Warner Bros. and Martin Scorsese’s The Film Foundation have produced a 4K digital restoration of JohnFord’sTheSearchers, and in the process created anew70mmprint.
The latter will be screened five days hence — Sunday, 4.21, 3:15pm — at Hollywood’sEgyptian, as a closing-day presentation from the TCM Classic Film Festival. Alexander Payne will offer a few thoughts.
No screenings for NYC film cognoscenti? Nothing planned for MoMA or FSLC’s Walter Reade? Or at the Film Forum or at Pleasantville’s Jacob Burns? Odd.
There’s just one problem. TheSearchers is rife with problematic depictions of Native Americans. Wokesters certainly won’t approve. Don’t even speculate what Lily Gladstone might say.
There’s really, really something wrong with college-age males who are into sexual choking. Ditto the young women who are also allegedly into it, as choking does nothing to heighten pleasure or bring about orgasm.
Yes, this is an actual thing, and there’s something truly foul and psychologically fucked up in the hearts and minds of the eager-beaver perpetrators. I’ve lived a vigorous sexual life for many decades, and I’ve never so much as flirted with even the idea of choking…are you kidding me?
“For the past four years, Dr. Debby Herbenick — one of the foremost researchers on American sexual behavior and director of the Center for Sexual Health Promotion at Indiana University — has been tracking the rapid rise of ‘rough sex’ among college students, particularly sexual strangulation, or what is colloquially referred to as choking.
“Nearly two-thirds of women in her most recent campus-representative survey of 5,000 students at an anonymized ‘major Midwestern university’ said a partner had choked them during sex (one-third in their most recent encounter). The rate of those women who said they were between the ages 12 and 17 the first time that happened had shot up to 40 percent from one in four.
“As someone who’s been writing for well over a decade about young people’s attitudes and early experience with sex in all its forms, I’d also begun clocking this phenomenon. I was initially startled in early 2020 when, during a post-talk q & a at an independent high school, a 16-year-old girl asked, ‘How come boys all want to choke you?’ In a different class, a 15-year-old boy wanted to know, ‘Why do girls all want to be choked?’ They do?
“Not long after, a college sophomore (and longtime interview subject) contacted me after her roommate came home in tears because a hookup partner, without warning, had put both hands on her throat and squeezed.”
Just as there is a long list of films that I can watch over and over again, there are also those that I will never again submit to. Near the top of this list is Michael Cimino‘s The Deer Hunter.
I’m not talking about a film I don’t care for. I’m talking about a film that I wouldn’t watch again if someone shoved a snub-nosed .38 into my ribs, or offered me a sizable cash bribe. Would you sit through Star Wars: The Phantom Menace for $20 bills? Would you watch A.I. or Always again? The Cannonball Run II? Sylvester Stallone‘s Cobra?
I’ve stayed away from this simultaneously audacious and godawful film for the last 45 years, and I’m not about to break my streak.
Memories of my first and only viewing in a Manhattan screening room (late November ’78) are branded on my brain tissue. That idiotic Russian Roulette device. Those working-class townspeople singing a wedding song like practiced professionals in a Russian opera. The relentlessly cloying and obnoxious (i.e., overly performed) working-class camaraderie. Those absurdly majestic Northwestern mountain peaks that happen to be in rural Pennsylvania.
And especially Christopher Walken‘s idiotic Russian roulette death…no lead character in a serious film has ever died for a dumber reason than Walken did in The Deer Hunter.
Politically and culturally TheDeerHunter is one of the most full-of-shit films about the American proletariat ever made. The way it simultaneously used and ignored the Vietnam War was sickening.
Posted by Peter Biskind soon after Cimino’s 7.2.16 death: “The politics are execrable, and were widely denounced at the time for turning the war inside out. Clearly, filmmakers who make features ‘based on’ reality take liberties with their material, and the truth vs. art debate is one that will probably go on forever, encompassing films like Triumph of the Will, On the Waterfront, Birth of a Nation, etc., etc. But I think we can make some distinctions.
“First, ironically, although The Deer Hunter is certainly not a documentary, Cimino took great pains to replicate documentary footage his researchers had uncovered. Even the Russian roulette sequences were mean to evoke the famous still photograph of the Saigon police chief shooting a prisoner at point blank range with a pistol to his head.
“But more to the point, there are so many perversions of the truth in The Deer Hunter, all seemingly intended to make the same ideological point — i.e., the Vietcong were evil Orientals — while the Americans were no more than naive victims. There’s a lot more going on here than mere creative license.
“And finally, if I may be indulged, the film is centrally about male bonding and friendship among Americans, with the war as a backdrop and the Vietnamese reduced to stick figures with guns. In my opinion it’s really disgraceful!”
Forget anyone seeing Jerry Lewis‘s The Day The Clown Cried (’72) later this year, which some seem to believe is in the cards. Just forget it.
On 1.13.24 or two and a half months ago, the belief that The Day The Clown Cried would be screened in June 2024 at the Library of Congress archive in Culpeper, Virginia (or at least sometime this year) was seemingly put to bed by Indiewire‘s Christian Zilko.
Zilko (rhymes with Sgt. Bilko) reported that an LoC representative had “confirmed to IndieWire that no public screenings are planned, as the archive does not possess a complete cut of the film.”
Oh, yeah? Then why did L.A. Times reporter Noah Bierman, after visiting the Culpeper campus nine years ago, quote the LoC’s head archivist Rob Stone saying “the library [has] agreed to not show the film for at least 10 years”? If the full version can’t be shown for lack of material why talk about screening it at all?
Two months later I inquired about also visiting the Library of Congress campus, and particularly about the possibility of viewing the metal cans containing The Day The Clown Cried.
On 10.14.15 I received an emailed reply from Mike Mashon, head of the LoC’s Moving Image section.
He said that the LoC’s agreement with Jerry Lewis places an embargo on The Day The Clown Cried “for ten years, including screenings and making any element associated with it to the public and researchers.” In other words, no can photos until 2025, and perhaps not even then.
Again: If a screening of the completed film is out of the question due to insufficient material, why mention showing it in 2025?
Even if only sections of the film are shown someday, it seems clear that the embargo will be in place until 2025 and not 2024, as some are assuming.
Yes, I’m guilty of having previously posted about a presumed June 2024 unveiling date, but I was lazy or distracted or I had bees in my head.
Just to be extra double sure, early this morning I asked Mashon to confirm the embargo date. He’s no longer on the job — retired. Let’s just presume that Clown Revelation Day, if it happens at all, won’t be until the summer of ’25.
Although the LoC apparently intends to eventually screen some kind of celluloid representation of The Day The Clown Cried at its Audio Visual Conservation campus in Culpeper, Virginia, curator Rob Stone has stated the LoC does not have a complete print of the film.
This morning a friend passed along a 31-minute Vimeo file (posted two months ago but yanked on Thursday morning…sorry) that provides the first real taste of Clown, or at least the first I’ve ever sat through.
Last night I finally watched Santiago Mitre’s Argentina, 1985, and it held me start to finish. Altogether a morally sobering experience, a disturbing history lesson and finally an affirmation of civic decency.
Heroic Buenos Aires prosecutor Julio Strassera, assisted by Luis Moreno Ocampo and a team of young researchers, brought a complex case against the baddies, and put a lot of them (but far from all) in jail, and certainly made a moral statement that resonated worldwide.
I saw Argentina, 1985 with the original Spanish-language dialogue (Amazon streaming idiotically defaults to English dubbing). I still don’t care for the first half-hour (too whimsical and anecdotal and digressive) and I felt increasingly annoyed by the constant cigarette smoking, but this is nonetheless a fact-based, disciplined, well-ordered story of good guys vs. bad guys. Based on the historical record, pic exemplifies how a first-rate, down-to-business research procedural and courtroom drama should operate.
Just before watching it I had been bickering with a smart guy who knows his Latin American history. He had been reminding me that Argentina has a long history of being a bad-news country that believes in white supremacy and racially repressive policies, and for many decades had made life very difficult for native Argentinians and POCs. The finale of Argentina, 1985 doesn’t leave you with this kind of residue at all. It leaves you with a great feeling of humanitarian compassion and decency. So there’s a basic conflict of perceptions.
Here’s a taste of how our discussion had been going prior to watching Mitre’s film…
Latin American history guy to HE or LAHG: “The fact is that Argentina, just like the U.S., committed genocide against its native population, so that today only about 1% of the country is indigenous, and lives in the south, hundreds of miles from Buenos Aires. The country’s black population is also miniscule, about 1%. The majority are European immigrants, primarily from Italy, Spain, Germany and England.
“Of all the countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, only Argentina and Chile (which also did a number on its indigenous population) have an overwhelmingly white population. All the other countries are a mix of black, mixed black and white, mixed white and indigenous, and pure indigenous.”
[Steven Spielberg‘s latest film has already been heavily reviewed, discussed, spoiled and Twitter-poked. Nonetheless spoiler whiners are hereby warned.]
I caught Steven Spielberg‘s The Fabelmans (Universal, 11.11) last night, and like everyone else I was prepared to be mildly disappointed. Because the word on the street is that this 151-minute family film isn’t nearly as great as those suck-uppy Toronto critics said it was. A decent film in many respects, some have said, and highlighted by a few…make that three stand-out scenes, but calm down. So I was ready for a mixed-bag experience, and that’s exactly what I realized it was as I left the theatre around 9 pm.
It’s all right in some respects and very good in terms of those three scenes (Judd Hirsch soliloquy, Gabriel LaBelle‘s teenaged “Sammy” shooting WWII battle scenes in the Arizona desert with verve and ingenuity, Sammy meeting the cantankerous John Ford at the very end) but it’s no Oscar frontrunner, I can tell you that. At best it’s a soft frontrunner because there’s no big consensus film that appears ready to elbow The Fabelmans aside.
It’s basically an overlong, broadly-played family movie about a kid learning the basic filmmaking ropes while his parents edge toward divorce, and it really doesn’t feel natural — for my money it feels too “performed”. Especially in the matter of Michelle Williams‘ Mitzi Fabelman, Samy’s colorful, excitable, piano-playing mom.
Judd Hirsch’s big scene aside, the family saga is…I’m not saying it’s boring but I wouldn’t call it especially rousing either, and Spielberg doesn’t seem to realize this. And he definitely lets it go on too long.
You have to ask “what if The Fabelmans wasn’t a largely autobiographical tale about Spielberg’s childhood…what if it was just a story about some boomer kid who loved movies and wanted to make his own?”
The fact is that without the Spielberg factor, without us knowing that this is the kid who went on to make Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List…if this was just the story of a filmstruck kid, it wouldn’t have been made because it doesn’t have that much in the way of basic magnetism…it’s just the slow story of a marriage that slowly falls apart and about how the oldest son deals with it all.
The Fabelman saga (cowritten by Spielberg and Tony Kushner) is simply not that riveting, and yet it means so much to Spielberg that he doesn’t seem to realize it’s only intermittently engaging to Average Joes. If he had realized this, he would have made it shorter. It should have run two hours max, not two and a half.
I’m not calling it a wholly unsatisfying or a poorly made film, but it’s mostly a so-so experience.
The only parts that I really liked were those that focused on Spielberg shooting and showing stuff. The marital infidelity stuff (Williams cheating on Paul Dano with Seth Rogen‘s “Uncle Benny”) was frankly trying my patience. The anti-Semitic high-school bully scene in the hallway doesn’t really work. And in the 1952 section, Sammy’s parents can’t understand why Sammy crashed his toy train set? They’ve just recently taken him to see The Greatest Show on Earth and they can’t figure it out?
The only scene I really adored was Sammy meeting grumpy old John Ford (David Lynch). The moment when the Searchers music begins playing as Sammy is looking around at the posters on the wall…this is the greatest moment in the film. Ford endlessly lighting the cigar was too much but barking at Sammy about the horizon lines was great.
The fact is that during most of the film I was losing patience. I just didn’t care all that much. I kept asking myself “when is this film going to leave the ground and get airborne”? It finally does at the very end with Ford/Lynch,
Julia Butters, who plays Sammny’s younger sister, isn’t as good here as she was in Quentin Tarantino‘s Once Upon A Time in Hollywood because she’s obliged to perform in a Spielberg vehicle in a Spielbergy fashion.
And that weird Jesus-freak girlfriend Sammy falls in with in Northern California! She was like a farcical sitcom character, like somebody out of Happy Days.
“Proponents of zoonotic origin must explain why the novel coronavirus, when it mutated or recombined, happened to pick its least favorite combination, the double CGG. Why did it replicate the choice the lab’s gain-of-function researchers would have made?
“Yes, it could have happened randomly, through mutations. But do you believe that? At the minimum, this fact — that the coronavirus, with all its random possibilities, took the rare and unnatural combination used by human researchers — implies that the leading theory for the origin of the coronavirus must be laboratory escape.”
The British Film Institute’s BFI Player Classics streaming service is launching in this country on Friday, 5.14.21. The service offers a collection of roughly 200 classic British films “picked by BFI experts.”
HE to BFI experts: A few days ago Terry Southern biographer Lee Hill wrote on HE that the never-seen Dr. Strangelove pie-fight sequence exists on film and is currently being stored in British Film Institute archives. “The BFI doesn’t publicize this fact,” Hill wrote, “but [the pie-fight footage] has been screened by a few researchers.”
Please offer access to the this footage as part of BFI Player Classics package, and I will sign up immediately. I imagine quite a few others would also become subscribers.
Yesterday a much-anticipated retort from Robert Weide, the documentarian and Curb Your Enthusiasm producer who’s been steadfastly defending Woody Allen in the years-long battle with the Farrows (Dylan, Mia, Ronan) over that allegation of child molestation on 8.4.92, appeared.
It deals with the alleged moving electric train set that Dylan described in some detail in a 2.1.14 N.Y. Times article, written by Nicholas Kristof.
Weide’s rebuttal surfaced concurrent with the airing of episode #2 of Kirby Dick and Amy Zeiring‘s Allen v. Farrow, a four-part series about same. On 2.22 or exactly a week ago, Weide accused Dick and Zeiring of either being “half-assed researchers” or “inherently manipulative and dishonest.” He pledged on Twitter that he would explain in due time.
The gist of Weide’s 2.28 argument, directly drawn from testimony from pro-Farrow nanny Kristi Groteke, who was working at Frog Hollow on the day of the alleged assault, is this: There was no electric train, moving or stationery, in the attic that day, but there was a non-electric plastic train toy — something for a two-year-old to push around and play with.
Does this constitute a ‘holy shit!” Perry Mason moment? No, but it does warrant a certain puzzlement.
Weide: “Dylan specifically recalls the train set ‘travel[ing] around the attic.’ Then why does the police diagram show the track having a circumference of only 4 feet at its widest? Maybe Dylan didn’t literally mean ‘around’ the attic, but around in a circle, in the attic? Maybe we should give her the benefit of the doubt here. But the question remains: was there such a functioning train set in that space? Moses says there wasn’t even an electrical outlet in the crawl space. So was the electric train battery-operated? Is there anyone who can untangle this conundrum at the center of Dylan’s accusation?
“In fact, there is.
“Kristi Groteke, a nanny in the Farrow household who was on duty that day, testified in the 1993 custody trial, Allen v. Farrow, from which the HBO series takes its title. Groteke appeared as a friendly witness for her employer, Mia Farrow, and was asked about the content of the attic during direct examination by Mia’s attorney, Eleanor Alter. This means Groteke’s answer would have been known by Mia’s defense team prior to questioning her on the stand. (This is the recollection of a 23-year-old woman, less than a year after the alleged event, versus a woman recounting her memories as a 7-year-old, 23 years after the fact.)
“When asked about the content of the crawl space, Groteke recalls [as follows]: ‘There are some pictures and there is a trunk where things are stored, and there is a train set which the children take out and play with sometimes.’ When asked to describe the set, Groteke replies, “They are big, heavy plastic, green tracks and they fit into each other like puzzle pieces, and the train is a train car that is made for a child to sit on and ride.’ Alter asks, “Have you ever seen the train set in any of the rooms?” Groteke: “Yes. I have seen it downstairs in the living room, but more recently in the past year in Mia’s room and in the children’s room, through the hallways.” Alter: “’So they take it out of the crawl space?’ Groteke: ‘Yes.'”
HEcomment: In short, for whatever reason Dylan apparently invented the recollection about a toy train moving around the attic or travelling along an oblong-shaped train track. You can put this down to the occasional vagueness of memory. I would put it down to unnecessaryinvention, which makes the water seem a bit murky.
A discussion of the merits happened this morning between myself, Friendo #1 and Friendo #2:
Friendo #1: “This doesn’t feel like the smoking gun Weide promised. I had thought, reading his implication, that we were going to discover the police drawing was some sort of fake. He raises an interesting issue, in terms of the nature of the train set. It wasn’t some electric train spinning around; it was larger and plastic — a notable discrepancy. But if anything, his post does serve to confirm that there was some sort of train set in the attic.
Eager journo eyeballs are now gazing upon Paul Greengrass‘s News of the World (Universal 12.25). I can only repeat my 10.22.20 observation that it appears to be “a Searchers-like tale (bookish 60ish beardo paid to deliver precocious, parentless, Kiowa-raised girl to relatives in old San Antonio) with a touch of True Grit. All kinds of adversity and prejudice slow their progress, including white slave traders looking to exploit the poor girl.
“Paul Greengrass‘s western is some kind of allegory, he’s said, for our presently divided culture. You don’t have to reassure me — Tom Hanks will do the right thing.”
So News of the World (Universal 12.25) is a Searchers-like tale (bookish 60ish beardo paid to deliver precocious, parentless, Kiowa-raised girl to relatives in old San Antonio) with a touch of True Grit. All kinds of adversity and prejudice slow their progress, including white slave traders looking to exploit the poor girl.
Paul Greengrass‘s western is some kind of allegory, he says, for our presently divided culture. You don’t have to reassure me — Tom Hanks will do the right thing.
Amazon synopsis of Paulette Jiles’ same-titled 2016 novel: “In the wake of the Civil War, Captain Jefferson Kidd (Hanks) travels through northern Texas, giving live readings from newspapers to paying audiences hungry for news of the world. An elderly widower who has lived through three wars and fought in two of them, the captain enjoys his rootless, solitary existence.
“In Wichita Falls, he is offered a $50 gold piece to deliver a young orphan, Johanna Loenberger (Helena Zengel), to her relatives in San Antonio. Four years earlier, a band of Kiowa raiders killed Johanna’s parents and sister; sparing the little girl, they raised her as one of their own. Recently rescued by the U.S. army, the ten-year-old has once again been torn away from the only home she knows.
“Their 400-mile journey south through unsettled territory and unforgiving terrain proves difficult and at times dangerous. Johanna has forgotten the English language, tries to escape at every opportunity, throws away her shoes, and refuses to act “civilized.” Yet as the miles pass, the two lonely survivors tentatively begin to trust each other, forming a bond that marks the difference between life and death in this treacherous land.
“Arriving in San Antonio, the reunion is neither happy nor welcome. The captain must hand Johanna over to an aunt and uncle she does not remember—strangers who regard her as an unwanted burden. A respectable man, Captain Kidd is faced with a terrible choice: abandon the girl to her fate or become — in the eyes of the law — a kidnapper himself.”
I’ve always avoided staying at Goulding’s Lodge in Monument Valley — storied history and great location but a bit too pricey for just a bland motel room. But Mexican Hat, where we stayed last night [Tuesday] and where I’ve bunked a couple of times previously, has been decimated by the pandemic. Relatively few visitors, no wifi, the color and vitality all but disappeared. So screw it — we’ve decided to move to Goulding’s later this morning. You only live once.
Deadline‘s Todd McCarthy: “You should go out to John Ford Point and take some snaps. The Gouldings, who homesteaded there in the 1920s, set up the trading post and eventually opened the lodge, drove their jalopy to Hollywood in the late ’30s to try to attract some Hollywood interest in filming there in order to raise some money for the locals. They somehow got in to see [producer] Walter Wanger, who brought Ford in to look at photos the Gouldings had brought along. The rest is history. With the Depression still on, just the short time the Stagecoach crew shot there helped the local economy considerably.
“John Huston had some good stories about having visited there in the early ’30s.
“Of course no one living there now, including the people who run the lodge, knows anything about the Gouldings.
“I went there many times from the mid ’70s through the ’90s, and there were always far more foreign tourists there than Americans — first the French, then Italians and, at one point, Russians. The last time I was there, maybe 10 years ago (the food was terrible!), it was overrun by Japanese. For years there was a religiously affiliated hospital tucked into a little ravine just around the side and back from Gouldings, but for reasons that were never clearly explained to me they were asked to leave some years back, which was unfortunate for health care reasons.
“One indelble memory I have, probably from about 20 years ago, is being on the north side of the Valley in the shadow of one of the big buttes. It’s utterly still and quiet, but then I hear a roar, just a low distant rumbling at first that gradually becomes louder and louder until it feels like something is right on top of me. But I can see nothing. Then suddenly, from over the top of the butte roars a B-52 at probably no higher than 300 feet. Absolutely petrifying. Have no idea what the hell was going on, why it was flying so low or what it was doing around Monument Valley in the first place. Utterly surreal.