“This is not a reality show…this is reality.”

Ben Wheatley‘s Rebecca (Netflix, 10.21) is more colorful and definitely more carnal than Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 version. I’ll give it that much. Hitch’s film was shot in black and white and was fairly discreet depiction-wise. Not so the newbie.

There wasn’t a hint of a sexual current between Laurence Olivier‘s Maxim de Winter and Joan Fontaine‘s nameless protagonist in Hitch’s Oscar winner. All we see them do is briefly hug a couple of times. Olivier doesn’t even kiss Fontaine on the lips (or so I recall).

But in Wheatley’s version, the new Maxim (played with a muffled and unconvincing British accent by Armie Hammer) harpoons the nameless protagonist (Lily James) on a beach surrounding a Mediterranean cove. And in daylight yet. And in the 1930s, when nice girls the world over had been sternly instructed that sex happened only after marriage.

In both the Hitchcock and Wheatley versions, the nameless protagonist is later interrogated by an employer, a socially pretentious, middle-aged scold named Edythe Van Hopper, about her moral behavior. The line is the same in both films: “Tell me, have you been doing something you shouldn’t?”

In Wheatley’s version, the protagonist’s never-spoken answer could, in a more candid world, go something like “well, yes, I’ve been a bit naughty, I suppose…Maxim and I were at the beach a day or two ago, and we were lying on a blanket together…I won’t go into details but he hastily removed my bathing suit and ravaged me like a centaur.”

In Hitchcock’s version, Fontaine is offended that Mrs. Van Hopper would even ask such a thing, and it’s easy to believe that nothing whatsoever has transpired between she and Olivier.

The idea behind Wheatley’s film is to appeal to younger women who like hotsy-totsy romantic dramas, or the cinematic equivalent of Harlequin bodice rippers. That’s pretty much what the new Rebecca is. There’s nothing criminal about that. If younger women of a certain intellectual capacity enjoy Wheatley’s film, great.

I didn’t believe a second of it. Daphne du Maurier‘s original novel, published in 1938 and set in the mid ’30s, was very much of its time. You can feel the musty past in its pages, and you can certainly sense the conservative social norms and prim behaviors in Hitchcock’s film. The people who helped create the original Rebecca and especially those who performed in it were all part of that 80-year-old realm.

From “How Rudy Giuliani Got Caught Red-Handed With Borat’s Daughter,” a 10.21 Daily Beast piece by Matt Wilstein about the money scene from Borat 2:

“Posing as a conservative journalist in the mold of Tomi Lahren — albeit with a strong eastern European accent — Tutar Sagdiev (Irina Nowak) sits down with Giuliani in a Manhattan hotel suite for an ‘interview’ in which she mostly flatters him into creepily flirting with her. “I’ll relax you, you want me to ask you a question?” Giuliani says as she giggles in response. After blaming China for the coronavirus, he agrees to “eat a bat” with his interviewer, who repeatedly touches his knee to egg him on.

“[Sacha] Baron Cohen first interrupts the interview dressed as a sound engineer with a large boom mic, but leaves before it’s over. At that point, Tutar offers to ‘have a drink in the bedroom’ with Giuliani, who happily obliges.

“On what appear to be hidden cameras, we see Giuliani remove her microphone and ask for her phone number and address as he sits down on the bed. He starts patting her backside as she removes the microphone from his pants. Giuliani then lies down on the bed and starts sticking his hands down his pants in a suggestive manner.”

…that struck at least one observer as “a bit of a jumble…a collection of fragments that leap around in time like Mexican jumping beans.”

This is exactly and precisely what raw inspiration looks, feels, smells and tastes like. It’s the 1% that Thomas Alva Edison spoke of. The hard work — the “perspiration” — is pulling all the fragments together and giving them some kind of shape, direction and poignancy. And even, if the spirit is upon you, a feeling for the profound.

To go by trailers for David Fincher’s upcoming film, the exceptional achievement of Herman J. Mankiewicz‘s script for Citizen Kane (with liberal flavoring and augmentation by Orson Welles) is that he managed to write it while half in the bag, and often completely soused, shitfaced, three sheets to the wind, etc.

Friendo: “Rudy Giuliani will have to go into hiding after Borat 2 (aka Borat Subsequent Moviefilm) gets released. With Trump still namechecking him and calling him his lawyer, you’d think Rudy would have warned him about this movie. The whole White House will have to distance themselves from Giuliani after 10.23.”

Everyone will want to see the upcoming footage of Trump cutting off his 60 Minutes interview with Lesley Stahl, which happened earlier today. He knows it’s over. He doesn’t care. Keeping up appearances at this stage of the game is meaningless. His whole game is “it’s all rigged against me, and if you’re voting for me you agree with my assessment.” As Sasha Stone or somebody else said a while ago, the Trumpanzees will probably approve of Today’s behavior as they believe that mainstream media is evil, etc.

I realize that my admiration for the action sequences in Ang Lee‘s high-frame-rate 4K Gemini Man means that I’m part of an extremely small minority, but my eyes really love the HFR…the startling clarity and 100% absence of any sort of motion blur. Yes, it doesn’t look or feel like “film” or movies, but I love it anyway when it comes to high velocity. I wasn’t a huge fan of the film itself, but who was?

Venice side street, taken in late May of 2017. Please consider the ancient wall and the soft and subdued yellow paint, and especially the mint-green colored awning accented by those six or seven strips of pink neon. If shot on 35mm film the only person who could properly capture this late-evening milieu would be Vittorio Storaro. I haven’t been to Venice since. It almost hurts to think about it. They say the camera on the new iPhone 12 is the best yet, and that it captures amazing colors and details when there’s not much light.

Excerpt from Barry Levine‘s “The Spider: Inside the Criminal Web of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell“:

“William ‘Dollar Bill’ Mersey spent hours with Epstein inside New York’s notorious Metropolitan Correctional Center in his role as an ‘inmate companion’ while the multimillionaire was on suicide watch. Mersey served a year at MCC in lower Manhattan after pleading guilty to federal tax evasion for under-reporting income from his escort advertising agency. He was released in early November last year.

Mersey quote: “Epstein didn’t brag about his lifestyle but knew everybody [who] mattered, so I did ask him one time, ‘Jeffrey, give me one anecdote that’s emblematic of the essence of Donald Trump.’

“Epstein thought about it and then said, ‘Donald and I are flying in my private jet to Florida and I have a French girl with me. Donald says to me, why don’t we land in Atlantic City so I can show your friend my casino?

“[Epstein] said, I’m not landing in Atlantic City…it’s all white trash down there. So the French girl goes, what does white trash mean? I don’t understand. And Trump says, ‘It’s me without money.'”

“I distinctly remember feeling tear-struck in 1986 when I learned of the death of Cary Grant, whom I’d always regarded as a beloved debonair uncle of sorts. I didn’t feel anything close to that when I heard the same news about my dad. The truth is the truth.” — from “Nobody’s Perfect,” an obit for my father, James Wells, who died on 6.19.08.

Grant, John Lennon, Marlon Brando and JFK — these are the only famous guys in my entire lifetime whose passing brought tears to my eyes.

In Los Angeles the news hit sometime around 10 pm on the evening of Saturday, 11.29.86. I was living in my Hightower Drive bungalow. I recall stepping outside and sitting down on my little front porch and meditating on finality as a general concept. The weepy moment came the following day. In a sense Grant had been a close companion almost my entire time on the planet, or at least from my teenage days onward, when I began watching some of his old films on the tube.

It was only a week or two later when I went down to Al’s Bar with a friend, and it was there that I ran into my future wife Maggie, who was hanging out with two girlfriends. We flew to Paris the following January, during a fairly brutal cold snap. We moved into the upstairs portion of 8682 Franklin Ave. the following August or thereabouts, and got married in Paris the following October.