It’s a wrap for the year in movies, and our resident critic separates the celluloid wheat from the chaff.
This year, I’ve once again been fending off would-be movie moguls and second-rate scribblers who consider my personal friendships with Hollywood’s great and good as an open door to this business we call show. But one pitch that’s been easy to bat away was from my old pal Blanco Sandero. You’ll know Blanc as producer of full-bore subcultural art movies, including biker romp Angels With Dirty Fingers and last year’s overnight sensation (in the sense it was mostly seen at 2am by junkies and perverts) The Doctor is In… SANE!
This pitch wasn’t nearly so tasteful: my old chum is getting into the grape business. Yes, you heard right, he’s hanging up his director’s chair to make wine – in California! Needless to say, I declined his invitation to invest mucho dinero – the Sunshine State does one thing well, and it comes in cans not bottles. Film cans, I’m talking about.
Anyway, if decent Euro glug isn’t your thing, you could do worse than a glass or two of South African vino (if you can get it past the thought police). There’s a lot of hot air talked about SA, mostly by people who’ve never visited that stunning country, but when I dropped in on the set of Gold earlier this year (see April’s issue of Monthly Film Magazine) I found a few decent chardonnays and a contented people watched over by second-to-none security forces. I suggest you catch Roger Moore and friends in that thrilling movie next summer for the kind of balanced view of South Africa you won’t get from the Trots who run the Observer colour supplement.
Speaking of which, I’ve gladly been a stranger to Britain’s drizzle-soaked picket lines recently, having snapped up my late, much-indebted chum Baxter Conrad’s Laurel Canyon hideaway for a song. Silver linings, eh? I hear the lights are out three days a week in London – well, the only candles I need in LA are patchouli-scented and used solely to enmooden my hot tub on games nights.
Here in Hollywood I’ve had a front-row seat at some of the movies set to shape cinema in the 1970s. There’s Woody Allen’s far-fetched Sleeper and the zany Westworld, in which some robots take over the Wild West. There’s also the merciless dissection of poor town planning and supply-chain ineptitude, Soylent Green. Noticeably, there’s been a dearth of sunny optimism in this year’s crop of celluloid – could it be that the unrealised dreams of the 1960s have turned sour and, in their wreckage, a new era of dark, paranoid, amoral visions of society speak profoundly to
