Month: March 2015

What I’m about to pass along happened 10 or 12 days ago. Only now can it be told. Bullshit — I just couldn’t be bothered to write about it until today, and even now I don’t feel all that motivated. But it happened. I was on the Yamaha and nudging my way out of an alley, about to cross northbound traffic on Robertson Blvd. and enter the southbound lanes. I vroomed across the northbound lanes and puttered my way toward the light on Burton Way, “splitting lanes” between two rows of idling engines. I then decided to veer into the far right lane just ahead of a large white SUV, but as I began to turn the SUV honked and blocked me by lurching forward. Slight brake screech. Okay, I said to myself. Some guy wants to play Dodge City.

The SUV driver, a smallish dude in a white tank top who looked a lot (but not exactly) like Kevin Hart, began to scold and sneer like his life, pride, financial future and family history depended on it…”fuck you think you’re fuckin’ doin’, motherfuckah?” I glanced and turned away. But even if I’d been the hair-trigger type a sixth sense was telling me to back off. If I’d said a single word or raised a single eyebrow, this guy might have leapt out of his car and gone all Ving Rhames or Suge Knight on me. Maybe. I definitely felt the readiness. My attempting to nudge in front of him was a major territorial challenge.

Read more

The one and only time I saw Steven Spielberg‘s 1941 was inside a small Manhattan screening room about a month before it opened, or sometime in mid-November of ’79. When it began with a parody of the opening Jaws beach scene with a pretty blonde taking a nude swim in the sea, complete with John Williams‘ Jaws theme music, I wanted to say out loud, “Holy crap, Spielberg is paying tribute to himself!?…he’s starting this film with an homage to his own Hollywood success to get a laugh!? My God!” Stanley Kubrick gave it to Spielberg straight when the latter visited the Elstree set of The Shining. “I saw your last movie, 1941,” Kubrick said. “It was great. It wasn’t funny but it was expertly made. You should have sold it as a drama.” I liked one scene — i.e., when Robert Stack‘s General Stillwell is chuckling happily and then choking up during a Hollywood Boulevard screening of Walt Disney‘s Dumbo.

A special extended version of 1941 running 146 minutes — 28 minutes longer than the original 118-minute cut — will screen at the American Cinematheque on Sunday afternoon at 5 pm, and I must say there’s a perverse part of me that wants to attend and endure this calamity all over again, just so I can say (a) “I saw the nearly two-and-a-half hour version!” and (b) “Let no one say I’m not willing to reconsider an opinion.”

Read more

Until a couple of days ago I’d never quite thought of 1971 as one of the truly legendary years in American cinema, or at least not along the lines of 1939 or ’62 or ’99. But on 3.18 a longish piece by a guy whose name might be Cole Brax (a vague echo of Cole Trickle, Tom Cruise‘s character in Days of Thunder) suggested this very thing. He didn’t make a complete-enough case for ’71’s lasting glory, but he definitely began the conversation. Key quote: “What I do know is that in 1971 many of the greatest filmmakers who ever lived released some of their best work. At the time, most of my favorite directors in film history were still active or just getting started. I don’t know what was in the water or the air that year (probably drugs), but the films that came out of that annum created a ripple effect that is felt to this very day.”

As noted Brax only lists a portion of the finest so here’s a more complete rundown, and listed in order of my personal preference:

Top 27 1971 Films: (1) The French Connection; (2) The Last Picture Show; (3) A Clockwork Orange (4) The Hospital, (5) McCabe & Mrs. Miller, (6) Sunday Bloody Sunday, (7) Get Carter, (8) Straw Dogs, (9) Murmur of the Heart, (10) Dirty Harry, (11) Klute, (12) Walkabout, (13) Two English Girls, (14) Death in Venice, (15) Two-Lane Blacktop, (16) Taking Off, (17) Carnal Knowledge, (18) Harold and Maude, (19) Roman Polanski’s Macbeth, (20) The Emigrants, (21) The Devils, (22) Play Misty for Me, (23) The Panic in Needle Park, (24) THX 1138, (25) Duel, (26) Little Murders, (27) Le Mans.

Read more

A 3.19 article by Nerdist contributor Kyle Hill reveals that Interstellar co-screenwriter Jonathan Nolan didn’t agree with the ending that his brother Chris went with. Speaking on 3.28 during a seminar at Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, Jonathan said that he would have preferred a “much more straightforward” finale. He basically said that Matthew McConaughey would have died in the middle of the “Einstein-Rosen bridge” or wormhole.

The second I read this I realized that I don’t ever want to see Interstellar again. I honestly wouldn’t sit through it if you paid me $50 or even $100 to do so. Okay, I would see it again for $1000. But the more I think back upon that exasperating film, the more repelled I feel.

Read more

My blood is up about watching Todd Kessler‘s Bloodline, the 13-episode Netflix series that began streaming today. I’m especially looking forward to hanging with Kyle Chandler, one of the most engaging and fascinating middle-period actors around today. If only scuzzy Ben Mendelsohn wasn’t playing the older “bad” brother. I know I complained about this only a month ago, but Mendelsohn exudes the exact same reptilian vibe in role after role. (The only exception has been his amiable-gambler role in the not-yet-released Mississippi Grind.) Like I said before, Mendelsohn walks into a room and it’s “okay, here’s the sweaty scumbag who’s going to poison the well and drag everyone to hell.” He’s Lurch in The Addams Family. He always glares, always perspires, always seethes and seems to constantly smoke no matter what role he’s playing. Bad guys are always more interesting if they don’t radiate venality out of every pore, as Mendelsohn does. And yet 95 times out of 100 casting directors always hire actors who look like they were born evil and breast-fed by Mama Satan.

Ben Palmer‘s Man Up has no U.S. distributor and is presently only scheduled to open in Ireland, the U.K. and a couple of other territories. It might be okay but I was slightly bothered by an age-gap issue right off the top. It’s an old tradition in Hollywood-funded romcoms and romances for the guy to be 20 or 25 years older than the girl. (58 year-old Clark Gable romancing 24 year-old Sophia Loren in 1959’s It Started in Naples) but Man Up‘s fleet indie-ish vibe suggests a non-traditional approach. Simon Pegg is 45 but (I’m sorry to say this but it’s true) looks like he’s pushing 48 or 49. Lake Bell turns 36 next week and was 35 when the film was shot. Man Up begins with Pegg assuming Bell is a 24 year-old woman he met online, so the film is telling us she looks ten years younger than her age. So while Pegg and Bell are only 10 years apart in actuality, their appearances suggest a gap of 20 or even 25 years. In short Pegg looks old enough to be Bell’s dad. Which is obviously fine if they’d made that part of the story, but apparently they haven’t. This aside, Bell delivers a fairly convincing British accent.

Read more

Yesterday Variety ran a James Rainey profile of Shivani Rawat, a 29 year-old woman of Indian heritage and financial privelege who’s running ShivHans Pictures, a Manhattan-based production company focusing on low to medium-range budgets ($8 million to $14 million). The money is coming from 5-Hour Energy honcho Manoj Bhargava, described in the piece as Rawat’s godfather and a close friend of her investor father, Mahipal Rawat.

ShivHans Pictures’ Shivani Rawat

The three films made so far by ShivHans are Dan Fogelman‘s Danny Collins, Jay Roach‘s Trumbo and Matt Ross‘s Captain Fantastic. All three are being distributed by Bleecker Street, an entry-level Fox Searchlight-style outfit run by former Focus co-CEO Andrew Karpen.

Fogelman tells Rainey that Ms. Rawat could be “the next Megan Ellison.” Whoa, whoa, whoa. There are two noteworthy similarities between Rawat and Ellison, both being 29 and both having used family (or, in Rawat’s case, extended family) wealth to buy their way into elite film circles. But in one instance at least, they seem to part ways in terms of having an eye for quality.

Ms. Ellison clearly has sublime taste, having produced Zero Dark Thirty, Foxcatcher, Her, American Hustle and Richard Linklater‘s forthcoming That’s What I’m Talking About. But Ms. Rawat’s taste buds may be less refined, at least as far as her reportedly impassioned support of Danny Collins is concerned.

Read more

“Best of Enemies captivates with its detail and historical footage, and makes one long for the Golden Age of TV and the peak of public discourse when men with ‘patrician, languid accents‘ could trade rhetorical barbs with eloquence and panache. It also makes one mourn the track upon which this televised mud fight (which gained huge ratings) set the American media.” — from Matthew Odam‘s SXSW review.

Read more

I know the difference between agreeably diverting, reasonably commercial action fare and a shoot-em-up thriller that is more or less complete dogshit and a waste of time. The latter tends to wind up with Rotten Tomato or Metacritic ratings of 35 or less (sometimes a lot less) and the decent-but-not-top-tier films usually rank in the 50s, 60s or 70s. Or something like that. I know that if a film has a 21% Rotten Tomato rating it’s almost certainly not worth the price. And that, strangely, is the current RT rating for Pierre Morel‘s The Gunman (Open Road, 3.20), and I’m telling you this is completely excessive and unfair. Ditto the 42% Metacritic rating — too low. I can see some critics saying “not bad not good enough” but there’s no justification for pounding this thing into the pavement.

The Gunman is a hit-and-miss second-tier affair that will probably perform poorly this weekend, even though it’s a moderately satisfying, handsomely filmed, well-cut and believably choreographed old-school thriller with a not-great-but-not-too-fumbly screenplay. It’s trim and efficient for the most part and quite beautiful to just stare at, and I had a good time sinking into it as a kind of exotic atmospheric ride or a rugged, suspenseful high-style thing. I processed it as I would a brief vacation that I wasn’t paying for.

Read more

March and April are tough movie months, not so much for people who don’t know much but certainly for the rest of us. May and June can also be a problem. It’s no picnic. Mostly brown torpedos. I’ve just scanned the latest Movie Box trailers…wow. Deliver me from mediocrity. Avengers: Age of Ultron, The Transporter Refueled, Paper Towns, Poltergeist, Max, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 2, Barely Lethal, Furious 7, Insidious: Chapter 3, Pixels, Roommate Wanted, Harlock: Space Pirate, Lazer Team, Thunderbirds Are Go.

Macbook Pro laptops usually die after three years, but the one I’m currently using had been getting sick sooner than expected. I work my laptops pretty hard, and over the last two or three weeks this particular puppy had been operating at slower and slower speeds. It has 8 gigs of RAM but page loads were agonizingly slow. I tried the usual fixes and flush-outs with Mac tech support, but those guys will never level with you. Two days ago I took the 2012 unit to Stan’s Tech Garage in West Hollywood, and the guy at the counter told me the truth, which was that my Macbook Pro’s old-school hard drive (i.e., the kind that spins around like a 78 rpm record player) was probably dying. For $500 and change they installed a new SSD (i.e., solid state drive) and migrated all my programs and data. The laptop now runs much faster, and is of course part of the current technological realm. It feels so fleet and smooth that I’m actually thinking of taking it back to Stan’s in order to double the memory to 16 gigs.

Read more

This clip is over a day old, but Vin Diesel spoke last Monday night (3.16) prior to a fan screening of Furious 7 (Universal, 4.3) at one of the Arclights. He choked up when he mentioned the late Paul Walker, explaining that “I lost my best friend…I lost my brother.” I’m presuming he meant his best onscreen friend…right? Diesel then passed along a curious anecdote. Whenever he and Walker were at a screening of the latest Fast & Furious installment, Walker “would always tell me, Vin, the best is still to come.” Walker would “always” say that? Meaning what exactly? That the film they were about to see (or had just seen) wasn’t that great but the next one will be better or perhaps even “the best”? Whenever John Ford was asked which of his films was his favorite, he would always say “the next one.” That I get.

Diesel also called Furious 7 “a labor of love.” That term specifically refers to something you’ve busted your ass to get right even though it didn’t compensate all that well. You put your heart into it because you cared. I’m sure that Walker’s tragedy made the shooting of Furious 7 an emotionally tough ride for Diesel and everyone else, but “labor of love’ isn’t the right term to use. The salaries were huge on this thing, I’m sure, and the expected income when the film opens…forget about it.

Read more