Earlier today The Independent‘s Antonia Molloy reported that Fifty Shades of Grey (Universal, 2.13), which will screen this evening at Hollywood’s Arclight, “is a bit of a slow burner.” An early review in the Sun (which you can’t read without a paid subscription) claims “there’s no sex at all for the first 40 minutes, and only 11 minutes of raunchy scenes” during the entire 125-minute film. It’s not how much sexy footage you use but the kind of sexy footage and how intense it is. How much coupling was in Last Tango in Paris? Maybe five minutes’ worth, if that. One stand-up schtupper with overcoats on, one anal-butter scene, another anal thing in the bathroom…that’s it. The Sun review reportedly says that “early scenes of the movie rely more on sensuality and tension between the couple, played by Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson, rather than full-on sex. [But] it makes every one of those 11 minutes count with boobs, bums and even a glimmer of Jamie’s junk.” Sam Taylor-Johnson and E.L. James‘ adaptation will have its official premiere at the Berlin Film Festival on Wednesday. L.A. reviewers has been told to hold off until Wednesday morning Pacific.
The Charlie Hebdo massacre bad guys, Said and Cherif Kouachi, were killed two or three hours ago by French police. A hostage crisis at a kosher supermarket in Paris is also reported as having concluded with one nutter and four hostages dead. Yet another conclusion to a standard urban-terrorists-killed-by-law-enforcement scenario, directed by the somewhat younger John Frankenheimer. I know that the aftermath video footage I’m seeing is right near the Porte de Vincennes metro station, which I’m quite familiar with as a visual staple of my Paris metro experiences.
This is the final day of 2014…big deal. Tomorrow will be the first day of 2015…and what of it? I feel great about a lot of stuff, mind. Best time of my life. I just don’t care about New Year’s Eve bullshit, and staying out until 3 am ruins the following day. This is a lousy town to celebrate in anyway, time-zone-wise. Everyone has already whoo-hoo’d and guzzled the bubbly and stumbled home and gone to sleep by the time midnight hits Los Angeles. Paris is the place to be.
The cooler and deeper you are, the quieter and more away-from-the-madding-crowd your New Year’s Eve is. I know a lady who says she always does it solo — meditating, painting, incense. Okay, maybe that’s taking it a bit too far in the other direction. I suspect that those who take really long showers are almost certainly among those who whoop it up on New Year’s Eve. In both instances they’re looking for comfort, for that womb-like security and sublime relaxation that comes from steaming hot water and alcohol and the embrace of fair-weather friends.
Every new day is a renewal, and the time to celebrate that is the early morning. And yet I’ve known people in my life who actually wake up in a bad mood. (My ex-wife was one of them.) How is that possible? How could the metaphor be lost on them?
Posted eight years ago: “I’d say ‘Happy New Year’ to everyone, but…all right, ‘Happy New Year.’ But I’ve always hated those words. Nothing’s ‘happy’ by way of hope. Happy is discovered, earned, lucked into. At best, people are content or…you know, joyously turned on for the moment or laughing or telling a funny story or a good joke. Placated, relaxed, enthused, generous of heart…but ‘happy’? Clams are happy. There’s only the hum. Either you hear it or you don’t.
Posted in 2010: “Nothing fills me with such spiritual satisfaction as my annual naysaying of this idiotic celebration of absolutely nothing.
“I love clinking glasses with cool people at cool parties as much as anyone else, but celebrating renewal by way of the hands of a clock and especially in the company of party animals making a big whoop-dee-doo has always felt like a huge humiliation.
“Only idiots believe in the idea of a of a midnight renewal. Renewal is a constant. Every minute marks the potential start of something beautiful and cleansing, and perhaps even transforming. So why hang back and celebrate a rite that denies this 24/7 theology, and in a kind of idiot-monkey way with party hats and noisemakers?
I shouldn’t admit this but I’ve pleaded for God’s help twice in my life. I was scared shitless both times. I felt like a hypocrite but I figured it couldn’t hurt. I told myself I was like Jimmy Stewart when he was trying to land the Spirit of St. Louis at Le Bourget field in Paris…”Oh, God, help me.” The first time was in ’78 or thereabouts, when I was truly frightened about my ability to survive as a freelance journalist in the rough-and-tumble, suffer-no-fools environment of New York City. The second was in the summer of ’05, when I was seriously concerned that Hollywood Elsewhere’s meager revenues might not be enough to survive on. I actually went to a Catholic church on Montrose Avenue in Brooklyn (i.e., St. Mary’s) and prayed. I guess my prayers were answered because I was doing okay a year later. If I ever get in trouble again I’ll probably get all penitent and go there again. Spiritually speaking I’m a Hindu — I feel much closer to the Bhagavad Gita than the Bible.
In my recently-posted piece about the 2014 New York Film Critics Circle winners, I expressed profound puzzlement about Marion Cotillard winning the Best Actress prize for her performances in Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardennes‘ Two Days, One Night as well as James Gray‘s The Immigrant. “Where did this Immigrant love come from?,” I asked. “What cabal of James Gray loyalists got together and rammed this through?”
A few minutes ago a friend explained that nobody has been talking about Cotillard as a Best Actress candidate at least partly because of the lackluster backing of the Weinstein Company.
“Even after The Immigrant trounced all other Weinstein titles (most notably, The Imitation Game) with both the Spirit Award nominating committee and now the NYFCC, the Weinstein Co. does not even list The immigrant on its ‘awards season’ screening RSVP website or its guild-friendly site, and until sending out an online screener to members of NYFCC in the middle of Thanksgiving weekend, had made no visible efforts to promote the film whatsoever.
“This in spite of the fact that The Immigrant had rave reviews pretty across the board when it opened last spring (76 on Metacritic to Imitation Game‘s 71 and Theory of Everything‘s 72). But I know, I know…it’s so much more interesting to theorize a burgeoning James Gray loyalist cabal in the NYFCC than going off the empirical evidence!”
Two nights ago a week-long Nastassja Kinski film series began under the auspices of the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Last night (11.28) they screened James Toback‘s Exposed (’83), in which Kinski costarred with Rudolf Nureyev and Harvey Keitel. (It also featured model Janice Dickinson, who recent came out as one of Bill Cosby‘s victims.) As a Paris-based terrorist named Rivas, Keitel delivers a memorable riff (in a scene with Kinski) about what he considers good-life essentials: “I’ll tell you what I want. Good food. Women. Good cigars. Good beds with fresh sheets Hot showers in Hilton hotels. New shoes. Poker. Blackjack. Dancing. Clint Eastwood westerns. And you. I knew from looking at your face.”
Rudolf Nureyev, Nastassja Kinski in James Toback’s Exposed.
Toback told me this morning that a major critic said at the time that “only Toback would have written dialogue as arcane as that for an international terrorist.” In fact the line was taken directly from an interview with the real Carlos, Toback said. Everything verbatim except Clint.
A couple of weeks ago I sat down with the kindly and serene Abderrahmane Sissako, director and co-writer of the well-crafted Timbuktu, the Mauritanian entry for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. Timbuktu was respectfully received at Cannes last May, but it’s one of the grimmest films I’ve ever sat through. Grim. My personal idea of misery is no wifi or sitting through an awful film or being dropped by a beautiful girlfriend who was magnificent in the sack. Misery in Sissako’s film, which is set in the Timbuktu region of Mali, a mostly barren African nation that few people in this country have heard of and wouldn’t give a shit about if they have, is much more hard-core. Forget about it. Shot in Mauritania, it’s about the 2012 occupation of Timbuktu by Ansar Dine, a relentlessly purist, wacked-out Islamic militia dedicated to enforcing Sharia law and order. The film was partly inspired by a public stoning of an unmarried couple in Aguelhok, in eastern Mali, but that’s just another pebble in the pond. I think we all know about the pitch-black souls of nutter Islamics by now.
Timbuktu director and co-writer Abderrahmane Sissako, translator Myriam Despujoulets during our interview at West Hollywood’s Pacific Design Center.
Timbuktu is in no way boring. Sissako knows how to tell a riveting tale and keep you engrossed, but good God. This is a film about dirt-poor hardscrabble types living in various states of misery and deprivation, powerless, at times terrified and always subject to rigid judgments and brutalities. An awful way to live. If there’s an uglier, crueler, more inhumane, more rancid belief system or culture than Islamic fundamentalism, I’d like to know what it is. The earth needs to be absolutely cleansed of this scourge. Welcome, western audiences, to life in one of the worst ideological desert prison camps ever created. Watching Timbuktu, for me, was like squatting on dirt at the bottom to a mine shaft, accompanied only by the flame of a single candle and surrounded by snakes and rats and bugs. Call Orkin, the extermination specialists.
Two days ago I riffed about the relative lack of calming shade and big towering trees in the Los Angeles area. Another thing we’re short of is rain, of course, and particularly torrential downpours, which I love standing in the middle of as long as I’m under an umbrella or shelter of some kind. I experienced an awesome cloudburst last year at this time (on 11.19.13) in Vietnam, in a forested area outside of Hue. The sound alone was fantastic. How many of these have I sampled since moving to Los Angeles in ’83? Damn few. I remember another really good one in Paris about 11 years ago. Rivers were raging in the gutters of narrow cobblestoned streets.
A few days ago Hollywood Reporter columnist Scott Feinberg moderated an AFI Fest discussion with A Most Violent Year director-writer J.C. Chandor, Whiplash director-writer Damien Chazelle, Two Days and One Night star Marion Cotillard, Nightcrawler star Jake Gyllenhaal, The Skeleton Twins star Bill Hader, Fort Bliss star Michelle Monaghan, Still Alice, Camp X-Ray and Clouds of Sils Maria star Kristen Stewart and Snowpiercer, Grand Budapest Hotel and Only Lovers Left Alive star Tilda Swinton. Who among the six actors is totally deserving of award-season applause but whose performance hasn’t caught on, at least in comparison to the others? Hader. Ten months ago I went nuts for Skeleton Twins in Sundance but the buzz just wouldn’t ignite, or not the way it should have.
Tech note: The THR video is watchable on my Mac laptops but not on my iPhone 6 Plus, nor on Jett’s iPhone 6. And yet Feinberg tells me it’s viewable on his phone. What about iPads and Kindles? It’s that damn Brightcove video/media platform, which many large publishers use but which isn’t as easily viewable as videos on YouTube or Vimeo. What’s the point of posting videos that aren’t supported on all the major devices?
I’ve come to a semi-profound realization about Los Angeles, one connected to my longstanding irritation with this bleached-out burg, and, correspondingly, why so many people say they love it when the nighttime energy manifests but are always inside during work hours. And it’s fairly basic. For there to be occasional serenity in anyone’s life outside their doors and dreams and meditations, there has to be some approximation of that easy feeling that comes from natural tree cover and respite from the sun’s glare. I never met a leaf I didn’t like, but Los Angeles has never been much for that.
My favorite cafe along rue Caulaincourt in Montmartre, obviously during the summer months.
Okay, you can obviously get some shade therapy here, but there’s little to be had outside of Beverly Hills, Brentwood, Bel Air, Hancock Park and upper Santa Monica. You basically need to be loaded or to placate yourself with visits to Griffith Park or Franklin Canyon.
Except, of course, when the sun does down, which is when everyone’s attitude suddenly changes and L.A. becomes a certain pulsing, splendorous, heat-of-the-night thing, which anyone with any kind of appreciation for perverse, off-kilter beauty has been seeing for decades.
“Gentlemen of the court, there are times when I’m ashamed to be a member of the human race and this is one such occasion.” — Kirk Douglas‘s Colonel Dax character in Stanley Kubrick‘s Paths of Glory.
Yesterday older, mostly white middle-class voters, understandably enraged about the generally healthy economy, the lowest unemployment rate in many years, a successful implementation of Obamacare, no terrorist attacks over the last six years and the fact that two people with the Ebola virus flew into this country and infected three health-care workers, installed a Republican majority in the Senate and a big Republican majority in the House. And today a major, must-see Chris Nolan film about the ruination and abandonment of our planet is opening nationwide. It seems to me that there’s a certain ironic linkage in that, and most likely a general disconnect among the natives.
Tens of thousands of Americans will be seeing Interstellar today and over the next five days and beyond, including those who voted for all of those highly principled Republicans who’ll be sworn in next January. The rural, mostly-white yokels who voted against President Barack Obama‘s Stalinist health-care system, his African heritage and his utter failure to stop the scourge of Ebola may be touched by Nolan’s film, and they may nod in recognition as they consider a possible future in which earth has become all but uninhabitable. But it’s probably a safe bet that very few of them will say as they walk out of the theatre in Bumblefuck, Kansas or wherever the fuck they live, “Yeah, the earth is partly destroyed now and our grandchildren and great-grandchilden will be really screwed if we don’t do something…hey, who did we just vote for?”
- All Hail Tom White, Taciturn Hero of “Killers of the Flower Moon”
Roughly two months ago a very early draft of Eric Roth‘s screenplay for Killers of the Flower Moon (dated 2.20.17,...
More » - Dead-End Insanity of “Nomadland”
Frances McDormand‘s Fern was strong but mule-stubborn and at the end of the day self-destructive, and this stunted psychology led...
More » - Mia Farrow’s Best Performances?
Can’t decide which performance is better, although I’ve always leaned toward Tina Vitale, her cynical New Jersey moll behind the...
More »
- Hedren’s 94th
Two days ago (1.19) a Facebook tribute congratulated Tippi Hedren for having reached her 94th year (blow out the candles!)...
More » - Criminal Protagonists
A friend suggested a list of the Ten Best American Crime Flicks of the ‘70s. By which he meant films...
More » - “‘Moby-Dick’ on Horseback”
I’ve never been able to give myself over to Sam Peckinpah’s Major Dundee, a 1965 Civil War–era western, and I’ve...
More »