It may sound like the wrong thing to say but this shot of Liam Neeson and Vanessa Redgrave at yesterday’s funeral for the late Natasha Richardson in Millbrook, NY., looks like a carefully composed shot (certainly in terms of lighting and framing) from a feature. Not a super-immaculate Vittorio Storaro composition but like something out of a Noah Baumbach film. One glance and you can feel it. Gray skies, somber garb, bush branches, despairing looks.
This photo alone, which sits atop a 3.22 Guardian takedown piece by Nick Adams about director-writer Richard Curtis and his latest film The Boat That Rocked (opening 4.1 in England, 8.29 stateside), has instilled serious concerns.
Gemma Arterton, Nick Frost in Richard Curtis’s The Boat That Rocked (Universal, 8.29)
Observe and Report “is not a movie about a guy who becomes a hero [but] a guy who’s decided in his own mind that he is one, all evidence to the contrary. Referring to this movie and Paul Blart: Mall Cop in the same breath because they’re both about mall cops is like comparing Straw Dogs to Babe because they’re both set on a farm.” — from Moises Chiullan‘s just-posted review of Jody Hill‘s upcoming Warner Bros. release, which is opening 4.10.
Anyone out there who believes that the Warner Bros. copy line on the Observe and Report poster is meant to be understood in this light — i.e., that Rogen’s character is delusional — doesn’t know much about studio marketing. The poster obviously isn’t taking the idea of Rogen’s mall cop being a hero seriously — the shades make it clear he’s a self-absorbed doofus — but the poster isn’t even flirting with the idea that the character may be seriously deranged in a Travis Bickle sense of the term. There isn’t a wisp of a hint of this in the poster art.
The Playlist is reporting about having spoken to a source in Austin during SXSW about Terrence Malick‘s Tree of Life undergoing additional shooting and that the film “is about a year away from completion and maybe a year and half away total.” Which means, if this turns out to be valid information, that we’re looking at a mid-2010 release.
Malick’s parallel IMAX project is said to be titled Voyage of Time. An anonymous Awards Daily commenter who claimed to be posting from Malick’s home town of Austin (but who could in fact be the great Ahmed Khan posting from Kabul) wrote earlier this month that Time will run in the vicinity of 45 minutes, that some Time footage may be used for Tree of Life, and that it’ll be released simultaneously with Tree of Life.
Clearly, Malick has an attachment to secrecy. He seems to live for it almost. To be able to work within such an utterly secret vacuum that no one is able to learn any substantive-sounding information is perhaps (who knows?) the bottom-line electric lightning-bolt element in Terrence Malick’s life and head. Secrecy! But with all the sniffing around no one, it seems, has stopped to consider the absolute lunacy of attempting to blend a story about an anxious 20th Century man (Sean Penn) and recollections of his distant father (Brad Pitt) with prehistoric pre-time elements, including a prehistoric creature sleeping in a sea of magma. Good God!
Until somebody closer to the action or someone with a professional rep with some kind of valid professional relationship with Malick spills I’m treating the whole thing as one big dinosaur wank.
“It’s over — we’re officially, royally fucked,” Rolling Stone‘s Matt Taibbi wrote last Thursday. (You can’t notice everything at the instant it happens.) “No empire can survive being rendered a permanent laughingstock, which is what happened as of a few weeks ago, when the buffoons who have been running things in this country finally went one step too far.
“It happened when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was forced to admit that he was once again going to have to stuff billions of taxpayer dollars into a dying insurance giant called AIG, itself a profound symbol of our national decline — a corporation that got rich insuring the concrete and steel of American industry in the country’s heyday, only to destroy itself chasing phantom fortunes at the Wall Street card tables, like a dissolute nobleman gambling away the family estate in the waning days of the British Empire.
“The latest bailout came as AIG admitted to having just posted the largest quarterly loss in American corporate history — some $61.7 billion. In the final three months of last year, the company lost more than $27 million every hour. That’s $465,000 a minute, a yearly income for a median American household every six seconds, roughly $7,750 a second.
“And all this happened at the end of eight straight years that America devoted to frantically chasing the shadow of a terrorist threat to no avail, eight years spent stopping every citizen at every airport to search every purse, bag, crotch and briefcase for juice boxes and explosive tubes of toothpaste. Yet in the end, our government had no mechanism for searching the balance sheets of companies that held life-or-death power over our society and was unable to spot holes in the national economy the size of Libya (whose entire GDP last year was smaller than AIG’s 2008 losses).”
Yesterday Variety‘s Michael Fleming posted a complain-and-lament piece (titled “How I Got Blogged Down”) about how pressure to quickly break stories online has led to sloppiness and retractions. His two prime examples are the bloggers who last week retracted premature news of Natasha Richardson‘s death (i.e., the distinction between actual and brain death having led to confusion) and Nikki Finke announcing on 1.29.08 she needed to “knock down” a rumor about ICM’s Jeff Berg departing his post after having posted a bit earlier that Berg was leaving.
“I chase film news,” Fleming writes, “[but] I regularly see half-baked stories posted, and quickly spread all over the world by sites that don’t verify them. [And] I’m troubled by a growing lack of objectivity, and an erosion of civility between competing journalists and the subjects we write about.”
One caveat is that while Fleming does chase news (like we all do) and is an excellent, thorough and fair-minded reporter, a good portion of what he breaks has been handed to him on a plate. Everybody feeds Variety with their fresh deals — there’s no more widely recognized and supported publication than Variety when it comes to this stuff — so it’s not like Fleming is out there all alone beating the bushes with a stick.
And what about the online reporters who’ve claimed to have broken stories and then seen their scoops turn up in a subsequent Variety report without any acknowledgement that they published it first? I’ve been hearing carpings along these lines for a long while now.
“Sometimes I wish there were more points of view from showbiz bloggers,” Fleming also says. “Too many of them have taken the same tone as they blur a line between objective reporting and opinion.” Who’s he talking about exactly? Why not name a couple of names and list examples of said blurrings?
“There is a preponderance of catty anonymous barbs, and bullying directed at other journalists and anyone in the industry who doesn’t play ball,” he states. Okay, but who’s bullying who over what particular issue? Playing ball regarding what activity or arena…early-bird screenings? Spit it out.
“Some bloggers seem to prize pummeling each other more than gathering news,” he observes. Yes, they do — and it’s entertaining (or at least diverting) when this happens. Fleming obviously doesn’t find it so, but what rankles him in particular? Bloggers will sometimes write about the same complaints that print journos used to privately share about each other at parties in the old days (i.e., the mid ’90s and before). The difference today is that it’s all hanging out on the clothesline 24/7.
Sometimes there are clothes out there that shouldn’t have been washed, or are too damp to air-dry, or which lack clothespins, or haven’t even gone into the washer to begin with. But one way or the other it all gets sorted out in the end. I think readers have come to understand you we all need to take almost everything with a grain of salt until the facts of life demonstrate otherwise. Depending on your POV and awareness levels, even official press releases can be fairly regarded as misleading or incomplete. Everybody spins to some degree. Nobody is 100% right or forthcoming about anything.
This Michael Fleming Variety story about Joel and Ethan Coen intending to direct their own version of True Grit (i.e., adapt the original Charles Portis book rather than remake the 1969 John Wayne film) is…whatever. Fleming mentions towards the end, however, that the Coens have “just completed” A Serious Man, which Focus Features will release in early October.
If Man is done why not take it to Cannes then? It’s late March, there’s plenty of time to put things in order…why not? Earlier this month the Coens told an esteemed director who happened to run into them that Cannes is not on their schedule Why? What would the downside be if they showed it there? A Serious Man is a starless, low-key exercise that’ll need all the hey-hey it can get.
“As Freud tells us in ‘Civilization and Its Discontents,’ we have to repress our infantile aggression in order for civilization to survive. But it’s worth paying top dollar to see those feelings acted out by an expert ensemble. And no bleating about the cruelty of farce, please. As [playwright Yasmina] Reza knows and so gleefully shows, without a killing there is no feast. ” — from John Lahr‘s 3.30 ‘s New Yorker review of God of Carnage, which I myself praised earlier this month.
God of Carnage costars Marcia Gay Harden, James Gandolfini, Hope Davis and Jeff Daniels.
“The lights dim in the screening room. Suddenly, the doomed Titanic fills the screen — but not the way I remember in the movie. The luxury liner is nearly vertical, starting its slide into the black Atlantic, and Leonardo DiCaprio is hanging on for life, just like always. But this time, I am too. The camera pans to the icy water far below, pulling me into the scene–the sensation reminds me of jerking awake from a dream–and I grip the sides of my seat to keep from falling into the drink.
“Most of us have seen the top-grossing film of all time. But not like this. The new version, still in production, was remade in digital 3-D, a technology that’s finally bringing a true third dimension to movies. Without giving you a headache.
“Had digital 3-D been available a dozen or so years ago when he shot Titanic, he’d have used it, director James Cameron tells me later. ” ‘But I didn’t have it at the time,’ he says ruefully. ‘Certainly every film I’m planning to do will be in 3-D.'” — from Josh Quittner‘s 3.19 Time piece about glimpsing footage from James Cameron‘s Avatar. Four days ago!
Plato’s Retreat, the legendary Upper West Side hetero sex club, was enjoying its heyday when I first moved to Manhattan in early 1978. I wanted to go and at least look at what was happening, but you couldn’t attend stag and the women I was seeing at the time thought the place was too threatening or tacky. Plus I was so poor that I didn’t feel good about forking over the $25 or $35 admission fee plus drinks and whatnot. Plus I was a bit of a prude.
I catted around a lot back then (who didn’t?), but the idea of being in a cellar-level club with dozens of buck-naked strangers…well, okay, but random couplings with whomever seemed a bit much.
What I didn’t realize 30-odd years ago (and only now understand) is that patron-wise Plato’s Retreat, which operated out of the Ansonia hotel on West 74th Street, wasn’t a congregation of Manhattan elite. Certainly not in the Studio 54 sense. Take away the celebrities and journalists who occasionally dropped by (Buck Henry, Richard Dreyfuss, et. al.) and Plato’s was essentially a bridge-and-tunnel scene run by a Queens pizza-parlor type of guy named Larry Levenson.
I had the naive impression back in the day that the Plato’s delectations were silky and uptown and akin to the erotic flavor of a Bernardo Bertolucci film. Hah! More like Tinto Brass.
A 9.22.02 N.Y. Times columnabout Levenson and Plato’s Retreat by Jon Hart reported that Plato’s “got its share of blue bloods and Wall Streeters, but the core clientele consisted of clock punchers from outside Manhattan, and committed heterosexual couples were the club’s base of support.”
What wised me up to all this was watching Mathew Kaufman and Jon Hart ‘s American Swing, a doc about the rise and fall of Levenson and Plato’s and the whole easy-nookie climate of the late ’60s, ’70s and early ’80s.
The film barely touches on the broader aspects of American sensuality and comme ci comme ca coupling back then (hippie movement beginnings, open relationships, swinger gatherings, etc.) and pretty much concentrates on Levenson’s wild ride, which lasted from the launch of Plato’s in ’77 until his IRS bust and subsequent imprisonment in ’81. The beginning of the AIDS epidemic in the mid ’80s brought the sex-club curtain down with a big wham.
So it’s basically the story of a dese-dem-dose kind of guy, and the movie itself — appropriately, I suppose — was made with a dese-dem-dose approach. It’s been painted, in other words, with a fairly common brush. It’s only 81 minutes long but it feels a bit longer because the visuals aren’t that grabby (a lot of low-grade monochrome video footage is used), there’s no Levenson to talk to (he died in ’99 of a heart attack) and Kaufman and Hart aren’t as curious as they could have been about some of the details, although they do a decent-enough job of telling the story.
American Swing will open on a limited theatrical basis on 3.27 and then be released on DVD on 4.14.
Levenson’s life and personality are well explored but the filmmakers barely pay attention to his wife and onetime Plato’s co-host Mary, who also died nine or ten years ago. She was a constant senior presence in the Plato’s heyday, and yet Kaufman and Hart couldn’t tell me what brought about her relatively early death when I spoke to them last week. They said something about people who knew her (or were related) wanting to keep things private. That’s odd. A good documentarian never backs off from learning the final truth about anything.
Lots of Levenson footage is used including some interesting talk-show appearances with Phil Donahue and former ABC daytime talk show host Stanley Siegel. The talking heads include Henry, former Screw editor Al Goldstein, former N.Y. Mayor Ed Koch, Melvin Van Peebles, and three or four women who attended with some regularity.
Here‘s more from the Hart piece:
“Perhaps it was fitting that Plato’s Retreat was created by a congenial cave man of sorts, a Bronx native named Larry Levenson. ‘He was shallow intellectually,’ recalled his close friend Al Goldstein, the publisher of Screw magazine. ‘He never read a book, never went to a movie.’
“A former fast-food manager, Mr. Levenson was hawking ice cream at Coney Island when his life took a fateful turn. One night in 1976, in a Sheepshead Bay cocktail lounge, he met a voluptuous housewife who introduced him to the world of subterranean swing clubs. After the first-name-only introductions, Mr. Levenson, his date and several other couples would go to a high-rise in Hoboken, N.J., where they shed their clothes and snorted amyl nitrate.
”We’d swing the entire weekend,” Mr. Levenson said. But there was a problem. ”It was tough to find parking. By the time we got to swinging, it was 2 in the morning.”
“Acting as host of a series of floating parties, Mr. Levenson quickly became known as ‘the king of swing,’ but he thought his operation would work more efficiently with a single venue. When a well-connected Brooklyn caterer named Frank Pernice became aware of Mr. Levenson’s operation, he saw financial opportunity in such an approach.
Larry Levenson and Mary, sometime in ’77 or ’78.
”’Right now you have a grocery store,’ Mr. Pernice told Mr. Levenson. ‘I can turn it into a supermarket.’ Within months, the former home of the Continental Baths, a bath house for gay men in the basement of the Ansonia, had been transformed into a palace for public sex.
“From the start Plato’s was a smash hit, largely because of the relaxed atmosphere. ‘I always used to say there’s more pressure at a singles bar than at Plato’s Retreat,’ one scenester recalled. ‘There was so much, so available, so why pressure anyone?’
“Mr. Levenson welcomed his guests with the playfulness of a kid in a sandbox, providing tours of the premises: the hot and cold buffet, the clothing-optional dance floor, the 60-person Jacuzzi, the labyrinth of thinly walled private areas, and especially the orgy room, a sea of mattresses on which naked couples formed an undulating tangle.
”’He added a friendly touch to the place,” one said. ‘He always used to tell couples if your marriage is in trouble, this won’t solve it. This is fun. This is extra.
”’Plato’s was welcome to anybody,’ Mr. Levenson said, ‘as long as you were a couple and you behaved yourself.’
“Which they did, despite the fact that many were probably high on Quaaludes, Plato’s drug of choice, which patrons stuffed into pouches emblazoned with the Plato’s logo, the same pouches featured in Vogue and which sold for $2 at Plato’s boutique.
“Celebrities stopped by to observe the scene while keeping their clothes on, among them the actor Richard Dreyfuss, an Ansonia resident who used to check out the action.
“Another visitor was the writer and actor Buck Henry. ‘We used to wander over there in the Saturday Night Live days to take a look,’ he recalled. ‘And of course we went there for the fine food.’ Besides the cuisine, did he engage? ‘Maybe,’ he replied.”
The three biggest N.Y. Times columnists — Paul Krugman, Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd — have this weekend delivered serious slapdowns to President Barack Obama, principally about a sense that he’s hasn’t been tough or angry enough with the big banks and the community of rank insider entitlement, that no real transparency has been forthcoming about where stimulus dollars have been going, and that he’s too dug in to the Tim Geithner-Lawrence Summers view of things, which is too Wall Street cozy and laissez-drifty.
The line that got me came from a N.Y. Times letter to the editor, and was used by RIch for the title of his column — “Has a Katrina Moment Arrived?” It was written five or six days ago by a Cupertino woman named Paulette Altmaier. “This is a defining moment for his presidency, and how he responds will determine the trajectory of his term,” she wrote. “He needs to deal with the excesses within the financial industry with the same toughness and conviction that President Ronald Reagan brought to bear during the air traffic controllers’ strike. To date, he is sorely wanting.”
Obama’s team “must start actually answering the questions that officials like Geithner and Summers routinely duck,” Rich wrote.
“Inquiring Americans have the right to know why it took six months for us to learn (some of) what A.I.G. did with our money. We need to understand why some of that money was used to bail out foreign banks. And why Goldman Sachs, which declared that its potential losses with A.I.G. were ‘immaterial,’ nonetheless got the largest-known A.I.G. handout of taxpayers’ cash ($12.9 billion) while also receiving a TARP bailout. We need to be told why retention bonuses went to some 50 bankers who not only were in the toxic A.I.G. unit but who left despite the “retention” jackpots. We must be told why taxpayers have so little control of the bailed-out financial institutions that we now own some or most of. And where are the M.R.I.’s from those ‘stress tests’ the Treasury Department is giving those banks?
“Another compelling question connects all of the above: why has there been so little transparency and so much evasiveness so far? The answer, I fear, is that too many of the administration’s officials are too marinated in the insiders’ culture to police it, reform it or own up to their own past complicity with it.”
Krugman scared me the most when he wrote yesterday morning that “the Geithner plan has now been leaked in detail [and] it’s exactly the plan that was widely analyzed — and found wanting — a couple of weeks ago. The zombie ideas have won.
“The Obama administration is now completely wedded to the idea that there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the financial system — that what we’re facing is the equivalent of a run on an essentially sound bank. As Tim Duy put it, there are no bad assets, only misunderstood assets. And if we get investors to understand that toxic waste is really, truly worth much more than anyone is willing to pay for it, all our problems will be solved.
“This plan will produce big gains for banks that didn’t actually need any help; it will, however, do little to reassure the public about banks that are seriously undercapitalized. And I fear that when the plan fails, as it almost surely will, the administration will have shot its bolt: it won’t be able to come back to Congress for a plan that might actually work. What an awful mess.”
Karl Malden is alive, hopefully well and three years shy of his 100th birthday. Malden was no spring chicken when he played Mitch in the original 1947 stage production of A Streetcar Named Desire — he was 35 years old. He was about 57 or 58 when he played Omar Bradley in Patton. And he was born with the name Mladen George Sekulovich . Has any marquee-value actor ever made it to 100?
<div style="background:#fff;padding:7px;"><a href="https://hollywood-elsewhere.com/category/reviews/"><img src=
"https://hollywood-elsewhere.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/reviews.jpg"></a></div>
- Really Nice Ride
To my great surprise and delight, Christy Hall‘s Daddio, which I was remiss in not seeing during last year’s Telluride...
More » - Live-Blogging “Bad Boys: Ride or Die”
7:45 pm: Okay, the initial light-hearted section (repartee, wedding, hospital, afterlife Joey Pants, healthy diet) was enjoyable, but Jesus, when...
More » - One of the Better Apes Franchise Flicks
It took me a full month to see Wes Ball and Josh Friedman‘s Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes...
More »
<div style="background:#fff;padding:7px;"><a href="https://hollywood-elsewhere.com/category/classic/"><img src="https://hollywood-elsewhere.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/heclassic-1-e1492633312403.jpg"></div>
- The Pull of Exceptional History
The Kamala surge is, I believe, mainly about two things — (a) people feeling lit up or joyful about being...
More » - If I Was Costner, I’d Probably Throw In The Towel
Unless Part Two of Kevin Costner‘s Horizon (Warner Bros., 8.16) somehow improves upon the sluggish initial installment and delivers something...
More » - Delicious, Demonic Otto Gross
For me, A Dangerous Method (2011) is David Cronenberg‘s tastiest and wickedest film — intense, sexually upfront and occasionally arousing...
More »