Day: March 22, 2015

Today Variety‘s “staff” ran a wrap-up piece about “13 break-out movies” that played at 2015 South by Southwest. Three days ago a similar N.Y. Times piece, written by Mekado Murphy, highlighted the “South by” films that were “the talk of the festival.” There were some overlaps but well over 20 films are included in the two articles, and yet neither mentions Ondi Timoner‘s BRAND: A Second Coming, a nearly two-hour doc about the transformation of Russell Brand from hyper libertine to social revolutionary.

This despite Timoner’s film having (a) opened SXSW to the usual hoopla, (b) won thoughtful praise from nearly every critic who reviewed it and (c) reportedly played to more than the usual rousing receptions at three separate showings. Several strong films played at “South by” and everyone, of course, has their special favorites, but how did these articles manage to completely ignore one of the festival’s most invigorating crowd-pleasers? Not to mention one of the most politically pointed films of that Austin gathering, and one that will likely cause a stir when it opens commercially later this year.

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I don’t follow the career paths of each and every noteworthy online film critic, and I’m certainly not in the habit of monitoring press releases from the New Jersey U.S. Attorney’s office. But something mind-blowing was announced and reported last Tuesday about a film writer I slightly “know” — i.e., Gabe Toro. His posts and reviews evaporated last August and some (LexG among them) have wondered what happened. He was arrested, is what happened. On 8.19.14. Last Tuesday’s press release plus two news accounts state that Toro, a 31-year-old resident of the Bronx, has pled guilty to online enticement of a minor to engage in criminal sexual conduct, and that he’ll face at least ten years in the slam when he’s sentenced on 6.25, and that he’ll have to register as a sex offender when he gets out.

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Everyone has been “ooh-ing and “aah”-ing the new trailer for Chris McQuarrie‘s Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation (Paramount, 7.31). I’m not immune to the excitement but there’s a slight blemish on the franchise. I’m referring to the fact that right now the Tom Cruise brand is undergoing yet another denigration due to Alex Gibney‘s Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief. Relatively few have seen Gibney’s doc (it pops on HBO on 3.29) but I have, and I’m telling you once again, as I wrote in my Sundance review, that Cruise comes off as a “coddled loon” and an enabler of a decidedly venal organization.

In this light (and I really don’t see how anyone can argue that this “light” doesn’t exist) it’s hard to relax with Cruise in this M:I5 context as the brave and daring Ethan. It’s a stone fact that Cruise is a seriously tainted guy off-screen — a possibly oblivious benefactor who’s supported and promoted a gang of vicious hombres who behave like a kind of evil “syndicate” while Cruise looks the other way. Watch Gibney’s film and tell me you don’t care at all, that the disparity between Cruise’s on-screen superhero and the unsavory real-life propagandist he’s more or less become in actuality doesn’t bother you in the least.

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“The first thing I’d say [is that] online we’ve got to embrace nuance over outrage. We’ve got to get past an outrage culture of reading things simply and making really broad conclusions about them, and instead ask questions and try to listen to each other better. Generally, we just aren’t doing a great job of listening to each other online. I don’t think in the end it’s very helpful for the overall quality of discourse.” — YA superstar John Green (Paper Towns, The Fault In Our Stars) talking to Refinery 29’s Sabrina Rojas Weiss about YA headliner Andrew Smith getting beaten up on Twitter for stating that his novels aren’t that invested in female characters because he “was raised in a family with four boys, and I absolutely did not know anything about girls at all.”

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