“…but it’s not funny to me.” — Democratic gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke to heckling Greg Abbott supporter in Mineral Wells, Texas, two or three hours ago.
Moments like these are magnetic bullets…bullets that are infinitely repeated on social media, and which everyone sees and responds to favorably or negatively. Methinks this is a huge boost for O’Rourke. He might win now.
Throughout most of the ’90s, when you thought of Brad Pitt you thought of two moments in David Fincher‘s Se7en — the head-in-a-box finale and the Yoda line. (Detective David Mills is as classic a character as Humphrey Bogart‘s Fred C. Dobbs.). And it stayed that way until Fincher’s Fight Club (’99), when Tyler Burden took over. The Durden thing reigned for eight years, and then came three landmark roles in relatively quick succession — Jesse James in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (’07), the dumbshit workout-instructor role in Burn After Reading (’08), and Billy Beane in Moneyball (’11), which is still Pitt’s finest all-time performance.
What 2022 male supporting performance is the most award-worthy right now? Easy answer: Colin Farrell‘s Oswald “Oz” Cobblepot (aka “Penguin”) in Matt Reeves‘ The Batman. Hands down, no question. And yet in Anne Thompson‘s IndieWire prediction piece about the hottest contenders in this category, she calls Farrell’s performance a “long shot.”
Thompson has posted a whole rundown. I don’t even want to weigh in except in the matter of Farrell.
“I think it makes a difference when a movie is physically bigger than you. I mean that. Your relationship to it changes.” — film critic Bilge Ebiri.
There’s no disputing that King Vidor‘s Duel in the Sun (’46), the derided David O. Selznick-produced western that became known as Lust in the Dust, is a groaner. Ditto The Fountainhead (’49), a boldly sexual adaption of Ayn Rand‘s novel with Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal. A pair of unsubtle big-studio movies about passion and fucking — overwrought and overplayed.
And yet I’ve never seen either in a theatre of any kind, and the Film Society of Lincoln Center is showing presumably handsome 35mm prints of both on Saturday as part of a Vidor retrospective. I’m tempted for obvious reasons.
You’re a rooster trapped in a miserable cockfighting life. You’ve been brought up this way by cruel humans, and you have no choice but to fight other roosters to the death. An awful way to live. But when the ostensible good guys rushed in last weekend and shut down a large cockfighting operation, “they were forced to euthanize nearly 150 roosters found at a Southern California home.” I don’t know about you but if I was a fighting rooster, I would rather keep fighting and live my life, however miserable, rather than be killed by the authorities. The miserable gladiator is always in a better spot than a dead one.
And no one’s disputing evidence (including first-hand victim accounts) of Armie Hammer‘s disturbing sexual psychology and behavior. Then again bondage, discipline and dominance is a game…a weird game that has never seemed the least bit intriguing to most of us, but a game nonetheless. Yes, ignoring “safe words” is wrong and contemptible. Yes, Armie made his own bed — no one to blame but himself. Yes, the history of the Hammer family is a perverse one.
Nonetheless there’s something about this Discovery+ trailer for House of Hammer that feels a wee bit tacky and tabloidy. The three-part documentary series will launch on Friday, 9.2.
I became a “bad kid” when I entered my early teens. Defying authority, shitty grades. I had all kinds of low-self-esteem issues, but that’s standard for any child of an alcoholic. I was certainly lippy and insolent with my dad, Jim Wells — a Mad Man exec who worked for J. Walter Thompson. I regarded him as a gruff, flinty, foul-tempered dick because — make no mistake — he was that.
One summer evening Jim and I came to blows, or rather he lost his temper and beat the shit out of me. I was 16. I suffered a head gash, bleeding all over my white shirt. I was seeing a therapist at the time, and as it happened I had a 7 pm appointment that evening. I told the therapist (who was also a serious dick) what had happened, and he took my dad’s side. He basically said, “Bruises and bloody shirt aside, kids like you are bad news and frankly you deserved it.”
In short, during a single summer evening I became 100% convinced that domestic parental violence was something to be avoided in the future, and that family therapists were not necessarily bringers of profound perception and wisdom.
Why hadn’t I grabbed a drinking glass and smashed it across my dad’s head during our kitchen fist fight? You know, like Joe Pesci does in that Copacabana fight in Raging Bull? I’ll tell you why. Because I was more of a lover (i.e., a movie lover) than a scrapper, plus I was basically too chicken to get seriously violent with my taller, heavier and stronger dad. When the kitchen fracas began I was mainly rope-a-doping — focused on protecting myself. But God, if I could relive that moment right now and if I had a hammer…
A year or two later I happened to watch Clarence Brown‘s Human Hearts, a family drama about a rebellious, independent-minded son (James Stewart) and his stern preacher father (Walter Huston). Huston has slapped Stewart around a few times, but prior to a fresh altercation Stewart tells him, “If you hit me, pop, I’m going to defend myself.” They tussle and Huston winds up giving Stewart another beating.
That was not the outcome I was hoping for.
Until last night I had somehow never read about James Garner‘s violent fight with his stepmother, Wilma. His alcoholic father married Wilma when the future movie star was five, in 1933. From the get-go Wilma was a “nasty bitch,” Garner recalled. His brother Jack later called her “a damn no-good woman.” Wilma would scold and beat Garner, and whenever he crossed the line Wilma would make him wear a dress and call him Louise. James finally had it out with Wilma in ’42, when he was 14. She came at him and he pushed back, finally “choking her to keep her from killing him in retaliation.”
Give her what for, Jimbo!
One way or another parents often manage to fuck their kids up. They brutalize and leave scars.
My son Dylan is currently back to regarding me as a dick in somewhat the same way that I regarded my dad long ago. (The difference is that I was 16 and Dylan is 32.) But in my late 20s as I sucked all that in and said “okay, that happened” and decided to cut my father a break, especially after he entered AA and apologized for his poor parenting skills and whatnot, explaining as honestly as he could that he just wasn’t cut out for being a good dad.
N.Y. Post article, posted today [8.10]: “Canadian rock guitarist Gord Lewis was found dead in his Hamilton, Ontario home on Sunday after he was allegedly murdered by his own son. Jonathan Lewis, 41, was arrested and charged with second-degree murder as the Hamilton Police Department continues to investigate the case, according to local reports.”
I would love to see a short film about Garner and Wilma’s relationship, ending with the strangle slapdown.
I’m feeling blue about Jordan Ruimy‘s firm declaration that White Noise, The Son, The Fabelmans, Blonde, The Whale, Master Gardener, She Said, Till, The Eternal Daughter and The Banshees of Inisherin are not going to Telluride.
We all knew The Fabelmans was a Toronto exclusive but that still leaves nine (9) high-interest films not playing in dear, beloved Telluride. How can I not feel dismayed about that? Then again maybe this means they’re all problematic.
Ruimy adds that White Noise, Master Gardener, Bardo, She Said, Bones & All and Blonde will also be absent at Toronto/TIFF. How can Toronto lay claim to being any kind of big-deal, world-class festival and not show Bardo, She Said, White Noise and the others? Then again roughly 100 Toronto films aren’t yet announced.
There are eight films expected to play Telluride that HE is particularly interested in seeing, and in this order: Bardo (Alejandro G. Inarritu), Tar (Todd Field), The Wonder (Sebastian Leilo), Bones and All (Luca Guadagnino), Empire of Light (Sam Mendes), Women Talking (Sarah Polley), All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (Laura Poitras) and The Pale Blue Eye (Scott Cooper).
Ruben Ostlund, director-writer of The Square (’17) and the forthcoming Triangle of Sadness (Neon, 10.7), isn’t into building audience identification with any of his characters a la Preston Sturges or Billy Wilder. His kind of detached, absurdist, scalpel-like social satire precludes this. During the first act of Sadness you’re thinking that Harris Dickinson‘s “Carl” and Charlbi Dean‘s “Yaya” are the ones we might root for, but bit by bit Ostlund divests us of that notion. Same deal with Claes Bang‘s museum director character in The Square — initially sympathetic and intriguing as far as he goes, but gradually smaller, less in command and more overwhelmed as the film goes on.
Biloxi Blues opened 34 years ago, and I haven’t given a moment’s thought to re-watching it. And yet it’s fine. Well written by Neil Simon, nicely acted by everyone. Set in the 1940s, and dealing with the then-taboo subject of homosexuality in the ranks. Directed by Mike Nichols, shot by Bill Butler, edited by Sam O’Steen. Good film, character-driven, nothing especially wrong with it, better than decent. Okay, maybe I will re-watch it.
From the mid ’50s to the early ’60s, Richard Egan was a quiet, low-key, Clark Gable-ish movie star. Gable without the barking voice or judgmental eyebrow or rogue manner, I mean. But with a deeper voice. One of those steady guys with nothing to prove. Plant your feet, look the other guy in the eye and tell the truth…that was Egan’s basic thing. An aura of maturity, thoughtfulness, confidence.
And his characters never once behaved in a socially obnoxious manner. Egan had his center, understood himself, could actually act within his realm.
Best Egan performances: A brief but noteworthy swordfight scene with Victor Mature in Demetrius and the Gladiators (’54). Gog (also ’54). Underwater! (’55) with Jane Russell. The View from Pompey’s Head (’55). The Revolt of Mamie Stover (’56), again with Russell. Love Me Tender (’56). Slaughter on Tenth Avenue (’57). A Summer Place (’59). Disney’s Pollyanna (’60). Esther and the King (’60). King Leonidas in The 300 Spartans (’62).
But after a streak of seven or eight years, Egan was more or less gone from features like a puff of smoke. He had turned 40 in July 1961, and was already on the way down. For a decade or so he worked in TV, and then he moved into regional theatre.
Egan died in ’78 at age 65 — prostate cancer. It just seems a shame.
I was moved to say something after watching Egan in Love Me Tender. Elvis Presley is why that modest 1956 release made money, of course, but Egan was the brick and mortar — all the action spun around his plain-spoken character, Vance Reno, and he just said his lines straight and true with that great deep voice. And he never wept or lost his temper or his cool. And the whole time you can feel how much he wants to ravage Debra Paget and much she wants him to, and how blind Presley’s “Clint” character is in this regard.
Love Me Tender is just a low-budget programmer, really, but Egan gives it a certain gravitas and conviction.
Egan can be briefly glimpsed in a crowded bar in Michael Ritchie and Robert Redford‘s Downhill Racer (’69)…humiliating. A major star in the late ’50s, a no-dialogue guy in a bar scene a decade later.
The timing wasn’t right, of course, but if Quentin Tarantino had somehow emerged as a hotshot director in the early to mid ’70s he could’ve written a great role for Egan and then cast him…maybe.
Wiki excerpt: “In 1966, when asked about his lack of film roles, Egan said, ‘They want anti-heroes now, and it’s just not for me. I’m just not right for that. It’s much easier to be cynical than to make a positive statement, to set up a man only to knock him down, than to show convincingly a man who successfully sticks by his beliefs. We desperately need something to give strength and fortitude to the lost. I want to be a part of that. Part of the solution. And if I can’t…well…I’m sure not interested in becoming part of the problem instead.”
