“A Heterosexual Movie by Gregg Araki”

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My first viewing of Gregg Araki‘s The Doom Generation happened at Sundance ’95 — 28 years ago and change.

Three months later I was working under Andy Olstein and the late Robert Sam Anson at Los Angeles magazine, and we’d all decided to run a big-spread piece about the new neo-noir fashion in movies (The Usual Suspects, Natural Born Killers, Leaving Las Vegas, the year-old Pulp Fiction, Araki’s film). I was the designated talent wrangler, and so I persuaded Araki, Bryan Singer, Benicio del Toro, Elizabeth Shue, Lara Flynn Boyle and Don Murphy to pose for photos at Smashbox.

I mainly remember the sploogey sexual stuff in Araki’s film, which I rather liked or was at least aroused by. It was basically a kind of hit-and-miss, hot-and-heavy, three-way relationship thing between Rose McGowan, James Duval and Jonathon Schaech. (An actual menage a trois happens toward the end with McGowan being love-muscled by both guys simultaneously.) The plot involved felonies and being chased around Los Angeles. If you want the chapter and verse, read the Wiki synopsis. Heidi Fleiss (whom I had done a fair amount of reporting about for Entertainment Weekly) has a cameo.

Tagline: “A Heterosexual Movie by Gregg Araki.”

McGowan was 21 or thereabouts during filming. On 9.5.23 she’ll hit the big five-oh.

A new 4K Bluray of a director’s cut will pop sometime in mid April or thereabouts. The NYC premiere will happen on April 6 at BAM. the following day it will begin shoewing at Manhattan’s IFC theatre; other bookings will follow in other cities.

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Michael Fassbender In A Nancy Meyers Film!

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Michael Fassbender speaking to self during initial negotiations: “I’ve kind of fallen into a career ditch — I know that. And I have to do something. Maybe stop glaring and brooding and looking haunted and pissed off. Maybe exude something looser and more conventionally romantic…more woman-friendly.

“Maybe making a Nancy Meyers film will work and maybe it won’t, but I should at least give it a shot. I need to smile and settle in and become Mr. Smoothie. Not Mr. Happy — that has a sexual connotation that I don’t need to get into after Shame — but Mr. Slip Slidey, and I don’t mean that in a Paul Simon sense. But not in a predatory sense either. Smooth and accomodating.”

Kaufman’s “Eff Those Guys” Speech

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“Adrienne Rich wrote, ‘I do know that art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of the power which holds it hostage.

“The world is beautiful. The world is impossibly complicated. And we have the opportunity to explore that. If we give that up for the carrot, then we might as well be the executives.

“I have dropped the ball, I have wasted years seeking the approval of people with money. Don’t get trapped in their world of box office numbers. You don’t work for the world of box-office numbers. You work for the world. Just make your story honest and tell it.

“They’ve tricked us into thinking we can’t do it without them. The truth is they can’t do anything of value without us.”

HE to Kaufman: Since when have the suits wanted to do “anything of value”? Haven’t they pretty nuch shut that shit down?

Hammond Sniffs An “All Quiet” Win

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Deadline‘s Pete Hammond is nursing a hunch that All Quiet on the Western Front will win the Best Picture Oscar on Sunday. My gut says otherwise but if this turns out to be true…good heavenly God! If EEAAO loses the big prize there will be cries of joy heard across the land.

Impressionable Age

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I’m pretty sure I posted this Gore Vidal quote before in hopes of sparking a discussion, but I can’t find the article.

Despite having been born in 1972, my preferred era of deep movie impressions happened between the late ’50s and mid ’60s. The films of 1962 and ’63, in particular, were key to my aesthetic development

49 worthy films from 1962: David Lean‘s Lawrence of Arabia, John Ford‘s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Sam Peckinpah‘s Ride The High Country, Robert Aldrich‘s Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, Bryan Forbes‘ The L-Shaped Room, Howard Hawks‘ Hatari, Francois Truffaut‘s Shoot The Piano Player, Francois Truffaut‘s Jules and Jim, Agnes Varda‘s Cleo From 5 to 7, Luis Bunuel‘s The Exterminating Angel (10)

Peter Ustinov‘s Billy Budd, the John Frankenheimer trio of Birdman of Alcatraz, The Manchurian Candidate and All Fall Down, J. Lee Thompson‘s Cape Fear, George Seaton‘s The Counterfeit Traitor, Frank Perry‘s David and Lisa, the Blake Edwards‘ duo of Experiment in Terror and Days of Wine and Roses, Pietro Germi‘s Divorce, Italian Style. (10)

Stanley Kubrick‘s Lolita, the great Kirk Douglas western Lonely are the Brave, John Schlesinger‘s A Kind of Loving, Roman Polanski‘s Knife in the Water (released in the U.S. in ’63), Alain Resnais‘ Last Year at Marienbad, Michelangelo Antonioni‘s L’eclisse, Sidney Lumet‘s version of Eugene O’Neil’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, Otto Preminger‘s Advise and Consent, Terence Young‘s Dr. No, John Huston‘s Freud. (10)

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HE Roundtable: Hawkins, Wallace, Wyler, Vidal

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A couple of hours ago I was discussing the Oscar nominations and wins that went to William Wyler‘s Ben-Hur (’59). This led me to a Charlie Rose riff that I posted on 8.17.16:

A Charlie Rose Show-type setting. A large, round, polished oak table. Bottles of Fiji water, the usual dark backdrop. The host is myself, and the guests are the late William Wyler, Jack Hawkins and Gore Vidal, all of whom helped create the 1959 version of Ben-Hur, along with original Ben-Hur author General Lew Wallace, still bearded and uniformed.

Jeffrey Wells: First of all, thank you all for coming. None of you are living, of course, but we appreciate your time nonetheless. Today’s topic, somewhat painful or at least uncomfortable to discuss, I realize, is the decision by the remakers of Ben-Hur — director Timur Bekmambetov, screenwriters Keith Clarke and John Ridley — to jettison the character of Quintus Arrius, the Roman general and nobleman who rescues Judah Ben-Hur from living death as an oar slave.

Wyler: For the sake of running time.

Vidal: The Arrius portions added up to roughly 30, 35 minutes. Which is one reason why our version, Willy, ran 212 minutes. The 1925 version ran…what was it, two and a half hours?

Wells: 143 minutes.

Wyler: And the new version, which of course we’ll never be able to see as they still won’t offer spectral streaming in heaven, despite numerous requests…

Vidal: Drop, it Willy. It’ll never happen.

Wells: The new version runs 123 minutes.

Hawkins: Who makes a film with the goal of eliminating characters from an original version to save time? If a character brings something good to a film, you keep him. Arrius is the only steady, fair-minded, comforting figure in Judah Ben-Hur’s life.

Vidal: The only character of consequence offering friendship and security, in the entire play. Or the film. At all.

Wallace: Except the Nazarene, of course.

Wyler: You don’t count him.

Vidal: He’s more of a spiritual presence than a character.

Wyler: Not a character. No dialogue. We don’t even see his face in our version.

Wallace: Of course, he’s human! As human as the next fellow. He was a man who lived and breathed and died and who now reigns in heaven, eternally sitting next to God the Father on a gleaming throne.

Wyler: (Clears throat)

Vidal: That’s fine, General Wallace.

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“EEAAO” Lemmings Over The Cliff

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In the opening paragraph of Sasha Stone‘s “Last Day of Oscar Voting as Mass Formation Takes Hold,” the reason for the insane allegiance to Everything Everywhere All At Once is laid flat on the kitchen table:

“Mass formation is the flipside of mass hysteria. Both are ways [in which] whole groups of people are afflicted in one direction or another, both affording greater chances for survival. We’ve seen mass hysteria afflict Hollywood and the awards race for about seven years now. What usually follows from mass hysteria is mass formation. That means everyone falls in line partly out of fear, but also to be part of one movement, one people.”

Paragraphs #2, #3 and #4 are pretty good also.

How Do Previous Oscar Sweepers Hold Up?

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The 2022-23 Oscar season will come to a merciful end six days hence — Sunday, March 12. The ABC telecast will start around 5:30 pm Pacific. (Or is it 6 pm? — I can never remember.) 3:30 or 4 pm if you count arrivals. And after it’s over, nobody will ever have to think about Everything Everywhere All At Once ever again, much less watch the fecking thing.

Thank God for the presence of third-time host Jimmy Kimmel, who will not be respected if he doesn’t address the fact that (a) a significant percentage of the Academy’s over-45 members hate the Daniels film, except (b) they’re afraid to say so even privately for fear of being branded as anti-Asian racists. Because Twitter is teeming with gangs of virtue-signalling mad dogs who are waiting to destroy anyone who doesn’t say the right thing.

EEAAO has been nominated for 11 Oscars, and the great fear is that it may sweep a la Titanic or Ben-Hur or The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. If there is a God it will win no more than five or six Oscars…please. I’m on my knees…please. It’s a profoundly annoying grab-bag of geek Marvel-esque crap and flotsam. Even Daniel Kwan‘s mother doesn’t get the adoration.

Starting with Gone With The Wind and up to La-La Land, 19 films have been nominated up the wazoo.

The difference between these 19 and Everything Everywhere All At Once is that the vast majority (with the arguable exceptions of Gigi, My Fair Lady, Return of the King and Slumdog Millionaire) are widely regarded as brilliant, very good or good. No fair-minded person over the age of 45 will insist with a straight face that EEAAO really and truly rings the bell.

Titanic and All About Eve were the most nominated sweepers with 14 nominations each. La La Land was nominated for 13 Oscars.

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Overpraised “Tori and Lokita”

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Jean Pierre and Luc Dardennes‘ Tori and Lokita is a watchable but moderately dull heart-and-compassion film about a typical Dardnennes subject — i.e., young underdog characters who are misunderstood by or at odds with mainstream Belgian society.

It’s a tragic immigration drama set near Liege, Belgium, about a pair of young, unrelated African kids (Pablo Schils as the younger Tori, Mbundu Joely as the teenaged Lokita) who get exploited and kicked around and treated cruelly by drug-dealing wolves.

It ends sadly and shockingly. I didn’t melt down but I felt it. The Cannes snobs did cartwheels in the lobby, but it’s just moderately okay.

The Dardennes have always had this plain, unaffected directing style — just point, shoot and watch. Believable characters, realistic dialogue, no musical score. Straight-up realism, take or leave. I’ve always emerged from their films saying “yup, that was a good, honest film” but I’ve never really been knocked flat. Because their plain-and-straight signature only penetrates so far. In my case at least.

If you know the Dardennes and how their films tend to play, Tori and Lokita feels very familiar You can’t help feeling sorry for these kids, but desperate immigrants have been getting kicked around and exploited for centuries, haven’t they? Life can be heartless for have-nots.

Tori and Lokita had its big debut in Cannes ten months ago. It opened in Europe last fall, and was available on Bluray & streaming late last October. Sideshow and Janus Film will give it a limited opening stateside on 3.24.23.

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Settling For Oscar Scraps

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My deep thundering depression over the seeming Oscar omnipotence of Everything Everywhere All At Once has come down to this:

With EEAAO having been nominated for no fewer than 11 Oscars, HE will celebrate any time it fails to win in this or that category. I’ll take anything.

We know for sure it will win three — Best Picture, Best Actress (Michelle Yeoh) and Best Supporting Actor (Ke Huy Quan), and…it pains me to say that I’m more or less resigned to the terrible folly of the Daniels winning Best Director. And in my cynical heart of hearts I’m acknowledging that the identity–driven sweep mentality will probably result in one or two more.

But maybe the grand EEAAO tally can be held to five or six? Things feel so grim in HE Land now…words fail. And yet there are shards of hope…if this contemptible and infuriating film fails to sweep the table…no more than six!…that’ll put at least some color back in my cheeks.