“We all know what a haunted house looks like: Victorian, Gothic. The Addams Family pile, the Bates residence in Psycho. Mansard roofs, looming gables, bullseye windows, porches, verandas.

“The renowned art historian Sarah Burns of Indiana University has made an exhaustive study of how this late 19th century style became ‘the prime sinister locus’ of American culture, chiefly gathered in the marvellous essay Better for ‘Haunts: Victorian Houses and the Modern Imagination.’

“Late-Victorian architecture was anathematised in the 1920s as a way of passing moral judgement on the tawdriness and excess of the Gilded Age. This was, in turn, a way of condemning the flashiness and superficial opulence of the pre-Crash 1920s.

“When artists such as Edward Hopper and Charles Burchfield painted houses as empty and sinister, they were indirectly passing judgement on the corruption of the day.” — from “It’s Coming From Inside the House,” an Architects Journal articles by Will Miles, 8.21.15.

Video taken this morning inside Mount Washington House in Hillsdale, New York.

Every two or three years I’ll re-watch Alexander Payne‘s Sideways, mainly to savor Paul Giamatti‘s exquisite performance as morose Miles, a failed novelist and wine aficionado who falls in love during a week-long hiatus in Santa Barbara wine country.

So I re-watched it again last night, and there’s absolutely no question that Giamatti’s conflicted and deflated fellow wasn’t just the best lead male performance of ’04, but possibly the 21st Century’s finest and certainly one of the most penetrating of the last 70 or 75 years.

In my mind Miles Raymond is right up there with Willy Loman as one of filmdom’s most poignant expressions of middle-aged ennui, only funnier and only flecked with a tragic arc as opposed to being defined by one.

Sideways was appropriately nominated for Best Picture Oscar that year, competing against The Aviator, Million Dollar Baby, Finding Neverland and Ray. But Giamatti wasn’t even nominated for Best Actor. He won SAG’s 2004 Best Actor award, but the Best Actor nominees turned out to be Jamie Foxx (Ray — the ultimate victor), Don Cheadle (Hotel Rwanda), Johnny Depp (Finding Neverland), Leonardo DiCaprio (The Aviator) and Clint Eastwood (Million Dollar Baby).

Due respect to Cheadle and director Terry George, but 17 and 1/2 years later I can’t recall a single scene from Hotel Rwanda. All I can remember is that everyone (myself included) said it was worthy.

Nor can I recall a single vivid scene from Finding Neverland….not one. In The Aviator, DiCaprio’s Howard Hughes struck me as overly strained and actor-ish — he was 15 times better in The Wolf of Wall Street.

The thinking in early ’05 was that Giamatti didn’t “work the room” hard enough. Jamie Foxx charmed the pants off of each and every Academy member he met that season, but Giamatti, like Miles himself, was a bit too sullen and withdrawn.

But what a joke it was and still is that the Academy basically said, “Yes, we recognize that Giamatti gave a great, half-funny and half-sad performance, but we just couldn’t nominate him…don’t ask us why…okay, we didn’t nominate him because we’re too shallow.”

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“…this court is hell-bent on radically changing this country.” — Robert Reich.

Straight from the shoulder and no bullshit: Is there anyone in the HE community who feels strongly about seeing or not seeing Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis this weekend?

If it’s a must-see, what’s the main factor driving that notion? And if it’s a meh, why do you feel that way?

You may have heard that Elvis underperformed last night and that it may finish the weekend with less than $20 million, which may translate into a third or even (God forbid) a fourth-place showing.

I’ll tell you what I’m feeling, and that’s a pre-West Side Story vibe because (a) 40-and-younger types don’t care that much about E.P., (b) the numbers will depend on whatever ticket-buying enthusiasm may happen among GenX and more particularly boomers, and don’t forget that (c) Elvis’s core fan base (those in their tweener and teen years when he first ignited) are older boomers plus the baby-bust generation.

I really and truly hope that Elvis (which I was half-okay with after seeing it in Cannes) does better than West Side Story. I don’t want to see it tank.

The Ankler ‘s Sean McNulty senses trouble…

My mind is reeling with the knowledge that with the termination of Roe vs. Wade made official, enormous waves of trauma and pain and grief will sweep across the country.

As much as I dislike the act of abortion and as queasy as I feel about abortions at 23 or 24 weeks, the right of women to choose whether to have a baby or not must be absolute. It should not be rescinded. Their bodies, their call.

Today is a black day for women everywhere, and a black day in American history. I’m very, very sorry.

Posted on 12.1.21: “I’ve mentioned before that something happened inside me several months ago, back when Jett and Cait‘s daughter, the recently born Sutton, was growing inside Cait. Suddenly the idea of terminating a fetus’s life was no longer an abstraction. I was especially disturbed by the idea of terminating a fetus at 24 weeks, which suddenly seemed wrong on some primal level. The Roe v. Wade law stipulated 24 weeks because that’s the point at which fetuses become viable, yes, but why so long into the pregnancy? Why not 18 or 20 weeks?”

Jack Nicholson to Rolling Stone in 1984: “I’m very contra my constituency in terms of abortion because I’m positively against it. I don’t have the right to any other view. My only emotion is gratitude, literally, for my life. I’m pro-choice but against abortion because I’m an illegitimate child myself and it would be hypocritical to take any other position.”

“Alito Absolutism Is A Brutal Thing,” posted on 5.14.22:

Bill Maher: “The current abortion divide between the states ‘makes me think about the Civil War…pre-Civil War. Because we seem to be going toward this place in America where we’re gonna be two countries. One where you’re a free woman, and another in which it’s a Dred Scott situation.

“When you look at some of the things that are being proposed in some of these [red] states. I mean, Louisiana says flat-out that [abortion] is homicide. When you drive from L.A. to Nevada…on one side of the border you’re a free person and on the other side you’re a criminal. You can fly across the country and gain and lose your reproductive rights 20 times.”

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…that there are accomplished, seemingly intelligent film obsessives who are actually persuaded that in Alexander Payne’s Election, Matthew Broderick’s high-school teacher is the villain and Reese Witherspoon’s Tracey Flick is…what, driven and misunderstood but essentially a decent soul?

Broderick’s character is a more-or-less moral fellow with weaknesses (extra-marital lust, loathing for Tracey Flick types, not smart enough to destroy that ballot instead of toss it into a waste basket). But Flick is Richard Nixon, for God’s sake. I’ve known screwed-down, hissy-fit Tracey Flick types all my life…’nuff said.

“Determined Little Sociopath,” Posted on 9.20.17: What was it about Election, exactly, that turned so many people off? Alexander Payne‘s brilliant, perfectly shaped black comedy cost $25 million (just shy of $37 million in 2017 dollars) to make, and it only earned a lousy $14.9 million (or nearly $22 million by today’s calculator). Something in this film irritated a large swath of the public, obviously, but what in particular? The reviews couldn’t have been better, but outside of some modest action in the cities Joe and Jane Popcorn just wouldn’t go.

I’ve long suspected that on some deep-seated level Jane didn’t care for the demonizing of Reese Witherspoon‘s Tracy Flick, who always struck me as a female Richard Nixon type — resentful, craven.

The irony, of course, is that Witherspoon will probably never luck into a role as good again. It enabled her to give her very best performance. Certainly her most memorable, in part because she wasn’t “acting” — Tracy Flick is inside Witherspoon as surely as Tom Dunson and Ethan Edwards were inside John Wayne. Tracy Flick was lightning in a bottle, and that stuff doesn’t grow on trees. Criterion’s Election Bluray will pop on 12.12.17.

Posted on 3.21.20, just as Covid-19 was manifesting big-time and pandemic consciousness was generating widespread depression: If it’s all the same Hollywood Elsewhere would like to move to Tahiti for two or three months, just for the privilege of walking around without a mask or surgical gloves. To the best of my knowledge only one native — French Polynesian politician Maina Sage — has been infected, and that it’s pretty much a clean-slate territory. Imagine the joy of just living without the terror.

The coronavirus claimed another 793 people today in northern Italy, including 546 deaths in the Lombardy epicenter. That country’s total death roster now stands at 4,825. The worldwide tally is 11,000, according to data collected by the Johns Hopkins University in the United States. More than 277,000 people have been infected, while some 88,000 have recovered.

From Nicholas Kristof’s N.Y. Times column, “The Best-Case Outcome for the Coronavirus, and the Worst,” posted on 3.20: “Dr. Neil M. Ferguson, a British epidemiologist who is regarded as one of the best disease modelers in the world, produced a sophisticated model with a worst case of 2.2 million deaths in the United States.

“I asked Ferguson for his best case. ‘About 1.1 million deaths,’ he said.

“When that’s a best-case scenario, it’s difficult to feel optimistic.”

Posted on Friday, 6.24: As it turned out Neil Ferguson was almost exactly on the money. The current tally of U.S. coronavirus deaths is 1,040,236, of which roughly 80% represented the elderly and the obese, and another portion the too-dumb-to-get-vaccinated crowd.

Presenting five fine fellows who once lived at 948 14th Street in Santa Monica. The orchestrator is the illustrious Ed Roach (far left), longtime Beach Boys photographer. Two possibilities: (1) Pic used to be in color but has faded to pink or (2) Ed shot it in black-and-white and decided to pink it up.

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The Victorian home of the late Pauline Kael, located on a grand hill in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. The place is quite huge — not quite the size of Cecil B. DeMille’s Los Feliz mansion, but in that general ballpark or so it seemed — and the sloping grounds are well-groomed and shrouded with many trees, and surrounded by a black iron fence. Most critics and columnists live in modest spartan abodes. But what is life without exceptions?

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