And so it has happened to Hud, and to Hombre and Harper and Harry and The Hustler and Hudsucker and Doc Hudson, to Butch and Brick and Billy the Kid and and Buffalo Bill and Judge Roy Bean and Mr. Bridge, to Harry Frigg and Henry Gondorff and Max Roby and, yes, even to Henry Wiggen of the New York Mammoths.
We will miss you.
Recently a colleague and I were discussing the phenomenon of finding something at the top of your Netflix queue and having no recollection of having put it in the queue, or or why you would have. But she was talking about Moonstruck, which she had just seen for the first time and was still wondering why she'd bothered.
Well, golly!
She is young, but she has never shown any signs before of deficiency in intelligence or taste. I was so stunned I didn't even have a chance to question her about it--or to do much but stammer in confusion. So I can only chalk it up to aberration. 'Cause really: has there been, in the past half-century, in the past sixty years, even, a better romantic comedy--more beautifully written, with more good actors giving career-best performances, with better contributions of mood from location and interior looks? Not to mention the dogs! And the Darryl Strawberry poster in the bar! Damn near perfect--I don't even mind listening to Dean Martin and Vicki Carr a little!
And now, I just heard the news: join me in raising a glass to Paul Newman.
A perverse provocation from Pier Paolo Pasolini, working from a model provided by the original sadist. Sadism + pederasty + coprophilia + coprophagy + some more sadism + oh, what the heck: some more sadism, to a murderous degree = Fascism. Clearly supposed to be damned near unwatchable, and it is. Oddly, the copy Netflix sent me seems to have included several interludes of baseball (also sadistic, or, from my perspective, masochistic) and a long stretch of debate between the world's oldest white man and a much younger, much less white man, moderated by an old-but-not-as-old white man trying in vain to get the other two to answer his questions. If anything, these interruptions put me more in a frame of mind to deal with the film's grotesqueries.
No, wait: a succession of relief pitchers walk in from the Mets bullpen and, as a group, perform a succession of metaphorically scatological and obscene acts . . .
Yes, it's true: for the second straight Sunday night, I selected my evening's entertainment as a way of finding consolation for baseball disappointment. This time, just flat-out laughter was the prescription. And it worked, mostly, though as you might guess, my fourth viewing in the slightly more than three years since its release produced the least laughter so far. This time, the only tellings of the joke itself that convulsed me were the ones most relying on something other than language--the card-trick version, e.g., the mime. The most outrageous of the others--Bob Sagat's, Gilbert Gottfried's--barely got a laugh. (And for the record, I've always thought Gottfried's shtick at the table early in the film is funnier than his much ballyhooed Friars Roast performance.) Still, this film at its least effective still makes me laugh more than . . . well, than any comedy I've seen in a theater this year, I'm sure. And I still have the extras to work out to.
Must have seemed like a good idea to add William Holden to the John Ford-John Wayne-cavalry formula, but Holden has never looked so uncomfortable; it's no surprise that Ford never worked with him again.
In a story based on an actual Civil War campaign, the Duke is a colonel assigned by Grant and Sherman to march through Mississippi on a suicide mission and destroy a rail junction crucial to the support of the Rebel forces defending Vicksburg. Holden is . . . well, Hawkeye Pierce. And there's a woman--a proud, defiant, treacherous daughter of the Confederacy (Constance Towers, notable for a nuclear pout) who ultimately, of course, succumbs to the well-hidden charms of Colonel Marlowe (who--this is supposed to give his character depth, you see--builds railroads in real life and thus hates having to destroy one for war, and incidentally hates doctors because two killed his young wife with a wrong-headed operation).
One nice bit has boys in a southern military academy marching out against the Yankees in a desperate bid to buy time for Bedford Forrest's men to intercept the bluecoats (Marlowe's troops gallantly retreat to avoid having the slaughter the little fellas, and also to give them a taste of glorious victory), but mostly it just makes you feel bad for Ford and Wayne and especially Holden--or maybe especially for Althea Gibson, who plays Miss Hannah's slave and (of course) beloved friend and confidante. Gibson was one of the greatest athletes of the twentieth century, and in this, her only film role, she proved that she was every bit the thespian that Babe Ruth was.
Updated w/ JT's prevacation-hurried, bare-bones numbers.
Ah, Dave Kehr's seasonal preview blurbs in the Times--and this time I am able to find them online, which saves me a lot of work but presents me with an ethical dilemma. Now, granted, my reproducing Kehr's work in full on a blog viewed by maybe a half-dozen people, most of whom get the Times already, is not going to affect circulation. But I'm pretty prickly about copyright issues, being in a biz that rather depends on the copyright.
So while I'll gleefully copy & paste titles and include some cast & crew info (which is of course in the public domain), if you want to read Kehr's blurbs, you're gonna have to go to the Times site and deal with the ads there: they're divided by month, September, October, November, and December.
Looks like a fairly lackluster season, frankly. Where's all the Oscar® fodder? As with last time, I'm in red, Jennie Tonic (to come; check back later) in green.
Christ, all that will have opened by the time I get back. Very unlikely I'll get to more than 3 or 4 of those.
A slice of life, death, and puppy love in the Great White Francophone North. Jos, who seems at the start to be the focus of the story, instead simply puts it in motion with his seasonal job change, tiring of the local asbestos mine and heading to high ground and the lumber camps; when he tires of that and returns home, he closes the bittersweet narrative circle.
Jacques Gagnon and Lyne Champagne are heartbreakingly beautiful as the awkward, uncertain young not-quite-lovers Benoit and Carmen. This was essentially the entire film career for each,
which just goes to show you that Canada is a stranger place than we know.
I don't know, for some reason after the Mets bullpen failed to hold a late-inning lead for the 2nd straight day, somehow I needed to see a film whose mantra is Always Be Closing. Not as strong as I remembered, and certainly not cinematic, but it has the Mamet language and the testosteronic free-for-all among a great ballsy cast.
I remember now, the last time I watched this, several years ago, being surprised by how funny this film is--by how amazingly Brando in particular couples (you should pardon the expression) comedy with despair. It's almost as if his character were a Mets fan.
A young Catherine Breillat appears, along with her sister Marie-Hélène, as pop wedding-dress fitters (in a hilarious non-Brando scene between Maria Schneider and Jean-Pierre Léaud, the latter taking a break from his career as alter ego for Truffaut and Godard to play a callow guerrilla filmmaker work for Bertolucci).
A little stunner of a pic that I'd never heard of until recently, written and directed by John Sayles and starring Rosanna Arquette, well into her 20s (this is shortly after her breakthrough in The Executioner's Song) but pitch perfect as a high school senior good girl in middle-class Jersey who wants to go to Sarah Lawrence and be an actor, but who runs into the bad boy she didn't realize she'd been waiting for. (She's equally on target as the much changed college freshman Jill; it's like two related but distinct roles--as was true for many of us making that transition, of course.)
It's sometimes excruciating (not for the weak at heart: Jill getting progressively drunker at a bar; Vincent Spano's Sheik lip-synching to Sinatra at a Miami lounge), almost always genuine. I could do without the final scene, which strikes the one big false note, and as much as I like Springsteen, Jersey or not, his songs don't really belong even as background to a film set in 1967.
If you watch it, keep an eye out for Robert Downey Jr. as Stewart; don't be noticing his name in the end credits like I did and then trying to find him on the DVD, 'cause at that point you're not going to remember any character named Stewart. Poignant moment at the very end of the credits: a dedication "To Dominique," obviously the recently murdered daughter of Griffin Dunne, one of the producers of the film.
Inevitably, films--particularly action suspensers--set largely on trains must confront the straight-as-rails metaphor: does it present surprising twists, or are you in the observation car, seeing everything coming from miles away? (Yeah, I know: few observation cars are elevated and forward-facing, but you get the idea.)
Well, Connecticut filmmaker (I love saying that) Brad Anderson, in only his fourth feature in the decade since the enchanting Next Stop Wonderland (and the first one anybody will see: combined U.S. box office, per IMDb, for Happy Accidents [2001], Session 9 [2001], and The Machinist [2004]: $2,145,192), has in the first two acts engineered (sorry) a few switches from the main line worthy of Hitchcock: you think you know what has happened to Roy (Woody Harrelson), but you don't; you think you know what's coming when Jessie (Emily Mortimer) and Carlos (Eduardo Noriega) traipse off into the country together, but you're in for at least one surprise, probably two.
Unfortunately, come act III, the only stunner remaining is how squirmy the torture scene is going to be. Yeesh! Even down the stretch, Mortimer is excellent as the former bad girl reminded what it was she didn't like about the dangerous life, and as a corrupt Russian narc, the suddenly omnipresent Ben Kingsley is, well, Ben Kingsley. Harrelson, on the other hand, is a lot more persuasive as a pornographer or a psychotic than as an Iowa hardware store owner.
OK, it's unfair to compare any other band with the Stones or any other concert film to a Stones concert film, but I think maybe we can declare a general principle here: if you're good enough, and if you stay fit enough, and if your shtick is fun--rockfun, sexful, prancefun, poutfun--then maybe you can still do it in your sixties and not just look like posturing old farts. But if your shtick is anger--well, there's a reason why "angry old man" was never a familiar phrase. Then again, I guess until The Decline of Western Civilization finally comes out on DVD, your options for seeing these guys are this and a lounge-lizard version of "When the Shit Hits the Fan" in Repo Man.
