Day: May 19, 2015

Variety‘s James Rainey has posted a piece about Cameron Crowe‘s Aloha (Sony, 5.29), otherwise known around these parts as Son of Deep Tiki. Rainey wasn’t given much to work with. He tried to arrange a conversation with Crowe, but the director-writer declined. Rainey asked Sony publicists to let him see Aloha to prepare the piece, and they declined. Rainey quotes that infamous leaked email criticism of Aloha by ex-Sony chief Amy Pascal, in which she said “it never, not even once, ever works.” Rainey tried to get Sony execs to talk about the relationship dramedy on the record, but they agreed only to speak as anonymous sources.

Rainey also notes that Sony has assembled only one trailer for the film — never a good sign. And yet one nameless person emphasizes that the version of Aloha that Pascal was talking about last fall has since been tightened and improved. It “probably” won’t do the business of Crowe’s Say Anything or Jerry Maguire, a source admits, “but is it a really entertaining movie for an audience? Yes, it is.”

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Simon Pegg in a Radio Times interview, posted earlier today: “Before Star Wars, the films that were box-office hits were The Godfather, Taxi Driver, Bonnie and Clyde and The French Connection — gritty, amoral art movies. Then suddenly the onus switched over to spectacle and everything changed.

“I’m very much a self-confessed fan of science-fiction and genre cinema. But part of me looks at society as it is now and thinks we’ve been infantilized by our own taste. We’re essentially all consuming very childish things — comic books, superheroes. Adults are watching this stuff, and taking it seriously!”

“It is a kind of dumbing down in a way.” Wells interjection: Kind of? Back to Pegg: “Because it’s taking our focus away from real-world issues. Films used to be about challenging, emotional journeys or moral questions that might make you walk away and re-evaluate how you felt about…whatever. Now we’re walking out of the cinema really not thinking about anything, other than the fact that the Hulk just had a fight with a robot.”

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Just what we need — a Peter Pan origin story. And one, to go by the trailer, that seems to be all about kids, climaxes, whee!, knock your CG socks off. The bummer, in a manner of speaking, is that the director is the great Joe Wright. I’ve been kicking this notion around that Wright decided to direct Pan (Warner Bros., 10.9) to prove to Hollywood that he could play the game — i.e., make a eye-popping, family-friendly blockbuster that’ll make loads of dough — after people started murmuring at parties (and I heard this talk all over the place two and a half years ago) that Anna Karenina was proof that he’d burrowed too far into his precious imaginings, that his tastes were too rarified.

That’s bunk, of course — Anna Karenina may have performed modestly at the box-office but it was a bold stylistic triumph. On 9.2.12 I called it “the first truly breathtaking high-style film of the year, a non-musical successor to Moulin Rouge and a spawn of the great ’70s films of Ken Russell (and by that I mean pre-Mahler Russell, which means The Music Lovers and Women In Love) as well as Powell-Pressburger’s The Red Shoes.” And now Wright, an auteur-level helmer of four stirring films over the last decade — Pride and Prejudice, Atonement, Hanna and Anna Karenina (let’s put aside The Soloist for the time being) — has made a film that’s looking to out-Spielberg Hook?

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I complained about this last year and I’m complaining again — the sound in the Grand Theatre Lumiere is too bassy and echo-y, and so I struggled to hear the dialogue during this morning’s screening of Denis Villeneuve‘s Sicario (Lionsgate, 9.18). I managed to pick up a stray word or phrase here and there, and when all else failed I relied on nouns and verbs contained in the French subtitles. Listen and read and combine, listen and read and combine…keep trying. The only way I understood complete sentences was from reading the English subtitles when Benicio del Toro spoke Spanish.

After a while I gave up and told myself to just go with the menacing atmosphere and Roger Deakins‘ cinematography and the portions of performances that seemed to occasionally register, and then figure out the particulars later on. Maybe this is a new thing, a way of seducing audiences into seeing films like Sicario twice.

I know that when I watch the Sicario screener on my home system a few months hence I’ll understand every word.

Sicario is basically about heavily militarized, inter-agency U.S. forces hunting down and shooting it out with the Mexican drug-cartel bad guys, and also flying here and there in a private jet and driving around in a parade of big black SUVs. It’s a strong welcome-to-hell piece, I’ll give it that, but Sicario doesn’t come close to the multi-layered, piled-on impact of Steven Soderbergh‘s Traffic, which dealt with more or less the same realm.

The tale, such as it is, is told from the perspective of Emily Blunt‘s FBI field agent, who of course is stunned and devastated by the unrelenting carnage blah blah. One of her battle-hardened colleagues, a senior veteran with a semi-casual “whatever works, bring it on” attitude, is played by the ever-reliable Josh Brolin. My favorite character by far was Benicio del Toro’s Alejandro, a shadowy Mexican operative with burning eyes and his own kind of existential attitude about things. Blunt’s partner is played by Daniel Kaluuya, and I’m telling you here and now and forever I didn’t understand a single phrase from this guy.

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I asked yesterday if anyone could share a PDF of Aaron Sorkin‘s Steve Jobs script; thanks to the four readers who did. I’m only through Act One, or page 58 out of 178, but it’s like riding the rapids, this thing. You just tear through it. No specifics but like the just-surfaced teaser it reminds you of The Social Network — the story of a brilliant dick who’s consumed by the urgency of his mission and a sense of absolute certainty that he’s a bringer of profound innovation, and either you’re with him or you’re not. He’s no sweetheart but what a character — the Napoleon Bonaparte of Silicon Valley. I love it so far. Delicious theatre. The performances are going to sing, particularly those from Michael Fassbender (despite concerns that he doesn’t resemble Jobs), Kate Winslet, Seth Rogen, Jeff Daniels, Katherine Waterston.

I decided to settle back and catch a 7 pm Salle Bunuel screening of Z, the 1969 Costa Gavras classic. He attended and introduced. I own the Bluray but I wanted to re-experience it with an audience. I’m glad I did. The finale — the epilogue, I mean — is such a knockout.