Nutso-Adjacent Parental Spillage
November 17, 2024
When I Heard Conan O'Brien Would Be Hosting The Oscars
November 17, 2024
Bad Grandpa
November 16, 2024
Woman Journalist: “To what extent are movies…[to that extent can] cinema make it possible that a woman like Kamala Harris could become President of the United States.”
Weaver: “I love that question. Because we’re all so excited about Kamala…to think for one moment that my work would have anything to do with her rise makes me very happy actually…it’s true that so many women come and thank me [choking up]….sorry. Give me my vodka. It’s been difficult since 2016.”
“I’m leaning more right now towards writing for theater…in a comedy play, the audience is a character in the room, and [when] you say this, the audience laughs, the actors kind of wait for a moment until the laugh dies down, then they get to pick up the pace and it’s a rhythm…it’s almost like the audience is almost like a live animal in the room.” — Quentin Tarantino to Bill Maher during 8.25 Club Random chat.
This immediately reminded me of a 20-minute Four Seasons sit-down I did with Tarantino nine years ago, and particularly an idea I shared about his writing an Iceman Cometh-like play that would focus on Kurt Russell‘s “Stuntman Mike” character from Death Proof.
Airport lounges are not inherently interesting places in which to hang. They’re imbued, however, with feelings of anticipation, expectation.
Flight #1 (LGA to Dallas/Ft. Worth) leaves at 7:35 am. Flight #2 (Dallas to Albuquerque) leaves at 1:45 pm. Then I’ll drive from Albuquerque to Telluride (290 miles, 5 and 1/2 hours) — a great, eye-filling journey.
“I’ve been used, screwed, abused, sued, subdued and tatto’ed.”
TimBurton’s BeetlejuiceBeetlejuice (Warner Bros., 9.6) not only screens tomorrow in Venice but opens domestically a bit more than a week hence. Where’s the buzz? I’m not feeling it. Nobody wants to sit through a cash-grab experience. I adore the 1988 original. Please don’t mess this up.
Variety‘s Alex Hitman is reporting that Cooper Hoffman (Saturday Night, Licorice Pizza) will play a would-be “sexual muse” to an artist played by Olivia Wilde in Gregg Araki‘s I Want Your Sex.
Written by Araki and Karley Sciortino, pic is described as a “provocative thriller” that “blithely explores desire, domination and fantasy.”
I’m sorry but nobody wants to see a film in which Cooper (son of “Philly” Hoffman**) performs sexually in any way, shape or form. Nobody wants to see any freckly-faced, doughy-bod, tiny-eyed ginger guy with his shirt or, God forbid, his pants off. He’s just not sexy or good-looking enough….sorry.
There’s a reason why John Wayne, Paul Newman, Clark Gable, Gary Cooper and Errol Flynn used to get the girl but Walter Brennan, Andy Devine, Edgar Buchanan, Donald Meek, Ernest Borgnine and Rupert Grint didn’t.
In fact Paddy Chayefsky wrote a teleplay (and then a movie version of the same script) about a homely Brooklyn butcher (a guy roughly in Cooper Hoffman’s league) who had such bad luck with girls that we was on the verge of giving up. It was sad but 1955 audiences understood his predicament because the actor who played the butcher was Ernest Borgnine.
** I’ll allow that the late, great Phillip Seymour Hoffman was briefly shown slamming ham with Marisa Tomei in Sidney Lumet‘s Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead, but that was a very fast and quick one-off.
After watching Lee last night, I can at least say that I’m much more familiar with the life and times of Lee Miller, and for that I’m grateful. I apologize for my previous ignorance.
For Lee — shot in late ’22, premiered in Toronto 12 months ago, opening on 9.13.24 — is a reasonably sturdy, realistic and believable portrait of a gutsy feminist firebrand who went for the gusto, and under fire at that.
Born in ’07, Miller died 37 years at age 70.
The Lee screenplay was written by Liz Hannah, John Collee and Marion Hume, and is adapted from Antony Penrose‘s “The Lives of Lee Miller” (’85).
Winslet produced and even personally coughed up for two weeks of expenses during filming.
A 1920s fashion model turned Parisian expat, Man Ray-influenced photographer and renowned WWII Vogue photojournalist (London Blitz, 1944 Paris liberation, horrors of Buchenwald and Dachau), Miller was in her late 30s when her war experiences began. Winslet was in her late 40s when filming started, but she and the 1940s-era Miller clearly resemble each other. Past their foxy prime (weathered, not slender) but with good bones and take-no-shit demeanors.
The film tells us that in real life Miller never rolled over for anyone — bristling with moxie, defiance, bravery. Sipped from a metal flask, smoked like a chimney.
Winslet and Alexander Sjarsgard, who plays her lover Roland Penrose, are only a year apart in age, although he’s in better shape.
Winslet has told journalists that she’s accepting of the fact that she’s become something of a big girl (not fat but fleshy, ample), but she’s also made sure that Lee viewers will understand that her bodacious ta-tas are just as big and bountiful as ever. Lee features three boob-flashing scenes, and one in particular definitely struck me as erotic — a moment when Penrose smears green body paint all over her upper torso.
Lee Miller was tough and gutsy and liked to fuck and smoke and hang out with the swells, and she took no shit or derision from sexist males. She was tough, scrappy, blunt.
Her experiences in war-torn France are tonally grim and draining but enveloping all the same. Kuras makes certain that we understand that war is hell, horror, slaughter. Stinking dead bodies on freight cars…good God. There’s no mistaking that Lee, in a very primal way, was affected by all this carnage. You can feel it in her sad, shaken, traumatized eyes.
I’m not a fan of Winslet’s crude, twangy American accent, but it doesn’t get in the way. Lee is a militantly feminist film. It’s basically saying that many (most?) men back then were smug, overbearing, entitled dicks. Hell, they still are! Men of the world, let’s all get together on a worldwide Zoom call and slit our throats!
Lee boasts a first-rate supporting cast — Marion Cotillard, Andrea Riseborough, Skarsgard, Andy Samberg, Noémie Merlant, Josh O’Connor.
“Not everyone can believe this. Surely they can see what he is.” — from a Lee scene in which Winslet is watching newsreel footage of Adolf Hitler but is also, obviously, referring to Donald Trump.
…of a Beatles documentary ever written can be found on the 2024 Venice Film festival website. A boilerplate description of Andre Ujica‘s TWST: Things We Said Today calls it “a time capsule of New York City between August 13-15, 1965, framed by the Beatles’ arrival in the city and their first concert at Shea Stadium.” But read this…it’s really good:
I hit the smallish bathroom after it ended. Two urinals and a toilet stall with six or seven guys lined up. I should have bailed right then and there, but I was looking for a little sit-down action and wasn’t sure of my alternate options.
A guy left the stall and a 30something black dude took ownership and, like, didn’t come out. Three, four minutes. Five minutes. Six. Could he be undergoing self-administered surgery? Filling out a mortgage application?
Then, still on the pot, he began talking to his girlfriend on his cell, flirting with her, settling in. “How ya doin’? Movie’s over…yeah. You wanna eat somethin’?,” etc.
If I had any balls I would have knocked on the stall door and, just like TomCruise in Collateral, said, “Yo, homey!” I didn’t, of course. I just stood and waited like a sap, listening to this jerkoff go on and on. The idea of showing consideration to others simply hadn’t occurred to him.
Around the seven- or eight-minute mark I gave up and went outside and used the facilities at a nearby Barnes and Noble.
It’s simply a matter of culture and manners. Let’s face it — some people are low-lifes.
I’ll be attending an invitational screening of George Clooney‘s The Ides of March at the Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday. If I happen to hit the bathroom after it ends I can absolutely guarantee that nobody will sit in a toilet stall for several minutes, ignoring the fact that several others are waiting, while chit-chatting with a girl. I’ll put $100 on this right now. I’ll bet anything.
And yet Vanessa Redgravedidn’t play the lead role or main protagonist — Jane Fonda (as playwright Lillian Hellman) fulfilled that task, and was Oscar-nominated for Best Actress. Fonda wound up winning a BAFTA and a Golden Globe, but not an Oscar.
For her titular performance as Julia, an anti-Nazi activist (and later martyr) who was Hellman’s close friend and who experiences traumatic surgery at the hands of the Nazis, Vanessa Redgrave was campaigned by 20th Century Fox for Best Supporting Actress, and she won.
By the same token, Zoe Saldana plays the lead role in Jacques Audiard‘s Emilia Perez — a frustrated Mexico City attorney, Rita Moro Castro, who’s persuaded to assist a Mexican cartel leader, Juan “Manitas” Del Monte, as he undergoes sex reassignment surgery, partly to evade the authorities and partly to become “Emilia Perez”.
Real-life trans person Karla Sofia Gascon plays the cartel leader and Perez, but it’s not a lead role — it’s a strong supporting thing as she’s clearly not the main protagonist plus Gascon doesn’t have a huge amount of face time in Audiard’s film, certainly not compared to Saldana.
The identity fanatics (i.e., the same folks who insisted that Killers or the Flower Moon‘s Lily Gladstone was a deserving recipient of a Best Actress Oscar) will be playing the same tune on behalf of Gascon.
She won’t win, of course, but Netflix will get to run a big identity campaign on behalf of Gascon ane the trans community, and that’s what they mostly care about.
Which of HE’s top 21 films released in 1999 have I re-watched more than a couple of times? Just four — Election, TheLimey, TheInsider and Malkovich. I re-watched Lola in an AMC plex a couple of months ago…loved it. I’ve actually re-watched AmericanBeauty three times, come to think. I’ve re-watched Al Pacino’s “ inches” speech from AnyGivenSunday 17 or 18 times.
