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Persistence of 42 Year Old "Betrayal"
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Sentthismorning: “Scott — I read your Cannes ‘25projectionpiece yesterday, and have two questions
“(1) You wrote that Wes Anderson’s ThePhoenicianScheme is “said to be Anderson’s strongest work since TheGrandBudapestHotel”. Good to hear! And yet it’s commonly understood that Anderson films are always primarily about the visual style and signature that I call “WesWorld.” Which basically means dry, ironic scenarios about aloof characters with a minimum of emotionalism.
“TheGrandBudapestHotel connected because it conveyed an emotional lament about declining old-world Europe and the falling away of tradition. What, pray tell, is ThePheonicianScheme actually about thematically? A rich guy’s (Benicio del Toro) regret about not being a better dad to his daughter?
“(2) You described Lynne Ramsay’s We Need toTalkAboutKevin (2011) as ‘egregiously’ snubbed or overlooked in terms of award-season accolades. Well, in my view it was righteously snubbed. That movie was beautifully shot but FUCKING RANCID inside. I called Ezra Miller’s titular performance and in fact the entire film ‘emotionalratpoison.’
”It’s good to hear that J–Law has scored with a strong performance in Ramsay’s Die, MyLove, but how can I trust your aesthetic if we’re so far apart on Kevin?”
To go by the below trailer, the just-released 4K Dirty Harry Bluray is infected with orange-teal disease…the same virus that has all but ruined several Criterion Blurays.
When’s the last time you’ve noticed that red paint on a city curb (absolutely no parking) had a red-orange hue? When’s the last time that the top of a fire hydrant was painted glaring teal-turquoise? Or a pickup truck, for that matter? Look at that big truck with the intense light-blue cab and a red-orange front bumper…this is bullshit.
Another trait of this malignant color scheme is pinkish flesh tones.
These icky colors and tints are all over the new Dirty Harry. I’ll take the old 1971 colors, thanks. Fire-engine red curbs, I mean.
Obviously orange-teal fascism is spreading like cancer. It really has to be stopped. Some eccentrics actually seem to prefer orange-teal. They’re zombies. They’re not human.
Surprise below! The orange-red curb from before has reverted back to a more reddish color…what gives?
Natural flesh tones on Clint’s face in this somewhat older image (from ’22 — below) are not all that prominent on the Dirty Harry 4K.
But the trailer alone tells me that Halyna Hutchins‘ cinematography is of a fairly high order — arthousey, Days of Heaven-ish, beautifully lighted. The portions of Rust that were shot after Halyna’s tragic death were handled by dp Bianca Cline.
For decades I’ve harbored fond memories of The President’s Analyst (’67), a half-annoying, half-hippieish, half-psychedelic social satire that starred the smooth James Coburn and a comfortably laid-back Godfrey Cambridge.
So when I gave Analyst a re-watch the other night, I was surprised to discover that much of it (roughly 60%) isn’t especially good…unfunny, broadly played, overly brittle, vaguely irritating, shallow in a Man From U.N.C.L.E.-ish or Our Man Flint-y way. I was soon looking at my watch and figuring “okay, not as good as I remembered.”
But then it does a switch-up and becomes a whole different film…it goes all hippie-dippie-ish and rock-and-rolly and free love-celebrating, and is generally invested in a kind of “spread the joy and transcendence of LSD” attitude. And then it dives into a surreal but amusing plotline about the malevolence of TPC (The Phone Company) and the robots behind this malignant entity. It ends with Coburn and Cambridge shooting it out with TPC droids….hilarious!
Rarely has a mezzo-mezzo mainstream film (green-lighted by Paramount’s Robert Evans) completely uncorked itself and gone all loopy-doopey like The President’s Analyst did. I ended up up chuckling and mostly loving it. The last 40%, I mean.
The big switch happens right around the one-hour mark. It starts when Coburn’s Dr. Sidney Schaefer, running from would-be assassins of an international cast, ducks into the legendary Cafe Wha? on McDougal Street and hooks up with a rock band led by “Eve of Destruction“‘s Barry McGuire (89 and still with us!). Schaefer quickly becomes a splendor-in-the-grass lover of the attractive, hippie-chicky Snow White (Jill Banner).
From the moment that McGuire and Banner slip into the narrative and invite Coburn to join them on their magic travels, The President’s Analyst becomes a mid ’60s “turn on, tune in and drop out” mood piece…a capturing of what a lot of people were feeling and delving into and experimenting with in ’66 and ’67.
In this sense Analyst is almost as much of a mid ’60s cultural capturing as John Boorman‘s Catch Us If You Can (’65) and Michelangelo Antonioni‘s Blow-Up (’66).
And yet that first hour…whoa. And the one-sheet slogans were hideous.
Poor, pixie-sized Banner was Marlon Brando‘s off-and-on girlfriend from roughly ’68 until her car-crash death in 1982, when she was only 35. She got slammed by a truck on the Ventura Freeway.
The career of Ted Flicker, director-writer of The President’s Analyst, went flat after someone slipped the Analyst script to J. Edgar Hoover‘s FBI, thereby tipping them off to the fact that Analyst would sharply satirize the bureau as well as the CIA. This led to Flicker and Evans being surveilled and harassed. The industry quickly got scared and dropped Flicker like a bad habit for a while. He later co-created Barney Miller. David Ewing‘s Ted Flicker: A Life in Three Acts screened in 2007 at the Santa Fe Film Festival. Flicker passed in 2014 at age 84.
Speaking as a mild-mannered, fair-minded, shoulder-shrugging film devotee, my feelings about this frightening TikTok video by “letsgofrightseeing” are roughly the same as the feelings held by many by elderly Cambodians about the terrorist regime of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.
I’m serious — this woman is rhetorically, behaviorally and substantially no different than Pol Pot.
There are very few things that are lower on the cultural cinematic scale than hardcore horror fans (movies, fiction). Not elevated horror but the grindhouse / slaughterhouse mulchy kind. I’m not saying fans of this ghoulash are the equivalent of swamp slime, but they’re in that general ballpark. They’re here and “alive” in a general sense, but their souls are corroded. They’re like zombies in a way.
1992 was my very first year at the Cannes Film Festival (I was there for Entertainment Weekly and Barbara O’Dair), and that was the year, of course, of Reservoir Dogs, which I saw there, of course, and fell insantly in love with,.
It pained me that I couldn’t get into the press conference (it might have had something to do with people with regular pink passes being told to wait until all the pink-with-yellow-pastille badge and lordly white-badge journos had been let in first). But I did manage to attend a Reservoir Dogs meet-and-greet soiree at the Majestic, which was cool.
For mostly sentimental reasons, I can’t stop telling myself that the 1992 Cannes Film Festival (5.7 to 5.18) was my absolute personal best. Because it was my first time there and therefore it felt fresh and exotic and intimidating as fuck. I had to think on my feet and figure it out as I went along, and despite being told that I would never figure out all the angles, somehow I did. ‘
It also felt great to be there on behalf of Entertainment Weekly and do pretty well in that capacity. Plus it was the first and only Cannes that I brought a tuxedo to. I’d been told it was an absolute social necessity.
Here are some of the reasons why I’ve always thought ’92 was the shit.
The first time you visit any major city or participate in any big-time event things always seem special and extra-dimensional…bracing, fascinating, open your eyes…everything you see, taste, smell and hear is stamped onto your brain matter…aromas, sights, protocols, expectations, surprises.
Nearly every night I enjoyed some late-night drinking and fraternizing at Le Petit Carlton, a popular street bar. (Or was it Le Petit Majestic?) If you can do the job and get moderately tipsy and schmoozy every night, so much the better. (Or so I thought at the time.) A year earlier I read a quote from P.J. O’Rourke — “Life would be unbearable without alcohol”. I remember chuckling and saying to myself, “Yeah, that’s how I feel also.” Jack Daniels and ginger ale mood-elevators were fun! Loved it!
But not altogether. Four years later I stopped drinking hard stuff; 20 years later (3.20.12) I embraced total sobriety.
Talk about your powerhouse second-bananas! In one 1957 western just about every formidable mid ‘50s character actor appeared — Lyle Bettger, Frank Faylen (Dobie Gillis), Earl Holliman (“Where is Everybody?”), Dennis Hopper (Giant) Whit Bissell (foot and mouth disease guy in Hud), Martin Milner (Route66), Kenneth Tobey (TheThing), Lee van Cleef (HighNoon), Jack Elam…who didn’t they hire?
Kino Lorber’s reportedly excellent 4K Bluray version has been available since late February, but there was still an expectation that the TCM screening would deliver a visual “bump”.
Why? Because the venerable man in the booth, Boston Light and Sound’s Chapin Cutler, was showing an extremely rare horizontal 8-perf VistaVision print. The vast majority of 1957 audiences saw Sturges’ film in 35mm.
Did the VistaVision Gunfight deliver, in fact, a bump over the Kino 4K? Maybe…who knows? No one who attended has offered a comparison, but I would be surprised if the VistaVision presentation offered anything double- or triple-wowser or even significantly “better” (sharper, grander, more impactful) than what the Kino 4K delivers on my 65-inch Sony 4K. (So far I’ve only seen an HD streaming version.)
And yet it was projected on that big Chinese screen under optimum conditions (Cutler is the best projectionist on the planet earth right now), and the film-nerd gang was all there. I’m sorry I wasn’t able to attend. I’m sure everyone enjoyed this approvable-if-less-than-classic western.
I’ve been trying to find images from Mad magazine’s “OK Gunfight at the Corral.” I distinctly recall a Purple Rose of Cairo image of Kirk Douglas‘s boozy Doc Holliday, and a caption that read “Doc, drunk as a skunk, shoots an usher in the movie theatre balcony” or words to that effect.
I despise low-thread-count T-shirts as a rule, but I’ve got to buy one of those shamrock green VistaVision fuckers.
Rahm Emanuel fully and completely understands what’s wrong with today’s Democrats, and why they’re likely to remain a minority party until they wake up and shake that shit off.
Early this afternoon I referred to Marvel’s latest (opening on Friday, 5.2) as Thunderballs. I guess I was thinking of Sean Connery‘s Thunderball plus Mel Brooks‘ Spaceballs. In all sincerity, Thunderballs is a better title — catchier, more amusing — than Thunderbolts….really.
