Month: September 2014

Yesterday’s trip to Deep Creek Hot Springs (just south of Apple Valley and Hesperia off the 15) turned into a comic disaster in no time. I was travelling with two nice ladies who had been there a couple of times before, and yet for reasons best not explored or rationalized they were disinclined to follow a route suggestion offered by Google Maps. They chose instead to head south from Hesperia/Apple Valley on a dusty, unpaved, deeply rutted path that often resembled a desert hermit’s driveway. Common sense screamed that this wasn’t the right way to go, but I kept my mouth shut and hoped for the best. Deeper and deeper into the scary badlands we went, and sure enough we found a nice squishy sand pit to get stuck in. AAA said they wouldn’t help because it was an off-road situation so I had to fork over $350 ($150 per hour from station to station) to pay for a private guy named Jesse to pull us out with a winch. But first we had to hump it back to civilization over hill and dale (about a two-mile trek) in order to make sure Jessie would find us. The whole ordeal took about six hours. No dips in the hot springs. We got the hell out of Dodge and drove down to Lake Arrowhead.

if Jesse can’t do it, nobody can.

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If the editors of this redband trailer wanted to be really cool, they would include quotes from North Korea’s July 2014 denunciation of the film — “terrorism” produced by “gangster-like scoundrels.” They could also throw in Seth Rogen‘s response — “Apparently Kim Jong Un plans on watching The Interview…I hope he likes it!” The North Koreans will never drop the lurid prose or get past their bullshit. They not only have the potential but the absolute willingness to lampoon themselves to no end. Last May their state news agency KCNA called President Obama a “wicked black monkey.”

Movies in service of the “it’s never too late to fall in love” homily are usually shudder-inducing. But as this is a remake of a respected 2005 Argentinian film it deserves at least a fair viewing and, for the time being, the benefit of the doubt, especially with the ascerbic Christopher Plummer trading bon mots with Shirley Maclaine. My first reaction was to wonder if it had something to do with Federico Fellini‘s Ginger and Fred. (It doesn’t.) Then I thought about the differing approaches to aging and “work” by the 84 year-old Plummer and the 80 year-old Maclaine. Both approaches are fine.

The last time I recall a name-brand actor getting really furious about his dog being murdered was in Norman Mailer‘s Tough Guys Don’t Dance (’87). Moments after his dog has taken a shiv in the ribs, Ryan O’Neal eyeballs the assailant and growls out “Your knife…is in my dog!” That line, to me, was silly-cool, and John Wick (Lionsgate, 10.24) is on a similar wavelength. But lines like “this is personal” and “that dog was the last gift of my dying wife” don’t help. A man’s relationship with his dog doesn’t have to be explained or put into context. Due respect to all dying or dead wives, but it exists on its own pure plane.

Indiewire critic Eric Kohn has seen John Wick at Fantastic Fest and has posted the following:

“Following the jubilant post-modern martial arts efforts 47 Ronin and Man of Tai Chi” — come again? — “Keanu Reeves stars in [this] hugely satisfying B-movie with the confidence of an actor right where he belongs. Like Liam Neeson and Samuel L. Jackson, Reeves’ performances in guilty pleasure fare are both straightforward and dripping with irony, with John Wick providing one of the best examples. Neither surprising or groundbreaking in any particular way, the movie gives us what we want and leaves it at that.

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One of HE’s constant complaints is the tendency of behind-the-wheel actors to take their eyes off the road for absurdly long periods — five or six or even seven seconds — in order to eyeball the person riding shotgun. That’s asking for disaster, of course, but actors don’t care — they insist on eye contact and directors won’t tell them to cut it out. Anyway, just once I’d like to see the person in the front passenger seat say, “Would you please watch the fucking road? Thank you. I don’t want to be in an accident. If you want to stare into the deep pools of my eyes wait for a red light or pull the fuck over.”

Presence, confidence, a touch of swagger. The last thing on the list, it seems, is having a buff bod and GQ fashion-model looks. A meta Casanova in Vienna, corseted women who are all too delighted. And on that note…

Richard Lester‘s Petulia is a chilly, emotionally distant film about a relationship that doesn’t quite come together, and yet there’s something very infectious and fizzy about it. I think it’s the combination of Lester’s dry ironic detachment and the odd atmospheric stirrings of what was happening in San Francisco when he shot it in the late summer and fall of 1967. There are snatches of music and marijuana and Haight-Ashbury in the periphery, but this is a film about being lonely and adrift…about wealth and comfort and social dance steps and two people who want out. It’s about a 40ish doctor (George C. Scott) who’s bored to death by almost everything in his life and a dishy, impossibly spacey rich girl (Julie Christie) who gets it in her head that Scott is some kind of cure for whatever might be ailing her. Petulia, which I return to every four or five years when I don’t feel like watching anything else, is composed of thousands of slices and fragments of everything and anything that was “happening” back then…sounds, whispers, glances. It’s somewhere between a tapestry and a jumble of pieces that don’t seem to fit, and yet they do when you step back. I think it’s one of the sharpest cultural time-capsule films Hollywood has ever churned out, and at the same time a curiously affecting love story. There an HD version on Amazon but none on Vudu or Netflix. I wish that Warner Home Video or Criterion or someone would punch out a Bluray.

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I’ve agreed to get up early tomorrow morning and drive out to Deep Creek Hot Springs, which is in a hilly wasteland about an hour or 90 minutes north of Lake Arrowhead. I never do this sort of thing and it’ll probably be good for my soul, but the current plan is to stay there for a good six or seven hours before pushing on to Lake Arrowhead. I’d be lying if I didn’t say I’m a bit worried about connectivity. Forget wifi — this area is so remote I won’t be able to make a call or send a text. If it turns out to as bar-less out there as I suspect it might be, tomorrow is going to be a very slow filing day. I’m just saying that upfront. I live in public, I file as a way of life…I don’t do well in the boonies.

I had a pair of dark green suede Beatle boots when I was 23 or 24…something like that. Looked great, were great. I found this British site that sells them but I’m afraid to pull the trigger because of bad associations. The only people I’ve seen wear them over the last quarter-century are icky, oily Eurotrash guys who over-dye their hair and wear neck jewelry, and I wouldn’t want to be associated with that aesthetic, thank you very much. I guess it’s better to let it go (by “it” I mean the past) but I wish there was a way.

I’ve written and said Liam “Paycheck” Neeson so many times on this site that it sounds as natural and unaffected as Daniel Day Lewis, Tommy Lee Jones and Billy Bob Thornton. I’m not sorry for calling him a paycheck slut because…well, he’s been that for the last five or so years…let’s be honest. But out of respect for Neeson’s performance in A Walk Among the Tombstones and for the general integrity of the film, I am hereby pledging to never again use that ignominious middle name. Even if he makes three or four more Taken films (and I wouldn’t put it past Neeson to do this), from here on this grizzled 62-year-old will be referred to on this site as Liam Neeson and nothing else.

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I’ll be shelling out to see Michael Roskam‘s The Drop again this evening. I couldn’t understand roughly a third of the dialogue when I saw it at Toronto’s Princess of Wales theatre the weekend before last. And don’t tell me it’s my hearing — another Toronto-visiting critic agreed with my complaint about the POW’s murky tones on top of which The Theory of Everything composer Johann Johannsson told me he found the sound substandard. I’ll be seeing The Drop this evening at the Landmark, which I know has excellent sound. But it pisses me off regardless. The Drop is fine but without the sound issue I would have waited for a Vudu HDX availability. I called it “an earnestly above-average, Friends of Eddie Coyle-ish crime drama…well-acted, agreeably flavorfu…one of those low-key neighborhood personality soup bowls.” I was especially taken by the “always impressive Tom Hardy as an unassuming, seemingly-none-too-bright barkeep named Tom who surprises the audience but particularly Matthias Schoenaert‘s bullying bad-guy character in Act Three,” etc.