Day: May 28, 2015

I know what it’s like to be dead. I know what it is to be sad. ‘Cause you’re making me feel like I’ve never been born…

Newsday‘s Rafer Guzman: “Imagine a candlelit dinner prepared by a top chef and served on the sands of a sparkling beach. Now imagine that the dinner has been boiling on the stove for something like two years and you’ve got Aloha, [which has] been overcooked into an unidentifiable, inedible mush. Aloha is one of those films whose characters behave and speak so irrationally that they no longer make any human sense at all.”

Variety‘s Andrew Barker: “Unbalanced, unwieldy and at times nearly unintelligible, Aloha is unquestionably Cameron Crowe’s worst film. Paced like a record on the wrong speed, or a Nancy Meyers movie recut by an over-caffeinated Jean-Luc Godard, the film bears all the telltale signs of a poorly executed salvage operation disfigured in the editing bay.”

Seattle Times‘ Moira McDonald: “Well-meaning but nearly unwatchable. Where’d you go, Cameron Crowe?”

The Hollywood Reporter‘s Shari Linden: “With the screenplay’s strained whimsy and pathos, not to mention its unpersuasive, at times incoherent musings on the politics of space exploration, Crowe squanders the star power at hand. As with another major miss by the writer-director, 2005’s Elizabethtown, the new film has the awkward feel of a repository for everything but the kitchen sink. The chemistry is mostly forced, the story without an emotional core. And though Crowe’s facility for language can be striking, here it never moves beyond self-consciousness.”

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Prague is downshifty enough to leave room for something I probably wouldn’t get around to in Los Angeles — a screening of Alfred Hitchcock‘s The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (’27) with live musical accompaniment. I’ve seen nearly all of the worthwhile Hitchcock films, but not this one. Tonight at 7 pm, or three hours hence.

Kate, a 20 year-old English-speaking waitress who works at Restaurace U Bile Kravy, an excellent little steak joint not far from Wenceslas Square.

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Reviews of Cameron Crowe‘s Aloha (Sony, 5.29) will finally pop later today. One presumes that reactions will be mostly non-adoring (here’s a review by The Stranger‘s Erik Henriksen). And yet a seasoned, been-around guy who attended Tuesday night’s all-media says that (a) it’s actually a fairly pleasing film and (b) his wife called it the most engaging she’s seen this year. (This will almost certainly turn out to be a minority view.) I won’t see Aloha until I return to the States on Monday…well, actually Tuesday as I’ll be catching a 7 pm Manhattan all-media of Entourage on 6.1.

In any event I’ve been thinking about the beefs against Crowe’s film by the Media Action Network for Asian Americans, which are basically that the Hawaii-based film ignores the multicultural nature of society in general (i.e., not just Hawaiian) by telling a story that is pretty much entirely about white people — Bradley Cooper, Emma Stone, Rachel McAdams, John Krasinski, Danny McBride, Bill Murray, Alec Baldwin.

“Caucasians only make up 30% of the population of Hawaii, but from watching this film, you’d think they made up 99%,” a MANAA press release reads. “This comes in a long line of films — The Descendants, 50 First Dates, Blue Crush, Pearl Harbor — that uses Hawaii for its exotic backdrop but goes out of its way to exclude the very people who live there. It’s an insult to the diverse culture and fabric of Hawaii.”

MANAA is mostly right. Nativism and multiculturalism are the reigning theologies today, and anyone making a film about a group of white people in a region or country in which the vast majority are non-white risks seeming a bit jaded, and certainly out of step with the times. On the other hand it should be allowable for Crowe, a white guy who grew up in Wonderbread San Diego in the ’50s and ’60s, to make a movie about a social realm in which he used to live in, and in which he probably to some extent still lives in in his head.

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From Peter Debruge’s 1.31.15 Sundance review: “Maybe it wasn’t such a great idea for Kevin Bacon’s corrupt small-town sheriff to leave the keys inside his unlocked patrol car. And maybe he should have thought twice before tossing his gunbelt in the backseat and stuffing a beaten-and-bound criminal in the trunk. But all those bad decisions make for B-movie gold in Jon Watts’ Cop Car (Focus World, 8.7), a tight, easily marketable genre exercise that pushes its lean premise and all-around disrespect for authority to entertaining extremes, taking wicked delight in imagining what might happen if two 10-year-olds were to stumble upon an abandoned police cruiser and take it for a joyride.

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The Aero is still my all-time favorite Los Angeles theatre — excellent repertory selections, first-rate digital projection. Closely followed by the Egyptian. But I won’t see 35mm shows at either venue for the simple reason that with very few exceptions, 35mm projection almost always guarantees a degraded experience. But the Vista, a first-run vintage theatre hanging by its nails, is probably the best place to watch a film in an old-timey atmosphere. (I’m not counting the downtown LA venues that occasionally host special-event screenings.) Digital plus 35mm, beautiful marquee, haunting pre-war decor, great-tasting popcorn, good enough seats. Cinefamily is my fourth favorite venue, especially if I’m able to sit in those cushy armchair-like seats near the front. For whatever reason I almost never think about going to the Nuart these days. And way, way, way down at the bottom of the list is Quentin Tarantino‘s New Beverly Cinema, which only shows 35mm and is therefore committed to perpetuating a kind of ’70s nostalgia time-machine atmosphere. If I never see another 35mm film it’ll be too soon. And I’m speaking as a former projectionist. And yet there’s something oddly alluring about seeing Fritz Lang‘s The Big Heat there on Wednesday or Thursday, 6.3 or 6.4. I know it won’t look or sound as good as the Bluray, but just once I want to see The Big Heat in a theatre.

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