Bill Maher: “I don’t want to sound like Donald Trump, Hillary, but your campaign stinks and your numbers are terrible…and that laugh…the one that makes people think you’re the Wicked Witch of The West Wing.” (And eye bags! I know they’re not funny because too many people have them and they’re not a criminal offense, but eye bags are a very pungent metaphor.) Best line in whole riff: Scott Walker “looks like a drunk in a silent movie who’s just been punched by mistake.”
I had arranged to do a quickie sitdown this morning at the SLS Hotel with Peter Bogdanovich, director of She’s Funny That Way (Lionsgate, 8.21). The appointment was for 10:15 am, but I flaked in a sense. What I mean is that with about 17 minutes to go I asked if I could please do a phoner instead. I was backed up with an unfinished piece and I figured what’s the difference if it’s person-to-person or on the phone? Well, that didn’t fly. The publicist checked and said there wasn’t a phone in the area where Bogdanovich was sitting, which of course wasn’t true. (I called the hotel desk right after this discussion and asked if there was a phone or a phone jack in the area where Bogdanovich was sitting; I was assured that there was.) The publicist then explained that the interview would have to be cancelled unless I got down there licketysplit.
Peter Bogdanovich
I’m guessing that Bogdanovich felt insulted that I had bailed on our face-to-face and refused to get on the phone out of pride or petulance. I don’t know this; it’s just a suspicion. I do know that the publicist telling me that there wasn’t an available phone was…uhm, a less than candid response.
So I got in touch with Bill Teck, director of the affecting Bogdanovich doc One Day Since Yesterday (which I just saw and reviewed a few days ago), and asked him to forward a private message to Bodganovich in which I’ll apologize for the last-minute switch and ask if there’s any way he could get on the phone or meet this weekend. Can’t hurt. If Bogdanovich blows me off, fine, but at least I’ll know that I went the extra mile.
A 35mm print of Michelangelo Antonioni‘s The Passenger (’75) played two nights ago at the Aero. I decided against attending, of course, because of my standard aversion to 35mm. Any print of a ’70s film carries a 75% to 80% chance of being scratched, weathered and “pink” to some extent. But the Aero screening put this 1975 classic back into my head and led to my purchasing a 2014 Spanish (Region 2) Bluray. As of now I’ve now posted the same YouTube clip of The Passenger‘s finale (7 minutes, 34 seconds) three times. The other two postings were on 6.18.13 and 4.25.14.)
From a 2006 David Thomson Guardian piece: “I can watch the world through Michelangelo Antonioni ‘s eyes forever. He is the greatest stylist of the modern era, and The Passenger may be my favorite film. No, it’s not in my top ten, but sometimes I think [The Passenger is the one I like the best, by which I fear I mean it’s the film I’d most like to be in, instead of just watching.”
From my 2013 post: “It’s soothing and nurturing to watch this shot every so often. When’s the last time a long dazzling uncut shot like this was the talk of film buffs the world over? 95% of those who live for CG-driven films would never even watch a film like The Passenger and therefore never contemplate a perfect scene like this, but if they did most would sit there like metal lawn furniture and go ‘uhm, okay, soooo…that’s it?’”
Eons ago some friends of mine had to deal with a second-rate motorcyle-gang psychopath who went by the name of Wild Bill. It happened in a small apartment that three of us — Chance, Mike and myself — were staying in next to a performance bar called Fat City in Wilmington, Vermont. I was luckily passed out in the bedroom from an overdose of Jack Daniels, but Chance’s descriptions have never left me.
It began with a loud knock on the door and Chance saying “who is it?” and a voice saying “look though the peephole.” (One of those dime-sized holes with a tiny metal latch.) Chance started to put his eye to the door when a switchblade knife blade suddenly jabbed through a couple of times. Chance got angry and opened the door and there was Wild Bill, wearing a chrome-plated Nazi helmet. He muscled his way in and wouldn’t leave.
He was fried and stupid and clearly dangerous, Chance said. Not what you’d call a top-of-the-line biker but a loser type. Bill had a pair of pliers hanging from his belt, and Chance asked him what they were for. “I’m an amateur dentist,” he said.
You could feel the booze and boiling rage, Chance said. Telling Bill to leave or (ha!) trying to force him out would’ve surely resulted in aggravated assault or worse. Chance and Mike decided to humor him.
Glenn Kenny has written a not-yet-posted piece for Vulture that takes issue with the portrayal of the late author David Foster Wallace in James Ponsoldt‘s The End of the Tour. It won’t appear until just before the film opens on 7.31, but it’ll probably be fairly interesting as Kenny knew the late writer fairly well (as an editor as well as on purely personal terms) and considered him a pally of sorts. He told me this morning that Tour is a “really inaccurate” portrait of what Wallace was like as a person.
I replied that it can’t be that inaccurate as Donald Margulies‘ script is based on David Lipsky‘s book, “Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself,” which is largely based on cassette recordings of his conservations with Wallace when he was interviewing him in ’96 (when Wallace was 34) for a Rolling Stone piece.
Kenny had strong retorts but those are on background. As noted, his piece is up later this month.
Margulies knew Ponsoldt from having taught him writing at Yale, and sent him the script directly. Margulies had no idea if he even knew who Wallace was but thought on the basis of his other films (The Spectacular Now, Smashed) that he would be perfect. It turned out Ponsolt was a Wallace devotee who had waded heavily into “Infinite Jest” at college and had read almost everything else Wallace had written. He even quoted Wallace’s “This Is Water” commencement speech at his own wedding.
A couple of years ago I posted a rant about an egregious form of road-ignoring in James Ponsoldt‘s The Spectacular Now. For years I’ve been twitching in my seat during car-chat scenes in which a driver mainly looks at the person riding shotgun and only glances at the road sporadically. (Roughly five or six seconds of eye-contact for every one or two seconds of road-watching.) But Ponsoldt and Miles Teller doubled down on this in a Spectacular scene in which Teller, bold as brass, totally ignores the road for ten or twelve seconds as he chats with some girls in a car that’s cruising alongside. I almost threw my shoe at the screen.
Jesse Eisenberg, Jason Segel in James Ponsoldt’s The End of the Tour. Obviously not the scene I’m referring to the piece as Segel is behind the wheel.
And now Ponsoldt has crossed the line again in The End of The Tour. In a second act scene Jesse Eisenberg (playing Rolling Stone journalist David Lipsky) is driving and talking to Jason Segel (as David Foster Wallace) and doing the usual “I don’t really need to look at the road…well, okay, I do every so often but c’mon…I’m actor and I need to make eye contact…this is what I do and I can’t just stare at the road and read lines.”
Thank you, Time Warner, for the total collapse of wifi and even TV cable service starting around 10 this morning. I need to go down to the local TWC office and switch out the modem. Plus I’ve been dealing with (a) my late mother’s insurance policy and (b) a multi-millionaire deadbeat who controls a subsidiary company that hasn’t fully paid for an ad that ran on HE last January. I’ll try to file by the late afternoon but no promises. One of the topics will be Amy, the Amy Winehouse doc that I finally saw last night after missing it in Cannes. Update: TWC wifi back on after three and a half hours of nothing. I still can’t file until later.
So Will Ferrell‘s the dorky step-dad and Mark Wahlberg‘s the cool, natural, Esquire-reading dad all the way through, right? Black and white, cool and uncool, relaxed machismo vs. anxious pathetic…sharp divisions observed. Up until the third act, of course, when Wahlberg shows his vulnerable flaws or twitches and Ferrell quietly mans up in some gracious, compassionate way. I know this movie before I’ve seen it. But I have to say that I honestly laughed at the motorcycle gag. And knocking out the cheerleader with the basketball…that too.
“Accusing women of supporting Hillary Clinton just because she’s female is misogynistic [bullshit],” Lena Dunham recently wrote on her Instagram account. “Women are smart enough to make decisions based on a number of factors: policy, track record, campaign strategy. Yes, I think it’s time for a female president but I’m not part of a witch’s cabal that senses ovaries and suddenly must vote.” And the default reason that the vast majority of African-Americans voted for Barack Obama wasn’t for kinship. And the default reason that many boomers and GenXers voted for Bill Clinton in ’92 and ’96 wasn’t because he shared their generational perspective and vice versa. And the default reason that Hillary is expected to win in ’16 has little if anything to do with the fact that a woman in the Oval Office will symbolically strengthen the hand of women everywhere. I don’t blame Dunham or any thinking progressive woman for being on Clinton’s team for gender reasons — it totally makes sense. But in the same breath it’s obvious that Dunham is talking right through her hat.
Clinton’s gender will of course be the default consideration for women during the ’16 election. But Dunham tries to deny it anyway and other women are (presumably) raising their fists and going “yeah!” Or are they? There’s so much rage and animus among Type-A media and showbiz women these days, obviously and justifiably directed at the suppressive chauvinists of the other side of the canyon. And yet the tone of much of the commentary from go-getter women is fierce and militant and “shut up, you’re full of it.” The mantra seems to be “I despise men or at least I frequently sneer at their bullshit and therefore I am.” I’m not saying women are the least bit unwarranted in pushing back at sexist bullshit, but too much rage leads to intemperate statements. It’s like a guerilla war out there. It’s almost like the Irish against the British in the 1920s.
Barbara Stanwyck‘s pre-code roles are interesting in a socially nervy context (she often played sexually brazen tough cookies who didn’t let guys push her around) but her flush period was between ’37 and ’44 — an era that began with Stella Dallas (’37) and ended with Double Indemnity (’44) but peaked, really, in ’41 when she was her crisp and feisty best in The Lady Eve, Meet John Doe and Ball of Fire. Stanny lost me when she cut her hair shorter (somewhere around 1948’s Sorry, Wrong Number) and began to play tough butch-boss types, especially in westerns like Alan Dwan‘s Cattle Queen of Montana and Samuel Fuller‘s Forty Guns (which pops on Bluray on 6.22.15 via Masters of Cinema). With a Brooklyn accent! On top of which Stanwyck was a right-winger who admired Ayn Rand and supported HUAC witch-hunting.
Simon Pegg in a Radio Times interview, posted earlier today: “Before Star Wars, the films that were box-office hits were The Godfather, Taxi Driver, Bonnie and Clyde and The French Connection — gritty, amoral art movies. Then suddenly the onus switched over to spectacle and everything changed.
“I’m very much a self-confessed fan of science-fiction and genre cinema. But part of me looks at society as it is now and thinks we’ve been infantilized by our own taste. We’re essentially all consuming very childish things — comic books, superheroes. Adults are watching this stuff, and taking it seriously!”
“It is a kind of dumbing down in a way.” Wells interjection: Kind of? Back to Pegg: “Because it’s taking our focus away from real-world issues. Films used to be about challenging, emotional journeys or moral questions that might make you walk away and re-evaluate how you felt about…whatever. Now we’re walking out of the cinema really not thinking about anything, other than the fact that the Hulk just had a fight with a robot.”
A sizable number of foo-foo Cannes critics have creamed over Matteo Garrone‘s Tale of Tales following Wednesday evening’s 7 pm screening. These responses have struck me as overly obliging, to put it gently. Due respect to Garrone (Gomorrah) and 17th Century Italian author Giambattista Basile, whose “Pentamoronem,” a collection of 50 dream fables published posthumously in 1634 and 1636, inspired many classic fairy-tales we’re all familiar with, but for all its compositional delights and atmospheric richness, Tale of Tales is a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing save that Garrone is a highly skilled, grand-vision director.
Yes, I enjoyed the fact that the three tales are adult-angled, which is to say dark, gloopey and completely unrelated to “happily ever after,” and I felt satisfied by their perversity as far as it went, but they don’t lead anywhere or echo anything — they’re just diseased and obsessive and aggressively illogical little sagas about royals who want what they want and then have to pay for their obsessions or blindnesses or over-reachings.
Out of the original 50 they seem to have been chosen by Garrone more for their confounding perversity than anything else. And I’m saying this as a fan of Fellini Satyricon (’69), which at least seemed to be saying something about the libertine culture of the late ’60s whereas Tale of Tales seems to be about nothing more than the fact that Garrone and his team had zilch to say. Except maybe that life is full of pitfalls and trap doors and at the end of the day the odds are that you’ll wind up fucked if you resort to magic to solve your problems.
- All Hail Tom White, Taciturn Hero of “Killers of the Flower Moon”
Roughly two months ago a very early draft of Eric Roth‘s screenplay for Killers of the Flower Moon (dated 2.20.17,...
More » - Dead-End Insanity of “Nomadland”
Frances McDormand‘s Fern was strong but mule-stubborn and at the end of the day self-destructive, and this stunted psychology led...
More » - Mia Farrow’s Best Performances?
Can’t decide which performance is better, although I’ve always leaned toward Tina Vitale, her cynical New Jersey moll behind the...
More »
- Hedren’s 94th
Two days ago (1.19) a Facebook tribute congratulated Tippi Hedren for having reached her 94th year (blow out the candles!)...
More » - Criminal Protagonists
A friend suggested a list of the Ten Best American Crime Flicks of the ‘70s. By which he meant films...
More » - “‘Moby-Dick’ on Horseback”
I’ve never been able to give myself over to Sam Peckinpah’s Major Dundee, a 1965 Civil War–era western, and I’ve...
More »