In the view of Variety‘s Peter Debruge, The Cabin in the Woods, which screened earlier today at South by Southwest, is a genre-buster and a game-changer.
“Not since Scream has a horror movie subverted the expectations that accompany the genre to such wicked effect as [this], a sly, self-conscious twist on one of slasher films’ ugliest stepchildren — the coed campsite massacre,” Debruge writes. “The less auds know going in, the more satisfying the payoff will be for this long-delayed, much-anticipated shocker, which was caught in limbo for more than two years during MGM’s bankruptcy.
“Given the provenance of the project, which was co-written by Joss Whedon and Buffy the Vampire Slayer collaborator Drew Goddard, it’s no wonder the film has assumed near-mythic status in the imaginations of fear-friendly fanboys. Designed as a response to the recent torture-porn strain of horror cinema, Cabin feels less like the final nail in that trend’s coffin than the start of something new: a smarter, more self-aware kind of chiller that still delivers the scares.”
“With plot holes aplenty, fanatics can pick the film apart if they please. For starters, the setting only makes sense for a couple of the scenarios at hand. But the idea is so ambitious and fresh, most will gladly play along.
“If the execution brings any regrets, it’s that first-time director Goddard (who co-wrote Cloverfield) seems somewhat outmatched by the considerable demands of his own high concept. Given all the film gets right, there’s no question this is one of the most exciting feature debuts of the last few years, but it’s a shame Whedon (who directed the second unit) or someone more polished wasn’t there to make the cabin, the woods and the cardboard characters as entertaining as the mind-warping secret that lies beneath.”
A little voice inside is wondering if Debruge might be a little hopped up by that Austin fanboy atmosphere. Dispassionate observers who have no investment whatsoever in fanboy horror or susceptibility to Austin mania need to see this thing straight and cold. We’ll take it from there.
Over and over web journalists have been reporting that Inside Llewyn Davis, the currently-filming Coen Bros. film set against the backdrop of the early ’60s folk scene in Greenwich Village, is “loosely based on the life and times of ’60s folk singer Dave Van Ronk.” Well, I’ve just read Joel and Ethan Coen‘s screenplay, and I can tell you that the character of Llewyn Davis bears no resemblance whatsover to the Dave Van Ronk I’ve read about over the years.
Carey Mulligan, Oscar Isaac shooting scene from Coen Bros.’ Inside Llewyn Davis.
The large, hulking Van Ronk got going as a Manhattan-based performer sometime in the mid ’50s. He was initially a jazz musician before shifting over to folk music. By the time the early ’60s rolled around he was fairly well ensconced in “the scene.” He gradually acquired a reputation as a big personality who knew everyone, and who had taken it upon himself to organize Village musicians so they wouldn’t be exploited by cafe owners who wanted to pay them zilch.
Van Ronk was always a relatively minor, small-time figure in terms of fame and record sales, but he was heavily committed to folk music, to the West Village musician community, to his troubadour way of life and certainly to everything that was starting to happen in the early ’60s. If nothing else a man who lived large.
Llewyn Davis as created by the Coen bros. (and played by the relatively small-statured and Latin-looking Oscar Isaac) is a guy who lives and thinks small, and who’s no match for Van Ronk spiritually either. He’s glum, morose — a kick-around guy trying to make it as a folk musician but not much of a go-getter. He’s pissed-off, resentful, a bit dull. He can sing and play guitar and isn’t untalented, but he has no fire in the belly. And any way you want to slice it Llewyn Davis is not Van Ronk. Or at least, not in any way I was able to detect.
Inside Llewyn Davis began filming in Manhattan last month, and it might be released before the year’s end. Scott Rudin is one of the producers. Wikipedia says Paramount will distribute domestically. It costars Isaac, Carey Mulligan (as a pissed-off folk singer who’s become pregnant by Davis and needs to abort their child), Justin Timberlake as Mulligan’s folk-troubadour husband, Garrett Hedlund, John Goodman, F. Murray Abraham, Stark Sands and Jeanine Seralles.
Carey Mulligan
The Coen’s script, typically sharp and well-honed with tasty characters and tart, tough dialogue, is about lethargy, really. And about taking care of a friend’s cat. And seeing to an abortion and trying to get paid and figure out your next move and…whatever else, man. It’s about a guy who isn’t even close to getting his act together, who just shuffles around from one couch to the next, grasping at straws, doing a session recording one day and trying to land a performing gig the next, like a rolling stone, no direction home.
It’s about how shitty it felt to be aimless and broke without a lot of passion in the first year of the Kennedy administration. A line from an Amazon review of Van Ronk’s co-authored autobiography notes that “the truth is that being a folk singer in the late 1950s wasn’t very much fun.” That sums up Inside Llewyn Davis. It’s about a guy who “exists” as a folk singer rather than one who is really struggling to be heard and really living the life and half-getting somewhere.
The period details are subtle and spot-on, and yes, Bob Dylan does make an oblique appearance at the very end (and is heard singing “I Was Young When I Left Home“) but Davis…? What a loser, what a deadhead. But I loved the script. It’s a real Coen Bros. film. When you’ve finished it you know you’ve tasted the early ’60s and that atmosphere (if I know the Coens the CG recreations of 1961 Manhattan are going to be exceptional) and that kick-around way of life, and that you’ve really become familiar with Llewyn Davis’s loser lifestyle. It’s something to bite into and remember. It has flavor and realism, but it has no story to speak of, really. Shit just happens. It’s a bit like A Serious Man, but without the theme about God’s cruelty and indifference to the plight of mortals.
What are the Coen’s saying? If you’re not driven or talented enough, don’t try to become a performer because life will take you down if you don’t have that spark? Something like that.
There’s another Dylan-performed tune called “Dink’s Song” that is heard at the halfway mark.
In and of itself, any romantic confection that casts Gael Garcia Bernal as a character named “Dr. Goldstein” needs to be taken out behind the shed, tied to a fencepost and ass-whipped with a leather strap.
Wiki synopsis: “Marley Corbett (Hudson), a carefree woman with a promising career, great friends, and witty sense of humor, learns that she has terminal cancer. She is told the news by Dr. Goldstein (Bernal), a successful doctor with a hardened exterior, who is deeply impressed and affected by the way Marley accepts the news of her fate with humor and dignity. From there, Marley and Julian find themselves falling in love, and doing their best to make the most of the time they have left.”
“This film is one long biopsy of pure horror: the tumours of sentimentality and bad acting metastasise everywhere, and Bernal, in particular, is horrendously bad.” — Peter Bradshaw, Guardian.
“I had no idea colon cancer was so much fun! It is so fantastic to be dying! Call it the Ass Cancer Life Plan. Every modern girl needs it.” — MaryAnn Johanson, Flick Filosopher.
“Rest assured I’m not going to give the game away as to whether Marley beats the disease. But given the movie’s set in New Orleans — a place famous for its funerals — I wouldn’t hold your breath.” — Robbie Collin, News of the World.
In a Gawker piece called “The Eddie Murphy That You Loved Is Dead,” Tim Grierson acknowledges that occasionally Eddie Murphy, by any measure one of the laziest and most smugly self-satisfied stars in Hollywood history, will flirt with being his old ’80s self.
“Every once in a while, he’ll do a Bowfinger. Or a Dreamgirls. Last year, he was in Tower Heist, which got so-so reviews but at least showed us a glimpse of the Murphy of old. Around that same time, the normally press-shy Murphy sat down for a lengthy Rolling Stone interview where he sounded like he had seen the light about his recent career choices.
“‘I don’t think I’m gonna be doing a lot of family stuff for a while,’ he said. ‘I don’t have any interest in that right now. There’s really no blueprint, but I’m trying to do some edgy stuff.’ If that wasn’t enough, he even hinted at maybe — just maybe — going back and doing standup for the first time in more than 20 years. For a lot of fans, his comments seemed to be confirmation that, yes, Murphy knew he had made bad choices of late and was going to atone.
“But then the Oscar gig didn’t happen, Tower Heist was only an okay commercial performer, and then, poof, there went all that talk about a comeback.
“That’s not to say that Murphy didn’t mean what he said to Rolling Stone or that a future comeback isn’t possible. But considering how much Hollywood stars like to capitalize on their heat when they have it, it’s interesting that we haven’t heard a peep from Murphy since he bowed out of the Academy Awards.”
The lighting in this scene from Francine, a 2012 SXSW attraction, is too dark and murky. On one level that sounds like the Jeffrey Jones‘ Emperor Joseph II saying in Amadeus that Mozart’s music has “too many notes.” On another level it’s too effing dark.
My prevailing memory of South by Southwest 2011 is one of lines, lines and more lines. No seniority, no elite press privileges, level playing field. It’s no duckwalk if you’re trying to file all the time. Cannes and Sundance offer elite passes to a certain journalistic fraternity. If you were me wouldn’t you prefer this kind of deal to a festival run by the sensibility of “the people’s republic of Austin”? This is but one of the reasons I’m not attending this year’s SXSW.
On top of which I wouldn’t want to deal with being even in the general realm of James Rocchi‘s late-night karaoke routine. To get into karaoke it helps to be half-bombed (at least on the singer’s part) and my newfound sobriety has put me on a separate path.
I stopped myself from flipping through all these time-wasters but I couldn’t resist checking out the alternate main-title opening of Jackie Brown, which I’d never watched on the DVD or Bluray for whatever reason.
It takes years to really understand some films, and in a certain sense to stand up to them. Particularly those made by world-class filmmakers — films with lots of style and jazz up their sleeves. If you ask me the Chicago critics in this early ’99 video clip — Roger Ebert, Michael Wilmington, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Ray Pride and Dann Gire — were so swayed by Stanley Kubrick‘s reputation as a genius-level director that they couldn’t quite bring themselves to just look at Eyes Wide Shut for what it really was and just say that.
Last night I re-watched the Eyes Wide Shut Bluray, and of course, as usual, I was sucked in start to finish. But I’m even more convinced now than ever before that this is one of the most soulless wanks (in terms of actual content as opposed to the look and mood of it) ever created by a major director.
You really need to listen to McDowell in this clip. He worked with Kubrick, knew him well, obviously saw through to the bottom of him. Once you’ve done that, read on.
Here’s how I put it way back when:
“I once referred to Eyes Wide Shut as a ‘perfectly white tablecloth.’ That implies purity of content and purpose, which it clearly has. But Eyes Wide Shut is also a tablecloth that feels stiff and unnatural from too much starch.
“Stanley Kubrick was one of the great cinematic geniuses of the 20th century, but on a personal level he wound up isolating himself, I feel, to the detriment of his art. The beloved, bearded hermit so admired by Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg (both of whom give great interviews on the Eyes Wide Shut DVD) had become, to a certain extent, an old fogey who didn’t really get the world anymore.
“Not that he wanted or needed to. He created in his films worlds that were poetically whole and self-balancing on their own aesthetic terms. But as time went on, they became more and more porcelain and pristine, and less flesh-and-blood. Eyes Wide Shut is probably the most porcelain of them all.
“I remember writing two or three pieces in ’99 and ’00 about how Eyes Wide Shut was a fascinating stiff that essentially portrayed of the decline of Stanley Kubrick. I remember bully-boy David Poland unloading ridicule in my direction because of this. All to say that it gave me comfort to come upon a similar judgment in David Thomson‘s re-review of Kubrick’s final film, which is found on page 273 of Have You Seen…?.
Here’s the first paragraph and two sentences at the article’s end:
“This is the last film of Stanley Kubrick — indeed, he died so soon after delivery of his cut that the legend quickly grew that he intended doing more things to his movie. But it’s hard at the end not to see the substantial gulf between the man who knew ‘everything’ about filmmaking but not nearly enough about life or love or sex (somehow, over the years those subjects did get left out).
“Not that the film lacks intrigue or suggestiveness. Mastery can be felt. It is just that the master seems to have forgotten, or given up on figuring out, why mastery should be any more valuable than supremacy at chess or French polishing.”
The last two lines of Thomson’s review: “It is a shock to find that the film is only 159 minutes. Every frame feels like a prison.”
From my March 2000 review: “If you want your art to matter, stay in touch with the world. Keep in the human drama, take walks, go to baseball games, chase women, argue with waiters, ride motorcycles, hang out with children, play poker, visit Paris as often as possible and always keep in touch with the craggy old guy with the bad cough who runs the news stand.
“Kubrick apparently did very little of this. The more invested he became in his secretive, secluded, every-detail-controlled, nothing-left-to-chance lifestyle in England — which he began to construct when he left Hollywood and moved there in the early ’60s — and the less familiar he became with the rude hustle-bustle of life on the outside, the more rigid and formalized and apart-from-life his films became.
“Kubrick’s movies were always impressively detailed and beautifully realized. They’ve always imposed a certain trance-like spell — an altogetherness and aesthetic unity common to the work of any major artist.
“What Kubrick chose to create is not being questioned here. On their own terms, his films are masterful. But choosing to isolate yourself from the unruly push-pull of life can have a calcifying effect upon your art.
“Kubrick was less Olympian and more loosey-goosey when he made his early films in the `50s (Fear and Desire, The Killing, Paths of Glory) and early `60s (Lolita, Dr. Strangelove). I’m not saying his ultra-arty period that began with 2001: A Space Odyssey and continued until his death with A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket and Eyes Wide Shut, resulted in lesser films. The opposite is probably true.
“I’m saying that however beautiful and mesmerizing they were on their own terms, these last six films of Kubrick’s were more and more unto themselves, lacking that reflective, straight-from-the-hurlyburly quality that makes any work of expression seem more vital and alive.
“So many things about Eyes Wide Shut irritate me. Don’t get me started. So many others have riffed on this.
“The stiff, phoney-baloney way everyone talks to one another. The unmistakable feeling that the world it presents is much closer to 1920s Vienna (where the original Arthur Schnitzler novel was set) than modern-day Manhattan. The babysitter calling Cruise and Nicole Kidman ‘Mr. Harford’ and ‘Mrs. Harford.’ (If there is one teenaged Manhattan babysitter who has ever expressed herself like a finishing school graduate of 1952 and addressed a modern Manhattan couple in their early 30s as ‘Mr.’ and ‘Mrs.,’ I will eat the throw rug in David Poland‘s apartment.) The trite cliches that constitute 85% of Cruise’s dialogue. The agonizingly stilted delivery that Kidman gives to her lines in the sequence in which she’s smoking pot and arguing with Cruise in their bedroom. That absolutely hateful piano chord that keeps banging away in Act Three.
“The ultimate proof that Kubrick was off his game in his final days? He was so wrong in his judgment that the MPAA wouldn’t hit him with an NC-17 rating for the orgy scene that he didn’t even shoot alternative footage he could use in the event he might be forced to prune the overt nudity. He was instead caught with his pants down and forced to resort to a ridiculous CGI cover-up that makes no sense in the context of the film. (Would Cruise’s sexually curious character be content with just seeing the shoulders and legs of the sexual performers as he walks through the mansion? Wouldn’t he make a point of actually seeing the real action?)
“No one has been blunt enough to say it, but Kubrick obviously played his cards like no one who had any serious understanding of the moral leanings of the culture, let alone a good poker player’s sense of the film business, would have. He played them like an old man whose instincts were failing him, and thereby put himself and Warner Brothers into an embarrassing position. I wish things hadn’t ended this way for him, but they did.
“I hope what I’ve written here isn’t misread. I’ll always be grateful to have lived in a world that included the films of Stanley Kubrick. He’s now in the company of Griffith, Lubitsch, Chaplin, Eisenstein and the rest. Prolific or spare, rich or struggling, lauded or derided as their artistic strivings may have been, they are all equal now.”
