Month: July 2015

I’ve lately been in touch with a couple I’ve known for ages, going back to the mid ’70s. The guy is a serious Movie Catholic who used to run a repertory cinema and in fact hired me as a projectionist in ’80 or ’81. A lot of frolic back then, and even some perversity. We used to score quaaludes together at the old Edlich Pharmacy on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Anyway we were talking on the phone and they said they’re planning a trip to Italy in September but within budgetary limits. I naturally volunteered my usual-usual about the difference between tourists and travellers (I belong to the latter group) and how nobody stays in hotels any more with all of the glorious (and delightfully less expensive) Airbnb options available and how only dinosaurs consult with travel agents about where to stay.

Well, it pains me to say this but my old friends are evolving into dinosaur-hood. Their choice and their money, of course, but they’re firmly committed to avoiding Airbnb rentals due to fear of “issues.” I assured them that these presumptions are wives tales but they won’t budge. They’ll almost certainly be paying 30% or 40% more by staying in hotels (not to mention mimicking the typical tourist lifestyle) but to each his own. But I thought it might be nice to join them in Venice and so as a last-ditch effort I told them about a two-story loft where I stayed with Dylan in late May 2014, a place owned by a classy lady named Federica Centulani. I sent them a video of the place. [See above.] I explained that if we split the $150 per day rent at Federica’s it would only be $75 each. And they still won’t budge.

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I happened to watch Richard Fleischer‘s The Boston Strangler last night. No, not at the Aero but on Vudu. Not bad but not much of a policier either. Two-thirds of it is about what passed for perversity in early ’60s Boston and a third is about the catching and examination of Albert DeSalvo (Tony Curtis). I was actually less impressed by Curtis’s look-at-me performance and more impressed by Henry Fonda‘s as Detective John Bottomly, and particularly by Hurd Hatfield‘s as Terence Huntley, a closeted but upfront, well-mannered gay guy. This led me to a poster for The Picture of Dorian Gray (’45), in which Hatfield played the lead. It made Hatfield a “star” (i.e., not really) even though the second-billed George Sanders got top billing on the poster because nobody knew Hatfield in ’45. This reminded me of the 2011 Arthur poster debacle in which Greta Gerwig, who played the co-lead romantic role that Liza Minelli had in the ’81 original, was left off early versions of the poster entirely.

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The reviews had made it clear that Magic Mike XXL is a wank and a throwaway, but with the otherwise-engaged Steven Soderbergh having shot and cut it I expected something slick and semi-cool — a movie in which nothing happens but with intriguing detours and a louche, hang-loose attitude. It’s about a group of lightweight hot bods (Channing Tatum, Matt Bomer, Kevin Nash, Adam Rodriguez, Joe Manganiello) making their way from Tampa to Myrtle Beach to compete in a male-stripper contest…and that’s all. Okay, maybe. But a feeling of waste and nothingness welled up as I watched this piece of shit yesterday afternoon. I began with stirrings of mild irritation but had worked up a fairly angry lather in less than 30 minutes. N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott had the nerve to call this “a coherent and rigorous theory of pleasure that is also an absolute blast” — a statement I honestly feel he should not only be ashamed of but should atone for.

Movies about “nothing” (i.e., those lacking conventional dramatic tension or a payoff) can work nicely if done right. This may sound fogeyish but my idea of an agreeable easygoing movie about floating along and never really coming to a boil is Fred Zinneman‘s The Sundowners. Yes, Magic Mike XXL fails the Sundowners test. And I’m not just saying it doesn’t belong in the same sentence as the original Magic Mike (which I called “one of those summer films that comes along once in a blue moon — a fun romp filled with yoks and swagger and whoo-hoo, but also sharp, wise and shrewdly observed, and flush with indie cred”). I’m saying it’s a film that smirks and piddles around but also pisses on you. A big yellow stream shooting out of the screen and onto my lap.

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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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London Has Fallen is a sequel to 2013’s Olympus Has Fallen. The obvious implication is that the producers behind both films (Gerard Butler, Alan Siegel, Mark Gill) are launching a Fallen franchise in which the gang can start globe-hopping and systematically arrange for wacko terrorists to destroy a new major city every couple of years. (It’s an idea, at least.) I’m more of a White House Down kind of guy because that film, whether you want to accept it or not, was a genre satire and pretty much a broad disaster comedy (at which I had a good time, laughed, clapped) while Olympus tried to deliver a semi-sincere Die Hard thing…and failed.

This morning Rope of Silicon‘s Brad Brevet posted a list of nine films he believes are the most likely to emerge as 2015 Best Picture Oscar nominees. So I decided to post a list of my own. The only Brevet nommies I disagree on are Pete Docter‘s Inside Out, which will not be Best Picture nominated because it’s animated and that’s that, and Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies, which I suspect will probably turn out to be a bit stodgy and time-piecey and maybe self-enshrining (you know Spielberg). In place of these two I’m betting the Academy will want to nominate one of the five big social-political films (James Vanderbilt‘s Truth, Jay Roach‘s Trumbo, Thomas McCarthy‘s Spotlight, Oliver Stone‘s Snowden, David Gordon Green‘s Our Brand Is Crisis) and perhaps even two of these….who knows?

I’m also betting/hoping that if Universal decides to platform Joel and Ethan Coen‘s Hail Caesar! in December it might well make the cut as the script happens to be brilliant and hilarious, even though it’s one of the Coen’s goofball flicks. It also goes without saying that while general assumptions seem to be that Martin Scorsese‘s Silence will probably open in 2016, the historical drama will almost certainly be a 2015 Best Picture nominee if it opens later this year (unless it turns out to be too gruesome). I realize that Love & Mercy‘s best shot is with the Spirit Awards but I’d love to see it Oscar-nominated — I think it really deserves to be.

Rope of Silicon’s 7.1 predictions (in this order of likelihood):

1. Steve Jobs (Universal, 10.9) — Danny Boyle (director), Aaron Sorkin (screenplay), Scott Rudin (producer); Cast: Michael Fassbender, Seth Rogen, Michael Stuhlbarg, Kate Winslet, Katherine Waterston.
2. The Revenant (20th Century Fox, 12.25) — Alejandro González Inarritu (director/screenplay); Mark “nobody can remember my middle initial” Smith (screenplay); Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy, Will Poulter, Domhnall Gleeson.
3. The Danish Girl — (Focus Features, 11.27) — Tom Hooper (director). Eddie Redmayne, Alicia Vikander, Amber Heard, Matthias Schoenaerts.
4. Carol (Weinstein Co., 12.18) — Todd Haynes (director); Pyllis Nagy (screenplay, based on Patricia Highsmith novel); Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara, Sarah Paulson, Kyle Chandler. Cannes reaction: Best Picture, Best Actress/Supporting Actress, Best Screenplay (Phyllis Nagy).
5. Joy (20th Century Fox, 12.25) — David O. Russell (director/screenplay). Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Robert De Niro, Bradley Cooper, Édgar Ramirez.
6. Bridge of Spies (Disney, 10.16) — Steven Spielberg (director); Matt Charman, Ethan Coen, Joel Coen (screenplay); Tom Hanks, Mark Rylance, Amy Ryan, Alan Alda, Billy Magnussen, Eve Hewson.
7. The Walk (TriStar/ImageMovers, 9.30) — Robert Zemeckis (director/screenplay); Christopher Browne (screenplay); Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ben Kingsley, James Badge Dale, Charlotte Le Bon. Sony/TriStar, 10.2.
8. Inside Out (Disney/Pixar, 6.19), d: Pete Docter.
9. Brooklyn (Fox Searchlight, 11.6) — John Crowley (director), Nick Hornby (screenwriter) — Saoirse Ronan, Domhnall Gleeson, Emory Cohen, Jim Broadbent, Julie Walters.

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I don’t watch Fallon or Kimmel all that much but I tend to keep track of each show’s highlights on Twitter (if there’s anything worth capturing or talking about the next day), and I’m not recalling much in the way of animal visits. Is there some kind of p.c. sensitivity thing these days about crassly exploiting animals or subjecting them to undue stress or something along those lines? Just wondering. I know that Carson definitely had animals on from time to time.