“Coyness is nice,
and coyness can stop you
From doing all the things in life that you want to,
So if there’s something you’d like to try…
Ask me, I won’t say no, how could I?
Because if it’s not love,
then it’s the bomb that will bring us together.”
– “Ask” by Morrissey & The Smiths
[cont’d]
To paraphrase Tarantino, a movie that successfully uses a piece of music, owns that music. Likewise, 1981’s docudrama “Mommie Dearest” (or MD) belongs to its lead actress, Faye Dunaway.
Audiences are fickle. As a broad example (pun not intended), Sydney Sweeney is objectively attractive, but sometimes we need to be reminded that her place in history – as a babe – will only occupy a small space: one inhabited by the ghosts of celebrity babes past, like Farrah Fawcett or Marilyn Monroe.
Same goes for legendary performances: they only become discourse if viewers put the proverbial poster on their wall. As much as I admire Dunaway, there’s only a handful of movies out of her six-decade career I can definitively name – most from one era.
[cont’d]
There are few things more comforting to a cinephile than Robert De Niro calling someone an expletive & unloading an entire pistol clip into them.
It’s unwholesome, but this has been his playground for decades. The Alto Knights is an impassioned throwback to the Scorsese/De Niro collaborations of old, but lacks the oomph of those masterpieces.
GQ’s 2006 interview with Bob is required reading for anyone wanting an encapsulation of the stubborn actor. I’m not here to rag on De Niro: he’s had many legendary performances over his long career. But like any artist (*cough* senior), he’s set in his ways, rejects change, and becomes crotchety when he feels disrespected.
Now an octogenarian, Bob can’t just go back & retroactively change his De Niro-isms, no matter how much digital technology de-ages him (like in Scorsese’s The Irishman). Now forced into ‘grandpa’ roles that he may or may-not feel are beneath him (being a new dad at 81 certainly increases that obligation), audiences know exactly what to expect.
[cont’d]
The following post contains language
that could be triggering.
If one tries to explain why they consider the ‘fall of the Roman Empire’ docudrama Caligula great, civilians won’t get it.
Then you show it to them, and not only will they still not get it, they are unlikely to speak with you again. Caligula is an ugly movie, in technique; aesthetic; and content combined (this is the Theatrical Version I’m talking about, presently).
[cont’d]
Let me set the scene: you’ve had a shitty week and you want to escape. You haven’t seen a movie in theaters for a while and the January “dumping ground” of unmarketable trash is overflowing with sub-tier titles to get your tiddies hard from the thought of the camp value. You convince your wife to go with you to a double-feature (but nothing subtitled, so you still haven’t seen Parasite). What do double-features in my family mean to me? It means sneaking-in from one movie to another. It doesn’t mean LEAVING THE THEATER to re-up only to have to come back in and pay for the second ticket. You need to be prepared: bring edibles; make sure you’ve gone to the bathroom; and go on a day when the ticket-taker wicket isn’t set up at the West Wing entrance where your two movies are going to be (the apps let you check your theater number now too). We had it all worked out: Ford v Ferrari was at 12:15 and ended at 15:00; Dolittle started at 15:00; and the theaters were side-by-side. Dolittle is really what we wanted to see but the timing wasn’t working: sometimes the second movie starts right away, and sometimes the gap between them is too long. This sounded like it would have worked like a dream. THANKS GOD. And then I had to piss. And Ford v Ferrari is not a short movie. A good movie, but not short. So I held my pee. And what happens as I leave the theater? They have the wicket set up at the end of the hallway, AFTER the men’s bathroom. Granted it was “Cheap Tuesday” but usually they have the L-shaped divider set up and it wasn’t there this time. The women’s bathroom doesn’t have any security: it’s halfway down the hall. And the East Wing of the theater doesn’t have the wicket set up after the bathroom! So I had two choices: either pee into my water bottle that I sneaked McDonald’s ice tea into and try to remember not to drink from it for the next two-hour movie (because we couldn’t get any snacks from concession either because of where it was located; that’s why my wife brought her purse the size of a knapsack) or pee like a normal person and skip the second movie. So we skipped the second movie.
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