Category Archives: Reviews

The Living Obit

Interview with Jack Nicholson | Interviews | Roger Ebert

I got a call this weekend from a former colleague at USA Today. He was refreshing the obituary on Jack Nicholson.

Refreshing obits is one of the few truly unpleasant tasks for a newspaperman. Any paper worth its salt has to keep an updated obituary on file, ready to go on deadline, for every politician, actor or athlete of national or international note, alive and aging. Walk into the Times or Post and you’ll find obituaries waiting for Robert De Niro, Robert Redford, Nancy Pelosi, Jimmy Carter, even Michael Jordan. And many more.

It’s a grim pile. And my colleague had to add fresh material for Nicholson’s.

When he reached out, I gave the same response a mother does when the phone rings in the middle of the night: Did something happen?

No, Bryan said, he just wanted to catch up on procedural duties in corona downtime. And he wanted me to give an anecdotal story, as I interviewed Nicholson a few times.

First I was touched. Then I felt old. Now I want to start a new trend in the media.

I call it Living Obits. Why do we wait to collect loving anecdotes about someone once that someone can’t hear them? Have you ever left a job, and been told what a great asset you were? It was a rush, wasn’t it? Wouldn’t you have wanted to hear that sooner?

So…Living Obits. The Times and Post sure as hell aren’t going to shake up something as sacred as their obituaries. And today’s social “media” kids don’t even have $600 saved up. They’re gonna be forward looking?

Thus, fuck them. We are proud to announce it here, now. I’ll begin the obit the way they should read, then add the anecdote I sent Bryan.

Rest in Pause.

Jack Nicholson, a three-time Oscar winner, 12-time Academy Award nominee and largely considered the greatest actor in Hollywood history, did not die today. He is 82.

Nicholson, who is survived with pals  Danny DeVito, Michelle Pfeiffer and Al Pacino, is a lifelong Lakers fans and can usually be seen courtside.Danny DeVito is listed (or ranked) 1 on the list Famous Friends of Jack Nicholson

Friends and even casual observers say fond things of Nicholson, including one twit who somehow found a working computer:

Jack Nicholson was the least-ostentatious Hollywood star I’ve ever met.

How un-ostentatious? The first time I met him, he greeted me coming out of the crapper.

Nicholson was doing press interviews for The Departed, the last Oscar-nominated film in which he’d star. And he’d granted USA TODAY a rare interview at his home, on the famed “Bad Boy Drive,” a.k.a. Mulholland Drive in Beverly Hills. It was so called because its residents included TinselTown scoundrels Nicholson, Warren Beatty and the late Marlon Brando.Hollywood Hellraisers: The Wild Lives and Fast Times of Marlon ...

When I got to the house, there was a sign over the gate doorbell: Do not ring before 10 a.m. A maid let me into the cluttered, unremarkable four-bedroom house Nicholson bought with the money from Easy Rider. “He’s coming down,” she said. “He’s upstairs.”Easy Rider at 50: how the rebellious road movie shook up the ...

A minute later, Nicholson ambled down the steps, tucking a button-down short-sleeve shirt into his pants and buckling his belt. “Sorry about that,” he said, zipping up. “I was in the can. Wanna  sandwich?” 

And I realized: Even with someone as famous as Jack Nicholson, it’s hard to break bread with a man who just finished with his pants and the can. I politely declined, opting instead for iced tea. 

Nicholson brought it out, along with a pot of coffee and a new pack of cigarettes for himself. He finished both in the 2-hour interview in his living room, which offered a panoramic view of the Santa Monica Mountains.Ws Zo Aerial Pov View Of Mulholland Drive Home Of Actor Jack ...

Nicholson said he never cottoned to many of the trappings of fame. He didn’t own a fleet of cars, only a Mercedes-Benz 600 he’d driven for 30 years (he considered it the best touring car of all time).

Nor did he want a mansion. He didn’t need more space, and the neighborhood, he said, was too important to him to move. He said he’d drop by unannounced to visit with Beatty. And Brando, with whom he shared a driveway, was a “riot” to live near, Nicholson said.

“He would sneak into my house while I was out,” he said. “One time, he left a pair of his underpants in the kitchen. No note, no nothing. Just his drawers, spread out on a shelf in the fridge. He was hilarious.”

It was the most colorful interview I’d ever done, and remains one of my fondest memories in a career full of them.

Still, I’m glad I passed on the sandwich.

 

 

Tiger King’s Court of Jesters

Joe Exotic in 'Tiger King'

Here, in the stark luminescence of a worldwide pandemic, we can be honest with each other, human to human. And here’s the truth: Cat people are weird.

You know it. I know it. And Netflix sure as hell knows it: Over winter, the streamer had the documentary of the season with Don’t F*** with Cats, a terrific true-crime tale. Now, they have the series of spring with Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness.

The series kicks off with the crazy-cat-lady premise, and then which proceeds to prove it — and then some — over seven jaw-dropping episodes. Netflix has made a lot of noise with unscripted programming, but it’s going to roar with this beyond-bizarre docu-series distraction, which demonstrates that outlandish people who love filming themselves are a formula for TV that’s grrrr-reat.

It’s hard to know, frankly, where to begin with all the strange twists and turns, but directors Eric Goode and Rebecca Chaiklin rightly assume that it’s easiest to work backward from the (almost) end: Joseph Maldonado-Passage, an eccentric keeper of tigers, lions and other big cats in Oklahoma who goes by the name “Joe Exotic,” allegedly having orchestrated a murder-for-hire plot against Carole Baskin, a woman who runs a facility called Big Cat Rescue, who had lobbied to shut down operations like his.Image result for joe exotic
After that, though, there’s a whole lot to chew on. Big cats, it turns out, are a kind of aphrodisiac, inspiring what can only be described as cultish devotion — including Joe’s marriage to not one but two men; another big-cat owner, Bhagavan “Doc” Antle, who is basically a polygamist; and Jeff Lowe, who comes into Joe’s orbit later and brags about using exotic pets as a come-on to find partners for threesomes.
But wait, there’s more: The colorful characters that Joe attracts to work for him (including one who loses a limb to a tiger attack); Joe’s desire to create his own media kingdom, enlisting a former Inside Edition correspondent, Rick Kirkham, to oversee his TV efforts; and finally, Joe’s forays into politics, running for president before mounting a libertarian bid for governor of Oklahoma, despite being a little unclear on what a libertarian actually is.
Finally, there’s Baskin, who would seemingly be the voice of reason in all this, objecting, as she does, to people housing and trading in dangerous cats. Still, she finances those efforts largely through the fortune she inherited from her late husband, who disappeared under the kind of mysterious circumstances that even a Dateline NBC producer might consider too good to be true.
Because the big-cat owners are showmen (beyond the zoo, Joe fancies himself a country-and-western singer), there’s a whole lot of vamping for the cameras. They also tend to document their actions extensively, which makes the occasional use of reenactments here feel especially gratuitous.
Still, even by the standards of reality TV — a genre populated by exhibitionists and those seeking their 15 minutes of fame — Tiger King is so awash in hard-to-believe oddballs that lean into their image it genuinely feels like a Coen brothers movie come to life, the kind of thing any studio would return to the writer saying the screenplay was too over the top.
During the final chapter, one of Joe’s employees says there’s “a lot of drama in the zoo world.” That’s about the only thing that’s understated in Tiger King, which — even amid the current glut of true crime — is the kind of binge-worthy game that’s almost impossible to resist.

The Disposables

Image result for lost girls movie

Sex workers are fairly disposable in Hollywood. Few deaths in movies are handled with the contempt that some filmmakers show the murders of those in the trade.

It’s one reason that the true-crime drama Lost Girls feels so bracing: It humanizes women often represented as disposable, more props than people. When a mother in the movie laments that her missing daughter, a sex worker, has been forgotten along with other women, her words feel like an accusation. When “our girls” are remembered, she says, it’s never as “friend, sister, mother, daughter.”

That condemnation runs like a pulsating current through Lost Girls, which centers on Mari Gilbert, a flinty heartbreaker played by Amy Ryan. A sober chronicle of victimization and empowerment, the movie tracks Mari’s search for her daughter Shannan, who vanished after meeting a client. The world sees a missing prostitute as an inevitability rather than a tragedy or outrage; Mari sees a beloved child and, in time, a cause that’s as political as it is personal. It’s a good, righteous fit for the director Liz Garbus, a documentarian drawn to stories about social justice, here making her fiction-feature debut. (Her docs include What Happened, Miss Simone?)

The real story is grim and shrouded in mystery. Early on May 1, 2010, Shannan Gilbert, a 24-year-old sex worker who advertised on Craigslist, called 911 screaming, “They’re trying to kill me.” She then disappeared.

Late that same year, a police dog sniffed out the corpse of a different woman in the same Long Island area where Shannan was last seen. Other bodies and body parts were recovered; one victim traced back to the mid-1990s. When most of the victims were identified as prostitutes, a detective said it was a “consolation” that the killer didn’t seem to be “selecting citizens at large.”

It’s easy to imagine Garbus reading that comment and becoming incensed. (The line appears in Robert Kolker’s Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery, the sympathetic book on which the movie is based.) There are different ways to describe Garbus’s telling of this mystery: it’s serious, respectful, gravely melancholic.Image result for lost girls movie

Yet anger best describes the movie’s atmosphere, its overall mood and its authorial tone. In some scenes, anger seems to hover over characters, as threatening as the movie’s permanently dark skies; at other times, it erupts, flushing faces and distorting voices.

In time, Mari’s personal ordeal opens into a haunting examination of gender and power, men and women. On one side of this divide the movie offers dead, grieving, angry, activist women; on the other it presents men who, with few exceptions, uphold the noxious status quo whether as suspects or members of the largely male police force that includes a weary commissioner (Gabriel Byrne).

The Lost Girls ebbs and flows; every so often, it spills over until you feel it seeping into you.

The girls would have wanted it that way.