Earlier today I rented Impeachment: American Crime Story. I watched a portion of episode #1, and I just couldn't get over the wrongness of Beanie Feldstein as Monica Lewinsky. They just don't look similar, not even a little bit. Monica was shapely; Beanie is chubby. I can't invest in the supposed reality. I'd like to submit, but Feldstein keeps getting in the way.
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Okay, I wanted to see or do other things when it was showing. I’ll catch it soon. The idea of Joaquin Pheonix playing a gentle, mild-mannered uncle seems odd. Most of us have come to accept that default Joaquin means being self-absorbed and caught up in the usual melancholy and smoking cigarettes, etc.
Kenneth Branagh‘s Belfast, Jane Campion‘s The Power of the Dog and Pablo Larrain‘s Spencer screened in Telluride last weekend, and in my opinion they’re all shortfallers. Certainly as far as the Movie Godz are concerned.
Each is destined to slam into a big thick concrete wall. Joe Popcorn and your straight-shooting, shake-it-off Academy and guild types will see to that. Every year we have to re-learn the difference between rarified mountain-air reactions vs. sea-level reality. We’re about to be schooled yet again.
There was only one film that hit a grand slam last weekend, and that’s Reinaldo Marcus Green, Zach Baylin and Will Smith‘s King Richard — period. A Best Picture Oscar nom is 100% assured, and even at this early date the odds seem to favor a win. Not to mention a Best Actor trophy for Smith, and a likely Best Supporting Actress nom for Aunjanue Ellis, who memorably portrays the brutally honest wife of Smith’s Richard Williams and the mother of tennis legends Venus and Serena Williams.
Right now certain critics, award-season handicappers and industry voices are telling each other that Belfast, The Power of the Dog and Spencer are award-season hotties. They’ll continue to insist upon this narrative for the next two or three months, and eventually the smoke will clear.
Belfast (Focus Features, 11.12), which producer Sid Ganis believes to be one of the best films he’s ever seen in his life, is a mawkish family drama that channels The Wonder Years, and delivers a vague impression of the “troubles” that plagued northern Ireland in the ’60s and ’70s. Plus a monochrome palette, perhaps the most insufferably cute and endearing performance by a child actor (Jude Hill) in film history, a dab or two of puppy love, Cieran Hinds‘ genuinely charming performance as a kindly grandpa, and loads and loads of Van Morrison. Then again the curious affection some have for this film (watch it win the TIFF audience award) may keep the torches burning.
The Power of the Dog is a chilly and perverse cattle-ranch drama that insists over and over that it’s a very bad thing for toxic males to suppress their homosexuality. (HE agrees.) Campion is a top-tier filmmaker but Dog‘s milieu is grim and stifling and melancholy, like the dark side of the moon. Yes, Benedict Cumberbatch is excellent as the enraged and closeted Phil, but he’s basically doing Daniel Day Lewis‘s “Bill the Butcher” in Gangs of New York. Or, if you will, “Daniel Plainview” in There Will Be Blood.
Spencer is an oddly surreal dreamscape flick that uses Lady Diana‘s anguished and loveless marriage to Prince Charles and a 1991 Christmas celebration at Queen Elizabeth’s Sandringham estate as the basis of what boils down to an elite psychological meltdown flick…”poor free-spirited, pheasant-sympathizing, pearl necklace-loathing Diana vs. the cold, bloodless gargoyle royals,” etc. Yes, Stewart will most likely be Oscar-nominated for Best Actress — her performance is definitely commendable.
After picking up our passes and buying some groceries, we checked into our spacious Airbnb rental at 26 Deep Creek Road (a little past the notorious Telluride airport)…unpacked, showered, learned the ins and outs, plugged everything in, etc. We went back to town around 7 pm, roamed around and hit La Marmotte for a nice pricey dinner and a slightly premature celebration of Tatiana’s birthday.
Our first encounter was with Picturehouse CEO Bob Berney and wife/partner/marketing hotshot Jeanne Berney about Liz Garbus‘s Becoming Cousteau, a Telluride attraction that Picturehouse is distributing. We then chatted with Santa Barbara Film Festival honcho Roger Durling and partner Daniel Launspach, who just happened to stroll in as we were being seated — they sat down about 12 feet away. When Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone and critic Clarence Moye dropped by to say hello, Durling strolled over and said, “This is starting to feel like dangerous liasons.”
Have I stated lately that Durling and Launspach are excellent human beings, large of heart and spirit? No getting around that, I’m afraid.
Weather permitting, we’ll be hitting the outdoor Telluride brunch around 10 am or thereabouts. Then comes the usual press orientation schmooze at the Werner Herzog theatre at 1:30 pm, followed by a secret Patron’s screening at 2:30 pm. (I’ve heard it might be Wes Anderson‘s The French Dispatch.) Then comes a 6:30 pm screening of Joe Wright‘s Cyrano plus a Peter Dinklage tribute. Finally at 9:30 pm will be a screening of Sean Baker‘s Red Rocket.
What the pandemic managed to do was all but kill the communal watching of quality-grade movies — i.e., theatrical — outside the rarified environs of film festivals and elite special-venue houses. Multiplexes have been devolving for years into gladiator arenas, showing only mostly lowest-common-denominator gruel for the grunts. Covid finalized that process. Cinema has obviously “survived”, but (festivals aside) largely through streaming. And don’t get me started about the shuttering of Hollywood’s ArcLight plex plus the Dome.
Here’s an edited version of a Reddit reaction to Robert Eggers‘ The Northman (Focus Features, 4.22). It comes out of a recent research screening in Dallas.
Excerpt #1: “I was extremely impressed with it. There’s a lot of brutal action and violence, and it overall had a very authentic Norse feel to it. It is a revenge tale slash Viking epic. I’d place it right above The Witch and just below The Lighthouse.”
Excerpt #2: “Honestly, this was Alexander Skaarsgard’s movie. [Note: Skarsgard plays Amleth, a Nordic prince whose allegedly truthful saga was used by William Shakespeare to create Hamlet.] AS is truly a beast [in this] and has given his most impressive performance yet.”
Excerpt #3: “As Queen Gudrun, Nicole Kidman was great also. Anya Taylor-Joy does give a [distinctive] performance, and she’s in one of my favorite scenes of the movie. Bjork plays a somewhat pivotal role [i.e., ‘Slav witch’], but only has one scene — lasts about five minutes.”
HE interjects: What about Ethan Hawke and Willem Dafoe?
Excerpt #4: “Jarin Blaschke‘s cinematography is stellar. Most of the lighting seemed to be from natural light sources. They said the color grading was still in progress. One or two scenes were in black and white, plus a lot blues, greens, greys, dark shadows. A few VFX shots that were pretty damn great and even a bit trippy at times.”
Excerpt #5: “More accessible than The Green Knight, The Lighthouse or The Witch. It’s basically a revenge/avenge tale and also probably like a lot of Viking legends out there, but the story was so well told. I thought the pacing was actually quite tight — there weren’t really any scenes I would trim or take out. I wish I could’ve understood certain bits of dialogue a bit better. Bjork’s scene is all whispers so it was hard to make out what she was saying but all in all it was pretty epic, pretty dark, very intense.”
On the day that Marlon Brando's One-Eyed Jacks opened (3.30.61), a 35mm print was sent to the Kennedy mansion in Palm Beach (1095 North Ocean Drive). JFK flew down from Washington that morning, arriving around 11:30 am. He joined his father (Joseph P. Kennedy), Peter Lawford and Bing Crosby for some golf that afternoon. They all had dinner and then watched Brando's film in the private screening room, which had been installed by Kennedy Sr., a Hollywood mogul in the 20s and 30s, after buying the home in 1933.
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HE to Joseph McBride, author of “Billy Wilder: Dancing on the Edge” (Columbia University Press, 9.24):
“I just wanted to tell you, Joe, how much fun your Wilder book is. I was expecting the usual sequential, chapter-by-chapter approach, and I got that from your very thorough recounting of his youth in Germany. (And you went to Germany for some first-hand digging — respect!)
“But once the Hollywood adventure begins, you start weaving in and out. You don’t abandon a steady, linear, through-line approach, but you don’t exactly stick to it either. The narrative starts hopping around, and I loved that! In your journey with Billy Wilder you become Billy Pilgrim, unstuck in time.
“And I love, love, LOVE that possibly accurate story about the waitress being paid to have it off with the square and virginal Charles Lindbergh in that Long Island hotel on the night before his flight, and then, at the end of the film, the same waitress being part of the crowd during Lindy’s triumphant victory parade in Manhattan, and he doesn’t see her waving! What a great ending! I love the young vanity mirror woman who is actually in the film, but the waitress story would have been ten times better.
“I agree about Gary Cooper’s hesitant (wussy?) manner as he got older, and that he was way too old to pay Audrey Hepburn‘s lover in Love in the Afternoon. But what about that Wilder quote that “I got Coop the week he suddenly got old.” Cary Grant would have been a much better fit. Coop looked like he was at least 65 if not 70 in that film.
“I’m still reading, but I’m hoping for fresh anecdotes and stories about the making of One Two Three. In my estimation the amazing velocity and chutzpah in the last half of that 1961 film represents one of Cagney’s greatest performances by far, right up there with Public Enemy and George M. Cohan and Cody Jarrett. Plus I loved the strident, back-and-forth, give-and-take energy between Cagney and Horst Buccholz…what was it exactly that HB said or did to piss Cagney off so much?
“I’m presuming that at one point you’ll offer thoughts about how and why Wilder succumbed to ‘50s conventionality by deciding to become a proficient ‘house director’ between ‘53 and ‘58. He just went along with the flow of things, took this and that job, tried to be Lubitsch in this or that way, etc. But the fact is that after the making and release of 1953’s Stalag 17 and before the writing and shooting of Some Like It Hot in ‘58, Billy Wilder took a four and a half-year breather from the burden of being ‘Billy Wilder.’ For lack of a better or fairer term, he became Paycheck Billy. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”
I’ve cracked the Dune code. I’ve figured it out. I finally know what it is. Dune is a “mood piece” that puts you into “a trance”, but it would help if you get really effing ripped before seeing the damn thing. Toke up, suck it down, bring your own brownies and gummies.
I began to sense this when a friend who recently saw it said he was a fan of “epically scaled movies, even flawed ones or those that are hard to follow [as Dune] has a number of distinct characters weaving in and out.” What Dune viewers need to do, in other words, is get themselves into a place in which “flaws” don’t especially matter and “following the action” isn’t all that vital. (Whuht?)
You just have submit to Dune, go with it, and see past ALL THAT FUCKING SAND. And you have to see it on a big screen — no watching Dune on iPads or laptops. You have to go big or nothing. You are little, microscopic …not even a granule of sand. Dune is the whole effing desert and it will fill your soul with wonder.
Then I talked to another guy who’s seen Dune and claims he “went into something of a trance and was mesmerized from beginning to end. Seeing it a big screen was fabulous, and I might well see it again sometime just for the immersive pleasure.” In other words, Dune tripped this guy out. Imagine if he’d dropped two Bliss gummies a half-hour before sitting down.
Third person: “Dune‘s not bad. It just makes no sense. But that’s okay — it’s a mood piece. Good to see if you’re really stoned.”
At first 2001: A Space Odyssey failed to “make sense” or add up for certain snooty people (i.e., critics, rationalists). It was derided for being a “shaggy God story”. And then what happened? Younger people started going to it ripped or even tripping, and suddenly the spaciness of it became the all of it. 2001 became a cult stoner movie, and then the marketing guys finally caught on and they changed their slogan to “the ultimate trip.”
This, I’m sensing more and more, is what Dune is or could be. If you meet it halfway by being ripped out of your gourd, you can climb onto its back like a huge sand worm and ride the whirlwind. The next time Warner Bros. has an on-the-lot screening, they need to forego the wine and cheese and pass out edibles instead.
Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson, who only spitballs about the Oscar potential of films she’s seen and who, like many others, takes great delight in getting early peeks at expensive, highly anticipated films, has put Denis Villeneuve‘s Dune (Warner Bros., 10.22) into her top slot on Gold Derby’s Best Picture prediction list.
That’s it, I said to myself. I have no more faith in Dune than I did in Blade Runner 2049 before seeing it (less actually), and I’ve never cared for the idea of investing in dense, multi-part sagas taking place in distant exotic realms and requiring enormous reading investments, and so it is now the solemn duty of all good souls and concerned cinefiles who stand with HE to say to Anne Thompson “what you like or what you think will be Best Picture nominated means nothing to us because we don’t trust you…we may become Dune fans down the road but for the time being we’re going to search for ways to diminish Dune just to spite your enthusiasm for it.”
Thompson was invited to see it the other day at the Steve Ross theatre on the Warner Bros. lot, you see, and there was wine and cheese and whatnot served in the lobby, and it was all very lah-dee-dah.
A friend who attended the same screening says Greig Fraser‘s cinematography is quite mesmerizing and that you can coast along on that aspect to your heart’s content. But there was absolutely no following the story for this person, not having read the original 1965 Frank Herbert novel or any of the sequels (Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, God Emperor of Dune, Heretics of Dune,Chapterhouse: Dune) and having no recollection of the disastrous 1984 David Lynch version, and that the plotting was too complex and that it seemed as if everyone was speaking some kind of foreign tongue, and that this sense of being lost and adrift had not, to put it mildly, coagulated into anything that amounted to the Right Best Picture Stuff…at least in this person’s opinion.
Let this be a moment in award-season history…a moment in which the little people in the bleachers rose up against the Anne Thompsons of the world, sitting in their pricey mezzanine seats along the first-base and third-base lines while sipping Chardonnay and munching fine cheese-and-cracker combos while the little people cope with their soggy popcorn and hot dogs and plastic cups of beer.
Three years ago I drove to Telluride with hotshot Variety music reporter Chris Willman. The first day we drove all the way from Los Angeles to Gallup, New Mexico -- call it ten hours or more if you take leg-stretching breaks. We stayed at the historic El Rancho Hotel. The remainder of the trip took four and a half hours -- relatively painless by comparison.
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