I’d honestly forgotten that legendary movie composer, conductor and multi-Oscar-winner Alfred Newman composed the 20th Century Fox fanfare theme, and then expanded it by a few bars when CinemaScope came along in ’53. You’d think I’d know this cold, but whatever.
Newman’s scores won nine Oscars, but there are relatively few (Gunga Din, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Wuthering Heights, Foreign Correspondent, The Snake Pit, Twelve O’Clock High, Anastasia, the musical ornamentation of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Carousel) that have really reached inside and moved me.
As for Newman’s overture sequence for How To Marry A Milionaire (a reboot of his 1946 “Street Scene” music), it’s fair to observe that he borrowed heavily from George Gershwin. The overture sequence seems strange by today’s standards, especially for a prelude to a middle-range comedy about gold-diggers. But he was quite the composer-maestro, and served as 20th Century Fox’s music honcho for 20 years.
Alfred Newman was the godfather of the Newman musical family — brother of Lionel and Emil, uncle of pop troubador-poet Randy, father of composers David and Thomas Newman.
Robert Pattinson’s career has obviously been damaged by this. Clearly he needs to sit down and watch Point Blank or, you know, a couple of ‘60s Steve McQueen films. Does the man have any self-respect AT ALL? Talk about totalemasculation.
It’s not the baggy kilt (although it looks awful — the hemline of kilts should always be above the knees) as much as the heavy brown velour jacket with the ridiculous zipper and absurd elephant collar.
This photo is a metaphor about life on Planet Neptune. Surrounded by effete bumble bee assistants with ties to envelope-pushing fashion designers, famous actors live in separate realms and have no fundamental sense of street reality.
“I don’t see how the Academy can penalize Andrea Riseborough because her friends and supporters have chosen to utilize [social media] platforms to champion a film or performance, especially when there is no evidence that they disparaged anyone else in the process. In the United States of America, we call this ‘free speech.’
“And to me, it’s particularly understandable why Riseborough’s friends and supporters adopted this approach. All of her higher-profile competitors who ended up not nominated on Tuesday — including Jessica Chastain for The Good Nurse (Netflix), Olivia Colman for Empire of Light (Searchlight), Viola Davis for The Woman King (Sony), Danielle Deadwyler for Till (UAR), Jennifer Lawrence for Causeway (Apple), Rooney Mara for Women Talking (UAR), Margot Robbie for Babylon (Paramount), Anya Taylor-Joy for The Menu (Searchlight) and Emma Thompson for Good Luck to You, Leo Grande (Searchlight) — had way more money spent on their behalf by the studios distributing their films.
“Riseborough’s friends and supporters had to act scrappier because they, unlike their competitors, didn’t have the resources NOT to.
“Christina Ricci: ‘So it’s only the films and actors that can afford the campaigns that deserve recognition? Feels elitist and exclusive and frankly very backward to me.’
“But beyond that, I think that the Academy should show a little faith in its own members. Riseborough’s friends and supporters didn’t have some magical potion that compelled other Academy members to vote for something, in the privacy of their own homes, that they didn’t actually like. They just mobilized voters to watch the movie so that they could, well, consider the performance at the center of it. And apparently, once voters did, they — like the critics whose raves propelled To Leslie to a 97 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes — were sold.”
Ringo Starr‘s version of Buck Owens‘ “Act Scrappier” is not purchasable, and is not on YouTube or Spotify.
Tom Verlaine, the Television singer-guitarist and all-around antiheroic late ‘70s punk icon, has passed at the definitely-too-young age of 73 — I’m sorry.
I saw Television play somewhere in Manhattan in the winter or spring of ’77. You might assume that the venue was CBGB, where I saw Patti Smith and Wendy O. Williams perform, but I honestly can’t remember. (I’ve actually seen Smith perform four times — CBGB, Westport Country Playhouse, Paris, L.A.’s Roxy). I felt throttled by Television’s punk metallic whateverism, but they were also the first band that made me feel like I’d somehow missed something, like I already was behind the times.
I bought “Marquee Moon“, but I didn’t like it enough to buy “Adventure“. I dropped out.
And by the way, the fact that in voting for the Oscar nominations, Academy voters didn’t automatically default to TillDanielleDeadwyler (completely deserving) and ViolaDavis (less so). Deadwyler aside they seemed to go more for merit than equity. This suggests that the French terror climate, which was going full guillotine two or three years ago, is gradually ebbing.
HE: “That’s not to say that Deadwyler wasn’t excellent in Till…she absolutely was and certainly merited a nomination, and probably would’ve landed one if only Michelle Williams had come to her senses and realized that her Fabelmans character (‘Ma Spielberg’) is an eccentric supporting character.”
Friendo: “Deadwyler’s performance in Till is good but overrated. There’s something too stentorian about it. And you, my friend, have seriously underrated Riseborough’s performance and To Leslie itself. You’ve said that you don’t like to spend two hours with that kind of character. But with all due respect, I don’t fully understand that, or at all chime with it.”
HE: “In Tender MerciesRobert Duvall does four or five minutes of drunken depravity and 110 or 115 minutes of gradual recovery. In To Leslie, Riseborough does a FULL HOUR’s worth of drunken depravity and then 45 or 50 minutes of gradual recovery. We get the depravity, guys! It’s a skipping vinyl record. What do we derive from an hour of depravity that we wouldn’t get just as fully from, say, 5, 10 or 15 minutes of the stuff? Enough already.”
Friendo: “Nope. Being a depraved drunk is much more dramatically interesting than being a pious person in recovery. Tender Mercies is, and always will be, a watchable but not ultimately all that interesting or even moving a film. It’s an austere art Hallmark card. I worship Robert Duvall but would take The Apostle a thousand times over Tender Mercies. The piety of that movie is precisely that we don’t see his character, Mac Sledge, drunk enough. That’s why Tender Mercies is the Oscar winner as glorified Sunday-school lesson.
HE: “I don’t like pious Christians either, but I felt safe and nurtured and taken care of by Tender Mercies. Andrea Riseborough’s performance, on the other hand, was a barefoot tour through Dante’s Inferno. Thanks but no thanks! I know ALL about being a drunk, thanks. Lessons from my father as well as own vodka-and-lemonade experiences from the early to mid ’90s.”
Today’s (9.28) discussion explored the woke pushback (i.e., Clayton Davis, Matt Belloni, Chinonye Chukwu and friends) against the surprisingly successful Andrea Riseborough Best Actress campaign, which will reverberate around for a while. I think it’s cool for a “little engine that could” movie to try to promote itself against the big entrenched distributors and their well-funded campaigns. Sasha doesn’t agree but there’s the fun of kicking things around. Here’s the link.
And here, as a bonus, is a 2.23.23 chat that somehow got lost in the shuffle.
1.27.23 press release: “A stunning 4K restoration of Ang Lee’s masterful Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon will open in theatres on Friday, 2.17. More than a breathtaking martial arts film, CTHD is a tragic romance and a touchstone of female empowerment.”
I loved Crouching Tiger and all, but it’s no secret there are more ardent fans of martial-arts movies than myself. I like aerial chop-socky the way I like musical numbers in a ’50s Arthur Freed musical — visually exciting and beautifully performed, etc., but if there’s too much exposure to restricted worlds of this sort you can start to go a bit nuts. Sublime choreography, Chinese mythology, inspired cutting…I get it but alright already.
Makers of idiotic steroid action films have been ignoring the basic laws of physics for a good 20 years or so, particularly since the wowser debut of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (’00) and the use of “wire guys” to allow heroes to leap anywhere from anything and land in a cool way like Superman.
In the HE book there is only one way to go with action films, and that is the path of mostly believable, bare-bones, “this could actually happen in the real world” physicality adhered to in Nicholas Winding Refn‘s Drive, Steven Soderbergh‘s Haywire and Peter Yates‘ Bullitt. All the rest is bullshit and you know it.
35 years ago Lethal Weapon used a funny jumping-off-a-building gag. Ragged-edge cop Mel Gibson is sent to the top of a four-story building in West Hollywood to talk an unstable guy out of making a suicide leap. Gibson winds up cuffing himself to the guy and jumping off the building, and they’re both falling to their deaths…not. They land on one of those huge inflated tent-sized bags…whomp!…that cops and firemen use to save people. All is well.
Flash forward to another jumping-off-a-building scene in Brad Bird and Tom Cruise‘s Mission: impossible 4 — Ghost Protocol (’11). An American operative is being chased over a rooftop by baddies in Budapest. He fires some rounds, kills a couple of guys, and then escapes by leaping off the building, continuing to shoot as he falls four or five stories to the pavement below. He’s saved, however, when he lands on a modest air mattress that’s about one-tenth the size of Lethal Weapon‘s tent-sized bag.
Where did this miracle air mattress come from? We’re not told. In what physical realm does a guy leap backwards four stories onto an air mattress that’s a little bit larger than a king-sized bed and live? I’ll tell you what realm. The realm of Mission: Impossible 4 — Ghost Protocol and its brethren.
Big-budget acton movies have ignored the laws of what happens when you jump or fall from any kind of height for so long nobody cares any more. You can do any stupid thing you want — jump off any building or bridge or moving airplane — and you can land safely, and audiences will still buy their tickets and eat their popcorn. Nothing matters.
Talk about your social media endorsements! Whoda thunk that J.J. Abrams is in cahoots with Sarah Polley and more precisely Women Talking Up A Storm In A Barn?
If Hollywood Elsewhere had Roger Durling‘s job as director of the Santa Barbara Int’l Film Festival, right now I’d be doing everything I could to add Andrea Riseborough to the SBIFF Virtuosos panel. She has to be included…no debate!
The current Virtuosos lineup includes Austin Butler (Elvis), Kerry Condon (The Banshees of Inisherin), Danielle Deadwyler (Till), Nina Hoss (Tár), Stephanie Hsu (Everything Everywhere All At Once), Jeremy Pope (The Inspection), Ke Huy Quan (Everything Everywhere All At Once), and Jeremy Strong (Armageddon Time).
The Academy’s statement, by the way, is merely about straddling the gulf between (a) ass-covering and (b) placating the conversation.
Read Pete Hammond’s excellent “Much Ado About Nothing” assessment.
The only February ’23 releases I’m vaguely looking forward to are M. Night Shyamalan‘s Knock at the Cabin (2.3), Steven Soderbergh‘s Magic Mike’s Last Dance (2,10) and Elizabeth Banks‘ Cocaine Bear (2.24), although the premise of the latter seems repulsive — deriving laughs and thrills from the accidental torture murder of an innocent bear, which actually happened in the ’80s.
I’m told that Benjamin Caron‘s Sharper might be worth a watch. I’m not looking forward to Neil Jordan‘s Marlowe (2.3), as it allegedly stinks, but I’ll see it regardless.
…to post this Sandra Bullock pull quote within Jessica Pressler’s Vanity Fair profile of Channing Tatum (“Magic Man”). I mean, that is a really terrible observation. I don’t care if Bullock said this with sincerity. It just reeks of bullshit.
The article is about promoting Magic Mike’s Last Dance (Warner Bros., 2.10.23), in which Tatum revives his most iconic role. He also produced. Steven Soderbergh directed.
It was reported last April that Tatum had fired MMLD costar Thandiwe Newton during production in London. It apparently had something to do with a fierce (if seemingly ridiculous) argument that Tatum and Newton had gotten into over the then-recent Will Smith Oscar slap. Tatum replaced Newton with Salma Hayek. I naturally expected Pressler to explore what actually happened and maybe deliver some blow-by-blow, but nope.
