Day: July 2, 2015

Updated, rewritten: I came out of Asif Kapadia‘s Amy with a sense of sadness, of course. But I didn’t have any one reaction, to be honest. Ten minutes after the screening ended I bought Back to Black.  When Amy Winehouse was great, which was nearly every time she sang, she was insanely great. But she was a mess for so long and such a foregone conclusion in terms of an early death that when it finally happened it was hardly a shock. It was almost a relief because at least the tortured aspects of her life had come to an end. That sounds a bit heartless but some people seem so bound for oblivion that you can’t help but feel a certain distance and disinterest.

My basic thought when the doc began was “Okay, how much purr and ectsasy before she starts to downswirl and die?” By the time Amy ended I was hissing Blake Fielder, her bastard ex-husband who definitely shortened her life with his cavalier attitude about drugs. Ditto her asshole dad, Mitch Winehouse, who very definitely leeched and didn’t help his daughter in the right guiding way. Without those two motherfuckers, Amy Winehouse might still be here.

And I’ll repeat again that the old saga of the self-destructive musical genius or famous performer — grew up gnarly, found fame with a great gift, burned brightly for a relatively brief time and then died from drug or alcohol abuse — has been told so many times that the tragic after-pall has seriously faded. How many times can we go there? Winehouse, Jimi Hendrix, Hank Williams, Brian Jones, Elvis Presley, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Charlie “Bird” Parker, Edith Piaf, Bix Beiderbecke…a story as old as the culture of recreational drugs and “yeah, man” indulgence itself.

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I don’t know who David Poland has spoken to but in a 6.28 Best Picture spitball piece he sounded confident about Martin Scorsese‘s Silence coming out later this year. I’d been under the impression that a 2015 bow was a maybe at best, and that a 2016 release was just as likely. Nonetheless Poland flatly declared that we should “expect a December berth and a November premiere.”

The Josh Gad-resembling guy, the red T-shirted lardo who explains the sexual wackamole game to the mom at the dinner table, is Zack Pearlman. Characters like this make me want to throw something at the screen. And yet low-rent comedies always seem to have at least one — a fat guy so coarse and hormonally obnoxious that he hasn’t the first hint of how appalling he is, and yet everyone kind of shrugs him off and goes “Yeah, well, he’s colorful.” And we’re stuck with guys like this because of Gad, more or less. Jack Black probably looks at guys like this and goes, “Wow, fairly pathetic.”

Message received last night from Manhattan broadcast media guy Bill McCuddy: “Just saw Trainwreck in a media/real people screening. Played great in the room. I loved it. Apatow’s best since Funny People.”

“What about Amy’s performance?,” I wrote back. “She wasn’t just funny — she reached way down and pulled out some real feeling and serious melancholia in some of those second and third-act scenes. That funeral eulogy? Seriously good stuff.”

McCuddy: “She’s great and I agree — especially some of her takes/reactions when other characters can’t see her. But that eulogy was also in the writing.” [Schumer wrote the screenplay.] “A lot of the movie is better written than audiences will give it credit for.”

Every good movie suffers from logic potholes. The goal is to avoid “crossing the threshold of tolerance,” as some guy wrote a few years ago in a piece I can’t find. There are some flaws in The Godfather, for instance. If Sonny has learned where Michael Corleone’s sitdown with The Turk is and Tessio has enough time to plant a gun, why can’t Sonny order a couple of skilled assassins to wait outside and slaughter the Turk when he leaves the restaurant? This of course would save Michael, whom Don Vito absolutely doesn’t want sullied by the family business, from having to hide out in Sicily and so on.

But it’s more dramatic and suspenseful, of course, to have the inexperienced Michael do the shooting at Louis’s Italian-American restaurant in the Bronx (will he blow it? get shot himself?) and so The Godfather is what it is. In actuality Don Corleone would so pissed at Sonny and Tom Hagen for getting Michael involved that he’d probably banish them to Sicily, but you can ignore this whole magilla without effort.

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Marshall Fine has posted a piece about the primal welling of tears when the right movie does the right thing. He naturally lists a few films that have melted him down — Inside Out, Field of Dreams, E.T., My Dog Skip, Cyrano de Bergerac (even an amateur staging will do, he says) and…wait, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon? Who cries at an acrobatic, roof-jumping martial-arts film? Worse, Fine says he once watered up during a certain undescribed scene in Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants.

I’m sorry but by the authority vested in me by the Internal Fraternity of Guydom, I hereby place Marshall Fine on a compassionate 30-day probation. This is not a slapdown or a suspension or demotion. He’s just being asked to contemplate the meaning of a seasoned critic weeping at a Hillary Clinton movie…that’s all. For his own health and that of his readers.

Everyone has written a piece about movie weeping. I tapped out my last one around eight years ago. I ran a quote from Owen Wilson that said most guys “choke up over loss. Stuff you once had in your life…a girlfriend or wife, a beloved dog, naivete…that’s now gone and irretrievable.”

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