Born in 1929, legendary TV journalist and probing celebrity interviewer Barbara Walters (aka “Baba Wawa”) has passed at age 93. She bagged so many big-deal, on-camera interviews during her half-century-plus career (many U.S. Presidents, Fidel Castro, Barack Obama, Katharine Hepburn, Monica Lewinsky, Warren Beatty, Vaclav Havel, Boris Yeltsin) that there’s no room to list them all. Not to mention the satirical stamp of Gilda Radner. Not to mention Walters launching of The View in ‘97. Respect for a major influencer & feminist pathfinder.
I’ve only just discovered a YouTube clip of the A&P musical dance sequence that closes Noah Baumbach‘s White Noise. It’s the only portion of the film that really and truly works.
I’ve written about this twice over the preceding two and a half months, but it can’t hurt to re-post. It’s titled “White Noise Finale That Could’ve Been.”
Posted on 10.1.22: “The common consensus is that whatever you may think of Noah Baumbach’s White Noise, a dryly farcical ‘80s period drama set in an Ohio college town, the final sequence — an ambitiously choreographed dance sequence featuring shoppers at an A & P supermarket — is the highlight.
“The sequence affirms the film’s basic theme about nearly everyone turning to all kinds of distractions (including food) to avoid contemplating their own mortality.
“Though brilliantly staged, the dance number is undercut by Baumbach’s decision to use it as a closing credits backdrop. Here’s how I put it to a friend:
“The LCD Soundsystem ‘New Body Rhumba’ finale could have been great if Baumbach hadn’t decided to overlay it with closing credits. I almost shouted out loud ‘Oh no!! He’s blowing it!!’
“I’m saying this because once the credits begin we instantly disengage as we tell ourselves okay, the movie’s over so the aisle–dancing is just a colorful bit, a spirit-picker-upper…whatever.’
“If Baumbach hadn’t given us permission to disengage, the dancing could have been wild and mind-blowing in a surreal Luis Bunuel-meets-Pedro Almodovar way. It could have been a mad slash across a wet-paint canvas…a Gene Kelly consumer-orgy crescendo.
“And then it could have segued into a closing credit crawl. Alas…”
I just want it known that I caught Bette Midler‘s “The Divine Miss M” show at the Berkeley Community Theatre (1930 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA 94704) on Saturday, 9.29.73.
Terry Anzur’s review appeared the following Tuesday (10.2.73) in The Stanford Daily.
My group included ex-girlfriend Sherry McCoy, her sister Donna and three or four pallies who shared a place on San Francisco’s Russian Hill. Tons of gay guys dressed in drag…quite the colorful community. And the crowd roared when Midler, carrying a pair of pink feather boas, ran out to ecstatic applause. Her opening number was “Friends.”
After the show we all went to the backstage door to watch Bette come out and sign autographs. Her hair was tied up in a bun (or she didn’t have the red wig on…whatever), and when she came out and waved ‘hi’ to the onlookers, Donna said “who’s that?” My eyes rolled into my forehead.
THR’s Scott Feinberg has abandoned Everything Everywhere All At Once as his #1 pick for the Best Picture Oscar winner, and has shifted Top Gun: Maverick into the top slot. Variety’s Clayton Davis also got behind Maverick a few days ago with EEAAO relegated to fourth place.
Thank fortune that Feinberg and Davis have faced reality and “seen the light”, so to speak.
Ke Huy Quan (i.e., “Short Round”) might win the Best Supporting Actor Oscar but EEAAO is all but finished as far as betting on the Big Prize is concerned.
And this is how it should be. Standards of cinematic decency are prevailing. Let everyone understand that HE is the epicenter of the worldwide EEAAO takedown campaign…a cause near and dear to the hearts of all serious cinema lovers.
The great Pele has succumbed to cancer at age 82. Pele‘s reputation as Brazil’s (and indeed the world’s) GOAT soccer player soared during the late ’50s, ’60s and early to mid ’70s. Lacking a sports gene, I didn’t pay attention to Pele until he appeared as a costar in 1981’s Victory (aka Escape to Victory), at which point he was 41 and essentially retired. Victory was a full-of-shit World War II fantasy sports flick — one of John Huston‘s most unfortunate director-for-hire gigs.
I’ve been told that Broadway’s diversified, woked-up stage musical of Some Like It Hot isn’t doing so well commercially. No stars to speak of is one reason. Overly woke-icized may be another.
The show ignores the basic scheme of the Billy Wilder’s 1959 classic, making more than half the characters black with the Jerry/Daphne character (played by Jack Lemmon in the Wilder film) embracing transgenderism and yaddah yaddah. And the show buries the film’s final line — “nobody’s perfect.” Of course it does!
Directed by Casey Nicholaw and featuring Christian Borle (Joe/Josephine), J. Harrison Ghee (Jerry/Daphne), Adrianna Hicks as Sugar (called Sugar “Kane” Kowalczyk when she was played by Marilyn Monroe) and Kevin Del Aguila as an Latino Osgood, Some Like It Hot opened just under three weeks ago — 12.11.22.
HE reader Des McGrath: “The Jack Lemmon character has been rewritten to discover that he is a trans woman over the course of the story.
“The immortal final line? Gone. Instead of Osgood Fielding responding ‘Nobody’s perfect’, he tells Daphne ‘You’re perfect just the way you are’ (or something like that).
“And the Marilyn Monroe character is no longer a dumb blonde but a strong black woman, who sings about how as a child growing up in a small town in Georgia she liked to go to the movies, but ‘could only use the balcony. Like the movies, life could be that black and white.’
“So now she wants to break the color barrier in Hollywood.”
HE to McGrath: “Like the film, the show is set in 1929. Sugar wants to break Hollywood’s color barrier in nineteen-twenty-fucking-nine? The new Some Like It Hot, in short, is another exercise in presentism — transposing the woke sensibilities of today to the jazz age.”
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