The Manhattan crowd (i.e., of which I’m a part) won’t see Damien Chazelle’s convulsive Hollywood period drama until Wednesday. Margot Robbie’s performance as a Clara Bow-like actress is said to be the standout element.
“Spotlight” Tied With “All The President’s Men”
Closely followed by (and in this order) The Insider, Network, Broadcast News, She Said, The Post, Ace in the Hole, Almost Famous, Zodiac, Between The Lines, Jack Webb ‘s –30-, Good Night and Good Luck, His Girl Friday, Nightcrawler, Truth, Frost Nixon, Sweet Smell of Success, Veronica Guerin, The Day The Earth Caught Fire, The Paper…21 so far. Which others?
It started with this. Stand-alone features only so The Wire doesn’t count.
Keith Richards’ “Happy”
I’m as delighted as the next person that just about every 2020 election denier lost their respective election bids last Tuesday, and that the final House tally may give Republicans only a one or two vote advantage. Plus Senator Catherine Cortez Masto‘s re-election in Nevada last night means that Democrats have locked their majority control of the Senate. Plus the odds seem to favor Sen. Raphael Warnock defeating Herschel “wacko” Walker in the early December Georgia runoff. American voters have basically rejected the MAGA crazies, and thank God for that highly significant trend. I still hate the Stalinist ultra lefties, of course, but at least…
Revision on House projection pic.twitter.com/dv3eQfcnPr
— Acyn (@Acyn) November 12, 2022
Looming Impotence
The idea is that Trump is over in more ways than one. A seemingly lewd and salacious thrust at first (“alpha dogs never die”), and then you start thinking about it…
And Then What Happens
This morning Jordan Ruimy sent me a screen capture of a half-interesting movie idea [after the jump]. I’ve re-worded it and used a shot of Back to the Future‘s “Biff” for an illustration, to wit: “A late 1950s or early 1960s high-school bully (like Sam Rechner or Oakes Fegley in The Fabelmans) is somehow transported into a 2022 high school or college — an institution teeming with diversity, Tik-Tokers and trans kids.”
Okay, cool premise…then what? The idea is basically a spin on those Rip Van Hippie scripts that were making the rounds in the ’80s.
True Confession
Like Steven Spielberg, I also tried my hand at filmmaking in my early youth. A sequence in The Fabelmans triggered the memory. Teenaged Sammy Fabelman (Gabriel LaBelle) is shown directing a WWII action movie with his teenaged high-school pallies. Well, when I was 11 I also rounded up my friends and attempted to shoot a short western in a local park.
I was shooting with my parents’ manual wind-up 8mm camera. I had roughed out some kind of synopsis (the usual good guys vs. bad guys routine). The big climax would’ve shown the bad guy getting shot and falling off a cliff. What happened, to my profound embarassment, is that I over-wound the camera, which caused it to freeze or jam or something. The bottom line is that despite making noises as if it was operating normally, I only got about five minutes worth of footage. I discovered this when the film came back from the Kodak lab.
I was mortified — all that planning and organizing and braggadocious ambition, and it was all for naught. If I’d been braver and more tenacious I would have confessed my technical failure to my friends and asked them to perform the western on another weekend, but I was so embarassed and deflated that I abandoned the idea. A fire-in-the-belly filmmaker would’ve tried again, but I didn’t. I wasn’t encouraged by my parents to give it another go (maybe they felt they’d indulged me sufficiently with the first filming attempt) but it was my fault. If I’d simply manned up and said “Okay, mistakes happen, let’s do it again,” I might have ended up with enough half-assed footage to assemble a half-decent attempt at a short film…who knows? And then I might’ve felt sufficiently encouraged to shoot another one and so on.
But I didn’t. Not trying again was the first significant failure or lack of nerve in my life. But I gradually rebounded on some level, and by my mid teens I was writing my own satiric high-school newsletter. But then I got into trouble with the high school assistant principal for using raw, ribald language, and my furious father was called in for a meeting with this blustery dickhead, and again I felt angry and mortified so my first journalistic enterprise was half-suffocated in the crib. I could have ignored the scolding and kept going, but I didn’t.
I hated my life back then — I hated damn near everything about it. The only spiritual escape valve was watching TV and movies and sneakily drinking beer on weekends. I was so angry and suffering from such a bad case of low self-esteem that I didn’t feel moved to try journalism again until my mid 20s.
Kids really do need support and encouragement from their parents and extended families, especially in their teens. Spielberg was lucky in that sense. The Fabelmans pretty much tells it all.
Can We Get This Straight, Please?
This is a very nickle-and-dime matter but…
In an 11.9 interview with N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott, Steven Spielberg recalls his brief meeting with legendary director John Ford — an encounter depicted at the end of his latest film, the largely autobiographical The Fabelmans (Universal, 11.11).
“I was only about 16 when I met him,” Spielberg says, “and I didn’t know anything about his reputation, how surly and ornery he was and how he ate young studio executives for breakfast. That only came later when people began writing more about him. I felt I really escaped that office with my life.”
The slight problem is that Spielberg was born on 12.18.46 and therefore lived his sixteenth year of life between 12.18.62 and 12.18.63. Spielberg’s meeting with Ford, which happened at Radford Studios in Studio City, was arranged by a “second cousin” who was working on the then-upcoming Hogan’s Heroes, which began pre-production in ’64 before debuting on CBS in September ’65.
Let’s presume Spielberg met Ford sometime in the summer of ’64, while he was working as an unpaid assistant at Universal Studios’ editorial department. (He graduated from Saratoga High School in June 1965, at age 18.) He was therefore 17 and 1/2 when Ford instructed him about horizon lines — 17, not “about 16.” Just saying.
“Three Fabelmans Keepers,” posted on 11.9.22.
Chapelle Washed Out The “Wakanda”
Closing remark: “It shouldn’t be this scary to talk about anything. It’s made my job incredibly difficult and to be honest with you, I’m getting sick of talking to a crowd like this. I love you to death and I thank you for your support, and I hope they don’t take anything away from me. Whoever ‘they’ are.”
Endurance Test
6:24 pm: I’m in my seat (E9) for a 6 pm showing of Wakanda Forever…God help me. I intend to tough it out no matter what.
Trailers put a deep scowl on my face. Movies for ADD morons. Nobody hates animation and those highly paid digital animators more than myself. If the ghosts of John Calley, Irving Thalberg, Daryl F. Zanuck or Dore Schary were sitting beside me and watching this shit…words fail.
I’m clutching my leather computer bag to my chest for warmth — November jacket weather outside and the AMC guys have the a.c. on.
9:50 pm: I lasted with Wakanda Forever for 90 minutes. I. Could. Not. Stand. Another. Minute.
I started to disengage when it got into the backstory of the Yucatán aquatic blue people. I knew I had another hour-plus to go. I just couldn’t do it.
Friendo #1: “The blue Yucatán people is the worst part. They should have lost it. The whole movie is obviously too long.”
Friendo #2: If you bailed at the 90-minute mark, you missed the best part.”
HE: “Good! Fine!”
Massachusetts Statehouse + Rat Silhouette
I accepted the death of Matt Damon‘s “Colin Sullivan” in The Departed, but I wanted Leo DiCaprio‘s “Billy Costigan” to live. Up to no good and loyal to Jack Nicholson‘s demonic “Frank Costello,” Sullivan earned that bullet in the head. But Costigan had performed cunningly and bravely — he deserved to live. Plus William Monahan‘s screenplay got that famous Chinese laundry saying wrong — in the film Costello says “no tickee, no laundry” but the actual line is “no tickee, no washee.”
Don’t Trust Any Film Critic Under 40
I don’t mean this literally, of course. There are always exceptions to the rule. But I do regard Millennial- and Zoomer-aged critics askance. Too many of them have bought into the bullshit. Too few of them think and write like men, and I mean that in the Robert Ryan / “Deke Thornton” sense of that term (i.e., “We’re after men, and I wish to God I was with them”).