O’Casey on Blowup mystery — posted on 8.1.07

According to Blowup costar Ronan O’Casey, who explained the full, partially-unfilmed plot of Michelangelo Antonioni‘s 1996 classic to Roger Ebert seven years ago, the inattention paid to the murder plot — on Antonioni’s part as well as that of David Hemming‘s photographer character — was a kind of accident. Antonioni was forced to go all mysterious and inconclusive, he says, because producer Carlo Ponti shut the film down before all the scenes were shot.

Ronan O’Casey’s only Blowup closeup

“The intended story was as follows: the young lover, armed with a pistol, was to precede Vanessa [Redgrave] and me to Maryon Park in London, conceal himself in the bushes and await our arrival,” O’Casey explains. “I pick up Vanessa in a nice new dark green Jaguar and we drive through London — giving Antonioni a chance to film that swinging, trendy, sixties city of the Beatles, Mary Quant, the Rolling Stones, and Carnaby Street. We stop and I buy Vanessa a man’s watch, which she wears throughout the rest of the film.

“We then saunter into the park, stopping now and then to kiss (lucky me). In the center of the park, Vanessa gives me a passionate embrace and prolonged kiss, and glances at the spot where her new lover is hiding. He shoots me (unlucky me), and the two leave the park intending to drive away. Their plans goes awry when he notices Hemmings with his camera and fears that Hemmings has photos of her. As it turns out, he has.

“None of this was ever shot. There were other scenes, such as those between Sarah Miles and Jeremy Glover [i.e, Vanessa’s character’s boyfriend who was also the trigger man in Maryon Park] that also went unrealized. Some of the scenes that were shot pertaining to the murder plot ended up in the film, but are completely puzzling to the audience. For example, in the film there is a scene with Vanessa and Hemmings at a cafe.” Wrong! The scene hes’ describing is between Hemmings and his bearded book editor.] A young man approaches, notices that she is with Hemmings, and runs away. That’s Glover. This makes for an odd, mysterious moment because the audience is completely ignorant of his identity.”
Ponti did Antonioni a favor, of course. If the all of this murder-plot, watch-buying stuff had been filmed and integrated into the film, Blowup would have been a much lesser work. That moment when Glover approaches the cafe and then walks away is perfect — absolutely perfect.

God bless Quentin Tarantino for lamenting the state of Hollywood today in which “ideology” — wokester totalitarianism + Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style conformity — has damn near become Hollywood’s end-all and be-all.

“There has become a thing that’s gone on, especially in this last year, where ideology is more important than art,” QT told Bill Maher the night before last**. “Ideology trumps art. Ideology trumps individual effort. Ideology trumps good. Ideology trumps entertaining.”

Maher said “yup” and simplified the basics — “It’s either virtue-signalling or special-effects superhero event flicks.”

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Four days ago Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone posted an essay titled “The State of the Race — It’s Time to Talk About Art vs. Propaganda.” Consider the last four paragraphs:

“Art cannot survive this moment if we don’t fight for it. We must fight as film critics, as journalists, as fans and, yes, as Oscar bloggers.

“Granted, I know most won’t risk it. So they pander, day in and day out on Twitter, saying exactly what they have to say and staying silent about what they know to be true but are too afraid to say. None of them will speak up — not the major writers on any website devoted to the Oscars. There are only three of us who will — Jeff Wells, David Poland and myself. We’ve been mostly sidelined by Film Twitter for being too outspoken and never apologizing – which is good and bad. Hey, you haven’t lived until you’ve had a gang of wild-eyed GenZers chasing you around and calling you a ‘white supremacist.’

“Could you ever have imagined that people would be afraid just to say what they really thought about something? That journalists and critics and filmmakers would be afraid? Granted, social media, like the printing press and the radio have wreaked havoc upon our species. Those advancements in communication played a part in creating modern chaos — revolutions, the Holocaust — but they also led to the greatest books ever written and FDR’s fireside chats and the Mercury players.

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The opening paragraph in “50 Reasons to Love Joni Mitchell’s ‘Blue’,” a 50-years-later commemorative tribute piece in the 6.20 edition of the N.Y. Times, contains a strange backhand gesture. Written by Lindsay Zoladz, the passage reads as follows:

“Just before embarking on the pivotal intercontinental voyage that would inspire much of her peerless 1971 album “Blue”, Mitchell considered her grandmothers. One ‘was a frustrated poet and musician…she kicked the kitchen door off of the hinges on the farm,’ Mitchell recalled in a 2003 documentary. The other ‘wept for the last time in her life at 14 behind some barn because she wanted a piano and said, ‘Dry your eyes, you silly girl, you’ll never have a piano.’”

That unnamed 2003 documentary is titled Joni Mitchell: A Woman of Heart and Mind. It was directed by Susan Lacy (who also helmed Spielberg, Jane Fonda In Five Acts, Judy Garland: By Myself, Leonard Bernstein: Reaching for the Note, Rod Serling: Submitted for Your Approval and Very Ralph) and aired on PBS’ “American Masters” series.

Given Lacy’s sterling reputation and the commendable chops and perceptions in Joni Mitchell: A Woman of Heart and Mind, why would Zoladz or her Times editor refer to it as “a 2003 documentary” — a reference that indicates a lack of respect or even derision?

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“Best Action Flicks of the 21st Century” was posted on 5.9.17. What if anything has changed in the action realm in the four years since?

To most people “action film” means violent, whoop-ass shit with lots of leaping around, automatic rifle fire, squealing tires and non-stop adrenalin. But when it comes to deciding on the best action films, most viewers aren’t that demanding. They love their jizz-whiz and don’t care about the shadings and subtleties. But I am demanding, you see. To really love an action film I have to believe that (a) what I’m watching bears at least some relation to human behavior as most of us have come to know it and is therefore delivering a semi-believable, well-motivated thing, and (b) what I’m watching could actually happen in the real-deal world of physics (i.e., no idiotic swan dives off 50-story office buildings).

I don’t care, by the way, if the action content in a film takes up the first 10 minutes or the last half-hour or the whole damn running time. All I care about is whether or not I believe what I’m seeing, or…you know, whether I’m distracted or dazzled enough so that I don’t pay attention to logic or realism factors. Whatever works. As long as action defines character and vice versa.

If I’m enjoying an action flick it’s because I fucking believe it, and I never believe anything that doesn’t respect some grown-up concept of reality. Fantasy flicks can blow me for the most part. I want an action movie that will plant its feet, look me in the eye and tell the fucking truth.

Very few 21st Century action films live up to HE’s rules and standards, or even give a damn about doing so. The Fast and Furious franchise is notorious for spitting in the face of reality. Almost all superhero comic-book movies revel in the fact that their realm allows them to ignore logic and believability. Once in a great while and in a very blue moon, a first-rate action flick will come along that defies HE rules but gets away with it. One of these was Ang Lee‘s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (’00), but that’s a very rare occurence. On the other hand Crouching Tiger led to the stars of Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle flying around on wires, and that was an awful thing to behold.

Here are Hollywood Elsewhere’s choices for the 11 craftiest, best-made, most believable action films of the 21st Century, and in this order:

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Initially posted on 8.26.07: Paul Greengrass‘s The Bourne Supremacy became notorious in certain circles for the exhausting, hyper-cutting, whip-pan technique that came to be known as “Paul Greengrass shaky-cam“, and which was later explored in a groundbreaking essay titled “Chaos Cinema.” I never felt sick from this technique, but others (I don’t know how many but at least a few) did.

I experienced my first shaky-cam vomit-splatter incident during an early-ish screening of The Bourne Supremacy on 7.12.04.

Sometime during the third act of an Ultimatum showing at the Writers Guild theatre, an older woman sitting on the left side spewed on the floor. It was kind of alphabet soup mixed with pumpkin puree and chopped Spanish peanuts. A few people got up and moved away. A guy who was sitting nearby told me later it smelled pretty awful in that section of the room.

The next day I mentioned the episode to a Universal publicist in an e-mail, not as something that was necessarily caused by Paul Greengrass shaky–cam but as something funny that had merely “happened.” I really hadn’t put two and two together. I was simply chuckling the way a fifth-grader might chortle with his friends if the really smart girl with the freckles and the pigtails had vomited in arithmetic class.

But the Universal publicist wasn’t in fifth grade — she was coming from the office of Roy Cohn during the Army-McCarthy hearings. Her voice shrill and agitated, and she read me the riot act in order to dissuade me from mentioning the incident in the column. I felt so overwhelmed with bludgeonings and bad vibes that I caved (wimp that I am deep down) and said, “Okay, all right…good God.”

Chaos Cinema Part 1 from matze on Vimeo.

“The Covid epidemic may be subsiding, but the epidemic that preceded it — the anxiety epidemic — is not, and usually when people drink, it’s too alleviate some form of anxiety. As we reenter society half of America has been saying that Covid was so stressful, they worry they’ll never fully recover. We’re using liquor as a crutch…”

Even during my drinking days I never once sipped wine or beer during a film, or prior to watching one. If anything I would down a strong cappuccino or an energy drink. I want to up my alterness levels during a film, not diminish them.

A 6.25 interview with F9 costar Jordana Brewster, written by The Hollywood Reporter‘s Aaron Couch, made me want to melt and die.

I don’t give a flying eff how Brewster landed more action scenes in F9…even flirting with such thoughts is tantamount to poisoning my being, my soul, the necessary communion with the fundamentals of life on the planet earth…these people — Couch included — are snarling beasts of the forest. Pardon my French, but they make me want to ralph.

“After playing Mia Toretto onscreen for 20 years dating back to the first The Fast and the Furious movie, Brewster knew she had more to offer, so she lobbied director Justin Lin to up her action this time, texting the filmmaker about the action-chops she was picking up as a guest star on the Lin-produced TV show Magnum P.I. and through doing her own training”…I don’t care and fuck Couch for attempting to inject that shit into my head.

“I’ve heard throughout my career that if you want something done, show you can do it. That’s something that is very difficult for me to do. To advocate for myself, but it paid off”….die a slow, agonizing death! Not Brewster or Couch but those who read this and go “hmm, interesting.”

Brewster: “There is…the opportunity to downsize it and go back to our roots with [the first Fast and Furious], where there is a little less green screen and we don’t have to visit as many cool locations, so maybe it’s less of a risk for the studio and we can just make something awesome and run with it.”

In other words, Brewster would like the franchise to cut the bullshit and become a feminist Drive a la Nicholas Winding Refn. Sounds good to me, but it’ll never happen. Because the Fast franchise it run by animals, and it’s about appealing to the taste buds of animals.

“Those improved action chops will likely come in handy down the road, as Lin has two more Fast films he’s directing to wrap up the main series. There are also rumblings of a female-focused spinoff in the works. Though nothing has been announced officially on that front, Brewster wonders if going back to the basics could be a way forward.

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