Day: September 19, 2013

That Kurt Russell Thing

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I would describe myself as a fairly good guy to have around when it comes to light carpentry and trimming trees (I worked as a tree surgeon in my 20s) and painting interiors and crawling under homes and stapling insulation to the floorboards and moving furniture. I’m not much for changing tires, but otherwise I’m pretty good at being handy and can therefore recognize this in others. And if you ask me Josh Brolin has a steady, authoritative “man of the house” manner in Jason Reitman‘s Labor Day. His character is probably a little too gentle and refined and devoted to baking pies for someone who’s done time for manslaughter, okay, but I believed in that anchored, down-to-it, let’s-get-this-done vibe. I wasn’t exactly doing cartwheels after catching this Paramount release in Telluride, but Brolin’s performance compensated to some extent.

Finding My Way Through It

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I knew what IOS7 was going to look like (my son Jett installed a Beta test version of it months ago) but I’m not having too many problems with it. It’s just taking some getting used to. A lot of people are angry, pissed, shocked but I’m taking my time with it, letting it settle in, rolling with it, learning the new moves. The only thing I hate and got rid of right away was the four-digit pass code that the new software requested. After punching that code six or seven times I 86’ed that shit.

The Social-Political Metaphor

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In Alfonso Cuaron‘s Gravity (Warner Bros., 10.4), Sandra Bullock plays an astronaut, Dr. Ryan Stone, struggling with a do-or-die situation that’s initially beyond her technical abilities. When high-speed debris destroys a space shuttle she’s manning with two others (including George Clooney‘s Matt Kowalski, a space-flight veteran), Stone not only has to survive with limited air but somehow return to earth — a tough order. In this sense Bullock is playing (I know how this sounds but it’s true) a variation on Doris Day‘s role in Julie (a terrified stewardess has to man the controls of a plane that has lost its pilot and co-pilot) and Karen Black‘s in Airport ’75 (a terrified stewardess has to fly a crew-less 747 before Charlton Heston can board and land it). Gravity is miles above and beyond these two mediocre films, technically as well as dramatically, so I’m not trying to diminish Cuaron’s film by making this comparison. Gravity is a brilliant experience. But Bullock is essentially playing, like Black and Day did earlier, a novice who has to grim up and find inner steel when the going gets tough. And the fact of the matter is that Black, Day and Bullock’s performances are roughly similar with much of the emphasis on “oh my God, I don’t know if I can handle this…what am I going to do?”

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Flaming Genital Submission

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It was announced yesterday that Amat Escalante‘s horrific Heli is Mexico’s official submission for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. You’ll have to search far and wide to find a colder, more repellent film than this, and I therefore admire the bravery…okay, the resolve of the Mexican officials who made this call. “This is an animalistic landscape, a territory lorded over by serpents and psychopaths,” I wrote after seeing Heli in Cannes. “It’s hugely unpleasant to watch, but I’ll give Escalante this — he shows violence as a brutally blunt and horrific tool. Which is exactly how it feels in real life.”

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Bated Breath

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A new Montages.no article about Lars von Trier‘s Nymphomaniac reports that while a softcore version will open theatrically in Denmark and Norway (in December 2013 and January 2014 respectively), the pornographic version, for which “the lower part of the actors is said to be digitally substituted with bodies of pornographic performers…will most likely be saved for a Cannes premiere in 2014.” Terrific. If this happens it’ll be highly unlikely that the XXX version will screen in festival competition. “It is not inconceivable that the hardcore version ultimately has to be experienced on DVD and Blu-ray,” the article cautions, adding that “it is still possible that the producers or the festival [will change] their minds.”

Ape Dreams

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What the world needs now is a brand-new Contempt — a film about 21st Century filmmaking that has nothing to do with Jean-Luc Godard or Alberto Moravia or memories of Michel Piccoli or Jack Palance. The focus would be on the pathetic refusal or inability of under-50 filmmakers to submit to even a semblance of realistic period aroma or behavior — they have to recreate all films set in the past according to their contemporary jackoff imaginings and comic-book mythologies. Hence Fury — David Ayer‘s World War II action thriller that is obviously aping Inglourious Basterds. Brad Pitt as Sergeant Wop-Bop-A-Loo-Bop….War Daddy, I mean…and a five-man crew (Shia LaBeouf, Logan Lerman, Michael Pena and some guy I’ve never heard of) on a “deadly behind-enemy-lines mission…striking at the heart of Nazi Germany,” blah blah splat.

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