Lalo Schifrin 1932-2025

 

Carolyn McCarthy 1944-2025

 

Bill Moyers 1934-2025

 

New Piece Just Finished Summer 2025

 

Lea Massari 1933-2025

 I adored her when I was a teen. 

Nathan Silver 1936-2025

H

is important book lost New York published in 1967 had a profound affect on me.

Marcia Resnick 1950-2025

 

Drugstore Cowboy 1989

 This was Gus Van Sant's second film after his startling black and white small independent film “Mala Noche” which told the story of a young liquor store clerk in Portland who gets amore and bent out of shape over a handsome young illegal Mexican immigrant sometime hustler. It was homoerotic and sexy. Drugstore is not homoerotic but it is sexy and stark. This is a great film and the new blu ray transfer from Criterion is lush and gorgeous. It tells the tale of 4 drugged out addicts living on the fringes of Portland, from hand to drug heist. The gang of 4 are made up of Bob who rules the roost along with his oversexed and fustrated wife Diane. The other two members of this botched team, is James LeGros who is a bit slow and low in intelligence and his girlfriend played by an impossibly young Heather Graham. They are also swell.

Matt Dillion who by the way is terrific plays Bob, the brains of the team and I use that term very loosely. Diane is played by the great Kelly Lynch who has one of the best lines in the history of cinema, the poor dish says to Bob who can't get it going in the sex department “You won't fuck me and I always have to drive ” There is very little sex and a lot of driving in the film.

Their MO is robbing drugstores of their pills and narcotics in stupid ways, but dumb luck generally works out well for them. The job they pull at the beginning of the movie is almost slapstick and screwball in its approach both from them and from Van Sant. This is a jaw dropping druggie movie, full of speed and outrage that really doesn't let up.

The gang start falling apart when Bob's paranoia about hexes, you know the a hat on bed thing is the main one, and the curse comes true for them when a heist at a hospital goes bad, and I mean very bad. Bob and the gang hightail it out of town and start a road trip to nowhere fast. Along the way there is a dead body that they have to get rid of, that brings the movie to dead end screwball level, you laugh on the other side of your face, as my mom liked to say when I misbehaved. “You will laugh on the other side of your face”, she would say to me as she stood glaring down at me in her housecoat and raven black hair doing her best Ruth Roman imitation in our film noir apartment that smelled of smoke from the fire we had and her unfiltered Raleigh cigarette dangling from her mouth. If my mom was a movie she would look like this one with a little Vertigo thrown in.

Drugstore is that kind of movie it brings up memories both good and bad. Van Sant has a nice visual imagination that he uses in Bob's drugged out hallucinations featuring tiny stuff flying by like in the Wizard of Oz, and in fact that no place like home classic figures nicely in this movie, their yellow brick road is a highway to no where fast. The cops are of course after them, and the head detective played by James Remar is taking no prisoners in his thirst to get them good with the goods.

There is also a treacherous drug dealer, a punk acted by the marvelous Max Perlich, and by the way what happened to him? Did he turn into Barry Keoghan when I wasn't looking? Also wonderful in a small part is the great Grace Zabriskie as Bob's fed up but loving mom. The film changes gears when Bob decides to go straight and enters into a rehab program to clean up his act and runs into an old acquaintance of his from his drug days. Tom the priest played by none other than William Burroughs who looks like death warmed over and sprinkles the film with words of wisdom. "There seems to be no more room in the church for an elderly drug-addicted priest” in his druggy way of looking at life. The look of the film is drenched in lush color cinematography by Robert Yeoman and has a great score with many songs spread here and there among the drugs and debris. Based on the autobiographical novel by James Fogle who was an addict and dealer. The best film, director, supporting actress, screenplay, cinematography of 1989. I love this movie.

Harris Yulin 1937-2025

 

Tendrils. Trauma and the Body

 One of my recent works on paper has been published in the magazine "Tendrils" I'm posting the original work along with how it appears in print. 

Brian Wilson 1942-2025

 another great loss, and the fat son of a bitch still walks this earth. Unfair.

Sly Stone 1943-2025

 

Enzo Staiola 1939-2025 Child actor in the Bicycle Thieves.

 

Oddball Magazine

New. Poem with a painting I did when I was a teenager. You can see it by clicking on the link.

 https://oddballmagazine.com/poem-by-noah-berlatsky-4/?fbclid=IwY2xjawKtblNleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBicmlkETE2NU04RVU1ZDRQS1RVZ2dBAR4PQn3SmSuN21Hayxu42CYahXHJP-8vI6u1Lb3vrVge0YwDTPtBDZgirKszxA_aem_2y8YbNOA7QuRcB9lQbRLrg

Edmund White 1940-2025

The marvelous writer Edmund White has passed. I met him once in the early 80's , briefly when my friend Jill Dunbar who co owned The original Three Lives Bookstore introduced me to him at the bookstore. A life well lived.

Valerie Mahaffey-1953-2025

 

Al Foster 1943-2025

 

Poil de Carotte 1932

Originally made by Julien Duvivier in 1925 as a silent film, he again took on the task of making this moving film about a troubled adolescent in 1932. The story as they say has legs, and there were several more versions of the story filmed. The young boy in the story is troubled not by anything he has done but mainly by his mean heartless mother who would today be brought to justice for child abuse. Her mean nickname for him is carrot top because of his red hair. The nickname sticks and everyone in the rural village he unhappily resides in with his miserable family calls him that. I suppose the nickname could have been affectionate but coming from the mouth of his mother its mean. Several of the other characters who have affection for him also called him by this nick name but it is used like a kiss and not a sword.

He seems at the beginning of the film to be smart and pleasant but with a sassy mouth he uses at his school. A typical boy who in an essay writes “A family is a group of people forced to live together under one roof and who can't stand each other” this sets up the story to follow as he will soon be returning to his tortured home for the summer holidays and his easy going demeanor and outlook changes. He is harassed both verbally and physically by his mother, largely ignored by his father and put upon by his two older siblings who rob money from their stingy mother and blame “carrot top” for their crimes.

His only affection comes from his Godfather a good kindly farmer, a young female child who adores him, and his caring housekeeper. That's it. At times the heartbreak of his life was almost unbearable for me to watch and he is finally driven to extreme actions mainly because of the behavior towards him from his terrible mother who is loathed not only by him but also her husband. She is also ridiculed by her other two children who have no use for her. Any of us who grew up in hostile households will sadly relate to this story.

The performance by Catherine Fonteney as the mother is too broad and extreme and is the weak link in this otherwise great and touching film. The father played by the esteemed actor Harry Baur is distracted and empty because of his loveless marriage to this shrew of a woman but we can see he has affection for his son. Its easy to hate the mother, and it would have been better if the actress was more subtle and nuanced in her performance. She is so over the top that she becomes a cartoon, a cliché of a bad woman and mother. A shame because it is a rich and complex role that calls for a much better actress than Fonteney.

The young actor Robert Lynen who plays the lead is brilliant and moving. He pretty much destroyed me in his acting of this sad put upon decent young boy who has to wear hand me downs, and is refused a desert of melon by his bitch of a mother. Lynen simply broke my heart and this is one of the great performances in cinema.

The sadness was also in his actual life. In the early 40's he joined the French resistance and was betrayed by a fellow fighter to the Nazi's who jailed and tortured him, finally killing him and 13 other members of the resistance in 1944 in front of a firing squad ,throwing his body in an unmarked grave. The sadness also reached Harry Baur who was also arrested by the Gestapo because he was married to a Jewish woman. He was later released but died in a mysterious fashion in 1943 no doubt due to the torture he endured from the Gestapo.

The director Julian Duvivier had a long career beginning in 1919 right through the late 60's and no doubt he would have continued to make films if he had not died in a car accident at the age of 71. Duvivier was part of the French classical cinema that was sometimes referred as “poetic realism” and one of his most famous films of this school is “Pepe Le Moko” which made an international star of the great Jean Gabin, who Duvivier worked with several times. He also worked in Hollywood an usual stint for “foreign” directors at this time and also did an adaption of Anna Karenina in England that starred Vivien Leigh. Sadly the young turks of the French New Wave including Godard and sadly Francois Truffaut who should have known better, Mercilessly attacked Duvivier and other directors of the romantic period of French poetic realism in the pages of film magazines especially in Cahiers du Cinema. I won't go into my feelings on this here, but I would think that if Truffaut was alive now he would change his tune. I'm including a link to the best critique and biographical piece of Duvivier if anyone is so inclined to learn more about him. Some of his films from this early period are now available to stream on the Criterion Channel.

https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2017/great-directors/julien-duvivier/