Tony Curtis’s Redemption

by

Last night Jett told me he recently re-watched Some Like It Hot (having seen it many times), and it suddenly hit him that (a) Tony Curtis‘s Joe character is a truly odious womanizer and (b) he doesn’t like him very much, and that Joe’s ugliness colored Jett’s basic attitude about the film.

I found this a familiar and even vaguely amusing viewpoint as this is a typical Millennial thing (moral condemnation + faint notions of cancelling directed toward a self-absorbed prick who wouldn’t fit into today’s realm).

My response: “But that’s the point of the character. Joe is ‘a liar and a phony’, as he admits to Marilyn Monroe‘s Sugar at the very end, but he gradually develops empathy and a conscience after putting on a wig and falsies and wearing a dress and thereby realizing ‘how the other half lives.’

“Joe feels so badly about lying to Sugar (i.e., pretending to be a Shell Oil heir) and then breaking her heart when he and Jack Lemmon‘s Jerry are forced to go on the lam in order to avoid Spats Columbo and his gang that he gives her the only item of value between them — a diamond bracelet that Joe E. Brown‘s Osgood Fielding had given Lemmon’s ‘Daphne’ (and which Joe has technically stolen).

“This is part of his third-act redemption,” I went on. “This plus Joe’s admitting to Sugar that he’s the same kind of thoughtless cad she’s been emotionally bruised by so often.

“Whenever a flawed movie character lets his guard down and admits to a significant moral failing, he’s taken a slight but significant step toward becoming a better human being.”

Example: The last-minute emotional breakthrough experienced by Anthony Quinn’s Zampano in Federico Fellini’s La Strada. A terrible brute throughout the whole film but at the very last minute he realizes who and what he is. His weeping on the beach symbolizes a kind of redemption. Small but noteworthy.

Read more

Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

by

After 21 months of scintillating baby vibes within a passive, moody or euphoric, in-and-out dynamic, the suddenly much-more-verbal-and-assertive Sutton actually called me “papa” a few times yesterday and two or three times motioned me to sit down next to her (patting the seat to indicate where I should plant my butt) and reached out and took my hand and led me around several times.

Her moods are rather moody as she’s now in her “terrible two” phase and giving her mother attitude (it began several weeks ago), but from my humble perspective it’s quite a thing when your granddaughter suddenly addresses you by name and urges you to do this or notice that with three- or four-word sentences.

Hundreds of billions have been through this, but it was the first time for this particular horse.

Read more

Late To “Sound of Freedom” Smear Attempt

by

Tip of the hat to World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy for digging into the recent Sound of Freedom smear that involved a clumsy mischaracterizing of alleged child-kidnapper Fabian Marta, who (a) is not a financier of the film but merely one of the film’s 6,678 crowdfunders and (b) is involved with some kind of child-custody mishegoss that apparently that has zip to do with child trafficking.

Marta’s lawyer Scott Rosenblum to Deadline‘s Anthony D’Alessandro: “I don’t understand how they’re charging him with this…he has nothing to do with kidnapping anyone.”

I washed my hands of Sound of Freedom after that Bedminster Golf Club screening for Donald Trump, but a few slipshod media outlets (including Newsweek) jumped on the Marta story a day or two ago, seemingly energized by the idea of slandering the Angel Studios release because it’s a rightwing thing. This is not cool.

Smarter Than It Immediately Sounds

by

Titles can deceive. The Kill Room (Shouut!, 9.28) sounds primitive but the trailer indicates otherwise — it’s apparently a moderately sophisticated, smartly written dark comedy.

Directed by Groundlings and Funny or Die veteran Nicol Paone and written by Jonathan Jacobson, it’s about a hitman (Joe Manganiello) who accidentally becomes a sensation as a hip avant-garde painter.

Pic costars Uma Thurman, Samuel L. Jackson, Maya Hawke (who also stars as Flannery O’Connor in Wildcat, co-written and directed by dad Ethan Hawke), Dree Hemingway and Debi Mazar.

The Hell You Say

by

This morning HE commenter Dean Treadway wrote something curious in the thread for “Annoying Beefalo on Baltic Beach.” He wrote “you must have been a terrible bully in school.”

Au contraire — it was often the other way around. During my horrible gulag youth I was occasionally victimized by bullies, both in fraternal and official realms. I was a provocateur, true, but the social punishment measures were brutal, even fiendish.

“Hardly a bully,” I replied. “I frequently felt alone and isolated and picked on. Mainly starting in my teens. Not always but often among rancid, herd-instinct groups in junior high and senior high (i.e., mainly in toxic New Jersey, hardly at all in Fairfield County).

“I consequently withdrew to some extent. I felt much more attached to movies and TV shows than to real life, which struck me as characterized by tiresome duty and drudgery and regulated boredom with very little in the way of discovery and adventure or, as Jim Morrison put it, “true sailing”.

And yet I had a perverse streak from an early age, rarely adhering to the straight and narrow. An instinctive oddball contrarian thing. Perhaps on some level an anarchist instinct, but more simply a healthy anti- authoritarian urge.

The first long word I learned to spell was anti–disestablishmentarianism.

Example: My Cub Scout group was hand painting fake-leather folders for personal diaries — we were simply supposed to try our hand at stylized caligraphy with the word “DIARY”’ front and center plus our names and birthdates at the bottom. I wrote the word “DAIRY” because I found it amusing.

I’m still pushing back against the bullies, except now they’re mainly from the ranks of Millennials and Zoomers.

Annoying Beefalo on Baltic Beach

by

Last night I drove all the way to Pleasantville’s Jacob Burns Film Center (45 minutes) to see Christian Petzold‘s Afire. Then I had to drive back, of course — another 45 for a total travel experience of 90 minutes.

Afire really isn’t worth all that time and gasoline. Because it requires the viewer to spend the entire running time (103 minutes) with one of the emptiest, most self-absorbed, clueless and physically unattractive characters I’ve ever hung with in my moviegoing life.

We’re speaking of Thomas Schubert‘s Leon, a fat, seemingly untalented, self-deluding writer for the first 85 or 90 minutes. And yet following a third-act tragedy that I won’t disclose, Leon suddenly becomes a gifted writer. Quelle surprise!

And so the film, we realize, isn’t as much about pudgy, fucked-up Leon as the difference between spinning your wheels for no discernible reason and writing true and straight about something real. And what improving your game can sometimes involve (i.e., a horrific inferno, the charring of flesh, the blackening of bones, being faced with terrible finality).

So the ending isn’t half bad but the first 85 or 90…God! Immature, pissed off, lost-in-the-proverbial-woods Leon obsessing about the highly attuned, rail-thin Nadja (Paula Beer) and never making any headway because he’s such a fleshy, mopey, self-deluding asshole.

Yesterday’s boilerplate: “While vacationing by the Baltic Sea, writer Leon (Schubert) and photographer Felix (Langston Uibel) are surprised by the presence of Nadja (Beer), a mysterious young woman staying as a guest at Felix’s family’s holiday home. Nadja distracts Leon from finishing his latest novel and, with brutal honesty, forces him to confront his caustic temperament and self-absorption. An encroaching forest fire threatens the group as Nadja and Leon grow closer, and tensions escalate when a handsome lifeguard and Leon’s tight-lipped book editor also arrive.”

If I was a film director I wouldn’t dare make a movie as thin, irritating and lacking in tension as the first two acts of Afire are. I was instantly annoyed and glancing at my watch and feeling sorry for myself, being stuck with this obviously not-very-good film and coping with air-conditioning that was too cold.

All I can say is thank God Schubert never gets naked, and double thank God he and Beers never do the actual deed. (Early on sex happens off-screen between Beer and another guy who’s mainly gay.) That’s not saying stuff doesn’t happen between them, or that their interactions aren’t faintly interesting from a certain perspective.

I was just grateful that Petzold respected the sensibilities of persons like myself. His discretion was gratifying. For he spared me the sight of Leon’s cashew-sized appendage…down on my knees!

In a comment HE reader Canyon Coyote tried to casually normalize beefalo + thin girl relationships, which he says are par for the course in his neck of the woods. I’ve spotted such pairings but c’mon, they were highly unusual before the obesity plague began to encroach roughly 20 years ago.

As I noted yesterday, Schubert is actually a bit heavier than John Belushi in Animal House and not that far from his appearance during his final Chateau Marmont cocaine speedball chapter, and only a few heaping plates of pasta short of obese. Just saying.