Year: 2014

After last night’s Big Hero 6 screening I saw Jennifer Kent‘s The Babadook, a brilliant, slow-burning psychological horror film made in a kind of German expressionist mode (I was reminded of aspects of F.W. Murnau‘s Nosferatu) and which is significantly more effective than The Shining in telling a story of dark spirits overtaking the mind and soul of a parent and leading to evil impulses. It’s also a descendant of Rosemary’s Baby in the way it takes its time, really burrows into character, doesn’t heap it on too heavily, and relies almost entirely on “in-camera” strategies. Kent needs to say hello to Guillermo del Toro and vice versa. The Badadook is cut from the same cloth as The Orphanage, which Guillermo produced for director Juan Antonio Bayona. I’ll run something a bit longer when my Atlanta-to-L.A. flight is underway. The Savannah-to-Atlanta flight departs at 3:30 pm.

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Suspicions are afoot that Disney’s family-friendly Big Hero 6, a spirited, highly “amusing” animated feature about a 13 year-old tech genius and his fat, care-giving robot buddy, might earn more next weekend than Chris Nolan‘s Interstellar, at least as far as the 11.7 to 11.9 period goes. (The Nolan will have a head start by opening on Wednesday, 11.5.) I caught Big Hero 6 last night inside the trustees theatre at the Savannah Film Festival, and the crowd just loved it. Laughing, gleeful, yaw-haw. I hated it, of course. It’s as smart and funny and “engaging” as a film like this could possibly be, but all super-calculated, corporate-minded cartoons send me into tailspins of depression. And yet it’s very well-made. Congratulations to co-directors Don Hall and Chris Williams for having made a lightweight flick that America is going to have a great time with.

Word around the campfire is that the first Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice trailer is locked and ready to roll. A Batman site (i.e., some 37 year-old overweight guy sitting around in his underwear) says the teaser “will be attached to a November or December Warner Bros. movie and released online around the same time.” Well, Interstellar is a Warner Bros. international release, and it opens on 11.5. Interstellar is certain to attract a better class of geek enthusiasts than those who show up for The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, which opens on 12.17…right?

After seeing Interstellar and contemplating the mixed reviews, TheWrap‘s Steve Pond is saying there’s still no Big Gorilla in the Best Picture room, which means that at the end of the day Boyhood, everyone’s favorite chimpanzee and obviously a long-distance runner, may be the last contender standing. Then to prove or fortify his point he looks at the other contenders and goes “yes but no, okay but naah, stirring but not quite.” Then he sticks his foot in it: “I love the exhilarating Birdman, but it’s awfully weird for Oscar voters.”

And with these words, Pond is holding hands and offering solace…speaking to the general community as a kind of understanding counselor…Father Pond in the confessional, listening to and to some extent validating the instincts of slouching comfort-seekers. “I understand, my parishioners,” he says, sounding a bit like Father O’Malley in Going My Way. “You don’t want exhilaration. You don’t want bracing New York theatre energy. You don’t want to know from the new 8 1/2 because — let’s be honest — you probably weren’t that much of a fan of Fellini’s 8 1/2 to begin with. Well, it’s okay. You can feel that way and I will be your voice, your listener, your interpreter, your man on the web…whatever lazy, semi-conscious, cow-pasture attitudes you want to bring to the Best Picture race, you’ll receive approbation and zero judgment from Father Pond.”

Shout Factory’s Bluray of Werner Herzog‘s Fitzcarraldo will be released on 1.13.15. The cover is actually the one-sheet art used by the film’s German distributor 32 years ago.

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen Don Siegel‘s Flaming Star. I probably haven’t, and if not because I’ve always thought that Elvis Presley made exactly two and a half decent films — Love Me Tender, Loving You (i.e., the halfer) and King Creole — and it was all downhill from then on. Now I’m starting to suspect otherwise. I’ll never buy the Flaming Star Bluray but maybe a high-def version will stream down the road.

“It is surprising…that this small, somber view of some of the misunderstanding and bloody strife between settlers and Indians in Texas of the 1870s is equally passionate about both,” N.Y. Times critic A.H. Weiler wrote on 12.17.60. “No guitar gala, Flaming Star is an unpretentious but sturdy western that takes the time, the place and the people seriously.

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Adopt has scheduled a cool-people-only screening of Nuri Bilge Ceylan‘s Winter Sleep, winner of the Palme d’Or winner at last May’s Cannes Film Festival. It’ll happen on Monday, 11.3 at 6 pm at the UTA Screening Room on Civic Center Drive. There is no more ardent fan of Ceylan than myself, but I missed Sleep in Cannes and then blew it off in Toronto also because of the 196-minute length. I’ve been told that it’s cool to invite “friends and fellow bloggers based in L.A.” so those with the right pedigree need to get in touch. The UTA screening room is about as good as it gets, quality-wise, so this’ll be a ripe opportunity to catch it in a deluxe way. Winter Sleep will open on 12.19 in New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC. The next two dozen or so markets will open between January 9th and 16th, timed to the announcement of the Oscar nominations.

A 10.25 Hollywood Reporter piece by Paul Bond quotes Exodus star Christian Bale by way of a 10.21 Christianity Today article by Drew Turney, and to me it’s hilarious. “I think [Moses] was likely schizophrenic,” Bale told reporters during a recent Los Angeles sitdown. “He was one of the most barbaric individuals that I ever read about in my life…a very troubled and tumultuous man who fought greatly against God, against his calling.”

So much for the staunch Christian view of the man, which was more or less delivered in Cecil B. DeMille‘s The Ten Commandments. I don’t know if Christian nutters will rise up in protest and give Exodus shit the way they dumped all over Noah, but it probably won’t matter if they do. The fact is that Noah did pretty well at the end of the day — $101 million domestic, $359 million worldwide.

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“First and foremost, anything you’ve heard about the sound in that packed-to-the-rafters 70mm IMAX screening at the TCL Chinese Theater Thursday night is absolutely true. Take a proprietary IMAX sound mix and speaker configuration that can be pretty inferior and add in the fact that Nolan’s mixes tend to be muddied historically (then consider that for some reason the system was turned up to 11) — it was a recipe for disaster.” — from Kris Tapley‘s In Contention review of Interstellar, posted this morning.

“I couldn’t understand full stretches of dialogue and the IMAX of it all with the pitch darkness of the celluloid (too dark, I’d wager), it just wasn’t settling.

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Interstellar is one of those big, rib-rattling, epic-sprawl movies that you only get from determined, well-funded visionaries like…well, like Chris Nolan. And this, make no mistake, is a super-charged time-travel flick that is also very personal. It’s basically about Nolan saying “there’s no place like home, like family, like love”…probably due to a suspicion that he works too obsessively and is missing out on his children’s lives or something along those lines. Sounds like The Wizard of Oz in Space, right? Without the jokes and the songs and the fancifulness, of course. And without, I regret to say, any way to believe in other-wordly realms. Interstellar is quite the wowser throttle ride — you have to see it, of course — but for me it didn’t hang together in a way that felt right or rooted or satisfying. It “played” but it didn’t sink in.

Interstellar is basically a grim story about love, loss, heroism…a down-the-rabbit-hole tale about seeking and adventuring and returning, Odysseus-style. It’s riveting at times. Now and then it’s breathtaking. And at times it is speechy and banal. At times it’s one of those “wait..give me that again?” movies. I just didn’t believe or understand a lot of it. And it has one scene that, no lie, is comically awful. Beware the killer colonist who once dropped in on Che Guevara!

That was my reaction, for the most part. I was “impressed” by it as far as the chops and the eye-filling scenery, both local and cosmic, were concerned and I generally liked the rumble-in-space stuff, but I couldn’t buy into it, man…not really. (Does this mean I’ll lose out on Paramount award-season ads? I’m weeping over this but I gotta be me.) But a friend tells me that Emile Hirsch and Chris Rock and Adrien Brody and a lot of other celebrities who saw it last Wednesday night were really blown away so…you know, don’t let me stop you. (Rock told my friend that he “doesn’t think any film can possibly match it.”) It’ll be Best Picture nominated, I suppose, because the community wants to kiss Nolan’s ass for the same reason it has smooched Spielberg’s ass for the last 39 years. And it’ll probably win two or three tech Oscars. And it’ll make loads of money.

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Laura Poitras‘s Citizenfour rated a 98% on Rotten Tomatoes and 89% on Metacritic — ratings I consider justified and appropriate. I’ve already written that I think it’s an all-but-guaranteed nominee for Best Feature-Length Documentary. It’s a real-life, you-are-there political intelligence thriller, and a fascinating horror film in that the boogie man is never seen or even heard, really, but is relentlessly sensed. He hovers. On the other hand the 63% Rotten Tomatoes and 62% Metacritic ratings given to Lynn Shelton‘s Laggies feel crabby. This is Shelton’s best, most agreeable film yet. Keira Knightley‘s performance never seems acted, certainly not pre- considered — pure moment-to-moment behavior. And then the film gets a nice boost from the wonderfully droll Sam Rockwell. I would even call it a kind of modest breakthrough. Reactions?