Screen Test

Tom Hanks and Austin Butler in “Elvis.” Warner Bros. image via IMDB Labor Day didn't just mark the beginning of fall – it also signaled an early start to film awards season. The first DVD screener “for your consideration” just arrived in my mailbox. Which means it's time to dust off the blog and let the games begin. The Emmys will be broadcast Monday on NBC where two of the very few series I've seen and written about here – “Ted Lasso” and “The White Lotus” – have chalked up a whole lot of nominations. Meanwhile, recent coverage from film festivals in Cannes and Venice is already handicapping early picks for this year's Oscar field. Baz Luhrmann's “Elvis,” an exuberant revision of the mythology surrounding rock 'n' roll's first – and still greatest – demigod, premiered at Cannes. It's playing in theaters, but is also available on HBO Max, which is where I saw it. Austin Butler's channeling of the rock icon – nailing his singing voice, his guitar ...

  Ray Liotta in “Something Wild.” ( Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios photo via IMDB) . Amber Heard and me at the 2018 Maui Film Festival at Wailea.  (Maui Film Festival photo.) No one had ever heard of Ray Liotta the first time I interviewed him. It was 1986. He and a couple of other young actors early in their careers – Jeff Daniels and Melanie Griffith – were in New Orleans on a press junket for “Something Wild.” The comedy thriller wasn't set in New Orleans but director Jonathan Demme – an aficionado of American culture – had picked the destination as an excuse to spend the weekend enjoying some storied N'awlins' food and music. “Something Wild” was a quirky romp in which straight-laced Daniels gets waylaid by free-spirited Griffith before her loose cannon husband shows up to change the mood entirely. Liotta played the loose cannon. He was such a ticking time bomb on screen, it came as news (with junket journalists frantically checking our press kits to find out who he was) t...

  When Anthony Bourdain came to Hawaii a few years before his death to film an episode of his CNN series “Parts Unknown,” someone threw a big party in his honor. I have friends who were there. It hearkened back to the luaus that greeted Mark Twain on his visit to the islands a century and a half earlier.  Bourdain and Twain were cut from the same cloth – world traveling adventurers whose glib humor and popularity with mass audiences masked the deep compassion and wisdom of their writing. They were working class, men of the people. Guys whose curiosity and love for life stemmed from not placing themselves above it. Memories of the CNN episode are fading now, but I recall that the star of the Emmy- and Peabody- winning series went spear fishing with some bruddahs off Molokai. They snagged an octopus, and Bourdain, as instructed, gamely proved his mettle by chewing on its head to remove its brain as they all bobbed in the channel.  He was into karate at the time, pursuing it...

       poynter.org photo Are we over Will Smith yet? Doesn't look that way. The notorious  Slap  is still sparking a veritable feeding frenzy across the mediaverse. So many columnists, professors and pundits have weighed in, I feel like I got PhD's in sociology, psychology and toxic masculinity in the week since the infamous moment that distracted the Academy Awards from the more hopeful messages of award winners “CODA,” Jessica Chastain, Ariana DeBose and “Drive My Car.” Aside from echoing Denzel Washington's biblical sentiment on the matter – who are any of us to judge? – I don't have much to add. Based on a decades-long career, Will Smith is a veritable monument; most of us are no more than flies buzzing around his edifice. But for all the probing of residual racism or the fragile insecurity of manly men, let me nominate two other candidates for boogyman in the superstar's tragic fall: Fame. And fortune. We didn't know it on Sunday night but now we have ...

     Hidetoshi Nishijima and Toko Miura in “Drive My Car.”  Bitters End photo via IMDB A red Saab 900 Turbo is a co-star as much as any of the human actors in Japan's powerfully moving “Drive My Car.” It won the Academy Award Sunday for best international feature amid nominations including best picture, best adapted screenplay and best director Ryusuki Hamaguchi. In the film's almost three hour run time, the Saab is in more than half the scenes. Many were shot inside the vehicle, moving in traffic. But a lot were shot from outside, from helicopters, from other vehicles or from the Saab itself, front or rear, mostly on picturesque roadways in and outside Hiroshima. The effect captures mesmerizing tranquility, the opposite of road rage. Driving a car – navigating a pathway through life – is one of the endless metaphors in the script adapted from “Men Without Women,” a short story collection by Haruku Murakami. Hidetoshi Nishijima plays renowned theatrical actor and dir...

Best comment on last night's Oscar moment came in a tweet from comedy writer Jena Friedman: "'Love will make you do crazy things' –Will Smith and most people in prison for murder."  I'd rather remember this year's Oscars this way (warning: spoiler alert): https://youtu.be/A0UR1IkJvlg

                    Ansel Elgort and Rene Zegler in “West Side Story.”  20 th   Century Studios photo via IMDB Granted, there’s something very First World even bringing up the subject of movies as the refrain of Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction” echoes in your brain and each day's news brings images of unfathomable courage enduring a crazed tyrant's murderous cruelty. But readers of this blog have spent the last several months with me getting ready for moviedom’s big night, Sunday on ABC. It would be a shame to quit now, with the finish line in sight. Unfortunately,  I haven’t quite finished my to-do list where the Oscars are concerned.  Despite several attempts I haven't been able to get past the first 10 minutes of “Dune,” likely winner in many of the tech categories. Big worms are all I remember from reading Frank Herbert's sci-fi classic decades ago, but whenever I try to watch it on a screen at hand, it just f...