Every picture has its shadows / And it has some source of light / Blindness, blindness and sight / The perils of benefactors / The blessings of parasites / Blindness, blindness and sight.
Ten days ago I re-posted a generic HE viewpoint…my longstanding praise of Paul Brickman‘s Risky Business (’83)…basically a statement that this was far more than a teenaged horndog comedy but å social satire of the slyest, dryest and most on-target kind.
Risky Business was hugely enjoyable (“Who’s the U-boat commander?” is one of the funniest lines ever spoken by an actor whom no one had heard of back then and who still draws a blank) and yet the butt of the humor was obvious and consistent…the whole thing was aimed squarely at the unfolding early ’80s zeitgiest and louche wealthy-guy opportunism in particular…a congregation of social forces that indicated we were all starting to ease up and hang back and say “what the fuck?” more and more…swirling downwards into greed and effete whateverism.
Critic Emmanuel Levy, who’s been around forever, said precisely the same thing:
But I was astonished to discover last night that David Denby, one of my all-time favorite critics who was with New York magazine for many years before moving over to The New Yorker…I was astonished to read Denby’s 8.22.83 review and realize that he missed Risky Business almost entirely. Denby obviously saw it, but it went right around him or through him or over him. He allowed that Brickman has some talent but basically panned the film, calling it “corrupt” and “a clear failure.”
A clear failure? It’s one of the smartest, funniest, most perfectly realized, on-point social satire-slash-sex comedies ever made…it’s right up there with The Apartment and The Graduate…it simultaneously understands and chortles in a resigned, low-key way at upper-middle-class entitlement, and with the cynical knowingness of a Reagan-era Oscar Wilde.
Another of my favorite cinematic soothsayers back then, N.Y. Times critic Janet Maslin, also missed it…mind-blowing. Christian Science Monitor critic David Sterritt dismissed it also.
Roger Ebert, however, got it….good for him.
Criterion’s Risky Business 4K pops on 7.23.24.
Donald Trump has been wealthy beyond measure since at least the ’80s, and yet he can’t afford to fix his serious baldness problem? By simply taking the time to address it with the sevices of the right people?
If this miserable pig had gone to my Prague team 20 or 25 years ago these blowover moments would never happen because there wouldn’t be any scalp to cover up.
Hair confection malfunction pic.twitter.com/xgs8eyEm2Z
— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) April 26, 2024
Yesterday six conservative members of the nine-member Supreme Court made it quite clear that they are whores for Donald Trump and fools for his plan to lay waste US democracy and bring fresh, ferocious, anti-democratic hell to this country if he wins in November…they will do whatever they can to shilly-shally their way out of the line of fire and submit to his agenda by any pretzel-contortioning that comes to mind.
Olbermann: “You, Samuel Allito, are personally backing America’s Hitler…as these six evil, corrupt, partisan, useless, anti-democracy gangsters on the Supreme Theocratic Court flailed around yesterday, looking for an excuse, any excuse, to bury the evidence against Trump and to fix the upcoming election…this destructive fascist court…you and I now know this.”
“Challe” is not a word in any language, but it reminds me of chattle, which basically means movable goods. The second word could be some kind of shortened slang abbreviation or cryptic allusion to people who come from Niger, the landlocked West African country.
Mr. Netanyahu, antisemitism is a vile and disgusting form of bigotry that has done unspeakable harm to millions.
Do not insult the intelligence of the American people by attempting to distract us from the immoral and illegal war policies of your extremist and racist government. pic.twitter.com/CnM6oOrHKd
— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) April 25, 2024
Over the last two evenings I re-watched Season #1 of Andrew Jarecki‘s The Jinx, which premiered nine years ago. Just to freshen my recollections. Late last night I segued into episode #1 of The Jinx, Part Two.
The episode #1 high point comes with nine-year-old footage of Jarecki showing an advance look at the final episode to the Jinx “family” (relatives of Durst’s three victims, witnesses, detectives, prosecutors). The thunderbolt moment happens when Durst mutters his famous bathroom confession (“Killed ’em all, of course”). The reaction in the room is quite something.
The all-but-universal reaction to Durst — his deep, New York-accented voice, the twitchy eyes, matter-of-fact recitations of his unreliable version of the facts, relaxed manner — is that he doesn’t radiate dangerous psycho vibes. Nothing excitable and physically rather small (5′ 6″). If nothing else The Jinx acquaints us with a fresh understanding of what an intelligent, unconventional psycho can actually sound like.
Durst is gone now, having died of a heart attack in ’22 in a prison hospital. He wasn’t very smart or crafty in hiding the Galveston rooming-house murder, or when he tried to elude authorities when he went on the lam, and he absolutely torpedoed himself, of course, by agreeing to be interviewed by Jarecki. But he behaved in a fairly “normal” and relatable way.
The bottom line is that Durst was very skilled at concealing decades of simmering rage.
Season #2 has six episodes — five more left. Episode 1 (“Why Are You Still Here?”) began streaming on Sunday, 4.21. Episode 2 (“Friendships Die Hard”) pops next Sunday, 4.28. Episode 3 (“Saving My Tears Until It’s Official”) streams on Sunday, May 5. Episode 4 (“The Unluckiest Man In The World”) debuts on Sunday, 5.12. The final two episodes will air on 5.19 and 5.26.
Mild-mannered Piers Morgan attempts a semi-normal conversation with the fearsome “Crackhead Barney“, who taunted Alec Baldwin the other day…watch the first five minutes.
2009 was 15 years ago, and by any fair standard a banner year for films, resulting in a very decent lineup for the Best Picture Oscar. But I’m wondering how these films have aged…which ones have held up the best in retrospect?
My personal faves among the Best Picture nominees were Kathryn Bigelow‘s The Hurt Locker, Joel and Ethan Coen‘s A Serious Man, Jason Reitman‘s Up in the Air, James Cameron‘s Avatar, Lone Scherfig‘s An Education and Neill Blomkamp‘s District 9…six in all.
I wasn’t in love with The Blind Side but I understood why others were. And I was meh or mixed-negative on Quentin Tarantino‘s Inglourious Basterds, Lee Daniels‘ Precious and Pete Docter‘s Up.
It hit me this morning that my 15-years-later thoughts about Up in The Air are fairly alpha and sturdy. Please give my Toronto Film Festival review a read-though and share your present-tense feelings.
“Up In The Air really has it all — recognizable human-scale truth, clarity, smart comfort, the right degree of restraint (i.e., knowing how not to push it), and — this got me more than anything else — a penetrating, almost unnerving sense of quiet.
“This is one of the calmest and most unforced this-is-who-we-are, what-we-need and what-we’re-all-afraid-of-in-the-workplace movies that I’ve ever seen. From an American viewpont, of course. The Europeans have almost made job-anxiety films into a genre — i.e., Laurent Cantet‘s Time Out, etc. But I would guess that Up In The Air will play very, very well in Paris.
“It’s a film that walks and talks it and knows it every step of the way. Work, adulthood, asking the questions that matter, compassion, family, stick-your-neck-out, etc. The whole package. With an almost profound lack of Hollywood bullshit and jerk-offery. And a kind of Brokeback Mountain-y theme at the finale — i.e., ‘move it or lose it.’
“Up In The Air doesn’t tell you what to feel — it lets you feel what it is. All the best movies do that. They don’t sell or pitch — they just lay it down on the Oriental carpet and say to the viewer, ‘We’ve got a good thing here, and if you agree, fine. And if you don’t, go with God.’
“You know what? The hell with that attitude. If you really watch and let this movie in and then say, as a friend of a good friend said after watching it in Telluride a few days ago, “I don’t know…it’s nice but it’s more like an okay ground-rule double than a homer,” then due respect but you’re the kind of person who likes candied popcorn and Strawberry Twizzlers and feel-good pills. No offense.
“Variety‘s Todd McCarthy called it “‘a slickly engaging piece of lightweight existentialism.’ That’s an unfair and inappropriate characterization. There’s a difference between lightweight and having the goods and taking it easy and laying it on gradually.
“The thing that puts Up In The Air over is that it’s about right effin’ now, which is to say the uncertain and fearful Great Recession current of 2009. Reitman has been working on it for six years, and if it had come out last September — just as the bad news about what those greedy selfish banking bastards had done was being announced and everyone started to mutter “uh-oh” to themselves — it wouldn’t be reflecting the cultural what-have-you as much as it is now. And yet it never alludes to anything that specific. It doesn’t have to.
“We all know about the story by now. Ryan Bingham (Clooney) is a kind of lightweight Zen smoothie who specializes in gently firing people when their bosses are too chicken to do it themselves. He doesn’t just like travelling around in business class seats and staying in nice hotels — he relishes the sense of belonging and security that he gets from being constantly in motion and never digging into a life of his own. And it’s easy to spot the arc — i.e., will Ryan find some way to let go of skimming along and maybe go for a little soul infusion?
“The basic story propellant comes from two women who represent a certain kind of change/growth/threat element — Alex (Vera Farmiga), a fellow traveller who’s an exact replica of Bingham save for her sexuality, and with whom he strikes up a nice groove-on relationship in the film’s beginning, and Natalie (Anna Kendrick), a hamster-sized junor exec who’s sold Ryan’s boss (Jason Bateman) on whacking people through a video conferencing system rather than face-to-face.
“But I don’t want to get into the story more than that. What happens, happens for the right reasons. The main thing is that none of the developments feel the least bit ungenuine. And I will square off with anyone who says the ending isn’t sufficiently ‘happy.’ Anyone who doesn’t realize that Clooney is quite another man and open to the next good thing at the finale simply hasn’t been paying attention.
“There are many witnesses in this film a la Reds — real-life people who’ve been laid off and are facing the abyss in more ways than one — and I’ve already read complaints that Reitman overplays this card. I respectfully disagree. The clips appear symmetrically (i.e., at the beginning and end), and have an added weight at the finale. “Repetition” doesn’t necessarily mean ‘repetitiously.’
“I’m really glad I caught Up In The Air at the beginning of the second wave — i.e., immediately post-Telluride. By the time it comes out on 11.13.09 it’ll be something else, and by that I mean the movie that snarkers will be looking to shoot down just to do that. Snarkers are so reprehensible. They pummel and flatten things down and rob them of their fresh-soil beauty.”
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