Son of “Therapist Asks Tough Question”

by

Initially posted on 4.18.22:

Don’t recite your resume or your hobbies, don’t tell us what you own or how your golf game has improved or how much you love your pets or anything peripheral…none of that…just tell us who you are.

Okay, here goes: I’m a guy who lives to write and writes to live. I believe that while certain bedrock behaviors are more or less constant, sobriety as a way of life matters a great deal, and if you’re sober, moods and perceptions are always tipping this way or that. There is no “real” essential identity. There is only our genetic history plus the constantly adjusting, moving-train way of things…influences, appetites, defense mechanisms, second thoughts.

I was angry as a kid because I’d suffered through a traumatic birth, and angry as a teenager because my functioning alcoholic dad managed to persuade me that I had to avoid turning out like him…that anything would be preferable to that. And yet I miss him as we speak.

Nicholson to HE: That’s very nice, Jeff, but as usual you’re dodging. Who are you? Just say it.

HE to Nicholson: I don’t have a pat answer, and neither do you. Nobody does. I’m an imaginative egocentric refugee from a middle-class New Jersey suburb. I live for those transcendent moments that descend from time to time. (We all do, I think.) I’ve been lucky in some respects, and I’ve been blessed with a strong constitution. Otherwise I’m a reasonably stable, steady-as-she-goes workaholic.

I vastly prefer the poetry of cinema + great writing + music to the occasionally maudlin reality of day-to-day life. My eyes go all watery when certain memories surface, and especially when certain songs and passages from certain film scores are re-savored.

Most of us understand about God’s absolute and infinite indifference about whether we are happy or not, and that there is only “be here now” and the hum of it all, etc. And yet deep down I seem to spend a lot of time trying to re-savor or re-appreciate my deepest and most lasting memories from the 20th Century, and all the while hitting re-fresh.

I understand the rule about not mentioning cats and dogs, but they’re mostly wonderful (98% of the time) to hang with.

Rainer Maria Rilke: “To simply be here is immense.”

“Boorman and the Devil” Is Melancholy, Exacting, Highly Perceptive

by

David Kittredge’s Boorman and The Devil, which I saw this morning at 9 am, is one of the wisest, deepest, most poetic-minded, most eloquent and most satisfyingly assembled “inside baseball meets human vulnerabilty” documentaries that I’ve ever seen.

With the festival nearly over, I wasn’t expecting any kind of triple or home run. But it’s a truly masterful film.

It actually ranks among the four or five best films I’ve seen in Venice thus far…seriously.

Kittredge doesn’t just cover the whole, calamitous, chapter-by-chapter story of the making of John Boorman‘s The Exorcist II: The Heretic. He also assesses Boorman’s entire career while examining his personal passions and tendencies.

The most intriguing aspect is an atmospheric recreation of the fascinating Hollywood milieu of 1976 and ’77, which was when the film was made…the closing chapter of the whole sprawling saga of New Hollywood, which began in ’67 (The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde) and ended with the super-successful, game-changing release of Star Wars in May ’77.

Produced over the last seven years, Boorman and the Devil is a very thorough telling of a grueling creative effort. Kittredge has interviewed pretty much every living person who worked on the film, starting with Boorman, the project’s bruised but resilient godfather.

Costars Linda Blair (who turned 66 last January) and Louise Fletcher (died three years ago) are given a healthy amount of screen time; ditto uncredited screenwriter Rospo Pallenberg and Steadicam inventor Garrett Brown.

A stimulating variety of peripheral participants and observers are also heard from — directors Joe Dante and Jeff Kanew, critics Bilge Ebiri and Stephanie Zacharek plus author and former Variety reporter Joe McBride.

There’s footage of a funny story about a sneak preview screening, passed along by Exorcist helmer William Friedkin….hilarious.

The Boorman interview apparently happened in ’18, as he tells Kittredge’s camera that he’s 85. Born in 1933, Boorman is now 92.

The two best docs about “difficult shoots that produced a good or classic film”, of course, are George Hickenlooper, Fax Bahr and Eleanor Coopola‘s Hearts of Darkness (’91) and Les Blank‘s Burden of Dreams (’82).

Kittredge’s doc belongs in the pantheon of an opposite category — i.e., docs about the making of movies that went horribly wrong.

Throughout the viewing I was saying to myself “how ironic that a movie this rich, insightful, compassionate and enticingly human-scaled is a study of one of the most notorious artistic and commercial failures in Hollywood history.”

Before seeing Kittridge’s doc I would have said that the best “films that went wrong” docs are (a) David Gregory‘s Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s ‘Island of Dr. Moreau’ (’14) and (b) Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe‘s Lost in La Mancha (’02).

Now I’m tempted to say that Kittredge’s doc is better than these two. It’s certainly their equal and then some.

Geoffrey Macnab‘s 9.2 Guardian piece about the doc is worth reading.

The professional-grade sketchings of key episodes during the film’s making are truly exceptional. I’ve reached out to Kittredge for an answer to this and other questions.

New Boxy Teaser For “Die, My Love”

by

“Die, My Love Warrants Respect But Joe and Jane Will Hate It“, posted on 5.17.25: “Having seen Lynne Ramsay‘s Die, My Love, I can at least pass along that while I respected what it was on about, the Debussy journos didn’t go for it.

“Much of the film is about the home-bound JLaw going increasingly crazy because the work-obsessed RPatz won’t fuck her.

“Pic is altogether too grim, too downish in a one-note sense, no plot pivots of any kind….just a downward swirl into Jennifer Lawrence‘s increasing derangement….down, down, down.

“What’s it really about? Just as Alfred Hitchcock‘s The Birds wasn’t so much a restrained horror film about malicious winged demons as an indictment of social complacency, Die, My Love isn’t so much about JLaw’s descent into self-destructive madness as a portrayal of the dull horror of doing almost nothing with your life while caring for a child…an indictment of middle-class, stay-at-home-and-burp-the-baby-while-baking-cookies momism.”

Can’t See The Point

by

A reputedly enhanced 4K version of Stanley Kubrick‘s Lolita (’62) has screened two or three times at the Venice Film Festival. The restoration was handled by the Criterion Collection in partnership with Warner Bros. It will turn up as a 4K Criterion Bluray disc later this year or early next.

Except the current Bluray version, which first popped in 2011, looks really good. Needle-sharp detail, rich blacks, etc. So what could Criterion’s 4K bump possibly render? What could they offer that would make their newbie worth $30 or whatever they’re going to charge?

All I can figure is that their 4K disc might present the film in a Kubrick-approved aspect ratio (mostly 1.37 with occasional crops to 1.66) that was last seen on a 1992 Criterion CAV disc.

Read more

Who Is Today’s Burl Ives…If Anyone?

by

In the ’50s Burl Ives was a formidable heavyweight in more ways than one — a major go-to when the studios needed a fat, older, charismatic presence…someone who could deliver real-deal feelings, planted authority and no-bullshit attitudes. East of Eden, The Big Country, Cat on a Hit Tin Roof, Desire Under the Elms, Wind Across the Everglades, Our Man in Havana, etc.

Who, if anyone, is the reigning fat formidable of 2025? Brendan Gleeson?

Read more

Armani Departure

by

The great and legendary Giorgio Armani has passed at age 91.

Either you understood and embraced the Armani men’s clothing aesthetic of the late ’70s, ’80s and early ’90s, or you didn’t. And if you didn’t you were pretty much out of it.

In the mid ’90s I interviewed Armani (or a rep who claimed to be him) for my weekly L.A. Times Syndicate Hollywood column, the topic being Oscar fashion. I had faxed an interview request to his Milan office, and and to my surprise somebody said “sure.”

When I think of the Armani heyday, this is what comes to mind:

The ironclad rule about gaining entrance to the original Studio 54 (i.e., Schrager-Rubell, April ’77 to the ’80 shutdown over tax evasion) was that you had to not only look good but dress well. That meant Giorgio Armani small-collared shirts if possible and certainly not being a bridge-and-tunnel guinea with polyester garb and Tony Manero hair stylings.

As I watched Matt Tyrnauer‘s Studio 54 I was waiting for someone to just say it, to just say that Saturday Night Fever borough types weren’t even considered because they just didn’t get it, mainly because of their dress sense but also because their plebian attitudes and mindsets were just as hopeless.

It finally happens at the half-hour mark. One of the door guys (possibly Marc Benecke) says “no, the bridge-and-tunnel people never got in“…never.” I can’t tell you how comforting it was to hear that again after so many years.

Another thing: Bob Calacello or somebody mentions how Studio 54 happened in a glorious period in American culture that was post-birth control and pre-AIDS. The film explains how liberal sexual attitudes were particularly celebrated by urban gay culture, which was just starting to sample freedoms that today are more or less taken for granted. Guys couldn’t hold hands on the street but they certainly could once they got inside Studio 54.

But one thing you can’t say in today’s climate (and which Tyrnauer’s film doesn’t even mention in passing) is that the ’70s were also a glorious nookie era for heterosexual guys. It was probably the most impulsive, heavily sensual, Caligula-like period (especially with the liberal use of quaaludes) to happen in straight-person circles since…you tell me. The days of Imperial Rome?

This kind of thing is now a verboten topic, of course, with the 2018 narrative mainly being about how guys need to forget “impulsive” and turn it down and be extra super careful in approaching women in any context. But things were quite different back in the Jimmy Carter era. I’m not expressing any particular nostalgia for those days, but the new Calvinism of 2018 couldn’t be farther away from what the social-sexual norms were 40 years ago. Just saying.

Schnabel’s Surreal Calamity Trip

by

I didn’t hate Julian Schnabel‘s In The Hand of Dante, which I caught a night or two ago, or at least I didn’t hate it altogether. But it did make me groan here and there, and it instilled anguished feelings…spasms of revulsion and disgust and disorientation. I literally said out loud “oh, God…oh, no…oh, Jesus” during a ridiculous mass-murder scene.

And I felt heartbroken that poor Oscar Isaac had committed to playing the dual lead role (a fictional wise-guy version of Tosches as well as the real, actual Dante Alighieri), and I felt so sickened by Gerard Butler‘s coarse, poseur-level performance as Louie, the hit man, that — BIG-ASS SPOILER WARNING! — I was overjoyed when Louie finally got plugged. “Good!” I said to myself, “and please burn in hell.”

Something is very wrong when a film by a director you’ve respected and admired for the better part of 30 years (Basquiat, Before Night Falls, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and At Eternity’s Gate are Schnabel’s best)…something is very, very wrong when his latest initially excites and delights and fills you with hope and even wonder, and then, in the space of less than 20 or 25 minutes, makes you feel like you’ve dropped some really bad acid.

No, I haven’t read Nick Tosches’ same-titled source novel, but I know Tosche’s hipster prose style pretty well (I’m a huge fan of “Hellfire” and “Dino: Living High In the Dirty Business of Dreams“) and…how to put this?…as I watched Schnabel’s film I was saying to myself “This is wrong, man…the crude, porno-violent pistol murders are way over the top…this isn’t the Tosches I know or want to know.”

Tosches’ 2002 novel was co-adapted by Schnabel and wife Louise Kugelberg, and this fact alone is somber testimony, you bet…proof, even, that fortifying a marriage by working on a movie script together is not, in and of itself, a good idea, for the lurching between delirious madman poetry and black-and-white bullets slamming into craniums and chest cavities is my idea of godawful.

I guess I’m now obliged to finally read Tosches’ 2002 book, a trippy, semi-fictional dream saga with the same title, but how could Tosches have written such a thing? There’s no question that Schnabel and Kugelberg have desecrated Tosches’ legacy here.

I can only tell you that walkouts began early on in the Sala Darsena, and that I was cringing and flinching and almost writhing in agony.

Butler is now 55 and way overweight, and the ridiculous “Louie” smokes like a mentally-deranged chimney. Butler reminded me a bit of Orson Welles‘ Hank Quinlan in Touch of Evil (’58), not in terms of Welles’ obesity (Butler is merely bloated by way of a pig diet) but in terms of his character’s perversity…theatrical, random-ass, sub-mental, dumb-fuck cruelty.

Born and raised in Scotland, Butler’s natural accent is soft and gentle and charming, but of course he’s been speaking with a fake, tough-guy patois all these years…what a shame.

HE to friendo a couple of hours after Dante ended: “Tosches’ semi-fictional book of the same title can’t be as vulgarly, bruisingly violent as the film is, not to mention gven to such wildly florid trip=outs and generally lost in its own psychedelic fantasy scenario. It starts well but within the first half-hour there’s a noticable absence of taste and discretion. It’s occasionally just plain awful. Okay, Martin Scorsese’s bushy-bearded cameo is a hoot, and Al Pacino has a good scene with a very young Tosches early on. But the shootings are so plentiful and thoughtless and grotesque…beyond repulsive.”