Year: 2015

Barry Levinson‘s Rock The Kasbah (Open Road) opens Friday but hasn’t been liberally press-screened, or at least not to my knowledge. The first screening I was invited to happens tonight. The review embargo is tomorrow morning at 6 am Pacific, but a review by the Village Voice‘s Alan Scherstuhl popped this morning. It’s a fun read. The best part is Schertstuhl’s assessment of the Murray formula:

“Quick! Name the movie where Bill Murray plays a proudly shabby dude who acts like a prick for an hour and then, for reasons of narrative convention rather than character-based truth, shambles toward either heroism or some vague be-nicer enlightenment. Maybe a tougher challenge would be to name the Bill Murray movie where that doesn’t happen: Zombieland? That one where he played FDR as our nation’s most twinkling hand-job enthusiast?

“Whether his sleepy-eyed hero is saving New York (Ghostbusters 1 and 2), his platoon (Stripes), or something more like his own threadbare soul (Scrooged, Groundhog Day, almost all of his whiskery late-career indies), Murray movies mostly hold to template whether they’re playing in the cineplex or the arthouse.

“In the final moments of last year’s miserable St. Vincent, his cantankerous bastard drunk is actually hauled onstage at an elementary school assembly and treated by local parents to a standing ovation, all just for being himself — a guy who in real life you would detest. The wearying thing about this? In those scenes where he’s a prick, Murray can still be an unsavory delight. He’s quite funny as St. Vincent‘s cartoon monster, right up until the movie starts insisting that we have to believe in this guy, too, just the way an Adam Sandler picture would.

“But even that doesn’t hold true in most of the listless and haphazard Rock the Kasbah.”

The bottom line is that Kasbah doesn’t, in Schertsuhl’s eyes, work very well. Again, the review.

I cold-called Matt Drudge sometime in either late ’96 or very early ’97, when I had a desk at People magazine. I wanted to report something or other about the Drudge Report, which was fairly new at the time. We soon became friendly. Not friend-friends but on the phone from time to time, talking about stories, friendly enough. I introduced him to Julia Phillips, with whom I was also palling around at the time. They quickly took to each other and she wound up helping him write The Drudge Manifesto. He eventually moved to Florida and then a falling-out of some kind happened over an email I sent him in ’01, some kind of lefty slam of one of his righty articles…can’t recall.

But putting a JEFFREY WELLS link on the Drudge Report home page was good and generous on his part. I think it appeared sometime in the fall of ’98, or right after my Mr. Showbiz column appeared. Matt was a real friend from the get-go. One weekend I was having computer trouble at the People office, and Matt — at the time a Los Angeles resident — was enough of a pal to drive all the way over and take a look at whatever the trouble was. (People editor Jack Kelly was there also that weekend, lurking and bothered by the presence of a non-staffer in the inner sanctum.) I brought Matt with me to a somewhat early screening of Titanic in November of ’97, and I distinctly recall both of us feeling the feel as we walked back to our cars on the Paramount lot.

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Adam Driver‘s Kylo Ren knows exactly who he is and what he intends to do. But the good guys aren’t so sure. They got nothin’, ma, to live up to…but then it gradually comes to them. Clarity, purpose. At the very beginning an older woman’s voice says “who are you?,” and Daisy Ridley‘s Rey says “Ahmahwan.” For a moment there I was hearing Johnny Rivers sing “Ahmahwan, ahmahwan…the one they call the Seventh Son.” At least I understand Ridley at the end when she says, “The force is callin’ to you…just let it in.” And of course I got the middle line when she asks Harrison Ford‘s Han Solo about “those stories about what happened” and he says “it’s true…all of it.” John Boyega‘s Finn looks like an amateur rugby player who works in sanitation to pay the rent. Oscar Isaac‘s Poe Dameron seems smooth, resolute…what’s he yelling about? Have they aged Carrie Fisher? She looks like Grandma Moses.

“I think…I want to believe that the American people are holding up Donald Trump as they might their middle finger…because they’re badly served by the Establishment.” — Norman Lear to Jeanne Wolf, recorded or at least sent today.

I know that Love & Mercy‘s Paul Dano isn’t anyone’s idea of the leading contender for Best Supporting Actor, but in my heart he stands head and shoulders above everyone else — period.  If you don’t like it, tough. Dano sang “You Still Believe In Me” with Brian Wilson‘s band just a few days ago — you want me to discount that? If you’re not listening at least partly to your heart in mid-October you probably don’t have one. There’s lots of time to go pure handicapper. Yes, the top BSA contenders in HE’s Oscar Balloon (re-posted this morning) tell a slightly different story: Robert DeNiro, Joy (NYS); Mark Rylance, Bridge of Spies; Mark Ruffalo or Michael Keaton, Spotlight; Paul Dano, Love & Mercy (EP); Tom Hardy, The Revenant (NYS). Heel-nippers: Michael Shannon, 99 Homes, Freeheld (EP); Benicio Del Toro, Sicario; Idris Elba, Beasts of No Nation; Jason Segel, End of the Tour; Sylvester Stallone, Creed (NYS); Ryan Gosling, The Big Short (NYS).

A new Star Wars: The Force Awakens trailer pops on Monday Night Football tonight. I’m such a huge sports fan that I had to check a Time Warner channel chart to remember where ESPN and ESPN2 are. I’ve honestly never watched Monday Night Football in my entire life…not once. I can see the trailer later tonight. Know what I’m doing instead? Taking another gander at Charlie Kaufman‘s Anomalisa. Because I’m always a bit shagged and fagged during Telluride and I probably didn’t give it my full attention. 75% or 80% but not 100%. Early to mid morning is the best time of day to see a film. That’s when I’m seeing Burnt tomorrow — 10 am.

Scroll over to 2:25 for Eddie Murphy‘s Bill Cosby impersonation — its worth it. It actually begins around 2:55 pm. And yet by joking about him and making everyone laugh, Murphy is sorta kinda saying “Yeah, Bill fucked up bad with the serial rapin’ and all but he’s still, you know, Bill Cosby…still a funny guy, right?”

I’ve never even fantasized about choking anyone in my life…please. And I would certainly be appalled if I saw a plane passenger choking another for any reason at all. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t derive a certain…uhm, faint satisfaction from the Southwest choking story, which appeared today on all the news outlets: “A Southwest Airlines jet was forced to turn back and make an emergency landing at LAX Sunday night after a male passenger allegedly began choking a woman because she reclined her seat, witnesses said.” I’ve long advocated a much more restrained and civilized response to seat recliners, which is to “accidentally” spill scalding black coffee on their head and then profusely apologize and offer to get napkins. And then repeat if they won’t take the hint.

Towards the end of his largely positive review of Cary Fukunaga‘s Beasts of No Nation, Matt Zoller Seitz notes there are aspects of the film “that feel somehow untrustworthy, or at least not immediately defensible. And it’s a short hop from there to the realization that this is the second recent, highly acclaimed film about dark-skinned people not directed by an African or an African-American that has the word Beasts in the title.” In other words, Fukunaga and Beasts of the Southern Wild director Benh Zeitlin may have conveyed a strain of unconscious racism — dark skin, beastly behavior, collective shudder.

“After that,” Seitz goes on, “you might realize that the Western commercial cinema almost never tells stories of Africa, except to sentimentalize European colonialism (Out of Africa, An African Dream, The Ghost in the Darkness) or show the depths of depravity of which Africans are capable (Hotel Rwanda, The Last King of Scotland, this).” Nobody wants to defend films that sentimentalize European colonialism by painting flattering portraits of racist exploiters like Karen Blixen, but could Seitz be right about Rwanda, Scotland and Fukunaga’s film — did their makers focus on savage, bloodthirsty behavior on the part of certain African tribes and leaders to suggest there’s something unholy under their skin?

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There’s a certain kind of heartwarming relationship drama that is more or less based on the Heidi formula. It always involves an older grump and a younger person — a long-lost son or daughter, a neighbor, a grandson or granddaughter, a naive co-worker. I’ve noticed that the press-release synopsis for these films almost always end with the following: “The two find common ground and form an unlikely bond which changes their lives in unexpected ways.” (The latest usage arrived today in a press release for Arnold Grossman‘s The Boat Builder, which costars Christopher Lloyd, Jane Kaczmarek and David Lascher.) I’m talking about the press release writers more than the filmmakers. If I was hired to bang this stuff out, I would suggest to my employer that perhaps we might form an unlikely bond by resolving to avoid tiresome cliches, and that in so doing we might change our lives in unexpected ways.

From a 10.12 piece by The Nation‘s William Greider: “Fresh chatter among Washington insiders is not about whether the Republican Party will win in 2016 but whether it will survive. The fear that Donald Trump might actually become the GOP nominee is the ultimate nightmare. Some gleeful Democrats are rooting (sotto voce) for the Donald, though many expect he will self-destruct.

“Nevertheless, Republicans face a larger problem. The GOP finds itself trapped in a marriage that has not only gone bad but is coming apart in full public view. After five decades of shrewd strategy, the Republican coalition Richard Nixon put together in 1968 — welcoming the segregationist white South into the Party of Lincoln — is now devouring itself in ugly, spiteful recriminations.

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I’ve never had the slightest interest in seeing John Sturges‘ allegedly mediocre Underwater (’55), but the notion hit me after glancing at this Big Short poster. But it’s not streaming so I guess not. Sturges’ Bad Day at Black Rock, a highly respected noir with Spencer Tracy, also opened in ’55 and in fact only a month earlier than Underwater — obviously a straight paycheck gig for all concerned. Wiki anecdote: “For its world premiere, on January 10, 1955, Underwater was projected on a submerged movie screen at Silver Springs, Florida. Invited guests were encouraged to don aqualungs and bathing suits so that they could watch the picture while swimming.”