Lohan’s Bankhead-Like Reputation

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Acting-wise, Lindsay Lohan hit a triple at age 12 with The Parent Trap (’98), and then slammed two homers with her performances in Mean Girls (’04) and especially A Prairie Home Companion (’06). She’s made other films, of course, and has recorded some music and certainly made headlines, but let’s be honest — nowadays she’s primarily known as a stalled Rehab Queen (although she’s only 35) and a person who was happening a little less than a decade ago but no longer.

I’m not saying Lohan is a permanent trainwreck whose personal weaknesses and lack of discipline have overwhelmed her career, mind, but that’s the image that has sunk in…be honest, Trey Taylor! Does Lohan need to “be” her image for the rest of her life? Of course not. She could begin to turn things around today, if she wanted to give it a shot.

The bottom line is that since ’05 or thereabouts Lohan has been more or less vying for the title of the 21st Century’s Tallulah Bankhead, which is actually a half-flattering description as Bankhead had a great decades-long theatre career (The Little Foxes, The Skin of Our Teeth, Clash By Night) and gave an award-worthy performance in one great film (Alfred Hitchcock‘s Lifeboat). When it came to nervy, challenging interviewers (the David Lettermans of the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s) Bankhead would typically agree with every tawdry tabloid anecdote and own her reputation — she gave as good as she got.

But since the recent release of Hulu’s Framing Britney Spears (“I am deeply sorry“), Twitter has been revisiting other instances of brash insensitivity in terms of stars being raked over the coals for their perceived personal problems or for indelicate behavior in general.

Movie Poster Violation

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The appearance of actors in a movie poster should never, ever argue with how they look in the film itself. Violation #1: Julie Christie‘s wig in Shampoo is straight, thick and frosty blonde — her natural poster hair is blonde-brownish and curly. Violation #2: In the film Goldie Hawn‘s blonde hair is worn with bangs — in the poster it’s oddly parted in a slightly off-center fashion. Violation #3: In the poster Warren Beatty‘s hair is noticably shorter than it is in the film.

White Oscar-Race Narcissism

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This morning I took part in a discussion about a 2.12 Wall Street Journal article titled “How Equality Lost to ‘Equity.’” The subhead reads “Civil-rights advocates abandon the old ideal for the new term, which ‘has no meaning‘ and promises no progress but makes it easy to impute bigotry, says Shelby Steele.”

Steele quote: “[The current meaning of the term] equity has no meaning, but it’s one that gives blacks power and leverage in American life. We can throw it around at any time, and wherever it lands, it carries this stigma that’ somebody’s a bigot.’ Its message is that there’s inequality that needs to be addressed, to be paid off. So if you hear me using the word ‘equity,’ I’m shaking you down.”

Here are some passages from the discussion that touched upon the Oscar race, and upon John McWhorter‘s “The Elect“:

Friendo #1: “The key concept is that ‘equity’ prioritizes equality of outcome over equality of opportunity.

“That’s where Martin Luther King Jr. would have reared up in protest against it. And where any sensible moral person today — e.g. the tiny fraction of those of us in media who actually resist woke mobthink — would stand up against it. Equality of opportunity should be the goal. Not outcome — that’s the social-cultural analogue of giving every kid a trophy.

“Applied to the Oscars, it’s especially ludicrous. Sure, you can have an Oscar slate where half the people are POCs, making up for past sins, etc., and we can all sing ‘Kumbaya’ and pat ourselves on the back when half the winners are black. But if that’s what you do, it’s such a contrivance, and you’re so cheapening what the awards are, that you’ve made it all mean next to nothing. ‘Look, Chadwick Boseman, Viola Davis and Delroy Lindo all won awards at the African-American Oscars! Hurray!! We woke white people really are something, aren’t we?!’

Friendo #2: ” The new enlightened white person religion [is about] atoning for past sins. I have a very privileged friend who lives in Ojai…married, rich, never had to work a day in her life. She’s now on a mission to explain white supremacy to all of her friends who ‘don’t get it.’ What does that do — it redeems and excuses her from accusations. I can’t wait until it all comes crashing down.”

Friendo #1: “If only it were driven by white guilt! The white liberals who Tom Wolfe mocked definitively half a century ago in ‘Radical Chic’ — Leonard Bernstein throwing his posh party for the Black Panthers, etc. — were driven, to a degree, by white guilt.

“The woke mob today is driven by white narcissism. By white vanity. Guilt would be too good for them. They’re adopted virtue-signaling as a lifestyle and as a cult. And as John McWhorter has brilliantly explained, these vanity rituals are so dependent upon reducing black people to a stupid masochistic permanent-victim status that, in fact, there’s no difference at all between white woke-ism and white supremacy.

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If Woody Had Any Cojones…

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Woody Allen needs to stop piddling around with relationship trifles like Rifkin’s Festival and make a movie that metaphorically grapples with the one great tragedy of his life — an alleged episode that happened nearly 30 years ago and is still hovering.

He needs to write a Crimes and Misdemeanors-level drama that might resemble David Mamet‘s Oleanna or Roman Polanski‘s J’Accuse, or might not resemble either of these. But he has to come to grips with the wokester mob in dramatic terms.

Make it a murder thing perhaps — a possibly innocent middle-aged guy appears to be guilty of murdering an ex-wife or ex-girlfriend. Or maybe an ex-business partner. Circumstantial evidence accumulates and he’s eventually charged and prosecuted. Maybe he goes to jail or maybe he gets off. Or maybe we learn at the last moment that he’s guilty. Something along those lines.

Allen has addressed the Farrow fiction in his autobiography, but it needs to be used for dramatic fodder.

57 Senators Voted To Condemn

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But a two-thirds majority (67 votes) was needed to convict the sociopathic Mar a Lago Beast. And so once again, due to the spineless, soul-less cowardice of red-state Republicans (even those who are planning to retire or aren’t facing re-election for another four to six years), Trump skates. The vote was 57 to 43 to convict.

Trump statement: “It is a sad commentary on our times that one political party in America is given a free pass to denigrate the rule of law, defame law enforcement, cheer mobs, excuse rioters, and transform justice into a tool of political vengeance, and persecute, blacklist, cancel and suppress all people and viewpoints with whom or which they disagree.”

Republican North Carolina Senator Richard Burr voted to convict — a surprise.

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21st Century Fizz Whizz

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The banner headline on the March issue of Empire, which has been on sale for three weeks, teases “The Greatest Cinema Moments Ever.” Which, of course, is bullshit. The actual content (37 pages) could be more accurately described as “Edgar Wright‘s Favorite Mindlowing Holy-Shit Movie Moments Over The Last 20 Years.”

The epic journey of cinema from the dawn of the sound era to New Year’s Eve 1999 is pretty much ignored. But that’s the Empire readership for you — the ’90s are the good old days, memories of the ’80s are fading fast and anything before the Ronald Reagan era is Paleozoic. That’s Wright for you also — a 46 year-old director who knows all about the 20th Century landscape (and all the joy, pain, anxiety, struggle and exhilaration of that convulsive century) but who thinks about movies only in terms of (a) bang-boom-pow-CG-fizz-whizz for movie nerds and more specifically (b) “Jesus, that was so fucking iconic!” and (c) “My God, that was one fucking kewl adrenaline rush!”

The cover faces are said to include Steven Spielberg, Tessa Thompson, Patty Jenkins, Jordan Peele, Taika Waititi, Paul Rudd, Guillermo del Toro, Chris Evans, Simon Pegg, Daniel Kaluuya, M. Night Shyamalan, Kumail Nanjiani, George Miller, Greta Gerwig, Kevin Feige (pronounced FAY–gee), Christopher McQuarrie, Joe Russo, J.J. Abrams, Bong Joon-ho, David Yates, Daisy (“Cary who?”) Ridley, Joe Cornish, Anya Taylor-Joy, James Gunn, Bill Hader, Alfonso Cuarón, Walter Hill, Rian Johnson, Spike Lee, James Cameron, Lily James, Robert Zemeckis, Ang Lee, Jon Hamm, Daniel Craig, Jon Favreau, Sam Mendes and Mark Hamill. But maybe not.

HE takes exception to the notion that Spike Lee, a serious scholastic movie buff, would watch a film within a packed house (remember packed houses?) while eating a greasy pepperoni pizza. Forget the Do The Right Thing reference — is there anything more rancid than stinking up the joint with the steamy smell of heated pepperoni while chewing and slurping and smacking his lips? I’m not kidding — only animals eat pizza during a film.

Sidesteppers

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If you want to hear four film journalists — TheWrap editor Sharon Waxman, Independent film critic Clarisse Loughrey. Wrap assistant managing editor Daniel Goldblatt and Wrap reporter Brian Welk — totally tiptoe around the National Society of Film Critics having called on Variety to remove an apology it added to a review of Promising Young Woman and afford critic Dennis Harvey a bit more respect…if you want to hear four people dodge this issue like their lives depend on it and say almost nothing of substance, please click on the embedded link (“Summer of Soul Director Questlove”) and go to the 28:20 mark.

Waxman doesn’t tiptoe as much as the other three, but they mostly seem to feel that Harvey misunderstood the film and expressed himself inelegantly — that, to them, is the main issue. Otherwise they have zip to say about Variety undercutting Harvey and totally groveling before Mulligan and Focus Features, etc.

Clarisse Loughrey: “[I was] a little dismayed as a woman…I do think that we have to give room to women’s concerns about [Harvey’s] review….I did take issue with [it] although not in the sense that something should be done about this.”

Will you listen to her? Loughrey almost believes that Variety‘s 11-months-later apology was the right thing to do, and that Harvey was guilty of an actual mistake in perception. This is exactly what the NSFC didn’t say, of course, but nobody points this out to her.

I’ve said repeatedly that I don’t agree with what Harvey seemed to be saying in the review, and that relative hotness standards have nothing to do with sexually predatory behavior by young males, and that Mulligan’s dry, stylized performance was chilly but compelling.

Mulligan didn’t ask for an apology. Variety offered one willy-nilly after she mentioned her displeasure with a certain paragraph in mid-December ’20 to N.Y. Times award-season columnist Kyle Buchanan. If Variety editors had an issue with that paragraph they should have addressed it with a counter-review or an editorial after it first appeared in January ’20. But they didn’t say or do anything for a full 11 months.

30 Best Films of the ’80s

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Cinematically speaking the ’80s was a big comedown decade — a time of relative shallowness, the end of the glorious ’70s, the flourishing of tits-and-zits sex comedies, the unfortunate advent of high-concept movies, a general climate of cheap highs + terrible fashion choices (shoulder pads, big hair), flash without substance plus Andrew Sarris writing that “the bottom has fallen out of badness in movies,” etc.

As we speak World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy is polling the usual suspects for their top ’80s picks, but I’m going to take a mad stab and pick some faves off the top of my head.

What makes a great ’80s film? Not just a relatable, well-crafted story but one that delivers (a) irony, (b) tangy or penetrating flavor, (c) the combination of intriguing characters and perfect acting, and (d) a compelling social echo factor…a mode of delivery that only portrays but sees right through to the essence of what was going on during this comparatively shallow, opportunistic, Reagan-ized period in U.S. history.

And so Hollywood Elsewhere’s choice for the Best (i.e., most arresting and perceptive) Film of the ’80s is — I’m perfectly serious — Paul Brickman‘s Risky Business. Because it’s (a) perfectly (and I mean exquisitely) made, and (b) because the ’80s was when everyone in the culture finally decided that the United States of America was a huge fucking sales opportunity and whorehouse, and that it was all about making money any way that could happen and fuck the consequences, and this movie, focused on a naive but entitled young lad fom Chicago’s North Shore and his smug, droll friends, nails that mindset perfectly. And — this is the master-stroke aspect — Brickman presents these kids as cool, laid-back and ironically self aware.

Here are the rest of my top ’80s picks, in no particular order and with the criteria being not just craft and charm but social resonsance: 2. Adrien Lyne‘s Fatal Attraction; 3 and 4. Peter Weir‘s Witness and Dead Poet’s Society; 5, 6 and 7. Woody Allen‘s Crimes and Misdemeanors, Hannah and Her sisters and The Purple Rose of Cairo; 8. Alan Pakula‘s Sophie’s Choice; 9 and 10. Sidney Lumet‘s Prince of the City and The Verdict; 11. David Lynch‘s Blue Velvet; 12. Oliver Stone‘s Platoon; 13. Spike Lee‘s Do The Right Thing; 14. Francois Truffaut‘s The Woman Next Door; 15 and 16. Stanley Kubrick‘s The Shining and Full Metal Jacket; 17 and 18. Brian DePalma‘s Scarface and The Untouchables; 19. Michael Mann‘s Thief; 20. Ridley Scott‘s Blade Runner; 21. Alain Resnais‘ Mon Oncle d’Amérique; 22. Albert Brooks‘ Lost in America; 24. Alex Cox‘s Repo Man; 25. John McTiernan‘s Die Hard; 26. Martin Scorsese‘s The Last Temptation of Christ; 27. James Cameron‘s Aliens; 28. George Miller‘s The Road Warrior; 29. Steven Spielberg‘s E.T., the Extra Terrestrial; 30. John Carpenter‘s They Live.

Oh, wait, I forgot Lawrence Kasdan‘s Body Heat and The Big Chill…make it 32.

I’ve also forgotten The Hidden, Drugstore Cowboy, Raging Bull and Local Hero… make it 36.

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Remember “Minari”?

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Lee Isaac Chung‘s Minari premiered during the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. The well-reviewed film has since collected many award nominations, and is finally opening today (2.12). I reviewed it on 10.30.20 — here are portions of what I wrote:

A hard-knocks family drama about a South Korean family trying to succeed at subsistence farming in 1980s Arkansas, Minari qualifies as a “modest” Spirit Awards thing. And yet something about Steven Yeun’s complex character (i.e., Jacob) and performance really got to me.

I’m speaking of a proud, obstinate man determined to make a stand and not be pushed around by bad luck. In moments of stress and self-doubt he’s clearly weighing two ways of responding to the situation. He may have chosen the wrong path, but he’s determined to stick to it regardless. That makes him a possibly tragic figure and definitely an interesting one.

I’m not sure if Yeun’s touching performance will yield a Best Actor nomination, but it could. Or should I say “should”?

A while ago Variety‘s Clayton Davis was all excited about the possibility of Yeun possibly becoming the first Asian actor to be Oscar nominated for a lead role. That’s the wrong emphasis. Yeun has given a very strong and sad performance in a pretty good film, and he might snag a Best Actor nom for his trouble. But his South Korean heritage should be anecdotal, not a cornerstone of his campaign. Wokesters see it differently, of course.

I loved the grandmother (Youn Yuh-Jung) and the two kids (Alan Kim, Noel Kate Cho). Especially the little boy.

And Paul (Will Patton), a flaky but good-hearted Jesus freak whom the somewhat insensitive Yeun doesn’t sufficiently respect. I dislike Christians for their evangelical leanings and support of Donald Trump, but if I was acquainted with one and he/she offered to pray for me, I would respond with respect and gratitude. Because such a gesture would mean a lot to them.

Jacob’s wife Monica (Han Ye-ri) is a good person but not exactly a portrait of steadfast marital support. She has this shitty, dismissive “I don’t like this” attitude from the get-go. They’re in a bad marriage.

I didn’t get the water situation. Jacob has bought (or rented?) a place with no water supply or sewage system? Isn’t is super-expensive to install your own sewage system and septic tank? Jacob presumably buys his own water heater, but in one scene he doesn’t have $500 to pay a professional well digger? Jacob has drilled his own well with Patton’s assistance, but the water supply is limited — not enough to nourish the crop and also provide shower water, kitchen water and whatnot.

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Deadly Venora Factor

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A couple of nights ago I re-watched Michael Mann‘s The Insider (’99) for maybe the sixth or seventh time. Oddly enough I noticed a couple of things for the very first time.

One is that the movie stops dead in its tracks whenever Diane Venora, portraying the brittle, fragile wife of Russell Crowe‘s Jeffrey Wigand, has any dialogue. “Liane Wigand” expresses the same damn thing in scene after scene — “I’m scared, I’m upset, this is intimidating, what about the children?, I feel threatened” — over and over and over, and after a while her vibe becomes really and truly deadly.

The second thing I noticed is that this 158-minute film doesn’t really kick into gear until the 90-minute mark, which is when Wigand testifies against Big Tobacco at a hearing held by the state of Mississippi. Before the 90-minute mark it’s an in-and-outer — always interesting and well-crafted but less than riveting from time to time, largely because of Diane Venora mucking things up. One of the reasons the final 68 minutes is so great is because Venora has disappeared, and thank God for that!

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Limp “Rifkin” Against Scenic Backdrop

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Last night I streamed Woody Allen‘s Rifkin’s Festival, and I’m afraid I can only echo what critics who caught it during last September’s San Sebastian Film Festival said in unison — it’s a bowl of mild, occasionally prickly porridge that’s simply not good enough. I wouldn’t call it a waste of time, but it certainly won’t enrich anyone’s appreciation or contemplation of their all-too-brief time on this planet. And that’s too bad.

Shot in the summer of ’19 against a simulation of the San Sebastian Film Festival (which actually happens in September), it’s a pallid, lamenting, ummistakably dreary sitcom about being cuckolded while shuffling along with a septugenarian sourpuss attitude. It putters and schmutters with occasional dreamscape tributes to classic ’60s cinema (Fellini’s 8 1/2, Truffaut’s Jules and Jim, Bunuel’s The Exterminating Angel, Bergman’s Persona and The Seventh Seal), which fit into the milieu, of course, but in a decidedly tired, “no longer part of the world” way. The film never bores but never really turns on the current. And I’m sorry for that.

It’s about Mort Rifkin (Wallace Shawn), a crabby 70something Jewish gnome from Manhattan who used to teach film, and his having accompanied Sue (Gina Gershon), his fetching 40something film publicist wife, to the festival, and how he immediately senses a current between Sue and her top client, a younger, mildly pretentious director named Philippe (Louis Garrel).

Rather than skulking around and seething with suspicion, fortune smiles when Mort visits a beautiful 30-something doctor named Jo (Elena Anaya) and promptly falls head over heels. No, Mort doesn’t make any overt moves (thank God!), but he does get involved in her turbulent marriage to a tempestuous artist Paco (Sergi López, whom I haven’t laid eyes on for a good decade or so). Mort talks to Jo (and to the audience) about working on an ambitious novel, but if you haven’t written your big novel by age 77 you should probably hang it up.

Vittorio Storaro‘s cinematography constantly glows. Every shot of San Sebastian is luscious and inviting.

After seeing the Rifkin’s Festival trailer last September I wrote that casting Wallace Shawn as a dismayed romantic protagonist is not what anyone would call audience-friendly. Shawn is pushing 80, for God’s sake, and the size of a Hobbit. By any semi-realistic biological standard he’s “out of the game.” It would be one thing if, say, Allen had cast the 75-year-old Steve Martin as a WASPy version of Mort. But it’s completely impossible to accept a bald Bilbo Baggins as a hormonal stand-in, and especially one who walks around with his mouth half open all the time. It was difficult enough to accept Shawn as Diane Heaton‘s ex-lover in Manhattan, and that was during the Carter administration.

I wrote that Shawn’s character “would naturally feel wounded and disoriented by Gershon’s temporary infidelity, but it’s all but impossible to relate to him in this context. My first reaction was that this is like John Huston casting Lionel Barrymore in the Humphrey Bogart role in Key Largo.”

I’ve been saying this for years, but if the 84 year-old Allen intends to keep churning them out he needs to work with a younger writing partner — some 40something whippersnapper who could punch up the material and lend a certain 21st Century edge. There’s nothing diminishing about such a scenario. Allen worked with Marshall Brickman on Annie Hall, after all, and with Douglas McGrath on Bullets Over Broadway.

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Stephens’ Spiked Column

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A Bret Stephens column about the week-old firing of N.Y. Times reporter Donald McNeil was recently spiked by Times publisher AG Sulzberger, mainly because Stephens quoted a previously published remark by ‘80s Republican attack-dog Lee Atwater that mentioned the “n” word. Khmer Rouge-minded staffers would’ve presumably had a fit if Stephens’ piece, which emphasizes intent as a key journalistic focus, had been published.

Here’s an excerpt: