Friendo to HE: “Saturday Night Fever isn’t even that good, but the opening makes me think movies will never be this good again.”

HE to friendo: “My initial thought when I first saw it was ‘nothing good can come from a film in which the star (John Travolta) dresses this horribly’…those high-heeled boots, grotesque bell bottoms…that awful bridge-and-tunnel haircut.

“There’s glory in the Brooklyn disco dance numbers, of course, and the tearful ending works, but I despised guys like this back in the day.”

Plus Nik Cohn‘s original New York story was piped.”

Friendo to HE: “I know but that opening scene. Pure genius.”

There’s a brief sequence toward the end of Maestro that’s fun and a bit sad. Leonard Bernstein (Bradley Cooper) and his aliing wife Felicia Montealegre are enjoying their three kids — Jamie (Maya Hawke), Nina (Alexa Swinton) and Alexander (Sam Nivola) — as they dance along to Shirley Ellis‘s “The Clapping Song.” The scene works, feels right.

It reminded me, of course, of Ellis’s other big mid ’60s hit, “The Name Game“, and how I never understood who the fuck “Ahno” is.

At the 1:06 mark Ellis sings the following:

“Ahno!
“Ahno Ahno bo-bar-no
“Bo-na-na, fanna fo-gay-no
“Fee-fi-muh-mah-mo
“Ahno!”

Go ahead and listen — I’m not mishearing. The 1:06 mark.

Today I checked the lyrics online and discovered Ellis is supposed to be saying “Arnold,” except she doesn’t.

“Arnold!
“Arnold, Arnold bo-bar-nold
“Bo-na-na, fanna fo-far-nold
“Fee-fi-muh-mar-nold
‘Arnold!”

Read more

…with a little touch of Pietro Annigoni’s JFK portrait for Time magazine back in ‘62 or thereabouts This is what Bell’s Palsy has done since last weekend. For the time being my looks are destroyed — I can’t smile, my right eye sags, dogs howl when I pass by.

Watch these seven videos (or two or three of them) and try to hold yourself back from seeing Maestro. It’s a rapture — feel it or lose.

=

Froj “Grand Appetites and Poor Things” Anthony Lane, The New Yorker, 12.1.23:

“One of the funniest things about Poor Things is the headline that appeared in Variety after the film’s première at the Venice Film Festival, on September 1st: ‘Emma Stone’s Graphic Poor Things Sex Scenes Make Venice Erupt in 8-Minute Standing Ovation.’

“Laying aside the giveaway verb — no eruptive dysfunction here — one can but marvel at the blush of puritan shockability in such a response. It’s a charming idea that the audience was stirred not by any dramatic skills on the part of the leading lady but exclusively by her valor as she dared to feign the gymnastic arts of love.

“There is indeed a fair dollop of carnality in Lanthimos’s movie, but it’s hardly a torrent. ‘Furious jumping,’ Bella calls it, in a fine example of her poetic plain speaking, and, having sampled it, she wants more. Sprawled in postcoital languor next to [Mark Ruffalo‘s] Duncan, she asks, ‘Why do people not do this all the time?’ — an excellent question to which I, like Duncan, have no satisfactory reply.

“What matters most is that the sex, pace Variety, is not some isolated bout of friskiness; it takes its place in a larger comedy of appetites, as Bella hungers to steep herself in experience. If she dislikes a mouthful of food, she spits it out. When she dances, she jerks like a doll gone mad.”

Juror No. 2 director Clint Eastwood in full-codger, Gabby Hayes mode:

Hollywood Elsewhere would also like to submit to Ozempic, but it’s too costly.

This note is spot-on. You can’t logically think yourself into the realm of satori. You have to just let it in in a way that sidesteps your giant intellect.

I’ve seen Takashi Yamazaki‘s Godzilla Minus One, and I mostly agree with the praise from director Joe Dante and all the critics who’ve been swooning over this recently-released, Toho-produced, English-subtitled, Japanese import that Yamazaki made for only $15 million…amazing!

It is indeed the most emotionally resonant, well-grounded, human-scale kaiju flick I’ve seen in decades, except I mostly hate Japanese monster movies and avoid them like the plague so my perspective doesn’t count for much. But others (genre fans) feel this way.

I “liked” (i.e. enjoyed goofing-on or hate-watching) the two Warner Bros. fatzilla films — Gareth Edwards’ 2014 Godzilla reboot and Adam Wingard’s 2021 Godzilla vs. Kong. Both were about totally obese monsters destroying cities and whatnot.

I haven’t seen the Kurt Russell Godzilla TV series, (Apple’s Legacy of Monsters) but that monster also appears to be a treadmill-avoider, judging by trailers.

But those were huge wallop monster spectacles while Yamazaki’s film is primarily an intimate, mid-1940s period piece that invests in a human saga about post-WWII struggle and reconstruction, family love and community, honor and devotion to country, etc.

Godzilla is a major “character”, of course — a metaphor for the mass murder of tens of thousands in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August ‘45 and therefore a reptilian manifestation of J. Robert Oppenheimer and Gen. Leslie Groves. But the humans are just as important and actually a bit more so. It’s an ensemble piece.

The lead is a Japanese kamikaze (i.e., suicide) pilot named Kōichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki). Despairing over Japan having lost the war, we meet Koichi as he is abandoning his kamikaze mission. Two years later in a bombed-out Tokyo, Koichi has sexlessly teamed with a young substitute mother named Noriko Ōishi (Minami Hamabe) while coping with intense survivor’s guilt (i.e., why didn’t I pointlessly sacrifice my life at the tail end of the war?).

Then the Godzilla threat manifests big-time (the monster, trust me, is not the star but a huge-big-noise supporting character). Before you know it almost total Tokyo destruction is happening all over again, and then Noriko is apparently killed by Godzilla’s wrath.

Down the road it’s eventually up to Koichi and a team of spirited pals who’ve been tasked with destroying war mines off the coast of Japan…one of these fine fellows (forget who) eventually brainstorms a special atyical bomb device that will kill Godzilla.

And you know that the climax will focus on Koichi being the guy who needs to fly a plane right into Godzilla, kamikaze-style, and thereby erase his survivor’s guilt.

I’m not going to spoil the last 20 minutes but boy oh boy, does this movie cop out! Not just regarding Koichi but another significant character. Total happy endings-ville. No balls, no hardball commitment, no accepting the occasionally brutal terms when the chips are down…we just want everyone to live and be happy!

I should report that Yamazaki’s monster is a somewhat leaner fellow than the WB fatzillas — he’s not as lean and “in shape” as Ishirō Honda‘s original monster in 1954’s Godzilla, but at the same time Yamazaki’s newbie looks like a sumo wrester who’s gone on a crash diet and consequently still has rolls of lingering belly and boob fat clinging to his upper body.

Most weirdly the newbie has breasts — I know the designer intended the chest mounds to look like male pectorals but they look like breasts for nursing, I swear.

Like Dante I too felt moved when we hear passages from Akira Ifukube‘s original 1954 Godzilla score.

Godzilla Minus One is probably the best written and most humanistic Godzilla film since the original. It’s about characters you actually come to know and care about, and about Godzilla secondarily.

It has no balls in terms of who dies and whatnot, but genre filmmakers like Yamazaki (he’s 59 as we speak) don’t respect death’s honesty — none of them do.

I was already on board, but the critical consensus is that Phillip Noyce‘s Fast Charlie (Vertical, 12.8) is pretty much the new Charley Varrick.

No film is ranked higher as we speak.

Anne Thompson’s cautious and temperate instincts have led her to rank Lily Gladstone as a fifth-place contender in the Best Actress race despite Lily’s recent Gotham and NYFCC wins. This means something. Thompson is no provocateur in the HE mode, no radical firebrand. She never walks upon unsafe ground.

That’s how long I need to determine whether a film is any good or not. Actually closer to two or three minutes. Same thing when reading a script — the first five to ten pages tell the tale.

Many people (some from the HE commentariat) say “no!…ignore your intuitions and instincts and tough it out…you owe this to the filmmaker.” Well, that’s one way to respond but it’s a terrible thing to sit through a film that you know is doomed from the start.

Many times I’ll perceive early on that a film is iffy or unsure of itself but is nonetheless up to something interesting or thoughtful or even a bit strange. These are the movies I’ll stay with despite the speed-bumps.

In a 2015 New Yorker interview with John Lahr, May December star Julianne Moore explained her acting strategy: “I always have to find the place where a character cries,” she said.

I became so annoyed by Todd Haynes’ half-campy, Savannah-based domestic drama that I quickly stopped caring why Moore’s character, Grace, who is somehow able to afford a fairly flush lifestyle in a beautiful seaside home on the modest earnings of a dessert-baking business, was upset about anything.

But Moore’s first crying scene is definitely weird because she’s weeping hysterically over one of her clients canceling a cake order. My first thought was “a cancellation hiccup causes a major meltdown? God, she’s a borderline psycho.”

Regional friendo (received last night):

HE answer: There’s no way SAG/AFTRA and the New Academy Kidz would give a Best Actor Oscar to a white Italian actor playing a brute beast who slaps his wife around.