Lin-Manuel Miranda's In the Heights musical film adaptation (from Crazy Rich Asians director Jon M. Chu) is admittedly not my usual beat, but it's got two big things working for it, against my usual -- it's got Anthony Ramos in the lead, and hoo boy are we smitten with Anthony Ramos. And second the thing is set in the neighborhood where I live in the real world, and was filmed all over my every-day places...
I keep doing double-takes tonight because all these people tweeting pictures from IN THE HEIGHTS on my timeline; I'm like, "Why is everybody hanging out down the street from me?" That movie's gonna be one of those weird views where I'm too distracted by locations pic.twitter.com/cn2PRp3u5m
I love my neighborhood with the heat of a thousand suns (especially after spending a good chunk of the past year straight up trapped in it because of the pandemic) and so this paean to it, well once it would've been exciting in a point-and-stare kinda way but honestly, here in 2021, it makes me emotional now. We've been through a lot -- we're still going through it, like all of you are in your places. The difference is my bonded-place is getting a big-budget musical...
... and I'm gonna cherish that shit. (PS I thiiiiink you can see my building in the above shot!) In the Heights is out on June 11th -- it's also opening the Tribeca Film Festival two days before that with a big screening at the United Palace Theater in Washington Heights, about a ten minute walk from my window! -- and they dropped a couple new trailers this week; here's the main one at this link, but I wanna share the one trailer that's titled "Washington Heights" because... duh, have you been listening to me?
"And it hit me then that one of the reasons why some people cling to what has vintage status is not because they like things old or marginally dated, which allows them to feel that their personal time and vintage time are magically in sync; rather it’s because the word vintage is just a figure of speech, a metaphor for saying that so many of us don’t really belong here, not in the present, or the past, or the future, but that all of us seek a life that exists simply elsewhere in time, or elsewhere on-screen, and that, not being able to find it, we have all learned to make do with what life throws our way."
What a glorious, glorious gift I've been gifted with today -- Criterion has begun a new series of essays on their website called "First Person" where they invite writers to discuss some of their most memorable film-going experiences, and their very first entry is Call me By Your Name author Andre Aciman talking about the second time he saw Billy Wilder's film The Apartment, in the early 1980s in NYC, and how it inspired him to go for a long walk around the ever-changing city afterwards. The Apartment is one of my favorite movies (and maybe you've heard me talk about Call Me By Your Name once or twice) -- I've even previously written about looking for The Apartment's locations here in this city, and about their disappearance! Anyway Aciman's piece is lovely and made me tear up, go read it.
I've always loved that old dude who is just sitting reading his newspaper next to the fountain in Washington Square Park as the world ends in Deep Impact. There are worse ways! Anyway I've talked about this many times here on the site, but I've always found great joy in Disaster Movies. You make a Disaster Movie and I'll go see your Disaster Movie and chances are I'll love it, even if I can in theory recognize it as shit.
They're critical-thinking proof for me -- in fact sometimes the dumber the better. (I'm looking at you, San Andreas.) I suppose I could get some interest insight into myself were I to discuss this misanthropic proclivity with a psychologist, but where's the fun in that? City go boom!
Anyway I just fell down a hole of watching Disaster Movie clips on YouTube, I suppose you can guess why, and there was a new feeling that came from them today, one that's probably even more disturbing were it analyzed -- one of comfort. Almost serenity. A giant wave obliterating my home, three years into a Trump Presidency, now sounds like a good deal. Seems about right.
As a kid of the 1980s so much of my youth was built on movies set in New York, a booming time for Big City Representation... something I felt cooler about before the worst aspect of that "Greed Is Good" NYC mentality became our current nightmare president slash tormentor. Sigh. Anyway I'd be remiss doing this series, where I'm celebrating my 20th year of surviving this place, if I didn't mention Ivan Reitman's formative flick Ghostbusters at some point. Hell I might end up having to mention it more than once when it comes down to it. An excellent place to start though is with that firehouse the dudes end up buying in Tribeca...
... since it's literally a five minute walk from where I sit every day typing this blog -- where I sit right this second! -- a fact that would've blown my baby brain apart if you'd have shared that info with me as I sat there sipping Ecto Cooler watching The Real Ghostbusters cartoon every Saturday morning. I've been slimed... with awesomeness! .
ONLY IN NEW YORK can you make a Ghostbusters reference and realize a second later that you were standing next to the Ghostbusters firehouse as you did it pic.twitter.com/XvnYuPL9tq
This fall I've have been here in NYC for 20 years -- hence this series you're reading right this second! -- and that means some things have changed since I moved here. The one that makes me the saddest is the closing in 2013 of the Emerald Inn, the bar that Billy Wilder and Jack Lemmon immortalized in their 1960 masterpiece.
The bar itself actually just moved over a few blocks to 250 West 72nd and if you're in the neighborhood I recommend going since there sadly isn't much in the way of old fashioned Irish pubs around there anymore, and I love that sort of thing. But it's not the same. They couldn't pick up that history, that air that Jack Lemmon and Billy Wilder breathed, and move it over several blocks. The original location of 205 Columbus Avenue is a Kate Spade store now -- I'm not saying you should buy several pints at the corner bodega and then go barf in a pricey handbag, but I'm not not...
Time for a brand new series here at MNPP! This here year of 2020 marks my 20th anniversary living in New York City -- I moved here on Labor Day Weekend of the year 2000, just a couple of months after graduating from college. And to celebrate this anniversary o' mine I plan on every single week for the rest of the year (on every Wednesday I think, but don't hold my erratic ass to that) listing a spot here in NYC that makes me think of a movie that was filmed at that location. Lord knows there are plenty enough such spots, and lord knows we New Yorkers love nothing more than talking about our dirty superior town. And I'm among the worst -- I'd say it's time to indulge that instinct proper-like. Let's get it started with one that truly got it started...
As far back as I can remember I wanted to live here. I'll surely get to some of the films that inspired that feeling in Little Me later on but today we're hitting up something that happened on one of my very first actual visits to this place before I officially made the big move -- I was in town begging NYU for better financial aid to transfer there from my school upstate (ultimately to no avail) and I happened upon a movie being shot a few blocks north of their campus.
After 20 years here seeing a movie being shot feels less novel and more like a barrier between me and my bagel place, but in the spring of 1997 I was 19 years old and tres excitable, and suddenly there was Jack Nicholson and Helen Hunt and Greg Kinnear standing fifty feet away. It certainly captured my imagination! I stood there on the other side of the street watching them film for ages -- I was a thirsty Film Student after all, and I'd never seen a production this massive. At one point they broke for lunch and Jack Nicholson... just went walking down the street? Like... a person? I followed him for a block but then felt weird about it and broke off towards the place I was supposed to be, but imagine? Jack f'ing Nicholson just walking down the street? I had to live here.
This is presumably a spoiler for the third season of the show but The Handmaids Tale appears to be filming on the Mall in Washington DC this afternoon -- you can see some more pictures over here. Either they're filming something or Margaret Atwood has proven too reliable a narrator once again and we've gone full extremist. After our President's fascistic press conference today it seems entirely possible! Can you find the Mike Pence in these pictures?
I probably wouldn't normally post these pictures -- even though I love the show -- but I'm actually headed to DC for the next four days myself and now I'm really hoping they're filming over the weekend so I can see some of this myself. Fingers crossed. On that tip I got some good answers from y'all when I tweeted this last week but if anybody has anything they want to add for me to check out this weekend have at it in the comments, your assistance is always appreciated...
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Anybody have any good suggestions for things I should visit in DC when I'm there for a couple days? I've been there before, seen the big touristy things -- looking for the less traveled slash weird stuff. Def gonna hit up the Folger Shakespeare Library, for obvious reasons pic.twitter.com/1agtPAXW2u
My quick weekend jaunt to Baltimore, Maryland was an unheralded success -- I booked it down for 36 hours in order to see John Waters' art show titled "Indecent Exposure" at the Baltimore Museum of Art, which runs through January 6th and I definitely, definitely recommend. I mean...
... one of the first thing you see when you walk into the exhibit is a Michael Jackson Baby hanging out with a Charles Manson Baby, and it only gets nuttier (by which I mean more brilliant) from there. And even besides his cunning ruminations on our world of trash there are some stunning shots of his Dreamlanders scattered about...
Oh Cookie, my beloved. If you'd like more photos that I took of the show check 'em out on my Instagram. As you can see up top I also wandered the streets of Baltimore doing a brief JW-inspired tour -- I found the four-story tall mural of Divine, which is located at 106. E. Preston St., and I also managed to find the most stretch where Divine ate dog shit in Pink Flamingos too. I also saw a woman on a deserted nighttime street downtown scream, "Rats! Rats!!!" as she ran off through some billowing steam, so Baltimore truly lived up to the hype.
Alrighty as it was spoken I was off-blog for most of the day, prepping last-minute plans for a weekend in Baltimore to see the John Waters art show called "Indecent Exposure" at the Baltimore Museum of Art - I already asked this on Twitter and got some great replies but if anybody has advice on Baltimore Stuff To Do please do share in the comments! And I'll see you Monday! If rats don't come out and bite my new nylons, that is...
I've been to Toronto a dozen times in my life, having grown up just across the lake, but I'm not enough of a local to've known that Queen Video was a real place and not just an easter egg put across from Jake Gyllenhaal to make me snicker.
Unfortunately Queen Video closed in 2016, so if you're planning on visiting it for your super duper Enemy Movie Location Tour the next time you're in town you'll have to cross that one off the list.
It's probably safe to assume at this point, whether you liked Blade Runner 2049 or not (I did not) that Denis Villeneuve has got a long career still ahead of him - next up is two Dune movies, apparently! - but I often find myself wondering where Enemy will fall when the dust settles on his career. My opinion's that it's his best movie to date but then as we all know...
... my opinion's mostly garbage. Anyway this is kind of a throwaway scene in the film; Jake's professor character has just been told by a co-worker in a very odd scene (even for this movie) that he should go watch a movie - nothing is stranger here than friendly conversation! - and so he goes and rents a movie. And suddenly...
... there he is.
I love how the movie inside the movie...
... actually looks less stylized than
the, uh, movie outside the movie as if
Jake's trapped in dual purgatories. (And isn't he?)
Every successive time that I see Call Me By Your Name the first tear seems to fall earlier and earlier in the narrative, but I finally seem to have settled on this shot at the 34 minute mark in the movie as my Initial Tear Incident - it's the Patient Zero of Blubbering. Why this moment? What is this moment? This is the morning after the big dance scene that we've all seen and giffed - Elio rides along with his Dad and Oliver to the ruins on Lake Garda where a statue's being brought up from the water.
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Not for nothing here's a pic of me at the Grotte di Catullo in Sirmione which is where an important scene of CALL ME BY YOUR NAME happens pic.twitter.com/X5GEbTFDrK
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Yes I have been right there where the boys are walking; that probably has a little bit of something to do with why this moment gets me - I feel myself enveloped in its world, its embrace, by then. And if you haven't noticed I like that feeling.
But it's more than that. I think you can pinpoint Elio finally understanding his feelings towards Oliver during that dance scene and this here shot represents his first opportunity to look at Oliver without anybody looking at him while he looks - as I wrote extensively at The Film Experience the tangled web of who's watching who in CMBYN is a huge part of its narrative thrust. Well here Elio's free to look upon the boy he likes for the first time knowing that he likes him and that little smile Chalamet steals...
... oh my goodness.
And sure enough as soon as Elio swings around to join his father and Oliver he puts his defensive sunglasses back on, lest his playful eyes give up the game.
A post shared by Darren Aronofsky (@darrenaronofsky) on
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If you don't follow me on Instagram then you're missing out on 1) tons and I do means tons of artfully positioned photographs of the New York City skyline and of paintings I like in museums (it gets real lively on there lemme tell ya what) and 2) you're missing out on the crazy adventure I had last night! So I will re-tell it here (or you just click over to the Instagram post where I told it the first time, too).
That picture up top promising tickets to the premiere of his new movie Mother! (see the trailer here) was posted by the director Darren Aronosfky yesterday afternoon. I called the phone number in the picture and a muffled creepy voice recording said to go down to the "Charging Bull" at Bowling Green and to look for someone with a horn between 7 and 8pm. Since that's close to my office, and right around the time I get out of work, I figured sure, I'll give it a try.
I went down and stood there for awhile watching tourists snap "funny" pictures with the bull's testicles, keeping my eyes peeled for a person wearing a horn - I was looking for an animal horn, since the bull was right there. Then right at 7pm there was a woman that a couple other people had spotted first with a big musical horn (I think it was a baritone?) strapped to her side. She was wearing a grey jumpsuit, and a little cap, and as I made my way over to her several other people who were on the hunt as well strided up - we formed a line, and one by one the woman took our thumb-prints on little pieces of paper. She handed me my paper and gave me directions down a couple winding streets, where I were supposed to deliver the paper to a man with a suitcase who would be waiting for me. She was sending people in different directions so clearly this game was spread out all over the area.
I took my paper and went walking. If you know this area of Manhattan (around Wall Street) then you know the streets can get very small and very empty, alley-like, very quickly, and with two swift turns I found myself in a narrow barren street all by myself looking for a man with a suitcase. I saw one man smoking a cigarette a little ways down and asked him if he knew anything about Mother! tickets and he just glared at me like I was a weirdo - part of me wondered if it was part of the game and if I was supposed to harass him at that point? Thankfully I didn't do that and I saw the street I was on winded to the left (it really seemed like a dead end at that point) and halfway down it was this...
This was clearly what I was looking for. The man stared me intently in the eyes (I was a little weirded out at this point, as well I should be, and he was relishing it) and held out his hand for the paper with my thumb-print on it. I held it up to hand it to him and before I really realized what was happening he had flicked out a lighter and set the paper on fire! It was flash-paper so it exploded and burned away quick. Show off.
The man then held up the suitcase and gestured for me to support it. I did and he flicked it open and lifted the top, and as he did a great beam of light illuminated his face. We were very close at this point, just the width of the suitcase separating us, and he was still staring at me intently as the light flickered across his mustache. It was... intimate. I was just straight up laughing at this point. The man reached into the suitcase and pulled out... .
... a red bell pepper. He set the suitcase down and handed me the pepper and told me they would see me on the 13th. I stood there for a moment, staring at the pepper, kind of unsure what to do, but I could hear a jungle from inside its hard shell so I put two and two together, and a little way down the alley - after stumbling away from the man, then stumbling back and asking to take a quick picture, and then stumbling back the other way again - I ripped the pepper open and inside of it was a key.
On the key-chain there was a number, and on the backside of that there was a phone number. I called it and the same creepy voice I heard on the first phone call gave me instructions for attending the premiere next week. So I guess I am going to the Mother!premiere next week! Stay tuned for a report from that. Hopefully the movie itself can live up to this already grand adventure.
Did any of you catch the 1962 travelogue romance Rome Adventure on TCM the other night? I stopped because I thought it was David Lean's film Summertime (which I just named one of my five favorite movies of 1955 the other day) at first but I got hooked even after I realized it wasn't - you can't go wrong with the baritone hum of Suzanne Pleshette and all that astonishing technicolor Italian scenery. And shelves!
Suzanne's character works at a bookstore while she's spending the summer in Rome, and a bunch of scenes center on her "friendship" with the owner Constance Ford -- I put that in quotes because Pleshette and Ford spend half the movie eye-fucking each other across the stacks of Baudelaire. Between this and The Birds I'm starting to think Suzy might've spent some time visiting the Isle of Lesbos while she was abroad. (A BROAD -- GET IT?)
But yes ostensibly as you see above this movie is supposed to be a romance between Suzanne and the 60s King of Bland Troy Donahue, even though he couldn't make chemistry with a beaker full of hydrochloric acid stuffed down his shorts. I will never get Troy Donahue, and knowing that he was brought in to replace the much more charismatic and handsome Tab Hunter once Tab refused to play Hollywood's games will probably always make me side-eye him.
I probably shouldn't shit-talk poor Troy too much today though since it is his birthday -- he would've been turning 81 today if he was still alive. And he doesn't really get in the way of the scenery in Rome Adventure, which is what you go to this kind of movie for in the first place, and man...
... does it deliver. I looked up its filming locations and discovered that I have actually been to the same section of Northern Italy that Troy & Suzanne take a small break to in the middle of the film, which was exciting -- I mean we do have a series here on the blog of places I have visited in movies, so this counts, even if after the fact. So they visit the mountain range called the Dolomites, specifically a couple of towns called Bolzano and Trentino, both of which I have been through on my way to the town called Castelrotto, which is a little further into the mountains. Here's me making a friend there!
I don't know whether I am Suzanne Pleshette or whether the dog is Suzanne Pleshette in that picture, but it's basically identical to the picture before it either way. I remade this movie without even knowing! Anyway Rome Adventure is fun in that very specific "We're going on vacation!" way - I wish they made more movies like it these days. Every so often you get an Under the Tuscan Sun but it's a genre that should really be more popular, don't ya think?
A few hours ago Armie Hammer's wife Elizabeth posted a shot on Instagram from the set of Luca Guadagnino's film Call Me By Your Name -- read this post here if you don't know what I am talking about -- of Armie and his boy-toy-to-be Timothy Chalumet rising from the aqua-marine depths of Lake Garda in Italy... here, I will give you a slightly better look:
That's the two of them in the blue shirts on the left. (And I think that's Luca in the hot green shorts.) Now normally I would throw a hissy-fit right here because the two of them are way way way too overdressed, but Mrs. Hammer had this to say alongside the picture:
"The ONE day @armiehammer and @tchalamet
aren't wearing booty shorts"
So we will give them the benefit of the doubt, for the time being. Considering what a sex bomb Guadagnino just delivered with A Bigger Splash, he's earned our trust. Sidenote: One thing that's driving me nuts about this is they're actually shooting in a place I have been before! If only I'd waited a couple of years to go!!!
"I too quit smoking (2013) AND find this type of pictures cool. Also, PSA: if you're feeling like you want to start smoking again, just remind yourself "I do not want my body and house to stink like stale horseshit", then go drink one more glass of water to entertain your hands and lips. Congrats, btw."