Imagine being known as a distinctive stamp choreographer with his own unmissable style…a leap-and-somersault-and-stomp thing that said “Michael Kidd” first and foremost but also “not gay.”
Posted on 12.26.07: “Three things about Michael Kidd, the award-winning choreographer (Guys and Dolls and Can-Can on stage, The Band Wagon and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers in films) who died Sunday night at his home in Los Angeles.
“One, he was straight. Two, he talked like a New York cab driver or newsstand vendor. And three, he gave a snappy, lived-in performance as a choreographer hired to finesse a stage show for a Santa Rosa teenage beauty pageant in Michael Richie‘s Smile (’75).”
This Tender Bar trailer is a much better thing than the film itself. Better timing, better editing, more emotion. It basically coasts along on the strength of Paul Simon‘s ‘Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard’, even though it has nothing to do with the film. It’s a mood cocktail that kind of lifts you up and pulls you along.
And now you can see what I meant in my review about young Daniel Ranieri playing a young version of Tye Sheridan. Stop blowing smoke as there’s NO WAY IN HELL this kid grows up to be Sheridan. You can’t be a dark-eyed Lebanese at age ten and suddenly transform into the biological son of a middle-class German paleface couple (Lily Rabe, Max Martini) when you hit 18. Come down to earth and stop trying to wrestle audiences into woke submission.
Last night I watched John Farrow: Hollywood’s Man in the Shadows, a 96-minute doc about the prolific, under-rated Australian-born director. Farrow made scores of better-than-decent, lower-budgeted films (The Big Clock, Five Came Back, Calcutta, His Kind of Woman, Hondo). A skilled and dependable craftsman, he directed no drop-dead masterpieces but was great with long takes.
Married for 20-odd years to Maureen O’Sullivan while constantly catting around, the Roman Catholic Farrow sired seven children, including Mia Farrow.
Co-directors Claude Gonzalez and Frans Vandenburg have delivered a respectable effort, often edifying if less than fully satisfying, for reasons I’ll try to explain.
The sage talking heads include Australian directors Phillip Noyce, Bruce Beresford and Philippe Mora, plus film critics Todd McCarthy, David Thomson, David Stratton, Margaret Pomeranz, Imogen Sara Smith and Farran Smith Nehme. Hollywood biographer Charles Higham and Farrow’s wry look-alike son, John Charles Farrow, also participate.
I’m not a serious Farrow devotee but I respect his assurance and sense of polish and control, and his extra-long takes are Scorsese– or Coppola-level.
I’m as much of a fan of The Big Clock as the next guy. Vincent Price’s performance in His Kind of Woman is one of my all-time camp favorites of the ’40s, and Five Came Back (’39), a crashed-in-the-jungle survival story with Lucille Ball, is a keeper. I’m trying to recall if I saw Farrow’s 1956 remake, Back From Eternity. And the 3-D, John Wayne-starring Hondo is pretty good.
I understand why producer Mike Todd fired Farrow off the direction of Around the World in 80 Days (i.e., Todd wanted a less headstrong director, someone he could push around) but why exactly did Farrow lose the King of Kings gig? The filmmakers couldn’t explore that?
Farrow losing two high-paying 1950s prestige gigs in the space of five years is odd. It alludes to an imperious, uncooperative manner.
Was Farrow’s 1963 heart attack a genetic thing? Was it due to alcohol abuse? Farrow was only 58 when he passed — a relatively early departure for a man who wasn’t overweight.
How many years ago was this doc shot? The answer seems to be “not recently.” Three, four years ago for the most part? More?
The elephant in the room, of course, is the absence of Mia Farrow and Ronan Farrow, and especially Mia.
I gather she didn’t participate due to negative feelings about her philandering, possibly emotionally abusive dad, and Ronan undoubtedly passed out of deference to his mom, but really? Mia refuses to sit for an interview because her Catholic father cheated on her mom with “dozens” of women during the heyday of the ‘40s and ‘50s, and she doesn’t want to endorse or seem blasé about that? In the context of her own checkered sexual history, Mia is hardly in a position to judge or throw stones. Very odd. Sexual indulgence and even perversity is seemingly baked into the Farrow clan’s DNA.
Tatiana needs her sleep gummies (i.e., Camino Midnight Blueberry lozenges) to drop off and get a decent eight or nine hours. I can sleep on the floor of an airport lounge or on the grass in a Paris park at 3 pm, but without her gummies Tatiana just tosses and turns like a sleepless zombie.
Login with Patreon to view this post
Kidman and Bardem can be de-aged with makeup and CG, of course, but will the audience buy it? Or will I be the only one carping and nitpicking while everyone else says “whatever”?
It’s one thing for an actress in her mid 50s to play 15 years younger, which is what Kidman will be doing when she portrays Ball in the early 1950s, when I Love Lucy was hitting its stride and she was in her early 40s. That’s presumably doable with makeup and careful lighting.
But a couple of days ago Sorkin mentioned to TCM’s Ben Mankiewicz that the film will include a scene of rehearsing for Too Many Girls, the 1940 George Abbott musical that Ball and Arnaz costarred in. (And which occasioned their first meeting, which led to their marriage later that year.) That will require the 52 year-old Bardem to play 30 years younger, as Arnaz was 22 or 23 when Girls was shot. Likewise Kidman will have to attempt to look 29 for this section of the film.
From EW summary of Sorkin-Mankiewicz interview: “Sorkin [reveals] that the film focuses on three points of ‘friction’ between Ball and Arnaz that really occurred but that Sorkin has condensed into the timeline of a single week.”
To the best of my knowledge there was one point of friction between Ball and Arnaz — Desi’s infidelity.
“Unregenerate Desilu Hound,” posted on 9.20.21: “As Lucy and Desi prepare over the course of a single week to shoot an episode that will go down in history as having some of the funniest and most memorable scenes to grace television, we will be enthralled to peek into why despite all of that passion and success their world-famous relationship could never be.”
“Cutting to the chase: Arnaz’s Cuban upbringing taught him that catting around outside the bonds of marriage was perfectly acceptable or at least workable.
I don’t know what I doing on the night of Friday, 6.25.93, but I was probably drinking my second or third vodka and lemonade of the evening and watching a laser disc movie in my living room. Maybe the kids were visiting that weekend….can’t remember. But for damn sure I wasn’t watching the final airing of Late Night with David Letterman — Dave’s last night on NBC before moving over to The Late Show on CBS.
It’s been 28 years, and all this time I’ve never watched this clip of Bruce Springsteen, teamed with Paul Shaffer & The World’s Most Dangerous Band, playing fucking “Glory Days.” That might be the best rock performance I’ve ever seen on a regular TV show, including Saturday Night Live.
Otherwise it’s the same grim, shadowy, rain-soaked, Gotham City noir shit…the same bowl of foreboding, the same Batman ghoulash…re-heated and re-served and re-garnished for brawny, strapping, grown-up Zoomers and clinging-to-youth Millennials, who are gradually panicking about approaching middle age and desperate to hang on to classic mythologies.
Q: “Who are you under there?” A “I’m vengeance.” Yeah, we figured that out over 30 years ago, back in the good old dawning days of 1989. And now it’s 32 years later and we’re wading through the same marsh.
Absolute respect and admiration for Matt Reeves, whose films HE has admired going back to Let Me In (’10). I just don’t get this one. I don’t see the need. I dont think anyone does. I think it’s just a cash grab. And I say that with full props for Reeves. He went for the money, and there’s nothing “wrong” with that.
Two weeks shy of Halloween and it’s beach weather — 85 degrees in West Hollywood. People in easy moods, shuffling around in T-shirts and flip-flops, basking in the warmth and no loud, coarse workmen singing their hearts out to ranchero music. And the cloudless sky is a pure bright blue.
Why am I seemingly the only person in WeHo wearing a high-thread-count T-shirt, faded slim jeans and Beatle boots? I can’t answer that, but I can state without hesitancy that it’s 68 degrees in Manhattan, 49 degrees in Paris and 67 degrees in Hanoi. Life is good if you turn your mind off and float downstream and forget about people like LexG and Glenn Kenny.
Smiling faces and two-faced enemies. Or, in Marlon Brando terminology, one-eyed jacks. Some actual friends or “friendos,” of course (and thank God for those few) but mostly fair-weather types, transactional allies, etc. Like any other big-city racket. Grow up.
