In The Company Of Glenn

London Film Festival: 'Lions For Lambs'

Matt Mueller reports:

I don’t think Tom Cruise hung around long enough to read the less-than-gushing reviews that greeted Lions For Lambs after its London Film Fest premiere. Tom showed up for his now-customary fan-meet-and-greet in London’s Leicester Square prior to the screening (he spends up to two hours on these walkabouts, leaving us groaning ticket-holders nursing sore bums waiting for him to quit pressing flesh). Anyway, back to those reviews… Time Out called Lambs “Politics For Dummys” and even The Times, which sponsored the world-premiere gala, said, “You can’t fault the anger, but the drama glows as brightly as a five-watt bulb.”

Hate to say it, but they’re both right.

Adieu, Bob

The late Robert Goulet represented the kind of entertainment my people—Irish and Italian North Jerseyites of a certain age—most enjoyed. Here he is enjoying his finest cinematic hour for my money (you, on the other hand, might have preferred him in Beetlejuice), in Malle's Atlantic City.

Talk about "his hair was perfect."

Alex Witchel's nasty 1993 New York Times Magazine piece on the man contains this fascinating bit:

I was once in the Ritz-Carlton in New York," [Goulet] says, "which has a very small lobby, and a man brushed past me and it was Arnold Schwarzenegger. I'm smoking a cigar and so is he and I say, 'Hello, I'm Robert Goulet, I'm an entertainer and I want to congratulate you on your success.' And he ignores that and points at my cigar and wants to know what kind it is. And I tell him it is called La Gloria Cubana and he holds up his, which is a Davidoff, and says, 'Mine is a Cadillac to your Volkswagen.' And walks away."

D'oh! How did John Connolly and I forgot to put that in Premiere's 2001 article "Arnold the Barbarian"?...

Spatial relations in Bava

Just give Mario a camera, Elke Sommer, and some Barcelona alleys, and he'll create nifty compositions all day...

Halloween greetings

"Fire...

...walk...

...with...

London Film Festival: 'Funny Games U.S.'

My old friend and colleague Matt Mueller, former editor of Premiere U.K., will be sending observations on the London Film Festival. Here's his first.

For festival acolytes, that unrelenting dash between Edinburgh, Venice and Toronto, with pit-stops in San Sebastian, Deauville and now Rome along the way, means that by the time the circus gets off in London, there really ain’t much to see that’s new, or hasn’t already been forensically dissected by every critic in the blogosphere. Still, London-Towners have been treated to a couple of high-profile unveilings in the festival’s first week. First up was Michael Haneke’s remake of his own 1997 Austrian chiller Funny Games – which he’s transplanted wholesale to America and retitled, appropriately enough, Funny Games U.S.

A squeaky-clean (not for long) Michael Pitt in Haneke's Americanization of Games

The thoroughly mature art of film criticism, take two (Updated, with pertinent illustrations.)

Note: This is a reconstruction of a post I put up last night and took down this morning after considering how much I didn't want to get into any pissing contests this week. Alas, it had already been noticed by the stalwart S.T. Van Airsdale at The Reeler, and I have been duly chided by him for folding. I see that Stu actually quotes one of the passages I might have thought better of including had I felt like being nice. Oh well. Fug it. Thanks a pantload, Stu; let the micturition fly where it may.

If, like me, you fondly recall Rex Reed's review of Don't Look Now for The New York Daily News (not available online,alas)—the one in which he expressed his disgust for the Julie Christie/Donald Sutherland sex scene by protesting "Put it on! Put it on!" (their clothing, that is)—you'll be delighted to learn that just the same caliber of movie writing flourishes today, as witness these passages from notices on Sidney Lumet's Before the Devil Knows You're Dead:

It's tough for a movie that starts out with a doggy-style sex scene in Rio to maintain momentum, and "Before the Devil" isn't nearly as carefully sculpted as Tomei (she's 42!)—Matt Pais, Metromix

Before the Devil [...] opens with an explicit sex scene between Marisa Tomei and Philip Seymour Hoffman, who does not (as he’d be the first to admit) have a body for soft-core but whose naked passion shows us a side of the character we wouldn’t see otherwise. (For the record, Marisa Tomei does have a body for soft-core.)—David Edelstein, New York

Hoffman is possibly the best American actor working today, capable of playing comedy or drama, gay or straight, meek or menacing, all with equal authority. He is a genius. But no one wants to see him naked. (Tomei, on the other hand, looks great, which may be why she’s as conspicuously unclothed as Brigitte Bardot in Contempt.) —Lawrence Levi, Stop Smiling

I have to give the reliably smarmy Levi some bonus points for the putatively high-minded Contempt reference, which will by recognized by anybody who's seen both films as an absolute non-sequitor. Nice!

The Monday Morning Foreign Region DVD Report...

...is off this week. Due to undue mental and spiritual distraction. I'd tell you more, but My Lovely Wife keeps insisting, "You're above that." I'm not, but I'd like for her to continue believing it...

In the meantime, I'm finding this one never gets old:

A Halloween query.

"You wanna date? You going out?"

Is Patty Mullen's turn in Frank Henenlotter's 1990 Frankenhooker the best film performance by a one-time Penthouse Pet ever? Or are there some Priscilla Barnes loyalists out there who wanna weigh in?

Eternal Returns #9

Scorpio Rising, Kenneth Anger, 1964

2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick, 1968

Heavily accented eyebrows in cinema, late '60s—early '70s

Visual notes for a study in progress...

Erica Gavin, Vixen, Russ Meyer, 1968

Edwige Fenech, Five Dolls for an August Moon, Mario Bava, 1970