Except for the fact that Tom Cruise refuses to sculpt his hair with Crew (fiber or grooming cream), much less use hair spray. And I can’t say I’m much of a fan of that rosey champagne-colored golf shirt, and particularly his decision to wear it wide open.
The Sitting-Down Bulky Guy
The last time I saw Ving Rhames on his feet and actually walking was in Pulp Fiction (’94), or a little more than 29 years ago. I’m speaking of the scene in which Rhames’ Marsellus Wallace is walking across a street in some godforsaken L.A. suburb (Hawthorne?) and happens to spot Bruce Willis‘s Butch Coolidge behind the wheel of his shitty car, etc. Two years later Rhames gave his first performance as Luther Stickell in Brian DePalma and Tom Cruise‘s Mission: Impossible (’96), and has been with the franchise ever since.
I’m not saying Rhames hasn’t been been seen on his feet or walking in his other film roles (Dave, Striptease, Con Air, Out of Sight, Entrapment, Bringing Out the Dead, Dawn of the Dead, I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry). but I don’t remember any of them. (Sorry.) All I can recall about Rhames is that he’s always sitting on his ass.
“Can’t Hate It If They Don’t Understand It.” — Christopher Nolan
Best Screen Rant pitch meeting video of all time….seriously. Two years old, and I’ve only just watched it.
Awkward Instant
And the first animal is jettisoned.
I’m sorry but as much as I wanted Farahani Edit’s mostly-pink Barbenheimer-and-Nazis trailer to delight and transport, it doesn’t. It stops and starts and the sound drops out a couple of times. Fatal errors!
HE Prefers Obama-Era Greta Gerwig to Present Incarnation
I still haven’t seen Barbie, of course, but being reminded yesterday of Greta Gerwig’s co-authoring of Disney’s seemingly woke-as-fuck Snow White bummed me out. This plus her reported interest in directing a Chronicles of Narnia film and her apparent general leanings as a writer-director since 2019’s Little Women, which seemed to signal an ardently feminist chapter…a proverbial turning of the page as she began to swim in a politically ideological stream…
Gerwig is obviously an inventive and visually exacting filmmaker, but I’m less taken with the incarnation that has come to be seen, felt and heard over the last four or five years than who she seemed to be (and with whom I fraternized two or three times) during her Obama-era output…her Greenberg, Frances Ha, Mistress America and Lady Bird period (2010 to 2017) when she was radiating a curiously appealing take on 21st Century life…truly imaginative and wonderfully peculiar…among the most idiosyncratic and organically rooted creative minds out there.
“Antonioni Gerwig,” posted almost exactly ten years ago:
Snow Zegler and Seven Diverse Individuals
I’m sorry — I meant to title this article “Snow Zegler and Seven Diverse Individuals Seeking To Craft and Fulfill Their Unique Identities and Aspirations.”
It seems (emphasis on the “s” word) as if Disney’s forthcoming Snow White (3.22.24) is some kind of reconstituted, anti-classical, woke-Stalinist nightmare — a Khmer Rouge-y, dwarf-less, political re-education camp reimagining of Walt Disney’s animated Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (’37)…good God almighty!
Written by co-scenarists Greta Gerwig and Erin Cressida Wilson and directed by Marc Webb, you can smell the woke garlic from a thousand miles away.
No dwarves, no diamond mine, no 19th Century fairy-tale mythology, no poisoned apple, no “mirror mirror on the wall”, no handsome Prince awaking Snow White from a coma-like slumber…actually I’m not sure that all or even most of these story elements have been eliminated but I do know for sure that the dwarves have been tossed.
Rise up, all ye traditional, had-it-up-to-here American parents!…rise up and push back against this revisionist, musical-minded serving of politically correct mush and send it to the same box-office dungeon or recovery clinic where Lightyear, Elemental, The Little Mermaid and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny are currently licking their wounds…if for no other reason than to feel the sheer adrenalized joy of revolt and rejection against the elite Marxist social visionaries.
In short, please tell the Disney wokesters to shove it…yes, once again.
Bugsy Siegel: “20 dwarves took turns doing handstands on the carpet…20 dwarves took turns doing handstands on the carpet…20 dwarves took turns doing handstands on the carpet,” etc.
All Hail Frank McRae
I don’t mean Gerrit Graham, although he’s great also. I mean the heavy-set guy in the purple costume (i.e., “High Prices”). McRae also stood out in 1941, 48 HRS., Red Dawn, Farewell to the King, Another 48 HRS., Last Action Hero.
“Quiet and Stately Film Noir”
Posted by filmmaker Matthew Wilder, director-writer of American Martyr, cowriter of Paul Schrader’s Dog Eat Dog:
Soderbergh’s “Command Z”
With Steven Soderbergh and Ed Solomon‘s Full Circle having begun to stream on Max yesterday (7.13), a trailer for a new Soderbergh feature, Command Z, is now viewable. Except I can’t find an embed code so feel free to click through.
Marnieheimer
This may sound silly and it probably is, but a voice out of the space-time continuum is telling me that Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie (‘64) can and should be rebranded, rejuvenated and re-culturalized by merging original Marnie poster art with the ironic girlie bullshit kitsch design of Barbie marketing and more particularly “Barbenheimer.”
There’s always been something vaguely suffocating about Marnie; it’s simply a matter of saying “okay, let’s add apocalyptic to suffocating and substitute red for pink and see if the cat licks it up.”
I can’t explain where this idea has come from exactly, and I certainly haven’t worked out any of the thematic details. I only know that in some strange way Barbie and Marnie have begun to bleed together in my mind. I’m 97% certain that Marnie cultists (Richard Brody, Dave Kehr, Glenn Kenny, et. al.) would somehow approve. .
A Frowned-Upon “Elmer Gantry” Scene?
Richard Brooks‘ Elmer Gantry (’60), an adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’s 1927 novel about an opportunistic evangelist hustler, has never been remade.
But if someone were to try, this church gospel scene would most likely be dropped. Wokesters would probably fault it for conveying a slightly patronizing view of black churchgoers and an overly flattering (or even an enobling) opinion of a white interloper.
Plus there are very few actors who can deliver the charisma that Burt Lancaster had in his heyday (late ’40s to mid ’60s). He was 46 or 47 when the film was made, but seemed a decade younger.
Lancaster’s performance won the 1960 Best Actor Oscar, which was handed out on 4.17.61 at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. He also won the New York Film Critics Best Actor Award for same; ditto a Golden Globe award.
Gantry contains one unintentionally funny scene. When Lancaster’s titular character manages to seduce Sister Sharon Falconer (Jean Simmons), an evangelist based on the real-life Aimee Semple McPherson, Andre Previn‘s orchestral score thunders with summonings of sin and doom.
Brooks, Simmons’ husband at the time, was evidently a thumping moralist, at least as far as his feelings about a religious figure enjoying carnal relations outside of wedlock were concerned.
Leo Gorcey’s Final Acting Credit
Many boomers know who Leo Gorcey was, but relatively few GenZ-ers recognize his name. (Forget Millennials and Zoomers.) The pugnacious actor, probably the best known of the Dead End kids (aka the Bowery Boys) but a lifetime boozer, died of liver failure on 6.2.69, one day shy of his 52nd birthday.
Gorcey could’ve achieved greater fame by becoming one of the many faces on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, but he was jettisoned when he said “sure, pay me.” Gorcey’s Bowery Boys partner Huntz Hall said okay for free, and thereby achieved immortality