…for my early-evening date with Guillermo del Toro‘s Nightmare Alley (which is getting raves for its cinematography and production design), and a little running around after, so I need to delay some of the posts I have planned. But in the meantime…
The night before last I had an excellent time re-watching Spike Lee‘s Inside Man, which is now 15 and 1/2 years old. One of my thoughts was “jeez, Denzel looks so young!” — he was around 51 or 52 during filming. No spring chicken, but much more buoyant looking compared to his 2021 constitution.
Anyway, the HE community needs to assemble a list of the best crime or heist films in which the “bad guys” get away with it**. The first of these would have to be Lewis Milestone and Frank Sinatra‘s Ocean’s 11 (’60) — no, they didn’t get to keep the money at the end but they weren’t caught or punished by the law, and were free to try again. Peter Yates‘ Robbery (’67), to some extent. Norman Jewison‘s The Thomas Crown Affair (’68), of course. Thieves get to keep the loot in Peter Yates‘ The Hot Rock (’71), and of course the cops never get wise.
What are the other big titles in this realm?
** Not Rififi, not Topkapi…a lot of gangs got busted or went home empty-handed in the ’50s and early ’60s.
Earlier today a N.Y. Times story reported that “after two hours of sometimes tense exchanges in one of the most significant abortion cases in years, [a majority of justices on the Supreme Court] appeared poised to uphold the [Mississippi] state law, which bans abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy.”
I’ve mentioned before that something happened inside me several months ago, back when Jett and Cait‘s daughter, the recently born Sutton, was growing inside Cait. Suddenly the idea of terminating a fetus’s life was no longer an abstraction. I was especially disturbed by the idea of terminating a fetus at 24 weeks, which suddenly seemed wrong on some primal level. The Roe v. Wade law stipulated 24 weeks because that’s the point at which fetuses become viable, yes, but why so long into the pregnancy? Why not 18 or 20 weeks?
The Mississippi law says no abortions after 15 weeks, or a couple of weeks shy of four months. Given reports that many or most women don’t even realize they’re pregnant until the fifth or sixth week, what is so difficult about deciding what to do about a pregnancy within a nine- or ten-week period?
However, the following sentence in the Times story bothered me: “Should Roe be overturned, at least 20 states will immediately or in short order make almost all abortions unlawful, forcing women who can afford it to travel long distances to obtain the procedure.” Why would these 20 states do that? Why not allow pregnant women to terminate pregnancies within the 15-week period?
21 years ago I sat down with Tony Curtis at the Beverly Glen shopping center, just south of Mulholland Drive. I waved to him above the heads of several customers sitting outside a popular, packed delicatessen. Curtis waved me over and led me to the inside of a less-crowded Starbucks — fewer people, fewer stares.
When he ordered coffee for both of us, the woman at the counter insisted on a freebie. “Really?” he said to her. “Well, thank you so much!”
We talked about everything — politics, drug-dependency (Curtis had difficulties in this area during the ’80s), Burt Lancaster, old Hollywood, his website (tonycurtis.com, a venue for selling his paintings), women, new technologies, etc.
At midpoint I handed Curtis a list of his 120 films and asked him to check those he’s genuinely proud of. He checked a total of 18. He checked Sweet Smell of Success (naturally) but not The Vikings. Some Like It Hot (of course!) but not The Outsider. He checked Houdini. Every film he made after Spartacus in 1960 up until 1968’s The Boston Strangler, he didn’t check. He checked his role as a pair of mafiosos — Louis ‘Lepke’ Buchalter in 1975’s Lepke and Sam Giancana in the 1986 TV movie Mafia Princess.
Among his notable TV guest appearances, Curtis checked only one — the voice role of ‘Stony Curtis’ in a 1965 episode of The Flintstones.
Dwayne’s answer would have to be “well, if you’re asking me that in the same way you asked Tony Curtis the same question, my answer would have to be zip. Because I’m not genuinely proud of any of my films. I’m glad a lot of them were popular and made money, and I’m certainly glad that I’ve become a hugely successful brand and all. But I’m not a Tony Curtis-level actor, and I never will be.”
Imagine my sitting down with Chris Pratt under similar circumstances. Imagine my handing him a list of the 14 or 15 films he’s starred or played a strong co-lead in over the last, say, 10 years, and asking him to check those he’s genuinely “proud of”.
Pratt’s answer would have to be “well, if you’re asking me that in the same spirit that you asked Tony Curtis and Dwayne Johnson, my answer would have to be that among the films I’ve starred in, I am genuinely proud of nothing. I’m ‘proud’ a lot of my films made money, and I’m certainly glad that I’ve become a hugely successful, bulky-bod, conservative-minded actor with big money and big homes.
“I’m genuinely proud of three films that I played a supporting role in between 2011 and 2013 — Bennett Miller‘s Moneyball, Kathy Bigelow‘s Zero Dark Thirty and Spike Jonze‘s Her — but that’s another subject. The bottom line is that as a movie star I make commercial fast-food movies and that’s all. If I’m the star, you know it’s going to be a throw-away, more or less. You know it, I know it. I’m really sorry I did Passengers, which everyone hated, but the money was good so I took it and ran like a thief.
…after staying with Peter Jackson’s 468–minuteBeatlesdoc over a two-day period:
Somewhere during the third or fourth hour I began to feel alittlebitBeatle–edout. But I’d suspected that would happen so it wasn’t a big surprise and I knew I’d eventually…well, feel proud about having watched the whole thing. Which I am.
It’s basically fly-on-the-wall stuff. Quite interesting. A casual, shaggy, verycoolhang. But after a while it loses a little something. Zeronarrativetension, of course, but that’s built into the concept. It almost bores at times but not quite. Because I’ve never really seen or felt the Beatles this “unguarded”, this “just being themselves”, or smoking this much. I’ve never felt this much access to their inner vibe or sanctum, if you will.
From John Anderson’s Wall Street Journal review:
Tapped out in stages through the day…
Anderson is correct in calling GetBack many things (including occasionally tedious) rolled into one. 60hours of footage boiled down to 468 minutes (nearly eight hours) — a chopped English salad of this and that song or conversation or moodjag, pieces of fun and improv and shaggy affectionate humor and experimentation, and so much smoking you’ll feel cancer seeping into your lungs. (There’s actually a warning about the smoking at the beginning of each episode.)
It’s never not interesting, and you gradually begin to pick up on things implied and unsaid.
Episode #1 covers thefirstsevendays, and ends on 1.10.69. Most of it consists of casual, enjoyable playing of new and old tunes. The best musical performance by far is of an old standard — Chuck Berry’s “Rock & Roll Music”.
A fair amount of “Abbey Road” numbers are played in rough form.
The 16mm image quality is very good considering. The cropped HD scanning (16 x 9 aspect ratio) has a high-grade clarity. No noticeable grain to speak of.
It’s fascinating when cameras are focused on a verbal discussion while Paul McCartney’s first stabs at “Let It Be” are heard in the background.
Nobody except Linda Eastman (who drops by a couple of times) says a word to Yoko “black hole” Ono, andwhocouldblamethem?
George Harrison’s frustration with McCartney’s ego & dominant band-leading (which was conveyed in Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s original half-century-old doc) is not especially readable here. George’s temporary departure was reportedly preceded by a big lunch-hour blowup between himself and the reportedly heroin-sedated John, but this happens off–camera.
There’s a fascinating discussion between Paul and others about how John and Yoko ‘s obsessive relationship prevented John and Paul from seeing each other and thereby composing together, and how Yoko’s constant presence led to a blocking of the old collaborative hormones.
There’s a SERIOUSLY MESMERIZING passage near the beginning of episode #2 in which John and Paul retire to the lunch room to privately discuss George having “quit” the band, but Hogg and his team have covertly planted a mike in a flower pot and so we hear everyline, everyword. And Jackson prints out the dialogue as it happens.
Once the Harrison-quitting episode is resolved, what little narrative tension the doc had is out the window.
12:30pmupdate: Most of episode #2 (which runs 173minutes) happens inside the newly created basement recording studio at Apple headquarters on Saville Row. This is where they record the “Get Back” album — not the worst Beatles album (that would be “Magical Mystery Tour”) but the second worst.
Seriously: Episode #2 is less interesting, a bit flabbier than episode #1. Do I need to watch the whole thing? Can I just jump to episode #3?
This will sound petty, of course, but somewhere in the middle of episode #2 (i.e., Saville Row recording studio) and for a couple of days, George Harrison begins wearing a pair of black high-tops with thick white laces. And they really look awful — about as far away from HE’sItaliansuedelace–upaesthetic as you can get. Absurd as it may sound, those high-tops brought me down.
2:20pmupdate: Episode #2 (173mins.) has finally ended. Episode #3 (138mins.) has begun. It’s been a long and winding road since I began watching this bear yesterday afternoon. With all due respect, I’m starting to feel alittleJohn, Paul, GeorgeandRingo–edout.
3:45pmupdate: The Saville Row roof concert is good. A little short (what is it, seven or eight songs?) but a crescendo of sorts. Observed by maybe 100 or so onlookers on nearby rooftops and whatnot. The delighted fans down below can’t see a thing. Two young policemen knock on the Apple door with noise complaints from older people, and insisting that the volume levels are too loud. Mal Evans takes them up on the roof. Their mindsets are so banal. ‘Twas ever thus.
I liked Jackson’s decision to use a horizontal split-screen presentation during the concert…three screens, two screens, occasional singles.
David Poland has calledTheBeatles: GetBack “the greatest art process documentary I have ever experienced.” I think it’s the greatest art process film since Curtis Hanson’s 8Mile.
Altogether a historic achievement. I’m not sure how truly great or (if you’re reading Poland) Shoah-level it might be, but it’s one marathon-sized music epic that you probably need to submit to.
Peter Jackson says his greatest fear making The Beatles doc #GetBack was finding out one or more of them were “primadonnas or assholes.”
They were not. “They are good guys… It sounds so simplistic. But I’m so happy that the four Beatles turned out to be good guys. Nice guys.” pic.twitter.com/MgixYe46ds
Why not just buy the damn thing, watch it and sort out the issues as I go along? Because I’m torn about it.
On one hand Ragtime, mainly set in the New York City area between 1905 and 1910, is a generally respected effort. Plus it seems all the more noteworthy now considering that a film of this type (released in the fall of ’81) would never be made for theatrical today.
Nobody has ever called it great or mindblowing, but some admire the devotional labor-of-love thing — the wonderful yesteryear detail, the ambitious scope, the old Model-T cars and horse-drawn wagons, the period-perfect clothing.
Plus a fair amount of work went into making Ragtime look as good as it possibly can. Plus the package includes a “directors cut workprint” that runs 174 minutes — 19 minutes longer than the original 1981 theatrical release version (i.e., 155 minutes). For me this is the biggest attraction.
Plus it offers some deleted and extended scenes. Plus a presumably engaging discussion between screenwriter Michael Weller and the esteemed screenwriter and man-about-town Larry Karaszewski, who worked with Forman on The People vs. Larry Flint. So it sounds like a decent package.
But on the other hand I know that Ragtime is an underwhelming, at times mildly irritating film. It certainly seemed that way when I caught a press screening sometime in the early fall of ’81, inside the Gulf & Western building on Columbus Circle. And no, I haven’t seen it since. I felt that as engrossing as some portions were, it didn’t feel right. It felt spotty. And it certainly didn’t catch the sweep, texture and wonderful authenticity of E.L. Doctorow’s 1975 book, the reading of which I adored.
It was great to see the 80-year-old James Cagney back in action, but I really didn’t care for some of the casting choices (especially Elizabeth McGovern as Evelyn Nesbit and the way-too-young Robert Joy as Harry K. Thaw).
And I never understood why so much attention was paid to the tragedy of CoalhouseWalker (Howard Rollins, Jr.), whose racially-provoked standoff was just one of many sagas that Doctorow passed along. Ragtime is so intently focused on this one character and his injured sense of honor that it could have been titled Ragtime: The Saga of Coalhouse Walker.
I realize that in accepting the challenge of compressing Doctorow’s fascinating cultural tapestry into a two and a-half-hour film, the efforts of Forman, Weller and the uncredited Bo Goldman were all but doomed from the start. In a perfect world Ragtime would have been produced as an eight- or ten-hour miniseries. Then it might have had a chance.
Two days ago Tatiana and I saw Joachim Trier‘s The Worst Person in The World (Neon). We were both deeply impressed and moved by this acclaimed Norwegian relationship drama, which is sure to be among the top contenders for Best Int’l Feature Oscar. Don’t forget that the lead performance by Renate Reinsve won the Best Actress trophy at the close of last July’s Cannes Film Festival.
The film stirred something strong and extra in Tatiana, and so she decided to bang out some thoughts. Note: She refers to her ex-husband Alexey in the first section. Here’s the essay:
I was very affected by The Worst Person in The World for an unsurprising reason. In some ways the lead character, Julie (Renate Reinsve), reminded me of myself when I was in my 20s.
1. Maternal instinct
Julie: Almost 30 but she doesn’t want children, confessing to her boyfriend Aksel that she has no maternal instinct.
Me: I had friends that at the age of 17 or 18 years old who were obsessed with having babies and their own families. It took me a long time for the maternal instinct to manifest within.
I got pregnant at 24, and I know the exact date and place — 10.28.98 in the heart of Nizhny Novgorod, right across from the Linguistic University, where my son is studying right now. I was pregnant but at the same time wondering why I wasn’t feeling the emotions that I thought future mothers should have. I told myself that these urges would gradually come to me.
Like Julie, I was not ready to be a mother. I was actually afraid of being a bad mother in life. I compared myself with my mom who sacrificed a lot because of us. [Tatiana has an older sister and a brother.] What made me happy with my pregnancy was that Alexey, my ex-husband, would be an excellent father. He had this inside. I was telling myself: well, I will not be an excellent mom, but Alexey will be a great dad. And he has excellent genes. And is very smart.
Women choose fathers for our children. On a subconscious level. The final decision is always on us.
Gleb was born on 7.28.99. I was full of joy, of course, but on some level I couldn’t quite accept that the baby was my son and I was his mother. The night Gleb was born, my one-year-older sister Svetlana came to stay and help with the baby for three months. She had a four year old son and knew all about baby care. When Gleb was one month old, we hired an amazing nanny whose name was also Tatiana. Plus we had a cleaning person.
Every morning I left at 8:15 am for my classes at the university, and then returned home around 3-4 pm. I was a very lucky mom, because Gleb was the sweetest baby in the world. He fell asleep around 9 or 10 pm and usually slept until 7 am. I don’t remember sleepless exhausting nights. And as I mentioned, I didn’t have to do all the routine work around the house.
The maternal instinct finally happened when Gleb was around one year old. And that was exactly the feeling I was waiting for.
2. Relations, Sex and Real Love
Julie: Being in a serious relations with Aksel, one night Julie crashes a party, meets a barista guy (Eivind), experiences a strong sexual and emotional attraction. Later she confesses to Aksel that she wants to quit their relationship, explaining that he dominates her in a certain way and she doesn’t feel happy. She leaves him for a new page of her life. With Eivind.
She says that she feels herself at peace with Eivind. Later, though, we can feel that they are not really a spiritual or intellectual match. Julia complains that Eivind will be “happy with working as a coffee barista when he hits his 50s, and never reading books”, and that Julie “wants more”. It’s obvious that she misses intelligent conversations with Aksel. When the physical passion fades away, many things in a partner become obvious. Passion always blocks our perception.
Of all the Facebook-software-generated birthday greetings that came in today, I was especially moved by one from Dan Richter, who played "Moonwatcher" in 2001 A Space Odyssey.
Login with Patreon to view this post
After serving a 20-year term in Spandau Prison for exploiting slave labor during World War II, the urbane and well-spoken Albert Speer — Nazi armaments minister from ’42 through’45, grand architect and Adolf Hitler confidante — published two well-written, self-serving books about his Nazi experience.
“Inside the Third Reich” (’69) was the most widely read and influential as far as Speer’s reputation was concerned. He presented himself as a basically decent and civilized family man who made a deal with the devil and was therefore “inescapably contaminated morally” for his complicity with the Nazi regime…forever stained and doomed to carry a searing sense of guilt for the rest of his life. “”
Out of these two books Speer became known not as “the good Nazi,” as many have called him, but the “not quite as bad as the other Nazi fanatics” guy with at least some sense of moral self-awareness and regret…a man who hadn’t denied his guilt and had served his prison sentence, and was looking to somehow atone in the years he had left. Speer died at age 76 in 1981.
Speer Goes to Hollywood director Vanessa Lapa, producer Tomar Eliav — Thursday, 11.4, 1:40 pm.
Vanessa Lapa‘s Speer Goes to Hollywood (opening today) is a 97-minute argument that Speer wasn’t the urbane smoothie he portrayed himself as, and that he was aware of the extermination of the Jews, and that he was just as much of a Nazi shit as Himmler or Geobbels or Bormann or any of the others.
It is HE’s belief that Speer was definitely an ambitious, anti-Semitic, cold-hearted prick who engaged in a Faustian bargain for his own professional benefit. But it is also HE’s view that his saga is not anomalous, and that many seemingly or ostensibly civilized people have supported evil policies and homicidal regimes throughout history.
The Brazilian senate recently endorsed a report that accused president Jair Bolsonaro of the Covid-related murder of tens of thousands of Brazilians due to neglect, incompetence and anti-scientific denialism. How many tens of thousands of Americans needlessly died as a direct result of Donald Trump‘s similar response to Covid-19, and who would argue that Dr. Deborah Birx wasn’t at least partly complicit in these deaths? Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger knew that the Vietnam War was unwinnable, but they kept it going for three or four years after the Nixon administration took power in January ’69 and in so doing caused the needless deaths of tens of thousands of Vietnamese. 1.7 million people were murdered in the Cambodian killing fields — were the Khmer Rouge cadres who saw to these deaths born killers, or were they just loyalists who did what was expected? How many hundreds of thousands died in China’s Great Cultural Revolution? 17,000 were killed during the French terror of the 1790s. How many hundreds or thousands of present-day careers have been destroyed by woke terrorists?
Throughout history ambitious cutthroat types have done almost anything to get ahead or serve their superiors, and they’ve never given a damn how many innocent lives were sacrificed in the bargain.
“They were the candy store years because there were drugs, stardom, the pill. I met a couple of girls in bed more than once, and I had sex in public places, like Studio 54.” — Dustin Hoffman, quoted in a Studio 54 piece on colorized.com.
The original Schrager-Rubell version of Studio 54 opened on 4.26.77 and closed on 2.3.80. Hoffman turned 40 on 8.8.77.
From HE review of Matt Tyrnauer‘s Studio 54 (“The Way It Was“), posted on 1.22.18: “Bob Calacello or somebody mentions how Studio 54 happened in a glorious period in American culture that was post-birth control and pre-AIDS. The film explains how liberal sexual attitudes were particularly celebrated by urban gay culture, which was just starting to sample freedoms that today are more or less taken for granted. Guys couldn’t hold hands on the street but they certainly could once they got inside Studio 54.
“But one thing you can’t say in today’s climate (and which Tyrnauer’s film doesn’t even mention in passing) is that the ’70s were also agloriousnookieeraforheterosexualguys. It was probably the most impulsive, heavily sensual, Caligula-like period (especially with the liberal use of quaaludes) to happen in straight-person circles since…you tell me. The days of Imperial Rome?
“This kind of thing is now a verboten topic, of course, with the 2018 narrative mainly being about how guys need to forget ‘impulsive’ and turn it down and be extra super careful in approaching women in any context. But things were quite different back in the JimmyCarterera. I’m not expressing any particular nostalgia for those days, but the new Calvinism of 2018 couldn’t be farther away from what the social-sexual norms were 40 years ago. Just saying.”
8:05 pm update: With Alec Baldwin now confirmed as the accidental prop-gun shooter in the death of Rust dp Halyna Hutchins, people need to calm down and take a couple of steps back. Baldwin’s reputation as an occasional hothead shouldn’t lead to speculation that what happened was anything other than a tragic accident.
The guilty party, if you will, is the person responsible for loading the prop weapon. Who the hell loads a prop pistol with the potential to shoot any sort of projectile? Talk about a totally crazy magic-bullet situation. One shot apparently went into Rust director-writer Joel Souza, 48, and then exited and hit poor Hutchins, who died soon after. Or vice versa. Just don’t start speculating that this horrible accident had anything to do with anyone’s temperament.
The New York Post‘s Kenneth Garger is reporting that Baldwin, the film’s star and producer, was the accidental shooter in the incident. Variety is reporting the same. Everyone is.
Quote: “Alec Baldwin fatally shot a woman and injured a man when a prop gun misfired at the New Mexico movie set of the film Rust, authorities said.”
Condolences to Hutchins’ family, friends, professional colleagues. Such a terrible tragedy. Nobody knows anything, but it certainly sounds like a case of cavalier or reckless disregard of safety measures.
Pic is a period western costarring Baldwin, Frances Fisher and Brady Noon under director-writer Joel Souza.
TMZ: “We’re told Alec was filming the scene when someone pulled the prop gun’s trigger. It’s unclear if the person who loaded the gun mistakenly placed bullets inside, or if something was lodged in the barrel that hit the director as well as the director of photography.
Souza, TMZ reports, was “hit in the clavicle.” No specifics on Hutchins’ wound, except that it was fatal.
A live bullet or a harmful projectile of some kind was lodged in the barrel of a prop gun? How could that possibly happen? Somebody fucked up hugely.
Let’s suppose that Hollywood Elsewhere manages to create, say, 500 glossy white matchbooks with the famous R-O-T monogram…exact duplicates of Cary Grant’s NorthbyNorthwest matchbook. And better yet, with a handwritten note inside each one that says “they’re on to you — I’m in your room.” If I did this, how much could I charge? $7.50 plus postage? $10?
I’m figuring once it gets around that the Academy Museum is thinking about posthumouslyindicting Alfred Hitchcock, Ernest Lehman and Cary Grant for attempting a kind of culturalgenocide against the Lakota nation, anti-wokesters will want to signal their pro-NorthbyNorthwest sympathies by owning a few R-O-T matchbooks. An Us-vs.-Them, band-of-brothers thing.
Extra-perverseidea: Perhaps I could persuade the museum to sell them in their gift store?