God, The Hollywood Reporter guys are really slow at posting these roundtable video chats. American Hustle‘s David O. Russell mentioned having participated in this discussion with Steve McQueen, Paul Greengrass, Ben Stiller, Alfonso Cuaron and Lee Daniels during his American Cinematheque appearqnce last Friday (11.8). I love all these guys except for Daniels — no offense but he’s never impressed me as a director, a personality or a conversationalist. In my book Russell and Cuaron are the kind of Orson Welles-ian shoot-from-the-hippers who are incapable of anything but direct, illuminating, midnight-lightning-flash commentary about absolutely any topic, including which insect repellent is best.
I landed at Seoul’s Incheon Int’l Airport just after 6 am this morning (or around 1:02 pm L.A. time), and I’m on the plane to Hanoi tonight at 6:40 pm.
Seoul is all about traffic and ugly buildings and smog for the most part. At first the milky stuff in the air seems like drizzly, standard-issue morning smog but by noon it looks and feels like the radioactive fallout in Stanley Kramer’s On The Beach.
My first impression of Seoul is mainly one of grimness, to be honest. It’s a combination of Newark, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh and the soulless parts of Tokyo (another city that I’m not enamored of). When they built Seoul they forgot to think about trying to make it attractive.
The first thing I saw when I got out of customs was a big Paradise casino poster featuring the smiling faces of Robert “anything for a buck” De Niro. I’m trying to post this as quickly as possibly so I can wander around for two or three hours and take some more photos.
I even had a bad experience trying to get free wifi in a Starbucks here. The software asked for personal info which I quickly provided, and then it turned right around and said “sorry, fuck you, no wifi.”
Seoul is not my idea of an urban turn-on. I’ll probably never return here.
“Not happening…way too laid back…zero narrative urgency,” I was muttering from the get-go. Basically the sixth episode of White Lotus Thai SERIOUSLY disappoints. Puttering around, way too slow. Things inch along but it’s all “woozy guilty lying aftermath to the big party night” stuff. Glacial pace…waiting, waiting. I was told...
I finally saw Walter Salles' I'm Still Here two days ago in Ojai. It's obviously an absorbing, very well-crafted, fact-based poltical drama, and yes, Fernanda Torres carries the whole thing on her shoulders. Superb actress. Fully deserving of her Best Actress nomination. But as good as it basically is...
After three-plus-years of delay and fiddling around, Bernard McMahon's Becoming Led Zeppelin, an obsequious 2021 doc about the early glory days of arguably the greatest metal-rock band of all time, is opening in IMAX today in roughly 200 theaters. Sony Pictures Classics is distributing. All I can say is, it...
To my great surprise and delight, Christy Hall's Daddio, which I was remiss in not seeing during last year's Telluride Film Festival, is a truly first-rate two-hander -- a pure-dialogue, character-revealing, heart-to-heart talkfest that knows what it's doing and ends sublimely. Yes, it all happens inside a Yellow Cab on...
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Unless Part Two of Kevin Costner's Horizon (Warner Bros., 8.16) somehow improves upon the sluggish initial installment and delivers something...
For me, A Dangerous Method (2011) is David Cronenberg's tastiest and wickedest film -- intense, sexually upfront and occasionally arousing...