Received today at 1:21 pm (Pacific): “Good afternoon, Jeffrey. I hope you and your family are doing well. I am reaching out to family members who have cremated remains in our care at Shaughnessey Banks Funeral Home. I found your contact information on your mother’s obituary from a few years ago. We currently have your brother Anthony’s cremated remains in our care. They came into our possession in 2010. Is there someone who would like to come and pick them up? — Brendan McKeon, Shaughnessey Banks Funeral Home.”
My brother’s ashes have been sitting in a box for 11 years and nobody said boo until today? If I was in the region I would drop by and suitably dispose. I could have sworn that I made arrangements after his passing (an accidental blend of swine flu, alcohol and Oxycontin) on 10.19.09. We were never especially “close”, but I attended a small farewell gathering of Tony’s friends at a Georgetown saloon.
When my sister passed from cancer in the spring of ’08 Tony and I scattered her remains into the Atlantic, right next to the Barnegat Lighthouse on Long Beach Island. My mother saw to my father’s remains when he died three months later. When my mom passed in ’15 I sprinkled her ashes around the Wilton Playshop, where she’d acted and directed in the ’60s and ’70s.
Tony was a good guy who fancied himself an X-factor prole. He was into healthy foods (wheat grass) and had excellent taste in films. He led something of a lonely life (no wife or girlfriend, no dog, no cat). The poor guy ran into a rough patch when the ’09 recession hit, Tony passed 11 and 1/4 years ago (10.19.09) in Georgetown, Connecticut.
Yesterday a much-anticipated retort from Robert Weide, the documentarian and Curb Your Enthusiasm producer who’s been steadfastly defending Woody Allen in the years-long battle with the Farrows (Dylan, Mia, Ronan) over that allegation of child molestation on 8.4.92, appeared.
It deals with the alleged moving electric train set that Dylan described in some detail in a 2.1.14 N.Y. Times article, written by Nicholas Kristof.
Weide’s rebuttal surfaced concurrent with the airing of episode #2 of Kirby Dick and Amy Zeiring‘s Allen v. Farrow, a four-part series about same. On 2.22 or exactly a week ago, Weide accused Dick and Zeiring of either being “half-assed researchers” or “inherently manipulative and dishonest.” He pledged on Twitter that he would explain in due time.
The gist of Weide’s 2.28 argument, directly drawn from testimony from pro-Farrow nanny Kristi Groteke, who was working at Frog Hollow on the day of the alleged assault, is this: There was no electric train, moving or stationery, in the attic that day, but there was a non-electric plastic train toy — something for a two-year-old to push around and play with.
Does this constitute a ‘holy shit!” Perry Mason moment? No, but it does warrant a certain puzzlement.
Weide: “Dylan specifically recalls the train set ‘travel[ing] around the attic.’ Then why does the police diagram show the track having a circumference of only 4 feet at its widest? Maybe Dylan didn’t literally mean ‘around’ the attic, but around in a circle, in the attic? Maybe we should give her the benefit of the doubt here. But the question remains: was there such a functioning train set in that space? Moses says there wasn’t even an electrical outlet in the crawl space. So was the electric train battery-operated? Is there anyone who can untangle this conundrum at the center of Dylan’s accusation?
“In fact, there is.
“Kristi Groteke, a nanny in the Farrow household who was on duty that day, testified in the 1993 custody trial, Allen v. Farrow, from which the HBO series takes its title. Groteke appeared as a friendly witness for her employer, Mia Farrow, and was asked about the content of the attic during direct examination by Mia’s attorney, Eleanor Alter. This means Groteke’s answer would have been known by Mia’s defense team prior to questioning her on the stand. (This is the recollection of a 23-year-old woman, less than a year after the alleged event, versus a woman recounting her memories as a 7-year-old, 23 years after the fact.)
“When asked about the content of the crawl space, Groteke recalls [as follows]: ‘There are some pictures and there is a trunk where things are stored, and there is a train set which the children take out and play with sometimes.’ When asked to describe the set, Groteke replies, “They are big, heavy plastic, green tracks and they fit into each other like puzzle pieces, and the train is a train car that is made for a child to sit on and ride.’ Alter asks, “Have you ever seen the train set in any of the rooms?” Groteke: “Yes. I have seen it downstairs in the living room, but more recently in the past year in Mia’s room and in the children’s room, through the hallways.” Alter: “’So they take it out of the crawl space?’ Groteke: ‘Yes.'”
HEcomment: In short, for whatever reason Dylan apparently invented the recollection about a toy train moving around the attic or travelling along an oblong-shaped train track. You can put this down to the occasional vagueness of memory. I would put it down to unnecessaryinvention, which makes the water seem a bit murky.
A discussion of the merits happened this morning between myself, Friendo #1 and Friendo #2:
Friendo #1: “This doesn’t feel like the smoking gun Weide promised. I had thought, reading his implication, that we were going to discover the police drawing was some sort of fake. He raises an interesting issue, in terms of the nature of the train set. It wasn’t some electric train spinning around; it was larger and plastic — a notable discrepancy. But if anything, his post does serve to confirm that there was some sort of train set in the attic.
From Richard Rushfield‘s latest Ankler column, dated 3.1,.21 and titled “Morning After Report: Global Warning”:
“Not to get too maudlin and dramatic about it, but last night I felt like I was witnessing the death of Hollywood before my very eyes,” Rushfield writes.
Excerpt: “Hollywood’s awards circuit has always been interesting in that it shows the face that the industry wants to present the world. Glamorous! Caring! Creators of myths and spectacle! Good looking! Conscience of the world! You name it, as Hollywood’s vision of itself has evolved.
“Last night, at a moment in which the world is truly in enormous pain, the face of Hollywood was selfish, self-obsessed, small, petty and incompetent; thinking about itself, thinking about its causes, thinking about anything but what the audience might be looking for from its entertainers at this moment.”
HE to Rushfield: As you know, progressive Hollywood is riding a wave of woke evangelical fervor. Artists of color, LGBTQs, the #MeToo community and various supporters throughout the Twitterverse have grabbed the reins and are leading the San Juan Hill charge, and the goal they’re pursuing — the hill they’re looking to conquer and plant their flag upon — is nothing less than the transforming of American society into a better, more open-hearted, less Republican, more compassionate and forward-looking place.
Well, not American society as a whole but the upscale, moderate-minded urban blues — those who are theoretically capable of modifying their thinking and social behavior.
In a certain sense it’s a myopic realm that progressive Hollywood is operating out of, and at the same time they’re reaching out and looking to touch people where they live. “Entertaining” Average Joes is what a good portion of the streaming and theatrical industry is still trying to do. But this, by and large, is not what the award-season community is focused upon.
Friendo: “I don’t know if you’ve seen Richard Rushfield’s Ankler column this morning, in which he basically calls last night’s Golden Globes the Worst Thing Ever, the Death of Hollywood, and other crimes against humanity.
“I watched the Globes and thought they were fine. They were the COVID-era Globes — no more, no less. That’s why they were what they were. Should they have been cancelled (as Rushfield apparently seems to think)? No. That would have been dumb. Better a compromised show and a compromised Oscars, than giving up the ghost.
“And I thought it was interesting — actually rather humane — to see a bunch of glamorous showbiz folks try to put on a glitzy awards ceremony on Zoom.
“Why was this a disaster? It’s Covidthat’s the disaster, for Chrissake.
“Rushfeld is having his cake and eating it too. ‘The Globes don’t matter! No one takes them seriously!” So is it okay if they go on? No! It’s a fatal compromise! It’s the end! Of everything!’
“The subtext of his columns is that he wants all this stuff to die. He’d deny it, but it’s there.”
Most of us would call losing one of our five senses — sight, sound, smell, taste, touch — an unmitigated tragedy. This, at least, would be our first thought. Gutted by loss, driven to tears — our ability to savor the joy and wonder of life sharply reduced and never to return.
But of course, the body gradually compensates. And so does the spirit.
Darius Marder‘s Sound of Metal tells the story of a heavy metal drummer, Ruben (Riz Ahmed), suddenly confronted with all-but-total hearing loss. And of course, freaking out and desperate for a cure, he sinks into denial and despair, before ultimately learning how to live with his new identity.
Ruben’s power-chord-playing partner Lou (Olivia Cooke) takes him to a sober house for the deaf, a bucolic retreat for hearing-loss victims run by Joe (Paul Raci), a 60-something Vietnam veteran. Ruben settles in, learns to “sign,” and even becomes a member of the family. Joe eventually offers him a permanent job at the house, but Ruben is determined to get cochlear implant surgery. He sells his touring van and drums and has the surgery, but his subsequent “hearing” is tinny and agitating.
The long and short is that Ruben finally comes to understand that deafness is not a handicap, but, if accepted and engaged with, a doorway to a certain enhancement.
Sound of Metal is a home-run for Ahmed, a performance that says “wait…this is it…this is me.”
The first time I noticed Ahmed was at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2010, when I saw him play a homegrown British terrorist in Four Lions. The next standout was his performance as Jake Gyllenhaal‘s half-assistant, half-colleague in Dan Gilroy‘s Nightcrawler (’14). Then came Rogue One (’16), in which he played Bodhi Rook, an Imperial cargo pilot who defects to the rebels. Then a bizarrely named 19th Century character (Hermann Kermit Warm) in Jacques Audiard‘s nihilistic, negligible The Sisters Brothers. And then, finally, Marder’s Sound of Metal.
I also believe that Paul Raci, Ruben’s straight-shooting mentor at the sober house for the deaf, deserves a Best Supporting Actor nom. Raci, whose parents were deaf, intimately understands the deaf community, and is perfect in the part. Like Harold Russell was perfect in The Best Years of Our Lives, I mean. Raci is actually a blend of Russell and Lives costar Hoagy Carmichael.
Sound of Metal is an absorbing and quite delicate film about using tragedy to transition from one world to another, and one that offers a doorway into a spirit world — a realm of cosmic serenity and stillness…a place that expresses the age-old axiom “never speak unless you can improve upon the silence.” Radiance is everywhere.
The bottom line is that Sound of Metal is easily the most spiritual Best Picture contender. It’s the only contender that says “look beyond the noise…look within.” It contains arias, symphonies, multitudes.
Sound of Metal uses innovative sound design to mimic the experience of hearing loss. Marder and Supervising Sound Editor Nicolas Becker drew upon extensive research into how hearing loss actually sounds, and began work on it a year before any other crew members were brought onto the film. The sound design team — lead by Becker and production sound mixer Phillip Bladh — definitely deserve Oscar noms, and…oh, hell, the Oscars themselves.
Also excellent are Olivia Cooke as Lou, Ruben’s singing-bandmate girlfriend who insists that he go to the sober house for the deaf, and Mathieu Amalric as her wealthy French dad.
There’s a moment when Ruben and Lou realize that they can’t resume their relationship, and it’s performed without a single line of explanation or descriptive dialogue…it’s one of the saddest breakup scenes I’ve ever seen.
In his assessment of last night’s Golden Globes telecast, THR’s Scott Feinberg notes that in the wake of negative aspersions cast by a recent L.A. Times article about an absence of African-American members in the HFPA, the GG winners were “remarkably diverse.”
He could have added that given the timing of the article, HFPA members felt understandably intimidated.
One could infer that HFPA members were prodded into voting for as many “diverse” nominees as possible in order to refute or muddy the implication of the L.A. Times article.
One could conclude, in other words, that they apparently wanted to say to the community at large that while the L.A. Times piece offered a certain implication, their GG winners offered another. We’re as woke as you want us to be, we’re not unaware of the current industry narrative, we’re totally on the bus, etc.
Back in ’51 a gifted artist in the employ of 20th Century Fox created an alternate version of The Day The Earth Stood Still. He/she added (a) a giant, dark gray mummy’s hand and (b) Gort carrying a screaming Las Vegas blonde dressed in a pink-champagne gown instead of Patricia Neal in a dark business suit. No one complained when the film opened on 9.18.51 and everyone realized that neither of these elements were in the film. Because artists were allowed to…wait for it…use their imaginations!
A few months later an Italian poster artist followed suit with similar art for Me Secreto Me Condena, which is what Alfred Hitchcock‘s I Confess was called in Roma, Siena, Venice, Genoa, San Remo, Montepulciano, Firenze, Milano and Brindisi. (Google Translation: “I Secretly Condemn Myself.”) Montgomery Clift was no longer a priest, and the same gown-wearing blonde from The Day The Earth Stood Still poster was back, only this time wearing a semi-transparent black outfit and lying before Clift in a posture of shame and degradation.
Tina Fey, Amy Poehler opening remarks (2:55): “The Golden Globes are given out by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association…made up of around 90 international, non-Black journalists who attend movie junkets each year in search of a better life.” (4:38) “Nomadland is about a lady played by Frances McDomand who travels across the desert in her van and poops in a bucket.” (5:46) “Soul is a beautiful Pixar animated movie in which a middle-aged black man accidentally get knocked out of his body and into a cat. The HFPA really responded to this movie because they do have five cat members.”
6:10 pm: HE is unable to invest any interest in animation, but respectfully believes that the HFPA giving a Golden Globe in this category to Pete Docter‘s Soul in an odd call. Posted on 11.29.20: “Despite an absolute avalanche of charm and energy and whimsical, wild-ass associations, Soul is just not good enough. Too fast and busy, too scattered, too all over the place, too hyper. And because it pushes a fundamentally false or at least conflicted concept of life. And because (this is minor but significant) it tries to normalize obesity with the casting of the fattest animated cat you’ve ever seen in your life.”
6:35 pm: Congrats to The Trial of the Chicago 7‘s Aaron Sorkin for winning the 2021 Golden Globe for Best Screenplay, Motion Picture. Posted on 9.22.20:
7:15 pm: Congrats to Minari for winning the Best Foreign Language Feature Golden Globe award. The only problem is that it’s not really a foreign-language feature. It’s a totally American film, set in the Midwestern heartland and featuring a scene in an American small-town church and costarring a Jesus freak (played by Will Patton). It happens to focus, yes, on characters who happen to speak Korean because that’s their native language. But it’s not a foreign-language film. Not in the usual sense.
7:45 pm: Congrats to The Mauritanian‘s Jodie Foster winning a GG for Best Supporting Actress, but where did this come from? And why, again, was Mank‘s Amanda Seyfried shafted? The Father‘s Olivia Colman gave the most compelling performance in this category, but she didn’t win because she won the Best Actress Oscar two years ago for The Favorite…right? Zip for Hillbilly Elegy‘s Glenn Close. I just don’t get (and I don’t “mean” anything by this) where the Foster vote came from. What drove it? Where was the big rationale?
8:10 pm: Congrats to Nomadland for winning Best Motion Picture, Drama; ditto Chloé Zhao winning for Best Director. Congrats all around.
Andra Day delivered an excellent performance in The United States vs. Billie Holiday — no question about that. But what she brought was significantly better than the film itself. Usually the film has to be well-liked or at least well-respected for a major category acting win to happen — not this year. You have to admit that Day winning is a surprise.
The bottom line is that HFPA members are seemingly terrified about possibly getting canceled or blackballed by the woke crowd. Hence the Boseman win (pure sentimental tribute trophy) + Kaluuya (I honestly feel that Sacha Baron Cohen really nailed Sorkin’s enhanced version of Abbie Hoffman, and I could’ve accepted a win for Leslie Odom Jr. as Sam Cooke in One Night in Miami) + Minari.
HFPA to Hollywood community (per friendo): “Just because we are an all-white voting body does not mean we are not woke. We get it. Please understand this. Because we do.”
Friendo: “Oscar-wise it’s Nomadland vs The Trial of the Chicago 7 for Best Picture. I think Boseman will probably win the Oscar for that goofy performance.”
Congrats to Daniel Kaluuya for winning a Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Supporting Role in Any Motion Picture. Kaluuya’s win for his performance in Judas and the Black Messiah was the kickoff announcement at this evening’s Golden Globe telecast. Kaluuya is totally fine as the late Fred Hampton, but HE respectfully believes that his costar Lakeith Stanfield should have won instead.
Because they’re regarded as patronizing. Now that I think of it, this might be true all around. I know that if anyone in a business context offers me a flattering comment (as in “boy, you sure do know a lot of people!”), that’s a signal that I’m not going to get what I’m looking for. If they toss you a bone, you’re a dead man. I’d probably feel the same if someone was to call me “smart”, “clever” or “brilliant” in a business meeting. My eyebrows would rise and I’d immediately mutter to myself, “This person is fucking with me.” So a word to the wise — don’t go there.
Legendary Australian helmer Fred Schepisi (The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Barbarosa, Plenty, Roxanne, A Cry in the Dark, The Russia House, Six Degrees of Separation, The Eye of the Storm) is doing just fine, thanks. Young in spirit, full of vim and vigor, etc. But for a few moments last night, there was a seeming cause for concern.
It started and mercifully ended with a Jack Morrissey tweet that said “rest in peace, Fred Schepisi.” I immediately wrote a friend who knows Schepisi and asked if he’d heard anything. He asked me what was up, and I forwarded the Morrissey tweet. Morrissey had been Twitter-conversing with a Los Angeles-based journalist, and the subject of A Cry in the Dark (aka Evil Angels) came up, and somehow or some way the words “rest in peace” popped out.
Maybe Morrissey’s idea was that Schepisi’s work on this film was so good that he didn’t need to worry about anything more and that he could rest in peace, etc. Or something like that.
Journalist explanation to Schepisi pally (late last night or this morning): “One of Variety‘s TV critics tweeted that Saturday Night Live used the phrase ‘a dingo ate my baby’ and said that A Cry in the Dark has a long legacy. I tweeted that I love the film, and its depiction of armchair punters who are convinced they know details of a case, based only on the news. A third person tweeted in response ‘RIP, Fred Schepisi.’ I love his work. I love your work too. Let me know if there’s anything I need to do here.”
The play and the film called Mister Roberts were based on Thomas Heggen’s same-titled 1946 novel, which was inspired by Heggen’s World War II endurance in the South Pacific. Heggens was 27 when the novel came out, and 29 when the play opened on Broadway. The poor guy died at age 30.
Explanation: “Bewildered by the fame he had longed for and under pressure to turn out another bestseller, Heggen found himself with a crippling case of writer’s block. ‘I don’t know how I wrote Mister Roberts,’ he admitted to a friend. ‘It was spirit writing’.
“Heggen became an insomniac and tried to cure it with increasing amounts of alcohol and prescription drugs. On May 19, 1949, he drowned in his bathtub after an overdose of sleeping pills. His death was ruled a probable suicide, although he left no note and those close to him insisted it was an accident.”
HE to Heggen in heaven: I feel your anguish, bruh, but all writing is spirit writing. If it ain’t spirit writing it’s probably not very good, and in some cases it’s just typing.
