Offering A Pass To Enlightened, Western, White-Guy Civilization

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“Why is it that every other culture gets a pass but the West is exclusively the sum of the worst things it’s ever done? You think only white people ever colonized? Historians estimate that the very non-Western Mr. Genghis Khan killed 40 million people, and that was in the 13th Century. He singlehandedly may have reduced the world’s population by 11%.”

“Priscilla” — A Slow, Gloomy Arthouse Take on Horrors of Graceland Confinement

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I saw Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla last night, and it has a certain depressive, despairing, slow-paced, fade-to-black quality that some viewers might find…well, respectable. I understand why certain critics have approved. It’s austere. And anti-male, of course. Coppola has been drawing water from this well over and over (i.e., a beautiful, young, sensitive princess is trapped in an authoritarian, male-dominated world) — here she’s added a #MeToo “expose the bastards!” ingredient.

I didn’t hate it but Priscilla sure moves like a turtle, and the cinematography is too dimly lighted and funereal even. (That or the foot-lambert levels are way below SMPTE standards at the Westport AMC plex where I saw it.) And some of the whispered, all-but-inaudible dialogue is all but impossible. Subtitles!

All I know is that the longer the film went on, the more my pulse dropped.

As I was exiting the theatre I overheard a youngish, palefaced brunette tell her mom (same characteristics) that she “loved it.” As she stood in the lobby I told her I had also just seen Priscilla, and that I was wondering (without tipping my own hand) what in particular she had loved. “It’s just that it tells the story from her viewpoint!” she exclaimed. “The others (Elvis films, I assumed she meant) have all told it from his.”

You’re right, I said — it certainly has Priscilla’s back.

If you’ve read “Elvis and Me“, Priscilla Presley‘s 1987 tell-all, or are familiar with the main story points (Elvis’s refusal to have intercourse before marriage, his pattern of infidelity including affairs with Ann-Margret, Nancy Sinatra and many others, the drug use, his dictatorial nature and random violence, Priscilla’s affair with a martial-arts instructor named Mike Stone, Elvis’s raping Priscilla when he learned of the affair), it’s important to understand that Coppola’s film sidesteps or underplays this material and in some cases ignores it entirely. She was determined not to make a “this happened and then that happened” biopic. She wanted to suggest and hint but not be especially blunt about anything.

The result, frankly, is boredom, albeit a respectable form of it — the kind that many critics have approved of.

True Ceasar Salad Story

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Last night I ordered a modestly priced Caesar Salad at Orem’s Diner, but for some reason my appetite faded. So I brown-bagged it, brought it home, put it in the fridge. My plan this morning was to do a wash at the Wilton Laundromat and then hit the library or the River Road Starbucks for the usual arduous filing.

So I grabbed my loaded-down leather computer bag, my bright-red laundry bag, a plastic container of Tide and the clear plastic Ceasar Salad container, and carried it all to the the car. I put the Caesar on the car roof while loading the back and front seats. No hurry, nice and careful. I started the engine, backed the car out and headed south to the laundromat.

It wasn’t until this evening around 7 pm that I realized what had happened with the Ceasar. I’m figuring it held on for two or three minutes as I drove along the winding country roads, but once I hit the gas on Route 7 the wind blew it off and the plastic container with all that Romaine lettuce and those chicken chunks and cherry tomatoes splattered and scattered big-time…it couldn’t have been a pretty sight.

I’m imagining what the person driving behind me must have thought: “God, will ya look at that absent-minded asshole?…he probably doesn’t even know what’s happened…who’s going to pick this mess up?…what if some hungry deer tries to eat some of the lettuce and chicken and some guy driving and texting isn’t paying sufficient attention?”

“Mean Streets” Was A Bust

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Several years ago Entertainment Weekly critic Owen Gleiberman wrote that Martin Scorsese‘s “volcanic” Mean Streets — one of the greatest debut efforts of all time if you don’t count Who’s That Knocking On My Door? and Boxcar Bertha — “barely made pocket change back in 1973, [having] grossed all of $3 million.”

In fact, both IMDB Pro and thenumbers.com report that Mean Streets grossed $32,645 domestic (U.S. and Canada) and somewhere in the vicinity of $59,034 worldwide. The Numbers actually reports that the global take was $50,539.

“Priscilla” Apparently Exposes Elvis As Deeply Weird and Pervy

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Variety‘s Matt Donnelly is reporting that September ’22, the late Lisa Marie Presley sent a pair of scathing, straight-from-the-shoulder emails to directior-writer Sofia Coppola about the not-yet-shot Priscilla, which she’d read a script for.

“My father only comes across as a predator and manipulative,” Lisa Marie wrote. “As his daughter, I don’t read this and see any of my father in this character. I don’t read this and see my mother’s perspective of my father. I read this and see your shockingly vengeful and contemptuous perspective, and I don’t understand why.”

Presley told Coppola that she would speak out against the project and her mother, Priscilla Presley, whose semi-imprisoned existence under the thumb of Elvis Presley between ’59 and sometime in the late ’60s is the subject of the film.

I won’t be seeing Priscilla until tomorrow. Has anyone seen it, and what’s your take? Was Elvis really as malevolent and fucked up as the film allegedly maintains? Coppola’s film also depicts the king of rock ‘n’ roll as Paul Bunyan-sized.

Jordan Ruimy: “Sadly, Priscilla does make Elvis look like a real jerk. Elvis is portrayed as an arrogant womanizer; soft at one moment, turbulent hound dog the next.”

DeNiro’s 28 Unassailable Performances

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While writing my Glenn Howerton piece it occured to me that 24 Gold Derby handicppers members are predicting a Best Supporting Actor supporting nomination for Robert DeNiro‘s “King” Hale in Killers of the Flower Moon.

This is actually a hugely annoying performance and doesn’t begin to deserve an Oscar nomination…get outta here! As I said in the piece, Bobby D’s twangy accent and repetitive dialogue gave me a headache when I saw Martin Scorsese’s film for the second time.

This gave me the idea of listing the DeNiro performances (less than 30) that are 100% guns blazing, completely non-problematic and absolutely unimpeachable. Here they are…the extra-special perfs are in boldface…and I’m not cutting him any slack by mentioning pretty goods and okays…this list is strictly about stellar and super-stellar.

28 standouts over a 53-year period….eight solid goldies in the ’70s, eight in the ’80s, eight in the ’90s and four in the 21st Century — we all know that DeNiro has made a significant number of shit-level movies since 9/11.

Greetings (’68) and Hi, Mom! (’70)….DeNiro playing the same character (Jon Rubin)
Bang the Drum Slowly (’73)
Mean Streets (’73)
The Godfather Part II (’74)
Taxi Driver (’76)
1900 (’76)
The Deer Hunter (’78)
Raging Bull (’80)
True Confessions (’81)
The King of Comedy (’83)
Once Upon a Time in America (’84)
Falling in Love (’84)
Angel Heart (’87)
The Untouchables (’87)
Midnight Run (’88)
Goodfellas (’90)
Mad Dog and Glory (’93)
This Boy’s Life (’93)
A Bronx Tale (’93)
Heat (’95)
Jackie Brown (’98)
Ronin (’99)
Analyze This (’99)
Meet the Parents (’00)
Silver Linings Playbook (’12)
The Intern (’15)
The Irishman (’19…forget the flawed CG aging aspect…the performance itself is the stuff of legend)