A month ago I said that if — I say “if” — Bradley Cooper‘s Is This Thing On? is a docudrama origin story, 55 year-old Will Arnett is 20 years too old to play stand-up comic John Bishop, who broke into the biz in 2000 at age 34. I don’t see how this is even a little bit disputable
Serene Expression Conveys All
This woman’s alpha-vibe smile expresses so much about how Venice visitors feel about being here. I went up to this 40ish blonde on the vaporetto and confessed (her husband standing right there and listening in) that I had shot video of her and that I was moved by her look of serenity. She said “thanks” and offered no protest about being captured, so to speak. I’m presuming that the HE community will take offense all the same and attempt to browbeat me for another video violation, and maybe even slap the woman around for going along with it.
Unless They Jettison Woke Lunacy, Dems Are All But Finished
Will hardcore progressives smell the coffee? Are they even capable of doing so?
Unless they abandon all the wokey crap and stop playing racial-identity politics (i.e., never permitting another Lily Gladstone-styled Best Actress identity campaign) and renounce gender affirming care for minors and drag shows in elementary schools and generally embrace the sensibly moderate theology of Rahm Emanuel and, yes, even J.K. Rowling, they’re finished for the time being.
They won’t budge, of course. In their minds they’re doing God’s work by pushing for transformational social change, and are determined to die on this hill, even if it means taking a once proud and effective political brand down to Davy Jones’ locker.
But unless they ditch all this shit, they’re effing toast.
“I’m Nothing, But I’d Like To Be Something”
It seems odd, to say the least, that the 82nd Venice International Film Festival is screening The Delicate Delinquent, a decent but unexceptional Jerry Lewis dramedy that opened in June ’57.
All I can figure is that Delinquent has recently been restored due to having been shot in VistaVision (I adore the clarity of black-and-white films in this process, The Desperate Hours and Fear Strikes Out being two examples) and Venice is offering a showcase out of respect or allegiance.
The Delicate Deliquent was Lewis’s first feature after the breakup of Martin & Lewis, and I guess the idea was to show the industry that he had a serious side and could play a normal, ground-level guy without going “hey laaaaady!”
It’s a passable shoulder-shrugger about an odd, not-that-young janitor named Sidney L. Pythias…named after the ancient Greek figure of legend? The film, directed and cowritten by Don McGuire (directed Johnny Concho, co-wrote Bad Day at Black Rock and Tootsie), doesn’t present Sidney as a j.d. out of Rebel Without a Cause or West Side Story. He’s basically just an aimless adolescent (Lewis was 30 when it was filmed in ’56) who lives in a cellar apartment.
The story is about Sidney being guided into a law-enforcement career by Darren McGavin‘s Mike Damon, a fair-minded cop who takes an interest.
Odyssey of Vaporetto Line 20
…and its ghost-like, possibly non-existent cousin called the MC…yeah.
Since arriving at HE’s Venice pad early Monday evening, I’ve been trying to crack the elusive, almost DaVinci Code-ish, secret-society schedule of the vaporetto that travels from San Zaccaria to the Lido Casino, which is where the Venice Film Festival unfolds.
We’re basically talking about a mystery vaporetto or vaporettos, one called Line 20 (apparently the most reliable) and another called MC (Mostra Cinema) and, at the same time, Line 2. But their existence is mostly in the realm of rumor and hearsay.
Could I go so far as to call these vaporetto lines mythical? Is their legend based on the stuff that dreams are made of? You tell me.
Where to board Line 20 at the San Zaccaria stop, as there are THREE yellow-painted stations for embarking and disembarking at this location? Beats me. People “say” stuff but nobody knows nuthin’. You can ask and search and poke around and explore all you want, but it just gets away from you.
Firstshowing.net’s Alex Billington, a valuable ally and a good hombre, says “dock B” is the way to go. And maybe he’s right.
But last night there were NO signs at ANY of the San Zaccaria stops that said ANYTHING about Line 20 or Line MC.
Info is scant because the MC and 20 lines are temporary or seasonal, and it’s all smoke and haze and shadows. Nothing is clear.
Have demons (hooved beasts with pointy tails and horns on their heads) posted information about these two lines with a deliberate intention of sewing pique and confusion?
Why do I feel, vaporetto-wise, like I’ve been took, hoodwinked, led astray, taken to the cleaners, boondoggled, flim-flammed, hog-tied, sold a bill of goods, led down the garden path, and had a tin can tied to my tail?
Filings From The “China Desk”
From the late ‘80s to mid ‘90s, certain elite critics (the late David Chute leading the pack) sold the legend or more precisely the promotional hype about the florid, anti-realistic, furiously kinetic brand of John Woo-stamped action cinema. Chute and others filing from the proverbial “China desk.” Everyone fell for it, and I’m not saying it wasn’t a signature genre or a real-deal “thing” (it obviously was), but thank God that era is over and done with.
Because to me it was always more about the “sell” than the actual cinematic reality, which is to say the flaunting of brazen, high-style cartoonish-ness. Action-driven (or more precisely action-opera driven and certainly fighting the principles of physics tooth and nail) as opposed to plot- or character-driven.
New York / Vulture‘s Bilge Elbiri is celebrating all the same. “Absurd, grotesque, sublime”, etc.
South Sea Solitude
Ron Howard‘s Eden (Vertical, 8.22) is a total flop, of course. Nobody wants to hang with a few headstrong German contrarians living hand-to-mouth on a remote island in the 1930s. I would have seen it nonetheless, but with all the packing and preparation I couldn’t find the time.
There’s something generally dull and flatliney about solitary survival films set on sandy remote islands…Randall Kleiser‘s The Blue Lagoon, the last third of Ruben Ostlund‘s Triangle of Sadness, Ivan Reitman‘s Six Days Seven Nights, Peter Weir‘s The Mosquito Coast, Stuart Heisler‘s Island of Desire, Michael Powell‘s Age of Consent…stuck there, no escaping, later.
In my book only three such films have “worked” — Robert Zemeckis‘s Cast Away (’00), Ken Annakin‘s Swiss Family Robinson (1960 Disney film) and Nicolas Roeg‘s Castaway (’86).
Agreed, Castaway is a tiny bit dull for a lack of story tension, but I was half-taken with…okay, with Amanda Donohoe‘s nudity. A Cannon release, I wrote the press kit for it. My phone interview with Oliver Reed didn’t go well — I tried not to rub him the wrong way but I said something about his character being a bit of a lazy sod. Things went downhill from there on.
Performed Without Spark
Posted on 7.24.23: “If nothing else, Oppenheimer makes it unmistakably clear that Christopher Nolan should never, ever film a sex scene again. Or should never again, at the very least, shoot one with Cillian Murphy and Florence Pugh. Within the confines of Nolan World, it’s all but impossible to believe that Oppie actually laid pipe.”
Animal Behavior
Originally posted on 7.9.08: Nothing destroys the allure of a presumably hot and happening restaurant more than common or crude behavior from the customers.
This lesson was impressed upon me very strongly about 25 years ago at an Italian restaurant on upper Columbus Avenue, not too far from the Museum of Natural History. It had just opened and been written about in a couple of publications, so I popped in one night for a quick one and to look at the menu. I eventually spoke to a waiter about this and that, and he pointed out that the owner was celebrating the opening of the place with a large group of friends and family. I looked over and there they were — 15 or so at a big table, raising glasses and being way too loud. They looked like New Jersey Italians.
I went downstairs to the bathroom, and as I was washing my hands one of the owner’s friends or family members — a big tall guy with a moustache — came in and went straight for the urinal and loudly belched, loudly farted and took a leak at precisely the same instant. Boom-boom-bam! And then he went “aaahhhh!” like a grizzly bear having an orgasm. And then he snorted.
Now, I’m as human as the next guy and so I try not to look down my nose at people, but this guy, I decided then and there, was a total animal. And I said to myself, if the owner has beasts in his family or among his friends, then he too must be a belching and farting peon on some level, and this will come out in different ways in the running of his business, and sooner or later the restaurant will close. Probably sooner. I decided all this less than 30 seconds after the show in the bathroom.
Four to six months later, the place had indeed closed. I’m not making this up.
Who Remembers Alfred Hitchcock’s Shameful Dishonor?
I hate saying this because it makes me sound a bit MAGA instead of the sensible left-centrist that I am, but I sorta kinda get the Trump administration being against all of those “white people bad” installations at the Smithsonian and other significant cultural museums.
I’m not suggesting that anyone should accept this whitehouse.gov page as gospel, but it highlights a rundown of various “white people are evil and need to be scolded if not diminished” installations at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the National Portrait Gallery and so on.
I kinda get all this because four years ago I was repelled by the Academy Museum’s unmistakable denigration of Alfred Hitchcock and North by Northwest in a Mount Rushmore exhibit that i saw in 2021. It was driven by the same basic woke mentality that is apparently manifesting in other museums today.
“Apology House“, posted on 10.9.21: The Academy Museum is a huge, four-story, super-expensive apology installation.
In room after room and in display after display, the museum says the following: “The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is very, very sorry that white men ran the film industry for 100 years straight, and there are doubtless too many white men running things now, but at least things are changing now for the better — women, Black artists, Asian-Americans, Native Americans and other POCs are making significant inroads, and we the Academy are proudly standing beside them and doing what we can to give them more power and say-so.
“So again, please understand our profound sorrow about how Hollywood’s film industry was run between 1915 and 2015, but the Academy is helping to make things right. Onward, progressive soldiers!”
I was especially entertained by two apology statements that are mounted on walls next to the “Backdrop An Invisible Art” exhibit. It partially salutes the huge Mount Rushmore painting used in Alfred Hitchcock‘s North by Northwest (’59) but mostly condemns it, or at least condemns the U.S. government for betraying the Lakota by allowing Mount Rushmore to be carved into a mountain in virgin Lakota territory, and by association condemns North by Northwest.
You’re given the distinct idea that North by Northwest is kind of an evil film, and that it might be better if Hitchcock, Ernest Lehman, Cary Grant and others involved were to be cancelled posthumously.
Hitchcock’s terrible failure to respect the Lakota Sioux’s sacred Paha Sapa (Black Hills) in South Dakota…this callous faux pas dogs his reputation to this very day. Because Hitch callously and obliviously staged the thrilling climax of North by Northwest atop the shamefully chiselled and misappropriated Mount Rushmore. Never forget that the British-born Alfred Hitchcock couldn’t have cared less. Sic semper auteurists!