Initially posted on 4.21.21: After re-watching Sam Peckinpah and Steve McQueen's The Getaway ('72) a couple of nights ago, I'm all the more certain that Roger Donaldson's 1994 remake, in which Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger took on the same Doc and Carol McCoy roles that McQueen and Ali McGraw played 22 years earlier, is a smoother, more involving watch.
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I missed Alice Rohrwacher‘s La Chimera at last year’s Cannes Film Festival and then again in Telluride eight months ago, but I finally saw it at the Jacob Burns on Sunday night and man, it has a real unwashed, hand-to-mouth, transportational spirit thing going on.
It’s about the ancient past (Etruscan artifacts) being dug up in Tuscany and sold and exploited by lowlife scruffs, and how this all shakes down in a moralistic or fable-like sense. It doesn’t pay off emotionally, or at least not in a way that I recognize, but it almost does. And it definitely feels whole by the end — I can say that for sure.
Rohrwacher, her dp Hélene Louvart (who mostly shoots within 1.37 and 1.66 aspect ratios), editor Nelly Quettier and the mostly tramp-like, generally unattractive cast (except for the radiant Carol Duarte, a Brazilian actress playing a kind of Gelsomina- or Guilietta Masina-like innocent, and the white-haired, eternally beautiful Isabella Rosellini)…Rohrwacher and friends are definitely up to something here.
Tall, pale-faced, unshaven Josh O’Connor plays Arthur, a kind of artifact whisperer — a filthy British-born bilingual fellow who smokes all the time, wears dirty clothing and ugly footwear and shuffles around with one of the worst haircuts in movie history.
But Arthur is about more than just stinky socks and rancid cigarette breath — he can sense or smell where Etruscan artifacts (sculpture, goblets, statues, frescoes) are buried, and so most of the film is about Josh guiding a band of tomb robbers on illegal digs. Their findings are sold to a sinister art dealer (Alba Rohrwacher, the director’s older sister), and that’s how they make ends meet.
La Chimera is about hundreds upon hundreds of spirit elements coexisiting in a hungry, dirt-poor realm without showers or deodorants or laundromats…the soiling and pirating of ancient remnants by low-life scuzzies…buried Etruscan pottery and tiled floors and erotic figurines…soil whispers, dusty ghosts.
Ethical conflicts abound, of course, but what matters is treating the past with care and reverence and allowing others to bask in its beauty. I don’t see what’s so bad about selling found history. As long as the artifacts are respected and not hoarded, what’s the problem?
It took me a good half hour before I got past O’Connor’s smelly feet and disgusting cigarette smoking and began to realize where the film is headed — before it hit me that it’s a casting a kind of underclass spell that really takes hold…that it’s a La Strada-like adventure or dirt poem, a half-fantasy or fairy tale about wretched refuse types looking to survive as best they can and not fretting about ethical issues…about digging up Etruscan pots and cups and marble statues and you-name-it…poor folks sifting through soil in Tuscany’s hidden regions (i.e., the kind that tourists rarely gaze upon).
Talk about a curious turn-on mechanism but this is Rohrwacher’s signature…she takes all kind of disparate, haunting, non-hygenic elements and throws them together like a salad maker…nothing is the least bit glammy or posed or polished or conventionally alluring…everything is half-assed, raggedy-assed…the sublime merged with the ugly.
La Chimera features one of the ugliest coastline super-sized factories I’ve ever seen in my life — it reminded me of a coastline factory in Piombino, a working-class town where tourists catch the ferry to Elba.
La Chimera has a real sense of spirit. Rohrwacher (her first name is pronounced Ahh-LEE-chuh) really goes for the off-handed, the weird, the gunky, the untidy, the muddy. It’s not exactly pleasant, but is kind of wonderful all the same.
A 4.16 Daily Mail article tells me that as far as Sydney Sweeney is concerned, producer Carol Baum (Dead Ringers, Father of the Bride, The Good Girl) and Hollywood Elsewhere park their cars in the same garage.
It’s nice to be agreed with by persons of taste and accomplishment, but when Baum asked her USC students to explain Sweeney’s appeal not one of them had the courage to say “formidable rack”?

HE’s 24-hour Manhattan sojourn included (a) a last-minute urge to attend a Friday afernoon press screening of Sasquatch Sunset, (b) a subsequent decision to bypass Sasquatch and stick to the original plan of catching a restored version of Claude Sautet‘s Classe tous risques (’60) at the Film Forum, (c) a realization that Sautet’s film, a somber, low-key depiction of a criminal sociopath (Lino Ventura) grappling with betrayal within a demimonde of old pals, is too talky for its own good, (d) a 7 pm Angelika press screening of Carol Doda Topless at the Condor, which was followed by a discussion session with co-directors Marlo McKenzie and Jonathan Parker, and (e) the blustery, bone-chilling air causing a fair amount of discomfort and a firm conviction that the approach of spring really needs to get into gear.

I’ll soon be catching a 3.22 screening of Jonathan Parker and Marlo McKenzie‘s Carol Doda Topless At The Condor. Due respect to the life and legend of the late Carol Doda (i.e., the first-ever topless club dancer), but I’m mostly interested in the bizarre death of Condor Club manager Jimmy Ferrozzo. It happened right around Thanksgiving of 1983. The “beefy” 40-year-old Ferrozzo was crushed to death by a white, hydraulically-lifted piano while he was doing the deed with one of the club’s strippers, 23 year-old Theresa Hill.
HE wants Poor Things‘ Emma Stone to win the Best Actress Oscar on Sunday night, and if not Stone then Anatomy of a Fall‘s Sandra Huller…please.
I’m just looking forward to a day in which identity won’t count for that much in Oscar voting. If you dip into your soul and bring the stuff that matters, then you’re eligible to be nominated and perhaps even likely to win. Quality, quality, quality of delivery.
Academy members voting to reject commonplace prejudice or blanket dismissals in decades or centuries past is primarily about them and not the actor or performance in question. Wokesters have been playing this trendy little game for six or seven years now, and it’s time to shut it down.
When the day comes that quality is valued more than equity or virtue-signalling, actors like Lily Gladstone will have to sink or swim based on their own chops, instincts and abilities…whether or not they can bring the necessary craft, depth and soul…a performance constructed from deep within or not at all.
Does anyone think that Da’Vine Joy Randolph‘s locked-in Best Supporting Actress win has anything whatsoever to do with identity? Okay, maybe a little but she’s been winning all season long because of how good she is in Alexander Payne‘s The Holdovers…period. I knew she was a slam-dunk Oscar nominee a half-hour after the film had begun screening in Telluride’s Werner Herzog theatre. I leaned over and muttered this to Sasha Stone.
Does anyone think that May December‘s Charles Melton was an early Best Supporting Actor favorite because he rode an identity horse (South Korean lineage + being a symbolic stand-in for underaged victims of sexual assault)? You’d better believe it, and thank God that nag gave out on him.
Does anyone believe that Sayonara‘s Miyoshi Umeki won her Best Supporting Actress Oscar over identity, way the hell back in 1958? She won because she played a selfless, devotional wife who died (along with Air Force husband Red Buttons**) due to racial prejudice. Plus her performance was significantly more affecting than the ones given by Carolyn Jones (The Bachelor Party), Elsa Lanchester (Witness for the Prosecution), Hope Lange (Peyton Place) and Diane Varsi (Peyton Place).
I realize that Gladstone’s identity campaign has stirred a sizable army of woke gladhanders and that the odds favor her winning, but this shit has to stop. It really does.
From Brian Rowe‘s “Five Reasons Why Emma Stone will still win Best Actress for Poor Things“, a Gold Derby articled dated 3.8.24.
Posted by World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy on 3.6.24: “Can Gladstone win the Oscar despite not being nominated by BAFTA and her role being a supporting turn? She appears in less than 1/3 of Killers runtime (56 minutes), whereas Stone is practically in every scene of Poor Things. If Gladstone had been campaigned in the Supporting category then she’d already have that Oscar in the bag.”
** Buttons’ performance resulted in a Best Supporting Actor win.
In HE’s judgment, 25 exceptional, high-quality films were released in 1959. (There were another 9 or 10 that were good, decent, not bad.) By today’s standards, here’s how the top 25 rank:
1. Billy Wlder‘s Some Like It Hot (released on 3.29.59)
2. Alfred Hitchcock‘s North by Northwest (released on 7.1.59)
3. John Ford‘s The Horse Soldiers (released on 6.12.59)
4. George Stevens‘ The Diary of Anne Frank (released 3.18.59)
5. Stanley Kramer‘s On The Beach (released on 12.17.59)
6. William Wyler‘s Ben-Hur (released on 11.18.59)
7. Alain Resnais‘s Hiroshima, Mon Amour (released in France on 6.10.59)
8. Lewis Milestone‘s Pork Chop Hill (released on 5.29.59)
9. Otto Preminger‘s Anatomy of a Murder (released on 7.2.59)
10. Francois Truffaut‘s The 400 Blows (released in France on 5.4.59)
11. Howard Hawks‘ Rio Bravo (released on 4.4.59)
12. Sidney Lumet‘s The Fugitive Kind (released on 4.14.59)
13. Tony Richardson‘s Look Back in Anger (released on 9.15.59)
14. Grigory Chukhray‘s Ballad of a Soldier (released on 12.1.59)
15. Robert Bresson‘s Pickpocket (released on 12.16.59)
16. Robert Wise‘s Odds Against Tomorrow (released on 10.15.59)
17. Delbert Mann‘s Middle of the Night (released on 6.17.59)
18. Robert Stevenson‘s Darby O’Gill and the Little People (released on 6.26.59)
19. Fred Zinnemann‘s The Nun’s Story (released on 6.18.59)
20. Guy Hamilton‘s The Devil’s Disciple (released on 8.20.59)
21. Roger Vadim‘s Les Liaisons Dangereuses (released on 9.9.59)
22. Richard Fleischer‘s Compulsion (released on 4.1.59)
23. Val Guest‘s Expresso Bongo (released on 12.11.59)
24. Carol Reed‘s Our Man in Havana (released in England on 12.30.59 / stateside on 1.27.60)
25. J. Lee Thompson‘s Tiger Bay (released in March 1959)
Bonus:
Charles Barton‘s The Shaggy Dog (released on 3.19.59).

I was amazed how cranked and excited I was by yesterday’s Super Bowl duel. I haven’t felt so crazily absorbed by a game of any kind, ever.
And — this is an Adam Carolla thing — I was reminded again about how wonderfully un-woke the sporting world is…no equity, no race bullshit, no DEI, no POCs complaining about not being shown the proper deference or accusing whiteys of fucking them over.
The players last night were on the field because they were good, period. They had proven their worth during the just-concluded season and were totally trusted by their coaches to perform well and to their utmost, and that’s all anyone cared about.
What’s that expression again? Oh, yeah, right — “merit over equity.”
Another thing about sporting competitions is that everyone accepts is that one team or another (or one golfer or tennis player or whomever) is going to lose, and that’s that. Life is hard, competition is demanding and certain competitors are going to feel gutted when they lose. But that’s life.
Imagine if Hollywood and the Oscars were to operate with this attitude. Talent matters! Only the best! Industry politics and high school popularity sentiments have always been a thing but equity standards are a whole different game —- an obstruction, a corrective.
Ayo Edebiri to Nikki Haley: “I was just curious, what would you say was the main cause of the Civil War? And do you think it starts with an S and ends with a lavery?”
Haley to Edebiri: “Yep, I probably should have said that the first time.”
Flipping the Romeo and Juliet tragedy into a joyful self-discovery trans cuitural grooming thing.
I’m furious at Megyn Kelly for her friendly coverage of Donald Trump, but I feel complete relaxation with Adam Carolla and I don’t care how the HE commentariat responds to this.
Key quote #1: “All roads lead to narcissism.” Key analogy: Passion fruit iced tea vs. regular iced tea.
Max Martin‘s “& Juliet” delivers an upfront queer trans makeover and sell-job and not a mere gay subplot along these lines.
A pro-level B’way entertainment, of course, but at the same time a kind of spirited cultural indoctrination session for the tourist rube audience by way of a “join us in celebrating who and what we are” Tin Pan Alley progressive (LGBTQ) agenda, which goes hand in hand, incidentally, with the current “Some Like It Hot” musical.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_(musical)?wprov=sfti1#
Billy Wilder’s 1959 screen comedy, ahead of its time in terms of acknowledging cross-dressing and gender behaviors while being strictly hetero, was hetero Broadway musicalized as “Sugar” back in ‘72 — now the same story has been converted into an ecstatic celebration of gender fluidity and queer identity and yaddah yaddah.
https://somelikeithotmusical.com/
Harvey Fierstein’s “Kinky Boots,” which I caught 11 years ago, sold a roughly similar bill of goods.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinky_Boots_(musical)?wprov=sfti1


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