The infamous airborne conflict between an inebriated Brad Pitt and a freaked-out Angelina Jolie, which happened aboard a private Nice-to-Burbank jet on Wednesday, 9.14.16, has once again been recalled, this time by Vanity Fair's Mark Seal ("Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s War of the Rosé"):
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In a 5.25 assessment of the Cannes Film Festival (“At a Particularly Strong Cannes Film Festival, Women’s Desires Pull Focus“), N.Y. Times critic and gender celebrationist Manohla Dargis totally dismisses Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire’s Black Flies, calling it “ridiculous.”
Black Flies, which I approved of in a 5.19 review, is based upon Shannon Burke‘s same-titled 2008 book, an account of his own rough-and-tumble experience as a NY Fire Department paramedic.
So this Tye Sheridan-Sean Penn film is what it is, but in Dargis’s view it isn’t underwhelming or overly generic or bludgeoning. No, it’s worthy of ridicule!
HE to Dargis: Does Martin Scorsese‘s Bringing Out The Dead also qualify in this regard?
In the same article Dargis swoons over Todd Haynes‘ May December, which I found strained, clumsy and, at times, borderline infuriating.
One of May December‘s forehead-slappers is a scene in which Julianne Moore‘s Gracie Atherton, a somewhat neurotic and brittle 60something who runs a dessert-cooking business out of her Savannah home, suffers a near-hysterical meltdown because a wealthy client has cancelled a birthday cake order.
Right away you’re asking yourself “if Gracie shrieks and wails over a cancelled cake order, how would she react if, God forbid, a pet was killed or if something horrible happened to one of her children?”
Concepts of proportion and restraint don’t seem to exist in Haynes’ creative realm.
Then it hit me — a Black Flies reshoot that, once integrated, might persuade Dargis to not call it “ridiculous.”
HE to Dargis: What if the Black Flies producers add Julianne Moore to the film and give her a glorified cameo? Have Sean Penn and Tye Sheridan visit her spacious Cobble Hill apartment, having heard from a concerned neighbor that she’s shrieking and wailing and possibly in major distress. They arrive only to realize that Moore is experiencing an emotional breakdown due to a client having cancelled a birthday cake order. The client has promised to pay for the cake but Moore is nonetheless heartbroken and bawling her eyes out.
Whaddaya think, Manohla? Would this scene, if added, help to rescue Black Flies?
…is next on the dance card. Slated to begin showing at the Salle Debussy at 6 pm, and of course we’re still lined up outside at 6:12 pm. It would be nice if festival staffers would make at least some attempt to screen films at the scheduled time. We’re all on a clock, trying to squeeze in meetings, feedings and as many films as possible, etc.
Not a huge fan of Glazer’s Under The Skin. For me only Sexy Beast, 22 and 1/2 years old, hits it out of the park..
But surely he understands that reactions to the Bud Light and Maybelline promotions demonstrate that he’s triggered fierce emotion in the hinterlands. He can’t dismiss that entirely. DM is living on an isolated island, and residents of the territory surrounding that island have spoken. They can’t all be idiots.
Mulvaney is obviously free to promote whatever as long as corporate America sees an upside. More power, no skin off my backside, etc.
My understanding is that DM is biologically male and hasn’t resorted to surgical alteration…right? I further understand that Dylan regards anyone who may allude to his biological origins and/or ignores his preferred pronouns as a bad or even criminal person. But he has to understand, surely, that pretending to be a woman is different than having actually been born as a biological woman or, failing that, having been surgically altered into womanhood.
This message from Dylan Mulvaney…I cannot even imagine being in her shoes. She's received a level of venom that is beyond belief. But she shows so much more grace in this 3.5 minutes than all of her detractors combined. pic.twitter.com/UiajP0AR29
— Natalie (she/her) 🏳️⚧️ (@natgrace79) April 28, 2023
Dylan Mulvaney wants to make it illegal to call him a man. Yes, he’s serious. pic.twitter.com/Su2wEgdBMU
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) April 28, 2023
HE to wokester prigs: 42 and 1/2 years ago I was hitting hip parties and bars in London and hanging with some Time Out pallies and listening frequently to Bow Wow Wow, who were fresh and explosive and kicking it in early December of '80.
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Having arrived in the mid to late ’90s and therefore born with the internet in their blood and visually locked into screens, Zoomers are regarded with suspicion by GenX and certainly by boomers, and in some cases loathed.
They’re presumed to be short-attention-spanners who are not that good with face-to-face interactions (i.e., office environments). Self-centered, snooty or derisive with elders and reluctant (and in some cases unwilling) to negotiate or compromise.
Not to mention obstinate, living in their own digital realm, great at multi-tasking, quick to condemn and even boycott (i.e., cancel) those whom they regard as not up to speed in terms of progressive social issues.
They’re regarded as whiners, political hard-heads and job-hoppers…basically a pain in the ass.
If a couple of GenZ pilots were to magically time-travel to Barranca, the port-of-call in Only Angels Have Wings, they almost certainly wouldn’t last five minutes. Geoff Carter (Cary Grant) would see right through their entitled attitudes and dismiss their worthless asses before their first flight. He wouldn’t even let them drink at the bar. Plus they wouldn’t understand the emotional meaning of Thomas Mitchell‘s two-headed coin.
Okay, not "heartbroken" but kinda sorry. FOMO'ed. I never really thought there was anything especially irksome or substandard about the 2015 Bluray version, but I love the idea of watching a richer, more vibrant version inside the big Chinese and basking in the whole Hollywood lore of it all (Steven Spielberg, Paul Thomas Anderson, Angie Dickinson).
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It took me a couple of attempts to get through John Scheinfeld‘s What The Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat and Tears?, but I finally did. My basic impression is that it’s an odd tale — a curio — about a strange detour that BS&T, a hugely popular jazz-rock fusion group, took in ’70 when they went on a State Department tour of three Soviet bloc countries in Eastern Europe (one being Romania). The tour was frowned upon by rock culture cognoscenti, and seemed to underline a general impression that BS&T was an MOR group favored by squares.
They also played a big gig at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, which was even more unhip than performing to Eastern Europe. And they appeared on The Andy Williams Show…Jesus. And then came that hokey track from their third album, “Lucretia McEvil“…later.
There’s nothing “wrong” with being MOR or appealing to people with vaguely schmaltzy taste in music and…you know, it takes all sorts to make a world and all that.
And I’m not saying that Scheinfeld hasn’t assembled a reasonably absorbing, pro-level film with flavor and feeling — he has. But unlike my all-time favorite Scheinfeld doc, Who Is Harry Nilsson (And Why Is Everybody Talkin’ About Him?, it doesn’t have a lot of emotional resonance. You come out of it and it’s like “okay, not bad…diverting as far as it went.”
But then I read Owen Gleiberman’s 3.27 Variety review, and a paragraph about David Clayton-Thomas, BST’s lead singer from mid’68 onward (not counting an attempted solo-career detour)…this paragraph just hit the spot, man. I don’t mean to sound flip or cruel, but it almost gave me more pleasure than Scheinfeld’s doc, to be perfectly honest….not that there’s anything especially lacking or derelict about the film. It just didn’t get me high.
“The rock-‘n’-roll-ecstasy-meets-relax-the-’70s-are-here duality of Blood, Sweat & Tears was incarnated by the contradictory charisma of David Clayton-Thomas,” Gleiberman writes. “He favored skin-tight shirts with tie-dye stripes and leather pants, but he was no hippie. With his longish receding hair and sultry eyebrows and trucker’s build, he was like Joe Don Baker reborn as Elvis’s surly, sleazy bruiser brother, and he sang in an insinuating Mack-truck blues growl, like a wilder Tom Jones with a hint of Jim Jones. He was mesmerizing.”
We all know what it means to be a “surly, sleazy bruiser type” — it means that underneath the facade you’re a sniffing, panting, four-legged dog on the prowl for poontang. It means that you’re into compulsive muff-diving and getting blown in hotel rooms at 3 am and whatnot. A guy who summons notions of being the ornery bad brother of Elvis suggests a gauche, hormonally-unbridled truck driver with low-rent appetites.
Does anyone remember that photo of Jim Jones‘ corpse after he shot himself, sprawled on the ground of that big tent with that big pot belly poking out? Charismatic cult leaders always had the pick of the litter, or so the cliche goes, and we’ve all read stories about Jones being a brooding sexual conquistador and all that, and then you throw in an early ’70s image of Joe Don Baker, still best known for playing the baseball-bat wielding Buford Pusser…throw it all together and it seems as if the doc should have focused on DCT rather than BS&T…whaddaya think?
I’m not saying that Gleiberman’s description reflects who DCT actually is, mind. In recent interviews the 81 year-old seems like a mellow, moderate, likable guy. I am saying, however, that good writing flips a switch.
All my adult life I've been in love with Joni Mitchell's "Free Man in Paris." But what I've especially loved all those years has been based on a misunderstanding, and right now I feel sick about this.
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Father Gabriele Amorth, the fact-based character played by Russell Crowe in The Pope's Exorcist, was a co-founder, along with five other like-minded priests, of the International Association of Exorcists. Amorth, who passed in 2016 at age 91, claimed to have performed "tens of thousands" of exorcisms over the decades.
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I was tapping out some thoughts about Rupert Murdoch’s sworn admission during testimony over the Dominion lawsuit trial against Fox News. And then I happened upon Rick Wilson’s 2.27 thoughts about same. He fails to note that Maoist woke terror on the left is…okay, not quite as bad as blind Trump denialism about the 2020 election having been rigged, but….okay, let’s not get into that now.
Wilson: “So the Dominion lawsuit depositions from Rupert Murdoch and Fox News are lighting up the internet tonight, and there’s a true frenzy over the revelations that the entire network, even the performative nightside trio of terror.
“They knew Trump lost. They knew there was not then (nor is there now) a scintilla of fraud. They knew, and lied. Over, and over, and over. They chose guests they knew were lying. They allowed story meetings promoting a massive, dangerous lie that reduced faith and belief in the American system. The entire top level of Fox management knew their lies were leading to danger for this nation.
“Just as the GOP once ruled the base and now the base rules the GOP, a slavering, inchoate rage beast demanding more and more…so to is Fox owned by its base. Rupert and Roger’s machine ran off the rails, and they fear their audience will follow the conspiracy crack at OAN or Newsmax or some damn Telegram channel.
“They knew the lies were lies. They fed and fed the beast. The Fox audience is, let’s be honest, unsophisticated.” [HE insert: Undereducated and incurious.] “They’re addicted to ‘hot women with great hair, big tits and degrees from cheap J-schools’ (as Roger Ailes used to say) and ragey bros telling them that their hatred of immigrants, blacks, gays, readin’ and ideas is logical.
·
“The question the Fox audience should but won’t ask is, ‘What else is behind the curtain? What else is a lie? What else do they say about us off-camera?’
“Here’s your answer: it’s [mostly] all a lie. The entire thing is a big, dumb, loud performance piece.
·
“They’re lying about Ukraine. About Biden (at scale). About all the catalog of imaginary culture war demons. (TONIGHT ON TUCKER: ‘Will Transtifa Terrorist Drag Queens FORCE your kids into Gay Sharia Marriage Veganism?’)
“This is Rupert and Roger’s model at its end state…a seething, metastasizing cancer consuming the minds of millions of Americans convinced by the cynical playhouse of a network of liars, arsonists, and enablers.
“Dominion called their b.s. Fox will lose. They’ll settle and offer a fat check and an elliptical apology.
“If their viewers had the slightest curiosity they’d start asking what Fox is lying about to them now…and tomorrow…and the next day. Because one thing is certain. The lies will continue.”
“We’re supposed to hate Jaws now?” He was responding to “Did These Chinatown Viewers Understand?” And I replied by summarizing Peter Biskind’s “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls” as follows:
The huge primal successes of Jaws (6.20.75) and Star Wars (5.20.77) slowly bland-ified the moody, anti-establishment ‘70s thing that had permeated Hollywood…the New Experimental Anti-Conventional Hollywood Party Era that began with Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate and The President’s Analyst (all released in ‘67).
Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, the directing maestros behind Jaws and Star Wars, pretty much killed the cool kidz party by injecting (a) a win-really-big greed jackpot virus into the Hollywood bloodstream and (b) a strain of thematic infantilization into movies in general.
These guys didn’t didn’t suck the creative oxygen out of the room deliberately or maliciously, but the massive success of their historic blockbusters gradually introduced the idea of “high concept” and suppressed the commercial intrigue factor among industry folk and audiences alike for adult movies like Night Moves, The Conversation, The Outfit, The French Connection, Z, Easy Rider, Mean Streets, Rosemary’s Baby, Raging Bull, Scarecrow, Get Carter, The Day of the Jackal, Dog Day Afternoon, Godfather I & II, That’ll Be The Day, Stardust, Sunday Bloody Sunday, Chinatown, The Hospital, Network, Prince of the City, The Ruling Class, Quadrophenia, The Last American Hero, Performance, Don’t Look Now, etc.
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