Am I a non-compliant suppressive person in the realm of gay cinema?
In my 9.1.23 review of Andrew Haigh‘s All Of Us Strangers, I praised it for being “a classy, meditative, top-tier capturing of an intimate gay relationship” while admitting that the beard-stubble sex footage made me squirm a bit. Which resulted in attacks, of course. For in today’s realm, if you don’t sing arias about bare-backed slurpy kissing scenes you’re a homophobe.
“Story-wise it’s kind of a gay Midnight in Paris,” I wrote, “except instead of hanging with F.ScottFitzgerald and ErnestHemingway the time traveller in question (a screenwriter named Adam, played by the mid-40ish AndrewScott) spends a lot of time with his late parents, who are miraculously alive and their old glorious selves, and played by JamieBell and ClaireFoy.
“Their get-togethers allow Adam, of course, a chance to explain to them both (well, his mom) that he’s been gay for decades but that being so inclined is no longer the socially uncertain, vaguely uncomfortable thing it was when mum and dad died in a car crash, back in the ’80s.
Shawn Levy and Steven Knight‘s All the Light We Cannot See (Netflix limited series, 11.2) is a danger-fraught World War II saga. Set in Paris and Saint-Malo, it’s mainly about four characters — Marie-Laure Le Blanc (Aria Mia Loberti), a blind French teenager; her father Daniel Le Blanc (Mark Ruffalo); a teenaged German lad named Werner Pfennig (Louis Hofmann); and Marie-Laure’s great uncle Etienne (Hugh Laurie).
Levy and Knight adhered to woke casting requirements by not choosing the best skilled actress to play Marie-Laure (wokesters feel that traditional acting or “pretending” is ungenuine), but Loberti because of her real-life “legal” blindness.
Wiki page: “Loberti landed the part after a global search for a blind and low-vision actor. A fan of the book, she auditioned after learning about the search from a childhood orientation and mobility teacher. Despite no acting training, Loberti beat out thousands of submission to secure the role; it is her first ever acting role and was her first audition.”
It is Louis CK's opinion that Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut "doesn't touch earth...it takes place in an incredibly high-up, thin-oxygen world...it's not about anyone that anyone [in the audience] knows,,,the movie has this plodding tone and plodding pace, which is what [Kubrick] does here.,..if he was a comic book artist, people would say 'this is how the guy draws.' Kubrick was a masterful filmmaker, and [when I watch Eyes Wide Shut] I just say 'this is where he was at, and what his fucked-up brain was making.'"
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This was your mission, Mr. Hunt. You choose to accept it and the fact that it didn’t work out…well, that’s on you.
Yesterday afternoon’s Albuquerque-to-JFK flight (Jet Blue, #66) left an hour late, but was expected to land by 11:30 pm. With my car parked at Jett’s home in West Orange, the plan was to take the Air Train to Howard Beach station and then an A train express to Penn Station and catch the last NJ Transit train to Orange — 12:55 am departure, arriving at 1:30 am. I arranged for an Uber to meet me at 1:35 am and take me to Jett’s — a four-minute ride (if that) that Uber would’ve charged me $30 for.
Flight #66 arrived at JFK at 11:40 pm (hey!), but it took us 20 minutes to unload. Did a 50-minute A train ride between Howard Beach and Penn Station seem reasonable? Maybe not, but at least I had a fighting chance if the Air Train and A Express were moving normally. Alas, the Air Train was on slumber meds and the A train killed me.
Maintenance issues are currently forcing the Manhattan-bound A train to unload passengers at Rockaway Blvd. We were shuffled into a sluggish bus, which drove us to the Euclid Ave. station. We got onto another A train but it was a local (whoo-hoo!), plus it just sat there for 11 or 12 minutes and then creaked and groaned and lumbered its way toward Manhattan, one pathetic stop at a time.
It was hell, but the NYC subway system has been making humans suffer for decades. You think late-night service is this soul-draining in London, Paris, Tokyo, Berlin, Moscow or Barcelona?
Ethan Hunt knew he was fucked as far as catching that 12:55 am train, so he cancelled the New Jersey Uber (a guy named Jose) but guess what? A $20 cancellation fee!
Ethan knew he was beaten. He got off the A train cattle car at Canal Street and figured he had no choice but to take an Uber to West Orange, which would cost $110 plus an after-tip. Then he spotted an ordinary Yellow Cab in front of a hotel. The driver told Ethan it would cost $120 but that included tolls plus having to take the Lincoln Tunnel (West 40th) because the Holland Tunnel is closed every night for six hours (11 pm to 5 am). Ethan went for it, the driver drove like a pro and we arrived at Jett’s home a little after 2 am.
JFK touchdown to West Orange, the total travelling time was two hours and 25 minutes.
If Jet Blue, which had cancelled my Tuesday night red-eye (Albuquerque to JFK) and thereby forced me to accept yesterday afternoon’s make-up flight…if Jet Blue hadn’t delayed the Albuquerque take-off by an hour-plus I might have made the last train to Orange and saved myself $80 or 90 dollars. Ethan Hunt and Hollywood Elsewhere are hereby expressing heartfelt gratitude.
Cinematic reference #1: A stressed-out Steve Martin swearing at the car-rental “gobble gobble!” lady in Planes, Trains and Automobiles. Cinematic reference #2: A 50something woman barking at Jerry Lewis‘s Jerry Langford in The King of Comedy: “You should get cancer…I hope you get cancer!”
A few days ago Kino Lorber released a double-disc 4K Bluray of Sidney Pollack and Robert Redford‘s Three Days of the Condor (’75). I’m not sure I see the need. I own the old Bluray from 2009 or thereabouts, and it’s fine.
The wifi signal in Albuquerque Airport is so anemic, so astoundingly sludgy, even slower than a dial-up connection in 1997 — that I can’t even post a link to a 9.2.23 High-Def Digest review.
Condor is a perfectly assembled, deliciously cool and extremely anxious time-capsule capturing of mid ’70s paranoia.
It works as a great companion piece to Alan Pakula and Warren Beatty‘s The Parallax View.
Redford’s “Turner” is one of his career-best performances, and Max von Sydow‘s “Joubert” is so exquisite in every scene…so gentle, settled-in and unmalicious…an almost serene European man involved in a dirty business.
I just wish that Leonard Atwood‘s motive behind the idiotic murdering of seven CIA employees in a midtown Manhattan office made more sense. Atwood freaked when he read Turner’s original “book report”, sent to CIA headquarters, about a rogue CIA operation — Atwood’s — that would’ve seized Middle Eastern oil fields.
Everything about Condor fits into place except for this one ludicrous plot device.
Cliff Robertson to John Houseman: “Do you miss that kind of action, sir?” Houseman to Robertson: “No, I miss that kind of clarity.”
I can’t pound out a ten-paragraph review of Yorgos Lanthimos‘ Poor Things as it’s nearly 11 pm and I’m really whipped (I only slept about four hours last night) but it’s totally fucking wild, this thing — it’s too sprawling to describe in a single sentence but I could start by calling it an imaginatively nutso, no-holds-barred sexual Frankenstein saga.
The production design and visual style are basically pervy Lathimos meets Terry Gilliam meets Jean Pierre Juenet…really crazy and wackazoid and fairly perfect in that regard.
Set in a make-believe 19th Century realm that includes fanciful versions of London, Paris and Lisbon, Poor Things is at least partly The Bride of Frankenstein by way of a long-haul feminist parable about a underdog woman eventually finding strength and wisdom and coming into her own.
It swan-dives into all kinds of surreal humor with boundless nudity and I-forget-how-many sex scenes in which Emma Stone, giving her bravest and craziest-ever performance, totally goes to town in this regard save for the last, oh, 20 or 25. The film runs 141 minutes.
Poor Things is easily Lanthimos’ finest film, and all hail Stone For having gone totally over the waterfall without a flotation device…giving her boldest, most totally-out-there performance as she rides the mighty steed, so to speak, while repeatedly behaving in a “big”, herky-jerky fashion as Tony McNamara’s screenplay, based on Alasdair Gray‘s same-titled novel, whips up the perversity and tests the boundaries of what used to be known as softcore sex scenes.
The costars include Mark Ruffalo (giving a totally enraged, broadly comic performance as a middle-aged libertine), Willem “Scarface” Dafoe as Dr. Godwin Baxter, Ramy Youssef as Dafoe’s assistant and Christopher Abbott as as an upper-class London slimeball, plus four stand-out cameos by Margaret Qualley, Kathryn Hunter, Suzy Bemba and 79-year-old Hanna Schygulla.
I’ll add to this tomorrow morning but this is one serious boundary-pusher…wow.
A screening of Andrew Haigh‘s much-celebrated All Of Us Strangers just ended an hour ago, and I’m…well, I’m a dissenter to some extent.
I’m sorry but as rooted, refined, well-written and emotionally palatable as this film is, being about a present-tense gay relationship in London, it’s slow as molasses (as in largely or at least somewhat boring) and the often whispered and mumbled dialogue is hard to make out, and when you boil it all down Strangers is basically 135 minutes of beard stubble rendered in widescreen close-up.
And yet it’s primarily about three or four conversations with ghosts.
Story-wise it’s kind of a gay Midnight in Paris, except instead of hanging with F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway the time traveller in question (a screenwriter named Adam, played by the mid-40ish Andrew Scott) spends a lot of time with his late parents, who are miraculously alive and their old glorious selves, and played by Jamie Bell and Claire Foy.
Their get-togethers allow Adam, of course, a chance to explain to them both (well, his mom) that he’s been gay (he doesn’t relate to queer) for decades but that being so inclined is no longer the socially uncertain, vaguely uncomfortable thing it was when mum and dad died in a car crash, back in the ’80s.
Strangers is certainly a classy, ultra-swoony, top-tier capturing of an intimate gay relationship. Then again I’m trying to imagine a hetero love affair portrayed or paced in this fashion (i.e., not much of a narrative, mostly about the past by way of dead-parent conversations) and I can’t.
Scott is a subdued, gentle-mannered, first-rate actor with classically handsome features and dark watery eyes (he once played Paul McCartney), and Harry, his lover, is played by the 27-year-old Paul Mescal, an HE non-favorite who wears a moustache and Van Dyke goatee in this thing and has generally horrible taste in clothing. Their performances are flawless; ditto the acting by Bell and Foy.
But I’d be lying if I didn’t say that watching Mescal and Scott get down with this and that intimate activity…beard-stubble eroticism with drooling kisses and leg rubbings and tender hair-stroking is…there’s no way to honestly react to the physical intimacy stuff without sounding like a conservative rube, and so, yes, I’m fully aware that I’m “not allowed” to say that such scenes are not my cup of tea.
Plus I’m used to gay sex scenes a la Brokeback Mountain or Call Me By Your Name…you know, the old-fashioned, straight-friendly kind.
But there’s no questioning the quality of it all. This is an honest, mature, sophisticated film about serious intimacy and the unpeeling of the usual layers.
Bottomline: If you’re going to make a film that vaguely borrows from Midnight in Paris, you should probably try to make it as diverting as that 2011 Woody Allen film.
I don’t care what the orientation of a pair of given lovers might be, but it’s generally not a good idea to make a boring love story… a love story in which nothing really happens between the here-and-now lovers (except for some fucking early on). All that happens is “gee, my dead parents are back in the old house and so I can talk to them about everything, and maybe introduce them to my boyfriend,” etc.
It goes without saying that All Of Us Strangers will play best in blue coastal cities, and that the kind of rapturous reception it’s gotten from major-outlet critics thus far reflects a certain form of self-protective political posturing (i.e., show approval or be branded a homophobe) that no one will admit to. But then most of us knew that going in.
It featured HarveyKeitel, of course. I wasn’t certain if costar Zina Bethune was part of it, but I thought she might be.
A guy I described as helpful (in this instance) friendo explained the basics:
“Yes, it’s Who’s That Knocking, and it’s NOT Zina Bethune, who was a nice girl who didn’t do nudity.
“The sex scene — a dream sequence — was shot in Amsterdam with Keitel and a series of European model/actresses.
“It was added because a would-be distributor in the United States agreed to pick up the movie but only if it had a nude scene that could give it grind house appeal.
“Scorsese was up to something in Paris at the time, got the funds from the would be distributor, had Keitel fly to Europe, tried to work the actor’s hair into an approximation of what it looked like when they shot the rest of the film, and concocted the sequence. For some reason Amsterdam was more viable than Paris at the time.
“Scorsese actually was so scared about running afoul of customs that he hid the reel like contraband when he left for the States.”
HE responds: Fascinating recap but I have questions. Scorsese presumably didn’t meet the Brooklyn-based distributor, Joseph Brenner (who was always looking to exploit sexual content in films, and whose company was either called Joseph Bremer Associates or Medford Film Distribution) in Paris. Why would he encounter Brenner way the hell over there?
Why Scorsese decided to fly Keitel to Amsterdam for the filming of the sexual dream sequence is a total mystery, but from our 2023 perspective it seems that if the pure-of-heart Zina Bethune (whose character obviously would and should have been a significant presence in the sexual fantasies of Keitel’s character)…if Bethune wasn’t such a conservative, no-nudity prude, the dream sequence could have been filmed in a lower Manhattan loft for a small fraction of the cost of the Amsterdam shoot. (No air fare or hotel bills, for one thing.)
I posted a Best of ’66 summary five years ago, but it can’t hurt to go again as I’ve shuffled things around and added a few.
In order of preference or greatness or historical importance, or a combination of all three…plus the not-bads and worst.
Top 15: 1. Michelangelo Antonioni‘s Blow-Up (aka Blowup); 2. Richard Brooks‘ The Professionals; 3. Fred Zinneman‘s A Man For All Seasons; 4. Robert Wise‘s The Sand Pebbles; 5. Robert Bresson‘s Au Hasard Balthazar, 6. Roman Polanski‘s Cul-de-sac; 7. Ingmar Bergman‘s Persona, 8. Bernard Girard‘s Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round; 9. Woody Allen‘s What’s Up, Tiger Lily?; 10. Arthur Penn‘s The Chase; 11. Mike Nichols‘ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?; 12. John Frankenheimer‘s Grand Prix, 13. Lewis Gilbert‘s Alfie, 14. Frankenheimer’s Seconds; 15. Jack Smight‘s Harper.
16. Milos Forman‘s Loves of a Blonde; 17. Billy Wilder‘s The Fortune Cookie, 18. Norman Jewison‘s The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming, 19. ClaudeLelouch‘s AMan and a Woman, 20. Gillo Pontecorvo‘s The Battle of Algiers, 21. Richard Lester‘s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, 22. Pier Paolo Pasolini‘s The Gospel According to St. Matthew, 23. Karel Reisz‘s Morgan!: A Suitable Case for Treatment.; 24. Blake Edwards‘ What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?; 25. JackSmight‘s Kaleidoscope.
Fine, Decent, Tolerable, Not Bad: Funeral in Berlin; A Fine Madness; Walk, Don’t Run; How to Steal a Million; Torn Curtain; The Wild Angels; This Property Is Condemned; After the Fox; The Appaloosa; Alvarez Kelly; Georgy Girl; Not With My Wife, You Don’t; The Good, the Bad and the Ugly; The Quiller Memorandum; King of Hearts.
Worst of ’66: Hawaii, Murderers’ Row; Frankie and Johnny, The Singing Nun, Modesty Blaise, The Fat Spy, A Big Hand for the Little Lady, Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number!, The Glass Bottom Boat, Paradise, Hawaiian Style; Nevada Smith; Assault on a Queen; Munster, Go Home!; Stagecoach (remake), The Blue Max, Three on a Couch, Batman, The Idol, The Bible: In the Beginning…, Mister Buddwing; An American Dream; Texas Across The River; Follow Me, Boys!; Is Paris Burning?; Madame X.
To hear it from The Limey‘s Terry Valentine (i.e., Peter Fonda), 1966 was the only year in which “the ’60s” were fully in flower and possessed by transformative energy and imaginings. There were countless manifestations — spiritual, creative — and firecracker-like amazements occurring within and without all over town.
April ’66 saw the famous Time magazine cover that asked “Is God dead?”, which was used by Roman Polanski during the filming of Rosemary’s Baby a year later.
Things were really and truly happening in the rock music realm. Hell, all over. Eight years after Cary Grant’s adventurous lysergic acid pathfinding and a year after Peter Fonda and John Lennon, both tripping their brains out at a small gathering somewhere in Benedict Canyon, clashed over Fonda’s “I know what it’s like to be dead” rumination, second-wave cool cats were sailing into the mystic like never before, and the almost revolutionary heterosexual activity wasn’t to be believed.
May ‘66 saw the release of Bob Dylan‘s Blonde On Blonde (and the coughing heat pipes in “Visions of Johanna”) and Brian Wilson‘s Pet Sounds, and three months later Revolver, the Beatles’ “acid album” which turned out to be their nerviest and most leap-forwardy, was released.
And the notorious Sunset Strip curfew riots (“For What It’s Worth”) began to happen in late fall of that year.
Film community-wise all kinds of mildly trippy, tingly and portentous things were popping all over in ‘66. Stanley Kubrick was neck-deep into the filming of the mystical, earthquake-level sci-fi classic 2001: A Space Odyssey. Warren Beatty and Arthur Penn were shooting the equally important Bonnie and Clyde, a zeitgeist page-turner if there ever was one.
But you’d never guess what was happening to go by the mood, tone and between-the-lines repartee during the 39th Oscar Awards, which honored the best films of 1966 but aired in April ’67, or roughly seven weeks before the release of Sgt. Pepper. Bob Hope‘s opening monologue is punishing, almost physically painful to endure. And look…there’s Ginger Rogers!
As a highly influential, world-renowned, Czech-born writer who moved to Paris in ’75, Kundera’s peak influence years were in the ’70s and especially the ’80s, which is when Philip Kaufman‘s The Unbearable Lightness of Being (’88) was released.
Having read and adored Kundera’s 1984 novel I was vaguely…actually more than vaguely disappointed with Kaufman’s film. There was so much more to the book than what Kaufman and co-scenarist Jean-Claude Carrière chose to focus upon. (I felt the same way about Kaufman’s The Right Stuff (’83) — Tom Wolfe’s 1979 book was ten times more interesting and engaging.)
The only thing I liked about Kaufman’s Unbearable Lightness were the performances by Daniel Day Lewis and the newly arrived Juliette Binoche, who was only 23 or 24 during filming.
I’ve always regarded Kundera’s prose style as immaculate and elegant. Pared to the bone, nothing extraneous or superfluous but with a certain oxygenated quality…a feeling of aliveness. In my estimation his writing has always existed in the same realm as Joseph Conrad‘s.
Along with Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, Jerzy Kosinski, Jim Harrison**, William Faulkner, Norman Mailer, William Safire and Russell Baker, Kundera has long been a major influence upon my own meager scrawlings.
Kundera was apparently a hound in his actual life (and so his semi-fictional characters followed suit), and I’m sorry but I really worshipped that special erotic current that sometimes permeated.
Kundera was something of a chauvinist, okay, but those sensual and sexual atmospheres were…I don’t know what to call them except cultured and tingly and fascinating on several levels. But it was all subordinate to those wonderfully honed sentences and that curiously magnetic sense of impermanence and vague anxiety and unsuppressible delight in the here-and-now.
I’ve just read a brief obit by The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Roxborough, an apparently obedient wokester who ends his article by noting that “Kundera’s depiction of personal, amoral behavior and sexual politics as a metaphor for the inherent absurdities of life in Czechoslovakia under communism drew widespread praise but also criticism, particularly from feminists who detected an inherent misogyny in his work.
“Kundera himself rarely gave interviews, and none of his books after ‘Unbearable Lightness’ achieved similar international success or acclaim.” Here’s the kicker: “[Kundera’s] final novel, perhaps fittingly titled ‘The Festival of Insignificance’, was published in 2015.”
As an occasional writer of none-too-flattering or too-honest obits, I was immediately disgusted by Roxborough’s final sentence.
Imagine Roxborough writing something similar if, God forbid, the great Clint Eastwood were to pass tomorrow — “None of Eastwood’s films over the last 15 years achieved the success or acclaim that he managed during the ’90s and early aughts — Unforgiven, A Perfect World, The Bridges of Madison County, Million Dollar Baby, Gran Torino. He hasn’t been a director of serious consequence since the beginning of the Obama administration, and perhaps it’s fitting to acknowledge that.”
I don’t want to sound rash or overly condemning, but it seems to me that Roxborough is some kind of grovelling woke toady….”do you see who I am, #MeToo vanguard feminists? Do you see how I diminished Kundera-the-chauvinist in my final sentence? Do you guys approve of this? Do I get a gold star?”