Month: September 2015

A 9.2 N.Y. Times story by Ken Belson presents a fairly clear case that Peter Landesman‘s Concussion (Sony, 12.25) isn’t quite the blistering, truth-telling whistleblower drama presented in the just-released trailer.

The forthcoming film dramatizes the true-life saga of Dr. Bennet Omalu (Will Smith), the forensic pathologist who discovered chronic traumatic encephalopathy or CTE — a then-new disease affecting football players — back in ’02, and how the NFL made his life hell as a result. Belson’s story, which relies on Sony hack e-mails, indicates that Sony execs felt it would be less troublesome from an N.F.L. standpoint to sand off some of the film’s edges.

The title of Belson’s piece, “Sony Altered ‘Concussion’ Film to Prevent N.F.L. Protests, Emails Show,” says it neatly.

Concussion doesn’t open for another four months but whatever the final impressions may be, the film has definitely taken a hit in terms of its integrity. However fair or unfair, perceptions are everything. I don’t know if anyone was thinking all that strongly about Concussion as a 2015 Best Picture contender, but anyone who had thoughts along those lines is probably re-assessing them to some extent.

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Already a couple of Everest critics are complaining that despite its technical triumphs, Baltasar Kormakur’s film doesn’t deliver enough emotion. Screen Daily‘s Tim Grierson, for one, has written that it’s “oddly uninvolving — it depicts a horrific scenario in an underwhelming, distancing way.” I don’t know what Grierson is on. I was completely caught up in Everest‘s agonizingly gradual death spiral, espeically during the second half. Ten seconds after I read this I sent myself a link to Grierson’s review along with the words “what planet?”

Everest gang early today at 2015 Venice Film Festival: (l. to r.) John Hawkes, Jason Clarke, Josh Brolin, Emily Watson, Baltasar Kormakur, Jake Gyllenhaal.

Here’s a more eloquent and (if you ask me) perceptive opinion from Variety‘s Justin Chang:

“This is a movie not about a few human beings who tried to conquer a mountain, but rather a mountain that took no notice of the human beings in its midst. Kormakur doesn’t make the mistake of exalting his subjects as extraordinary individuals, or suggesting that they were obeying some sort of noble higher calling. Everest is blunt, businesslike and — as it begins its long march through the death zone — something of an achievement. The specifics don’t get any clearer, but editor Mick Audsley’s cross-cutting among the different climbing factions creates its own propulsive logic. We get to know the characters not just by their appearances and personalities, but by their different positions on the mountain, where many of them find themselves trapped as a freak storm sets in.

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I’ve hiked in the Swiss Alps but I’ve never climbed a rocky mountain. Hell, I’ll probably never even visit Nepal much less get close to Mount Everest. (I’m more of a warm weather/balmy climes type of guy.) But after seeing Baltasar Kormakur‘s Everest (Universal, 9.25) I really and truly feel like I’ve done it all — flown into Kathmandu, climbed the foothills, stayed in the base camps, climbed the damn mountain, run out of oxygen, gotten hit by a rogue blizzard and nearly died. And in 3D with actors I know and like dying around me. But I made it down and recovered and got up and walked into the theatre lobby and hit the bathroom with 12 other guys and thought to myself, “Wow, it’s nice to be alive in a warm sophisticated city with all the amenities. But I’m also glad I just went through hell just now…a blind, howling, frostbitten hell at 29,000 feet.”

It’s a helluva thing, this film, because it doesn’t cheat or exaggerate or use CG that you can spot very easily, and because it puts you right into the grim horror of what happened to eight climbers trying to ascend Everest on May 10th and 11th of 1996. Climbers who were eaten by a mountain that does not suffer fools and doesn’t give a damn about anyone or anything. A mountain that looks at climbers making their way up and says, “You guys think you’re tough and ballsy and maybe you are, but you’d better get used to the possibility of a slow painful death and never seeing your loved ones or pets again. Because I will fuck you like a pig if I get into one of my moods.

“I’ve killed more than 250 climbers since the early 20s, and don’t presume you’re not on the list, pal. I can kill anyone, including experienced climbers. Because if you’re fool enough to climb this high and under these conditions, it’s actually pretty easy.”

Everest is realism at its most immersive and forbidding (the 3D is so good you don’t even notice it after a while), and a very strong docudrama with several actor-characters you get to know and like and care about, and edited with exactly the right amount of discipline (there’s no padding or deadweight) and clarity and feeling. It delivers real sadness but it doesn’t squeeze it out because it doesn’t need to. It just lets the facts wrap themselves around you.

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Earth vs. aliens fed through a YA blender, or rather based on a series of Rick Yancey-authored YA novels. Chloe Grace Moretz, Liev Schreiber, Alex Roe, Nick Robinson, Ron Livingston, Maggie Siff, Maika Monroe and Tony Revolori. Directed by J (i.e., no period) Blakeson with a script by Susannah Grant, and produced by Graham King. The 5th Wave will open on 1.15.16…of course!

Eight months ago I was told that Josh Gad was “more or less on-board” (i.e., not contractually but emotionally and intentionally) to play Roger Ebert in Russ & Roger Go Beyond, a fact-based comedy about the making of Beyond The Valley of the Dolls. Today The Hollywood Reporter‘s Borys Kit reported that Gad’s people and the Russ & Roger guys have finally “closed the deal.” Terrific, guys — it only took two-thirds of a year!

I still maintain that Jonah Hill, who knows from erudite and whipsmart and intellectual confidence, would have been a much better choice to play the late critic.

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“You need to see Justin Kurzel‘s Macbeth (Weinstein Co., 12.4) to savor the smoke and the chill and the dampness, the treeless topography, the ash-smeared faces and gooey blood drippings and Michael Fassbender‘s dirty fingernails. The emphasis, no question, is on blood, venality, gray skies, gunk, grime, authentic Scottish locations and general grimness — the basic Game of Thrones-meets-300 elements that, for me, always result in two reactions: (a) ‘This again?’ and (b) ‘Let me outta here.’

“If the grimy, toenail-fungus, sweat-covered scrotum approach turns you on, great…have at it. But I have a lifelong affection for Shakespeare’s poetry, you see, as well as a general love for the English language, especially when spoken by RADA-trained actors with stirring elocutionary skills. Which is not what you get from Kurzel’s Macbeth, which runs 113 minutes compared to the 140-minute length of Roman Polanski’s 1971 version, which Variety‘s Guy Lodge has patronizingly described as ‘tortured.’ (Lodge to Polanski: “If you only could have somehow put aside those feelings in your system due to your wife’s unfortunate murder…”)

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Eddie Redmayne in drag is half-appealing even to straights, so when he succumbs to the feeling of womanhood when holding that dress he seems vulnerable, sincere, genuine. And that’s a big reason why The Danish Girl feels (to go by this trailer) like a smooth and classy stroll through a rarified 1920s realm. It’s clearly made for mainstreamers like myself and not, perish the thought, for the transgender community, which will probably complain about it. But you can feel the delicacy, the sensitivity, the tenderness. Not just in the acting but in the dreamy movie score (piano, strings) by Alexandre Desplat. SAG and the Academy will nominate Redmayne for Best Actor, of course, but I suspect he won’t win. But the film will hit the sweet spot with cultivated viewers.

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Just to keep things amusing I’ve decided to pop out a weekly HE newsletter sheet called Little Yellow Pill. HE regulars don’t need reminders but I’m looking to send ’em out anyway. What the hell, punch up traffic, sell ad space, etc. An award-season thing. I’ve got a list of 10,000 email addresses but we’re looking to keep it real by encouraging everyone to sign up so no one feels pestered. Here’s to the entire HE community — hardcores, filmmakers, lurkers, window-gazers, ubers, casuals, the Irish, Australians, mentally-challenged haters from Twitter, early adopters and intrigued newcomers. Click the “subscribe” tab above or just click on this.

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There’s an old, old joke (referenced 34 years ago by N.Y. Times columnist Russell Baker) about the difference between above-the-credit-block and below it. “When Ronald Reagan-for-President talk first started,” Baker wrote, “Jack Warner, one of Mr. Reagan’s Warner Bros. employers, is said to have replied, ‘No, Jimmy Stewart for President — Ronald Reagan for his best friend.'”

Jason Sudekis, Alison Brie doing Sundance publicity for Sleeping with Other People.

There are some people, Warner meant, that just don’t have that marquee quality. And I am telling you that according to my Jack Warner-like standards, Alison Brie, the costar of Sleeping With Other People (IFC Films, 9.11), is best friend material. Which is not a bad thing. It’s fine. But it is what it is.

Brie is Rhoda, not Mary Tyler Moore. If you were to ask Junior Soprano he would say “she’s definitely not Angie Dickinson.” She has an agreeably perky vibe and is pleasantly attractive as far as it goes, but she’s “indie.” When I was watching the film, which by the way is a better-than-decent Manhattan romcom, I kept wanting someone hotter to be playing her part. Something in her eyes just dials it down for me.

Yeah, I know — who am I to talk because I’m older and not the fetching guy with the .400 batting average that I was back in the day? But some people have that “you can’t fuck me because I’m too hot for you” quality and some don’t.

And you know what? I just put my neck in a noose for saying that. Put me on the rack and throw me in jail. Because anyone with eyes knows that Alison Brie, best known for her Annie Edison role on NBC’s Community, is a vision of Venus and absolute thermometer-busting hotness second to none.

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As I suspected/projected earlier this month, Fox Searchlight has given Luca Guadignino‘s A Bigger Splash a spring ’16 release date — May 13th, to be precise, or right in the middle of the 2016 Cannes Film Festival (5.11 to 5.22). And yet this relationship melodrama costarring Tilda Swinton, Dakota Johnson, Ralph Fiennes and Matthias Schoenaerts, a remake of Jacques Deray‘s La Piscine (’69) and set on a Mediterranean island, will debut in a few days at the Venice Film Festival, and then will open theatrically in England in October. (And in Germany on 3.31.16.) But U.S. of A. critics not covering Venice may have to wait seven or eight months to see it.

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