I've tried to watch The Only Game in Town ('70) a couple of times, but I can't get through it.
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Everyone who cares about first-rate, upscale, drop-your-pants cinema will soon be seeing Oppenheimer (Universal, 7.21), and the vast majority will almost certainly love it for various smart-guy reasons — the intense Nolan-esque focus, the mindblowing visual scale, the fierce ambition, the psychological intensity.
I’m certainly not expecting it to be any kind of financial shortfaller, although I suspect it will register with a fair percentage of the viewing public as not escapist enough but that’s fine — who wants brainless escapism from an effete aesthete like Chris Nolan?
But I had to laugh this morning when I read a one-word comment on Jordan Ruimy’s World of Reel site…written by a guy I don’t know (and probably don’t want to know) called “Hannibal Lolocaust”.
The morning actually started with two dismaying Letterboxd grades from a couple of French critics who saw Oppenheimer in Paris this morning, named “peachfuzz” (i.e., Emmanuel van Elslande) and Nathanael Bentura. The former gave it 3.5 stars out of five; Bentura gave it 3 stars. Obviously the opinions of two small-time French guys is statistically insignificant, but if I were Nolan I’d be going “hmmm.” Just a little bit. Especially when you add that tweet from Sean Nyberg.
Why isn’t someone saying it’s an ecstasy pill…a profoundly fascinating journey? I know, I know — Kenny Turan was very impressed.
Here’s another fellow who was favorably impressed: “It is very destabilizing. It’s very long with multiple movies in one, but in the end it’s pure Nolan. Quite fascinating. I don’t want to oversell it either, but it’s at the top of the basket of Nolan films, I would say.”
What does “very destabilizing” mean, I wonder? Not following a clean narrative line or something?
Turan: “Arguably Nolan’s most impressive work yet in the way it combines his acknowledged visual mastery with one of the deepest character dives in recent American cinema, Oppenheimer demanded to be explored on its own [terms] with as much depth as possible.”
HE to friendo: “What the hell is Kenny actually saying? Deep character dive. What, in a submersible?”
Friendo to HE: “It’s largely a character study, apparently.”
HE to friendo: “Jesus, now it’s starting to sounmd like a chore to sit through. From everything I’ve read and watched J. Robert Oppenheimer has always struck me as a gifted genius physicist, but deep down he was a strand of overcooked fettucini. Sensitive to a fault. Who wants to hang out for three hours with a guilt-stricken weeny?”
Friendo to HE: “The embargo lifts at 5:30 pm today. Right after the Paris premiere.”
HE to friendo: “Pack your bags, kids! We’re all going on a long Oppenheimer guilt trip…a deep dive into the Cillian Murphy guilt swamp…splashing around in that swamp like Bela Lugosi in Bride of the Monster…just kidding. And yet, as I’ve said two or three times, WITHOUT showing what actually happened, horrifically, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 8.6.45 and 8.9.45. What about the incidental fact that the Japanese bad guys, obstinate and fanatical to an agonizing fault, had to be defeated, and as ghastly and horrific as the atom bomb was, those two homicidal explosions ended the war with Japan? Naahh, the Murphy guilt swamp is more compelling.”
Friendo to HE: “I don’t think Nolan just focuses on the A-bomb. He zeroes in on Oppie’s destructive obsessive nature as a man.”
HE to friendo: “Yeah, I’m getting that.”
Friendo to HE: “Allegedly there’s full frontal nudity. Murphy and Florence Pugh as Jean Tatlock, an off-and-on lover of Oppie’s in the late ’30s and a Communist party member who came to an unhappy end.”
During HE’s thrilling but arduous Paris-Cannes adventure (5.11 through 5.30) I somehow found the idea of paywalliing content a bridge too far, so everything was wide open for that nearly three-week period. So the paywall returns starting today. Thanks to subscribers for understanding and hanging in there. I’m even starting to figure out HE’s travel strategy for Telluride ’23, which is only three months off.
It’s Sunday evening (6:15 pm), the sun won’t slip into dusk for another three hours (during the warm months night doesn’t really begin in Paris until 10 pm), and for the first time in nearly two weeks I’m finally feeling relaxed and settled down. Breathing easy.
A couple of hours ago I took my first late-afternoon nap since…I don’t know, May 10th or something. It’s amazing what a decent snooze can do for your disposition. The whole city feels casual and chill. Everyone is sharing the same dreamy mood. Blue sky, gentle sunshine, not too hot.
After nearly two weeks of mostly Cannes-generated stress, deadline pressures, way too little sleep (i.e., the snore bear), waiting in line after line for the next Salle Debussy film and regarding the usual suspects askance, feelings of serenity are finally within. Not for long but at least tonight feels right.
Alas, it all starts again late tomorrow afternoon with my 7:15 pm flight to Newark. God protect me from being seated next to a Jabba.
Daniel Craig cutting loose in Paris is wonderful…wait, wait, why is he slinking around in some swanky hotel? Get back on the streets, bruh! Feel the joy and rapture. You don’t need Belvedere Vodka…you really don’t.
Seven days ago Jordan Ruimy reported that Woody Allen “is close to shooting his next film in Paris, possibly in October. It’s said to be a darker drama in the same vein as Match Point [with a] French- and English-speaking cast. There are no additional plot details, or a title for that matter.
“This would be Allen’s 50th film as a director” — and possibly his last, according to what the 86-year-old Allen told Alec Baldwin earlier today — “so you know that he’ll want to knock it out of the park.”
Two hours ago Deadline reported similar news — shooting in Paris in the late summer or early fall — after listening to the Baldwin-Allen interview. But without any mention of the forthcoming film having any alleged Match Point-like similarities.
No discussions of the notorious Dylan Farrow incident that allegedly occured in August 1992, and no mention of HBO’s Allen vs. Farrow doc that explored that incident, and no mentions of Baldwin’s horrible Rust incident that resulted in the accidental death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins.
Originally posted on 8.19.15: “But Tony, with his impulsiveness and selfishness…he’s locked up in that fucking head of his.” — Junior Soprano (Dominic Chianese) in “The Knight in White Satin Armor,” the 25th Sopranos episode and twelfth of season #2, originally aired on 4.2.00.
When I first heard this line I laughed, and then I asked myself to what extent it applies to Scott Foundas or myself or George Clooney or Alejandro G. Inarritu or whomever.
I like to think of myself as a free man in Paris who’s just dropped a tab of mescaline, but the unfortunate truth is that I’m probably “locked up” as much as Tony Soprano or anyone else ever was. It doesn’t feel good to admit this, but it’s probably true.
I know that I’m theoretically open to the concept of an emotional and psychological jailbreak, and that I live for that possibility on a daily basis. I could name a lot of journalists in my circle who are totally locked up (or more precisely locked down) but what would that accomplish?
I know that the line struck me as hilarious when I first heard it, and I’m chuckling at it right now.
We know it’s fake, but it’s pretty good. And chilling — we all get the point. It’s fairly amazing to consider the Roland Emmerich– or Michael Bay-level CG fakery that’s available these days to almost any enterprising online hoodwinker.
Here’s a portion of a hand-written “aerogramme” that I wrote to my parents on 5.3.76. I was living with girlfriend Sophie Black (now a renowned poet and Columbia University prof) in a small studio at 9 rue Gregoire du Tours. I was only three and a half years old at the time.
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