Day: April 10, 2013

The interest that GenY and developmentally-stunted GenXers have in period westerns (along the semi-scrupulous lines of, say, The Wild Bunch, The Grey Fox, Days of Heaven, Heaven’s Gate and McCabe and Mrs. Miller) is apparently zilch. They don’t want to commune with bygone eras in any kind of realistic way — they only want digitally spritzed-up fantasies that all feel and look like the same 21st Century bullshit video game. Same formula, same attitude, same pacing and cutting.

Yes, Jerry Bruckheimer and Gore Verbinski‘s The Lone Ranger (Disney, 7.3) is a popcorn goof and hardly about “history.” But shouldn’t some form of believable yesteryear atmosphere be woven into it? If you ask me the to-hell-with-historical-realism aesthetic began 14 years ago with Barry Sonnenfeld‘s Wild Wild West (high-throttle FX and wowser technology in a steampunk style) and gained strength with the japey style of the Pirates of the Caribbean flicks.

Hollywood has always phonied up history in this and that way by kowtowing to contemporary fashions and mores. Errol Flynn‘s 1938 Robin Hood was pure fantasy-driven pop. William Holden‘s anti-war attitudes in The Bridge on the River Kwai were those of a mid ’50s sophisticate, and were unrealistically imposed upon the World War II setting. Biblical epics of the ’50s and ’60s were, of course, resplendently phony in various ways. So ignoring the way things were is not new. But will we ever see actual period films again, at least on an intermittent basis? The kind of period we saw in the two Godfather films, in Reds, in Ken Russell‘s Women in Love (which is to say not Mahler or Lisztomania), in Michael Mann‘s Last of the Mohicans, etc. John Sturges‘ The Magnificent Seven was very much of its time (i.e, 1960), but at least it was half-loyal to the trappings of the Old West. Even the Sergio Leone Almeria films of the ’60s were at least semi-credible. Is that kind of thing gone with the wind?

Seriously, how infantile and neurotic is it to say “I don’t want to know from historical realities — I just want my own kind of CG realm imposed upon everything that ever was. I want all of history revised so it feels like something I’d recognize and could slip right into with my hand-held devices”?

This “re-imagining of all creation in CG terms” aesthetic has migrated over to African-wildlife docs even. I’ve actually seen docs that use CG enhancements to zass things up so lions and tigers and crocs and wild dogs look even fiercer than they do in actuality.

I attended last night’s Los Angeles premiere of To The Wonder, and I had exactly the same reaction as I did last September in Toronto. It’s a beautifully shot object d’art, but it helps to know what it doesn’t do going in. Terrence Malick‘s decision to shoot a drama about things not working out between a couple with next to no dialogue certainly has integrity. I don’t know how many times Olga Kurylenko (who plays Ben Affleck‘s French wife who winds up stranded and gasping for air in Bartlesville, Oklahoma) twirls around in this film, but she does it a lot.

To The Wonder costars Olga Kurylenko, Ben Affleck, Rachel McAdams.

(l. tor.) McAdams, Affleck, Green, Kurylenko, Gonda.

Affleck (who’s put on a few pounds since the Oscar telecast) offered some pre-screening remarks alogn with producers Sarah Green and Nicholas Gonda, and got a laugh when he noted that what he’d just said amounted to more dialogue that he has in the film.

The screening and the after-party were held inside the Pacific Design Center. I said hello to James Woods, who’s crafty and convincing in Phillip Noyce‘s Mary and Martha, an HBO drama debuting on 4.20, and to Killing Them Softly director-writer Andrew Dominik.

On the way out I asked Green if the Malick film formerly known as Lawless has a new title. Not yet, she said. I told her I’d read a riff about Knight of Cups possibly going to Cannes based on an understanding that it’s closer to being completed than the film formerly known as Lawless. Green said she didn’t know and that the ball is in Terry’s court, etc. I’m presuming that sections of both will be shown to buyers, at least.

Most of To The Wonder was shot in Bartlesville, and I noticed for the first time last night that it contains two shots of a large, second-story-balcony home that looks a lot like the one bought and used for the forthcoming adaptation of August: Osage County, which was also shot in Bartlesville and nearby Pawhuska. For all I know the Bartlesville area has five or ten homes that look like this.

The event sponsors were Disaronno ( an Italian liqueur) and Fiji Water.

“Although Universal’s publicity department has asked that journalists refrain from spilling the secrets of Oblivion (Universal, 4.19), the major revelations, once they arrive, will hardly surprise anyone familiar with Total Recall, The Matrix and the countless other sci-fi touchstones hovering over this striking, visually resplendent adventure,” writes Variety‘s Justin Chang.

“Pitting the latest action-hero incarnation of Tom Cruise against an army of alien marauders, director Joseph Kosinski’s follow-up to Tron: Legacy is a moderately clever dystopian mindbender with a gratifying human pulse, despite some questionable narrative developments along the way.”

This plus Todd McCarthy’s half-approving review leaves you with an idea that while Oblivion may not be great or legendary, it isn’t half bad.

A.O. Scott, Dana Stevens and Werner Herzog talking about the departed Roger Ebert on Charlie Rose (Monday 4.8):

The easy-lay critics will give it a pass and general audiences rarely consider quality issues, but Brian Helgeland‘s 42 (Warner Bros., 4.12) is apparently in trouble with discerning types. The period baseball biopic has encountered two dismissive reviews out of the gate with Variety‘s Scott Foundas and The Hollywood Reporter‘s Todd McCarthy calling it too self-consciously mythical by half.

“All that effort to get funding and then the rewrites and shooting hassles and post-production struggles and we’re finally about to open and wham…pans from Foundas and McCarthy! This fist is for them!”

McCarthy writes that 42 is guilty of “hyperbole and unnecessary inflation that infects the film as a whole. Rather than letting its hero’s accomplishments and behavior speak for themselves, Helgeland hammers home every achievement and then puts a halo around it, as if anyone won’t get it otherwise. [The film is] pretty when it should be gritty and grandiosely noble instead of just telling it like it was.

“Whether in the deep South or the streets of Brooklyn, life here looks spiffy and well-scrubbed enough to appear in a department store window, while the soaring musical accompaniment seems to be stamping all the protagonists’ passports for immediate admission to that great ballpark in the sky.”

Foundas calls it “thick with canned inspirationalism and heroic platitudes, but only occasionally pushing past the iconic to grapple with the real human drama of Robinson’s life. 42 [is] a relentlessly formulaic biopic that succeeds at transforming one of the most compelling sports narratives of the 20th century into a home run of hagiography.

“[It] remains largely on the surface of things, pitting its Robinson (relative newcomer Chadwick Boseman) against a succession of cartoonish racists and Southern good-old-boys who are either softened by the first baseman’s towering nobility, or completely drowned out by composer Mark Isham’s incessant fanfares.”

Any actress can put on a spirited act on a talk show. The bottom line is that Lilo’s problem is two-pronged — the manic addictive behavior resulting in the refusal of grade-A directors, writers and producers to even consider offering her a decent part in a blue-chip feature or HBO film or whatever. So she’s a prisoner in a dungeon in which she can only perform in sketchy indies and bottom-of-the-barrel junk like Scary Movie 5.