Disqus - Latest Comments for danleo

Re: O Youth and Beauty

danleo — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 23:13:47 -0000

Apparently John O'Hara was a pretty nasty piece of work himself, but I recently read his "Pal Joey" stories and quite enjoyed them in all their consummate nastiness, and in fact was impressed that the New Yorker published such nasty stories in the Ross era. But the thought of going back and re-reading all those Cheever stories -- I dunno, maybe someday...It's been a long time since I read him, but back when I did he kept annoying the hell out of me. It's like he was always bending over backwards trying to infuse beauty into what was basically dull.

Re: Newman’s Own

danleo — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 16:41:58 -0000

Love those dark side movies he did. The Verdict. Hombre. Hustler. And my favorite: Hud.

Re: Wednesday Night at the Movies: Sweet Smell of Success Open Thread

danleo — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 15:50:42 -0000

I'm drawing a blank on any other B&W epics since Schindler, or even between Longest Day and Schindler's List.

Re: Wednesday Night at the Movies: Sweet Smell of Success Open Thread

danleo — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 19:58:18 -0000

Great comments, Henry. One of the reasons that I'm so fond of the decade following Sweet Smell is that this was the last era when film-makers could reasonably be able to make movies in black-and-white because they knew that black-and-white was best for the material:

Besides Wilder's and Frankenheimer's B&W work from that tiime, just off the top of my head: Hud. The Hustler. Dr. Strangelove. Lolita. Hell Is For Heroes. Night of the Iguana. King Rat. A Hard Day's Night. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner. Darling. The Knack. A Taste of Honey. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. Bergman's movies, and Godard's and Truffaut's early movies. I Vitelloni, La Dolce Vita, 8 & 1/2. Rocco and His Brothers. Le Doulos. Not to mention Faster Pussycat, Kill! Kill!...and on and on. God movies suck nowadays...

Re: Wednesday Night at the Movies: Sweet Smell of Success Open Thread

danleo — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 22:49:05 -0000

Excellent opening essay, dear Siren.

To me this movie is Tony Curtis's masterpiece. I just find his performance perfect, and, yes, sympathetic -- but maybe that says something about me. After I had seen this movie a lot of times I read an interview with Curtis (I had never really read much about him before), and I saw how vulnerable he is and was, how insecure he was as a young man. Whatever, he played this part brilliantly. I was trying to think of how other, more vaunted actors would have fared in the part, Brando or (my favorite film actor) Montgomery Clift. Those men would have been great in the piece, but I don't know if they would have been better.

The one thing I don't like about this movie? (And it's one of my all-time faves.) The two-young-lovers plotline. These two are just two fucking nice for my money. What the hell, if the movie was going to bomb anyway, couldn't they at least have shown Marty Milner smoking a joint? I mean, come on, the dude was a jazz musician.

A re-make would undoubtedly suck, but if the Coen Brothers (the obvious choice) did re-make it I vote for making the young couple kinda fucked up too. (Clooney as J.J. and, uh, Brad Pitt as Sidney?)

Re: Californication: Or, Mulder Does the Wild Thing (a lot)

danleo — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 15:09:56 -0000

Hey, Kyle, I haven't seen a single episode since the premiere. I'll have to check out the first season on DVD and see if I agree with you. By the way, I'm totally with you about reality shows. Just can't watch 'em. But now I've discovered Hulu and its dozens of old Alfred Hitchcock shows: bliss.

Re: Imitation of Life

danleo — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 16:41:30 -0000

And what about that great title sequence and song?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGZ7NJ2rgyM

Re: Project Runway Live-Blogging on Life Support

danleo — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 18:59:18 -0000

I feel your pain, Jen. When a TV show is good it can always get better. But it seems like once a show starts to go bad it just never gets better. Kinda like human relationships.

Re: “I Ain’t Gonna Eat Out My Heart Any More”; or, Two Old Farts Sitting Around Commenting

danleo — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 23:44:12 -0000

Damn, we left out James Brown and Cat Stevens? But of course this could go on forever. We haven't even mentioned Sky Saxon of the Seeds, for Christ's sake.

Re: “I Ain’t Gonna Eat Out My Heart Any More”; or, Two Old Farts Sitting Around Commenting

danleo — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 18:30:07 -0000

Kathleen, someday I'll learn how to embed video clips in my Newcritics pieces, and then we'll really be in trouble.

Re: Squeaking and sqawking with the animals

danleo — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 00:10:41 -0000

Picking up on one the the off-topic subjects, namely the magnificent Oliver Reed, I was remembering a notorious appearance of his on Johnny Carson, and damn if I didn't find it on Youtube:

Enjoy.

I love Youtube.

Re: George Carlin Was A Liberal

danleo — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 22:01:28 -0000

You gotta love a guy who made his living telling Americans how stupid we are.

One thing's for sure, he was never going to run out of material.

Re: On the symbolic nature of a broken air conditioner: In The Heat Of The Night and the rise of the New South

danleo — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 16:31:04 -0000

Ah, thanks, Lance. I'm honored. Maybe after this current series.
Maybe some of these cool downbeat, black-and-white 60s movies, like
Hud, the Hustler, or King Rat. Or it might be fun to take as a theme
a great actor or actress: like, say, the first four or five films of
a Montgomery Clift, or Brando, or the three James Dean movies. I
recently watched Red River for the first time in a long time, and
Clift was so good in that, his first movie. Or you could do a series
on Howard Hawks, or Godard, or Fellini, or Jean-Pierre Melville...As
long as it's not, like, the films of Michael Bay.

Re: On the symbolic nature of a broken air conditioner: In The Heat Of The Night and the rise of the New South

danleo — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 18:49:34 -0000

Tom, in reply to your most recent comment: I wish I had the time right now to really let loose with a good long post on The Wild Bunch. As I said before somewhere up above, to me it's not a perfect movie, but it has, to my mind, at least six or seven scenes that are great, which is three or four scenes more than what Howard Hawks said you had to have to make a good movie.

To me the 60s were a real golden age of movie-making, but a lot of my favorites didn't make much of an impact at the Oscars. You had the tail-end of studio-system big-budget over-lit Hollywood studio fim-making, but you had the French New wave, the real heyday of Italian film-making (Fellini, Antonioni, Visconti, Germi, et al), the one-man genre known as Bergman, an onslaught of great British films (Richardson, Reisz, Anderson, Schlesinger, Richard Lester (from Philadelphia originally), Bryan Forbes; and in America the last years when film makers could make movies in black-and-white just because they knew the material (usually adult drama) would be better in black-and-white (Hud, the Hustler, In Cold Blood, etc.). And the 60s were also so rich in the sort of demotic "outsider' film-making that I love: the biker and horror and LSD movies from the Roger Corman factory, all those dozens of fabulous spaghetti westerns, all the great trashy James Bond rip-offs (not to mention the trashy great Bond films themselves), the bizarre yakuza movies of Suzuki, all the classic Zatoichi The Blind Swordsman movies. What a decade of riches. The year we've been discussing in this series was definitely a sort of watershed year, at least for mainstream American film-making, but there was already this great movement in cinema going on worldwide. A movement now sadly dead and gone.

Re: On the symbolic nature of a broken air conditioner: In The Heat Of The Night and the rise of the New South

danleo — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 17:22:06 -0000

I love going off topic like this, and so did Holden Caulfield. I love
how the lines in The Wild Bunch are so sparse, but they feel etched
in stone.

"You're not gettin' rid of anybody. We're gonna stick together, just
like it used to be. When you side with a man you stay with him, and
if you can't do that you're like some animal. You're finished. We're
all finished. All of us. Mount up."

Beautiful.

I wish we could discuss The Wild Bunch or In Cold Blood or even The
Professionals, or the Hustler or The Cincinnati Kid, or King Rat, or
the Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner instead of Guess Who's
Coming to Dinner or, uh, Dr Dolittle.

Re: On the symbolic nature of a broken air conditioner: In The Heat Of The Night and the rise of the New South

danleo — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 06:11:03 -0000

Henry, I'm so with you. Another crappy thing about contemporary epic
scenes is they always go for the goddam CGI. Enough with that crap. I
get it already, you can make anything happen, you can make ten
thousand Mexican horsemen ride over that hill, but y'know what? For a
lot less money and time you could hire a hundred extras and horses
and make it real instead.

Oh, right, and the expression on Holden's face as he gets dressed in
the brothel, as he's making his decision to go back after Angel. The
prostitutes. And, yeah, Oates's face after Holden's "Let's go."

"Why not?"

His last line in the movie. The Wild Bunch isn't a perfect movie, but
that scene is perfect. They just don't make 'em like that any more.

Another guy who was in line for Pike Bishop was Lee Marvin. He
would've been great too, but Holden was perfection in that role.

Re: On the symbolic nature of a broken air conditioner: In The Heat Of The Night and the rise of the New South

danleo — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 23:39:40 -0000

They should've brought in Tennessee Williams to do that final rewrite.

Nighty night, guys! ( I'll check in tomorrow.)

Re: On the symbolic nature of a broken air conditioner: In The Heat Of The Night and the rise of the New South

danleo — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 23:37:13 -0000

Hey, ya know what, maybe the film-makers really did know about the cop/race thing in Philly, and one reason they made that choice was just because Tibbs would have had to be one extremely tough guy to make detective in this town at that time. On Rizzo's force he would have had to be four times as good as anyone else on his squad just to hold his own. The man should have been a nervous wreck.

Re: On the symbolic nature of a broken air conditioner: In The Heat Of The Night and the rise of the New South

danleo — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 23:26:54 -0000

There was just something about the way Dundee wrapped up that didn't quite work. It was another one of those movies that went into production without a finished script. And that sort of thing never fails to amaze me. I remember the late great Sidney Pollack saying that he had never once gone into production with a finished script. There's something very weird about Hollywood.

But then again, the final river-fight sequence in Dundee -- these wide shots with all these goddam riders coming off the far hilltop -- briilliant movie-making. And Charlton Heston rocked in that movie too. Heston was one of Peckinpah's short-listed actors for Pike Bishop in the Wild Bunch, and as great as William Holden was in that, I wonder how Heston would have fared? Just being Heston he might have added this whole scary dimension to the part.

Re: On the symbolic nature of a broken air conditioner: In The Heat Of The Night and the rise of the New South

danleo — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 22:58:07 -0000

Y'know, Gerard, one of the things I love about certain actors is how
they can bring these epiphanies of brilliance to movies that aren't
completely good, or in the case of Garcia, understandably not to
everyone's taste. E.g., nearly every movie buff justifiably looks on
Major Dundee as a flawed movie, but Oates's death scene is a classic
-- we must give Peckinpah primary credit for that scene too of
course, but, man, if the rest of the movie had been up to that level,
it would be a masterpiece.

Re: On the symbolic nature of a broken air conditioner: In The Heat Of The Night and the rise of the New South

danleo — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 22:45:50 -0000

By the way, I wonder if the film-makers knew how rough it would have been for Tibbs to make it to detective in Philly at that time? maybe not impossible, but very very rough. This was the era of Frank Rizzo ("I'm gonna make Attila the Hun look like a faggot") as police commissioner, and trust me, black people in this town did not think of the police as being black-friendly.

Re: On the symbolic nature of a broken air conditioner: In The Heat Of The Night and the rise of the New South

danleo — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 22:40:07 -0000

Yeah, he was so good. Died way too young, too.

Re: On the symbolic nature of a broken air conditioner: In The Heat Of The Night and the rise of the New South

danleo — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 22:36:49 -0000

I just checked, and, yep, our man Scott Wilson's still around. Damn he was good in In Cold Blood too, although I have never ever and never will be able to watch the murder scenes in that movie again. To this day I find them more horrifying than anything else I've ever seen in a movie. Maybe it's because not only are the victims human, but the actors play the killers as human.

Re: On the symbolic nature of a broken air conditioner: In The Heat Of The Night and the rise of the New South

danleo — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 22:26:30 -0000

Hey, Ivan, our thoughts crossed each other in transmission. And, yes, Scott Wilson -- what a pro. And last I noticed, he's still around.

Re: On the symbolic nature of a broken air conditioner: In The Heat Of The Night and the rise of the New South

danleo — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 22:23:37 -0000

Hey, guys sorry I’m late. But here’s a topic: was there ever a more unique and irreplaceable character actor than Warren Oates?

IMDB quotes an exchange from Heat of the Night that somehow encapsulates his career:

Ofcr. Sam Wood: Where you keeping the pie tonight?
Ralph Henshaw, diner counterman: I ate the last piece just before you came in.

Nobody played one of life’s eternal losers better than Warren Oates.

Anyone remember his death scene from Major Dundee? He knows he’s going to get shot for desertion, and he accepts his fate. He squints up at the bright sky, at the world, for one last time. He tells Charlton Heston’s Dundee that Dundee’s just doing what he has to do, but he curses him anyway, and God-blesses Robert E. Lee. Then to spare him the firing squad his former commanding officer, Richard Harris’s Tyreen, draws his gun and shoots him dead. Brilliant.

And what a brilliant if brief career as a leading man. Nobody else could have come close to what he did in Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. This is probably one of my personal top ten movie performances by a male actor. He just dives into the heart of darkness, and he never comes out.