Month: January 2014

Chapman and MacLain Way‘s The Battered Bastards of Baseball is a wonderfully spirited documentary about a scrappy-ass minor-league Portland baseball team called the Mavericks. The “Mavs” were a genuinely independent operation (i.e., not a farm team for a major-league club) that was owned and managed by character actor Bing Russell, the father of Kurt Russell. The Mavs lasted for five years — 73′ to ’77. The doc is about a proudly non-corporate baseball team. It’s about spunk and tobacco juice. It’s about a team of third- and fourth-rate players who won games, sold a shitload of tickets and revitalized the Portland baseball scene. Joe Garagiola loved and promoted the Mavs. Former Yankee Jim Bouton pitched for the Mavs in ’75 and ’77. Director Todd Field (In The Bedroom) was the team’s bat boy.

The Battered Bastards of Baseball co-directors Chapman and Maclain Way on either side of Kurt Russell during Monday night’s after-party at 501 Main Street. The dinner was organized/hosted by Melanie Blum’s Next Generation Filmmaker Series.

Read more

I’m sorry but Kate Barker-Froyland‘s Song One struck me as way too gentle, delicate and sensitive for its own good. Way. I left after 45 minutes. The part I saw seemed like a musical (i.e., music-augmented) love story in the vein of John Carney‘s Once and Can A Song Save Your Life? It’s about an anthropologist (Anne Hathaway) who is summoned by her mother (Mary Steenburgen) to return to Manhattan to attend to her musician brother, who’s submerged in a coma after a car accident. Before long Hathaway watches an amiable, somewhat famous folk singer (Johnny Flynn) perform at a club. She introduces herself and tells him of her brother’s condition. (The brother has had some kind of vague relationship with Flynn or is big fan of his or something.). Anyway they start going out and attending clubs and sitting on rooftops and making eyes at each other. Goo-goo eyes, actually. After the sixth or seventh time that Flynn looked at Hathaway like a five-week-old puppy, I muttered to myself “okay, that’s it” and I got up and left. No offense.

My recollection of Basil Dearden‘s vividly photographed Khartoum (’66) is that of a tepid and bloodless historical war epic. Not awful but not great. But the film, a 1.22.14 Bluray release on Twilight Time, has three powerful elements. One, Laurence Olivier‘s glint-of-madness performance as The Mahdi, or more precisely his “addressing the troops” scene. (Yes, another semi-ludicrous “white guy playing ethic guy” performance, but obviously crackling with energy.) Two, the fact that it was shot in Ultra Panavison 70, with an aspect ratio of 2.75 to 1. And three, the Bluray reportedly contains the previously censored head-on-a-stick footage that follows the spear-killing of General “Chinese” Gordon (Charlton Heston).

Bill Hader‘s angry, vulnerable, hurting-guy performance in The Skeleton Twins is a career-changer. He’s no longer the SNL smartass who delivers zingy, colorful movie performances on the side. He’s now a real-deal actor who can bore into a character as deeply as any other gifted performer. John Michael McDonagh‘s Calvary, which I saw last night, is basically a wash — static, too dialogue-y, fatalistic, dull. Basically a meditation on the modern Irish soul that says (a) “we’re going wrong” and (b) “those boy-diddling Catholic priests need to pay for their crimes.” I tweeted about Zach Braff‘s Wish I Was Here a couple of days ago, calling it “a little too much into comforting meditations and family-embracing bromides to be comforting or illuminating.” It’s an open-hearted piece, but a little too calculated in that direction” and “pretty much the exact opposite of A Serious Man in a spiritual/philosophical sense.”

Monday, 1.20 at 12:30 pm. I got started an hour later than usual this morning due to crashing at 2 am, which was the fault of Richard Linklater‘s Boyhood beginning around 10 pm last night. I have to leave by 1:30 pm for the pain-in-the-ass Redstone Cinemas (located way out in Kimball Junction) to catch the last hour of Steve James‘ Life Itself, the Roger Ebert doc that I saw the first 65 minutes of late yesterday afternoon and loved — it’s a bluntly truthful, brilliantly made, profoundly touching portrait of a really good guy. Then I have to catch Kate Barker-Froyland‘s Song One, the Anne Hathaway romantic drama, followed by Chapman and Maclain Way‘s The Battered Bastards of Baseball, a doc about Bing Russell‘s minor-league baseball team, the Mavericks. The final film, 9:45 pm at the Eccles, is Gregg Araki‘s White Bird in a Blizzard.

Last Friday Weinstein Co. honcho Harvey Weinstein told CNN’s Piers Morgan that he’s going to stop making films with cynical, exploitation-style violence for its own sake. — i.e., violence as style, violence in air quotes. Doesn’t that mean he and that bloated, over-praised, low-rent hillbilly known as Quentin Tarantino are pretty much done? Is there any major Hollywood director who has demonstrated more conclusively that he’s incapable of making a film without blowing people away or roasting them alive or beating them to death with baseball bats or what-have-you? Tarantino has never written or directed a film that deals with anything intimate or emotional or humanly vulnerable — he basically directs “covers” of ’70s exploitation-style genre films in which bad guys get killed, period. QT is creatively incapable of working outside of that safe little splatter box that he’s been operating out of since Reservoir Dogs.

Read more

I’ve long admired the great Richard Linklater and treasured most of his films (the one negative standout being 1998’s The Newton Boys) And like everyone else I felt instantly engaged and intrigued, sight unseen, by the Boyhood concept — i.e., filming the life of a young Texas kid (Ellar Coltrane) and his sister (Lorelei Linklater) growing up with divorced parents (Ethan Hawke, Patricia Arquette) over 11 or 12 years (i.e., ’02 to ’13). Is Boyhood as rich and fertile as it sounds? I saw it last night at the Eccles, all 160 minutes worth, and I have to say “yeah, pretty much” — it’s a remarkably novel, human-scale, life-passage stunt film. I can’t honestly call it staggering or mind-blowing but that’s not a putdown, given what it is.

Boyhood is a mild-mannered thing, and yet obviously a mature, perceptive, highly intelligent enterprise. It’s never less than intriguing or astute or resonant. It feels like a docudrama — acted and written but naturalistic in tone. It grows on you like anything or anyone else that you might gradually get to know over a long stretch, and yet the 160 minutes fly right by. The long-haul scheme of Boyhood naturally gets in the way of what most of us would call a riveting drama. A film of this type is not going to knock you down with some third-act punch. It drip-drip-drips its way into your movie-watching system. And yet anyone who asks, I’m going to tell them “definitely worth catching” and “never seen anything quite like it before” and so on.

Read more

It is believed that Academy members (a) don’t watch many award-season movies in theatres, (b) skip chapters or fall asleep when they watch them at home on DVD screeners, and (c) prefer to allow the winners of the guild awards (PGA, SAG, DGA, etc.) to “influence” their vote rather than listen to their own criteria or instincts. Yes, Virginia — Academy members are sheep. And therefore last night’s tie for the Producers Guild Daryl F. Zanuck Award for Outstanding Theatrical Motion Picture, shared by 12 Years A Slave and Gravity, is something of a big deal.

Until last night it was presumed that the sheep could and would probably give the Best Picture Oscar to American Hustle if that David O. Russell film had won the top PGA trophy on the heels of winning the SAG Best Ensemble Award two nights ago (i.e., Saturday, 1.18). Now the woolies are lost and wandering around the labrynthian forest without a shepherd to guide them…baaah! They’re going to have to decide among the top three contenders on their own…baaah!

Read more

I’ve just realized that Steve James‘ Life Itself, which I saw an hour’s worth earlier this evening and was completely knocked over by, has a press & industry screening tomorrow night at 7 pm at the Holiday Cinemas. Now I can see the whole thing. Smooth and incisive and as plain-spoken as Ebert’s prose, Life is definitely among my best of the festival this far (along with Whiplash, Laggies and The Skeleton Twins).

Amir Bar-Lev‘s Happy Valley is a shrewdly sculpted, richly perceptive study of denial — of people’s willingness and even eagerness to practice denial if so motivated. The specific subject is the Penn State child-abuse sex scandal of 2011 and 2012, which resulted in convicted pedophile Jerry Sandusky doing 30 years in jail and the late beloved Penn State coach Joe Paterno being at lest partly defined between now and forever as a pedophile enabler. The Freeh report (conducted by former FBI director Louis Freeh and his law firm) stated that Paterno, Penn State president Graham Spanier, athletic director Tim Curley and school vp Gary Schultz all knew about Sandusky probably being guilty of child molestation as far back as 1998, and that all were complicit in looking the other way. State College residents and especially Penn State football fans were enraged when Paterno was fired for not saying or doing enough. Even after the Freeh report they wouldn’t let go.

(l.) convicted pedophile Jerry Sandusky; (r.) the late Joe Paterno.

Read more

Like everyone else, I thought the Armond White foot-shooting incident (the City Arts critic allegedly calling 12 years A Slave director Steve McQueen an “embarassing doorman” and a “garbageman” at a 1.6 New York Film Critics Circle awards ceremony, and getting expelled by the NYFCC on 1.13 as a result) had been sufficiently reported. The matter was written about thoroughly and eloquently by Entertainment Weekly critic Owen Gleiberman on 1.13 and by New York critic David Edelstein on 1.14. But two days ago (Friday, 1.17) a N.Y. Times Cara Buckley story brought it up again. Buckley’s piece is not a career obit or a hand-wringing lament about boorish public behavior, but is more or less neutrally respectful of White’s position that he was booted out by a group of Hollywood-kowtowing, left-liberal commissars. Really?

There’s one thing I’ve been told by a certain NYFCC member that I completely accept, to wit: the NYFCC committee did not enjoy giving White his walking papers and were quite anguished about it, but as White had refused to explain or apologize for the incident at their 1.13 meeting, they felt they had to lay down the law. “It was lose, lose,” Edelstein tells Buckley. Giving White the boot left him feeling “devastated and dreadful,” he says, because “we need to treasure the cranks, we need to treasure the crackpots because the [film criticism] profession has gotten so cautious.”

Read more

Six- or eight-paragraph Sundance “reviews” are out of the question for me. Between three movies per day and all the running around the most I can manage, it seems, is to tap out tweets and then build these into three- or four-paragraph riffs, but I have to do this on the shuttle bus between screenings or while sitting in the hatefully drafty Yarrow lobby or in my seat at the Library of the Eccles before a film begins, and then bang out what I can in the mornings before the day starts. But even by that loose-shoe standard I’ve been falling behind over the last 48 hours. (Yesterday I had to move out of condo #1 and into condo #2, a time-eating pain in the ass.) So I’m staying in the pad for a few hours today (Sunday, 1.20) to catch up.

Kelly Reilly, Brendan Gleeson in John Martin McDonaugh’s Calvary.

At 2:15 pm an 11-hour adventure begins. Amir Bar Lev‘s Happy Valley, an examination of the Jerry Sandusky sexual-molesting Penn State reach-around scandal, screens at the MARC. Then I’ll be catching the first hour of Steve James‘ Life Itself, the 112-minute Roger Ebert doc. (My suspicion is that it’s going to be an overly Valentine-ish portrayal of the late critic — I’ll at least be able to detect whether that’s true or not within 60 minutes.) Then comes John Michael McDonaugh‘s Calvary (which I’m 100% certain will be a moderately engrossing, well-written thing with a flawless Brendan Gleeson performance) at 6:45 pm. The q & a for this Ireland-set drama will end around 8:30 pm or so, leaving about 75 minutes before Richard Linklater‘s 160-minute Boyhood begins. Between the intros and whatnot the epic-length docudrama-resembling narrative will end around 1 am. Back to the condo and crash by 2 am, maybe. Monday’s writing and screening scheduled will of course be compromised by this.

Read more