Month: March 2015

I’ve never seen Orson Welles’ The Lady From Shanghai (’47). At least I have the character to admit that. I traded for the Bluray last night, but aside from the hall-of-mirrors sequence how good is it really? I’ve always heard it’s a mixed bag at best. Was Welles a little too hefty to be playing a romantic lead? (He was only 32 at the time…look at him.) I was told last year that the 100th anniversary of Welles’ birth will be celebrated in Cannes along with the big premiere of Welles’ long-suppressed, recently restored The Other Side of the Wind. Welles’ actual centennial is on 5.6.15.

The SXSW consensus was that Alex Gibney’s Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine was a blistering takedown. Another view was that Jobs was a brilliant prick and no day at the beach, but that’s how most geniuses roll to varying degrees and that Gibney merely captured this reality. I guess no journos will see the doc again until award season?

I wrote a “making of Tootsie piece in mid ’82 when I was managing editor of The Film Journal. Sydney Pollack heard I was doing a takedown piece so he called me preemptively and said, “Okay, let’s talk.” Pollack was an adult and a pragmatist. We became friendly in the early ’90s. When he was bed-ridden with cancer I asked if he’d seen Four Months, Three Weeks, Two Days; he said he hadn’t so that evening I dropped off a DVD screener at his home in the Pacific Palisades. Pollack passed the following May.

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The 2015 Cannes Film Festival poster was revealed today — acres of infinite whiteness surrounding a somewhat opaque black-and-white snap of a short-haired Ingrid Bergman (probably taken in the early to mid ’50s) and accented by subtle publisher’s-blue lettering. I realize that Cannes posters have to be simple and elegant, but this is surely one of the blandest and least engaging in the festival’s nearly 70-year history. The poster was conceived by Magnum Agency’s Hervé Chigioni and graphic designer Gilles Frappier. Bergman and Notorious costar Cary Grant graced the 1993 Cannes poster. [After the jump.] Consider the posters for Bergman’s Stromboli and Journey to Italy [ditto] — visually “busy” but a helluva lot more interesting, no offense, than the Chigioni-Frappier.

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I didn’t see Everardo Gout‘s Days Of Grace, a 12-year saga set in Mexico City, at last year’s Cannes Film Festival. Boilerplate: “Three disparate lives intersect as they are impacted by violence and abduction. Lupe, an idealistic cop, is tasked to investigate a crime ring. When a woman’s businessman husband is kidnapped, she must go outside the law to fight for his release. And a would-be boxer is drawn into a lifestyle that finds him guarding a kidnap while facing down a criminal mastermind.” Grace will debut on HBO on 5.1 with DVD/Blu-ray and On Demand starting five days later.

Two days ago Hitfix TV guy Daniel Fienberg actually wrote that “for many viewers, Ben Mendelsohn will probably be the surprise breakout star of Netflix’s Bloodline.” Really. Feinberg meant it. I was appalled. Mendelsohn’s Danny character, the oldest and surliest son of Robert and Sally Rayburn (Sam Shepard, Sissy Spacek), is a really bad package — a malignant, sandal-wearing, cigarette-smoking scumbag. Danny’s death was blessedly promised in a flash-forward excerpt in episode #1, but here I am on episode #4 and the fucker is still hanging around. God, I hate the way Mendelsohn is always sucking on cigarettes! And his toes sticking out all the time. Just finished episode #5 (or was it #6?): Okay, I feel a little sorry for him but let’s not get carried away.

Sweaty, nicotine-stained Ben Mendelsohn in Bloodline

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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Good Kill (IFC Films, 4.10.15) “is about drone warfare and this righteous drama’s take on it. The military jargon is bogus and insulting. There is, of course, no such thing as a ‘good kill’, and Andrew Niccol’s drama will remind you of that repeatedly. Good Kill runs through the rituals of military slaughter. It dehumanizes the combatant and underlines the inhuman nature of collateral damage and strikes based on pattern behavior. It’s often slow and occasionally simplistic, but at least someone’s talking about the issue.” — Excerpted from Henry Barnes‘ Guardian review, filed on 9.12.14 from the Toronto Film festival.

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Ken Loach‘s Jimmy’s Hall “is a no-frills, true-life drama about Irish rabble-rouser Jimmy Gralton upon returning to his native home after more than 20 years spent in the U.S., and about his conflicts with conservative forces who feared the possible igniting of a leftist movement, and Gralton’s subsequent deportation back to the U.S. It’s a Loach thing through and through — mid-tempo, working-class, earnest, low-key, authentic, political. I mean no disrespect when I say it’s a bit of a shrugger. There are vague echoes, of course, of today’s 1% vs. 99% equation, and a refrain of the old rule about dissidents always dealing with struggle and adversity. The painterly textures and atmosphere are what moved me the most. I miss the visual splendors of rural, old-time Ireland (the small-village architecture, the browns and greens, the candle-glow lighting) that Loach has often captured in his films, and which are exquisitely presented here. He shot it on that dying technological format known as celluloid.” — filed from Cannes on 5.22.14.

Yesterday Pierre Morel and Sean Penn‘s The Gunman opened on 2816 screens and tallied a first-day gross of $1,769,000, which averages out to $628 per theatre. A problematic but reasonably diverting film, The Gunman performed only slightly better yesterday than Matthew Vaughn‘s reprehensible Kingsman: The Secret Service, which opened five weeks ago and has earned about $111 million thus far. To me the Morel-Penn is far more tolerable than the Vaughn, but American audiences don’t agree. You can’t expect fairness or justice at the box-office, but The Gunman didn’t deserve to die such an ignominious death.

It’s a significant deal to some, I hope, that a Criterion Bluray of Carol Reed‘s Odd Man Out is streeting on 4.14. Not so much for me as I purchased the British Network Region 2 Bluray (which has some of the same extras as the Criterion) two and a half years ago, or in August of 2012.  Odd Man Out is regarded as a serious classic by boomer and GenX film mavens (or at least the more devoted of these), but I wonder if there are any under-35s who even know or care. I need to keep reminding myself that under-35s regard ’80s films as old, ’60s and ’70s films as wheelchair material and almost anything made before that as too musty by half.

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