An interpretation about Paul Greengrass and Tom Hanks‘ News of the World (Universal, 12.25) was discussed this morning. The basic premise has to do with love and family values and tribal identity. It’s about a widowed 60ish Civil War veteran (Hanks) agreeing to to deliver a white, German-descended girl (Helena Zengel), taken and raised by Kiowa natives many years earlier, to her aunt and uncle in the San Antonio area.
The idea of white captive children being raised by 19th Century Native Americans was explored to some extent by John Ford‘s The Searchers (’56), Herschel Daugherty‘s The Light in The Forest (’58) and Arthur Penn‘s Little Big Man (’70).
Historical accounts have reported that a good number of white youths raised by Indians, especially if they were captured at a young age, didn’t want to return to white society. They had bonded, been embraced and felt a special kinship.
This is dramatized briefly in News of the World when Zengel’s character calls out to a Kiowa tribe on the far side of a river, pleading that she wants to return to them, that she speaks their language and doesn’t want to lose them, etc.
Couple this with a longstanding belief that something inherently evil and genocidal resides in European-descended white people — that they’ve always invaded, plundered, murdered, enslaved and otherwise destroyed native cultures. Certainly as far as their settling (i.e., occupation) of the Americas and Western Hemisphere was concerned.
The hole in that viewpoint, at least as far as News of the World is concerned, is that the central white person is played by the fundamentally decent Tom Hanks.
Roughly seven months ago I watched Spike Lee‘s “New York New York” valentine video. Spunk and spirit, inspired by Covid hardships, “we’ll get through this together,” etc. Today the New York Film Critics Circle gave Lee a special award for it.
It’s decent enough piece but who was the camera operator? Because some of the shots aren’t exactly on the level of John Ford or Sergei Eisenstein. And may I ask what it was shot with? An iPhone, I’m presuming, but the footage looks a bit muddy. Maybe that was the intention, but for the most part iPhone video footage looks cleaner than this.
Spike Lee reacts to learning that he had been given a special award by the New York Film Critics Circle for his short film “New York New York”: “It’s really my love letter to New York City, the greatest city in the world and I don’t care what nobody says!” https://t.co/GAW56rpqhMpic.twitter.com/Hf57LJPGi4
Everyone understands that dual pronoun use is currently in fashion among certain non-binary persons to express the complexities of their gender identity in different contexts and social settings…right?
I just want to apologize in advance to the gender-fluid, vague-pronoun crowd that I am, always have been and always will be a “he”, as in dude, guy, male-ish, rumblehog rider, baseball mitt owner, etc.
Although I’ve identified as metrosexual for years and have long abhorred certain aspects of macho posturing, I will never be a “he/she/whatever” and I’m definitely not a “they.”
I can’t be a “they” because I’m just, you know, a single person with a single past. Am I missing something? Do I need to shoot myself with a Sig Sauer? Or should I split my head open with a sharp axe?
My name is Jeff, I live in West Hollywood, and I only use “he/him” pronouns. I know that’s kind of an uncool or anti-social thing these days, but I’m obstinate, I guess.
Speaker #1: “Hey, where’d they go?” Speaker #2: “Who?” Speaker #1: “They were just here a few minutes ago.” Speaker #2: “Jeff was just here. He’s down at Kinkos picking up an order.” Speaker #1: “They’re at Kinkos?” Speaker #2: “No, he is…Jeff is.” Speaker #1: “I’m just trying to use cautious terminology. You don’t have to be disrespectful about it.” Speaker #2: “Who’s being disrespectful? I’m just saying plain and straight like Walter Brennan on horseback might say in a John Ford western, ‘He’s down at Kinkos’…period.”
The daughter of an occasional friend (i.e., one who sometimes ignores me but not always) recently insisted upon dual pronouns when they spoke about a female friend she was planning to meet in another city. “And so we had to navigate these awkward conversations,” the friend reports. “’How are they?’ ‘Oh, they’re fine.’ ‘I’m going to be seeing them later.’ If I were to point out how utterly bizarre this is [my daughter] would get angry.”
“What it actually satisfies is a need to be something other than Cis,” she interpreted. Cis is bad — cis is asshole males, must to avoid. Plus, she said, “It’s a way of getting attention from peers. Simplistic, yes. A few writers believe it is a kind of contagious hysteria, like anorexia.”
Actual friendo reply: “I still don’t get how an individual person can be a ‘they.’ Doesn’t that, like, break the basic rules of grammar? I mean, I don’t even get what it means.
“I know they mean well and I know this is what people want to hear about and I know it’s meant to be progress, but I just feel exhausted. She/Her/Hers. Does it have to be both Her and Hers? Aren’t they the same thing?”
Variety‘s Clayton Davis has posted an updated list of the Top Ten Likeliest Best Picture Nominees, and I’m telling you right now that at least three of his picks are somewhat questionable. I’m speaking of Emerald Fennell‘s Promising Young Woman, Shaka King‘s Judas and the Black Messiah and Ryan Murphy‘s The Prom.
The safest bets on Clayton’s list are Nomadland, Mank, The Trial of the Chicago 7, Minari and The Father (5). The soft positives are One Night in Miami and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2).
If The Prom lands a Best Picture nomination…well, let’s hold up on that puppy.
It may be that Promising Young Woman will land a Best Picture nomination as a gesture of respect. It has its finger on the pulse, so to speak, and it’s an impressive film for its hardcore asshole-hating sensibility and its refusal to offer even a semblance of a warm, reassuring, semi-fuzzy ending. It’s a mark of integrity to stick to your guns the way Emerald Fennell has. I’d nonetheless be very surprised if a film this didactic and hate-driven turns out to be Best Picture nominated. Respected, yes. Ballsy, yes. But that may be all.
I’ve asked around and it doesn’t appear as if any of the usual in-the-loop handicappers have seen Judas and the Black Messiah. One naturally wonders if Clayton knows someone associated with the film, etc.
Judas and the Black Messiah seems to be basically a riff on John Ford‘s The Informer, minus the alcoholic Gypo Nolan factor. Lakeith Stanfield‘s performance as the FBI snitch William O’Neal, who infamously ratted out Black Panther organizer Fred Hampton, would have to be the central figure, I would imagine.
I’m sorry but Judas and the Black Messiah strikes me as overly “on the nose” for a movie title. Hampton wasn’t a “black messiah” by any definition I’m familiar with. The term generally alludes to perhaps a deliverer of some kind, or some kind of holy figure who might bring a measure of salvation to followers. Hampton was a hardcore Black Panther and a respected organizer who had a certain profile in New Left circles in Chicago. The FBI regarded him as an incendiary figure, but he wasn’t famous. He wasn’t Eldridge Cleaver or Bobby Seale or Stokely Carmichael. He had a certain profile, and of course he was killed (in December 1969) before the famous Radical Chic party thrown by Leonard and Felicia Bernstein, which had invited Don Cox as a guest of honor.
It just seems a bit excessive to call Hampton a messianic figure, and then to identify O’Neal as a “Judas”…yes, he was that but to label him as such in the title seems so sledgehammer. It indicates to me that the film may follow suit. Who knows?
When Sergio Leone titled his famous 1966 spaghetti western The Good, The Bad and The Ugly ,he didn’t specifically allude to the fact that Clint Eastwood was playing “the Good”, Lee Van Cleef “the Bad” and Eli Wallach “the Ugly.” The title allowed you to think that maybe all three characters possessed these characteristics in equal measure. It allowed you to think that it wasn’t necessarily a settled issue.
Everyone who attended Kendall Jenner‘s birthday party last Saturday night (Halloween) had to first be insta-tested and given a clean bill of health before going upstairs. It isn’t cool to throw a big party these days, of course, but if you’re gonna say “fuck it, I don’t care, life is short, let’s do it anyway”, Kendall chose the right methodology.
The party happened at Harriet’s Rooftop atop WeHo’s 1 Hotel.
Roughly 100 coolios attended, including Justin Bieber, The Weeknd, Jaden Smith, Hailey Baldwin, Kanye West, Kim Kardashian West, Scott Disick, Kylie Jenner, Travis Scott, Paris Hilton, Justine Skye, Quavo, Winnie Harlow, Swaeetie and Doja Cat. I trust they had a good time and that the testing was efficient and everyone’s fine, etc . We’re all entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and that includes the above. No one’s better than anyone else.
But I have a question. Imagine for the sake of imagining that Kendall’s guests were on a Los Angeles-to-Seoul flight aboard a privately-charted jumbo jet, and an hour or two past Hawaii the jet was shot down by terrorists and sank into the Pacific. Apart from the loss of life suffered by the crew, how exactly would the world be a lesser place as a result of this tragedy?
Imagine that a gathering of old-time Hollywood hotshots were all on a Pan American Clipper flight from Los Angeles to Honolulu in early 1939…Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, Carole Lombard, Ginger Rogers, Fred Astaire, Joel McCrea, Olivia De Havilland, Joan Fontaine, Don Ameche, Jean Arthur, Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, John Ford, Howard Hawks, Victor Fleming, Alfred Hitchcock, Viven Leigh, Laurence Olivier, Leslie Howard, Ann Sheridan, Ray Milland, Rosalind Russell. And an hour or two west of Los Angeles the plane was shot down by Axis agents and sank into the Pacific. Would the world have been a lesser place?
The reviews are correct, the rumors are true: Michelle Pfeiffer has lucked into the best role of her life in Azazel Jacobs‘ French Exit (Sony Pictures Classics, 2.12.21), a sardonic “comedy” with a gently surreal quality around the edges.
Which means that it’s not all that surreal, or at least not to me. A talking deceased husband (Tracy Letts) inhabiting the body of a cat or cryptically conversing with his widow and son during a seance…whatever. What French Exit is really about is dry gallows humor by way of a certain kind of “I won’t back down” resignation. And within that particular realm it’s very, very good.
If you’re going to make a bitter-end comedy with this kind of attitude or philosophy, you need to own it — no excuses or mitigations, no second thoughts, no third-act softenings. If nothing else French Exit is self-aware and highly confident, and therefore by any fair standard a first-rate effort. Is it “funny”? Well, not actually but it’s good company as far it goes. I was smirking. I was never bored. At the very least I was intrigued.
Exit is about Pfeiffer’s Frances Price, a suddenly destitute, formerly wealthy widow in her mid ’60s who decides to move into a friend’s Paris apartment with her extremely passive son Malcolm (Lucas Hedges) after learning that her once-ample bank account is all but empty. It’s also about how she does absolutely nothing to save herself. In fact she hurries the inevitable along.
But Pfeiffer really goes to town. She delivers every line with just the right shadings of jaded indifference, except it’s not a cold performance. It’s sly and fetching. You could almost say that Frances is a little bit like the Margo Channing role was for Bette Davis in All About Eve (’50) — a snooty bitch with nearly all the great lines. It absolutely represents a Best Actress Oscar nomination, and perhaps even a win. She’s as much of an assured contender as The Father‘s Anthony Hopkins.
The difference is that Davis was full of bite and gusto in Joseph L. Mankiewicz‘s 1950 classic while Pfeiffer is, like, really laid back in Jacobs’ film. So laid back that the only real observation or question about Frances is “okay, she’s having her fun because she really doesn’t give a shit and is comfortable with Parisian finality, so what method will she choose?”
Imagine that all of your money and marketable skills are somehow gone in a flash, and you have around 40K left in the bank. What would the HE community do?
Most of us would probably say, “Okay, I have to find a job or create a new income stream of some kind. The days of monetary comfort and treadmill engagement may be over, but it’s better to live and strive and hope for a better future than to collapse in a heap and give up.”
But a small minority might say, “The good times are over? I’ll have to sweat and struggle and use public transportation in order to survive? Okay, fuck it. Fuck it all. Let’s fly to Paris or Hanoi or Rome, rent a nice pad somewhere, eat well and enjoy the city, and when the money’s gone I’ll off myself with an overdose of heroin or something.”
You could describe the first response as noble or admirable — the classic “when the going gets tough, the tough get their asses in gear” approach that Jane Darwell shared at the end of John Ford‘s The Grapes of Wrath (’40). The second response is basically “if you think I’m gonna stick around while my life gets more and more desperate, you’ve got another think coming.”
Based on a same-titled 2018 novel by Patrick deWitt, French Exit is definitely about the second option. It’s about throwing in the towel, but always with a deliciously baroque attitude, a witty bon mot, a raised eyebrow or a frozen glare of some kind. It may be about extreme detachment but the deadpan nihilism is front and center and loaded for bear.
Chloe Zhao‘s Nomadland is a moody, mesmerizing bulls-eye — a 21st Century Grapes of Wrath minus the simmering anger of Tom Joad and the villainy of random predators. Like John Ford and John Steinbeck‘s 1940 classic, Zhao’s film is pure Americana, set against a backdrop of brusque fate and heartless capitalism, shaded with angst and no shortage of adversity and yet sustained by a certain persistence of spirit, both in front of and behind the camera.
It’s a masterful, painterly portrayal of the American dispossessed, and a fascinating, character-rich study of a roaming vagabond and a constantly evolving community of weathered, mostly retirement-age homeless victims of a cruel economy (it’s set in the wake of the ’09 recession).
I respected Zhao’s previous film, The Rider, which, like Nomadland, is about a sympathetic character who’s stuck in a tough situation with no apparent way out. But I didn’t love it for the rigid scheme and an ending that was mostly about resignation.
Nomadland is on another level. Within five minutes I knew it was a much better, more ambitious film — quietly somber and yet grander in scope, gentler, sadder.
A Best Actress nomination is absolutely locked and loaded for Frances McDormand and her performance as Fern, a sturdy 60something, widowed and close to broke and living out of a van and with no interest in settling. She’s an iron-willed survivor coping with extreme vulnerability; amiable and attentive and yet closed off or at least resistant to emotional attentions on a certain level, self-described as “house-less” as opposed to homeless, moving from job to job, camp to camp, parking lot to parking lot. Inscrutable and yet scrutable.
Nomadland, trust me, is going to be Best Picture nominated. Obviously. Zhao will be Best Director nominated. Joshua James Richard‘s magic-hour cinematography will also lasso a nom. But not, I’m told, Ludovico Einaudi‘s haunting piano score, because it wasn’t composed for the film.
A friend told me that Nomadland, which he felt had shortchanged him due to a lack of some of the usual usuals (carefully-plotted story, second-act pivot, decisive ending), would’ve been better as a half-hour short. I strongly disagree due to the incontestable fact that it grows and deepens and adds more detail with each and every scene. It’s a portrait piece.
By the end you’re left with a full understanding of an industrious but somewhat closed-off woman who doesn’t want to invest in anything but her own discipline, and is curiously resistant to any overtures that verge on the intimate. She can only live in the unstable now, in her own hard but not quite miserable life.
Thank fortune for Fern as well as the audience that Nomadland is full of humanist grace notes…charity, kindness, confessions, helping hands.
Shot in 2.39:1 (which none of the critics so far have even mentioned), it’s all character and atmosphere and mood — “tone poem” is the most favored term thus far. The enhancements are, in this order, (a) McDormand McDormand McDormand, (b) a winning supporting turn by David Straitharn as a kindly, would-be romantic partner, (c) a steady supply of brief turns by real homeless folk, (c) the painterly images…gently dusky and soft and glowing, (d) Zhao’s crisp, urgent editing and especially (e) Einaudi’s score, which pulls you in you right away and captures exactly the right meditative tone.
I’ve always avoided staying at Goulding’s Lodge in Monument Valley — storied history and great location but a bit too pricey for just a bland motel room. But Mexican Hat, where we stayed last night [Tuesday] and where I’ve bunked a couple of times previously, has been decimated by the pandemic. Relatively few visitors, no wifi, the color and vitality all but disappeared. So screw it — we’ve decided to move to Goulding’s later this morning. You only live once.
Deadline‘s Todd McCarthy: “You should go out to John Ford Point and take some snaps. The Gouldings, who homesteaded there in the 1920s, set up the trading post and eventually opened the lodge, drove their jalopy to Hollywood in the late ’30s to try to attract some Hollywood interest in filming there in order to raise some money for the locals. They somehow got in to see [producer] Walter Wanger, who brought Ford in to look at photos the Gouldings had brought along. The rest is history. With the Depression still on, just the short time the Stagecoach crew shot there helped the local economy considerably.
“John Huston had some good stories about having visited there in the early ’30s.
“Of course no one living there now, including the people who run the lodge, knows anything about the Gouldings.
“I went there many times from the mid ’70s through the ’90s, and there were always far more foreign tourists there than Americans — first the French, then Italians and, at one point, Russians. The last time I was there, maybe 10 years ago (the food was terrible!), it was overrun by Japanese. For years there was a religiously affiliated hospital tucked into a little ravine just around the side and back from Gouldings, but for reasons that were never clearly explained to me they were asked to leave some years back, which was unfortunate for health care reasons.
“One indelble memory I have, probably from about 20 years ago, is being on the north side of the Valley in the shadow of one of the big buttes. It’s utterly still and quiet, but then I hear a roar, just a low distant rumbling at first that gradually becomes louder and louder until it feels like something is right on top of me. But I can see nothing. Then suddenly, from over the top of the butte roars a B-52 at probably no higher than 300 feet. Absolutely petrifying. Have no idea what the hell was going on, why it was flying so low or what it was doing around Monument Valley in the first place. Utterly surreal.
I remember being told by my Us editor, Stephen Schaefer, that a decision had been made by Universal publicists and magazine editors alike to concentrate on Henry and Drew and downplay poor Robert. “But he’s so good in the film!,” I replied, feeling a bit sorry for the guy. That may be true, I was told, but he’s too old and not cute enough — the story will be about Henry and Drew.
The piece was called “E.T.’s Tiny Heroes,” and it turned out to be a cover (my first). The issue date was 7.20.82.
Richard Attenborough‘s Gandhi won the 1982 Best Picture Oscar. Because it said something important and politically correct about social issues, human rights and whatnot. E.T. should have won for the simple, undisputed fact that it’s a much better film that Gandhi…much. Yes, some of it feels emotionally heavy-handed, but that’s sentiment for you. It doesn’t age well. Ask John Ford about that.
Why would I want to watch Outpost in Malaya (aka The Planter’s Wife)? Because I mentioned it 12 and 1/2 years ago, sight unseen, after finding a color photo of the old Leows’ State marquee while this 1952 Ken Annakin film was playing there. In the back of my mind I’ve always wanted to at least sample parts of it.
Posted on 12.6.07: “I accept that I’ll probably never see Outpost in Malaya, a Jack Hawkins-Claudette Colbert adventure flick with rubber plants, Communist insurgents, elephants, a cobra and a mongoose. It’s not on DVD, was never issued on VHS and hasn’t even aired on TCM or TNT. But if I hadn’t wandered across this shot of 1952 Times Square, I never would have even heard of this Ken Annakin film. And to think that people lined up to see it, bought popcorn and everything.”
That was then, this is now. A year or two ago a 480p version began streaming on Amazon, and about two weeks ago it appeared for free on YouTube. I watched the very beginning this morning and was shocked to discover it’s in black and white.
All this time I’d presumed it had been shot in glorious color. The exotic backdrop obviously required it. A year earlier John Huston‘s The African Queen had been location-filmed in Technicolor, and in ’52 John Ford‘s Mogambo (which opened on 10.9.53) was captured in Kenya the same way. Alas, the Outpost in Malaya producers (Pinnacle Productions) couldn’t manage the cost. Here’s Bosley Crowther’s 11.27.52 review.
By the way: Malaysia was subject to the British Empire from the 18th Century onward. Peninsular Malaysia was unified as the Malayan Union in 1946. Malaya was restructured as the Federation of Malaya in 1948 and achieved independence on 8.31.57. Malaya united with North Borneo, Sarawak, and Singapore on 16 September 1963 to become Malaysia. In 1965, Singapore was expelled from the federation.”
I’ve decided that the coolest sailing ship owned by a Hollywood hotshot was John Ford‘s USS Araner — 106 feet, 147 tons, a significant presence in Donovan’s Reef, now moored in Honolulu. (Ford bought her in 1934, sold her in ’71.) The second coolest is a tie between James Cagney‘s Swift of Ipswitch (bought in ’40, sold in ’58) and David Crosby‘s Mayan, which he owned for 45 years. The third coolest is Humphrey Bogart‘s 55-foot Santana (’45 to Bogart’s death in ’57).
Yes, I’d have trouble defining the differences between a schooner, yawl, sloop, sailboat, ketch and cutter. But I love the romance of the sea plus the idea of having enough time to sail away on one of these things, under whatever circumstance.
Taken in 1959 from somewhere near B’way and 48th. Otto Preminger‘s Porgy and Bess opened on 6.24.59. Notice that John Ford’s The Horse Soldiers, playing at the Astor, is billboarded in the distance. Ford’s film opened on 6.12.59.
This Is Cinerama opened on 9.30.52. It played for at least a year at the Warner. After one year in four cities (New York, Los Angeles, Detroit, Chicago), pic had grossed $4,305,000, with $2,208,000 in New York alone.
William Wyler’s Detective Story, promoted on two-side Mayfair billboard, opened on 11.6.51. The fact that Audrey Hepburn (whose biggest 1951 credit was a small part in The Lavender Hill Mob) isn’t wearing a cold-weather coat suggests pic was shot right after Wyler’s film opened.