits around in native blankets and gives dirty looks to all the evil crackers as Leo injects her with poisoned insulin…fascinating!
** Except for the musical score by the late Robbie Robertson — this is likely to win.
4:15 pm eastern: All hail the Gods of Rome! Not only did Killers of the Flower Moon‘s Lily Gladstone fail to win the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Leading Performance Award, but she didn’t even place in runner-up status (although she did so qualify in the supporting category). For now at least, her identity campaign has been stopped in its tracks…screech! The award has been split between Anatomy of a Fall‘s Sandra Hüller, and Poor Things‘ Emma Stone.
The runner-ups are All of Us Strangers‘ Andrew Scott and American Fiction’s Jeffrey Wright,
LAFCA’s Best Supporting Performance awards have gone to Rachel McAdams, (Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret) and The Holdovers‘ Da’Vine Joy Randolph. Runners-up: Lily Gladstone, Killers of the Flower Moon, and Ryan Gosling, Barbie.
Earlier today: The Los Angeles Film Critics Association is widely regarded as perhaps the most fickle and eccentric awards-bestowing org on the planet. We all know this. Don’t argue.
Not only have they chopped the roster of eligible acting winners in half by dispensing with gender, but they’re known worldwide as the only major critics group that routinely takes a brunch break during voting….bagels and soft-spread cream cheese, lox and onions, potato salad, pickles, Ruffles chips, half-consumed jars of mayonnaise, etc. They’re dedicated to their eccentricity, and when they vote each year everyone says “okay, here come the virtue-signalling fruit loops.” Not that bagels, cream cheese, onions and wokeness necessarily go hand in hand.
Seven years ago (i.e., late ’16) LAFCA gave Lily Gladstone their Best Supporting Actress award for having stared longingly at Kristen Stewart while saying almost nothing in Kelly Reichardt‘s Certain Women — basically an attagirl identity award for Gladstone playing her own rural Native American self while conveying lesbian currents.
You just know they’re going to come roaring back and give her their Best Actress trophy for doing roughly the same thing in Killers of the Flower Moon, or for playing a hetero Native American woman staring daggers at Robert DeNiro and the other bad guys while saying almost nothing.
So far…
Best Screenplay: All of Us Strangers. Andrew Haigh.
Runner-up: May December, Samy Burch.
Best Cinematography: Poor Things (Searchlight) — Robbie Ryan
Runner-up: Killers of the Flower Moon (Apple Original Films/Paramount Pictures) — Rodrigo Prieto
Best Production Design: Barbie (Warner Bros.) — Sarah Greenwood
Runner-up: Poor Things (Searchlight Pictures) — Shona Heath, James Price
Best Music Score: The Zone of Interest (A24) — Mica Levi, sound designer Johnnie Burn.
Runner-up: Barbie (Warner Bros.) — Mark Ronson, Andrew Wyatt.
I was impossible not to respect Leonardo DiCaprio's intense, go-for-broke performances as loose-cannon tupes in This Boy's Life and What's Eating Gilbert Grape, which he performed at age 16 and 17 or something like that. But they were "kid" performances. Next came a pulp western, The Quick and the Dead ('95), which, performed at age 19, showcased his first teenager performance. Alas, the movie wasn't so hot.
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In other words, during filming of The Hustler director Robert Rossen developed the hots for female lead Piper Laurie, unaware that she’d been “seeing” critic Joe Morgenstern (aka “JoMo”). Just before filming ended Rossen offered Laurie a significant role (presumably the sensuous, mentally disturbed temptress that Jean Seberg eventually played) in Lilith, but the blood drained from Rossen’s face when Laurie said she was about to marry Morgenstern…gaahhh!
“Lauren Boebert is a disgrace to this country.”
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...which means that in a manner of speaking or superficial speculation that the lead character in Quentin Tarantino's upcoming film will resemble a late '70s version of former stand-up comedian, former HE comment-thread enfant terrible ("I want a hooker!") and podcaster LexG (aka Mike Gilbert).
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A few days ago Kino Lorber released a double-disc 4K Bluray of Sidney Pollack and Robert Redford‘s Three Days of the Condor (’75). I’m not sure I see the need. I own the old Bluray from 2009 or thereabouts, and it’s fine.
The wifi signal in Albuquerque Airport is so anemic, so astoundingly sludgy, even slower than a dial-up connection in 1997 — that I can’t even post a link to a 9.2.23 High-Def Digest review.
Condor is a perfectly assembled, deliciously cool and extremely anxious time-capsule capturing of mid ’70s paranoia.
It works as a great companion piece to Alan Pakula and Warren Beatty‘s The Parallax View.
Redford’s “Turner” is one of his career-best performances, and Max von Sydow‘s “Joubert” is so exquisite in every scene…so gentle, settled-in and unmalicious…an almost serene European man involved in a dirty business.
I just wish that Leonard Atwood‘s motive behind the idiotic murdering of seven CIA employees in a midtown Manhattan office made more sense. Atwood freaked when he read Turner’s original “book report”, sent to CIA headquarters, about a rogue CIA operation — Atwood’s — that would’ve seized Middle Eastern oil fields.
Everything about Condor fits into place except for this one ludicrous plot device.
Cliff Robertson to John Houseman: “Do you miss that kind of action, sir?” Houseman to Robertson: “No, I miss that kind of clarity.”
I was into MILFs way before the acronym became familiar, you bet.
When I was 12 or 13 I had the distinct hots for a married neighbor and a mother of four, although nothing ever “happened”.
The usual junior-high-school fantasies about my foxy 20something teachers interfered with my grades, of course.
When I was 15 or 16 my mother sat me down and warned me about predatory older women, which only whetted my appetite.
When I was 22 and living in Southport I was seriously entwined with a 34 year-old divorcee named Suzie, and I distinctly recall she and I being sternly lectured by her next-door neighbors about our perverse behavior.
When I was driving for Checker Cab in Boston I was briefly hot-and-heavy with a classy, salt-and-pepper-haired woman of means, and in the late ’70s I had at least three casual affairs with Westport women in their late 30s and 40s.
Hence my lifelong interest in films about same. The fruit wasn’t forbidden, but was at least frowned upon to some extent.
The first poke-through was A Cold Wind in August (’61), in which a 30something stripper (Lola Albright) fell for a 17 year-old lad (Scott Marlowe). Six years later the bloody doors were blown off by a fascinating affair between the 40ish Mrs Robinson (played by a 35 year-old Anne Bancroft) and the 20-year-old Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman was 29) in Mike Nichols‘ The Graduate (’67).
Two years later came That Cold Day in the Park (’69), in which the 30-year-old Sandy Dennis became deeply involved with an 18 year-old (Michael Burns).
Such affairs, in short, enjoyed a certain Hollywood vogue for a while, but then wore off and pretty much went away. I’m sure I’m forgetting a few titles, although Sirk’s Magnificent Obsession doesn’t count due to the emotional constipation factor, no to mention Jane Wyman‘s extremely unflattering pageboy haircut.
Now, in any event, there’s a slight resurgence of this kind of thing with May December (Netflix, 11.17), a curiously admired Todd Haynes drama that’s partly based upon the real-life affair between school teacher Mary Kay Letourneau (now deceased) and Vili Fualaau, who was around 13 when things began to happen. Letourneau was jailed but they were subsequently married, and wound up with two kids. Letourneau died of cancer on 7.6.20.
Julianne Moore plays the Letourneau-resembling Gracie Atherton, a neurotic 60something dessert chef who’s married to Joe Yoo (Charles Melton), a 36 year-old half-Korean dude who was also around 13 when Gracie technically “raped” him while they were working together at a pet store, and with whom they’re currently raising two or three college-age kids.
I’m not a fan of May December, which will open the N.Y. Film Festival on Friday, 9.29. But at least it’s resuscitated the notion of risque, once-frowned-upon relationships of this kind.
I’d like to see such pairings depicted more often. One interesting possibility, for example, would be the real-life, four-year affair between Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Wagner, whicb began when they were respectively 45 and 22 — a striking age difference that caused, in the parlance of Eric Clapton, talk and suspicion.
I’m mentioning Stanwyck-Wagner because no female industry professional or film critic would raise their eyebrows if such a relationship were to be dramatized today. It would pass muster by current standards, although the depiction of an older man-younger woman Hollywood age-gap affair of 20 or 25 years, which used to be fairly common, would never be produced in today’s climate.
It’s extremely difficult to imagine anyone wanting to remake, say, Up Close and Personal, an unsuccessful 1996 romantic drama that was vaguely based upon the life of the late Jessica Savitch, and dealt with a May-December relationship between an older TV news producer (Robert Redford) and a young ambitious reporter (Michelle Pfeiffer). Such a story would probably be regarded as problematic and distasteful, to say the least.
No one today would touch a remake of Fred Schepisi‘s The Russia House (’90) with a twenty-foot pole. A romantic espionage drama based on a John Le Carre novel, it presented a love affair between Pfeiffer (then 32) and Sean Connery (then pushing 60) — a 28-year gap.
I could go on and on about older guy-younger woman relationships of this sort, which used to be par for the course but are now mostly out of the question. But older women and younger guys? No problemo.
After much thought and consternation I’ve decided that grief recovery dramas are a bad thing to wade into, and that they’re actually a sub-genre of sorts…a shamelessly whorish one.
And that’s not a putdown of Manchester From The Sea because Casey Affleck doesn’t recover from grief at the end — he’s stuck in the swamp and will never climb out.
The only grief recovery drama I’ve truly admired is Robert Redford‘s Ordinary People (’80) — the sadness in that film gets me each and every time.
Otherwise I’ve had it with this genre. HE to grieving characters: I’m not saying “snap out of it!” like Cher in Moonstruck, but I am saying i’ve no interest in holding your clammy hand as you moan and writhe and quake with sorrow.
Note: I’m not referring to real life and actual grief, of course, but to the exploitation of same by the wrong people.
Posted on 3.1.20: Here's a recollection from The Sting producer Tony Bill:
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