Bones and All director Luca Guadagnino speaking at the Zurich Film festival, as reported by Variety‘s Marta Balaga: “The idea the U.S. wants to give to the world has a lot to do with the imagery they create about themselves. We have been sold this imagery like dope. I tried to go [to the States] and do what the great foreign filmmakers of the 1930 and 40s did. They immersed themselves into it.”

Guadagnino said he “doesn’t believe in looking for chemistry between the performers, calling it ‘American stupidity…it’s so ridiculous. The only chemistry has to be in the mind of a director towards his actors.”

Teasing his upcoming tennis movie “Challengers” and “An Even Bigger Splash,” now clocking in at over three hours, Guadagnino wondered if his characters are always driven by passion, not reason.

“I like Election by Alexander Payne. [Tracy Flick] is stubborn and knows what she wants, which is fantastic, but I don’t know if I could make a movie like that or be with a character like that.”

Luca’s next two films are Challengers, a Boston-shot tennis flick with Zendaya, Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor, and An Even Bigger Splash, which Balaga says is “now clocking in at over three hours.”

HE is sorry to report that Nicholas Stoller and Billy Eichner‘s Bros, billed as the first mainstream gay romcom, is already dead. The wide release is under $5 million for the weekend, and not expected to earn much more than $12 million domestic. I wrote a mostly approving review two nights ago and it reportedly played half-decently in the big cities, but most of the country (especially the deep hinterlands) wasn’t into it, bruh. Everyone likes a good romantic tale, and Bros is just as good (and certainly as well written) as any Tom Hanks or Billy Crystal romcom from the ’90s, and most auds approve of frisky sexual behavior but…well, perhaps not so much in the realm that I’m afraid to identify in this sentence for fear of being called homophobic. The collapse of Bros shows that Joe and Jane Popcorn are not all that keen about wading into a sexual-emotional realm that is not theirs to have and hold. If you count Zoomers the U.S. gay population is somewhere around 6% or 7% — do the math.

The common consensus is that whatever you may think of Noah Baumbach’s White Noise, a dryly farcical ‘80s period drama set in an Ohio college town, the final sequence — an ambitiously choreographed dance sequence featuring shoppers at an A & P supermarket — is the highlight.

The sequence affirms the film’s basic theme about nearly everyone turning to all kinds of distractions (including food) to avoid contemplating their own mortality.

Though brilliantly staged, the dance number is undercut by Baumbach’s decision to use it as a closing credits backdrop. Here’s how I put it to a friend:

“The LCD Soundsystem ‘New Body Rumba’ finale could have been great if Baumbach hadn’t decided to overlay it with closing credits. I almost shouted out loud ‘Oh no!! He’s blowing it!!’

“I’m saying this because once the credits begin we instantly disengage as we tell ourselves ‘okay, the movie’s over so the aisle–dancing is just a colorful bit, a spirit-picker-upper…whatever.’

“If Baumbach hadn’t given us permission to disengage, the dancing could have been wild and mind-blowing in a surreal Luis Bunuel-meets-Pedro Almodovar way. It could have been a mad slash across a wet-paint canvas…a Gene Kelly consumer-orgy crescendo.

And then it could have segued into a closing credit crawl. Alas…

This morning a Geek Squad tech guy was visiting the condo. Problems resulting from competing internet systems (Optimum vs. eero) were being addressed.

The first thing the GS guy did was call an Optimum agent about establishing a bridge connection. (Don’t ask.). The street address and account # had been verified, but the Optimum agent also needed to verify the name of the account holder (Joanne Jasser) and the corresponding phone #.

The latter was provided but I told the rep that the principal’s first name was a colloquial Jody rather than the more formal Joanne. Her response: “We don’t have an account holder by that name.”

It was soon after explained that Jody and Joanne were one and the same, but until that moment of clarity the Optimum rep was ready and willing to stop exchanging info. Everything but the first name had synched. The Optimum rep was being extra precise, of course. It could also be argued that she wasn’t the brightest bulb. I’ll let it go at that.

It’s difficult to write on a moving, lurching, swaying train…apologies.

This is either a foyer or a section of the living room inside Marilyn Monroe’s home, the only place she ever owned, at 12305 Fifth Helena Drive in Brentwood. It was taken the morning of 8.5.62, a few hours after she’d been found dead.

The heritage of the home was classic Mexican adobe (overhead beams, classic brick patio), and she had bought a few pieces of Mexican-made furniture earlier that year when she visited Mexico City. On or about 3.1.62 she dropped by the set of Luis Bunuel‘s The Exterminating Angel, which was finishing shooting at Churubusco Studios. It played in Cannes less than three months later.

A copy of the N.Y. Times sits on the peasant bench, along with two coffee-table books (Mexico + the paintings of Pierre-Auguste Renoir).

What gets me is the dinky little portable stereo. You’d think she would’ve placed it atop a wooden table of some kind, but no — on the floor! The same kind of cheap-ass stereo player that kids fresh out of college put on their bedroom floors in the ’60s. Monroe either forgot to buy a table or thought the stereo sounded better on the carpeted floor, transmitting the vibes to the floorboards or something. Monroe wasn’t rich when she died. It’s so touching to imagine her deciding to go with an inexpensive college-dorm stereo rather than the swanky kind that, say, Frank Sinatra or JFK would’ve owned.

Here are some cheap retro record players.

This is the Marilyn Monroe I’ve always had in my head, as opposed to the bruised, traumatized, exaggerated victim in Blonde. A neurotic smarty who cared about culture, world events, good music, etc. I wonder what she listened to during dinner hour? Did she ever wander around Paris or Rome?

HE is down with Nicholas Stoller, Billy Eichner and Judd Apatow‘s Bros, which I saw Thursday evening. I admired the witty writing, the expert acting, the character-building and professional construction, and it also touched me in a somewhat old-fashioned way. It struck me as generally gutsy and first-rate schmaltz, and at times more than that.

Is it like a typical Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks romcom from the ’90s? Yeah, but a good one! And with boners and beards!

I felt a genuine kinship and a comfort level with the characters and even, to a significant extent, with the sexuality.

The alone-ness, defensiveness and brusque “I don’t trust you” personality of Eichner’s “Bobby Lieber”, an openly gay museum curator and musician, are very clearly and movingly conveyed, and I really liked Luke MacFarlane‘s “Aaron”, a muscular wills attorney and fledgling chocolatier whom Bobby falls for early on, only to stumble through the usual commitment-or-not issues.

I got as much of a relaxed upfront gay feeling from this as I did from Luca Guadagnino‘s Call Me By Your Name, which is much tamer and less sexually provocative than Bros.

Coming from a straight guy like myself, this kind of approval means something. Or it might mean something, I should say. I caught a 5pm showing of Bros with a friend in Westport, and we were the only ones in the house.

I don’t know what Apatow’s writing input was, but aside from the pointed, confessional, signature-level writing from Eichner, whose story this primarily is, I could feel the Apatow-ness all the way through. It had a King of Staten Island-like feeling of assurance and carefully measured control…a professional sense of timing and pacing and all-around wholeness that I bought into. (Eichner and Stoller are credited as cowriters.)

Speaking of my straightness, Bros struck me (and I know what this is going to sound like) as a little too pronounced in terms of the gay consciousness factor. Just a wee little bit.

Did everything in this movie have to be about sexuality and sexual identity and frank, take-it-or leave-it, this-is-what-gay-life-is-like revelation? How many lines in this film dealt with the occasional banality or neutrality of things? How many lines in this didn’t address or comment upon gay behaviors or culture or history? Damn few. As Sigmund Freud might have said, occasionally a gay man will enter a tobacco shop for a couple of good cigars, and he’ll just say “gimme a couple of good cigars” without mentioning or alluding to his orientation.

Bros has been described as a somewhat predictable, straight-laced gay romcom, but there’s nothing restrained about the sexual scenes, which at times almost reminded me of Frank Ripploh‘s Taxi Zum Klo. Forgive me but I somehow don’t recall a scene in Sleepless in Seattle in which Meg Ryan talked to a girlfriend about peeing on Tom Hanks, or told Hanks during a vulnerable moment that she wants him to fuck her, or that the last time his big fat banana slid into her she went “oh wow.”

There are two great scenes (okay, one and a half) with Debra Messing. The Abraham Lincoln-was-gay thing is simultaneously acknowledged as bullshit but also pushed a little too far. But Amy Schumer’s Eleanor Roosevelt and Kenan Thompson‘s James Baldwin are just right. Ditto Bowen Yang, Kristin Chenoweth, Harvey Fierstein, a Ben Stiller cameo, etc.

Forgive me but there’s so much in our daily lives that falls under the headings of “banal” or “middle class whatevs”, and this movie just won’t ease up with the avoidance of that banality and the persistence of the gay experience and corresponding sensibilities.

There’s a dinner scene with Aaron’s parents that drives this aspect home. Along with Aaron, I was silently begging Bobby to ease up and tone it down. In this scene Bobby voices his support for educating second-graders about gay views and lifestyles. I don’t care what this sounds like coming from me, but kids 10-and-under should be left the fuck alone. That part REALLY didn’t work for me.

But otherwise Bros is refreshingly smart and engaging and well-structured, and I really liked the romcom squareness of it all. I can’t think of a kicker line so this’ll have to do.

No one in the world is more knowledgable than restoration guru Robert Harris about how films of distinction should ideally look on home video, particularly via 1080p and 4K Blurays. He is the absolute Yoda of this realm.

So after my recent traumatic encounter with the 4K Heat Bluray, I searched out Harris’s assessment of this disc on Home Theatre Forum, the most sophisticated platform anywhere for taking the measure of high-def capturings.

And I was absolutely crestfallen when I read Harris’s positive review.

Harris knows much, much more than I will ever know about this stuff, but I’ve seen Heat in all kinds of formats over the last 27 years (including a first-peek 35mm press screening at the Steve Ross theatre on the Warner Bros. lot). I was upset because I know for an absolute fact that the 4K Heat Bluray looks way too dark, and that what my eyes saw three nights ago was and is a desecration.

I felt confused and stunned by Harris’s remarks, and particularly by a suggestion that my settings may be “off.” HE’s Wilton TV, owned by the honorable Jody Jasser, is a solid, relatively new, state-of-the-art 65 inch Sony OLED. 

4K’s middle name, after all, is darkness. But there’s a possible solution for due diligence types. “If you dig into the setup menu,” I was told, “you’ll find black level settings.”

HE commenter ‘Kyle D’: “The UHD Heat looks great on a calibrated display in a dark room, but it will probably look like ass on most displays in most viewing conditions, and I can’t really blame or disparage people for not putting in the effort to get it looking right.”

HE regulars know Harris as the guy who oversaw the exquisite, ace-level 2007 and ’08 Godfather Bluray restoration, along with his other famous restorations (Vertigo, Lawrence of Arabia, Spartacus, Rear Window, My Fair Lady).

HE to Harris: “I’ll always be devoted to and awestruck by the 2007-2008 Godfather Bluray, but I was so upset by that awful 4K Heat Bluray that late last night I threw in the 2022 4K Godfather Bluray.

“I just needed to remind myself that a 4K remastering of a great film doesn’t have to be an infuriating stew of murk and mud covered by a black nun’s stocking.

“While I understand that it’s not as true of a capturing of the 1972 original as your version, I was delighted by the ‘22 4K nonetheless

“The Willis blacks are deep and satiny and delicious as fudge, and that indoor golden-amber lighting and those luscious taxicab reds and the detail on those tweed overcoats and those shiny, hand-rubbed 1940s cars, and those sunlit hues during the wedding scene and the death in the tomato garden scene and in Sicily, and I didn’t have to go into settings and adjust the black levels on the 65-inch Sony OLED. Imagine! It just looked that way on its own.

“I will always prefer your 15 year-old version (I’ll always think of it as the one that Willis heartily approved of) but in the wake of my dreadful 4K Heat nightmare the Godfather 4K looked like absolute heaven on earth. And the 4K The Godfather Part II disc, which I watched earlier this year in West Hollywood…fuhgedaboudit.

Posted on 2.16.22:

“Heaving Seas,” initially posted on 4.25.20: All my life I’ve dreamt of sailing a long distance on a sizable schooner. Five or six months, maybe longer. Not as an owner, God forbid, but as a traveller somehow paying my way. Or as a guest or crew member or whatever.

Down the Pacific coast to Mexico and Central America, through the Panama Canal and around the Caribbean, stopping in Belize, Cuba, Turks and Caicos and wherever the spirit points. And then across the Atlantic to the Canaries and then through the Strait of Gibraltar and then all around the Mediterranean — Spain’s Costa del Sol, southern France, Italy, Sicily, Greece, Turkey, Jordan, Israel, Egypt. Maybe even push on across the Indian Ocean to Southeast Asia…why not?

This 37 year-old Rod Stewart music video got me going. The schooner it was filmed on, I mean. I went looking for a facsimile and quickly found one — the Atlantic, a ten-year-old, three-masted schooner, 212 feet long, steel hull, currently moored off the coast of Italy. God knows what a craft this size would cost, but if you’re loaded…

Here’s another schooner, the 76-year-old Di Donna Goelette O Remington.

Excitement, adventure, exotic climes, unfamiliar sights and sounds…all of it nourishing. But never, ever on a grotesquely over-sized cruise ship.

I was initially inclined to ignore the whole story about Jihad Rehab (aka The UnRedacted), which was reported last Sunday (9.25) by Michael Powell in the N.Y. Times. My thinking was “another story about wokester cowards throwing a filmmaker under the bus because of accusations of racism even though they liked the film to begin with”…big deal, that’s what these serpents do for a living, react to accusations by killing or maiming careers.”

But Megyn Kelly’s discussion of the story with Matt Taibbi got me going again.

Key passage from N.Y. Times story: “Abigail Disney, a grandniece of Walt Disney, had been the executive producer of Jihad Rehab and called it ‘freaking brilliant’ in an email to the doc’s director, Meg Smaker. Now she’s disavowed it. The film ‘landed like a truckload of hate,’ Ms. Disney wrote in an open letter.”