Month: October 2014

Today Queen Elizabeth named Angelina Jolie an honorary dame in honor of her work fighting sexual violence and…uhm, for services to Britain’s foreign policy, whatever that actually means. My first thought when I saw photos of the two was “what a formidable, go-getter person Jolie is…seriously. So socially conscious, so talented, so industrious, so rich, so many kids. You just want to get down on your knees, y’know? (Hollywood Elsewhere is already down on its knees, hoping for a substantial Universal award-season buy.) But right now Hollywood is asking itself “what can we and our lowly American culture do to add to the Jolie acclaim in a substantial way? Let’s see…of course! Let’s give her an Oscar for Best Director as a way of honoring Unbroken, which the mainstream default softies want to celebrate anyway with a Best Picture Oscar because…well, because they do. Because the saga of an Olympic athlete who meets Hitler in 1936 and goes on to survive not one but two agonizing World War II traumas has that elemental schwing that says “Oscar! Oscar! Deserves an Oscar!”

Read more

I wouldn’t see Dracula Untold with a knife at my back. I wouldn’t watch if it was offered free on a seven-hour, no-wifi flight and I was dying of boredom. If Universal paid me $50 to see it I’d relent and sit down and suffer through the first 30 to 45 minutes…but then I’d turn it off or start checking my messages when the Universal watchdog wasn’t looking. But Jordan Hoffman is right — the guy who wrote that headline deserves a high-five or a drink or whatever.

Synopsis for Glenn Ficarra and John Requathe‘s Focus (Warner Bros., 2.27.15): “Nicky Spurgeon (Will Smith) is a seasoned con-man, who becomes romantically involved with a young attractive woman (Margot Robbie) while introducing her to the tricks of his con man trade. She gets too close for comfort and he abruptly breaks it off. Three years later, the former flame — now an accomplished femme fatale — shows up in Buenos Aires while trying to scam a billionaire international race car owner. In the midst of Nicky’s latest, very dangerous scheme, she throws his plans for a loop…and the consummate con man off his game.”

A little more than a week ago I ran a piece about how Montgomery Clift, once regarded as one of the three reigning ’50s-era brooders along with Marlon Brando and James Dean, is barely known among GenY types and whose memory is apparently fading in general. Then today I ran across a Rio Bravo vs. High Noon piece I posted seven and a half years ago, and it hit me that these two films — considered by boomer and GenX film buffs as essential, world-class mythical westerns — are probably unknown to most of your GenY moviegoers and Hulu/Netflix subscribers. I’m only guessing but I wouldn’t be surprised to read definitive polling proof of this. Or that The Searchers is also dead to them. If the late Stuart Byron, author of a landmark New York piece about The Searchers, was among us he’d be inconsolable. One thing I know is that GenY considers almost everything made before the ’80s as ancient; I also believe that westerns carry next to no cred with them. With the possible exception of The Wild Bunch almost all oaters are considered “dad” or even “grand-dad” films by anyone born after 1985. Am I wrong?

Read more

“Theodore Melfi‘s St. Vincent is an emotionally engaging, nicely-crafted, perfectly agreeable dysfunctional family dramedy set in…where is it, Sheepshead Bay? And good old Bill Murray‘s performance as Vincent, a retired, lazy-ass, less-than-hygenic boozer with a good heart, is a juicy role and roughly on par with his performances in Rushmore and Lost in Translation. The film isn’t quite substantial enough on its own terms to be Best Picture-nominated but it’s certainly good enough to not stand in the way of a possible Oscar nomination for Murray. It never lifted me out of the my chair but it’s nice, it’s fine…nothing to complain about. I enjoyed it. And it’s very agreeable to see Melissa McCarthy give a steady, focused, mid-tempo performance that doesn’t involve acting like a lower-middle-class slob. St. Vincent is basically a louche-goofball babysitting drama, and the 12 year-old kid (Jaeden Liberher) who more or less costars with Murray, is on-target also. Smart and mature, stands his ground, doesn’t ‘kid’ it up too much.” — from my 9.6 Toronto Film Festival mini-review.

Standby has no U.S. distributor, but it seems reasonably decent. Even if the story is built on pointless deception. Sometimes you can tell. Brian Gleeson (son of Brendan, brother of Domhnall) has low-key charm and confidence; Mad Men‘s Jessica Pare, whose refusal to modify her rabbit choppers shows a kind of integrity, doesn’t seem to be forcing things either. Directed by Rob and Ronan Burke, written by Pierce Ryan. Opens in the UK and Ireland on 11.14.

Out of a record-breaking 83 submissions, here, in this order, are the HE picks. Which are basically the ones I saw and really liked in Cannes with the exception of Ida, which I saw last January in Sundance, and Rocks In My Pockets, which I’ve been told is a strong piece about depression. What am I missing? The notorious foreign-language committee has blown off Cannes-celebrated entries before…which ones will they ignore this time around?

Leviathan, d: Andrey Zvyagintsev (Russia); Wild Tales , d: Damian Szifron (Argentina); Ida, d: Paweł Pawlikowski (Poland); Two Days, One Night, d: Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne (Belgium); Winter Sleep, d: Nuri Bilge Ceylan Turkey); Force Majeure, d: Ruben Östlund (Sweden); Mommy, d: Xavier Dolan (Canada); Rocks in My Pockets, d: Signe Baumane (Latvia).

The one foreign-language feature I’ve heard is stunningly banal and deserves no consideration at all is Cantinflas, d: Sebastian del Amo (Mexico).

…but watch out for that Lindelof influence.

Another bright fellow from The New Yorker (i.e., Joshua Rothman) has pointed out what 85% to 90% of the crowd refuses to acknowledge (or is unable to grasp due to an insufficient brain-cell count or obstinacy or whatever) — i.e., Gone Girl is about a lot more than just the plot.

“Gone Girl, in a sense, is Fight Club squared,” Rothman states. “To explore the positive and negative sides of the manliness myth, Fincher had only to propose a single character, a man with a ‘disassociated” personality (Brad Pitt’s enraged Tyler Durden is the alter ego of Edward Norton’s unnamed, milquetoast protagonist). Gone Girl demands two bifurcated people, each of whom must play both the victim and the aggressor. And the mythos of coupledom is more complex and troubled than the mythos of manliness.

Read more

To me, the words “Damon Lindelof” attached to a film or TV project are a threat. They don’t mean “this movie will be shit” but they do mean “okay, here we go on the fucking inconclusive Lindelof train to Meanderville.” After slogging through the frequently infuriating The Leftovers I’m convinced that Lindelof isn’t so much a story-teller as a situational explorer. He’s strikes me as this dorky, bespectacled, comic-book-generation guy who goes “Oooh, here’s a cool idea! Kewwl! What if this happened and that happened and then our lead character suddenly realizes that…well, let’s not get hung up on resolutions but this is a cool realm…let’s play with it!”

Lindelof was one of the many architects of Cowboys & Aliens but I’m sure he did what he could to imprint himself upon it, and I hated it. He rewrote Jon Spaihts on Prometheus and I double-hated that one. The Star Trek film he co-wrote was okay, but World War Z was basically a situational zombie slog with no way out, and then came The Fucking Leftovers. Now we have Tomorrowland (formerly 1952) to contend with — a magical fable dream-tale that Lindelof and director Brad Bird co-wrote.

Read more

Eight days ago I was waiting for an IRT uptown train and close to going nuts from a pulsing high-pitched whine that sounded like the cry of the mutant ants in Them! (’54). This morning Patton Oswalt tweeted that an eerie ringtone coming out of someone’s cell phone had the same damn sound. If this was a ’50s sci-fi film, somebody would wave this off as a coincidence. But this is real life. A voice is telling me something’s up.

Alex Gibney and Mick Jagger‘s Mr. Dynamite will debut on HBO on 10.27, and I will call HBO publicity tomorrow and ask to be sent a screener and the odds are that they’ll wind up ignoring me unless I push and beg. Tate Taylor‘s Get On Up was a respectable, hard-pushin’ Hollywood biopic with a tough, fearless performance from Chadwick Boseman (whom I’m sitting down with next week). But you know the Gibney will be the real deal.