Year: 2015

This morning I tweeted that Alejandro G. Inarritu‘s The Revenant, which I saw last night, is “an unflinchingly brutal, you-are-there, cold-wind, raw-element immersion like something you’ve never seen.” Because as beautiful as it is, it’s not a walk in the park, this thing. It’s rapturous, fierce, immersive, delirious…submerged in ice, arctic air, brutality…an ordeal of blood, agony, survival, snow, ice water, wounds and steaming horse guts.” If I’d just left it at that, everything would be fine. But because two women I saw it with reacted quite viscerally and with considerable discomfort (especially the one sitting next to me, a friend and a respected, high-level dp who’s been around and climbed her way to the top in a very tough business) and because a journalist friend told me The Revenant would totally freak his wife out, I added four words that got me killed on Twitter: “Forget women seeing this.”

Every time this happens, I feel like a wildebeest being surrounded and torn apart by hyenas or wild dogs. May I apologize for tapping out those words, or would you rather just continue to circle and bite and snarl and tear my stomach open, o ye fucking fang-toothed predators?

Agreed — I shouldn’t have said that. “Forget women seeing this” is a gross simplification. I’m down on my knees and whining like a little piglet….”wheee!…wheee!…I’m sorry…I’m sorry!” If I had given the matter 15 or 20 seconds worth of thought I would have rephrased and qualified in some way. I’m not stupid, and I know that generalizations always get you into trouble.

But if you had been watching The Revenant with a friend who was shielding her eyes every five or ten minutes and even going into a curled-over, fetal-tuck position at times, literally bending over and almost chirping like a chipmunk during the extra-violent or extra-gross scenes and being such a total candy-ass that I nudged her a couple of times (“Pssst…c’mon, show some respect for the filmmaker!”), what would you have been thinking? And what if you’d heard a fellow female journalist, sitting two seats away, call it “brutal“? And what if you’d been told by a fellow male journalist after the screening that his wife “wouldn’t last five minutes with this thing,” what would you be saying to yourself?

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Congrats to all the 2016 Spirit Award nominees, particularly Carol and Beasts of No Nation for having landed six each. Spotlight landed four noms plus a pre-determined Robert Altman award for ensemble acting. Best feature noms were handed to Carol, Spotlight, Beasts of No Nation, Anomalisa and Sean Baker’s Tangerine. And no Best Feature nom for Love & Mercy, which is 15 or 20 times the movie Tangerine is? Fuck is that about? Be honest: If Tangerine had been shot on a bigger budget with an Alexa HD instead of an iPhone 5, would it have even been nominated?

It seems to me that Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara snagging Best Actress noms is a pushback to the Weinstein Co. narrative of Blanchett being lead and Mara supporting.

Here are the 2016 Spirit Awards noms with a few HE favorite and Likeliest To Win distinctions on a per-category, whenever-I’m-into-it basis:

Best Feature: Anomalisa (not a wisp of a chance), Beasts of No Nation, Carol, Spotlight (HE Favorite, Likeliest To Win), Tangerine (double forget it).

Best Director: Sean Baker, Tangerine; Cary Joji Fukunaga, Beasts of No Nation (2nd Most Likely Winner); Todd Haynes, Carol; Charlie Kaufman & Duke Johnson, Anomalisa; Tom McCarthy, Spotlight (HE favorite, Likeliest To Win); David Robert Mitchell, It Follows.

Best Screenplay: Charlie Kaufman, Anomalisa; Donald Margulies, The End of the Tour; Phyllis Nagy, Carol (HE favorite); Tom McCarthy & Josh Singer, Spotlight (Likeliest To Win), S. Craig Zahler, Bone Tomahawk.

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The Revenant is an experience I’ve never had before. It’s totally its own beast. This is not a movie for sissies. A female friend sitting to my right frequently hid her eyes. It’s beautiful, fierce, immersive, delirious. Submerged in ice, arctic air, brutality and a kind of artful oppression. An ordeal of blood, agony, survival, snow, ice water, wounds and steaming horse guts. Great cinema is not always easy to absorb because it often challenges. It can sometimes feel hard or difficult, gnarly, awesome, almost too much…but it almost always sticks with you. I’m presuming The Revenant will do this. F.X. Feeney and I were talking after tonight’s screening of The Revenant, and he thinks it’s going to gather steam and percolate and sink into more and more systems as the years pass by. He compared it to Michael Mann‘s Heat in this respect; I was thinking it might eventually acquire the kind of rep that The Shining has now. Oh, and I fell completely in love with Ryuichi Sakamoto‘s simple, majesterial score.

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The headline refers to Glenn Kenny’s reaction to James Ponsoldt‘s End of the Tour, and particularly Jason Segel‘s hulking-behemoth performance as the late David Foster Wallace. Just when Kenny thought he was out, they pull him back in.

The new Big Short trailer is trying to sell a revenge-caper plot that doesn’t exist. Early on the husky-voiced narrator says the following: “When the banks committed the greatest fraud in U.S. history, four outsiders risked it all to take them down.” Nobody, trust me, is looking to take anyone down in The Big Short. It’s about a few guys (including Ryan Gosling, Steve Carell and Brad Pitt‘s characters) shorting the residential mortgage market in order to profit off the stupidity of the big banks. Ladies, it’s okay with me if Paramount marketing wants to misrepresent the film. The Big Short is a delicious financial procedural, but people who go expecting a little Ocean’s 11 action are going to feel a wee bit underwhelmed. Again, the mp3.

The Krampus legend, which originated in Austria in the 1800s, is about “a horned, anthropomorphic figure [who] punishes children during the Christmas season who have misbehaved.” But in Michael Dougherty‘s darkly comic film (Universal, 12.4), Krampus is looking to punish the whole family for being selfish, distracted, self-absorbed shits who couldn’t care less about the Christmas spirit, etc. In short, Krampus is at least theoretically a metaphor for rightwing Christians who despise non-believers and insist that Starbucks’ red cups without snowfakes or reindeer or any of the other bullshit decorations are an affront to the legend of Jesus. Will Krampus be half-funny? Will it be better than just another rank holiday movie looking to cash in? From screening invite: “Please note the review embargo is Thursday, December 3rd, 2015 at 4 pm Pacific.” If Universal had said it’s fine to post reviews at 10 am the day before it opens, that would obviously indicate a high level of confidence. But 4 pm is worrisome.

This poster was recently snap-captured by a relation of Sasha Stone‘s in a Los Cabos plex. In the ’80s or before the poster would read Silencio but everybody reads English now & nobody cares. Is the “do not be afraid” slogan aimed at moviegoers who might be concerned about sitting through another Kundun-like, Scorsese-goes-to-Asia-to-sink-into-the-spiritual film? Except this time the focus is on damp, bearded men of faith in 17th Century Japan who wind up getting, like, tortured. And why would a poster say “coming soon” with the first possible peek-out being next May’s Cannes Film Festival, at best?

Invitations went out this morning for NY and LA press screenings of Quentin Tarantino‘s The Hateful Eight. Reviews are embargoed until 12.21. All screenings will present the slightly longer Ultra Panavision 70 version, which will run 175 minutes with a 12-minute intermission for a grand total of 187 minutes. I’ll be expecting, of course, an overture and an entr’acte musical passage between the two parts.

If you’re one of those impassioned, laser-focused, well-dressed media types you’ll almost certainly be driving towards the Academy’s Samuel Goldwyn theatre tonight around 7 pm or so. Because the show starts at 8 pm and you’ll want a good seat. “Something familiar, something peculiar, something for everyone…The Revenant tonight! Something appealing, something appalling, something for everyone…The Revenant tonight! Old situations, new complications,nothing portentous or polite…The Revenant tonight!” — from Stephen Sondheim‘s “The Revenant Tonight” from A Funny Thing Happened on The Way to the Forum.

Looking forward to re-watching every one of these on the 60-inch Samsung with the sound as full and crisp as I choose. Especially 45 Years (I’m fairly certain Charlotte Rampling is going to score with critics groups as a Best Actress recipient) and Son of Saul.

Click here to jump past HE Sink-In

It’s a plain, straight fact that Cary Fukunaga‘s Beasts of No Nation is a piece of devastating, world-class art — undeniably alive and probing and humanistic, a film about conscience and savagery and moral choice. It goes without saying that such a film requires award-season acclaim, and that denying it this will be some kind of perverse. But from the moment Beasts opened simultaneously on Netflix and in a relative handful of upmarket theatres on 10.16, three things have become apparent, and it almost takes a degree in marketing to figure out the whole equation.

One, a consensus has developed among film Catholics that despite its difficult subject matter (i.e., African child soldiers conscripted and goaded into committing atrocities during a civil war) Beasts is nothing short of a jolting, half-hallucinatory masterpiece — a 21st Century Apocalypse Now by a director with a momentous career ahead of him. It’s one of the few noteworthy films of 2015 to be spoken of in genuinely worshipful terms. For a few weeks now people like Jake Gyllenhaal, Ben Affleck and Sally Field have been hosting screenings and more or less dropping to their knees. Robert Downey, Jr. is also a fan. Many people are.

Two, some exhibitors (i.e., AMC Cinemas, Carmike Cinemas, Cinemark, Regal) have turned their backs over the day-and-date thing, and some Academy members have said in recent party-chat conversations that Beasts needs to be disciplined (i.e., not voted for) for the same reason, despite the fact that the quality of it demands attention at the very least, and the fact that Netflix is simply perched at the forefront of emerging release patterns.

And three, as was the case with Steve McQueen‘s 12 Years A Slave, winner of the 2013 Best Picture Oscar, some people just won’t see it. Some women, I’ve heard, just don’t want to watch a young boy (i.e., Abraham Attah‘s Agu) commit horrendous acts and in so doing lose his humanity. (Then again if they saw Beasts they’d know that Agu not only escapes his wartime servitude near the end but confesses his sins in a plea for redemption.) But all serious film lovers understand that when a film is said to be really and truly exceptional, you have to put aside your concerns and just submit. You have to let it in.

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Maureen Dowd‘s 11.20 N.Y. Times Magazine piece about Hollywood boy’s-club sexism, which I finally got around to reading on today’s Miami-to-Los Angeles flight, is well written, heavily researched (Dowd interviewed and wrote for nearly six months) and very persuasive. It airs basic truths for the most part. As you might expect the piece re-emphasizes and summarizes the basic complaint about old-school dick attitudes making things difficult (in varying degrees) for women in the film and TV industry. Which of course is true. Ask any fair-minded woman who works in any professional capacity in this town…please.

Dowd has spoken to over 30 female directors, producers and execs, and the gist, boiled down, is that women directors are (a) put through tough hoops and get treated a certain way, (b) can be thrown into movie jail for a single failure whereas male directors always seem to have a couple of “get out of jail” cards in their back pocket, (c) are regarded as not being as well suited to playing the role of the proverbial take-charge generalissimo on a movie set as guy directors seem to be, (d) are suspiciously regarded as theoretically or potentially indecisive or ditzy, (e) are indifferent or hostile to conventional male-gaze fantasies, and (f) aren’t nearly as favored as young baseball-cap-wearing directors like Colin Trevorrow (Jurassic World, Star Wars: Episode 9).

The best Dowd quote is from an interview she did two days ago (11.20) on CBS This Morning, to wit: “The amazing thing is, I’ve covered Saudi Arabia and I’ve covered the Catholic church, and in both cases these societies got warped. They got sick because they’re not using the brains…of women. And who knew that the same thing could happen in the most liberal town on earth?”

I could throw out minor nitpicks here and there, but there’s one blatantly false claim made about Elaine May‘s experience directing Ishtar that Dowd, I feel, should have at least qualified if not challenged. The quote comes from director Leslye Headland (Sleeping With Other People, Bachelorette), to wit: “‘These dudes, man. Spielberg and Cassavetes and Woody Allen have all made some unwatchable movies. But it’s Elaine May and Ishtar you remember. It’s not Elaine May’s fault. Poor Elaine.’”

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