George Gallo‘s The Comeback Trail (Cloudburst, 11.13) is a sardonic Hollywood farce that seems similar to Mel Brooks‘ The Producers. Directed by Gallo and co-written with Josh Posner, it stars Robert De Niro, Tommy Lee Jones, Morgan Freeman, Zach Braff, Emile Hirsch and Eddie Griffin.
Boilerplate: “Max Barber (De Niro), a film producer in debt to the mob, finances a badly written western in the hopes of the production killing its aging star, Duke Montana (Jones).”
Pic is a remake of a 1982 film of the same name, directed, co-produced and edited by Harry Hurwitz and costarring Chuck McCann and Buster Crabbe (in the Duke Montana role). Cameos by Hugh Hefner, Henny Youngman and Professor Irwin Corey.
Frank Pierson‘s “My Battles With Barbra And Jon” is/was a New West article that was published just after the 12.19.76 opening of Pierson, Barbra Streisand and Jon Peters‘ A Star Is Born.
Last night I found the Pierson piece on the Wayback Machine. It’s a longish read.
Key passage: “For us, the picture cost $6 million and a year of our lives. For the audience it’s $3.50 and an evening out. If it’s a bum evening, it doesn’t make me any better or worse as a person. But if you think the film is you, if it is your effort to transform your lover into a producer worthy of a superstar [and] if you think it is a home movie about your love and your hope and your deepest feelings, if it’s your life that you laid out for the folks and they don’t smile back, that’s death.”
I’ve pasted it forthwith:
In the summer when school is out, Instamatics and flashcubes at the ready, they wait outside the homes of the stars. Hoping for a glimpse of Paul, or Clint, or Steve, or Barbra. A glimpse of a radiant life, full of wealth and fame and sex and happiness.
Pursuing in their lemming way this fantasy of stardom, they have driven Barbra Streisand and Jon Peters, her ex-hairdresser, now her partner in life’s adventure, as far as they can retreat, up a narrow country road, overhung with great oaks and eucalyptus, to a rustic ranch house buried in the Malibu mountains.
But the fans are already there, lurking outside the gate, glaring at visitors. Jon is not dismayed. He roars with exuberant laughter — “We’re training the dog to attack.”
Barbra is not happy. Her brow is furrowed and her eyes are full of hurt. “What do they want from me?” she asks. And yet they’re the paying customers whose unending eagerness to pay $3.50 and up to see Barbra show emotion is making all this possible.
All this is a golden forest, where Barbra and Jon are at play like children of the gods. The ranch house is all earth tones and artfully aged wood, peopled with Art Deco statuary, every corner filled with antiques, pictures, elegant rugs and throws and shawls, lamps, plants, objets d’art of every description, none of it going together, in such profusion only an impression of magnificence is generated. For some reason it doesn’t seem cluttered, which is perhaps part of Barbra’s secret. It is like a magical attic, in which every trunk and old discarded hat rack or moose head has a sentimental history, printed on a card. Nooks and crannies abound, a great house for hide and seek. It is completely satisfactory; I believe Barbra Streisand lives here.
A new garden is being started today, during my first visit. It arrives on a truck, and the entire thing is planted before lunch, with everything in bloom. It reminds me of an old Hollywood joke about Cecil B. De Mille and his extravagant film vision of the Bible: “This is what God would do, if he had the money.”
15 and 1/4 years ago I caught Tommy Lee Jones‘ The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada in Cannes. I was an instant admirer. Directed by and starring Jones and based on a script by Guillermo Arriaga, it’s a tautly absorbing, well-crafted morality (i.e., anti-racism) tale. I decided this morning that re-watching it might be a good idea. It’s now on my Amazon watchlist.
Here are some impressions about the film and a press session that the producers staged in the hills above Cannes. Filed on 5.19.05, the piece was called “Respecting a Dead Guy.”
“I’ve pledged not to wade into The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada until later this evening, but it’s fair to repeat what other journos are saying, which is that it’s highly respectable. Some (like the Toronto Sun‘s Bruce Kirkland) expressed surprise at how smartly composed and compassionate and thematically rich it is. Surprised because you never know what to expect from a first-time-out director. It could have been indulgent or precious or half-baked.
“It’s also fair to report that I attended an American Pavilion interview late Wednesday afternoon between Jones and Roger Ebert. Ebert made it clear he’d had a positive reaction to the film. He also asked if anyone in the audience had seen it, and when I raised my hand he asked me what I thought and I offered a thumbs-up gesture.
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada producer Michael Fitzgerald (left), director-producer-star Tommy Lee Jones (center) and Toronto Sun critic-reporter Bruce Kirkland at Thursday’s press gathering at a wonderfully picturesque and soul-soothing villa in the hills above Cannes — 5.19.05, 12:35 pm.
View of Cannes and the Med from EuropaCorp-rented villa.
“The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada is a modern-day tale set in western Texas and northern Chihuahua, Mexico. It deals with a ranch foreman (Jones), a border patrolman (Barry Pepper) and an illegal immigrant named Melquiades Estrada who works for Jones. The second half is a horseback-journey film about redemption and seeing through prejudices and embedded attitudes.
“It’s a film with a great deal of compassion and soul and a generally humanistic view of things. If you want your literary influences, check out Flannery O’Connor’s work and William Faulkner’s ‘As I Lay Dying.’
“In the press kit, Arriaga says he wanted “to make a study in social contrast between the land that’s south of the Rio Grande river and the land that’s north of it. About what ironies, injustices, glory, beauty and redemption you can find in this area that has its own character…something that cannot be imposed, something that has grown and evolved…something that cannot be controlled.”
“Just before 11 am today myself and a few other journos (Kirkland, Stephen Schaefer, Desson Thomson, Harlan Jacobson, Shari Roman, etc.) were driven in a minivan from the Gray d’Albion hotel near the Croisette into the hills above Cannes, and eventually (the driver got lost) to a beautiful hilltop villa.
“The purpose was to allow for a brief schmooze with Jones, Arriaga, Pepper, young co-star January Jones and producer Michael Fitzgerald (whose other ventures include Colour Me Kubrick and Sean Penn’s The Pledge).
Pepper said that Jones “has a very deep passion for strong visual composition and the poetry of words.” He read some passages from his on-set journal, and on one page he described Jones as “a Southern badass with a ruthless work ethic and a heart the size of the Copper Canyon.”
“He mentioned two things that Jones told him before shooting a couple of scenes — ‘Keep it stupid simple’ and ‘don’t do somethin’, just stand there.’
A remastered 20th anniversary 4K version of Darren Aronofsky‘s Requiem for a Dream will pop on 10.13.20. The critically admired film, based on Hubert Selby Jr.‘s 1978 novel and worshipped by Midwestern Evangelical audiences, opened on 10.6.00. (I’m kidding about the Evangelicals.) Presented in Dolby Vision with a new Dolby Atmos audio track + a pair of new behind-the-scenes featurettes.
Ennio Morricone was a talented, gainfully employed composer who knew from catchy hooks and whistling melodies, but to a significant degree he was a a genre guy. Because when you boil it right down his whole career rests upon his scores for Sergio Leone‘s spaghetti westerns (A Fistful of Dollars, For A Few Dollars More, Once Upon A Time in the West) and, more recently, his score for Quentin Tarantino‘s The Hateful Eight. Plus the scores for Gillo Pontecorvo‘s The Battle of Algiers, Bernardo Bertolucci‘s 1900 and Terrence Malick‘s Days of Heaven (along with Leo Kottke).
In the Italian realm Morricone’s music wasn’t as deep or ravishing as Nino Rota‘s, and he certainly wasn’t in the same league as Hollywood powerhouse composers like Bernard Herrmann, Max Steiner, Franz Waxman, Elmer Bernstein, John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith, James Horner, David Raksin, Dimitri Tiomkin, Miklos Rozsa, Maurice Jarre, Alex North and Hugo Freidhofer. Not in my book, he wasn’t.
I’ve been getting more and more irritated by having to constantly wipe my glasses when I walk around with my flag mask. If I wear it correctly, I mean, with the steam engine-like nostril breath collecting and escaping and fogging the hell out of the lenses. As Ashley Judd said to Robert De Niro in Heat, “I’m sick of it, sick of it!”
It’s gotten so when I’m walking outside and a safe distance from other humans I just tug the mask below my nose…fuck it.
Don’t kid yourself — right now we’re living through the Second Great Depression. In late March I called it “a dystopian realm, almost a kind of On The Beach atmosphere…a low-security, self-policed concentration camp with wifi.” Except now things are a tad more liberal and semi-open. Toilet paper isn’t an exotic rarity any more. But we’re still “in it.”
Instead of bread lines we have masked citizens waiting in line outside supermarkets. Instead of Midwestern downmarket gangsters (Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger) holding up banks as a reaction to economic devastation, we have bumblefuck “open up!” protestors storming state houses and causing infections to spike. In many ways the same dynamic. The winter of our discontent.
Perhaps the biggest difference is that in the early ’30s FDR was in the White House, and today we have a sociopathic gangster-demagogue running things.
“It’s a New York family crime drama like nothing Lumet (83 friggin’ years old and cooking with high-test like he was in the ’70s and ’80s) has ever attempted, much less achieved. And with a killer cast giving exceptional perfs — Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Albert Finney, Ethan Hawke, Marisa Tomei. It’s like something out of Shakespeare or Greek tragedy…it’s the House of Borgia. And a great suspense film to boot.
“I don’t have time to get into this now (have to hit the I’m Not There party and then another film) but I’ll elaborate tomorrow. But I immediately knew this would be exceptional. How did I come to this conclusion? I figured any film that starts off with a naked Hoffman doing it doggy-style with a naked Tomei — a ‘whoa!’ shot if I’ve ever seen one — has to be dealing from a fairly exceptional deck.
“Lumet had lost the beat from time to time. The ’90s were not a glorious period for him. Critical Care (’97), Night Falls on Manhattan (’97), Gloria (’99), Guilty as Sin (’93) and A Stranger Among Us (’92) were all problem films. Q & A (’90) was the last truly decent Lumet film until Find Me Guilty came along in ’06. And now Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, a better film than Find Me Guilty (which is saying a lot) and Lumet’s best since Prince of the City.”
Here are HE’s top 25 films released in 2007 — Zodiac, American Gangster, Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead, No Country for Old Men, 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days, I’m Not There, Once, Superbad, Michael Clayton, There Will Be Blood, Things We Lost in the Fire, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Atonement, Sicko, Eastern Promises, The Bourne Ultimatum, Control, The Orphanage, 28 Weeks Later, In The Valley of Elah, Ratatouille, Charlie Wilson’s War, The Darjeeling Limited, Knocked Up and Sweeney Todd.
What a year! Just as strong as ’99, and perhaps a touch better. And every one of them played in theatres. Remember theatres?
I don’t know why I forgot to watch Bad Education on the HBO screener site, but it may have been a combination of exhaustion due to wall painting, general pandemic depression and day dreaming about sailing the South Seas. Then again it premieres two hours hence (8 pm Eastern) so I’ll catch it then.
Great reviews (RT 92%) during last September’s Toronto Film Festival, and yet — this is a minor point — of all the reviews I’ve read not one has mentioned that the aspect ratio of Bad Education is 2.39:1. Not one.
“Based on a real-life scandal, BadEducation is a small and economical movie, but not slight, as it gives us a good taste of the banality of greed and entitlement, never turning its compromised characters into easily dismissed comic monsters.
“Written by Mike Makowsky and directed by Cory Finley, it shows us just how good Frank is at his job and just how much he cares about his young charges, before it lets us discover the extent of his vanity and self-serving needs. Finley and Makowsky achieve a tone that swings expertly between pathos and dark humor.” — from Matthew Gilbert’s Boston Globe review, posted on 4.23.
And it’s not a six-parter! It actually does the job in less than two hours.
Standing six feet apart, the Rolling Stones (Jagger, Richards, Watts, Wood) will play a tune during tomorrow’s two-hour telecast “Together at Home”, which begins at 8 pm (on both coasts). Other performers will include Eddie Vedder, Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga, Paul McCartney, Billie Eilish, Lizzo, Elton John, Andrea Bocelli, Celine Dion, Shawn Mendes, Camila Cabello, Jennifer Lopez, Kacey Musgraves, Billie Joe Armstrong, Chris Martin, Sam Smith, Lang Lang, Alanis Morissette, Burna Boy and Stevie Wonder.
All well and good but there’s no special current if a band is performing inside a closed studio or in someone’s living room or whatever. No audience or lighting effects or big arena means NO JUICE.
Participating outlets will include ABC, NBC, ViacomCBS Networks, iHeartMedia and Bell Media networks, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Yahoo, Twitch, Amazon Prime Video, Apple Music, Roblox, Tidal, Alibaba, beIN Media Group, LiveXLive, Tencent, TuneIn, AXS TV, beIN Media Group, MultiChoice Group and RTE. BBC One will air the fucking thing on Sunday night.
A streaming-only, six-hour pre-telecast special will also happen tomorrow, beginning at 2 p.m. Eastern and 11 am Pacific. Performers will include Sheryl Crow and the Killers, Adam Lambert, Andra Day, Annie Lennox, Ben Platt, Charlie Puth, Christine and the Queens, Common, Ellie Goulding, Hozier, Jack Johnson, Jennifer Hudson, Jessie Reyez, Juanes, Kesha, Lady Antebellum, Liam Payne, Luis Fonsi, Maren Morris, Michael Bublé, Niall Horan, etc.
Some faces need moustaches. Some movie-star faces (Clark Gable, Burt Reynolds, Sam Elliott, Tom Selleck) are almost unimaginable without them. For some movie characters (Robert Redford‘s Sundance Kid, Daniel Day Lewis‘s Bill the Butcher) moustaches were essential components.
But it just occured to me this morning that while two-week stubble and beards are par for the course these days (at least among customers of West Hollywood Pavilions), it’s become a relatively rare thing to run into a moustache upon an otherwise clean shaven mug. Not unheard of but rare, and to be honest a little curious looking.
That’s because there have only been three distinct phases over the last 90-odd years in which moustaches were “happening.”
Phase one began with Clark Gable‘s carefully trimmed ‘stache in It Happened One Night (’34) — an urban machismo profile that launched a thousand ships. The pencil-thin ‘stache lasted until death for Gable and Brian Donlevy and a few others but only into the late ’40s or early ’50s for everyone else.
Four or five years after Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid the “Castro clone” ‘stache exploded within urban gay communities, and it refused to retreat until…what, the mid ’80s? I know that for those paying attention, the gay clone look was suddenly hugely unfashionable soon after the failure of Alan Carr‘s Can’t Stop The Music (’80), so there was that.
Moustaches will never go away, of course, but they haven’t re-ignited over the last 40-plus years. Unless I’ve been missing something. I live in a gay neighborhood so don’t tell me.
18 days ago (i.e., before the coronavirus had even begun to destroy American life as we know it) I posted a piece about Stephen Farber and Michael McClellan‘s “Cinema ’62: The Greatest Year at the Movies” (Rutgers University Press). It was titled “1962 Was The Year.”
The paragraph that grabbed me was a suggestion that not only was ’62 a great year but also the last great annum for black and white films.
For mainstream monochrome features began to fade soon after. Fewer and fewer appeared in ’63, ’64 and ’65, which is precisely when color TVs were beginning to become more and more common in middle-class households. 1966 was the last year that the Academy awarded an Oscar for Best Cinematography, Black and White. The nominees were Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Fortune Cookie, Georgy Girl, Is Paris Burning? and Seconds.
Hammond: “[The authors] point out that so many of 1962’s best were in black and white (anathema for millennials today), and in fact only two of the ten lead acting Oscar nominees were in color. Thus it might be the last hurrah of black and white, followed by its ultimate decline before a little more than half the decade was out.”
Here’s my rundown of 40 exceptional 1962 black-and-white films: John Ford‘s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Robert Aldrich‘s Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, Bryan Forbes‘ The L-Shaped Room, Francois Truffaut‘s Shoot The Piano Player, Francois Truffaut‘s Jules and Jim, Agnes Varda‘s Cleo From 5 to 7, Luis Bunuel‘s The Exterminating Angel; Peter Ustinov‘s Billy Budd; J. Lee Thompson‘s Cape Fear; Frank Perry‘s David and Lisa. (10)
John Frankenheimer‘s Birdman of Alcatraz, The Manchurian Candidate and All Fall Down, the Blake Edwards‘ duo of Experiment in Terror and Days of Wine and Roses, Frank Perry‘s David and Lisa, Pietro Germi‘s Divorce, Italian Style; Stanley Kubrick‘s Lolita, the great Kirk Douglas western Lonely are the Brave, John Schlesinger‘s A Kind of Loving. (10)
Robert Mulligan‘s To Kill a Mockingbird, the internationally-directed The Longest Day, Arthur Penn‘s The Miracle Worker, Roman Polanski‘s Knife in the Water (released in the U.S. in ’63), Alain Resnais‘ Last Year at Marienbad, Michelangelo Antonioni‘s L’eclisse, Sidney Lumet‘s version of Eugene O’Neil’sLong Day’s Journey into Night, Otto Preminger‘s Advise and Consent; Jules Dassin‘s Phaedra, Don Siegel‘s Hell Is For Heroes. (10)
Tony Richardson‘s TheLonelinessoftheLong–DistanceRunner; Ralph Nelson and Rod Serling‘s Requiem for a Heavyweight; Serge Bourguignon‘s Sundays and Cybele (a.k.a., Les dimanches de ville d’Avray); Orson Welles‘ The Trial; Denis Sanders‘ War Hunt (which costarred Robert Redford and Sydney Pollack); Philip Leacock‘s The War Lover; Masaki Kobayashi‘s Harikiri; Andre Takovsky’sIvan’s Childhood; Robert Wise‘s Two for the Seesaw; Herk Harvey‘s Carnival of Souls. (10)
At the end of each year there are always 20 to 25 films that qualify as excellent, very good or good. The creme de la creme is usually between five and ten, but the final tally of approvables is always around 20, and 25 if you want to be liberal about it. But 1962 was different. By my count nearly 50 films that anyone would rank as praiseworthy or seriously noteworthy were released that year. Roughly double the average. The HE rundown is below.
I’ve riffed off and on about the ’62 roster over the last 15 or so years, but now there’s a new book that celebrates this mid-Kennedy administration chapter — Stephen Farber and Michael McClellan‘s “Cinema ’62: The Greatest Year at the Movies” (Rutgers University Press). The pub date is 3.13.
For many years the general consensus has been that the greatest movie years were 1939, ’62, ’71 and ’99. Which others?
Excerpt: “Most conventional film histories dismiss the early 1960s as a pallid era, a downtime between the heights of the classic studio system and the rise of New Hollywood directors like Scorsese and Altman in the 1970s. It seemed to be a moment when the movie industry was floundering as the popularity of television caused a downturn in cinema attendance.
On the contrary, “Cinema ’62′ asserts that 1962 “was a peak year for film, with a high standard of quality that has not been equaled since.”
A decade or so ago I wrote about a BAM retrospective on 1962 films. NYFCC chairman Armond White, the apparent architect of the series, wrote at the time that 1962 “was equal to Hollywood’s fabled 1939 so we welcome this great opportunity to learn and revise film history.”
Here’s my updated rundown of 1962 worthies: David Lean‘s Lawrence of Arabia, John Ford‘s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Sam Peckinpah‘s Ride The High Country, Robert Aldrich‘s Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, Bryan Forbes‘ The L-Shaped Room, Howard Hawks‘ Hatari, Francois Truffaut‘s Shoot The Piano Player, Francois Truffaut‘s Jules and Jim, Agnes Varda‘s Cleo From 5 to 7, Luis Bunuel‘s The Exterminating Angel (10)
Peter Ustinov‘s Billy Budd, the John Frankenheimer trio of Birdman of Alcatraz, The Manchurian Candidate and All Fall Down, J. Lee Thompson‘s Cape Fear, George Seaton‘s The Counterfeit Traitor, Frank Perry‘s David and Lisa, the Blake Edwards‘ duo of Experiment in Terror and Days of Wine and Roses, Pietro Germi‘s Divorce, Italian Style. (10)
Stanley Kubrick‘s Lolita, the great Kirk Douglas western Lonely are the Brave, John Schlesinger‘s A Kind of Loving, Roman Polanski‘s Knife in the Water (released in the U.S. in ’63), Alain Resnais‘ Last Year at Marienbad, Michelangelo Antonioni‘s L’eclisse, Sidney Lumet‘s version of Eugene O’Neil’sLong Day’s Journey into Night, Otto Preminger‘s Advise and Consent, Terence Young‘s Dr. No, John Huston‘s Freud. (10)