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Category Archives: Movies
IMAGE
I find this image, from Wong Kar Wai’s latest film The Grandmaster, ravishing.
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IT’S THAT TIME OF YEAR
With thanks to Ron Salvatore . . .
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CLARA BOW
POOR BABY
On location in Canada for River Of No Return, where she sprained her ankle on a slippery rock in a stream.
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AUDREY
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A MOVIE POSTER FOR TODAY
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ESSENTIAL
The first of the Godfather films cost 6 million dollars and has to date grossed 133 million dollars, making it one of the most profitable films of all time. It was the highest-grossing film in its year of release and in adjusted dollars it’s among the top 25 highest grossing films in the history of movies.
Its sequel, The Godfather Part II, cost 13 million dollars and has to date grossed 57 million dollars. It was the fifth most successful film in its years of release. Not in the same box-office league as its predecessor, but it has still earned the studio which made it a clear profit of at least 13 million dollars on an investment of 13 million dollars. In most businesses, that would qualify as a killing.
The Godfather Part II is one of the greatest of all films. It is intelligent, impeccably crafted, visually stunning, profound in its insight into American culture — and wildly entertaining. The idea that an intelligent, impeccably crafted, profound, visually stunning film could be a high-grossing film today is an almost surreal fantasy. The film came out 40 years ago. 40 years is a long time, but it’s not that long a time.
What has happened to Hollywood, to our culture, in those four decades? Has there ever been a more complete and more catastrophic collapse of values, virtue and taste in the whole history of human civilization — apart from cultures ravaged by war or financial apocalypse?
This is a subject worthy of the most serious meditation.
Meanwhile, the Blu-ray edition of The Godfather Part II belongs in every civilized home.
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GIRL WITH LPs
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NASTASSJA
THE SHOES OF THE FISHERMAN
PZ offers some thoughts on Edward Snowden from a religious perspective:
‘Edward Snowden’ by Howard Terpning
Viewing the 1968 movie The Shoes of the Fisherman, which was based on a 1963 novel by Morris West, made me think of Edward Snowden. To my mind, Howard Terpning’s theatrical poster for that movie (above) of a good man dressed in formal whites, brings Snowden’s immortal sacrifice bunt into the world of popular art.
Why would I say this?
Well, the hero of The Shoes of the Fisherman, a Russian-born pope and former political prisoner named Kyril Lakota, is a real Christian! That sounds a little strange to me as I write it, but what the Pope in West’s novel and the movie does is so unexpected and counter-institutional that it could break the moral impasse of the world. (You’ve got to see this movie.)
The Pope suddenly starts to stand in the real shoes of the fisherman — the poor, broken and impetuous first head of the Church. In doing so, Kyril kicks the legs out from under the set table of international politics and self interest that permeates the world. This is what I believe Edward Snowden has done — the wonderful illegal sin he has committed. He has knocked the legs out from under a massive set table.
We talk sometimes about “speaking truth to power”. Religious people will speak of the “principalities and powers of this world”. But rarely does a religious person actually go there. What usually happens is that religion “strains out gnats and swallows camels” (Matthew 23:24). Which is to say, religion, in many forms, gets stuck on tertiary things — personal angers and giant nothings.
In Snowden I see a man who has touched a nerve. A really BIG nerve. I say this because a country like ours would not be straining so hard to get him, using client states to force down a president’s plane and threatening every airport and state — every Middlesex village and farm — before he has even taken a single footstep to freedom, if he had not touched a really big nerve.
What is this nerve? It is Power and Control, the truth about Power and Control.
Edward Snowden has embodied George Orwell’s maxim, “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
As a religious man, therefore — Snowden himself has said he is an agnostic –I can’t help putting together this operation of personal sacrifice, truth-telling, and hitting the world’s open secret of Power and Control. When I think of Edward Snowden, I can’t help thinking, of Kyril Lakota, and Howard Terpning’s picture.
WHY WE FIGHT
No comment required.
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SOON
If you let Obama destroy the Constitution you’ll regret it. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life.
SURROGATE COCK
It’s worth listening to Francis Ford Coppola’s commentary on the new Blu-ray edition of The Godfather just to get a sense of how vile studio executives were, even in the freewheeling, adventuresome atmosphere of Hollywood in the 1970s.
Robert Evans, celebrated by some as a “creative” producer, hated Coppola’s uniformly brilliant casting of The Godfather, hated Brando’s performance, hated the way Coppola was directing the film and came within inches of firing Coppola off the production three weeks into the 65-day shoot. Only a series of lucky circumstances saved Coppola’s job, including a timely Oscar for his script for Patton..
Evans had a studio stooge on the set at all times who tried to get Coppola to cut crucial scenes from the film before they were shot, and if Coppola refused, he would subtract days from the shooting schedule hoping that Coppola wouldn’t be able to complete the scenes in the time allotted. Coppola scrambled and somehow managed to get the scenes done anyway. At one point Evans threatened to assign Coppola a co-director to handle the action scenes — some of the best and most powerful action scenes in movie history.
When the film was finished, Evans told Coppola that if he didn’t deliver a cut that clocked in at less than two hours and fifteen minutes the film would be taken away from him. When Coppola delivered such a cut, by eviscerating his own two hour and forty-five minute cut, Evans had a fit, saying that Coppola had cut out all the best scenes and insisting that Coppola put them back. Then Evans took credit for creating the longer cut. Evans hated the Nino Rota score Coppola had commissioned and kept it only when Coppola insisted they preview the film with the score and see how an audience reacted. The audience loved the movie and the score.
In the end, it was Coppola who made Evans — a pea-brained little shit heel if there ever was one — look good, though Evans seems to have genuinely believed that he was the mastermind behind the film’s success. What Evans did was buy the rights to a novel he thought would make a nice little pot-boiler of a movie, which he intended to set in modern-day Kansas City. He hired a young director he thought could work fast to churn out the pot-boiler. When the book became a best-seller he allowed Coppola to retain the period setting and upped the budget enough to make this feasible, but just barely. Then he did everything in his power to wreck the great movie Coppola was quite clearly in the process of making. For this he thought he deserved respect? It’s sort of like an impotent bridegroom hiring a brilliant cocksman to fuck his wife on their wedding night and then trying to take credit for her orgasm.
To give the Devil his due, Evans had an instinct for spotting talented cocksmen and taking chances on them. His problem was that he mistook their dicks for his. His wife Ali MacGraw, who dumped him for Steve McQueen, didn’t suffer from the same misapprehension, at least not for long.
AN LP COVER FOR TODAY
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