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Guy Pearce has some staying power for sure...Memento and LA Confidential are still his calling cards I'd say, but he's been good in a range of other things and The Brutalist looks like another big role for him.
Dude has great taste in and success with women too: he has kids with a Dutch actress Carice van Houten who was Melisandre on Game of Thrones, excellent as the lead in a great Verhoeven movie called Black Books, and generally is a classy, intelligent beauty.
<blockquote>I always thought that Belmondo had that Steve McQueen thing going -- rugged AND cute, in the same face.</blockquote>Belmondo was also the Tom Cruise of his day because he made a public point of doing all his own stunts. I recently watched one of his OK '70s cop movies, Fear Over The City (1975), a.k.a. The Night Caller and his stunting is *insane* - so much stuff up on rooftops and ledges and on top of trains where it's clearly him....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bpi0t4UqRmI
<blockquote>Another thing about Cat Ballou: Lee Marvin played two roles -- good guy and bad guy,</blockquote>Brilliant performance and one of the best Oscar wins ever in my view - Marvin playing against type and in two roles, and hilarious.Great movie generally I think. Fonda sexy as hell, so many funny parts, great high-concept songs, great flash-backy structure. I adored it on Saturday-afternoon tv as a kid, and watching it again recently, it still works as an adult. I'm always heartened when I see Cat Ballou's influence on later movies. The Farrelly brothers leaned on it extensively for There's Something about Mary, and made bank, and Billy Crystal's City Slickers which also made bank, took a lot from it too. CB is a stonking good-time classic for me.
<blockquote>To which I add: "If you made a great movie that was only shown in one room to 100 people, should THAT be considered a success?"</blockquote>Relatedly. I read some articles recently talking about 'snubs' in various critical awards and the Golden Globes this year. One that stuck out to me was the suggestion Marianne Jean-Baptiste had been snubbed for Mike Leigh's Hard Truths (she got a supporting actress Oscar nom for Leigh's relatively big '90s hit Secrets and Lies). but then I checked out the facts - that Hard Truths has Had literally *no* official release in the US yet. I'm sorry but you can't be snubbed for anything if you haven't put yourself out there for actual judgement. Yes, very occasionally critics and other voters will pile in with support to hail a genuine obscurity but... no one has any entitlement to such extraordinary consideration, films become *entitled* to consideration only if they take the actual risk of paying for a release, even a very limited one in LA and NYC (as The Brutalist has done). I'm prepared to believe that Hard Truths is one of the best films of the year, but you do have to *actually* release it to really count as being from any particular year!
A Jan 3 update on how all the recently-released (and other) Oscar hopefuls are doing box office-wise:
https://www.boxofficemojo.com/date/2025-01-03/?ref_=bo_hm_rd
A Complete Unknown has been a bit of a disappointment so far. It opened on Xmas Day on 2800 screens and has never been above 4th and has mostly been 6th in daily grosses, raking in $36 million by Jan 3. Nosferatu with the same release frame and pattern has grossed $60 million. I would have predicted the reverse grosses for those two... and, really, the slow response to ACU makes me question Chalamet's star power, which I'd thought was solidifying.
The Brutalist and Nickel Boys are still in very limited release (8 and 18 screens max so far respectively for 15 and 22 days). Both have strong per screen daily averages but their overall grosses are still minimal with The Brutalist grossing $1 mill and Nickel boys only $300K.
Anora which opened back in October (and did ultimately go wide-ish to over a thousand screens) is doing very little business now and appears to be on track to make around $15 million domestic.
Sing Sing which opened in limited release back in July has grossed $2 mill so far, but appears to have been slotted in for a wide release on Jan 17 to take advantage of Awards season.
The Subtance got a wide release in September but has topped out at about $16 mill.
Last Summer, Green Border, Hard Truths have barely had US releases. And Emilia Perez has been Netflix only in the US.
Sheesh, what a motley crew.
Mikey Madison makes a sure-footed appearance in the Criterion Closet:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AUc5BfebCM
Good move.
Another couple of important 1965 releases didn't reach the US until deep into 1966 or even 1967: The Naked Prey and A Few Dollars More. In general I'd point to both of these as part of a growing drive-in, exploitation-cinema market that allowed for sleeper hits to grow and grow. These films made so much money in the US across 1966 and 1967 that studios would have to pay attention both in terms of putting in their own money (United Artists paid for much of The Good the Bad and the Ugly and you can see that money on-screen!) and in terms of which projects of their own they'd develop. A lot of the wild stuff being produced by studios from 1967 onwards has its origins around 1965-1966 when it's clear that kids are digging on Leone and Morricone and even Cornel Wilde for Pete's sake, not to mention Corman's various efforts for the time. At the same time as the big hits were bigger than ever, the times were a-changin' under the surface in the world of drive-in-circuit sleeper hits.
Looked at historically, 1965 is marked by three movies making more money than God: Sound (saving Fox), Zhivago (saving MGM), and Thunderball. Adjusted for inflation Thunderball makes $1.3 Billion., and Zhivago and Sound amke $2+ and $3+Billion respectively - I don't think Hollywood's ever had a year like it.
And these films had reverberations. Julie Christie was the breakout star of Zhivago but she won the Best Actress Oscar for Darling, an artsy, elliptical, swinging London critical fave. One of the best years for any actress ever. Connery is obviously the star of Thunderball - the biggest Bond ever to this day... but he also had a great f-bomb-using artsy desert-prison-drama, The Hill that year for Lumet. So two of the biggest stars of the year had one foot in artsy, cutting edge cinema. And dark mirrors of Bond came thick and fast: Ipcress and Spy who Came in from Cold.
To balance out the broad comedy of The Great Race and Cat Ballou, Hollywood also had some artsy satire going on with things like The Loved One (with a young Robert Morse). It wasn't a hit but it pointed the way to things like The Graduate a few years later.
Polanski got his first hit with Repulsion. Next stop, Hollywood.
In France, peak Godard arrived with Alphaville and especially Pierrot le fou. The latter put together Godard's Breathless star, Belmondo, with his muse and then recently ex-wife, Anna Karina for the first and only time. After this Godard would lose touch with the French star system, become much more political and obsessively intellectual and lose most of his mass audience for good. Pierrot le fou is ultra-smart-alecky and snotty (and bitter because it's clear that Godard is in part using the film outrageously to restage his breakup with Karina) but also ingenious and fun and beautiful/starry. An increasingly sour Godard wouldn't allow himself or his audience that much cinematic pleasure ever again.
In Italy, Fellini showed exactly where he was going after the triumph of 81/2 with Juliet of the Spirits. Fantastical surrealism full steam ahead. Italian realism showed life with the heartbreaking I Knew her Well.
Film was alive in '65 for sure.
<blockquote>Hey, wait a second there, swanstep -- you have SEEN a/the script?</blockquote>Two scripts are floating around online if you do the obvious google-search. One is called a Final Draft and is credited to just Peter Benchley and, for example, doesn't have the Indianapolis speech as we know it (which Milius provided IIRC) and lacks a lot of the dialogue refinement that we know and love. One is credited to Benchley and Carl Gottlieb and has the Indianapolis speech scene as we know it, and much more (but not all) of the final dialogue generally. The Fin-showing in the pot-roast fishermen scene is in both scripts and it's very extensively described - the fin's black and enormous and even 'seems to reach up to the sky' as the guy in the water looks back from his desperate efforts to climb out of the water.
The Benchley final draft is in a couple of places:
https://screencraft.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Jaws.pdf
and, a little tidied up,
https://indiegroundfilms.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/jaws-final-numbered.pdf
The Benchley&Gottlieb script is also in a couple of places:
https://thescriptlab.com/wp-content/uploads/scripts/jaws-1975.pdf
and
http://bythelens.org/screenplays/Jaws.pdf (where it sports an additional title 'Stillness in the Water')
Enjoy!
<blockquote>Funny: the 1965 HELP album was a split of songs(about half the album's running time) and the instrumental score from the movie.</blockquote>That was the US-only Capitol Records version of the album, everywhere else got 2 full sides of Beatles stuff including 'Yesterday' (a US #1 later), a song that Paul wrote on the piano as 'Scrambled Eggs' while they were making the movie (Paul tortured his bandmates with 'Does anyone know where this melody I heard in a dream is from?' and finished the lyrics for it only after the film wrapped so it doesn't appear in the film.)
Most people (including me) never actually heard the original US Help! album. It sounds quite cool actually - according to wiki about half the instrumentals are orchestral fantasias of earlier Beatles hits like 'Hard Days' Night' and 'From me to you'.
<blockquote>I still guess I'm more comfortable with Jaws in two parts:
Part One: The attacks on innocents near the beach.
Part Two: Men at sea.</blockquote>I agree that that is a very natural way to break down the film: there are, after all these significant shots and their associated musical cues *telling* us that we're going out to sea now and in a sense that a whole new movie is about to begin.
The first big significant shot is at the end of 'The pond' sequence - the camera just points out to sea (we have Brody's POV in this as it's his realization as much ours) through the breakwater (where the shark has just gone) as the music rises - that's where we're going. A bunch of short scenes follow at the hospital with the mayor, down on the docks joshing with Hooper and Quint, saying goodbye to the wife and then we get the second big significant shot, through the window framed by cleaned shark jaws we see the Orca steam out of the port and into open water. Here. We. Go. [This was all so satisfying in the 1975 theater as a kid - I remember thinking out loud "Wow" and internally "that's just masterful".]
All that said, the three act structure I find useful builds on Jaws' ingenious character structuring that Brody Hooper and Quint form this triangle where each pair has something in common (expertise [QH], class [BQ], age [HB]) that sets them against the other member of the triangle. Screenwriting perfection that streamlines the book considerably. Hooper has an affair with Brody's wife in the book!, whereas the the film's momentum between the male protagonists is always positive/building towards the team that'll solve the big problem they face.
Building on all that, we get the following character-driven structure:
Act 1: Brody [alone against the shark (and the town)]
Act 2: Brody and Hooper [work together (from after the Kitteridge Boy death to 4th July/The Pond)]
Act 3: Brody and Hooper and Quint [work together (Men at sea)]
I don't have anything to add about the 'Jaws Lie' you identify ecarle, but I too would like to know which specific additional shark shots were scripted/storyboarded/planned but (i) cancelled/not shot at all or (ii) shot but abandoned because 'too fake looking'/shark didn't work well enough'. My guess is that the general 'slow reveal' of the shark before the third act with our three protagonists together out on in Quint's boat was always intended (I remember the released script having a fin visible in the 'two guys fishing with a pot-roast off the dock sequence' whereas the shark is left completely invisible in the released cut - but a fin at night is still keeping most of the shark hidden), so the category (i) & (ii) shots will almost all be from that third act.
Relatedly, I had access to Disney+ for a few weeks and watched their doc. 'Music by John Williams'. It was excellent and full of reminders of his craft, how even his most well-known scores have their subtleties and are always somehow even better than you probably remember. Jaws ends very classily and Williams was a big part of that:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BCX1SbOvvk
<blockquote>I'm not sure that any of the end-of-year Oscar bait (Anora, Hard Truths, The Brutalist, A Complete Unknown, Sing Sing, Nosferatu, Last Summer, Green Border, and so on) is going to improve on them!</blockquote>The Brutalist is one I'm definitely looking forward to... I've been very intrigued by how it's possible to make a 3.5 hour, VistaVision epic without a large studio etc. backing it... The director (or his wife perhaps) simply had to be a big trust-fund kid I thought. While I'm sure that there's family support in the mix allowing for all the long lead-time, the following article from Slate clarified a lot for me.
https://bit.ly/3VNo2kn
So they prepped the film for seven years to within an inch of its life with various people attached at various times keeping the dream alive, but then finally shot for only 33 days. Total budget = $10 mill.. That's incredible. The power of a single-minded, sure-of-itself dream. Wow. Good for them!
Oh, btw, The Brutalist finally opened this weekend on 4 screens in NYC and L.A. (3 are 70mm projections and 1 of the L.A. screens is Imax) and made $250K for a good start. It will be fascinating to see how it goes from here.
<blockquote>Well, Ms. Madison has a "hook" for her film, following in an honored tradition among female and male stars(Richard Gere in American Gigolo.)</blockquote>I'm not sure myself whether Madison is going to get such a great boost from this film. The near-documentary style of the film together with the fact that it principally reads as yet another Sean Baker near-doc about people on the margins of society/usually with a gritty sex-work angle. None of the stars of Baker's previous films in this vein have gone on to big careers... rather it's Baker's own star that's gradually risen. The first film of his that I heard about and saw, Tangerine, was made for almost nothing and got press for being shot on Iphone 5s, and now, with Anora he's winning the Palme D'Or at Cannes! On one level, Madison does an amazing job in Anora, she just *is* a simple-minded stripper from a certain class, but that sort of performance is easy to kind of condescend to as someone playing themselves. I suspect that if Madison wants to get awards she needs to do lots of talk-shows immediately where she puts distance between herself and her character. There's something wrong with her character too - she doesn't change at all until almost the end of the film... and she ends up seeming a bit thick for not having reaching the obvious conclusion about her situation earlier. In general, for someone as street-tough as her to fall so completely for the trust-fund rich kid she marries is hard to swallow.
<blockquote>her role as a "sex worker"(the new and polite term that, while nice, confuses the issue as to whether the character is a stripper or a hooker or both)</blockquote>She's both in the film.... her main job is as an exotic dancer giving private shows in VIP rooms at a strip club but we learn right away that she bends the rules about what she's allowed to do in those rooms to get bigger tips and that, later, her and the other girls from the club are very comfortable doing actual hooker dates after the club finishes.
<blockquote>QT brought in "new hot stars" Austin Butler(as Tex Watson), Sydney Sweeney(as the Manson girl lookout up at the house) and now Mickey Madison.</blockquote>Don't forget QT also had The Substance's Margaret Qualley as his hitch-hiking Manson gal (whose feet were prominently featured).
If you're in the UK or Europe, Studio Canal's new restorations of all of Hitchcock's early films in one Blu-ray box-set make a good gift (even for oneself). This trailer for the package stunned me:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Np2osZonlRY
<blockquote>Coppola's two "male juvie delinquent movies." I read the reviews and for some reason I just didn't want to see those movies....They felt like Coppola was betraying his Godfather roots AND the epic scale of Apocalypse Now.</blockquote>Coppola's post-Apocalypse output is quite patchy and eccentric but Rumble Finish is possibly his best after 1980. It's very revealing in a way - it's *highly* influenced by Welles and Bergman and Godard and Pasolini and Antonioni and experimental US film like Maya Deren's more generally, and it's the prototype for the small, little seen films Coppola has made in the 21C like Youth after Youth and Twixt. It's funny, *both* Coppola and Lucas have at various points said that that all they *really* wanted to do was make small, film-schooly, euro-chic, experimental films, but only Coppola has actually lived out this aspiration starting with Rumble Fish, which remains his best effort in this direction.
<blockquote>I understand it only covers a certain time in his life. I do hope its the time that includes "The Times They Are a Changin'" and "Like a Rolling Stone."</blockquote>Yep, it covers from the moment Dylan first arrives in NYC (1961) to his 'going electric' moment at the Newport Folk Festival (1965) where he debuted 'Like a Rolling Stone'. That is, the whole almost mythological, almost incomprehensibly great part of Dylan's career.
<blockquote>OK...good recommendation. I expect that's where she was found for Twisters. They have been pushing the film's male star, Glenn Powell, superhard for stardom.</blockquote>LIke most people, I first saw Powell as the young-Tom-Cruisey 'Hangman' in Top Gun Maverick. He was definitely going to be given his shot as a leading man star after that... and so it has transpired..... it's now up to the public as to whether they really want him. Note that another Maverick supporting player who jumped out a bit - the cutie female pilot, Phoenix, played by Monica Barbaro - has a big supporting, semi-lead part as Joan Baez in A Complete Unknown and seems very likely to get an Oscar nom. This is great. Maverick was *such* a big cultural event - a movie almost everybody has ended up seeing. It's the sort of thing that should lift all boats, help seed extended careers in Hollywood and so it's proving.