Simon Boccanegra

I need to have the season behind me to see how it settles in my mind, but at times I'm finding it more elaborately and intricately plotted than actually funny. And I've found elaborate lies on Curb funnier in the past. For example, almost 20 years ago in "Chet's Shirt," Larry is at the dentist making an excuse for not accepting the dentist's dinner invitation. He says he spent the weekend at a "pear farm," and he keeps adding detail after detail until he gets tripped up. Then the dentist lowers the boom: a mutual acquaintance saw Larry in town, so the orchard lie was never selling even when it appeared to be. I thought that was a really funny scene. Here, the thing about Larry owning a cow named Jessie...much less so. I didn't believe Larry would come up with that particular lie, I didn't believe Woody Harrelson would buy it, and there were funnier paths out of the situation that provoked it (a vegan actor seeing Larry using cream, in Larry's kitchen). But everything had to happen the way it happened because they were trying to make it connect to other story elements: the Klansman, dropped snack foods, the shofar. When Harrelson wanted to meet the cow and was being so dogged about finding a day to do it...it's not remarkable for Curb to remind us of a George plot from Seinfeld, but a George plot from the post-Larry Seinfeld? (Susan's parents insisting on driving out to see George's horses, Snoopy and Prickly Pete. That too was funnier the first time around.) However, in the past when I've remarked that things are getting stale or a season is not jelling, there's sometimes been a gem like "The Ski Lift" a week or two away. We'll see..

The quote feature isn't cooperating with me this morning. Aghst is in italics. Is Woody Harrelson hardcore PETA or Larry just mocking animal rights activists? That awards speech Larry and Jeff were watching at the beginning, right down to the lines about the exploitation of cows and calves so we can have cream in our coffee, was almost a direct lift of Joaquin Phoenix's overwrought speech when he won for Joker at the 2020 Oscars. I think they were just having some fun with celebrity activism. Harrelson really is vegan, but I don't think he "cream-shames" people in stores, etc. Kaley Cuoco is arguably a bigger star at the moment than Woody but she plays an entitled/sloppy optometrist while Woody plays himself, a star whom Larry wants to cast on his show. BTW it has to be a running joke that Larry is always working on a show within the show but none of them ever make it to air. Or Jon Hamm plays himself while Vince Vaughan plays a character. It's always been pretty arbitrary. Jon Hamm and Bryan Cranston are probably equally famous (both were even the lead of a famous AMC series), but Hamm played himself and Cranston played a doctor. In the early seasons, Michael York was himself in the restaurant plot, but the more famous Ed Asner was just someone's rich blowhard father. I think Larry and company just think up scenarios, and sometimes they want the famous people to send themselves up within Curb-world, and other times they invent characters and think of actors who would be good for them. I dunno about Cuoco being a bigger star than Harrelson, though. He'd win for name recognition. He's lasted so long and covered so many bases: one of the best-loved sitcoms of all time, three Oscar nominations, movies everyone knows such as No Country for Old Men, etc. I'm guessing in this case they thought of Harrelson because of the plot with Larry being reluctant to cast his frenemy Ted Danson in Young Larry. If he landed someone else from Cheers, it would rub it in that much more. Edit: I really liked Mary Ferguson #3.

It's last season's plot, but I only just discovered the below. There's also an entry for Latte Larry's, which is mostly rave reviews, except that some people deduct a star for the weird bathrooms.

I loved early Cheryl/Larry, meaning the first three seasons. She was exasperated or bewildered by him a lot of the time, but they also had a lot of sweet moments. Her character was positioned halfway between her conservative religious family and the looser Hollywood lifestyle of Larry and his friends, so she was a good down-to-earth foil for him without being a tiresome scold. Something changed in the next few seasons. Maybe it was just creatively shaking things up, or maybe the real-life David marriage was souring and it was affecting the stories. But from the moment the Davids made that anniversary pact that he could cheat with someone, the dynamic started to curdle. I wasn't sorry when they split up in season 6. However, I've always liked Cheryl Hines, both on CYE and in other things I've seen her in (such as Waitress). I'm glad she's remained part of the gang, even if sometimes there's a feeling that the show is straining to keep a core cast member around (a phenomenon I hereby term "Lorraine Bracco's syndrome," re: later seasons of The Sopranos).

Where she worries for a moment she's lost, and then Dave calls out to her? That was Badlands National Park in South Dakota.

The most interesting thing I learned from those biographical bits that replaced the typical performance excerpts at the Oscars is that Yuh-jung Youn fell in love with the movies in large part from seeing the work of the writer/directors Robert Altman and Mike Leigh. Altman and Leigh are so obviously products of the environments in which they came up: Altman was such an American director (M*A*S*H, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Nashville, The Player, Short Cuts), and Leigh was and remains as English as they come (Naked, Secrets & Lies, Topsy-Turvy, Vera Drake, Mr. Turner). Both of those guys -- who have made many movies I love too -- create films that are dense with dialogue, and she likely was experiencing their work through dubbed or subtitled versions. That they were powerful influences on her is a testament to the power of cinema, of great storytelling and vision, to cross boundaries. I'm reminded of Ang Lee's beautiful recollection (you can find it on YouTube) of seeing an Ingmar Bergman film as a young student and being transformed by the experience. With such films as Minari and last year's Parasite, it can go in the other direction too. Some young person is being inspired by these filmmakers and may name them first someday.

I'm happy for Hopkins. Some people are angry or disappointed, and it did end the ceremony on a weird note (no one even making a speech on his behalf), but I don't think anyone who sees the film can say he was undeserving on the merits of the work. This isn't just the usual good showing you'd see in almost any film in which he has a significant role; it was a real career-crowning performance. I wanted either him or Ahmed to win; I thought they were the most special and memorable. Yeun was very good with the least showy role of the five.

It's a damp, dated little thing. It only threatens to turn into a great movie in Lotte Lenya's few scenes as the gigolo procurer. She's a hoot.

Presently available on the Criterion Channel (as well as in a new Blu-ray on their label), this is an adaptation, expansion, and 1980s update of Joyce Carol Oates's harrowing, much-anthologized 1966 story "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" from director Joyce Chopra and screenwriter Tom Cole. It was acclaimed, then mostly forgotten and long difficult to find, but it has recently been remastered and is being reconsidered as a lost classic. It has a sensational breakthrough performance of great range and texture from 18-year-old Laura Dern. She had appeared in big films such as Teachers and Mask but was headlining a movie for the first time. She was playing three years younger, as a Northern California girl named Connie who is becoming sexually curious in the summer between her freshman and sophomore years. Connie has an imperfect though far from tragic home life in a big, symbolically unfinished house with a loving but nagging mother (an excellent Mary Kay Place), a sweet but clueless father (rock great Levon Helm, whose unschooled acting is well used), and a responsible, seemingly frigid older sister (Elizabeth Berridge, Mrs. Mozart in Amadeus) to whom she is unfavorably compared. Connie and two girlfriends regularly lie to their parents about their evening plans and spend hours cruising the mall and a local hamburger joint, where they don heavy makeup and sexier outfits and flirt with boys. While they enjoy the male attention, they are not ready and willing for everything it could lead to. The three men with whom we see Connie in one-on-one time in the film are, disturbingly, progressively older. Even the first and youngest of the three, played by the boyish-looking William Ragsdale (of that same year's Fright Night), is said to have graduated high school already. About halfway through, Connie has an ugly fight with her mother and refuses to go with the family to a barbecue at a relative's far-away house. While she is home alone, she is visited by a handsome man claiming to be 18 but clearly much older, who calls himself Arnold Friend (Treat Williams). We had already seen him staring at her in town from behind his sunglasses, and now he shows up in a big gold controvertible. He has James Dean affectations and has brought along another man as a mostly mute accomplice. A. Friend knows far too much about Connie, including her family's present whereabouts and the full names of her friends. He wants her to "go for a ride" with him, and his talk is calm, seductive, persistent, and subtly threatening. The accomplice mutters a couple sentences about his ability to disable the phone line. Connie is initially curious and flirtatious, then frightened, but never as much as she should be. Dern's performance here reminded me of a snake's hypnotized prey. It's a concise and unusual film. The low-key first half meanders through extremely well-observed and well-acted scenes that serve to establish a girl whose home life is such that she wants to be seen, paid attention to as something special. The characters in Connie's family have an interesting and lifelike way of talking around what they want to say; they never quite land on the words that would get their issues out in the open. One flaw is that the universe in which it is taking place can be distractingly generic. (Example: I've never heard anyone anywhere, in any era, identify a movie by the auditorium number it is playing in at the local cineplex—e.g., "You should see the movie in #3." Seinfeld did this right with its made-up titles.) Once Connie's family departs, the second half is suspenseful and gripping, with Connie at a symbolic threshold, a fragile screen door away from A. Friend and whatever he and his accomplice have planned for her. Oates's short story ended with Connie terrified into near-catatonia, stepping out of the house and into A. Friend's car. The Oates has been interpreted as both a straight-ahead horror story and in a less literal way, as an allegory for the sixties youth counterculture that was in bloom at the time it was written, with A. Friend as a sort of pied piper. The film is different, more hopeful. As menacing as A. Friend remains, he is shaded down a little. If he is to be taken at face value here (and more than one reading is possible), I'm not sure I buy the closing scenes the script provides. But it is easy to understand why this little movie resonates and has been deemed worth another look in our present climate of examination of predatory behaviors. Only the music—songs by James Taylor and an electronic score as ghastly as such things often were in 1985—dates it.

I didn't see depression per se there, although I thought the loss of her husband was a shadow over everything. We don't learn much about him, but they obviously had a long marriage with no children, either because they didn't want them or they couldn't have them. They worked together and lived together. So I think he was her life partner and they were well suited and had a strong bond, and now when other people suggest that she live with them in a more conventional and secure arrangement than living out of her van, it doesn't have appeal for her. She's had that person to come home to and share space with. She's done that, and at least for now, she's done with that. There's a freedom to the way she lives now that makes the loss and realignment easier to deal with. Even though hers is a precarious way of living -- engine trouble, plummeting temperatures, or even a flat can be big setbacks -- it can also be rich and fulfilling. She can encounter other people and allow them into her life in a way that works for her. Much credit to Zhao for the fine natural performances of the actual itinerants around the pros, McDormand and Strathairn.

I kept thinking that the problematic sex that's the focus of most of the conversation was just the tip of the iceberg. I'm sure I'm not the first to point it out, but the body of poor dozing "Handsome Man" was constantly in danger. She's taking him along for a chase through Cairo with armed goons and tanks, she's letting him steal a plane that could be shot down, he's getting thrown all over the White House by the Cheetah...Steve's consciousness may be all-in for this, but the dude hosting him didn't sign up for any of it! That said, while I didn't think this was one of those rare sequels that equal or surpass the original, I enjoyed it. A likable, hard-working cast and a certain generosity of spirit carried it along. It's one of those movies I'm not of a mind to fight and die for; if someone says "Wonder Woman 1984 sucked! I want my two and a half hours back," I can understand the disappointment and just shrug it off. But for me, it passed the watch-checking test -- meaning I wasn't doing it much. It was fun to look at and had a basically sound message in keeping with my understanding of the main character and what she stands for. I liked the idea that Lord and the Cheetah were not really evil people; they were just corrupted more and more as they tried to grab onto their dreams, and this worked especially well in a "greed decade" story. I'll see a third entry in the series.

It's a shame Jane Asher isn't better known, other than as Paul's most significant pre-Linda relationship and the subject of some of his Beatles-era love songs (and "fight" songs, e.g., "I'm Looking Through You"). Although she has a lot of television and movie credits, I think much of her best work has been on the stage. She played Miss Havisham to great acclaim at the West Yorkshire a few years ago.

I am glad I streamed this one rather than seeing it at the movies, because I wanted to see it a second time right after I finished it. I intended just to re-watch the beginning scenes (if they can be so termed) in light of what we learn, but then I found it impossible to shut it off. It's really a remarkable play-to-film job. I could imagine the acting performances and the words having the same effect on the stage, but here the filmmakers have editing, cinematography, and production design on their side too. These disciplines are used in sophisticated ways that give the story dimensions it couldn't have had in the theater. It's unsettling at first when you find yourself thinking, "Wait. Weren't the cabinets different before? Wasn't the couch a different color? Where did the piano go?" And, of course, it's like being in the main character's mind, untethered from chronology. Except for scenes that break away to Anne's point of view, we're in the moment, in every moment, with Anthony. Every moment is real and convincing, but we struggle to link them up and figure out what's reliable. As much as Hopkins and Colman deserve all their plaudits and nominations, this whole mini-ensemble is on a comparably high level. I've always enjoyed Olivia Williams, and her performance in the final scene is beautiful. I love the way she lets Anthony's "Fuck off with your medication" roll off her. Catherine has heard it all, from Anthony and many before him. Imogen Poots and the two actors playing the husband are very good too. I appreciated, too, that the film never dwelt on the character's pre-dementia life. There was no coaxing of tears with talk of or flashbacks to how brilliant and accomplished Anthony was (although he must have done well for himself). There was just one old photo of him on the nightstand with the two daughters, and we could not even see that in clear focus. Virtually the entire film is preoccupied with a slippery "now." I hope people whose interest in movies goes beyond CGI carnage don't let the subject matter frighten them away. This is a reminder that great drama can be found in almost any subject, even a grim one, even one that's been done often (not always well) in movies and TV.

It's a favorite of mine from the last ten years or so, and there's almost nothing about it I would want changed, so mileage varies. However, I remember people saying similar things about Brokeback Mountain in 2005-06 -- that they didn't see what the two guys had in common or what their deep connection was supposed to be about. In both cases we're looking back at a more furtive and fearful time for same-sex relationships, and in both cases one party is more experienced and assured than the other at the start. There isn't the same kind of milieu available for meeting and easy auditioning of potential partners as there would be later. The initial chemistry is in looks, intuition, what's beneath the words. Once a connection is made, what follows is a first timer's experience, and in Carol the imbalance is more pronounced because one of the parties is some years older. However, Therese ends the story a confident person using her talents to establish herself in a profession, and Carol too has growth, and the progress they make isn't all about their relationship. They have lives and interiority apart from that, which I like. I love Blanchett's big scene with her husband and their attorneys, the "live against my grain" speech. I thought Cincinnati very convincingly passed for the New York of an earlier time. Kyle Chandler is so good as Blanchett's estranged husband. The character is well written, but his was an overlooked performance. On paper, his character is the villain, but he isn't really a villain. Even when he's drunk and angry, there are lines of behavior he will not cross; he's a gentleman. There's just nothing in his privileged background to prepare him for this. Like the wives in Brokeback Mountain, he loves and cannot be loved in return.

I'm not going to claim I was falling asleep (and if I had been, that would probably have more to do with my own sleep cycles than with the film's quality), but I did think this dragged badly and that its nominations for Picture and Screenplay would have been better bestowed elsewhere. It was trying to do a few things -- tell an undercover story with all the familiar perilous scenes where the guy is on the cusp of being found out; educate the audience about the history of the Black Panthers and the FBI's war on them; tell a love story; delineate a complex friend/betrayer relationship involving Hampton and O'Neal, and make the case that O'Neal was a "Judas" before he even met Hampton -- and I didn't think it did any one of them very well. It's a lumpy, undercooked movie with an especially punishing third quarter. When the onscreen text at the end of the movie is more interesting than most of the scenes, it's not a good sign. Stanfield and Plemons were quite good. I've liked Kaluuya in other movies, such as Sicario and Widows, but I didn't think the screenplay created a well-drawn character for him here. The casting of Sheen and his ostentatious physical transformation were more distracting than effective, although I think I know what they were trying for (that familiar voice of white rectitude, e.g., Presidents Bartlet and Kennedy on television, as an historically nefarious character). It's more primer than drama. At that level, neither terrible nor great.

Also, it's such a male-heavy movie. That's fine; movies are about the characters and situations they're about. I wouldn't advocate a new film of Billy Budd or whatever with some gratuitous female presences shoved into in it Just Because, and writing women hasn't always been an Aaron Sorkin strength anyway (Molly's Game did show some growth). But I still liked the contrast the blond cop and the snarky receptionist added. They were well played and well written and made the movie a little better.

I've only seen the final two seasons once (I have "The Supremes" coming up in the Great West Wing Rewatch of '21), but I enjoyed the Santos/Vinick era first time around. We had seen some of the campaigning side of politics in season 4 and in the occasional flashback to Bartlet's first run, but I love that stuff, so I liked getting a deep dive into it with Bartlet's two would-be successors and those who fell short of the nominations. I felt the candidates and their supporting characters gave an old show some new life, and it was the point when The West Wing finally found an identity post Sorkin. A few bright spots aside, season 5 has been as much of a chore the second time around as I'd remembered. Episode after episode is a big shrug. Things that should be huge are no more consequential, compelling or moving than the B-story filler. I'm surprised the ratings stayed as steady as they did in that season. But I also felt that Sorkin's later two seasons, especially 4, showed a falling-off in quality. More of the sides of him I don't like were getting into the scripts: the lecturing, the stagy tics like repetitive dialogue, the apparent trolling of his critics. The inspiring oratory wasn't as consistently inspiring, either. (However, no matter how bland it was, it always got thunderous applause, reminding me a little of those Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip sketches we were told were hilarious.) I don't want to overstate the case, though. There are magnificent episodes that are favorites of mine in seasons 3 and 4. Far fewer in 5.

I think it had more to do with the family history (father) of the playwright who wrote the episode. He wrote nothing else for The West Wing, so I assume he was a friendly peer of Sorkin's. That one came up recently in my first-ever complete rewatch of the series (now I'm slogging through season 5). I liked it less than I'd remembered. It was going to be a tough sell, because it was so unlike anything else in the series, not even being set in Washington. They had to nail it, and I don't think the script did that. Alzheimer's is not an unusual subject for drama, and it's been handled better elsewhere, before and after. We'd just barely heard about CJ's father before that, and the episode seemed rushed. This was understandable and necessary, but still so. We raced through all the obvious, familiar dementia scenes: Dad's forgetting things he should know in his first scene; in his second scene, he doesn't recognize CJ herself; then there's the obligatory doctor's visit; the car ride that turns perilous, etc. It was like a disease-of-the-week film compressed into 40-odd minutes. And the scenes with the love interest played by Matthew Modine did nothing for me. Overall, it reminded me of those ER episodes with a single character on a trip to California, Mississippi, Africa, or wherever. Those were never my favorites.

I've also read Eric Heisserer's screenplay. It's very good, although there's one subplot/complication in the middle that I'm glad got the scissors, so the movie's final form is an improvement. Heisserer's first description of the main character is "Louise has a clean, timeless look about her; the kind of woman who ages gracefully." They could not have cast her more effectively. Tzi Ma gives one of the great one-scene performances in this movie. When we finally meet this General Shang, he's gracious and there's a formal warmth to his interaction with Louise, yet we can sense a forceful personality. It isn't difficult to imagine this man also being a feared military leader. I can't imagine an actor getting more into (or out of) those few minutes.

I don't believe it was considered feminist when it was on. There was a lot of mainstream media commentary on the demeaning treatment of the female characters while Sorkin's seasons were airing ("Does West Wing Give Women Short Shrift?" was an Entertainment Weekly piece in the third season; their followup several months later was "Does Wing's Sexist Tone Go Too Far?"). It was the same on the internet. Even at the show's early peak, the issue was brought up frequently in the recaps and forums on Television Without Pity. I would say it's a sterling example of a show that had good and memorable female characters while being problematic in execution. Largely owing to what the actors brought to them, I'm still very fond of (to name a few) CJ, Abigail, and Joey Lucas. And to give credit where due, the writing for them wasn't entirely obstacles. I can understand why Joey is one of Marlee Matlin's favorites of the roles she's played. (Her comments from a retrospective last year: "All the years before West Wing, I would always play deaf victims or sympathetic characters, or talked about being deaf and the sign language and it got so old. But when the show came into my life, I thought, 'Wait a minute, how is he going to write this? Joey Lucas is a pollster. In the history of television, there’s never been a deaf pollster.' And he just happened to make her deaf and he was willing to think outside the box. And that’s what I loved about that character. For the [rest of my time on the show] there was never a discussion in the script why my character was deaf, why she did what she did. It was just who she was.")

I've never seen Bones, so my only reference point for it is BoJack Horseman. I'm grateful for its existence just because it enabled this.

I hate that there was Josh Lyman bashing going on here and I'm months/pages too late. But I guess one is never too late. Josh would be very high on the list of beloved TV characters I couldn't stand. I watched the first several episodes of The West Wing when it premiered in 1999, and the one that got it taken off my rounds was a Josh-heavy episode. He'd bugged me before that, but this was the fatal dose. It was the one in which he's freaking out all hour long because he got an NSC "in case of attack" card and his coworkers didn't. He goes to some pastoral counselor/friend and does that thing Aaron Sorkin thinks is good writing of psychology, where a character puts the wrong word in a sentence so we know what he's really upset about. He gets hand-holding from CJ over it. Then the episode ends with him returning his card to the president; he doesn't want to be separated from his friends, and now he wants to break bread and drink beer with them, or whatever. Big blocks of cheese in the White House hadn't gone out with Andrew Jackson, is what I was thinking. (I won't even get into the "Gee whiz, look at these modern career gals" stuff from the two older guys right before that, because Josh is the current target.) I've liked Whitford in other roles, but something about the way the character and the actor lined up that time just didn't sit well. His displays of sensitivity and empathy always looked like preening to me. But, obviously, mileage varied and he has the trophies. Much later, I did watch West Wing all the way through and really did like the show, without changing my opinion of one of the focal characters. I learned to live with him, but I was more of a Toby Ziegler type.

I honestly didn't get true "evil" from Langella's portrayal and Sorkin's writing -- just deeply prejudiced, hidebound, and addled. His intermittent cognitive issues seemed genuine to me, and that may have been a kindness of dramatic license. I've read commentary on the film that the real Hoffman had "all his vicious wits about him" right to the end. Sorkin has in the past been guilty of writing overly broad opponents for his virtuous protagonists, but I didn't feel that way this time. I found this judge all too plausibly awful.

Really, the title references not the person but the recording. "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" was an actual 1927 record referencing the black bottom dance, which had been around for a while by that point. The play and film are fictionalized accounts of the day it was recorded. One of Rainey's rivals among the early black recording artists, Ethel Waters, had her own counterpoint record out the same year ("Take Your Black Bottom Outside"). So Ma Rainey could have been in it far less than this and it could still have had that title. On Supporting versus Lead: I think Davis is in MRBB enough to be considered a lead for the Oscars, but what I found odd was that she won Supporting for Fences, in which she seemed to me clearly the co-lead. In fact, when she and Washington appeared in the play on the stage in 2010, she had won the Lead Actress Tony. As good as she was in Fences, it seemed a bit lopsided to put her up against people like Michelle Williams (Manchester by the Sea) and Naomie Harris (Moonlight), who did unforgettable work but had a fraction of the time. But I get it. Actors submit in the categories in which they have the best chance, and there have been lead winners who were really supporting and vice versa. We've had famous cases such as Anthony Hopkins winning Best Actor for Silence of the Lambs, a 2-hour 18-minute movie in which he's not even in 18 minutes.

I hated this. I tried, really, and I made all the allowances I feel were fair, but I don't think it was worthy of its subject. It seemed like a first-time filmmaker leaning way too hard on her (good) cast to give the characters the dimensions she had not, and being really muddled in her messaging. I hope it wins nothing, and the best I can say is that maybe it will be a growing experience and Ms. Fennell's second, third, fourth films will really be something.