Hollywood Elsewhere extends its thanks to the young and the careless…the unvaccinated sociopaths…thanks, guys, for ushering in the Delta variant tenfold over the past four or five weeks…thank you thank you thank you.
I’d begun to feel really wonderful about not wearing masks indoors. But now, thanks to All The Fine Young Ayeholes of L.A. County, we all have to put them back on starting tomorrow night.
Dr. Sam Torbati, medical director of the emergency department of Cedars-Sinai: “All of a sudden in the past couple weeks, we’ve seen a seven-fold increase in the number of people coming to the emergency room with COVID-related issues. Right now we’re seeing moreyoungassholesinfected because they’re more active and proportionally less-vaccinated because, you know, they’re stupidandarrogant…they’re not wearing face masks and aren’t protected so they’re going to get infected.”
Shawn Robbins, chief analyst at Box Office Pro to Variety: “It’s too soon to tell if renewed mask mandates in localized areas will discourage much activity. There’s still a pent-up desire to get back to normality. With many people having had a taste of that so far this summer, it would be challenging to expect such encouraging trends to reverse significantly as long as vaccines continue proving to be effective against known variants.”
Last night I had my second taste of Summer of Soul (Searchlight, 7.2). I had seen it theatrically in late June and had a nice, easy time with it. It’s a very warm and affecting film — a piece of New York-area cultural history I hadn’t sampled before, and was glad to have finally done so.
Shot during the mid-to-late summer of ’69 at the Harlem Cultural Festival, the doc is half…make that two-thirds about music and a third about revolutionary-cultural uplift. Changes were in the air; terra firma was shifting. ’69 was the year, remember, when average African Americans began self-identifying as “black”. And the footage is magnificent. You can almost feel the heat, smell the New York air, grass and trees, the cooked food, the cigar and cigarette smoke and the faint scent of flat, room-temperature beer.
Most of the film — directed by Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, shot a half-century ago by Shawn Peters, brilliantly edited by Joshua L. Pearson — is focused on the great songs and performances, and is what you might call (for lack of a better term) honky–friendly. Nobody says anything about the legacy of inherently evil whiteys or The 1619 Project or CRT…a blessing! Then it becomes more political and more Black-attuned about the serious consciousness elevations that were happening everywhere in all corners, and then it whips back into a more-or-less pure musical mode at the end.
Last night’s viewing was on Hulu, and it was just as pleasurable as the first time. Stevie Wonder on the drums, Mahalia Jackson uncorked, Nina Simone (I immediately flashed back to Liz Garbus‘s What Happened, Miss Simone?), The 5th Dimension (at age 26 Marilyn McCoo was arguably the dishiest 20th Century pop star who’d ever performed… pure strawberry shortcake), The Staple Singers, Gladys Knight & the Pips, and the orgasmic, thundering, X-factored Sly and the Family Stone — the only group who performed at the Harlem Cultural Festival who looked and posed and performed in a hippie-ish manner…the only organic, live-wire reflection of what had been happening in music and on campuses and in the cities since ’66 or thereabouts.
Festivalgoers are interviewed about their reactions to the 7.20.69 Moon landing, and the all-but-universal reaction was “that’s very nice but we could use some of that money down here in Harlem, because a lot of people are poor and hurtin’.”
Nobody mentions the Woodstock Music and Arts Fair or compares it to the Harlem Cultural Festival (i.e., “the black Woodstock”). It just was what it was on its own terms.
And nobody mentions the hour-long specials of the concerts that were broadcast by WNEW Metromedia (Channel 5) on Saturday evenings throughout June, July and August — 10:30 to 11:30 pm.
For what it’s worth, a critic friend who’s been around and knows the score says that Sean Baker‘s Red Rocket (A24) is his pick for the best in the Cannes competition.
Will it win the Palme d’Or? Or one of the major awards at least? I know nothing but if Spike Lee‘s jury is determined to choose a “woke” winner…okay, I won’t go there.
PartTimeHero: “Jesus Christ…people are actually upset about this? They were Anthony Bourdain‘s own verified words. Let’s not get too ‘woke’ on documentary filmmakers or you are going to have to accept the equal and opposite: that a documentary in theory is not far off from the makers of Jersey Shore or Survivor cobbling together their own storylines from footage.”
Mr. F.: “All they had to do was say it wasn’t an actual recording of Bourdain and they would have been fine. I just don’t understand the need to make it “his” voice. It’s the aural equivalent of putting a deepfake into a documentary, yet I suspect that would cross a line for you.”
Jeffrey Wells to Mr. F.: “Putting a visual deepfake into a documentary? Yes, that would be unacceptable. But there’s nothing wrong with what Neville did. Nothing whatsoever. I agree that he should have copped to it in the closing credits.”
Mr. F. to Jeffrey Wells: “But it’s exactly the same thing. Say you want to include a scene in a documentary that the subject has described in a book, interview, whatever — but there was never a video recording. You have the technology to shoot an actor doing what the subject says they did, then deepfake the footage to put the subject’s face on the actor’s body. While one is a visual recreation and the other an audio recreation: they are the same thing.”
Jeffrey Wells to Mr. F.: “Wrong. The key situation facing Neville was how to best aurally represent what Bourdain had written.
“Documentarians never resort to just showing passages that have been written — they ALWAYS have somebody read them. So the question was should Neville have (a) hired an actor to imitate Bourdain, or (b) read the passages himself (like Scorsese did in his Dylan doc) or (c) digitally replicate Bourdain’s voice?
“The key thing was representing Bourdain’s thoughts accurately and scrupulously. HOW they were read is a secondary issue. I have no problem with a deepfake Bourdain voice reading them, and why should you? Nobody’s lying or misrepresenting. It was simply a matter of what kind of voice would read Bourdain’s thoughts — the voice of an imitator, the voice of a neutral party (like Neville’s) or the simulated voice of Bourdain.
“If a Bourdain-imitating actor had read the passages in question, nobody would have said boo.
“Yes, there should have been a closing credit acknowledgment of this strategy, but otherwise it was obviously no biggie.”
In a 7.15 New Yorker article titled "A Haunting New Documentary About Anthony Bourdain," Helen Rosner has revealed that director Morgan Neville resorted to a sophisticated voice-editing or voice-replicating process that some on Twitter are tut-tutting about.
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The Blue Bayou trailer lays it right on the line — racism is very bad. Right away you detect the tone of social-justice instruction and an unsubtle replay of the anti-racism current that was explored 64 years ago in Joshua Logan‘s Sayonara (’57), in which an inter-racial couple (Red Buttons, Miyoshi Umeki) struggled against repressive racial attitudes.
This time an adopted, Korean-born New Orleans family man (Justin Chon, who also directed and wrote the screenplay) and his pretty Anglo-Saxon American wife (Alicia Vikander) are up against shit-for-brains ICE guys who insist on treating him like a Korean immigrant with a criminal record and want to kick him out blah blah.
Variety‘s Guy Lodgecalls this “an emotional pile-driver of a film [in which] sob-disrupted dialogue and background strings [compete] for our eardrums.” Obviously punishment for characters and audience members alike. Sanctimonious preaching to the woke choir.
The Guardian‘s Peter Bradshawinsists that Apichatpong Weerasethakul‘s Memoria “is a beautiful and mysterious movie, slow cinema that decelerates your heartbeat.
“In a calmly realist, non-mystic movie language, Weerasethakul” — a.k.a. Joe Weisenheimer — “really can convince you that the living and the dead, the past and the present, the terrestrial and the other, do exist side by side.
“All admirers of this director, with his enigmatic realist-mystic masterpieces such as Tropical Malady and Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives will know broadly what to expect. But he is still capable of astonishing you, all over again. I’m not being facetious when I say that watching this film reminded me of when I was 17, hearing ‘Revolution 9’ on The White Album for the first time. It left a residue of happiness in my heart.”
A few years ago I wrote that spelling and pronouncing the name of the celebrated Thailand director (Mekong Hotel, Cemetery of Splendor) has always been a challenge for me. His Wiki bio says that “cinephiles affectionately refer to him as ‘Joe’ Weerasethakul — a nickname that he, like many with similarly long Thai names, has adopted out of convenience.”
The last name, of course, is much more difficult to handle than the first. In my mind he’s always been Apichatpong J. Weisenheimer or, more simply, “Joe Weisenheimer.”
The film is basically about hearing or at least believing that you’re hearing (or vaguely sensing) sound vibrations that may be connected to something more meaningful than mere ound vibrations. I know all about that.
Friendo: “I heard it was a total joke. Unwatchable, except for the minimalist crowd. I would NEVER sit thru another of this guy’s movies ever again.”
During the summer of ’20 I happened to notice a minor Facebook thing — a long-distance photo of an odd-shaped cloud that looked like Godzilla from, like, a distance of six or seven miles. Since that time literally hundreds of thousands (or it is millions?) of idiots have decided that this cloud had some kind of religious significance. That thread is still going today, and if you ask me it’s a metaphor for how stunningly stupid and delusional religious people can be when they put their minds to it. In a way, the fact that so many saw Jesus in a Godzilla cloud shape explains why Donald Trump is still an influential figure. Among the mouth-breathers, I mean.
“This life’s hard, man, but it’s even harder if you’re stupid.” — Steven Keats‘ “Jackie Brown” character in Peter Yates‘ The Friends of Eddie Coyle (’73).
We’re no longer allowed to use the words “foxy” or “fetching” these days (or even think in those terms), but this Hejira image is perfect…easily the effiest of Joni Mitchell ever beheld. The outdoor Hejira photos were taken by Joel Bernstein at Lake Mendota, in Madison, Wisconsin; the indoor studio shots (of which this is obviously one) were taken by Norman Seeff.
Speaking as a central Jersey, Wes Anderson-type of guy (Union County, southwest of Newark, not far from Route 22) this seems like a reasonably honest capturing or delineation of the four stratas of New Jersey culture. I know that I always regarded South Jersey (Timothee Chalamet or Bruce Springsteen-ville) as a somewhat coarser, less cultured region…punky, scrappier. At the same time I don’t relate to the North Jersey Tilda Swinton thing either. (Not that I mind the projecting of greater wealth — I just can’t emotionally find myself in that realm.)
