Its not just that I associate this political Newsweek cartoon with the early ‘90s. (Obviously.). It’s been pasted to an office door for 30+ years, and there’s something about chuckling at the predatory jungle atmosphere of Washington, D.C….it’s hard to put into words but this image somehow makes me feel all mushy inside. I love the Quayle hair between the deer ears.
Last night Javier Bardem and Nicole Kidman, costars of Being The Ricardos. were given the Maltin Modern Master award by the Santa Barbara Int’l Film Festival. Inside the Arlington Theatre, I mean. Kidman appeared remotely due to a hamstring injury. The legendary Leonard Maltin himself handled the interviewing honors. It was a generally pleasant evening.
Neither Javier nor Nicole will win in their respective categories — Will Smith will take the Best Actor trophy, and the Best Actress Oscar will be won by either Jessica Chastain or (my fondest wish) Penelope Cruz, aka Mrs. Javier.
But I’d like to nominate or even hand an award to Javier for being the best person nominated in a major category — the kindest and warmest and most accessible fellow in the 2022 Oscar constellation.
Why? It’s all subjective but it comes down to something that happened 15 years ago in Cannes. That would be 2007 — the No Country for Old Men year. Javier and I were sitting on the the Cote d’Azur beach in the evening, and I bummed a Marlboro light from the guy, and as we parted company a few minutes later he gave me another — one to grow on, so to speak. I’ve never forgotten that moment, and that’s why I like him so much.
Update: I’m now thinking I might’ve gotten that wrong. The extra Marlboro Light episode might have happened at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills, either in ’07 or ’08. But what’s the difference?
Originally posted on 3.3.13: “A reading of Stanley Kubrick‘s 9.29.69 screenplay makes it fairly obvious that Napoleon would have had the same vibe as Barry Lyndon, and been spoken the same way and framed and paced the same way.
“Okay, the lead character would be a determined egomaniacal genius instead of an amoral Irish lout and Napoleon would have more than one battle scene, but beyond these and other distinctions we’re talking the same line of country. Everything Kubrick wanted to accomplish or put into Napoleon he put into Lyndon — simple.
“Remember the scene when Ryan O’Neal‘s Lyndon asks the pretty blonde fraulein if he could pay her for a meal, and then the follow-up scene inside her cottage when they carefully and delicately get around to talking about him staying that night and being her lover, etc.?
Consider this scene from Kubrick’s Napoleon — same tone, same idea, same sexual undercurrent. A lonely soldier, a poor young woman, etc.
EXT. LYON STREET – NIGHT
It is a witheringly cold winter night, in Lyon. People, bundled up to the eyes, hurry along the almost deserted street, past empty cafes which are still open. Napoleon, 16 years old, hands deep in his pockets, shoulders hunched against the cold, passes a charming, young street-walker, about his own age. He stops and looks at her, uncertainly. A large snowflake lands on her nose which makes him smile.
GIRL: Good evening, sir.
NAPOLEON: Good evening, Mademoiselle.
GIRL: The weather is terrible, isn’t it, sir?
NAPOLEON: Yes, it is. It must be one of the worst nights we have had this winter.
GIRL: Yes, it must be.
Napoleon is at a loss for conversation.
NAPOLEON: You must be chilled to the bone, standing out of doors like this.
GIRL: Yes, I am, sir.
NAPOLEON: Then what brings you out on such a night?
GIRL: Well, one must do something to live, you know. And I have an elderly mother who depends on me.
NAPOLEON: Oh, I see. That must be a great burden.
GIRL: One must take life as it comes. Do you live in Lyon, sir?
NAPOLEON: No, I’m only here on leave. My regiment is at Valence.
GIRL: Are you staying with a friend, sir?
NAPOLEON: No…I have a…room…at the Hotel de Perrin.
GIRL: Is it a nice warm room, sir?
NAPOLEON: Well, it must be a good deal warmer than it is here on the street.
GIRL: Would you like to take me there, so that we can get warm, sir?
NAPOLEON: Uhhn…yes, of course. If you would like to go there. But I have very little money.
GIRL: Do you have three francs, sir?
The Russian shelling of mothers and young children inside a maternity hospital in the Ukranian city of Mariupol is off-the-charts evil. History now has no choice but to regard the war crimes of Vladimir Putin in the same light as those of Slobodan Milosovic. Or should we compare him to Ralph Fiennes' Amon Goth in Schindler's List? War is cruelty, horror, depravity. The mind shudders.
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A little more than four years ago, director-screenwriter-playwright Neil LaBute was abruptly cancelled by MCC Theater, an upscale Off Broadway company that had produced and supported his controversial plays for 15 years. LaBute has worked steadily in features and TV since and is doing “fine”, but the MCC surprise seemed to signal an across-the-board dismissal of LaBute by #MeToo and #TimesUp progressives.
LaBute’s provocative plays and films (In the Company of Men, Your Friends & Neighbors, The Shape of Things, Fat Pig, Some Girl(s), Some Velvet Morning, Reasons To Be Pretty) have been derided by certain critics as misanthropic and misogynist. His speciality is dramatizing misunderstandings, woundings and acidic currents between contentious men and women in their 20s, 30s and 40s.
Anyway, it would seem (and I’m emphasizing the “s” word) that LaBute didn’t do anything specific to warrant the MCC termination. It seems, rather, that he just continued to write the same kind of stuff, and that post-2017 the woke comintern simply said “enough” and decided to get rid of him.
Last night I watched LaBute’s House of Darkness, an elevated horror film that uses (borrows?) themes and situations from Promising Young Woman and Midsommar. When and if it opens, House of Darkness, which costars Kate Bosworth and Justin Long, will probably be attacked as a metaphorical woman-hating horror film. Or a man-hating #MeToo horror film. Or something like that.
It’s definitely trafficking in social metaphor — #MeToo and #TimesUp and others in the women’s progressive movement looking to bring pain and terror to the male jerks of the world.
I don’t think House of Darkness does anything phenomenal. All it does is apply the basic LaBute attitude software to Promising Young Midsommar.
Long plays a typical Labute-ian sexist sleazeball bullshitter, and Bosworth (they’ve been actual, real-life lovers since last year) plays one of the Dracula sisters.
Bosworth and two other women play feminist avengers, and Long is a boozy, middle-aged version of Keanu Reeves‘ Jonathan Harker.
Unlike the bright and sunshine-filled Midsommar, LaBute’s film takes place in the dead of night inside a large, European-styled, castle-like abode (i.e., the real-life Dromborg Castle in Fayetteville, Arkansas). Suffice that horrible punishment happens to Long’s dipshit bad guy, whom no sensible woman would want to be within 100 yards of anyway.
The bottom line is that there’s barely a mention of LaBute’s film online. I searched around last night and it simply doesn’t exist except on IMDB Pro. No stills, no trailers, no nothin’. Very little on LaBute’s IMDB Pro page and nothing whatsoever on his Wikipedia page. No mention of the film on Long and Bosworth’s IMDB and Wikipedia pages.
It’s as if people on their respective staffs or teams went to some difficulty to erase any mention of this film. It’s almost unheard of for mentions of a completed but unreleased film to be this difficult to find.
Why guest programmer Claudia Puig chose to book this lost-at-sea film at the Santa Barbara Film Festival is anyone’s guess. Perhaps she decided to include it out of respect for LaBute’s reputation during his late ’90s-early aughts heyday?
Perhaps the producers tried to sell it and failed, not just theatrically but with streamers and cable stations….everyone shrugged. (Maybe.). I called a couple of producer’s reps today and they said they’d never heard of it.
But House of Darkness isn’t that bad. It’s creepy, diverting, socially thoughtful — altogether a half-decent sit.
It’s doubly weird that producers allowed the SBIFF to be the first-anywhere festival to show House of Darkness. And without a word of fanfare. They knew, of course, that people like me would see it and write about it, etc.
Anne “softball” Thompson is moderating this year’s SBIFF “It Starts With The Script” panel — (l. to r.) King Richard writer Zach Baylin, Belfast director-writer Kenneth Branagh, The Lost Daughter director-writer Maggie Gyllenhaal, CODA director–writer Sian Heder, Don’t Look Up director & co-writer Adam McKay, Dune director & co–writer Denis Villeneuve, The Worst Person in the World director & co-writer Joachim Trier.
It’s happening inside the cavernous Arlington theatre. The usual venue, Santa Barbara’s Lobero theatre, is allegedly being renovated.
The acoustics aren’t right again, or at least they aren’t from my front-row center seat — everyone sounds bassy and echo-y — I haven’t been able to make out a single thought or phrase. I’m sure that a properly mixed video of this panel will be much easier to understand.
McKay doesn’t like to sit up — he prefers to slump with his head resting against the seat. I’m told he suffers from a condition — essential tremors — that prohibits him from normal sitting. The large SBIFF panel chairs were used to accommodate him.
If I were moderating, I would ask Baylin how he, a white guy, managed to write such a frank, absorbing, real-deal script about a black family from Compton? How could he have possibly understood or dramatically translated the story of the Williams family, given his privileged white-guy sensibilities? It’s a facetious question, of course, but I’m sure it came up during King Richards’ hiring phase and/or development.
Oh, and by the way: Thompson is wearing plain black slacks or jeans (relaxed fit), but Gyllenhaal and Heder have both submitted to the fashionista fascists by wearing broadly flared slacks (Gyllenhaal’s outfit is earthy copper, Heder’s is light brown corduroy).
This metaphorical occurrence happened earlier today in Kyiv. A certain party has yelled at me for having joined Newsweek, the NY Post, the Guardian and others in posting this video. “Where is the proof that the tank is Russian?,” etc. HE reply: The common consensus, backed up by reporting, is that the tank was definitely Russian.
Joseph McBride‘s “The Whole Durn Human Comedy” (Anthem, 3.1) is half-nutrition and half-dessert — a warm, wise, non-linear take on the careers of the great Joel and Ethan Coen.
But around the halfway mark it hit me that McBride and Anthem may have published the first Coen brothers eulogy on dead tree materials. For all the signals seem to say (or at least indicate) that these guys just aren’t feeling it, certainly on Ethan’s part. This is a book that says the Coens have a great history that may have wound to a close, and that their brand is no longer a going concern. We all hope otherwise, of course, but who knows?
The last effort from Joel and Ethan was The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, an anthology film for Netflix. But my view is that it didn’t count because it wasn’t really a single-narrative “Coen Bros. film” that opened in theatres. Within that realm, Joel and Ethan have actually been M.I.A. since Hail, Caesar!, which came out in 2016 and was a bit of a disappointment. It was fine (Josh Brolin was excellent) but it also felt incomplete.
If you ask me the last real Coen brothers film was Inside Llewyn Davis, which was nine fucking years ago.
McBride and I did a phoner a couple of weeks ago. I tried to grill McBride about this apparent state of affairs, but the only substantive comment he shared about Joel and Ethan possibly going their separate ways…well, read below.
If you know your Coens, you knew they’ve always conveyed for a contempt for American culture, and one way or another they’ve always delivered a scolding and a critique…which was true of Billy Wilder also, I think. But a lot of people “really hated” A Serious Man‘s mockery of Jewish community anti-semitism…God’s in a bad mood…doesn’t give a shit.
The last effort from Joel and Ethan Coen was The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, an anthology film for Netflix. But that wasn’t really a single-narrative “Coen Bros. film” that opened in theatres. Within that realm, Joel and Ethan have been M.I.A. since Hail, Caesar!, which came out three years ago. Except that was a bit of a disappointment. It was fine (Josh Brolin was excellent) but at the same time a bit strained and somehow incomplete.
I “liked” but didn’t love True Grit (’10) all that much. It was basically about Jeff Burly Bridges going “shnawwhhhhr-rawwwhhrr-rawwrrluurrllllh.” It certainly wasn’t an elegant, blue-ribbon, balls-to-the-wall, ars gratia artis Coen pic — it was a well-written, slow-moving western with serious authenticity, noteworthy camerawork, tip-top production design and, okay, a few noteworthy scenes.
So let’s just call the last 11 or 12 years a difficult, in-and-out, up-and-down saga for the boys, but at the same time acknowledge that the Coens have enjoyed two golden periods of shining creativity and productivity.
HE to God #1: “Cosmic design, unity and connectivity are obvious to anyone with half a brain, but as a beyond-intelligent entity do you and your only begotten son feel just a teeny bit responsible for the massive amounts of stupidity, ignorance and arrogance that are directly attributable to religious devotion? Which is partly responsible for destroying the earth as we speak? Are you good with all that?”
Roughly 25 years ago I was hosting a Woodland Hills screening series called Hot Shot Movies, and one of the films I booked for the fall of ’97 was Taylor Hackford‘s The Devil’s Advocate. It’s no one’s idea of a great film. It has, however, a great Al Pacino speech at the very end — the Devil himself (i.e., “John Milton”) explaining what a pious asshole and sadistic mind-fucker God the Father is.
I don’t know who wrote Pacino’s rant, but the film is based on Andrew Neiderman‘s same-titled 1990 novel; the screenplay was co-authored by Jonathan Lemkin and Tony Gilroy.
Milton: “Let me give you a little inside information about God. God likes to watch. He’s a prankster. Think about it. He gives man instincts. He gives you this extraordinary gift, and then what does he do? I swear…for his own amusement…his own private cosmic gag reel, he sets the rules in opposition. It’s the goof of all time, [and] he’s laughin’ his sick fuckin’ ass off! He’s a tight-ass, he’s a sadist, he’s an absentee landlord.”
HE to God #2: “Do you agree or disagree with Gilroy‘s assertion that you’re an absentee landlord? When I was a kid I thought you were that deep, slowed-down voice in Cecil B. Demille‘s The Ten Commandments; now you’re nothing more than a component in one of the ugliest political-religious movements in U.S. history.”
Decades ago I read a Charles Bukowski recollection about the glorious results of a long, deep sleep. The author-poet had slept for two days straight, and when he finally awoke he felt wonderful. Bukowski’s body felt like $10 million bucks, etc. So I decided to follow suit. Lights out at 9 pm, a good 10 or 11 hours.
I woke up at 1:30 am and couldn’t get back to sleep. I studied my Twitter feed for an hour or so, and then decided to re-watch Steven Spielberg‘s The Post (’17) on the phone. My reaction was roughly the same as it was four years ago — respected the effort, loved the performances, admired Liz Hannah and Josh Singer‘s well-honed script, felt a certain emotional poignancy toward the end.
The Post was nominated for Best Picture and Best Actress (Streep) at the 90th Academy Awards, but Academy members mostly ignored it — identity politics and representation of historically devalued groups were the big concerns. If you ask me The Post didn’t deserve to be dismissed as a self-congratulating, middle-class, big-studio film about journalistic integrity, made by and for well-off, well-educated whiteys. But that’s how a certain percentage of the Academy saw it.
The Post isn’t a journalistic procedural as much as a feminist parable — a story about how Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham (Meryl Streep), who initially saw herself as less than ideally suited to the task and little more than a blandly embedded figure in Washington social circles, gradually grew some courage and a sense of journalistic purpose during the Pentagon Papers episode, which transpired over a 17-day period in June 1971.
In this light, the key scene — Spielberg’s signature moment — comes when Streep emerges from a historic Supreme Court session about the legality of publishing the Pentagon Papers, and several women on the steps gaze with admiration as she passes by.
On the other hand I found myself distracted by those klutzy moments that Spielberg always puts into his films — little errors of judgments that normalize characters by making them seem vulnerable. Graham waking up in her bedroom with several books and files on her bed, and of course they all fall from the bed and onto the floor, loudly. Graham meeting Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks) inside a posh Washington restaurant, and of course she stumbles and accidentally knocks over a chair. An open-mouthed Washington Post intern visits the N.Y. Times building on West 43rd street, and as he starts to cross the street you just know he’ll almost get hit by a taxi…sure enough, that happens. (I’m fairly sure that another cab screeches to a stop later on.)
I finally got back to sleep at 5:30 am. The Bukowski sleep-in thing will have to wait.
Hollywood Elsewhere suspects that classic-film distributor and alleged rights-squatter Wade Williams, the apparent owner of distribution rights to William Cameron Menzies' Invaders From Mars ('53) since the mid '70s, has a top-secret plan for creating and then distributing a restored 4K Bluray of this legendary impressionist classic.
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Sometimes I hate comedy that you’re expected to “laugh” at. Almost as much as I hate people who hideously shriek and guffaw in cafes and bars after their second glass of wine. For most of my life I’ve been an LQTM type of guy. I worship at the altar of no-laugh funny. This is where the gold is.
Upon these two deadpan dialogue scenes hang all of the humor and informed attitude of Joel and Ethan Coen‘s Burn After Reading. Idiots will watch these scenes with sour, quizzical expressions and say “Where’s the funny? We don’t get it.” And they never will.
The senior artist — the guy who channels most of the music, does most of the dancing and “carries the ball”, so to speak — is the great David Rasche (Sledgehammer, United 93, In The Loop). J. K. Simmons is obviously on the same wavelength, of course, but he’s strictly a straight man. Rasche owns this scene.
It has been said that the absolute Coen peak of the aughts (and arguably of their careers) happened between ’07 and ’09, and involved three films in quick succession — No Country For Old Men (’07), Burn After Reading (’08) and A Serious Man (’09). My fourth favorite Coen film of the aughts is Intolerable Cruelty (’03).
Blood Simple was obviously the best Coen film of the ’80s. Fargo (’96) and The Big Lebowski (’98) were the crown jewels of the ’90s. The best Coen film of the 20teens, of course, was Inside Llewyn Davis.
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