Michael Cimino, RIP

When did you last get excited by a movie? When was the last time a movie came out that made you want to see it - again and again and again?

I remember in the 1990s when Pulp Fiction hit theaters - it was so exciting, such daring filmmaking, such thrilling storytelling, that I went to see it four times in the theaters. Back then, movies seem to matter to people, personally, and they seemed to be important cultural touchstones as well. Movies were, dare I say it, important. They mattered. They lived.

Today? Movies suck - or mostly suck. These days, TV shows have the cultural edge that movies once enjoyed. For the most part, movies now are either one of two things: huge, cynical, money-hungry enterprises (think of the proliferation of "franchises" and the unending number of sequels) or calculated "Oscar-bait", movies designed to win awards and make some money but are otherwise forgettable. Movies don't excite anymore. They don't live inside us or the culture. The artistry of film making isn't moving forward, taking strides. It's stuck. And that's sad.

So how did we get here? It took a long time. While movies were burning up the culture in the 1970s through the 1990s, the seeds of their downfall were being planting at the same time, namely the era of blockbusters and sequels, along with the upwards spiral of production costs. But most of all came the huge costs of failure. When movies fail, they not only lose money but can destroy careers.

In 1978, a director named Michael Cimino made a movie called The Deer Hunter, about working class men and women who's lives are shattered by the Vietnam war. The movie was a huge success - it made lots of money and won several Oscars, including Best Picture. Two years later, Cimino produced his follow-up, Heaven's Gate, about 19th century land wars in the American West. This movie failed catastrophically, so much so that the studio that financed it went under. 

It was the first time that a movie's failure actually did something so devastating. Needless to say, the studios reacted accordingly. In the decades that followed, movies became increasingly "safer" so as not to offend audiences and critics. That's not to say, in the ensuing decades, that there still haven't been other huge failures as well as other exciting movies (like Pulp Fiction). But over time, safeness won over daring. The deary cinematic landscape we live in today is largely due to the failure of Heaven's Gate -- a movie that tried every bit to be as good as The Deer Hunter but wasn't.

Michael Cimino died last week, and his professional trajectory tells us a lot about the culture we live in today. After his once promising career was derailed, Cimino only directed a small number of movies, most of which critics and audiences ignored. This was, and is, a shame. A daring director was largely sidelined because of this (certainly huge) failure and the art of film, I think, suffered as a result.

Movies matter less now because directors are increasingly not the voices of their own films. When was the last time you saw a movie and really felt like you saw art being created? Yes, such film "auteurs" like Quentin Tarantino, Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, Paul Thomas Anderson, and the Coen Brothers are still making movies - but for how much longer? And when they're gone, who will replace them? I have no idea. There seem to be no young auteurs on the horizon.

When you watch both The Deer Hunter and Heaven's Gate, putting aside both movies' virtues and flaws, what strikes you about them is that these are stories being told by a great directorial voice; that you are watching someone's singular vision spring to life; that these are movies that do what only movies can do best: tell a story through moving images, the director as storyteller. Like a painter using paints and brushes, like a writer using words and a pen, like a sculptor using stones and chisel, this is a director using camera and film to tell a story and imprint an artistic style on your consciousness. Cimino didn't need special effects, he didn't need clever dialogue, he didn't need fancy editing, he didn't need any visual or storytelling tricks - he was amazingly confident in the way that he simply pointed and moved the camera, coreographing his scenes with such skill, that his vision came across so strongly that you were left with an impression that lasted long after these movies were over. 

Having seen both films, I remember them - the storytelling is unconventional, the performances are bold, the camera work is thrilling and confident, a master clearly at work. Ask yourself this: when was the last time you saw movie where you felt like this? Probably a long time.

And as good as television is these days, it will never have the cinematic visual power of the movies. Television is still mostly a writer's medium with the director serving as the writer's handmaiden. That's fine! But movies are first and last a director's medium, and they are at their most powerful when the director's voice rings loudly.

In many ways, Cimino both exemplified everything that used to be great about movie making and was also indirectly responsible for its decline. His ego, apparently, got in the way of his work. But now that he has passed on, it's important to remember that filmmakers like him used to reign supreme in our culture and that hopefully, one day, movies will live again.

PS. You must read Final Cut by Steven Bach, generally considered the best book ever written about the movie business, which chronicles the turbulent history of Heaven's Gate. It paints Cimino in a very unflattering light but, after reading it, you'll understand how movies are what they are today. You can find the documentary based on the book at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyeOmPMHRYg.

PPS. Cimino was a New Yorker, originally from Long Island, but he got his start working in advertising in NYC in the Mad Men era of the 1960s.

QT in NYC?

Classic Mr NYC

The one and only time that I've been to Los Angeles was in late March 1995. My brother was living there and I visited him during my Spring break. I was there for a week and we drove north with a friend and visited San Francisco and then drove back along the Pacific Coast Highway, visiting San Simeon and gorgeous Central Valley places like Monterrey and Carmel.

I blogged about it extensively in 2018. And I concluded the post about how, just before I boarded my flight back home to NYC, I spoke to my dad by phone, informing me of my college acceptance.

Something I didn't mention, however, because it was totally irrelevant, was that my last full night in LA was the same night as the 67th annual Academy Awards. It was the same night that Forrest Gump swept the Oscars but also when Quentin Tarantino won Best Original Screenplay for Pulp Fiction. 

So I was fascinated to stumble upon an article about the Oscar party held that night in LA by Harvey Weinstein and his company Miramax that had produced Pulp Fiction. Apparently, in a city and business known for wild parties, this was the wildest party in Oscar history. Many big stars at the time congregated, people got into fistfights, Harvey Weinstein threatened to go steal the Oscars from the Forrest Gump people -- and a wanted criminal crashed the party, apparently being persued by the cops while Hollywood partied.

It was, apparently, the last kind of wild, out-of-control Oscar party that Hollywood used to have. In the decades afterwards, the business and the parties became more sedate. And as you always see when you look at a moment frozen in time, some of the people at the party have continued to thrive -- like Leonardo DiCaprio, Jodie Foster, Samuel L Jackson -- while others -- like the host, Harvey Weinstein himself, and Kevin Spacey -- went into infamy ... and prison.

And to think that yours truly Mr NYC was in LA that night. Crazy. Only in the movies ...

P.S. This Oscars ceremony also had another NYC twist -- David Letterman was the host and he notoriously bombed. "Uma" ... "Oprah" ... "Uma" ... "Oprah."

Yeah, it didn't work. 

Get Down Say Ugh! "Pulp Fiction" @ 25

Twenty-five years ago this week Quentin Tarantino's classic film Pulp Fiction was released and became the movie of the decade -- it was violent, profane, massively entertaining, and brilliant. It was a huge hit, launched and relaunched many big careers, made Tarantino a star director and a household name, and brought the independent movie world into the mainstream.

And it's still a classic, great movie a quarter of a century later.

I've blogged a lot about this movie and you can read it all here. But I don't think I fully appreciated the impact this movie had on me at the time until recently -- that it made me fall in love with art and culture in a way that my then-teenage self hadn't appreciated until then; that it made me love movies as an art-form and not just entertainment; that it made me fall in love with writing and storytelling, that it made me excited about creativity in a way that I hadn't been before. It made me realize you can take anything in the world, including things most people consider trashy, and turn it into art -- like, for example, this blog.

The movie is a pastiche of different stories, various characters, and old movies. It's the closest thing that a movie ever came to a collage while, at the same time, being totally original. It's artistic, slow-moving, complex -- and also simple and easy to understand, plus massively entertaining. It's a miracle of a movie, a true original.

It also had a great soundtrack! It was full of country songs, funk songs, covers of old songs, and classic rock. The soundtrack is as classic as the movie and introduced me to lots of great music that I had never heard before -- including my personal favorite, "Jungle Boogie" by Kool and the Gang. "Get down, get down!"

You should read New York Times film critic Janet Maslin's original 1994 review to see how this film was greeted back then -- and how it still resonates today.

   

NYC's Ray Donovan

Remember The Wolf in Pulp Fiction? 

"I solve problems," he proudly declares.

This type of person is more commonly known as a "fixer", the person called in to solve difficult, embarrassing, expensive, potentially life-shattering messes that people, usually wealthy people, stupidly get themselves into. 

In movies like Pulp Fiction or Michael Clayton, and TV shows like Ray Donovan, fixers are usually asked to dispose of dead bodies, intimidate people, engage in blackmail (or get blackmailers to back off), launder money, and destroy or hide incriminating evidence. Fixers are usually smart, skilled, stealthy, shadowy -- they operate behind the scenes, undercover, quickly and efficiently. They keep the appearance of law abiding respectability intact for their clients -- even when it couldn't be further from the truth. 

Michael Cohen, the Trump's lawyer whose home and offices were just raided, fancies himself the president's fixer. The problem is that he's an idiot who loves the limelight and actually makes his client's problems worse!   

But not all fixers are sleazy accomplices. Some are, in fact, just good public servants.

Meet Stanley Brezenoff. 

He's an eighty-year old lifetime public servant who has worked in and out of city government for decades. He was a deputy mayor under Koch and has held a variety of jobs where he has usually fixed agencies under duress. De Blasio has called on Stanley's services multiple times since taking office.

Stanley's latest assignment: fixing NYCHA, the public housing authority that has fallen into dysfunction. Stanley is coming in to turn around he troubled agency and will hopefully improve the lives of its 400,000 residents. 

He's basically the fixer of NYC, our own Ray Donovan, and it's great that, even at his age, he feels the call to serve. 

Or, as De Blasio probably said when he found out that Stanley would help, "Well s!@t yeah, n$gro, that's all you had to say!"

1994: A Cultural Nostalgia Trip

Re: my post below. Some of you might recall that 1994 was actually a very, very important year in American culture. In fact, it remains one of the most important cultural years ever. Think about it:

It was the year Pulp Fiction came out, revolutionizing independent cinema, unleashing the whole Tarantino phenomenon, and making John Travolta cool again.

It was the year Friends and ER premiered, giving us George Clooney and Jennifer Aniston and a whole lot more big names.

It was the year of the great but tragically short-lived show, the aforementioned My So-Called Life (that gave us Claire Danes).

It was the year REM released Monster, with their big hit "What's the Frequency, Kenneth?" Madonna also had a big hit called "I'll Remember" (the video of which you see here), that appeared in a now forgotten movie called "With Honors." The only thing that was interesting about this movie was that it was the last even semi-successful thing Patrick Dempsey did before Grey's Anatomy.

It was the year Kurt Cobain committed suicide and effectively ended the whole grunge movement.

It was the year Richard Nixon died, the first president to do so in more than 20 years.

It was the year Republicans took over the House and Senate, redrawing the political map. George W. Bush was also elected Governor of Texas that year and, well ... we all know what that led to.

And as I also indicated below, it was the year OJ Simpson was accused of murder, starting the whole 24/7 cable news soap-opera format.

I'm not saying everything that happened in American culture 1994 was great but it sure was memorable and it certainly had a lasting impact.

Chris and Lidia: Food, Show Business, and Nostalgia

A couple of week ago, the always great WNYC interview Leonard Lopate had a surprise guest host -- legendary, Oscar-winning actor Christopher Walken. Walken needs no introduction: he is one of the most beloved, amazing actors of his generation. He has made many great movies (Annie Hall, The Deer Hunter, True Romance, Pulp Fiction, Catch Me If You Can), has had career on stage (he recently appeared on Broadway and, did you know that he started as song and dance man in musicals?), and even music videos. He is also a frequent guest host of Saturday Night Live and crafted a couple of great characters -- "the Continental" and the music producer always screaming "More cowbell!" Imitating Christopher Walken has practically become a cottage industry -- Kevin Spacey, Jay Mohr and others have received acclaim pretending to be him -- that he will be remembered forever.

By the way, did you know Walken has been married to the same woman for 40+, casting agent Georgianne who casted The Sopranos? And that his mother recently died at age 104? Pretty amazing.

Recently, during Walken's hosting gig he interviewed a bunch of people including restaurateur/TV cooking host Lidia Bastianich. Both grew up in Queens in the 1950s and have knew each other back then (Lidia actually worked in Walken's Bakery in Astoria, owned by Chris's family). In this wonderful interview, they talk about their families and lives growing up back then and Chris talks about his family's bakery and how he used to work in the back. Lidia talks a lot about her career and her memories of Chris's family and they are joined by Lidia's adorable mama who shares her memories of Chris's dad and what a great, hard-working man he man. You don't hear a lot of interviews like this so it's something really special. Enjoy.

Pulp Fiction Trailer (1994)

I remember seeing this trailer in 1994 and it gave me shpilkus (literally translated: "hairpins in the tuchas").

"It's all falling indelibly into the past"

When I started this blog almost three years ago, it was never meant to be a nostalgia blog, a "those were the days" kinda thing. It was meant to be a dynamic forum capturing life in the world's most dynamic city. I still think it serves that purpose but, increasingly, it's turned more and more into a nostalgia blog.

Perhaps it was inevitable. And I'm the first one to dismiss people who carp about the old days being better than the present. But recent events make it seem like the city has accelerated in a direction that I don't recognize. And as a life-long New Yorker, I'm scared.

Last week I wrote multiple entries about how Old New York Charm (the closings of Tavern on the Green and Cafe des Artists, the ruination of the Plaza Hotel) and Old New York Grit (the cleaning out of Canal Street, Frank Serpico) are disappearing. Then this past week, JD Salinger died (a great NYC writer) and the sale of Stuy-Town officially became a debacle. Also, the great New York movie studio Miramax closed last week, now basically a studio in name only but not practice (remember the Miramax hey-dey of the 1990s? The Crying Game, The Piano, Pulp Fiction, Good Will Hunting, Chicago. Gone now.).

I feel like I'm looking out the back window of a car gaining speed as the city I once knew and loved is shrinking and disappearing into invisibility.

And what are we heading to? A city of soulless wealth, boring glass buildings, bad Yuppie taste, super-expensive real estate prices, and pockets of poverty and despair. At this rate, in twenty years, New York will be like Cleveland. Egads.

"It's all falling indelibly into the past." Don Dellilo wrote this as the last sentence of the opening chapter of his 1997 book Underworld. Indelibly -- not easily moved or erased. But increasingly the past is being erased and replaced with a new scary future. Instead of "indelibly" I would say it's inevitable. It's all falling inevitably into the past. Where do we go from here?

Talking about NYC in the past, there's some new books about the city during WW2. They sound interesting.

Classic Mr NYC

In 2008, I did a couple blog posts about the year 1994. One concerned a movie called "The Wackness" that was a piece of nostalgia about 1994 New York. The other was a "cultural nostalgia" trip to that year -- a year when everything changed.

You think I kid. But I kid you not.
 

A lot happened in 1994. A lot that we're still living with today.

 

Tonya Harding vs. Nancy Kerrigan. The OJ Simpson case. Kurt Cobain's suicide. The Rwandan genocide. The Major League Baseball Strike. Nelson Mandela became President of South Africa. My So-Called Life, Friends, ER, Forrest Gump, Pulp Fiction and all the big careers that were launched (and re-launched).

 

And the world we live in today was largely created that year.

 

The Republicans took over Congress and George W. Bush became governor of Texas -- which lead to President Bush, the Iraq War, and eventually President Obama.

 

And 1994 was also the first year when this thing called the Internet began to penetrate the popular consciousness. As this clip from the Today show proves, before then, no one really knew what "Internet" was. People still had yet to grasp the concept of this rootless world of information. It would take years before things like Amazon, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter would consolidate control over the Internet -- back then, it was an electronic Wild West. But 1994 was the year it broke through -- and changed our world forever.

The Great Precursor: "The Beautiful and Damned" @ 100

Last year saw the release of two movies based on musicals -- In the Heights by Lin-Manuel Miranda and tick ... tick ... BOOM! by Jonathan Larson (the movie of which was actually directed Miranda) -- that would never have been made had their respective creators not then, for their next shows, created arguably the two greatest musicals of the last 25 years -- Rent and Hamilton.  

Call them precursors, forerunners, warm-up-acts, playing in the minors before the majors, what have you -- the small things that came before the big things, the good things before the truly GREAT things. Their first shows got them attention and acclaim. Their next shows vaulted them into cultural history. 

Think Reservoir Dogs before Pulp Fiction, War of the Worlds before Citizen Kane, Llewyn Davis playing before Bob Dylan at the Gaslight, you get the idea. Before something really great, you have to have something pretty good -- but the pretty good won't get remembered unless followed by something really great. 

Got it?

Between 1919 and 1941, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote four novels (plus one uncompleted one) and numerous short stories. The voice of his generation, doyen of the Jazz Age, Fitzgerald would be remembered today as a talented writer who was a product of his era had he not written what is arguably the greatest American novel of the 20th century -- The Great Gatsby. Gatsby's legacy towers over American literature, it's themes of the emptiness of the American dream, the false promise of wealth buying love and happiness, and how we can never recreate our idealized pasts even though we are haunted by them have made it truly timeless.

Every time I read Gatsby I'm just amazed by what a perfect, gorgeous, and powerful story it is -- and how its creation was nothing short of a miracle.

So what came before it? Even Fitzgerald had to have his own warm up act -- in this case, two novels: his youthful 1919 debut, This Side of Paradise, and his 1922 dark satire The Beautiful and Damned.

When Gatsby turns 100 in 2025, there will doubtless be myriad articles, documentaries, think pieces celebrating its greatness. It'll be a Gatsby melee. There will probably be a deluge of analysis of this seminal American work, this forever masterpiece. As well there should be!

But The Beautiful and Damned is being, no surprise, critically overlooked, ignored, on its 100th anniversary. It's like the ugly sibling being slighted for the gorgeous one. 

Thus it's left to yours truly to celebrate the 100 anniversary of Gatsby's precursor -- call it the Great Precursor -- The Beautiful and Damned, the novel you read constantly thinking, "And right after this book, he wrote The Great Gatsby!"

The novel is about married couple living a dissolute life in nineteen-teens NYC. Although Fitzgerald is mostly associated with the 1920s (and this novel was published in March, 1922), it's story is set between 1913 and 1921, bookending the First World War. The orphaned Anthony Patch is the grandson of a wealthy, irascible industrialist who spends his days sleeping and his evening partying -- and waiting for his grandfather to die so that he will inherit tens of millions of dollars (essentially the equivalent of a billion or more today). Anthony meets, through his friends, a debutante named Gloria from Kansas City. They marry and, together, they spend their days drinking and spending money they don't really have, alienating people and getting into trouble -- before Anthony is drafted and heads south for basic training for the First World War. Adultery and hangovers ensue, and a couple ugly twists rob Anthony of his inheritance -- and sanity. The ending is a real shock. 

It's an ugly, tragic tale but it's also a darkly funny book. Where Gatsby is elegiac, Beautiful and Damned is nasty. Fitzgerald does not get sentimental or deep here -- it's almost documentary like in showing and mocking the bad behavior of the ideal, mindless rich (who are never as rich as they think).

When I read this book in college, my professor said, "It's a very bad book." That took me by surprise since, in school, we're supposed to read the great works by the masters -- not one of their minor, or even bad, works. I didn't think the book bad at all -- it's entertaining, amusing, and quite appealing to the sarcastic mind, but it's also overlong and overwritten, clearly the work of a young writer trying to prove himself, favoring verbosity over restraint.

Still, I recommend reading The Beautiful and Damned on its centenary year since, while it's a product of its time, it's a time that reverberates today -- and, yes, because it's the one that came BEFORE, the Great Precursor to The Great Gatsby, the seeds of the timeless greatness that flowered afterwards.

P.S. I hesitated making this comparison earlier but here goes now: another way to put it is, The Beautiful and Damned is like the person you seriously dated before you met your spouse. Barack Obama, who lived in NYC during law school before making his career in Chicago, once called our city "The great love of your life that you never married." 

That's this book in a nutshell.

Review: "Wolfs" & the NYC Night Movie

They don't make movies like this anymore -- well, okay, they do, but they don't play in movie theaters anymore; instead, they pop up on streaming.

But it's always great to see a fast-paced, character-centered flick with great movie stars -- especially when it involves them running around NYC.

Wolves stars George Clooney and Brad Pitt -- thirty-years removed from their starmaking roles on the TV show ER and in the movie Interview With the Vampire, respectively -- as two "cleaners" or "wolves" (like the one Harvey Keitel played in that other 194 classic Pulp Fiction), whose job is to mop up crime scenes, dispose of bodies and evidence, and make sure that the guilty get away with it and justice is denied to the victim. In Wolves, this crime scene involves a dead kid, a backpack full of drugs, and a hysterical female District Attorney (played by the wonderful Amy Ryan) who is running for reelection and needs this problem solved pronto. 

The twist in this movie is that these two now middle-aged wolves are called to clean up the same crime scene unbenowst two each other. And when they clean up the scene and get the dead kid's body out of the downtown Manhattan hotel they were called to -- well, it all goes sideways and mayhem ensues when it turns out the kid really isn't dead.

Wolves then turns into a very fun, almost two hour yarn of car chases, shootouts, sleazy nightclubs, oddball characters, snappy dialogue, chowing down in diners, and everything that makes a good pulpy story. Most of all, it's great to see Clooney and Pitt act their hearts out, their chemistry palpable, in an original story not based on IP. It's just an entertaining movie. Remember those?

But other big thing I love about Wolves, as you might guess, its that it's a real NYC and a real NYC night movie. The story starts downtown but before you know it our heroes are zooming around Chinatown and Lower Manhattan, then they're out in the wilds of Queens. It's a movie that gives you a sense of the whole city. 

And the whole thing takes place at night, when the city falls into a sense of sexy mystery, a place of danger and excitement, a whole other NYC. I think it's fair to say that Wolves joins the company of other brilliant NYC night movies like After Hours, Taxi Driver, Night on Earth, While the City Sleeps, the Whit Stillman classics Metropolitan and The Last Days of Disco, The Warriors, Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist -- heck, I'll even throw in Eyes Wide Shut. 

You're Welcome

I've been thinking about the movie Once Upon a Time in Hollywood at lot lately. It just keeps invading my thoughts. Directed by Quentin Tarantino, it's my favorite of his movies after Pulp Fiction; and even more than that masterpiece, this one feels personal -- clearly for him, and especially for me. 

While largely plotless, at times meandering, this movie stays in your head for a long time after seeing it. It deposits itself in your soul. It makes you think in layers. The point of the movie isn't the story or action but its characters, their relationships with each other, and their place and time i.e. a culturally changing city and movie business in 1969. This movie is truly a work of art, a self-contained world that invites you to stay awhile and become absorbed in it. Like this blog, it captures "the spirit and psyche", the soul, of a particular time and place. 

When I think about Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, the word "pastiche" comes to mind. Pastiche is defined as an artistic work consisting of a medley of pieces taken from various sources. This movie feels just like that, a collage, a repository for memories, a collection of favorite things, a funhouse of nostalgia, a love letter to the past and future (again, much like Mr NYC). Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is also Tarantino's tribute to working people, to the grunts, to the almost-was and never-weres, to the people who don't make history but live through it and deal with its consequences (much like Mr NYC).

Specifically, this movie is about a has-been C-list cowboy actor named Rick Dalton and his stuntman/gofer/driver/friend Cliff Booth. They are trying to find work in a newly swinging, hippy Hollywood that they don't recognize anymore (sort of like how I don't recognize NYC anymore while trying to keep a middling career going in it). Rick has never been a big star (he lost out to Steve McQueen for The Great Escape) and Cliff's stuntman days are over (many in the business believe he may have killed his wife; we never learn if he did or didn't, leaving a tantalizing mystery for us to ponder). Along the way we also meet Sharon Tate, their beautiful neighbor and an up-and-coming actress, married to the big-time director Roman Polanski. In real life, Sharon and several others were killed by the Manson Family in August 1969, sending shockwaves through Hollywood and the country, a dark moment in the shiny city.

This movie poses a simple question: "What if the Manson murders were thwarted? What if good prevailed instead of evil? What if guys like Rick and Cliff got a second chance? What is there was a real-life Hollywood ending? Would the future and past have been different? Would our world, our present, be a slightly better place?"

Once Upon a Time ... asks these questions but smartly doesn't answer them -- it leaves it to us, the viewers, to imagine the answers, the possibilities of the roads not taken. The brilliance of this movie is not only that it lovingly recreates the Hollywood of 1969, and tells the real-life and fictional stories of some of its players, but it reminds us of how life is a daily struggle between darkness and light, between hope and fear, between kindness and cruelty, between making this choice and that choice, between our love for the past and our hopes and fears for the future.

As the name connotes, Once Upon a Time ... makes you think that it's a fairy tale, a nostalgia trip, a mere backwards glace, but it's actually a very forward looking "pastiche" -- it makes you wonder about the future as much as gaze on the past. It's not un-coincidental that this movie takes place exactly 50 years (1969) before its release (2019) -- it forces us to confront where we came from, about what happened in those intervening 50 years, and about where we might be going in the next 50 years. That's the neat trick of this story, the many ironies within it -- a hero might actually also be a killer, an actor might actually play his role in real life, imaginary violence inspires real violence and vice versa, the real heroes are behind the scenes and never acknowledged, the heroes we see aren't really heroes at all, and the real villains are nowhere to be seen because they make others do their dirty work. It's about the illusions, the myths, the shadows and lights, that we see in the movies and that hover over American life. It's also about innocence lost, the falling away of real life into vague memories, the past gone forever, the evitable forward grind of the future.

Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going? Who will we become? And let's have fun along the way! That's the movie in nutshell: a series of these unanswered questions, beautifully presented, as well as a celebration of the journey of life.

And that, in many ways, is also what this blog is about for me and NYC -- a pastiche, a collage, a repository for memories, a collection of favorite things, a funhouse of nostalgia, a love letter to the past and future, a work of art, a self-contained world that invites you to visit a while and become absorbed in.

Welcome.

Sex, Lies, and Harvey: The Dark Side of Success

America worships success -- money, power, fame, the ultimate three-legged stool of achievement.

More than that, we love "success stories", people born into humble circumstances who, through hard work and smarts, through good ol' fashioned grit, gain that aforementioned stool. ("Jenny from the Block", etc.)

Nobody in NYC personified that success story more than Harvey Weinstein.

Born to the children of Jewish immigrants escaping European anti-semitism, Harvey grew up in a housing project in Queens. He went to college in Buffalo and did something brilliant: in the 1970s, he got into the music scene there and brought acts like the Rolling Stones to perform. He learned the nitty-gritty of show business, how to market, how to promote, how to woo talent, how to produce, how to get stuff done. He then moved back to NYC in the early 1980s and got into the movie business with his brother Bob. Their company, MiraMax (sweetly named after their parents, Miriam and Max) became a powerhouse of independent cinema. Harvey was a genius at recognizing talent, cultivating it, and getting the world to see and reward it.

Remember all those great movies? sex, lies, and videotape? My Left Foot? The Crying Game? The Piano? Pulp Fiction? The English Patient? Good Will Hunting? Chicago? The King's Speech? (Among many others.) Harvey Weinstein made them happen.

He built the careers of great directors and actors (there'd be no Quentin Tarantino or Gwenyth Paltrow without him), his movies won Oscars, and, of course, he made money -- tons of money. At a time when the movie business was becoming more corporate, more boring, more "safe", more about sequels and franchises and figuring out how to generate theme park rides or toys to be included with fast food deals, Weinstein was saying "No! We stand for quality! Originality! Artistry! Groundbreaking films! And we can get rich at the same time!" In many ways, Harvey Weinstein saved the commercial viability and artistic integrity of cinema at a time when it was under threat. He made movies matter again. For that, we owe him a debt.

Of course, now we all know that it came at a price -- a horrible one. While Harvey was producing great movies, he was also terrorizing women. He harassed them, raped them, demeaned them, and, if they didn't submit to his desires, he ruined their lives. He used his power and wealth to shield himself from the consequences of his behavior for decades. His awfulness was an "open secret" but it didn't matter -- his success let him get away with it. (I know someone who worked at MiraMax in the 1990s, and Harvey's yelling and screaming was, like Trump's daily Tweet awfulness, such a daily occurrence that it became normal. Harvey would explode at people for the simplest, smallest things -- things most normal people wouldn't even get upset about it).

Harvey Weinstein epitomized the success that America worships and that NYC facilitates. And he personified its dark side. The grandson of people escaping terror became a terrorist himself.

One of the reasons people strongly desire success -- and will go to great lengths to achieve it -- is because they believe that success means, "I can do anything I want! I can have anyone I want! Nothing will stop me! I am invincible!" It is, they believe, the ultimate freedom, the ultimate promise of America.

Sex and revenge have always been the phantom legs of the three-legged success stool. Yes, money means a wonderful material quality of life, fame means getting invited to any party, and power means getting stuff done -- but what's the point of all that, a lot of people (i.e. men) think, "If I don't also get laid? A lot! With lots of people! Lots of different hot people! And if I can't get even with the people who done me wrong?"

Women, and lots of them, are the ultimate prize, the ultimate accomplishment, the ultimate fuel for ambition, the ultimate reward for great success  -- especially for guys like Harvey who couldn't get them based on their looks or personality alone.

But here's the catch: women still don't want these guys. These guys may have scaled the heights, they may have transcended their humble origins into great success, they may have "made it" -- but not really. They're still ugly and gross, they're still "Jennys from the block", the kids who got bullied in the schoolyard.

These guys know it -- and it fills them with rage. It fills them with hatred towards women. Everything's worthless if all their success can't buy them genuine desirability. And the dark side in them, their demons, are unleashed to horrifying effect. They want revenge, they want to hurt these women who will never want them. And everyone suffers for it.

It's so sad that it's come to this. Harvey Weinstein is, in many ways, an extreme and high-profile example of this problem. Success means everything but it's nothing if it doesn't make you the kind of person you always wanted to be. And that's a humbleness you can never transcend or buy your way out of. You never stop being who you really are, no matter how much you achieve.

There are so many interrelated tragedies to this whole thing. There's Harvey's victims, first and foremost. There's Harvey, the man, a man who reached the heights only to fall back down to earth hard. There's the movies, the great movies he brought into the world, forever tainted now by their association with him. And this man, once upon a time one of NYC's favorite sons, is now its greatest villain since Bernie Madoff.

So often we like to say that successful people's lives have had "fairy tales endings" -- but it's never that simple. It never ends until, you know, the end. And sometimes the fairy tale is very, very dark.

Harvey Weinstein's story would make a good movie that he probably would've produced.

Postscript: I remember the summer of 1998. I was spending the summer at college, far from NYC, dreaming about coming home as soon as I graduated the next year. Fortuitously I found a copy of New York magazine at the place I was working, a special 30 anniversary issue, that featured interviews with prominent New Yorkers. One of the interviews was with Bob and Harvey Weinstein. They recounted their humble origins, what made them become such big successes, their love of movies, and why they'd never leave NYC. Their short interview was memorable because it reminded me of why I desperately wanted to come home and what the city was all about.

Harvey said in the interview: "I love New York. We can go to the grocery store and not bump into guys who want to do a three-picture deal." That's what I loved about NYC too, then and now: we can be anyone and do anything and yet have another life completely. (Harvey had another life, as we discovered, another scary one). So perhaps it's not surprising that Harvey also said, "there are no limits. If you follow your heart instead of your head, you can do incredible things."

 Harvey didn't believe in limits, as we know all too well now, but he did incredible things and horrible things at the same time (thus the duality of man). And the humble kid from Queens has been humbled once again.  

Review: "The Last Seduction" (1994)

Something was in the movie water in October 1994 when not one, not two, but three very different but nonetheless classic movies were released -- Pulp Fiction, Clerks, and The Last Seduction.

The Last Seduction falls into my favorite new category of NYC movies -- movies about New Yorkers who are far from home, in an environment that is totally alien to them.

The plot revolves a woman who works as a telemarketing manger who is married to a doctor. They are deeply in debt to the mob and decide to make some easy money by engaging in a one time drug deal (the doctor-husband sells some goons stolen prescription drugs and winds up with a big suitcase full of cash). His wife then steals the money and heads upstate, leaving her husband to the mafia's fate, while she plans to get to Chicago and start a new life. Worried that her husband and the mob might find her if she gets to Chicago too soon, she stops in a small town in upstate New York, gets a job, and seduces a local man (hence the title) into murdering her husband (the mob has not yet killed him but instead broken several of his fingers).

Her plan is coldly brilliant and flawlessly executed but she is desperate to get out of this small town and go back to NYC so she can live large on her stolen loot. Throughout the movie there are jokes about living in "cowtown", how this city woman cannot tolerate life in this tiny place, and she even tells her "cowboy" at once point to go find a nice "cowgirl" and make "cowbabies." Lovely lady.

The great actress Linda Fiorentino played Bridget, the scheming femme fatale, while Peter Berg plays the mark of her seduction, and Bill Pullman is her miserable husband. The people in this movie are uniformly horrible, the story starts out dark and gets darker, and it ends badly. But the movie is also very funny and, yes, sometimes sexy. This is the kind of movie that doesnt get made anymore and, had it not been so well made and acted, would have just been another dumb thriller.

So this is a great one to watch although probably not with someone you're in a relationship with. It makes you want to become celibate.  

Review: "Don't Drink the Water" (1994) & "Die Hard with a Vengeance" (1995) -- Two Mid-1990s NYC Oddities

In the mid-1990s two very different NYC-related movies graced movie and television screens that, looking back, seem truly bizarre that they were ever made. 

The first is a TV movie that aired in December, 1994. It was written and directed by Woody Allen called Don't Drink the Water. It was based on a play that Woody had written and was produced on Broadway in the mid-1960s. It then became a lackluster movie starring, of all people, Jackie Gleason. Woody didn't like the movie version (he had nothing to do with it) so, thirty years later, he directed it for television.

Don't Drink the Water is about a Jewish caterer from New Jersey who is on vacation with his family in an unnamed Communist country in Eastern Europe. The country has been consumed by chaos, so the caterer and his family seek refuge in the American embassy. But things in the embassy are wacky as well, and hilarity ensues. In the meantime, the young American consult running the embassy falls for the caterer's daughter -- and romance ensues. And all the usual Woody humor is there, including lots of jokes about deli foods. 

Woody made this film at a weird time in his life and career. He had just gone through the whole break up scandal with Mia Farrow and his reputation had been dinged -- but he had also just released the great movie Bullets Over Broadway, and was riding high on critical acclaim and strong box office. This TV movie was therefore something of a pastiche, a little side-project. Many Woody fans might know even know it exists. 

Woody stars as the caterer in the film, his wife is played by the always wonderful Julie Kavner, and the daughter is played by Mayim Bialik who was finishing her run on the TV show Blossom. Others in the cast include the great Edward Herrmann (pre-Gilmore Girls) and Dom Deluise but the real surprise is that the American consul is played by Michael J. Fox.

Yes, Marty McFly and Alvy Singer were in a movie together.

Fox had been a huge star in the 1980s with the show Family Ties, the Back to the Future movies, and some other notable films. But by the mid-1990s his star seemed to be waning so that's why, presumably, he agreed to do this TV movie with Woody. A couple of years later he starred on the TV show Spin City, cementing a comeback -- and then years later he disclosed a devestating Parkinson's diagnosis. 

It's not a great movie but it's still amazing to realize that there was a time when Woody Allen could actually get a movie made and broadcast on ABC, a big TV network -- and that people would watch it! How times have changed. 

Then, a few months later, Die Hard with a Vengeance hit 1995 summer movie theaters. 

It was the third in the multi-part Die Hard movie series starring Bruce Willis. Where the first one took place in a huge office building in LA, and the second took place at an airport in Washington, DC, this third flick takes place all over Manhattan. Willis's John McClane cop character is at home in NYC this time when things start blowing up around town. A mystery man named Simon contacts McClane and forces him to play a serious of dangerous games around Manhattan in order to prevent future explosions ("Simon says" -- Get it?). It turns out that this is all a distraction so that Simon and his goons can rob the $104 billion dollars in gold that are stored under Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Simon declares that it makes Fort Knox look like something for tourists.

And lots of violence, car chases, shoot-outs and one-liners ensue.

Willis is at his charasmatic best in his film and his side-kick is played by the brilliant Samuel Jackson. They had just starred in the now-classic Pulp Fiction (although shared no scenes together) so they were riding on this juice of that movie. The villian, Simon, is played by Jeremy Irons, and he really hams it up here, a mustache-twirling bad guy. Iron was about four years removed from his Oscar win and although his days as a big movie star were coming to an end.

And the big secret is that we find out he's the brother of Gruber, the villian from the first Die Hard movie played by Allan Rickman. "He was an asshole," both Simon and McClane agree.

The plot and action in this movie are idiotic in the extreme, and the idea of terrorism in NYC seemed much more far-fetched in 1995 than it did six years later. However, it's a real NYC eye-candy movie -- not only do we see great shots of Lower Manhattan, we also go to Harlem, the ports, and even the subway stop at 72nd Street and Broadway. 

Again, getting actors of the caliber of Willis, Jackson and Irons in a movie together that was this wild -- as well as the biggest box office hit of 1995 -- seems crazy today (this movie spelt "big pay day" all over it). And making a movie where NYC gets mostly blown up would not be PC today. Also, I actually remember going to see this movie in theaters right before I went to college -- and then totally forgot about it until now. 

So there's a look back at two movies from 30 years ago that, in today's NYC and entertainment environment, would be unthinkable of getting made today. 

Summer of '94

I've blogged about the year 1994 -- probably one of the most culturally and politically consequential years of the last quarter century -- several times so I won't bore you with another nostalgic post. 

But it seems that I was onto something. WNYC is currently running a month long series called "Summer of '94" where they go back and examine the music of that year and the impact it had: the death of Kurt Cobain and Nirvana, rap going mainstream, Dookie, the Pulp Fiction soundtrack, the debuts of Beck, Weezer, and Notorious B.I.G. 

What were you doing in 1994?

Big "What Ifs": "Popeye Doyle" & Peter Manso RIP

In 1981 New York City Mayor Ed Koch was overwhelming re-elected to a second term. He was so popular that he received the nomination of both the Republican and Democratic parties. His landslide win established him as a formidable political figure and higher office called. 

Koch answered it by running for Governor of New York State -- and failed spectacularly. 

He gave an interview to a journalist named Peter Manso -- who has just died at the age of 84 -- in Playboy magazine. With his deft interviewing skills, Manso got Koch to admit what he thought about upstate New York, and the same thing that made Koch so popular in NYC -- his brashness, his "tell-it-like-it-is", no-holds-barred instinct to speak his mind -- terminated his campaign for governor. Koch told Manso about upstate, "It's sterile. It's nothing. It's wasting your life … a joke … you have to drive 20 miles to buy a gingham dress or a Sears Roebuck suit … [Albany is] small town life at its worst.”

Even in an age before social media, these comments sparked widespread outrage -- and Koch ended up losing the Democratic primary to then-Lieutenant Governor Mario Cuomo. The history speaks for itself -- Cuomo wound up serving as governor for three terms, from 1983 to 1995, and now his son Andrew Cuomo is governor, having been in office since 2011 (whether he'll make it to the end of his term in 2022 remains to be seen). 

So Peter Manso changed the course of New York City and New York State history. But for him -- and it's a big "what if" -- Ed Koch might have wound up as governor and the Cuomo dynasty that has ruled New York off-and-on for 40 years might never have gotten off the ground. 

Then there's Doyle, Popeye Doyle.

You might recognize the name if you've ever seen the 1971 classic The French Connection and the 1975 sequel. Doyle is the quintessential OG rough-and-gruff police detective, a sort of NYC Dirty Harry -- he doesn't play-by-the-rules or conform in order to deliver justice to his benighted city. In the mid-1980s, a decade of so after the second movie, someone got the idea that a TV show about Popeye Doyle might be a idea -- so a pilot was made starring Ed O'Neill called, quite brilliantly, Popeye Doyle. The plot is fairly basic -- a model is murdered, and Doyle tracks the case which gets him involved with a drug cartel and terrorists. 

But only the pilot was made -- the TV show, to quote Pulp Fiction, "became nothing." It was broadcast in the fall of 1986 and shortly thereafter Ed O'Neill went on to star in Married ... with Children for a decade and then, years later, the great Modern Family for another decade. So another big "what if" is that had Popeye Doyle been picked up and run for even one season, O'Neill probably would never have done Married ... or Modern Family and the history of television would be very different. 

Both "what ifs" are reminders that the course of history -- whether political or cultural -- is made by the decisions we make, by seemingly random choices and transient events or desires, or by unforced errors (like Koch's) or aesthetic judgments (like Popeye Doyle). We live with the results, for better or worse, of the decisions that we and others make that affect our lives and those of us around us. 

Life in NYC and everywhere is determined and altered by people's choices, and everything else lives on in the realm of the "what ifs." 

Mr NYC in France, Holland & England

Memory is tricky. Some things we remember as clearly as a blue cloudless sky. Other things we remember only faintly or not at all. It doesn't matter how long ago or recently these events were -- we remember what we want to, for whatever reason, no matter how long ago. 

I think the memories that fade are those that can't be easily catagorized as "good" or "bad." We remember our traumas and our triumphs but rarely the things in between. 

As our movements in the outside world have been limited by the pandemic, as I've clocked more time at home than ever before, I've spent a lot of time thinking about trips I've taken in the past. Most of them I've blogged about here already but then, quite recently, my memory was jogged about a trip I had taken the summer befor my freshman year of high school. It was a five week student trip to France, Holland and England. For whatever reasons, I honestly hadn't thought about or remembered even going on this trip for years and years and years.

Until now.

I guess I didn't really remember this trip because I didn't like most of the other kids on this trip and there was lots of teenage nonesense (who wants to remember that?). And yet, as I thought about the trip again recently, I realized I didn't remember any of the other kids on it -- but I remember what I saw.

And what I saw was amazing.

First, France. We landed in an airport in Basel, Switzerland and took a bus across the French border to a small town called Argentierre. It was a small, picturesque country town. We stayed in a hostel up on a hill, with a stunning view of the Alps. We would then walk down into the town to get food and change money but we spent most of our time hiking the Alps and beholding the amazing vistas. After a few days we took an overnight train to Paris, emerging into the city in the early morning (in fact both of my trips to Paris, nearly 20 years apart, have involved my arrival by train). We stayed in an old fashioned stone building on a beautiful street with a courtyard, and we walked streets and over the bridges of this stunning city every day. One night we even ate in a Chinese restaurant. We visited the Louvre and, yes, saw the Mona Lisa; we visited the bizarre-looking Centre Pompidou (a modern art museum that is a piece of modern art itself), we walked through the Luxumbourg Gardens and strolled around at night, the city truly living up to its reputation as the city of lights.

Second, Holland. We took a train to, if I remember correctly, the Hague but we didn't see any of the international courts of justice. Instead, we got on bicycles and biked for several days around the most hilly parts of this otherwise very flat country. This was the roughest part of the trip for me -- by far. The bikes were big and metal and I had neither the size nor stamina for long stretches of biking (at one point we even biked past some royal palace behind a big gate). At the end of each day, at the various hostels we'd stop at, I would collapse from exhaustion (we did, however, spend one afternoon during our biking adventures at a topless beach -- that was interesting!). At one point, as we were biking, I had a really nasty fall and the skin from part of my left knee was dug out, exposing a vein. It took a long time to heal and I still have a scar to this day. Fortunately, we soon ended the biking portion of the journey and headed to Amsterdam. I love this town. Highly walkable, gorgeous canals, lovely and simple architecture. We went to all of the big museums (I don't remember all of them, sadly), and, of course, we saw Anne Frank's house which was moving, sad, and inspiring. And, yes, we strolled around the notorious Red Light District although obvious we didn't patronize it. Nor did we go into any of the pot cafes. However, I did go into some of the McDonalds and, not for the nothing, I laughed the loudest when the movie Pulp Fiction came out and the Vincent Vega character talked about Royales with Cheese and people in Amsterdam soaking french fries with mayonaise. I saw all that with my own eyes, a couple of years before Mr. Quentin Tarantino did!

Third, England. We took a boat to get there, a boat from Belgium. I don't remember where in Belgium we left from or where in England we landed at. But on the day we landed we took a boat to Cambridge and stayed at the university. Our home was called Sidney Sussex College (British universities are made up of a number of "colleges"), whose most famous alumni (in real life) is Oliver Cromwell and (fictional) is Sherlock Holmes. Again, memories of this time was scarce, but I remember we ate in these huge neo-classical dining halls and we rowed down the River Cam in punts which is a huge tradition there. Next we headed north to the beautiful Lake District where we spent days backpacking around the stunning hills and dales around the lakes, mist everywhere. We also visited Rydle Mount, the modest but gorgeous home of the poet William Wordsworth whose family still owns it to this day. Then we headed down to London and stayed at the University of London, a massive and rather dreary modern-y place. I've been to London several times since then and I honestly don't remember much about this particular visit except that we spent a lot of time hanging out in the city's parks -- including the infamous Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park where, on Sundays, people stand and kvetch about whatever's on their mind. One guy I saw spent his time shouting "I'm perfect! I'm perfect!"

After that, we came back to NYC.

And that's it. That's all I remember. But these vague memories of that trip, a long time ago, has inspired me to go back to France, Holland and England as soon as possible -- and to enjoy it properly this time!