Blue-chip film restoration guru and exhibition master Robert Harris recently invited HE to visit the Bedford Playhouse. Earlier today Wilton friendo Jodi Jasser and I were given a grand technical tour, and then attended a private, friends-only, run-through screening of West Side Story.

How does Steven Spielberg, Tony Kushner and choreographer Justin Peck‘s film play a second time? No diminishment. Just as vibrant and perfectly tuned, just as occasionally tearful. I still feel that the first four-fifths are better than the final act (i.e., post-rumble) but not to any problematic degree.

I had never visited this absolutely top-of-the-line, technically-awesome theatre (633 Old Post Road, Bedford, NY 10506), which is part of the Clive Davis Art Center. Nor had I visited time-trippy Bedford, which radiates only a few aspects of 21st Century life and consciousness — it’s quite the bucolic little hamlet. You can imagine young Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn walking their pet leopard on these streets back in the late 1930s.

The main BP theatre offers state-of-the-art projection (Christie digital) and sound with Dolby Atmos, luxurious reclining seats, a lobby cafe, a pair of smaller screening rooms, whistle-clean bathrooms. It may be the most technically impressive theatre I’ve ever attended outside of the usual first-rate industry facilities in Los Angeles, New York, London and elsewhere. It’s easily the highest quality theatre experience in a wealthy, super-exclusive New York suburb that I’ve ever tasted in my life.

I hereby resolve to attend the Bedford again and as often as possible. Thanks to Mr. Harris for the invitation, and to the Bedford Playhouse staff for putting on a perfect show.

“You might be living through The Turn if you ever found yourself feeling like free speech should stay free even if it offended some group or individual but now can’t admit it at dinner with friends because you are afraid of being thought a bigot. You are living through The Turn if you think that burning down towns and looting stores isn’t the best way to promote social justice, but feel you can’t say so because you know you’ll be called a white supremacist.

“If you’ve felt yourself unable to speak your mind, if you have a queasy feeling that your friends might disown you if you shared your most intimately held concerns, if you are feeling a bit breathless and a bit hopeless and entirely unsure what on earth is going on, I am sorry to inform you that The Turn is upon you.

“I know just how awful it feels. The Turn brings with it the sort of pain most of us don’t feel as adults; you’d have to go all the way back to junior high, maybe, to recall a stabbing sensation quite as deep and confounding as watching your friends all turn on you and decide that you’re not worthy of their affection any more. It’s the kind of primal rejection that is devastating precisely because it forces you to rethink everything, not only your convictions about the world but also your idea of yourself, your values, and your priorities.

“We all want to be embraced. We all want the men and women we consider most swell to approve of us and confirm that we, too, are good and great. We all want the love and the laurels; The Turn takes both away.” — from “The Turn,” a 12.8.21 Tablet essay by Liel Leibovitz.

Posted on 9.15.13: Manhattan life is plagued by many irritations. I hate the fact that subway car doors frequently don’t open for several seconds after the train stops at a station. (In Paris you can manually open the doors yourself with that silver latch handle thing.) But the biggest drag these days (for me anyway) are the slowpokes on the street and especially in the subways.

I’m not saying they have to race around like crazy rats, but what’s wrong with walking with a purposeful stride? Very few do this, it seems, and the ones that are really slow are always blocking the sidewalks in groups of five or six or more. I was going to say it’s the tourists but I’m starting to think it’s almost everyone these days except for X-factor types. For me walking around Manhattan is exhilarating exercise, especially if you walk with a little bounce in your step; for the vast majority it’s apparently something to be endured by reducing energy expenditure as much as possible and shuffling around like 80somethings.

So basically when you’re walking around Manhattan half the game is spotting the “blockers” before you’re stuck behind them and have to sidestep their ass. The ones to watch out for in this respect are couples of any age, older women, heavy middle-aged men and especially urban females of girth.

I first mentioned this eight years ago: “Out-of-towners always seem to walk the streets without the slightest hint of spunk or urgency in their step, like they’re making their way from the bedroom to the refrigerator at 2 ayem in their pajamas and nightgowns. And they’re always wearing those dead-to-the-world expressions. (Writer Fran Leibowitz has described the shuffling gait of tourists as the ‘mall meander.’)

“Every day I’m walking along at my usual spirited pace and these Jabbas and sea lions are always walking ahead of me in self-protecting groups or, worse, three abreast. The idea that they might be blocking people, much less defying the basic transportation law of going with the flow, doesn’t seem to occur to them. Then again, the flow in Jabba tourist areas (Times Square, Rockefeller Center) is very zombie-paced so it probably feels right from their perspective.”

There’s a scene in The Bridge on the River Kwai (’57) when William Holden angrily kicks a non-functioning two-way radio, and suddenly it’s working again. There’s a scene in The Hot Rock (’72) in which a police precinct captain (William Redfield) is told by a subordinate that the phones aren’t working, and he asks “well, did you jiggle it? Did you…you know, fiddle around with it?” There’s a bit in The Empire Strikes Back (’80) when the Millennium Falcon won’t turn over and so Han Solo twice slams a console with his fist and wham…it’s working again.

11 years ago my last and final Windows laptop (I had more or less become a Mac person two years earlier) stopped working in some fashion — it was acting all gummy and sluggish — and so I decided to bitch-slap it a couple of times. Instead of suddenly springing to life, the laptop more or less died. Violence, I realized with a start, was not the answer. Times and technology had changed. I resolved at that moment never to try and William Holden or Harrison Ford or William Redfield my way out of a technical problem again.

Light flurries began to fall around 10 pm in the Wilton-Westport region. I’m posting this because I’d forgotten how cool it is to wake up and look out upon snow-covered woods. Comments are unnecessary — it’s just a nice thing to experience, especially if you’re from West Hollywood.

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“Much too long in gestation, too much expectation, not dishonorable but ultimately unnecessary and disappointingly slack. And of course missing some key players from the original.” — tapped out by “brenkilco” on 8.31.21.

“A dingleberry doodle plot involving memory implants and obscured lineage and a secret no one must know (no one! just ask Jared Leto!) and a little wooden horse with a date (6.10.21) carved into the base, and some shit-hooey about original replicant creator Eldon Tyrell having given Rachael, the experimental replicant played by Sean Young in the ’82 original, the organic potential to reproduce and blah blah. And a narrative pace that will slow your own pulse and make your eyelids flutter and descend, and a growing need to escape into the outer lobby so you can order a hot dog and check your messages.” — posted on 8.30.21.

“Fucking way too long” — Ridley Scott, quoted in the Telegraph.

The following passage is from Clifton Webb’s Wikipedia biography. Born in 1889, Webb’s given name was Webb Parmelee Hollenbeck. Thank God for the mind of Noel Coward.

By the way: Gene Tierney‘s Laura Hunt and Dana Andrews‘ Mark McPherson would’ve never lasted as a couple. Laura was attracted to Mark’s good looks, no-bullshit honesty and moral integrity, but she’d become accustomed to a flush, upper Fifth Avenue lifestyle, and that would have been impossible on a Mark’s meager salary. Laura’s ideal husband, of course, would have been a blend of McPherson plus Clifton Webb‘s Waldo Lydecker (money, brains, sophistication).

In a 14-paragraph discussion about various pluses and handicaps affecting the 2021 Best Actress Oscar race, Vanity Fair ‘s David Canfield and Rebecca Ford acknowledge (a) the worthiness of Lady Gaga, Kristen Stewart and Nicole Kidman’s respective performances in House of Gucci, Spencer and Being The Ricardos, and at the same time (b) note that buzz for the films themselves has been settling down. And they salute West Side Story’s Rachel Zegler, of course.

Then they actually manage to mention (in paragraphs #10 and #14) the year’s finest lead female performances, hands down — Parallel Mothers’ Penelope Cruz and The Worst Person in the World’s Renate Reinsve. Which struck me as obliging and accommodating.

A24 is re-opening David Lowery‘s The Green Knight in hopes of generating awards talk. For me, only Leos Carax‘s Annette was more hateful, more agonizing to sit through…Lowery gave us the second most torturous film of the year.

“Deep Medieval Dweeb“, posted on 8.21.21:

(a) “I will never forget The Green Knight, and I will never, ever watch it again. It’s an exacting, carefully crafted, ‘first-rate”‘ creation by a director of serious merit, and I was moaning and writhing all through it. I can’t believe I watched the whole thing, but I toughed it out and that — in my eyes, at least — is worth serious man points.”

(b) “The Green Knight is a sodden medieval dreamscape thing — a trippy, bizarre, hallucinatory quicksand movie that moves like a snail and will make you weep with frustration and perhaps even lead to pondering the idea of your own decapitation. What would I rather do, I was asking myself — watch the rest of The Green Knight or bend over and allow my head to be cut off? Both would be terrible things to endure, I reasoned, but at least decapitation would be quick and then I’d be at peace. Watching The Green Knight for 130 minutes, on the other hand…”

(c) “Film critics generally don’t acknowledge audience miserablism. For most of them visual style is 90% to 95% of the game. If a director shoots a film with a half-mad, child-like sense of indulgence with a persistent visual motif (i.e., everything in The Green Knight is either muted gray or dispiriting brown or intense green)…bathing the viewer in mood and mystery and moisture…filmmakers like Lowery adore mist, fog, rain, mud, sweat, rivers, streams)…that’s it and all is well.”

For me, Bob Strauss-styled Get Out fetishism signified the beginning of elite woke craziness in movies, and that was four fucking years ago.

Jordan Ruimy hit the nail on the head when he said “we’re living in a very interesting time right now in film criticism. Back in the ’90s, even ten years ago it was such a different spectrum…and now political theory [has] snuck in, and any film you watch now you have to judge it politically, and that’s the way it’s going right now. And it’s infuriating.”

From a 48-minute chat with Ruimy (The Playlist, The Film Stage, We Got This Covered, The Young Folks, World of Reel). If you ask me the most interesting portion happens during the first eight or nine minutes, when we mainly discussed the “woke” support for Jordan Peele‘s Get Out. Again, the mp3. Here are selected transcriptions:

Wells: “This is a movie that traffics in social satire and horror, and basically says there’s a quietly malicious attitude that elite whites have toward people of color, and that they’re trying to turn them into zombies and make them into the kind of people they want…this is a weird metaphor because the same people who are loving Get Out are the people who are depicted in the film, the same malicious whites who are trying to manipulate people of color. The liberals with money and taste and who would’ve voted for Barack Obama a third time…these are the bad guys in the film and it’s this crowd…this liberal crowd is pushing Get Out the most.”

Critic Jordan Ruimy (The Playlist, The Film Stage, We Got This Covered, The Young Folks, World of Reel).

Ruimy: “We’re living in a very interesting time right now in film criticism. Back in the ’90s, even ten years ago it was such a different spectrum…and now political theory [has] snuck in, and any film you watch now you have to judge it politically, and that’s the way it’s going right now. And it’s very infuriating. Even though art should be political in a way. If Get Out had come out ten years ago, we would have totally forgotten it by the end of the year. We wouldn’t have even remembered it. That’s what’s really maddening about this whole thing.

“Do I think Get Out is a good movie? Yeah, I do. As I said I had one hell of a time watching it with a big crowd [at the AMC Boston Common plex]. But to go back to this criticstop10 site which has compiled over 388 critics list, and Get Out made 276 lists in the top ten. It’s also topped the most lists — 46 lists have it at #1. Most of the people who really rave about [it] are Millennials. They always connect it to the woke movement and to the current political climate. If this were ’01 or ’02 hours and there was no woke movement, no critical theory…”

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Hanging around Westport has led to recollections of good old times in the mid ’70s, and not all of them about randy cavortings. One of the episodes involved a platonic friendship I had with author Jill Robinson, who now identifies as Jill Schary Robinson. We became friendly sometime in late ’76 or thereabouts.

Posted on 4.10.15: With United Talent Agency‘s recent snatching of several CAA agents and clients over the past week, my thoughts turned this morning to UTA’s CEO and co-founder Jeremy Zimmer, with whom I’ve felt a vague connection for 25 years and actually a bit more. Not so much for who he is (he’s fine but he’s an agent) but because in the mid-to-late ’70s I was somewhat friendly with his mother, author Jill Robinson (“Perdido“, “Bed/Time/Story”), when I was living in Westport, and because I’ve long been an admirer of her father (and Jeremy’s grandfather) Dore Schary — the late producer, playwright, screenwriter and former RKO and MGM honcho, a serious liberal whose taste in films was more complex and layered and socially progressive than that of Louis B. Mayer, whom Schary succeeded at MGM before losing the post himself in 1956.

I’ve always loved the sound of that name — Dore Schary. It could be a character in a mystery novel, used to suggest someone cultivated and learned adn maybe a bit moody. There’s no way in hell that a lifeguard or a race-car driver or a high-school janitor could ever answer to it.

And I’ve always respected Zimmer for having uttered, a quarter-century ago when he was at ICM, an uncharacteristically blunt (and, as it turned out, prophetic) assessment of the basic nature of Hollywood’s agent culture: “The big agencies are all like animals, raping and pillaging each other day in and day out.” (My admiration grew years later when Zimmer’s thought was echoed by Matt Zoller Seitz when he said in a 2006 Slate piece that Barry Lyndon was about “animals in clothes.”) Zimmer’s quote, which resulted in ICM chairman Jeff Berg showing him the door, was first reported by Variety and then by Spy‘s “Celia Brady”.

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