Yesterday I sent New Orleans-based movie maven David Dubos a PDF of Kelly Marcel‘s Savings Mr. Banks screenplay. A few hours later he replied: “Read it today, quite good. Surefire Oscar nom for Best Original screenplay, and likely acting noms for Tom Hanks, Emma Thompson.
“On a side note (and this might be just a coincidence), but in the trailer for Ridley Scott‘s The Counselor (20th Century Fox, 10.25), the wire stretched across the highway to behead some poor sap…I remember reading that eons ago as a means of disposal in Truman Capote‘s Handcarved Coffins, in which the serial killer did the same thing. I wonder if Cormac McCarthy read that? Probably, I’m guessing.” — from an email friend, received yesterday.
Michael Winterbottom‘s The Look of Love (IFC Films, 7.5), which I saw at last January’s Sundance Film Festival, is an almost entirely flat thing to sit through, enlivened only by Steve Coogan‘s droll (if one-note) performance as British adult magazine and sex-biz entrepeneur Paul Raymond. An impressive recreation of ’60s and ’70s scenes, styles and mores, it’s a film that basically says that (a) erotic indulgence has its downside, (b) cocaine tends to fuck your life up and (c) it’s not a good idea to treat your daughter like a fellow bacchanalian. Fascinating! It’s reasonably well done but there’s simply not enough good material here for a real film, and what little Matt Greenhaigh‘s screenplay contains is presented by Winterbottom in a rote, almost ho-hum fashion.
I kicked things around this morning with Boxoffice.com’s Phil Contrino, a longtime Oscar Poker contributor until Sasha Stone suddenly dropped me last October after I wrote about our raging Silver Linings Playbook argument in the parking garage of the Aidikoff screening room (but without identifying her or even her gender), and in so doing threw Contrino out with the bathwater. Phil and I talked about (a) why and how The Lone Ranger has tanked, (b) Cate Blanchett‘s possible award-calibre performance in Woody Allen‘s Blue Jasmine, (c) the possibility that Armie Hammer might be the new Taylor Kitsch, (d) the Weinstein strategy behind their decision to open the Oscar-bound Fruitvale Station in July, (e) Pacific Rim and (f) Only God Forgives. Again, the mp3.
The above title is, of course, presented in air quotes. An allusion, if you will, to the colorful phrasings of Jack Nicholson‘s J.J. Gittes and that scene in Chinatown when he asked Lt. Lou Escobar, “Tell me…you still puttin’ Chinamen in jail for spittin’ in the laundry?” To which Escobar replied, “You’re a little behind the times, Jake. They use steam irons now.” It also alludes to screenwriter William Monahan having gotten it wrong in The Departed when he had Nicholson’s Frank Costello says, “No tickee, no laundry.” Cop-out! I’ve been hearing “no tickee, no washee” since I was a kid.
Nicholas Winding Refn‘s Only God Forgives (Radius-TWC, 7.19) is world-class in its repulsiveness, and it goes way beyond being a time-waster. The fumes from this oppressively violent Asian macho bullshit sword-slicing fantasy will sink into your system and your soul and leave you off-kilter — tainted in ways that may be hard to pinpoint at first but are no less real — for weeks after seeing it. Or months. Or eternally.
I’m feeling a little odd in that I’m finding myself in…well, perhaps not 100% agreement but certainly not strident disgreement with an op-ed about the recent Egyptian military coup by N.Y. Times op-ed columnist David Brooks. His basic point is that it’s at least a half-good thing that Mohammed Morsi is out on his ass. Core statement: “This week’s military coup may merely bring Egypt back to where it was: a bloated and dysfunctional superstate controlled by a self-serving military elite. But at least radical Islam, the main threat to global peace, has been partially discredited and removed from office.
A light dinner last night around 7 pm, and then we schlepped up Eighth Avenue with mobs of people gathered on corners and sitting curbside and on sidewalks in hopes that this would be a good enough vantage point to see the fireworks. For whatever reason the bulls were blocking off almost all side streets leading to the Hudson. The exception was 23rd Street so that’s where we made our left turn. We would up a block or so past 10th Avenue.
That viral video of a Hawthorne cop shooting a rottweiler four times followed by the poor dog writhing in pain…awful. I always thought if you shoot a dog, God forbid, that he’d be out like a light. It was obviously a volatile, hair-trigger thing on the cop’s part, but rottweilers are killers. The video clearly shows that the owner was taunting the fuzz, and if he’d been smart he wouldn’t have allowed the dog to jump out of the back seat by failing to roll the windows up two-thirds. We all know why people own Rottweilers. They want a snarling beast by their side in the event of a home invasion or street altercation of some kind. Eff with me and my dog will take a chunk out of your ass. Yes, the poor dog was only following instinct by trying to protect his owner, but the owner created the hassle in the first place.
I for one don’t hold with the idea that disco and the disco era (’74 to ’80) has been “gravely misunderstood”, as Jamie Kastner‘s The Secret Disco Revolution maintains. It was actually “a time of liberation for gays, blacks and women,” he’s saying. To a certain extent he’s right, I suppose, but when disco was peaking a lot of people like myself were somewhere between intensely put off and revolted. Okay, I went to Studio 54 like everyone else, yes, and I did a line or two there and even had fumbling, incomplete sex in the balcony once and yes, I loved dancing to “Don’t You Want Me, Baby?” and “Gloria.” I strangely enjoyed those times. Which is why, apart from liking the film and wanting to discuss it, I asked to speak with Kastner.
The Film Experience‘s Nathaniel R. is calling Albert Brooks‘ Lost in America (’85) a significant Independence Day film. In fact, Rogers calls it “an obvious, easy choice.” Brilliant, hilarious and endlessly rewatchable as Brooks film is, is there anyone out there who has said to themselves or their friends, “Lost in America? You have to ask? Totally great film to watch on the 4th of July!”
LIA “has a great many trenchant observations about American lives in the Reagan years in the form of its willfully self-deluded yuppies played by Julie Hagerty and Brooks himself,” he writes, “but the myths it demolishes about following one’s heart and all that cuts much deeper into the national psyche than satirizing just one decade. Constantly hilarious in a characteristically deadpan, mordant way, Lost in America is easily the most cynical title on this list, cynical enough that a less gifted comic mind might not have been able to balance out the humor with the acid, but there’s no rule that a national holiday can’t be used as a time for frank self-reflection and an acknowledgement of the nation’s character flaws.”
I’ve been waiting for years to find a decent YouTube clip of Warren Beatty as Milton Armitage, the snooty and in almost all ways superior nemesis of Dwayne Hickman in the first season (’59-’60) of The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. Only now with the entire series recently released on DVD can the full flavor of Armitage be re-appreciated. What a shit, and yet a shit whom Beatty (along with the writers, of course) labored mightily to mock at every turn.