Day: January 17, 2015

With Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland‘s Still Alice having opened yesterday, here’s a portion of my 11.28 review. Actually, I’m rewriting portions as I go along. Well, half and half. I began by saying that Still Alice is a morose but affecting Lifetime movie about a brilliant college professor (Julianne Moore) who, at age 50, begins to succumb to the awful progressive malice of Alzheimer’s diseasem, or actually early onset Alzheimer’s. Which an HE reader has since dubbed Alice-heimer’s. Sorry.

Moore plays her melancholy part with delicacy and the depth of feeling that only great actresses seem to fully harness — she’s convincing and then some and deserves the Best Actress Oscar that she’s been all but asssured of winning for…what, four and a half months now?

But for me, Still Alice is a hellish thing to sit through. It’s a dirge about a kind of death sentence or more precisely a spiritual suffocation, mitigated to some extent by the fact that the condemned (i.e., Moore) is attractive and wealthy and married to a nice man (Alec Baldwin) and surrounded by bright, sensitive family members who care a great deal and can do absolutely nothing to help.

Still Alice is a movie that says “okay, your brain is going to start dying now…okay, the symptoms are getting a little worse now…is the horror of this predicament affecting everyone? Getting worse, still worse…my God, this disease really sucks! And Julianne Moore can’t do anything about it. And neither can you, the viewer. Because we, the filmmakers, have decided that the most sensitive and affecting thing to do is for everyone — Moore, the costars, the audience, Jeffrey Wells sitting on his living room couch — to just ride it out to the end…sadly, gently, compassionately.”

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Without giving too much attention to Fear Clinic (Anchor Bay, 1.30) I’d like to mention my efforts as a freelance public relations guy for New Line Cinema in ’85 and ’86, and particularly my promotion of Jack Sholder‘s A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge, and even more particularly the semi-phenomenon know as “Freddiemania,” which originated with spottings of movie fans dressed as Freddy Krueger a la Rocky Horror for midnight showings of Wes Craven‘s A Nightmare on Elm Street (’84). There weren’t that many Freddy freaks to be found, to be perfectly honest, but it was an interesting and amusing enough story to persuade Entertainment Tonight and the N.Y. Times and other big outlets to run pieces on it and to speak with Sholder (who later directed The Hidden, one of the finest New Line films ever made) as well as Freddy himself, Robert Englund, with whom I became friendly and hung out with a bit. (Producer Mike DeLuca was a 20 year-old New Line assistant at the time.) One of my big Freddy promotional stunts was persuading Englund to march in New York’s Village Halloween Parade on 10.31.85 from Houston Street up to 14th or 23rd or something like that.

Nine days ago I mentioned that while I respect the learned dweeb mentality of Variety reviewer Guy Lodge, I don’t trust him that much. Not after his praising of Abbas Kiarostami‘s suffocating, mildly infuriating Certified Copy, and certainly not after giving a total pass to Paddington without at least mentioning that the story is ridiculous and wafer-thin. You also have to consider the native loyalty factor in any England-residing critic’s review of a British-made film, and particularly one directed and written by a youngish Brit — in this instance Alex Garland. All to say that Lodge has now reviewed Ex Machina. Read it carefully.

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The cover of the latest issue of The New Yorker depicts the late Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, Martin Luther King, Jr., Michael Brown and NYPD Officer Wenjian Liu marching together, arm in arm — united against hate, bigotry and particularly violence, as they all met their doom from…actually, it’s not that simple. Two of them died at the hands of armed assassins — haters who fired coldly, deliberately. The other three died in racially-charged altercations that could and should have been avoided if tempers on both sides had been cooler — not quite as cut-and-dried. I just wonder how Dr. King would feel about being depicted as morally and spiritually allied with and in a sense occupying the same historical station as Brown, who was no sweetheart. A roughly similar image would be a New Yorker cover depicting a group of famed World War II figures marching side by side — George S. Patton, Omar Bradley, Douglas MacArthur, James Doolittle, Ernie Pyle and Eddie Slovik.

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Conservative people of faith are going to see American Sniper this weekend. America gets off the couch, climbs into the SUV, drives down to the multiplex, buys tickets, turns off cell phone, etc. And goes, “Hmmm, yeah…that was okay. The battle scenes at least.” Variety‘s Maane Khatchatourian is reporting that Clint Eastwood’s not-bad-but-far-from-great Iraq War drama might actually earn $68 million by Sunday night and $80 million by Monday night, having grossed a startling $30.5 million yesterday — “the biggest single-day take in January.” Plus Eastwood’s biggest hit ever? Its a conservative man’s look at war, duty and country…and that’s where a lot of Amurrican hinterlanders are at. As I wrote the other day, if a movie respects hinterland culture or theology, flyover-state types will line up regardless of how good it is. If nothing else, American Sniper does that thing. The Fox News crowd (i.e., white-haired steak-eaters and their wives) has, I’m assuming, come out in force.

“A nice candid shot of one of the actors who worked with Bradley Cooper in American Sniper,” as tweeted last night by Mark Harris.