This obviously first-rate, professional-grade short was produced by A24 marketing to promote J.C. Chandor‘s A Most Violent Year (2015). It’s not pushing fiction — Manhattan, Brooklyn (I never even visited Williamsburg until sometime in the mid ’90s) and Queens were unquestionably rougher, scrappier, grimmer and less hygenic 40 years ago.
Not to me and my semi-struggling journalist-photographer friends and the neighborhoods in which we lived (West Village, Soho, Chelsea, Hell’s Kitchen, Upper West and East Sides, Murray Hill) but certainly to people living in the marginalized areas and shittier nabes.
This is a tired, soggy cliche, of course, but Manhattan was a much richer, livelier and more flavorful place in ’81, certainly from a cultural standpoint. The Manhattan of Sidney Lumet‘s Prince of the City was a real, actual thing back then. Repertory cinemas were plentiful and doing okay. A degraded but half-alluring version of Studio 54 was still in business. Cafe Central (my home-away-from-home in late ’81 and ’82) was the greatest actor-hangout bar in the world; and Nishi was the greatest Japanese restaurant of all time. The greedy ’80s were just beginning (Ronald Reagan had recently taken a bullet), but the storied Pearl Paint, which gave up the ghost in ’14, was thriving. I would have that time again.
Today’s Manhattan is cleaner, tidier and safer but unaffordable unless you earn a mid six-figure income or better. And millionaires fare all the better.
In his 7.15 review of Morgan Neville‘s Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain (opening Friday), Wall Street Journal critic Joe Morgenstern notes that the film “has been criticized for what some see as a sexist and reductionist implication that Bourdain’s failed relationship with his last girlfriend, the Italian actress and filmmaker Asia Argento, was the cause of his suicide.
“Argento figures significantly toward the end of the film, as she did in its subject’s life,” Morgenstern writes. “But she’s a latecomer in a documentary that evokes, and makes sense of, the full sweep of Anthony Bourdain’s gifts, charms, successive careers, sustaining passions and bedeviling obsessions. A film of fitting energy and complexity, it’s a stirring account of an astonishing life.”
“The first 80 to 90 minutes of Roadrunner are just okay. At times they almost feel a bit boring. But during the final 30 or 40 minutes the film dives into the ‘what happened during the final few weeks of Bourdain’s life, and why did he fucking hang himself?’ section.
“By the end the viewer has been left with a clear impression that Bourdain’s relationship with the notoriously edgy and prickly Asia Argento was a giddy, obsessive thing that intensified Bourdain’s hot plate and probably jarred his sense of emotional equilibrium.
“I’m not saying that Argento ‘killed’ him in some way — Bourdain sadly did that all to himself — but she definitely shook him up and rattled his composure and apparently brought him to the edge of something or other.
“Bourdain was a moody, free-associating, nakedly honest fellow with a tendency to occasionally fall into caves of depression, and it appears that he swan-dove into the Argento relationship without the slightest sense of measured, step-by-step gradualism. Frank Sinatra once sang “let’s take it nice and easy…it’s gonna be so easy.” Bourdain definitely didn’t do that with Argento.
“There’s a stocky guy from Bourdain’s camera crew who tells Neville that Anthony was ‘a lifelong addictive personality, [and at the end he was] addicted to another person [i.e., Argento]. He didn’t understand he would drive her away if he didn’t stop talking about [how great she was]…you could see her pulling back and he just wouldn’t stop.’
“So in a way Bourdain was apparently smothering Argento to some extent, and so just before his death she performed that public affair in Rome with Hugo Clement. Her apparent intention was to say to Bourdain ‘back off, don’t smother me, let me be free.’ She and Bourdain had an open relationship, but if Argento had been a tad more considerate she would have indulged herself with Clement more discreetly.
In the doc, Parts Unknown director Michael Steed says he checked on Bourdain after the Argento-Clement photos appeared online, and that Bourdain was not cool about it, mentioning that “a little fucking discretion” would have been nice on Argento’s part.
He meant that if you have an open relationship you fuck around in the shadows — you don’t push it in your partner’s face.
Argento didn’t push Bourdain off the cliff — he jumped of his own accord. But had it not been for their relationship and his extreme immersion in that bond, Bourdain might be alive today. Maybe. Who knows? Possibly. This is definitely what the film leaves you with.
This will be of little interest, I realize, to anyone except for aspect-ratio fanatics like myself. But within the past month I’ve watched Amazon rentals of Billy Wilder‘s The Spirit of St. Louis (’57) and John Guillermin and Irwin Allen‘s The Towering Inferno (’74). And neither made me happy.
Both films were shot within a standard widescreen a.r. (2.39:1), but for reasons of pure laziness and indifference are being presented to Amazon renters with flat aspect ratios of roughly 1.78:1 or 16 x 9, which is the dimension of a standard widescreen HD TV.
The difference between the two screen shapes (comparison below) is obvious — the 1.78 version chops the sides off. It’s just as obvious that certain parties (most likely on the Amazon end) involved in the presentation of these films couldn’t care less about showing them correctly.
I’ve been watching The Spirit of St. Louis for years so why did I pay to rent it on Amazon? Because the 1.78 version is presented in HD, and the 2006 DVD is obviously available only in 480p.
I had mostly bailed on HBO’s Westworld by the end of season #1 and certainly by the middle of season #2. The endless puzzleboxing was infuriating. I was amazed that the producers had the chutzpah to launch a third season (eight episodes, 3.15.20 to 5.3.20), but that they did. I refused to watch. I was done.
A fourth season was announced in April 2020, and they’ve been shooting it over the last several weeks, or so I understand. A couple of months ago a certain Reddit guy posted that the old western village of Sweetwater would be used again for the new season, and has been moved forward in time to the 1920s.
Posted on 2.20.20: Westworld‘s third season is nearly upon us. An eight-episode endurance test that begins on 3.15.20, it will presumably deliver the same infuriating mixture of bullshit brain-teasing, dick-diddling, plotzing and puzzleboxing.
Last summer showrunners Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joytold Entertainment Weekly that season 3 would have a more comprehensible story line…really? “Season 3 is a little less of a guessing game and more of an experience with the hosts finally getting to meet their makers,” Nolan said.
Posted on 4.27.18: “That feeling of being fiddled and diddled without end, of several storylines unfolding, expanding and loop-dee-looping for no purpose than to keep unfolding, expanding and loop-dee-looping…is such that I’m determined to hate all further permutations of Westworld without watching it. I don’t care how that sounds or what it implies. Come hell or high water, I will not go there.”
From a 4.20.18 review by CNN’s Brian Lowry: “The first half of [season #2] repeats the show’s more impenetrable drawbacks — playing three-dimensional chess, while spending too much time sadistically blowing away pawns. The result is a show that’s easier to admire than consistently like.
“The push and pull of Westworld is that it grapples with deep intellectual conundrums while reveling in a kind of numbing pageant of death and destruction. Where the latter is organic to the world of HBO’s other huge genre hit, Game of Thrones, it doesn’t always feel integral to the story here, but rather a means of killing (and killing and killing) time.”
It’s good that Britney Spears was today granted a request to hire her own attorney, which “could mark a major shift in how her 13-year conservatorship case has been handled” — or, in plainer terms, could result in her conservatorship being dissolved altogether, which is what Spears wants.
N.Y. Times: The pre-scheduled court hearing was forced to address the sudden departure of her court-appointed attorney, Samuel D. Ingham III, who has handled her case since 2008. Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Brenda Penny approved Ingham’s resignation and his replacement with Spears’ chosen attorney, former federal prosecutor Mathew Rosengart.
NBC News: “Spears broke down in tears during Wednesday’s hearing, explaining to the judge that she was ‘extremely scared’ of her father, James “Jamie” Spears, and that she is not willing to be evaluated in order to remove him.
“‘I’m here to get rid of my dad and charge him with conservatorship abuse,’ she said, adding that she wanted him investigated and that ‘this conservatorship has allowed my dad to ruin my life.'”
On the other hand the appearance of Florida congressman Matt Gaetz at a “Free Britney” rally outside the same Los Angeles courthouse probably wasn’t the greatest “look” for the Spears team. Gaetz was obviously trying to rehabilitate his image as a guy who’s revelled in the company of young women, including a 17 year-old girl. Gaetz has denied any wrongdoing, but we all know what he was attempting to “say”, p.r.-wise.
I was dozing through some spritzed-up, century-old YouTube footage (4K, 60 fps) of New York City a while ago, and the musical score, which I didn’t immediately recognize, snuck up and took me away. It wasn’t as delicate or sublime as Rachmaninoff‘s “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini“, but it was all sad strings and seemed to be coming from the same general ballpark. A movie score, I began to suspect, but which? Then it hit me.
It was Hans Zimmer‘s main theme (“Tennessee”) from Michael Bay‘s Pearl Harbor (’01). Which shocked me because most of us don’t associate whorish or bombastic or otherwise second-rate films with stirring musical scores. So please tell me which films that everyone agreed weren’t very good or worse…which of these flawed films had exceptionally moving scores? There must be at least a few.
“There was a movie-theatre moment eight years ago when I thought Michael Bay might one day grow into a semi-mature film artist. Maybe. To my delight and surprise the opening of Pearl Harbor began with Hans Zimmer‘s music playing for nine or ten beautiful seconds over a black screen — a semi-overture, I thought at first. But the black gave way to a shot of World War I-era biplanes cruising over cornfields during magic hour — a middle-American nostalgia scene. And then the film was and up and running, and soon it was all downhill.
Nonetheless that black-screen opener was, I have to say, mildly impressive.
“I asked Bay about this at a press conference the next day. He talked about how he had to fight hard to begin the film this way, especially since it meant not starting this Jerry Bruckheimer-produced film with the traditional highway-tree-lightning Bruckheimer logo.
All of a sudden there’s a surge of Cannes oogah-boogah, generated by three recently-screened titles. Things are happening, the communal blood is up, buzz is buzzin’, etc.
The craziest of the three is Julia Ducournau‘s Titane, an extreme wackazoid auto-erotic midnight movie (“very violent”) made for critics who love embracing the outer behavioral limits as a way of asserting their anti-bourgeois credentials.
The most quietly absorbing and perhaps the saddest and most compelling is Asghar Farhadi‘s A Hero, a reportedly subtle, solemn and very well made Iran-based drama about an indebted man, on a brief furlough from prison, trying to do the right thing only to suffer the ravages of social media.
And an impressive blend of scurviness, small-town desperation and humanist compassion is reportedly delivered by Sean Baker‘s Red Rocket, a small-time loser drama about an aged-out porn star (Simon Rex) flopping on his mother’s couch in Texas City, Texas (an oil-refinery suburb of Galveston) as he tries to somehow regenerate his life by finding a hot young lassie who might be interested in a porn career and may have the stuff that will strike sparks with the Los Angeles porn industry
Which of these films will most likely penetrate the thick gelatinous membrane of the American moviegoing consciousness (or at least movie-watching distraction)…which show will animate the attention span or activate the den of drooping cultural depression?
Obviously Baker’s Red Rocket (the term, by the way, is slang for a dog’s erection) because it’s American and involves banal oozy sex and general small-town, what-the-fuck depravity — familiar topics for many younger Americans these days.
Farhadi’s A Hero will travel with Farhadi fans (and that would include yours truly) and that in itself should suffice.
And Ducournau’s Titane is obviously made for the wackos and weirdos…have at it!
…but it wasn’t. Because Amazon decided early on to campaign Small Axe, the Steve McQueen anthology series that began on British TV and which included Mangrove, a brilliant Chicago 7-like courtroom drama, for Emmy awards. This decision was greeted with shock and surprise by award-season handicappers because of the high regard in which Mangrove and Lover’s Rock, another portion of Small Axe, were held.
This 12.22.20 HE piece explains the reasoning behind Amazon’s decision fairly thoroughly.
And today the whole Amazon strategy collapsed like a house of cards with the Emmy nominations almost totally snubbing Small Axe, except for a single nomination — best cinematography in a limited/anthology series.
This is a major forehead-slapper. Had McQueen’s film been theatrically released and somehow qualified for a Best Picture nomination, it might well have beaten Nomadland. Or at least, it should have in the eyes of the Movie Godz, being a significantly better film and all.
Repeating for extra emphasis: The entire Small Axe anthology was entirely shut out by the Emmys. Why? What the hell happened? What do Amazon execs have to say about all this? Talk about a nonsensical wipe-out.
Yesterday I finally saw a good portion of Steve McQueen‘s Small Axe quintet — specifically Mangrove, Red White and Blue and Lover’s Rock. (I’ve yet to watch Alex Wheatle, which I’m been told is the least of the five, and Education.) I was delighted to be finally sinking into the Big Three. McQueen is such a masterful filmmaker. He elevates material simply by focusing, framing and sharpening. His eye (visual choices) and sense of rhythm are impeccable. This, I was muttering to myself, is ace-level filmmaking…this is what it’s all about.
I was hugely impressed by all three, but especially by Mangrove, a gripping, well-throttled political drama which echoes and parallels Aaron Sorkin‘s Trial of the Chicago 7.
Both are about (a) landmark trials involving police brutality in the general time frame of the late ’60s and early ’70s, (b) activist defendants and flame-fanning media coverage, (c) an imperious, disapproving judge (Alex Jennings is McQueen’s Frank Langella), (d) a passionate barrister for the defense (Jack Lowden as a kind of British BillKuntsler), and (e) a decisive verdict or narrative aftermath that exposed institutional bias.
Mangrove (Amazon, currently streaming) is primarily about the late Frank Crichlow (Shaun Parkes), the owner-operator of a neighborhood-friendly Notting Hill restaurant that served spicy food, attracted a cutting-edge clientele (locals, journalists, activists, Jimi Hendrix) and became a kind of community nerve center for political hey-hey.
The 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks will fall on Saturday, 9.11.21 — roughly 8 and 1/2 weeks from now. It’ll be treated as a fairly big deal by everyone, I suspect, and by the mainstream media in particular. Documentary tributes, historical assessments, first-hand recollections, etc.
But after repeatedly looking back at the particulars and reflecting on the social changes that have occured since and particularly the huge mess that the George Bush administration made of Iraq and Afghanistan…where the hell do you start and what’s really left to say?
I was at the Toronto Film Festival when the 9/11 attacks happened, and two distinct and primal thoughts were coursing through my head that day. One was that what had happened was Pearl Harbor all over again, and that no one would ever forget it…that was obvious. The other was that I wanted to hop a bus down to Manhattan immediately because I regarded it (and still do) as more of a home than Los Angeles, where I’ve lived since ’83. I don’t know anyone who feels emotionally close to Los Angeles. It’s just not that much of a rootsy place.
I lived in Manhattan for nearly six years, ’78 to ’83, as a struggling journalist, and in a pair of commuter towns in my childhood and teens (Westfield, N.J. and Wilton, Connecticut), and when that ghastly day arrived I guess I wanted to experience the horror among “friends”, so to speak. It felt somehow wrong or derelict to be in Toronto, of all places. I just wanted to be there. I suddenly wanted to reconnect with my lifelong Manhattan roots…a town I’d visited off and on from the time I was five or six years old…a city I’d begun visiting without my parent’s knowledge starting when I was 14 or thereabouts…I just felt terrible about not being there. It sounds perverse, but I wanted to share the aroma of crushed rocks and asbestos clouds and gasoline fumes.
Movie-wise a terrible tragedy arose from the 9/11 attacks, and that was the explosion of superhero movies. This happened, I believe, out of some kind of deep-seated need to dramatize and savor the vanquishing of villains by omnipotent good guys…figures who would rid our hearts of uncertainty and ambiguity.
D.C. superhero flicks have been a multiplex fixture since Batman Begins (’05) and the MCU onslaught began with 2008’s Iron Man. We’ve been living with them for 15 or 16 years now with no end in sight. Not only were many of the movies themselves oppressively formulaic and numbing to the soul, but the concurrent rise of cable and streaming led to the gradual collapse of middle-class theatrical stand-alones.
In a 3.25.17 N.Y. Times piece called “The Perverse Thrill of Chaotic Times,” Teddy Wayne wrote that “the common denominator in all these films is that we safely watch cataclysms from afar. Nearly all of us saw the Kennedy assassination and other national tragedies on a screen, not in person. A common observation after Sept. 11 was that the destruction of the World Trade Center seemed out of a movie.”
There’s another thing I can say for sure about 9/11, and that’s that four excellent films arose directly from it — Tony Scott‘s Man on Fire (’04), Paul Greengrass‘s Flight 93 (’06), and Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal‘s The Hurt Locker (2009 stateside) and Zero Dark Thirty (’12).
Starting in ’02 or ’03 I began writing off and on about the 9/11 story of Port Authority employee Pasquale Buzzelli — i.e., “the 9/11 surfer”. I gradually got to know Pasquale and particularly his wife, Louise, during the aughts, particularly when I was living in Brooklyn in ’05 and again during my return to NYC between late ’08 and early ’11. I tried helping them find a co-writer for Pasquale’s book, “We All Fall Down.”
That’s all I have in my head right now. More to come, I’m sure.
What this Bluray seems to provide, based on frame captures, is another lovingly restored grainstorm experience — a hazy, soft-focused relation of Criterion’s Bluray of The Awful Truth (released on 4.7.18). Borzage’s 1937 film probably looks as good as it ever will on Bluray, agreed, but it’s certainly not the stuff of profound visual transportation. Not in my book, it isn’t.
So I asked Levine what exactly is so “great” about the Criterion Bluray in question. Not only did he decline to reply, but he blocked me.
If I was Levine I would’ve manned up and said something like “this is the most lusciously rendered version of this classic Borzage film ever savored in HD…the heavy-mosquito-swamp atmosphere is not a problem but a beautifully detailed, other-worldly immersion…Jean Arthur, Charles Boyer and Colin Clive covered in hundreds of trillions of micro-mosquitoes…it’s glorious!”
There’s always been a Grand Canyon-sized gulf between the cinematic preferences of press + industry sophistos who attend the Cannes Film Festival vs. the locals and tourists who occasionally attend a festival beach screening.
There’s nothing particularly “wrong” with the latter preferring the simple, oafish, completely free pleasures of F9 outdoors to, say, trying to score tickets to one of the indoor festival screenings, many if not most of which would probably rub your hoi polloi types the wrong way.
Consider nonetheless this report about last night’s F9 screening by Variety‘s Manori Ravindran, and more particularly the last seven words in the opening paragraph: “F9 may not have been the planetary blockbuster anyone expected at Cannes, but amid the randy nuns, self-indulgent musicals and bovine documentaries, it was the planetary blockbuster we needed.”
Remember that Mad magazine bit when the alarmed Lone Ranger shouts “Indians everywhere, Tonto!…we’re surrounded!” and the faintly grinning Tonto says “what you mean ‘we’?”
In the same spirit, HE asks Revindran “what do you mean F9 was what ‘we‘ needed”?
Given the all-but-universal understanding that the Fast & Furious franchise is soul cancer for the chumps and that some of us could be forgiven for assuming that F9 producers are in league with satanic forces, are you, a London-based Variety staffer, saying that you…what, identify with the rabble? Or are you suggesting that F9 is a pleasure to sit through?
Ravindran notes that soon after F9 was unveiled in early June as a high-profile beach freebie, it was “instantly mocked by some who balked at Vin Diesel’s Dom Toretto putting the pedal to the metal in highbrow Cannes.
“But come Monday evening, hundreds of people — [mostly] holiday makers — lined up along the Croisette hoping to score a striped deckchair or sandy spot to watch the latest chapter in Universal’s 20-year-old franchise.
“Cannes’ July dates, as opposed to the usual May affair, meant many were at the film festival for the first time in their lives, and rather than struggle to navigate a finicky ticketing system for an auteur movie they might not even like, the familiarity of another Fast and the Furious movie promised an evening of guaranteed thrills.”
