Day: July 6, 2017

It was announced today that Ava DuVernay will write and direct a five-episode Netflix series about the Central Park jogger case of ’89. I don’t know, man. Ken and Sarah Burns‘ The Central Park Five, a 2012 documentary, was one thing (i.e., not without problems but compelling). But a dramatic miniseries will be a whole ‘nother challenge.

The case was about the assault and rape of Trisha Meili, a female stockbroker, in Manhattan’s Central Park on 4.19.89. Five young black dudes — Anton McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Kharey Wise and Yusef Salaam — were wrongly prosecuted and falsely imprisoned, only to be exonerated and freed several years later. A flat-out expression of racist hysteria and institutional corruption.

Duvernay is facing two significant problems in terms of her main characters — the five alleged assailants and Meili. If DuVernay fudges, sidesteps or fabricates (as she did with her depiction of Lyndon B. Johnson in Selma), she’s going to run into trouble.

Problem #1: The teenagers who were unjustly prosecuted and imprisoned put their necks in a noose when they stupidly confessed to the crime during police interrogation. They were coerced, yes, but with the assent of parents and/or guardians. Their apparent motive in confessing was that they were tired and wanted to go home.

How do you dramatize this without the audience saying “what the fuck is wrong with these guys…have they ever heard of ‘you can hassle me all you want but I didn’t do it’ or, better yet, ‘I’m not saying anything until I talk to an attorney’?”

Problem #2: The victim’s decision to jog in the vicinity of 102nd street on a dark road inside the park around 10:30 pm was almost as stupid. I lived in New York City in the early ’80s so don’t tell me — what Meili did was flat-out insane. Nobody of any gender or size with a vestige of common sense should’ve jogged in Central Park after dusk back then (and especially in the late ’80s when racial relations were volatile and Manhattan ‘was a completely schizophrenic and divided city’), much less above 96th street and much less above friggin’ 100th street. Everybody knows you don’t tempt fate like that. Any kid who’s read Grimm Fairy Tales knows that wolves lurk in the forest at night.

How do you dramatize Meili’s late-night jogging without the audience thinking “wait…is she an idiot?

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Either you’re intrigued and excited by the idea of a spooky but essentially non-scary ghost movie, or you’re not. Or you’re able to embrace the idea of a silent and passive ghost under a bedsheet, or not. 90% if not 95% of ticket-buyers prefer the dead-obvious kind of ghost flick (i.e. anything in the vein of the Conjuring series) and maybe 5% or 10% (if that) have a place in their heads for smarter, subtler variations. Which is one way of acknowledging that David Lowery‘s A Ghost Story, which opens tonight, probably won’t be setting any box-office records. But man, it sure rang my bell at Sundance last January.

Please…if you’re smarter than a fencepost and can think outside the box, give it a looksee this weekend.

I’m not the first one to say this, but it could be argued that the scariest thing about A Ghost Story is Lowery himself.

From Madison + Vine’s Jake Coyle: “A Ghost Story is what it says it is, and it may well haunt you. It won’t scare you; it doesn’t even say ‘boo.’ But glowing light and ghostly soulfulness linger on like a quiet, scratching presence that won’t leave you.”

Posted last month: Apologies to David Lowery and A24 for forgetting to include A Ghost Story in my recent rundown of the best 2017 flicks thus far. It belongs and then some. I’m putting A Ghost Story just below The Square but above Get Out, which was in sixth place until a few minutes ago but is now in seventh.

The new ranking: (1) Luca Guadagnino‘s Call Me By Your Name, (2) Michael Showalter’s The Big Sick (Lionsgate/Amazon, 6.23), (3) Matt Reeves‘ War For The Planet of the Apes, (4) Andrey Zvyagintsev‘s Loveless, (5) Ruben Ostlund‘s The Square, (6) Lowery’s A Ghost Story and (7) Jordan Peele‘s Get Out.

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My heart went pitty-pat this morning when I read the following comment from HE reader GoToSleep: “I’m not sure what the tracking is for Spider-Man: Homecoming and of course this is anecdotal as fuck, but it was way too easy to get tickets at my Brooklyn Alamo theater. The 3D screenings, as of 11AM Thursday, are wide open for seats, and you can still get tickets for most of the 2D screenings.”

I’m presuming that the jaded-Brooklyn-hipster mentality is behind the “too easy” availability of Alamo ducats. Variety is forecasting $85 to $100 million this weekend. I for one would feel a slight surge of satisfaction or even comfort if the about-to-pop Sony release would under-perform to some extent. This would indicate a higher degree of franchise fatigue than the trades are currently detecting…please!

If you and your friends believe in fairies, you have to communicate to the dark empire that (a) you’re sick of the endless MCU and D.C. sequels, revisitings and reboots, and (b) you want more semi-original, Baby Driver-type fare (even if the wheels fall off Edgar Wright‘s action-musical during the final 15 minutes). Yes, I’m dreaming. Yes, I’m nursing a dead fantasy that the corporate-think poisoning of megaplex fare could perhaps be diluted or even turn a corner.