John Cassavetes - C or D

I just noticed Mazursky's Tempest in on Criterion.. I might check it out tonite, it's been years since I've seen it

Haven't seen M&M yet (soon), but I did just watch Martin Ritt's Edge of the City, with JC and Sidney Poitier in a mildly homoerotic spin on On the Waterfront. On Criterion til the end of the month, and recommended.

Tempest is a time capsule, man.

the constant yelling

That just overwhelmed everything else in Minnie & Moskowitz for me--if there was anything good in there, it was drowned out by the constant yelling.

The constant yelling in M&M vs the constant laughing in Faces

Well, Tempest was a bloated, aimless mess but still a pretty fun watch. I thought I'd seen it before and remembered it all being on the Greek island, but at least half of it is in NYC and Atlantic City. Acting is great, but as a romantic comedy it fails on both fronts, so I'm not sure how to classify it.
A film that cost $13 million and did $5 million at the box office, and you can see why.

there was almost as much yelling as laughing in Faces

and no acting

:)

I prefer Bugs Bunny’s performance of “I Dream of Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair.”

Go watch Deathdream if you'd like to see the lead husband + wife play husband + wife in a much better movie.

I thought Shadows and Too Late Blues were really interesting snapshots of the late 50s-early 60s. but have not been sure I've liked Cassavetes’ films in general

thought Husbands was a real improvement in cinematography from his earlier films, but there is just so much toxic masculinity in it that it is repulsive to me

“You’re inscrutable!”

I think I'd find those characters just as exhausting if they were having an enlightened discussion on The Female Eunuch.

from the last famous person you were surprised to discover was actually still alive:

Saw a Happy Birthday Mom from Zoe Cassavetes on Twitter recently, and lo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gena_Rowlands Didn't know she was active that long, or that she was in 10 of John's movies (or possibly problematic re some of them later)

― dow, Sunday, June 20, 2021 3:33 PM (three days ago) bookmarkflaglink

was thinking of her anyway, having seen her four Alfred Hitchcock performances, one on Presents, three on Hour.

― dow, Sunday, June 20, 2021 Wonder if she did any harm w changes in those JC prints? I always enjoy her acting anyway.

even A Woman Under the Influence was hard going

Minnie and Moskowitz falls a little short of being among my very favourite Cassavetes films, but it may be his funniest.

Machine Gun McCain - Cassavettes, Falk and Rowlands cashing those sweet sweet paychecks for an Italian director (the guy who did Sacco & Vanzetti, so most likely a paycheck job for him as well.) Still, the scenes filmed in Las Vegas have a tourist's eagerness to capture everything - you get to see billboards advertising who was in town at the time - and the Morricone score is reliably excellent.

from the wiki bio of Gena I linked above---wonder if her alleged interference makes significant difference in those extant editions:
Cassavetes era (1963–1984)
Rowlands and Cassavetes made ten films together: A Child Is Waiting (1963), Faces (1968), Machine Gun McCain (1969), Minnie and Moskowitz (1971), A Woman Under the Influence (1974; nomination for Academy Award for Best Actress), Two-Minute Warning (1976), Opening Night (1977), Gloria (1980; nomination for Academy Award for Best Actress), Tempest (1982), and Love Streams (1984).[11]

According to Boston University film scholar Ray Carney, Rowlands sought to suppress an early version of Cassavetes's first film, Shadows, that Carney says he rediscovered after decades of searching.[12] Rowlands also became involved in the screenings of Husbands and Love Streams, according to Carney. The UCLA Film and Television Archive mounted a restoration of Husbands, as it was pruned down (without Cassavetes's consent, and in violation of his contract) by Columbia Pictures several months after its release, in an attempt to restore as much of the removed content as possible. At Rowlands's request, UCLA created an alternative print with almost ten minutes of content edited out, as Rowlands felt that these scenes were in poor taste. The alternative print is the only one that has been made available for rental.[13]

even in the alternative print I thought a lot of scenes in Husbands were in poor taste

watched The Killing of a Chinese Bookie today

from Pillip Lopate’s Criterion essay 8 years ago:

“In 1976, when The Killing of a Chinese Bookie was first released, it bombed at the box office, much to Cassavetes’s disappointment. Critics found it disorganized, self-indulgent, and unfathomable; audiences took their word for it and stayed away. Today, the film seems a model of narrative clarity and lucidity; either our eyes have caught up to Cassavetes or the reigning aesthetic has evolved steadily in the direction of his personal cinematic style. Now we are more accustomed to hanging out and listening in on the comic banality of low-life small talk; to a semidocumentary, handheld-camera, ambient-sound approach; to morally divided or not entirely sympathetic characters, dollops of “dead time,” and subversions of traditional genre expectations.”

I don’t know about it being a model of narrative clarity and lucidity, and it is very rough and somewhat off-putting like all of his films, but I thought it was interesting.

looking back on all of the films of his I've seen in the past year or so, Opening Night had the theatricality and some of the toxic male aura of his other films, but it softened his edges somewhat and was funny and memorable

My-favorite.

I watched A Child is Waiting on TCM three nights ago. What a stiff, compromised, often affecting film.

A Stanley Kramer Production!

A Stanley Kramer Interference!