A significant wrinkle has been added to the Nashville school shooter situation. The wrinkle is that the 28 year old shooter, Audrey Hale, was a biological female identifying as a transgender male. Aiden Hale was the transgender name.
How Long Will Bragg Drag This Out?
Pull the trigger already…Jesus. Update: Wednesday at the earliest.
Cannes Pad
For many years Ann Hornaday and I shared a beautiful, third-floor, Napoleonic-era duplex in the old part of Cannes (7 rue Jean Mero). Seven weeks hence I’ll be crashing in a new place that’s way the hell over on the other side of town — 15 Rue Jean Cresp, 06400 Cannes, France. Less convenient because it’s a 25-minute walk to the Palais, but there’s some kind of bus service and rent-a-bikes so let’s see what happens.
When They Were Kings
Sydney Pollack and Robert Redford collaborated on seven commendable films over a 24-year period — This Property Is Condemned (’66), Jeremiah Johnson (’72), The Way We Were (’73), Three Days of the Condor (’75), The Electric Horseman (’79), Out of Africa (’85), Havana (’90).
There’s no question that the top three and the hottest streak happened between ’71 and ’75 — a four-year period that gave birth to Jeremiah Johnson, The Way We Were and Three Days of the Condor. Which of these are the best? It’s a close tie between Condor and TWWW. I’ve always leaned towards Condor because I can’t stand Bradford Dillman‘s WASPy character…literally chalk on a blackboard whenever he appears.
In these seven films Redford is “always the same character,” Pollack told Charlie Rose in ’93. “To me he’s a throwback to the actors I was nuts about when I was growing up and going to movies. A real classical, traditional, old-fashioned movie star who was very, very redolent of some kind of American essence, if you will. Very much a part of the American landscape. Heroic in a kind of understated way.
“And I was really fascinated with [the realization[ that all of the characters he played in these films are the same character. He’s gotten older and older and older and gone to different places…sometimes he’s out west, sometimes he’s in Africa, sometimes in New York, sometimes in Cuba…but he’s the same character.
“Number one, he’s a man who doesn’t want to give up any of himself in order to have a relationship…which costs him severely [as] he’s always alone, ultimately. And number two, he doesn’t want to live in a society in which he has to subjugate his own individual needs for the purposes of some collective authority. So he’s usually on the edge of an uncivilized airier territory. It’s why he’s a mountain man…it’s why he’s in Africa. A guy who believes it’s possibly to have relationships but doesn’t really understand what he has to personally give up…an individualist in the sort of real, generic, basic sense of the word.”
The Don Logan Bolt and the Buzz
The special joys of what the HE lifestyle used to be on a year-round basis for nearly 20 years…”it’s not about the money…it’s the charge, it’s the bolt, it’s the buzz, it’s the sheer fuck-off’edness of it all…am I right?”…this kind of bracing, half-mad, snorting, surging life…the laughs and encounters, the luscious flavors and intrigues, the traveling and the airports at dawn and the cavernous European train stations, the occasional set visits, cool parties, subway intrigues, Academy screenings, small screenings, all-media screenings, press junkets, visiting the homes of friends near and far, noisy restaurants, walking the crowded streets of Rome, London, Paris and Hanoi, writing in crowded cafes, hitting the occasional bar with a pally or two, the aroma of exotic places and the hundreds upon hundreds of little things that just happen as part of the general hurly-burly…”
Female (28) School Shooter
Seven are dead from a mass shooting at the Covenant School, an elementary school on the outskirts of Nashville. The cops are saying that the shooter was a female in her teens, armed with two assault-style rifles and a handgun. Three students and three faculty members are dead along with the shooter. When the officers got to the second level of the school, they saw a female shooter, apparently in her teens, and they drilled her right quick.
98% of mass shooters have been men, according to The Violence Project.
If This Recent Freeway Accident…
…had been featured in John Wick: Chapter Four, I would have suspended my disdain and said “okay, not bad, impressive…especially the part with the
Romantic Foolishness on Horseback
In a 7.27.12 N.Y. Times essay, director Alex Cox (Repo Man) went to bat for Kirk Douglas and Dalton Trumbo‘s Lonely Are The Brave (’62).
“It’s hard to imagine a film as radical or pessimistic [as this one] being made today,” he wrote. “Douglas’s lead character Jack Burns refuses to carry ID or listen to reason. He disrespects the power company by cutting its barbed-wire fences; the county jail, by breaking out; the sheriff, whose manhunt he eludes; the military-industrial complex, whose helicopter he shoots down; and us, the viewers, who — when the lights go up or the DVD ends — return to a life played mainly by the rules.
“Remarkably for a low-budget western, Lonely Are the Brave poses uneasy questions about the idea, and value, of heroism,” Cox concluded.
All my life I’ve been telling people that Lonely Are The Brave is one of Douglas’s finest films, and that it certainly contains one of his best performances. I told Douglas this when I interviewed him 41 years ago in Laredo, Texas, and he agreed without hesitation. I actually first said this to him a month or so earlier during a press meet-and=greet at Elaine’s, which Bobby Zarem had arranged.
I respect Lonely Are The Brave for what it does right. I love the plainness and simplicity of it. I love Walter Matthau‘s performance as the sheriff who gets what Jack Burns (or the Burns metaphor) is basically about, and who sympathizes with him. I love widescreen black-and-white photography by Philip Lathrop (Experiment in Terror, Days of Wine and Roses, Point Blank). And early on there’s a very well-handled scene between Burns and an ex-girlfriend, played by Gena Rowlands.
But Burns is too much for me these days. He’s such a romantic fool, a stubborn nine year-old, a middle-aged guy who never thinks farther than the next job, the next pretty girl in a bar, the next shot of rye, the well-being of his horse. He’s basically just swaggering around and saying “fuck it…I’m just not one of those guys who thinks practically about anything…fact is, I’m a romantic construct…a metaphor for the last sentimental cowboy battling the encroachments of civilization.”
I still like Lonely Are The Brave, mind. But not as much as I used to.
How Many Days Does It Take?
…to fully examine who was primarily at fault in a ski-slope collision that happened seven years ago (2.26.16)? Alleged victim Terry Sanderson, now 76, waited almost three years to sue Gwyneth Paltrow for $3.1 million, claiming she wham-slammed into him on a Deer Valley ski slope, breaking four ribs and knocking him cold before “bolting” down the hill.
We all want Gwynneth to lose this case…please.
Only Clayton Davis, Ultimate “Casablanca” Authority, Can Clear This Up
@VarietyArchives Jan 14, 1942 pic.twitter.com/4Ik9gzohce
— Steven Gaydos (@HighSierraMan) March 25, 2023
On 11.26.12, IndieWire‘s Oliver Lyttleton filed the following: “One of cinema’s most enduring urban legends is that Ronald Reagan was originally cast as Rick in the project. In fact, it was never true, but there is at least fair basis for the rumors. Reagan was named, along with Ann Sheridan (Angels With Dirty Faces) and Dennis Morgan (River’s End) in a studio press release as taking the lead roles in the project in early 1942.
“But in fact, none were actually involved. Having been called up to active army duty after Pearl Harbor, Reagan had been ruled out. He was, however, seemingly mentioned by publicists along with Sheridan and Morgan in an attempt to keep their names out there. George Raft also famously turned the project down, but again, the truth of that is in doubt.
“The studio’s records suggest that Bogart had always been producer Hal Wallis‘ first choice for the part, though Jack Warner may have preferred Raft. There were other actors considered for other parts, though. Hedy Lamarr — who also starred in “Algiers” — was mentioned for the role of Ilsa, but MGM wouldn’t release her from her contract (Lamarr went on to play the role in a 1944 radio adaptation opposite Alan Ladd as Rick). French actress Michele Morgan (Le Quaid des brumes) did test for the part, but RKO wanted a whopping $55,000 to loan her to Warners, so the studio went for Bergman as David O. Selznick was asking half as much money for her, so long as Warners would lend him Olivia de Haviland in exchange.”
Zero Perspective
Pretty mucb every panting admirer of John Wick: Chapter Four is aroused by the logistics of making it…magnificent visual dynamic, breathtaking Parisian backdrops, magnificent set dressings, brilliant choreographic energy, a relentless violent ballet, etc.
None of them are addressing what the film actually is…what it’s saying…what it actually amounts to.
Bizarre Murder In Wilton
A highly unusual and disturbing thing happened in bucolic Wilton on the morning of Tuesday, 3.21, or five days ago. A 39 year-old married guy was stabbed to death by a 31 year-old nutbag neighbor. The victim’s name was Arinzechukwu “Red” Ukachukwu (tough pronounce), and the killer was and is Sebastian Andrews, a 31 year-old guy who was living with his father and an older brother on Wilton’s Indian Hill Road.
The victim and his wife, Alisha Lager, bought their home “after the pandemic,” according to a toothless story by Hearst Media Group’s Peter Yankowski. Lager is left to care for their two-year-old son.
I found an attractive, magic-hour photo of the couple on Lager’s Facebook page. The victim, the assailant and Lager — all Millennials.
Yankowski: “Born on 1.12.84, Ukachukwu was a creative entrepreneur, musician and a tech wizard. He was raised in Brooklyn by parents who were active in the Nigerian community. He attended private schools and then Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts. In 2005 he graduated from the University of Albany with a degree in economics.”
Fox61’s Matt Caron reported that at last Wednesday’s hearing Andrews asked to speak and was advised by his attorney, Kevin Black, not to say anything. The state’s attorney said that “there appears to be some sort of psychological issue involved.”
The arrest warrant reports that Andrews alleged that he found Ukachukwu “trespassing on [his father’s] property several times.” This appears to be an unsubstantiated claim.
Compounded with the “psychological issue,” facts suggests that the killing was some kind of bizarre racial hate crime, perhaps in a vein vaguely similar to the 2020 killing of Ahmaud Arbery. Who stabs a neighbor with a kitchen knife and then drags his body into a garage and then takes a shower and calmly waits for the cops to arrive?
The crime was reported by Andrews’ father, who saw the killing happen in real time. Nobody has spoken to him, nor has anyone explored if his now-jailed son had some kind of social media history. I poked around and found nothing.