From the early to mid ’60s, director-screenwriter Robert Towne had a passionate, occasionally troubled relationship with dancer-actress Barrie Chase, who was the daughter of Red River screenwriter Borden Chase. In 1966, things came to an end when Chase decided to wed Swedish actor Jan Malmsjo.
According to Sam Wasson‘s “The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood“, Towne and Chase’s big breakup scene happened high in the Hollywood hills. Here’s page 89:
Although Warren Beatty obtained a co-writing credit on Shampoo (’75), Towne is the primary author. He worked on it for years. Here’s the final scene between Beatty and Julie Christie (i.e., “George Roundy” and “Jackie Shawn”). It happens on a hilltop somewhere in Beverly Hills.
Christie: “You’re going to kill me…”
Beatty: “Honey?”
Chrstie: “What are you trying to do?”
Beatty: “I want you to marry me. I wanna take care of you. I want you to have a baby with me. Hey, I know I’m a fuck-up but I’ll take care of you. I’ll make you happy — I swear to God I will. (Two or three beats.) What do you think?”
Christie: “It’s too late.”
Beatty: “Whaddaya mean ‘it’s too late’? We’re not dead yet. That’s the only thing that’s too late.”
Christie: “Lester’s left Felicia. I’m going [with him] to Acapulco on a 4 o’clock flight. He’s asked me to marry him.”
Beatty: “Oh…honey. (Gently weeping.) Honey, please. Please, honey. I…I don’t trust anybody but you.”
I first began to hate George Lucas 37 years ago, after seeing Return of the Jedi. He had taken what most of us regarded as a great galactic Arthurian saga and ruined it with Ewoks and bonfires and happy songs on the forest planet of Endor. I held onto my hate for decades (when I was writing for Reel,com in ’99 I called him a flannel-shirt-wearing lesbian), but now I love the guy.
Or rather I love John Robert Thompson‘s deepfake Lucas, whom I’ve been following for a while via Collider Videos. His fatalistic cynicism is so pure, so bone-tired, so lethargic, so fuck-it-all. Not to mention his pot belly and sagging breasts.
I would totally pay to see a feature in which deepfake Lucas wise-cracks his way through the development and shooting of the last three Star Wars films, commenting on the goings-on like some kind of sardonic Greek chorus. I’m serious — I would triple-pay to see this. (He could even step in as Adam Driver‘s older-bro confidante during the alleged “thing” with Daisy Ridley.) Because super-loaded deepfake Lucas doesn’t give a shit. At all.
Deepfake Lucas: “Everyone thought that the prequels were bad. Everyone thought those were the lowest-rated. As it turns out, what you don’t reaiize is that The Rise of Skywalker is actually the lowest rated. Hah-hah…sorry, I can’t suppress my laughter. It just feels so good.
“J.J. comes to me, crying…called me up like a little bitch. ‘Oh, George, I need your help.’ I said, ‘Oh, now you need my help? Well, I’m sorry but I don’t make those movies any more.’ Then I called him back and said ‘stop crying, don’t be a little bitch…what’s the problem?’ And he said, “Rian Johnson just totally destroyed [the saga with] this last film and I don’t know how to pick up the pieces.’ And he started hashing things out, and then Kathy Kennedy came along and said ‘well, we’re gonna go this way’, and I said ‘okay, I’m out…I’m out.’ That was the last time I talked to them.”
Michael Bloomberg’s campaign has officially denied published reports that he’s considering asking (good God) Hillary Clinton to be his running mate for the 2020 presidential election — “We are focused on the primary and the debate, not vp speculation.” Even if he had briefly flirted with this idea, I’m sure Bloomberg has completely discharged it by now. If he goes with a woman it would probably be Kamala Harris or Stacey Abrams.
Sometime in the summer of ’84 I began working for hotshot publicists Bobby Zarem and Dick Delson, who’d recently become partners. One of our activities was handling promotion (i.e., not unit publicity) for Tim Burton and Paul Reubens‘ Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, which shot in the late summer and early fall of that year and opened in August ’85.
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My son Dylan didn’t declare this painting to be self-portraiture, but everyone presumed it was on some level. He was 19 or 20, as I recall. My heart went out. I never forgot it, wanted to see it again, asked my ex if she could send me an image. It arrived last night.
Posted on 12.18.07: “Throwing a bag of Mexican takeout food at a cab is not what anyone would call a mature or attractive thing to do, but that’s what I did last night after a Boston Checker almost hit me as I was crossing Commonwealth Avenue in slushy snow. I have to be honest and say it felt right for about three or four seconds. Then I felt like an idiot.
I turned to my left and saw a pair of killer headlights half-screeching and half-skidding towards me. Instead of leaping out of the way I went into a dead-freeze, deer-in-the-headlights mode. The cab stopped — no exaggeration — with less than six inches to spare.
Anyone who’s ever escaped getting hit like this knows that the usual reaction is rage. I think I said something really cool and clever like “what the fuck are you doing, asshole?” Their cab driver screamed something back in the same vein. That tore it — he almost kills me and then he yells at me? That’s when I threw the Mexican takeout, which hit the passenger-door window.
The cabbie, double-riled by the bean dip and guacamole splattered over the rear door and window, hit the brakes and jumped out, and I went into mock Sideways mode (Thomas Haden Church swinging the club on the golf course) and howled like an animal. The driver jumped back in and drove off. End of dignified altercation.
I doubt I’ll be seeing Ricky Tollman‘s Run This Town (Oscilloscope, 3.6). Mainly because of Ben Platt (Dear Evan Hansen, The Politician), who has one of those faces you can’t help but fantasize about punching or at least slapping. In this trailer Platt seems to radiate a certain dim-witted, candy-assed uncertainty and open-mouthed ambivalence, and hanging with him for 99 minutes would almost certainly be too much to bear. I hate this guy.
Pic follows Platt’s Bram Shriver, a Toronto reporter whose professional prospects are enhanced when he’s fed a cellphone video of then-Toronto Mayor Rob Ford (Damien Lewis in a fat suit) smoking crack. You’ll notice that the trailer never gives you a good look at Lewis’s obese mayor. To go by Joe Leydon‘s South by Southwest review (4.16.19), there’s a reason for that.
Posted on 4.16.19: “It doesn’t help at all that Mayor Ford — who looms large, literally and physically, despite his status as a supporting character — is played by a heavily latexed Damian Lewis in a less-than-convincing fat suit. Lewis so closely resembles Mike Myers’ Fat Bastard character in the Austin Powers franchise that it’s practically impossible to fully appreciate his spot-on portrayal of a man with an unstable id checked only sporadically by an image-conscious superego (Donald Trump, anyone?).”
Has a fat suit ever worked in a dramatic film? Yes — John Lithgow‘s Roger Ailes in Bombshell. Other instances?
Now that Criterion has established itself as an outfit that likes to add teal tints to highly regarded classics (Teorema, Midnight Cowboy, Bull Durham, Sisters), I’m naturally dreading what might happen with their forthcoming Great Escape Bluray, which will street on 5.12.
Make no mistake — with four teal-tinted disasters to their credit, a Criterion Bluray of a late 20th Century color film is now something to be feared.
To go by DVD Beaver captures that I’ve posted three or four times, what they’ve done with the above four titles is nothing short of vandalism. I’m especially concerned with DVD Beaver‘s Gary W. Tooze having complained seven years ago that MGM’s 2013 Great Escape Bluray was “a little heavy on the teal.”
Even if Criterion doesn’t screw the colors up, their 4K remastering almost certainly won’t deliver a “bump” to John Sturges’ 1963 war classic. I’ve seen this film ten or twelve times, most recently a restored projected version at the 2013 TCM Classic Film Festival, and it just doesn’t look all that extra–level. It never did and it never will. Daniel Fapp‘s 35mm cinematography is perfectly fine but except for two or three sequences that were either shot in fog or tinted misty-gray, there’s nothing about his widescreen visuals that really stand out.
I don’t know why Criterion is even releasing a 4K digital restoration, but God forbid they”ll make it look worse than even before.
“Underwhelming Great Escape“, posted on 4.27.13: “I caught yesterday afternoon’s TCM Classic Film Festival screening of The Great Escape, and I’m sorry to say that it was a pleasant but no-great-shakes experience.
“John Sturges‘ classic World War II action drama has been remastered for a forthcoming Bluray (due May 7th) and I was assuming that the DCP version would make this 1963 film look and sound a little spiffier and brassier and more eye-filling than it did the last time I saw it in a theatre, which was sometime in the ’80s.
“Especially, you know, if the DCP guys scanned the original negative and were given the funding from MGM Home Video to do an extra nice job.
“I’m kidding, of course. MGM Home Video is renowned as a bargain-basement outfit. They don’t want to spend a dime more than they have to. If MGM Home Video ran an airline you wouldn’t want to fly with them, trust me. The result is that they probably scanned an inter-positive rather than the original Great Escape negative with an order to do the best job they could within a tight budget. I don’t know any budgetary facts but what I saw on the big Chinese screen looked like a handsomely-shot film that had been mastered by the Mrs. Grace L. Ferguson Airline and Storm Door Company.
Woke progressive purist twitter is currently doing what it can to weaken if not destroy Michael Bloomberg‘s chances of wrangling the Democratic nomination. Earth to WPPT: Stop-and-frisk, okay, but the redlining complaints are misleading. The 2008 financial collapse came about largely because predatory banks began offering home loans to people who clearly didn’t financially qualify — did anyone see The Big Short? Among the underqualified were African Americans and other loan recipients of color.
WPPT has already gone to work on Pete Buttigieg and drawn a fair amount of blood (too moderate, not gay enough, weak with POCs). And WPPT has done everything it can to promote Bernie Sanders, who of course will lose to Donald Trump if he comes the Democratic nominee. With Biden and Warren all but finished, only Amy Klobuchar has yet to cope with the WTTP takedown treatment.
One way or another, the combined forces of WPPT and voters of color will almost certainly give us another four years of Donald Trump. Thanks, fellas. I despise you with all my heart.
What Democratic ticket would I like to see at this point? Bloomberg-Buttigieg. Sure to be hated by WPPT, but they’d definitely defeat The Beast.
A person quickly glancing at today’s Rotten Tomatoes summary might lump Downhill and Fantasy Island together as roughly equal bad greenies. That would be an incorrect perception. Because Downhill (though admittedly a questionable film to see on Valentine’s Day) really isn’t half bad. Especially if you’re able to divest yourself of the idiotic presumption that because it stars Will Ferrell and Julia Louis Dreyfus it must be a laugh riot.
In no way, shape or form is Downhill a “comedy”. At best it offers a few chuckles. At the same time it’s not my idea of a problematic film — it’s smart, attuned, watchable. And it really ends brilliantly. Is it as good as Ruben Ostlund‘s 2014 original? Some say no; I say it doesn’t matter.
Repeating: I found it better than decent — adult, well measured, emotionally frank, well acted and cunningly written. (Faxon and Rash shared screenplay credit with Jesse Armstrong.) It’s not a burn, it’s not about a ‘black and white situation’ (as one of the less perceptive characters puts it) and it provides ample food for thought and discussion. It’s not silly, stupid or frivolous but (gasp!) a serious film fused with sharp, occasionally amusing dialogue.
Paul Schrader quoted on 11.30.18: “There are people who talk about the American cinema of the ‘70s as some halcyon period. It was to a degree but not because there were any more talented filmmakers. There’s probably, in fact, more talented filmmakers today than there was in the ‘70s. What there was in the ‘70s was better audiences.
“When people take movies seriously it’s very easy to make a serious movie. When they don’t take [them] seriously, it’s very, very hard. We now have audiences that don’t take movies seriously so it’s hard to make a serious movie for them. It’s not that us filmmakers are letting you down, it’s [that] audiences are letting us down.”
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