Year: 2015

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.

Glenn Kenny has written a not-yet-posted piece for Vulture that takes issue with the portrayal of the late author David Foster Wallace in James Ponsoldt‘s The End of the Tour. It won’t appear until just before the film opens on 7.31, but it’ll probably be fairly interesting as Kenny knew the late writer fairly well (as an editor as well as on purely personal terms) and considered him a pally of sorts. He told me this morning that Tour is a “really inaccurate” portrait of what Wallace was like as a person.

I replied that it can’t be that inaccurate as Donald Margulies‘ script is based on David Lipsky‘s book, “Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself,” which is largely based on cassette recordings of his conservations with Wallace when he was interviewing him in ’96 (when Wallace was 34) for a Rolling Stone piece.

Kenny had strong retorts but those are on background. As noted, his piece is up later this month.

Margulies knew Ponsoldt from having taught him writing at Yale, and sent him the script directly. Margulies had no idea if he even knew who Wallace was but thought on the basis of his other films (The Spectacular Now, Smashed) that he would be perfect. It turned out Ponsolt was a Wallace devotee who had waded heavily into “Infinite Jest” at college and had read almost everything else Wallace had written. He even quoted Wallace’s “This Is Water” commencement speech at his own wedding.

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A couple of years ago I posted a rant about an egregious form of road-ignoring in James Ponsoldt‘s The Spectacular Now. For years I’ve been twitching in my seat during car-chat scenes in which a driver mainly looks at the person riding shotgun and only glances at the road sporadically. (Roughly five or six seconds of eye-contact for every one or two seconds of road-watching.) But Ponsoldt and Miles Teller doubled down on this in a Spectacular scene in which Teller, bold as brass, totally ignores the road for ten or twelve seconds as he chats with some girls in a car that’s cruising alongside. I almost threw my shoe at the screen.

Jesse Eisenberg, Jason Segel in James Ponsoldt’s The End of the Tour. Obviously not the scene I’m referring to the piece as Segel is behind the wheel.

And now Ponsoldt has crossed the line again in The End of The Tour. In a second act scene Jesse Eisenberg (playing Rolling Stone journalist David Lipsky) is driving and talking to Jason Segel (as David Foster Wallace) and doing the usual “I don’t really need to look at the road…well, okay, I do every so often but c’mon…I’m actor and I need to make eye contact…this is what I do and I can’t just stare at the road and read lines.”

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I’m sorry to say I wasn’t all that taken with James Ponsoldt‘s The End of the Tour (A24, 7.31), which I saw last night at the Aero. It’s a dialogue-driven thing with not enough going on underneath. The basic focus is the renowned David Foster Wallace (Jason Segel), author of “Infinite Jest” and other respected works, and particularly a five-day-long interview he did in ’96 with Rolling Stone correspondent David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg), when Foster was 34. (Wallace offed himself at age 46.) It’s largely set in Wallace’s grungy, cluttered home in rural Illinois, which seems like a horrid, barren, show-covered gulag. I’ll get into this in a subsequent post but I wouldn’t want The End of the Tour to get in the way of anyone enjoying (or listening to for the first time) Wallace’s “This Is Water” commencement address, which he delivered a decade ago at Kenyon College. Here’s the whole thing and here’s a video that conveys a portion:

I was afraid there might be some kind of inability to suspend disbelief with Michael Fassbender playing Steve Jobs because he looks nothing like the guy. But he sure seems to behave like Walter Isaacson’s version of Jobs in this trailer and the film (or at least this hinting of it) seems to have its ducks in order so I’m starting to feel more relaxed. On top of which I’ve read a draft of Aaron Sorkin‘s script and it’s a strong, riveting, rat-a-tat-tat deal, let me tell you.

Again, that hacked Sony email written by Sony marketing exec Michael Pavlic about the script: “It’s brilliant. It’s perfect. There are marketing liabilities. It’s long, it’s claustrophobic, it’s talky, it could be a play, it risks being all one medium close-up, it’s periody…a mediation on Jobs himself. It’s insistent upon itself, it’s relentless. I kept begging for someone to walk outside, for some daylight, for an opening…

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Anything that seriously threatens the family unit tends to result in serious difficulty and quite often divorce court. In my experience people break up over three things — not enough money, infidelity and a refusal to deal seriously with an addiction problem (alcohol, drugs, gambling). One of these three, mostly on the part of a husband, will usually persuade the wife that she can do better alone or with someone else. Honest question: Affleck-Garner were called Bennifer, which is what Affleck Lopez were also called, or so I recall. My preferred Affleck-Lopez term was B.Lo — did anybody at all use that or was it just me and five other guys?

At the very least, Maryse Alberti‘s cinematography makes Creed (Warner Bros., 11.25) look better than half decent. Directed and co-written by Ryan Coogler (Fruitvale Station). Starring Michael B. Jordan, costarring Sylvester Stallone, Tessa Thompson, Tony Bellew and Graham McTavish. If you want to get technical you could call it the seventh Rocky film but it looks more like a cousin than part of the immediate family.

I regard all raves of all films shown at South by Southwest as highly suspect. Way too many easy-lay geeks attend this Austin-based festival, and when they see something half-decent they all go “wheee!…we’re totally in love with the film and the filmmakers and distributors who allowed us to see it early because this makes us look necessary and important in the overall scheme!” So when Judd Apatow and Amy Schumer‘s Trainwreck (Universal, 7.17) was cheered in Austin last March, I said to myself, “Oh, yeah?…we’ll see about that.”

Last night I saw about that and all I can say is “holy shit.” Actually that’s not all I can say but it’ll do for starters. I guess I also need to say “fuck me” and “mea culpa” and all the rest of that hash. Then again I didn’t respond to the film last February — I merely shared a somewhat insensitive gut reaction to Schumer as a conceivable object of barroom desire within the prism of a trailer. But that’s all water under the bridge because Trainwreck, no lie, is dryly hilarious and smoothly brilliant and damn near perfect. It’s the finest, funniest, most confident, emotionally open-hearted and skillful film Apatow has ever made, hands down. I was feeling the chills plus a wonderful sense of comfort and assurance less than five minutes in. Wow, this is good…no, it’s better…God, what a relief…no moaning or leaning forward or covering my face with my hands…pleasure cruise.

I went to the Arclight hoping and praying that Trainwreck would at least be good enough so I could write “hey, Schumer’s not bad and the film is relatively decent.” Well, it’s much better than that, and Schumer’s performance is not only a revelation but an instant, locked-in Best Actress contender. I’m dead serious, and if the other know-it-alls don’t wake up to this they’re going to be strenuously argued with. Don’t even start in with the tiresome refrain of “oh, comedic performances never merit award-season attention.” Shut up. Great performances demand respect, applause and serious salutes…period.

I still think Schumer is a 7.5 or an 8 but it doesn’t matter because (and I know how ludicrous this is going to sound given my history) I fell in love in a sense — I saw past or through all that and the crap that’s still floating around even now. For it became more and more clear as I watched that Schumer’s personality and performance constitute a kind of cultural breakthrough — no actress has ever delivered this kind of attitude and energy before in a well-written, emotionally affecting comedy, and I really don’t see how anyone can argue that Schumer isn’t in the derby at this point. (A columnist friend doesn’t agree but said that Schumer’s Trainwreck screenplay is a surefire contender for Best Original Screenplay.)

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