The “who knows?” states are in yellow. The reptilian nihilists and sociopaths who are still supporting Trump after everything he’s done and everything that’s gone down…words fail. “Deranged” isn’t a strong enough term. From npr.org’s Dominic Montanaro, posted this morning:

Trying to write about Glenn Kenny‘s “Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas“, which put me into some kind of serious hog heaven…I don’t know where to start. Or end for that matter. Talk about a package stuffed with goodies and more goodies, and before you know it you can’t keep up and they’re falling off the conveyer belt and you’re Lucille Ball in the chocolate factory.

Please understand this is the most devotional and meticulous making-of-Goodfellas book that anyone could ever possibly write. I mean, Kenny burrowed and burrowed deep…talked to or library-researched every possible source, living or dead — director Martin Scorsese, producer Irwin Winkler and Barbara De Fina, “Wiseguy” author Nick Pileggi, Robert De Niro (whose casting as Jimmy Conway happened at the last minute), editor Thelma Schoonmaker, crew guys, et. al. — and generally oil-drilled for a two-year period and then assessed this 1990 gangster classic from each and every imaginable angle.

But it’s so great to sink into this thing, which is like…I don’t know, a combination college course, shiatsu massage and mineral bath. At times it’s almost (and please don’t take this the wrong way) exhausting, and yet in the best possible way. It works you over, and at the same time delivers an amazing cumulative high. If you want to know, like, everything and I mean everything about this film, this is the well you need to jump into.

If Goodfellas means as much to you as it does to me…if you’re a Goodfellas junkie (which I’ve been for the last 30 years anyway) you don’t have much of a choice. You have to pick it up and keep this ultimate couch-potato companion on your coffee table and pick it up when the mood strikes.

That’s how I got through it, to be honest. After the first three or four chapters I decided it might be better to read it in short spurts, 10 or 15 pages at a time and then put it down and then come back. It felt better that way. Because otherwise it’s a big fat chocolate bear.

I’ve watched Goodfellas…I’d almost rather not say. At least 15 or 20 times, which isn’t as obsessive as it sounds. Not once a year since it opened, which would be 30 times, but a whole lot of times in my living room…VHS, cable, streaming, laser disc, DVD, Bluray (including the infamous 25th anniversary “Brownfellas” version, which definitely isn’t as pleasing as the 2007 and 2010 Bluray versions) and of course 4K streaming, which I’m cool with because the lentil soup and caramel have been removed.

It’s frankly gotten to the point that I can’t really get off on it like I used to…I know it too well…backwards, forwards and sideways. And yet I’ll never stop savoring and re-savoring all the great parts, which is pretty much every shot and scene.

Why, then, would I want to re-immerse all the more via Glenn’s book? But I wanted to without question. I had to. An uncorrected trade paperback proof is sitting right next to me, and I know that the next time I crack it open it’ll be good sailing.

If I’d written “Mad Men” I would have blended the history and facts and quotes with how this film has always made me feel about my suburban New Jersey past, and those aggressive Italian guys I used to run into from time to time, and particularly those black pegged pants, starched white shirts, pointy black lace-ups and black leather jackets they all wore. And how they’d taunt me from time to time (Them: “Are you a guinea? No? Then what good are ya?”) and how I’d scowl and mutter “aagghh, fuck those guys.”

And yet nothing in the history of cinema has ever made me feel so warm and comforted and at ease among friends as that tracking shot when the camera (assuming the POV of Ray Liotta‘s Henry Hill) strolls through the Bamboo Lounge, amber-lighted with tiki torches and packed with friendly wiseguys who say to him “hey, what’s up, guy?” and “I took care of that thing for ya” and “I wenna see that guy, wenna see him” and so on. Strange, isn’t it? I hated the guineas as a teenager but I’ve loved their company ever since.

Thanks to Larry Karaszewski, Hollywood Elsewhere now owns the coolest (not to mention the most exclusive) ironic Joe Biden bumper sticker in all of Los Angeles, if not the entire nation.

HE to Millennials and Zoomers: Released in mid-July of 1970, Joe was a disturbing lightning-rod drama about simmering middle-class annoyance and anger towards hippie culture. Five or six weeks before Joe opened the infamous “hard-hat riot” happened in lower Manhattan, and thereby provided a real-life echo with roughly 400 construction workers (many of them helping to build the World Trade Center) beating up antiwar demonstrators.

Directed by John Avildsen (Rocky, Save The Tiger, The Karate Kid), Joe launched the career of Peter Boyle, whose performance as the titular blue-collar hippie hater had everyone talking. It also featured the debut performance of 23 year-old Susan Sarandon.

Wiki anecdote: “When Peter Boyle saw audience members cheering the violence in Joe, he refused to appear in any other film or television show that glorified violence.”

Two days hence IFC Films will be opening Sean Durkin‘s The Nest theatrically. Alas, in relatively few…well, actually one Los Angeles-area location when you get right down to it. I’m talking about Santa Ana’s Regency (South Coast Village, 1561 W Sunflower Ave.Santa Ana, CA, 92704). Honestly? So starved am I for a theatrical experience, I’m thinking of driving all the way down there to see it.**

“It’s been nine long years since The Nest’s writer-director, Sean Durkin, made a splash with his superb feature debut, Martha Marcy May Marlene. (In between, he directed a miniseries, Southcliffe, for England’s Channel 4.) That film was fundamentally a triumph of editing, cutting back and forth between different time periods in a way that made past and present feel interchangeable. Here, Durkin has teamed up with the great Hungarian cinematographer Mátyás Erdély (the original Miss Bala, Son Of Saul, Sunset), and together they’ve fashioned something remarkable: an utterly non-supernatural haunted house story.

“Nothing overtly creepy or menacing ever happens, with the exception of one moment in which a door is mysteriously open after Allison is sure that she’d locked it. Yet The Nest deliberately replicates the ominous look and feel of a slow-burn horror movie, with establishing shots held just a beat too long, shadows that swallow up corners of the room, and physical distance between characters that generates constant free-floating unease. This approach may well frustrate genre buffs who jump to the wrong conclusion early on, but it provides a startlingly fresh angle on otherwise routine domestic discord.” — from Mike D’Angelo’s 9.15 AV Club review.

This is small potatoes but if you have any sporting blood, you have to admit that Joe Biden referring yesterday to the “Harris-Biden” administration along with Kamala Harris mentioning the “Harris administration” last weekend…you know the Trump campaign will make an attack ad out of this. A Joe gaffe is one thing (part of his brand) but a seemingly coordinated Joe-Kamala blunder (emphasis on the “s” word) is something else. It might as well be admitted to. The Trumpies will claim these mistakes are Freudian slips.

Hats off to the amusing Jonathan Mann for some extremely fast work

Not just the film, of course, but the jacket art. One of the best Criterion covers ever. Amores perros had its big debut in Cannes on 5.14.00 — 20 years and change. The Bluray pops on 12.15.20.

Campaigning in comfortable work boots and sneakers (even if they’re whitesides) is a cool thing, a signature thing. I like what she’s saying. Seriously. Especially being 5’2″ and all.

But the tracking shot should have stayed with her another ten seconds or so.

Mrs. Vice President. pic.twitter.com/wvmrgFLmoa

— Jill Biden For FLOTUS (@Jillbiden46) September 15, 2020

…and I saw a huge rogue wave breaking toward my ship, I would turn the ship away (“full steam ahead, left hard rudder!”) so that the crest of the wave would smash into the stern. Yes, the ship would be momentarily engulfed and might even be submerged for a few seconds but would then pop through like a cork and be pushed along by the sheer force of energy. It would then basically surf atop the whitewater like a boogie board. That way Gene Hackman, Shelley Winters, Ernest Borgnine, Carol Lynley and Red Buttons might live to see another day. The one thing you never want to let happen is to allow the tidal wave to hit you from the side — that invites capsizing.

The legend is that right after yelling “cut!”, director Irwin Allen would always ask “is everyone okay?”

Today’s big story is about Madonna inking a deal with Universal to direct a biopic about herself, based on a script co-written by herself and Diablo Cody. Matt Donnelly‘s Variety story says the untiled pic will evolve under the wing of Uni’s filmed entertainment chairperson Donna Langley and producer Amy Pascal, whose shingle is set up on the lot. No casting announcements or production timeline.

This is the first time in history that any big-name talent has announced such an intention. And of course, the idea invites skepticism. Intriguing biopics have to about more than just “this happened and that happened,” and what hope is there, honestly, that Madonna, who’s directed two features, will be interested in conveying some kind of warts-and-all saga about who she is or was deep down? An approach, in short, that might push the usual biopic boundaries.

Official Madonna statement: “I want to convey the incredible journey that life has taken me on as an artist, a musician, a dancer…a human being trying to make her way in this world. The focus of this film will always be music. Music has kept me going and art has kept me alive. There are so many untold and inspiring stories and who better to tell it than me? It’s essential to share the roller-coaster ride of my life with my voice and vision.”

Madonna and producer-mixer Jellybean Benitez, sometime around the release of her 1983 debut album.

Three or four years ago Madonna made it clear that she was no fan of Elyse Hollander‘s Blonde Ambition, a top-rated Black List script about her struggle to find success as a pop singer in early ’80s Manhattan. I became an instant fan of this script, and declared in a 12.16.16 piece that “it’s going to be a good, hard-knocks industry drama when it gets made — basically a blend of a scrappy singing Evita mixed with A Star Is Born.”

At the very least Madonna and Cody should re-read Blonde Ambition and borrow as much as they legally can from it. Or, better yet, hire Hollander to come aboard as a co-writer.

Blonde Ambition “is a flinty, unsentimental empowerment saga about a tough cookie who took no prisoners and was always out for #1,” I wrote. “No hearts and flowers for this mama-san.

“A Star Is Born‘s logline was basically ‘big star with a drinking problem falls for younger ingenue, she rises as he falls and finally commits suicide, leaving her with a broken heart.’ Blonde Ambition is about a hungry, super-driven New York pop singer who, like Evita Peron (whom Madonna portrayed in ’96), climbs to the top by forming alliances with this and that guy who helps her in some crucial way, and then moves on to the next partner or benefactor, but at no point in the journey is she fighting for anything other than her own success, and is no sentimentalist or sweetheart.

Alternate: Our very own hungry, hustling, hard-charging singer, living on tips and dimes in NYC in ’81 and ’82, finally gets a leg-up when she cuts a deal with (and then falls in love with) Jellybean Benitez, who remixes her initially troubled debut album (which contained “Borderline” and “Lucky Star”) and makes it into a hit…but like with a previous boyfriend, bandmate Dan Gilroy, she eventually pushes Jellybean aside in favor of a new producer for her second album, Like A Virgin (’84). So Jellybean is the Vickie Lester of this tale, his heart broken at the end by a woman he loved but who finally loved only herself.

I never got around to watching Luca Guadagnino‘s We Are Who We Are until yesterday, which is when the debut episode began streaming on HBO. So that’s all I’ve seen of this eight-episode series — installment #1. (It’s embedded after the jump.)

Set in 2016, it’s a dive into here-and-now teenage alienation — an awkward-adolescence, coming-of-age, trying-to-figure-it-out thing about a 14 year-old kid (Jack Dylan Grazer, who just turned 17 in real life) with the worst taste in clothing…I have to stop myself right here. I don’t want to make this piece about my own sartorial preferences past or present, but if I was 14 today I would rather stab myself with a steak knife than wear an unsubtle, over-sized T-shirt with the ugliest pair of baggy, leopard-skin shorts ever manufactured in human history. Not to mention a pair of unappealing red sneakers…okay, I’ll give that part of the ensemble a pass.

We Are Who We Are is set on a U.S. military base near Venice, Italy, and it concerns the initially agonizing struggle of Grazer’s character, Fraser Wilson, to acclimate after flying in from New York to live with his mom, an Army colonel named Sarah (Chloe Sevigny), and her wife, Maggie (Alice Braga), who also wears a uniform. Fraser is gay but not “out,” or so it appears. (There’s an eye-rolling moment when he happens to step into a barracks and catch sight of a few Army guys taking a shower, and he just stares.) All kinds of new relationships, assessments and misadventures await the poor guy, the most prominent being Jordan Kristine Seamon‘s Caitlin, a long-haired, African-American beauty who appears to be more or less straight but you never know.

I didn’t initially care all that much for Frazer or the general vibe, to be honest, but then it began to gradually pull me in. Guadagnino, whose A Bigger Splash and especially Call Me By Your Name established him as a maestro of sun-kissed Italian sensuality and a certain instinctual, improvisational, come-what-may attitude about life’s possibilities, really gets into Fraser’s impressions and moods and whatnot, and even though he’s another typically inarticulate kid who lives deep in his head and inside whatever tunes he happens to be listening to, there’s something about the nowness, aliveness, alone-ness and scattered whatever-ness in the atmosphere of this thing that turns a certain key.

We Are Who We Are is breathing fresh air, up to something else and, to me at least, offering a new kind of stimulant.

Fraser seems so dorky, so emotionally stunted and scowling. He’s 14 but behaves more like an angry eight year old with a taller, lankier frame. I guess I’ll eventually get used to him. Interesting eyes but so fucking clueless and closed off. Yes, of course — so was I at that age. The difference is that I kept most of my anxiety bottled up inside, at least in the presence of elders and to some extent with my peers. I half-confided in a couple of friends, I suppose, although I probably wasn’t articulate enough at the time to even share my truest thoughts with myself. But at least I didn’t commit any clothing crimes.

A filmmaker friend who knows the series top to bottom assures me that “you’ll end up loving Fraser — he’s an angel of vengeance against the current.”

I don’t know what else to say except that the first episode has convinced me to see the series through to the end.

Kyle Buchanan, the N.Y. Times‘ award-season columnist and inheritor of David Carr’s “carpetbagger” handle, has written an excellent piece about Guadagnino and the series.

As a Santa Monica College film student, Tatiana is taking a Coen Bros. appreciation course. She’s in the midst of watching a long list of their films for preparation, and I’ve watched two or three with her. Unfortunately this immersion has reminded me of some aspects of their films that I don’t like all that much any more. Certain strategies or indulgences that I found captivating or delightful 20 or 30-plus years ago have lost some of their intrigue.

For the most part Blood Simple (’84) has lost none of its deliciously manipulative, film-nerd brilliance. The dying M. Emmet Walsh (as the sleazy gumshoe) looking up at that tiny glob of sink water and waiting with a mixture of apprehension and panic for it to drop onto his face is one of my all-time favorite closing sequences. Brilliant! But I also found myself irritated by the none-too-bright behavior of John Getz‘s “Ray” and especially his unquestioned and unexplored assumption that Frances McDormand‘s “Abby” killed her husband (Dan Hedaya‘s “Marty”), and his decision to make sure Marty is dead and then bury his body. I’ll accept a certain amount of stupidity on the part of a central character, but when he/she crosses the line I’m out.

I found myself doubling down on my hate for Raising Arizona (’87). I wrote last March about a friend slipping me a draft of the script in early ’86, before they began filming. I loved the dark humor, the flirting with absurdity, the Preston Sturges-like tone. But I was envisioning a film that would work against all that with a tone of low-key naturalism.

When I saw the finished film I was horrified. It was pushed way too hard — too pedal-to-the-metal. And I hated, hated, HATED John Goodman‘s Gale and William Forsythe‘s Evelle.” Simon Pegg once described Raising Arizona as “a living, breathing Looney Tunes cartoon” — that’s precisely what I hated about it.”

Then we watched Barton Fink (’91), which I hadn’t seen since…I forget but sometime in the mid to late ’90s. My first reaction was that the various horrors experienced by John Turturro‘s impossibly pretentious screenwriter (based, I’ve always assumed, on Clifford Odets) are a metaphor for a terrible case of writer’s block and the feeling of suppressed panic that takes over when you’re unable to make an idea or some kind of writing challenge “work” — to put it down on the page in a way that feels right and true and perhaps even profound. Hell, the inability to write anything along these lines and the self-doubt that creeps into your system the longer the blockage lasts.

This time I was filled with more and more irritation for Fink’s general arrogance and stupidity — his obstinate mindset, his inability (i.e., the Coen’s refusal) to share his thoughts, the refusal to watch a few Wallace Beery films or peruse some scripts for research, his inability to at least type out a few random ideas or at least write stuff on napkins. Once I succumbed to this negativity I started focusing on his ridiculous Eraserhead haircut, and the way his bare feet looked and the awful cut of his thick tweed suit and the fact that he travelled all the way from New York to California with some kind of overnight suitcase with room for maybe a shirt or two, a couple of boxer shorts and a couple pairs of socks but that’s all.