If you’re unfortunately tethered to an unhappy and dysfunctional family and can barely stand your siblings during holiday gatherings, you can at least take comfort in the fact that the battling O’Neals were always worse off.
The father of all this misery, of course, was the late Ryan O’Neal, who apparently insisted on disliking his children, never apologizing and blowing them off repeatedly.
Posted early today by the N.Y. Post’s Dana Kennedy:
Respect and praise for the late Tom Smothers, whose provocative views and attitudes in the late ‘60s made The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, which aired on CBS for two years and two months (February ‘67 to April ‘69), the hippest mainstream show on television.
If you were youngish and dropping acid, listening to progressive rock (Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, The Who), loving films like The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde and The President’s Analyst and generally hating the Vietnam War, you almost certainly watched this intensely spiritual (in a Nehru jacket sense of the term), anti-establishment show on a fairly regular and reverent basis.
CBS finally cancelled the Smothers Comedy Hour over regional complaints that it had pushed the counter-culture envelope too far.
Tom has passed from cancer at age 86.
Is there any way to say that I’m not especially interested in submitting to The Color Purple without sounding like a shitty, closed-off person?
The answer is probably “no”. And so most critics have decided to submit and “enjoy” and just, you know, roll with it. Simpler that way.
I know myself and my cinematic standards, and I can always sense or intuit that a certain film will almost certainly be, for me, a very difficult watch.
Honestly? I didn’t even like the 38-year-old Steven Spielberg version, which many critics have said is allegedly superior to the Blitz Bazawule newbie.
Just so we’re clear, Carl Reiner‘s Where’s Poppa? and Peter Yates‘ The Hot Rock delivered the one-two punch that made George Segal into a marquee brand.
Segal was a respected, well-liked, plugging-away actor throughout the ’60s, and he definitely elevated his stock rating with his lead performance in Irvin Kershner‘s Loving (’70 — 3.4.70).
But Reiner-Yates added the boldface, above-the-title stardom factor to Segal’s guilt-ridden, self-flagellating, Jewish-guy thing, and he was off to the races.
Poppa (a cult film, not a hit) was released on 11.10.70, and The Hot Rock (a silly ensemble caper comedy for guys) arrived on 1.26.72 or 14 months later.
Pre-Poppa and post-Hot Rock Segal were entirely different entities.
With these two in the bag, Segal landed the titular role in Paul Mazursky‘s Blume in Love (6.17.73), and thereafter he wasn’t just a star but a complex ’70s soul man — the highest rung of the realm.
And then, 14 months after Blume, came Segal’s Bill Denny in California Split (8.7.74) — another grand-slammer.
And then God lost interest and Segal’s hot streak ended, just like that. Segal kept working for another 40 years after that, and good for his spirit and tenacity. But what a rude jolt.
1970 through ‘74: “You’re finally really hot, George…you’re totally cool and everyone digs you.” 1975 and onward: “Okay, you’re still good but time to cool things down.”
I’m truly lucky to have a strong constitution and therefore good health. And I absolutely love doing the column and living this rat-a-tat life on a day-to-day basis, but the best part of my journalistic hot–shot life is over. 1991 to 2019 — 28 years when things were pretty good and often delicious and sometimes wonderful. I’m simply too poor these days. Savoring the joys and adventures of yore is out of reach —that’s the long and the short of it.
Lee Sun-kyun, the popular 48-year-old South Korean actor who played the wealthy dad in Parasite (i.e., the aloof fellow who fired the long-serving maid who later knocked on the front door during the rainstorm, etc.), has apparently offed himself. Drug use apparently had something to do with this tragedy. Very sorry for all concerned.
If you know George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty–Four”, you surely know the sinister character of “O’Brien,” a duplicitous double agent who pretends to be Winston Smith’s friend but is actually a member of the Thought Police. OBrien’s goal is to seek out and persecute thought criminals.
I’m not saying David Poland is a manifestation of a woke O’Brien but he is unmistakably projecting a false flag narrative when he posts bullshit like the tweets below. Poland is either completely self-deluding, which doesn’t square with the fact that he’s very sharp and socially aware, or he is simply an agent of smoke and propaganda who is spewing this crap in order to politically protect himself.
You know what’s a lot better than you might expect? Rollercoaster (’77), a Jennings Lang-produced disaster thriller, made near the end of the big-budget disaster-flick cycle.
Rollercoaster was promoted as a drop-your-socks Sensurround experience, and it was that to a certain extent. But it was mainly an intelligent, low-key, logic-driven chase thriller.
You’d figure with the disaster-flick promotion there would be at least two or three scenes of rollercoaster cars flying off the tracks and people being killed, etc. There’s only one such scene, however, and it happens during the first half-hour and that’s it.
The rest is all cat-and-mouse stuff with amusement park inspector George Segal on the trail of psycho yuppie bomber Timothy Bottoms.
I would’t necessarily call it Hitchcockian but it uses elements of suspense to engaging effect.
Rollercoaster was written by Richard Levinson and William Link, the guys who created Colombo. It’s nicely (as in carefully, patiently) directed by James Goldstone (The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight —-’71); Goldstone’s big-screen career was unfortunately killed when he directed When Time Ran Out… (’80).
Here’s a link to the whole film.
A little less than three years ago I posted a roster of HE’s top 20 Henry Fonda films. There was some pushback over my placing Sergio Leone‘s Once Upon A Time In The West, in which Fonda played a blackhearted villain named Frank, in 15th place.
I put it there because it wasn’t a “Henry Fonda” performance, but an aberration in the vein of Fort Apache. And yet even Fonda’s Fort Apache performance as Lieutenant Colonel Owen Thursday, a stiff-necked, emotionally constipated fanatic, represented an aspect of his own nature. (Peter Fonda once said this in an interview.) Frank was a bizarre showhorse role — completely divorced from Fonda the man and Fonda the legend.
In 19 of the 20 performances listed below Fonda was basically playing himself, which is how we’ve always preferred him.
1. 12 Angry Men
2 The Ox-Bow Incident
3. The Grapes of Wrath
4. The Lady Eve
5. The Best Man
6. The Wrong Man
7. Young Mr, Lincoln
8. Drums Along The Mohawk
9. My Darling Clementine
10. You Only Live Once
11. Fort Apache
12. On Golden Pond
13. The Boston Strangler
14. The Fugitive
15. Once Upon a Time in the West
16. Advise and Consent
17. Slim
18. Jezebel
19. The Tin Star
20. Jesse James
Arguably the worst stinkers of Fonda’s career were Mr. Roberts, Fail Safe (a technically good film that I’ve only rewatched once — that means something) and Sex and the Single Girl.
I’m not saying that people are feeling less empathy for alleged victims of sexual assault (no one should ever let that ball drop), but they seem to be feeling less knee-jerky and less Robespierre-ish in the matter of instantly condemning alleged perpetrators.
There’s no way such a proclamation would have been published three years ago. People seem to be understanding that #MeToo overplayed its hand and that a somewhat more circumspect, due-process attitude about sexual misbehavior is warranted.
In 2009 quite a few Hollywood heavyweights signed a letter in support of Roman Polanski….seems like a long time ago.
David Rothkopf to Steve Schmidt: “The irrationality of the degree of support for [The Beast]…despite his criminality, his control over the Republican party seems stronger than it’s ever been….even with all these trials, even with all we know about him….rational objections to this anti-democratic authoritarian don’t seem to hold.”
That’s because Trumpism isn’t rational — it’s emotional, primal, boiling in the blood. And Rothkopf doesn’t even allude to this.
Far-right Trump supporters believe that over the last several years U.S. culture has been under assault by the woke scourge (currently manifested by Biden’s kneejerk deference to diverse tribalism, equity favored over meritocracy, scolding white people for being white, trans values in elementary schools, Dylan Mulvaney, hordes of immigrants surging through the Mexican border), and they see him as the only hardcore bully-boy enemy of this scourge…the only guy who is saying “fuck this noise” without qualification.
Is there merit to this general thesis or analysis? To varying degrees, yes. Is it worth electing a fascist dictator in order to put a stop to this scourge, or at least to try and reverse or suppress it? Of course it wouldnt be worth it. Putting Trump back into the White House would be insanity. But like I just said, the Trump bonfire isn’t about rationality.
