…means that Eloise, our lonely, bewildered protagonist (Thomasin McKenzie), will, once she steps inside Cafe de Paris, run into all kinds of celebrities and social climbers of the moment, including, one imagines, David Hemmings‘ photographer (“Thomas”) from Blow-Up or costar Terrence Stamp when young and drifting into his mystical phase. Or the Kray brothers.
Thunderball opened in London on 12.29.65, so the timeline works for early ’66.
It’s too bad that Wright went for a horror angle. Imagine all the stories and situations that could happen within such a realm. Horror drags everything down to its own level. The message seems to be “don’t go back in time….it’s horrible!”
The U.S. release of Last Night in Soho is on 10.22.21, and in England on 10.29.21.
The other day Paul Schraderposted that photo of his 20-year-old self from the spring of ’67. Given the current mindset of the community of friends and collaborators that he runs with, Schrader felt obliged to disparage the rural-white-kid look that he had at the time.
Facebook: “This is [what] white living in Michigan can make you and there was nobody to say, ‘Man, you’re white'”
As in “man, you’re hopeless…that look on your face, that smug Columbia T-shirt….you need to get out in the world and rumble it up and suffer some hard knocks and see what’s what.” Which all young people need to do.
The under-implication wasn’t just that the Schrader of ’67 needed to learn and grow and mature — the implication was that his Michigan whitebread background was an expression of inherent blindness and perhaps worse. He was a flawed human being because of his skin shade, his family heritage.
Which, of course, is the current view everywhere — white folk are inherently rotten apples unless proved or re-educated otherwise. And so I just posted the following (which no Hollywood liberal-progressive would dare share in a workplace):
I went searching for Sam Waterston‘s death eyes in this scene from the director’s cut of Oliver Stone‘s Nixon (’95), and in so doing was reminded of how good this Helms-vs.-Nixon confrontation scene really is. Perfect focused and haunted performances from Anthony Hopkins and especially Waterston — God, he’s so much better at conveying chilly remove than caring and compassion.
I wasn’t always a self-employed journalistic brand. In my 20s and 30s I was hustling jobs and leads like everyone else, and so I naturally put a lot of care and effort into maintaining a handsome, well-ordered professional resume. I might have been dying inside, but the better the resume looked, the better I felt.
I stopped thinking about resumes 30 years ago, thank God, but now, thanks to the terror of Soviet Millennial wokester blacklisting, I’m thinking it might be wise to step back into the resume pit. Just to be on the safe side.
The paywall thing (launching soon) will generate income and I expect that award-season ads will happen next fall (as they did earlier this year), but who knows if things will work as planned? As far as maintaining the relatively modest Jeff-and-Tatiana lifestyle is concerned, I mean.
So I’m creating a new resume and will begin to sniff around for opportunities. It’s like being 33 again…love it! Life is a barrel of excitement, never a dull moment, etc.
“Dear Prospective Employer: I’ve been a hotshot Hollywood journalist-columnist-critic for three decades now, and I’m proud and satisfied to say that my professional life has flourished during this period. But lately the jackals have been circling and taking little flesh nips and drawing blood, and so after some reflection and meditation,” etc.
I wrote the following article in ’97 for the L.A. Times Syndicate, and re-posted it in October ’04 — two months after launching Hollywood Elsewhere:
Say what you will about Bliss, Lance Young’s film about love and sexuality that earned a 50% RT rating. But that housefly-on-the-fan shot is awesome.
“Young marrieds Craig Sheffer and Sheryl Lee are lying in bed and mulling over their troubled sex life. Lee’s psychological history is at the nub. One of her problems is a bug phobia — always scrubbing under the sink, hunting around for creepy-crawlies. Anyway, the camera rises up from their bed, climbing higher and higher until it comes to an overhead propeller fan. And we suddenly notice a fly sitting on one of the blades.
How did Young get the little bugger to just sit there, waiting for his big moment?
Answer: The fly had been placed in a freezer for five minutes just before Young yelled “action!”, and was thus too frozen to make any moves. And even if he wasn’t all but frozen stiff he would’ve failed, due to a thread of tungsten wire — thinner than a human hair — tied to the fly’s midsection.
The person who arranged all this was “fly wrangler” Anne Gordon, whose company, Annie’s Animal Actors, was hired by the Bliss shoot in Vancouver.
The Bliss fly is actually a flesh fly — the kind that feeds on meat, and is about two or three times larger than your average house fly. Gordon bought 100 to the set on shooting day but only used “about a dozen” to get the shot.
A different chilled fly was used for each take, she says, because it would be cruel — not to mention impractical — for the same fly to be sent back to the freezer after each shot. The optimum time to shoot a chilled fly is four minutes after the ice chest, she says. They’re usually warmed up and able to fly around after seven minutes.
Another way to get a fly to sit still is to “cover him with a special mixture of milk and honey,” says Mark Dumas of the Vancouver-based Creative Animal Talent. “That way it’ll stay there a while and groom itself.”
The overhead ceiling fan shot was “tough,” says Gordon, and not just because of fly-prep issues. She says she felt a bit awkward looking down at a couple doing a love scene all day. “They’re down in the bed doing their thing and I’m up on the ladder,” she says. “They hardly had anything on.”
From World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy: “[Herewith] a chart of the most likely films to make it to Cannes official competition in July. There have been a lot of pieces from the trades speculating inaccurately about some films. I’d rather be on the cautious side. Yes, last-minute changes by Fremaux and his selection committee can happen in the blink of an eye. However, as we speak, these are the titles with the best shot as of 5.17.21 (HE = exceptional HE interest):
Serious Contenders:
“The French Dispatch” (Wes Anderson) / HE
“Annette” (Leos Carax) / HE
“Ahed’s Knee” (Nadav Lapid)
“Memoria” (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
“Benedetta” (Paul Verhoeven) / HE
“Tromperie” (Arnaud Desplechin) / HE
“Tres Piani” (Nanni Moretti)
“Where is Anne Frank?” (Ari Folman)
“A Hero” (Asghar Farhadi) / HE
“Triangle of Sadness” (Ruben Östlund)
“Bergman Island” (Mia Hansen-Love) / HE
“Flag Day” (Sean Penn) /
“Nobody’s Hero” (Alain Guiraudie)
“Drive My Car” (Ryûsuke Hamaguchi)
“Petrov’s Flu” (Kirill Serebrennikov)
“Decision To Leave” (Park Chan-wook) / HE
“Another World” (Stephane Brizé)
“Paris, 13th District” (Jacques Audiard) / HE
“Titane” (Julia Ducournau) / HE
“The Tragedy of Macbeth” (Joel Coen) / HE
“In Front of Your Face” (Hong San-soo) / HE
If only Ruth Bader Ginsburg had stepped down in ’14 or ’15 and thereby allowed President Obama to nominate Merrick Garland (or someone similar) to fill her Supreme Court seat, we wouldn’t be in this mess. But she didn’t and here we are with Amy Coney Barrett sitting in Ginsburg’s chair, and Roe v. Wade, it appears, is about to be…well, not exactly struck down but diminished.
As I understand it, Roe v. Wade, which became law in 1973, said that states can’t outlaw abortions for any fetuses before they reach “fetal viability“, or roughly 23 or 24 weeks into a pregnancy.
Jesus, really? Roe says no abortions can be refused until after the fifth month and closer to five and a half? I somehow never quite absorbed this. If a woman decides against having a child, shouldn’t she have it aborted within a few weeks and certainly no later than two or three months, tops? Who waits five months to terminate a pregnancy? That’s fucked.
“The new case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, No. 19-1392, concerns a law enacted by the Republican-dominated Mississippi legislature that banned abortions if ‘the probable gestational age of the unborn human’ was determined to be more than 15 weeks.
“The statute included narrow exceptions for medical emergencies or ‘a severe fetal abnormality.’
“Lower courts said the law was plainly unconstitutional under Roe, which forbids states from banning abortions before fetal viability.
“Mississippi’s sole abortion clinic sued, saying the law ran afoul of Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 decision that affirmed Roe’s core holding.”
As I understand it, if the Supreme Court upholds Mississippi’s contested abortion law, the new reality would be that all abortions have to happen within 15 weeks. Honestly? That doesn’t sound all that crazy to me. A woman’s right to choose is assured — they’d simply have to abort no later than three and a half (nearly four) months into the pregnancy.
In the comment thread for “Five Things” (5.14), which was all about the superhack career of Richard Donner, someone mentioned The Omen (’76) and I jumped in with the following:
“The Omen is a good creepy film of its type. The best thing about it is Jerry Goldsmith‘s score. I would have drowned Damian after realizing what he is, but that’s me. I realize, of course, that unless Gregory Peck and Lee Remick remain in a denial cocoon for years on end there’s no movie.”
Because of that posting I re-watched this 1976 film last night, and almost immediately I was scolding myself for calling it “a good creepy film of its type.” It’s not — it’s actually a very stupid film that was made in a lazy, half-assed manner with mostly awful dialogue, and was burdened by idiotic plotting.
The Omen‘s success was based upon a general audience belief in mythical religious bullshit, and it launched itself upon the lore of The Exorcist (’73), which was and is a much better film. So please accept my apology for saying what I said. I don’t know what I was thinking.
With the exception of three good scenes — the nanny hangs herself during Damian’s birthday party, the dogs in the graveyard scene with Peck and David Warner, and Warner gets his head sliced off by a flying pane of glass — The Omen is a painfully mediocre effort.
Almost every scene summons the same reaction: “Why isn’t this better…why didn’t they rewrite the dialogue?…God, this wasn’t finessed at all.”
I came to really hate the tiny, beady eyes of that young actor who played Damian — Harvey Spencer Stephens (who’s now 51 years old).
The middle-aged, warlock-eyed priest who gets impaled by a falling javelin of some sort — why did he just stand there like a screaming idiot as he watched the rod plunge toward him?
Why didn’t Peck and Remick simply fire that awful demonic nanny (Billie Whitelaw)?
Why didn’t Peck just buy a pistol and shoot that demonic Rotweiler right between the eyes, and in fact shoot all the other Rotweilers in the graveyard?
As I mentioned Friday, The Omen depends upon Peck and Remick refusingtoconsidertheobvious during most of the running time. Refusing to reach for an umbrella, wear a raincoat or take shelter during a thunderstorm…that kind of idiocy.
During his career heyday (’45 to ’64) Peck mostly played one smart, restrained, rational-minded character after another. (His roles in Spellbound, Duel in the Sun and Moby Dick were the exceptions.) The Omen was the first time Peck was called upon to play a stuffed-shirt moron — a denialist of the first order. Okay, he starts to wake up during the final half-hour, but it’s truly painful to watch an actor known for dignity and rectitude and sensible behavior undermine the idea of intelligent assessment at every turn.
For some odd reason the footage of Rome made me almost weep with nostalgia for that city — I haven’t been there since ’17.
I could watch The Exorcist once a year for the rest of my life, but I’ll never watch another Omen film again…ever. I was truly angry at myself for wasting 111 minutes of my life.
In an interview with Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn, Robert De Niro spoke about his recently injured leg. “I tore my quad** somehow,” he said. “It’s just a simple stepping over something and I just went down. The pain was excruciating and now I have to get it fixed.
“But it happens, especially when you get older. You have to be prepared for unexpected things. But it’s manageable.”
De Niro said the injury wouldn’t affect his performance as bad-guy cattleman William Hale in Martin Scorsese‘s Killers of the Flower Moon, which is currently rolling. “[Hale is] pretty much a sedentary character in a way,” he said. “I don’t move around a lot, thank God. So we’ll manage. I just have to get the procedure done and keep it straight in a certain position and let it heal.”
And so the point of this riff: Please name the most vividly etched sedentary characters in the history of cinema, starting with Jabba the Hutt and moving on down. How about Orson Welles‘ Cardinal Woolsey in A Man For All Seasons (’66)? Or the supreme Martian commander in Invaders From Mars (green head, face of a Mexican woman, communicates with lizard-like pincers or tentacles)? Maybe the iron-lung guy in The Big Lebowski? Or William Hickey‘s Don Corrado in Prizzi’s Honor.
Only full sedentary characters qualify. Sidney Greenstreet sits like an iron Buddha statue 95% of the time in The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca, but now and then he gets up and walks into or out of a room — that’s a disqualifier.
Richard Rushfield‘s hard-boiled Ankler assessment of the maneuverings and backstories that led to the (temporary) death of the HFPA and the Golden Globes makes for excellent reading.
“It’s like a cheap murder mystery,” he analogizes, “in the small town where everyone had a motive.” Great line!
Key passage: “The HFPA last week issued their plan to overhaul the organization, the centerpiece of which was a commitment to ‘to fulfill the HFPA’s commitment to add at least 20 new members by August 2021 and increase membership by 50% in 18 months.’
“If the main objection on the table was the racial composition, 50% in 18 months seems like a pretty serious overhaul from where I sit. It’s a lot bigger and faster, proportionately, than the Academy transformed itself. This pledge was also accompanied by a timeline for new board elections, the adoption of new bylaws, etc. etc.
“All of which would seem to amount to just about a complete reworking of the entire group. I don’t recall the Academy, for instance, pledging that its entire board would step down.
“In response to this, the publicists’ letter was a complete dismissal that this represented change at all. So essentially they [seemed to be] demanding that the HFPA double [its] membership and the current members vote themselves out of control of the organization entirely within a year. A big ask! In the face of a pretty significant overhaul. Again, has any organization ever been asked to do that, short of criminal indictments and war crimes?”
The great actor, producer and director Norman Lloyd passed earlier today at age 106.
I was so taken by his performance as a blind but very skilled English professor in Curtis Hanson‘s In Her Shoes that I asked to chat with him. Two encounters happened, both in September ’05. We did a phoner, and then I was invited to take snaps at his Mandeville Canyon home. We talked for another hour or so.
Norman Lloyd, 90, is in only three scenes in In Her Shoes and is on screen maybe seven or eight minutes, but his performance is one of the most poignant notes in a film that has more than a few of them.
It’s not one of those burn-through-the-screen performances (along the lines of, say, Beatrice Straight‘s fight-with-Bill-Holden scene in Network). It’s more like a coaxer. You can sense Lloyd’s intellectual energy and zest for life despite his character’s withered state, and you can feel and admire the tenderness he shows to Maggie …tenderness mixed in with a little classroom discipline.
He plays a sightless retired college professor who prods Diaz’s Maggie character, who is dyslexic and can’t read a billboard slogan without stumbling, into reading poetry to him — specifically a poem about loss and emotional guardedness by Elizabeth Bishop.
At first Maggie is reluctant, then she agrees to read to him…slowly, almost painfully…I have a dyslexic friend and she doesn’t read this slowly…but she gradually improves.
Then Lloyd prods her into explaining what she thinks of the poem. She tries to duck this, but Lloyd — relying on skills from a lifetime of teaching — won’t let her.
This isn’t just the heart of the scene — it’s a pivotal scene in the film. It’s the moment when Maggie turns the corner and starts taking steps to be someone a little better…because she starts believing in her ability to see through to the core of things, and in the first-time-ever notion that she has a lot more to develop and uncover within herself.
I know how cliched it sounds to say a character “turns a corner” and so on, but sometimes these moments happen in life. You just have to be able to hear the little voice in the back of your head that says, “You’ve taken a small step…you’ve just moved along.”
From “Lisey’s Story” Wikipage (the Stephen King book, not the Pablo Larrain/J.J, Abrams miniseries): “The genesis was an incident in June 1999 in which King was hit by a van in Lovell, Maine, and seriously injured; while he was in the hospital, his wife Tabitha decided to redesign his studio. Coming home from the hospital and seeing his books and belongings in boxes, King saw an image of what his studio would look like after his death.”
The eight-parter starts on 6.4.21, concludes on 7.16.21.