Month: March 2016

A couple of weeks ago I noted that the almost uniformly positive reactions to Jeff Nichols‘ Midnight Special were due to the fact that (a) critics have decided Nichols is one of the auteurist good guys and a likable one at that, and therefore (b) any semi-coherent film he makes gets at least a pass if not a thumbs-up. The same thing seems to be happening now with Richard Linklater and his latest film, Everybody Wants Some!, which currently has ratings of 97% and 84% on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, respectively.

It’s not that critics are being too kind (although I think some of them are) but most are not really levelling with their readers. Which is why people don’t trust them. They know/sense that critics live in their own elite realm, and that they always seem to write about this realm (self-regarding, navel-gazing) rather than the one inhabited by ticket-buyers.

There’s obviously nothing wrong with recognizing and celebrating Linklater’s exceptional vision and extraordinary focus, but at the same time you have to at least mention that Everybody Wants Some! doesn’t tell anything close to a story, and that there are millions of Joe Popcorns out there who go to movies expecting some kind of narrative with a beginning, a middle and an end. It’s fine to say “this is better than the usual-usual, and it’s so special that it doesn’t need to tell a story”…no problem with that. But you have to at least admit that the none-too-hips are going to have a problem with a movie that ignores the playbook and makes up its own whimsical music as it goes along.

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 The good news is that Richard Linklater‘s Everybody Wants Some! is cool, smart, fresh, atypical. It’s a period campus ramble-on, set in the climes of Texas State University in 1980, and more particularly a situational thing that feels enjoyably realistic and familiar in at least a couple of hundred different ways.

The bad news is that it’s mostly about a bunch of baseball-star jocks sharing a fraternity house, and athletes, I feel, are always a drag to hang with because they’re mostly a bunch of pea-brains — hormonal, relentlessly competitive, single-minded, somewhat conservative, egoistic, and lacking in curiosity. I’m sorry but I’ve been around the track a couple of hundred times and that’s my opinion.

Then again Everybody Wants Some! is a refreshingly unusual jocks-on-a-college-campus comedy, which is to say something quieter and more oblique and introspective and curious about what makes this or that guy tick. It spends a whole lotta time answering that last line of inquiry.

Yes, it’s frequently amusing but I’m not even sure if it’s fair to use the word “comedy.” It dispenses a steady torrent of little laugh sliders that make you chortle or grin or guffaw, but it never strains to be “funny.” Either you’re paying attention and enjoying the observational servings or you’re not.

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Susan Sarandon feels that there’s really no comparison between Bernie Sanders, whose candidacy is some kind of heaven-sent, once-in-a-lifetime event, and the profoundly sullied, corporate-moneyed Hillary Clinton, who’s “not on the right side” of things. Sarandon’s assessment is more correct than not and I’ll never be ecstatic about Clinton’s candidacy, but I’m definitely voting for her. Put it this way — it’ll be nihilistic to not vote against Trump winning. Not a happy situation, agreed. Sarandon may not admit this, but if Bernie were to capture the Democratic nomination (which can’t possibly happen) he would be George McGovern in ’72.

Doug Tirola‘s Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead will stream eventually, but the Magnolia Bluray comes out of the gate on 4.19. I plugged and plugged this doc for months after catching it at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival. “Quite the cultural landmark…about something that nearly everyone understands or identifies with to some degree, which is the seed and birth of anarchic, counter-conventional, ultra-outlandish comedy, which everybody takes for granted today but was a whole new thing when it popped out of the National Lampoon in 1970.”

I wasn’t paying much attention when Chuck Todd’s MTP Daily, a daily spinoff of Meet The Press, popped last September. But editors of NewscastStudio, a trade publication for creative pros working in television, were, and I’m genuinely surprised that they didn’t acknowledge that the Capitol building logo design is a direct lift from Saul Bass‘s art for Otto Preminger‘s Advise and Consent (’62). NewscastStudo quote, posted on 9.28.15: “The show uses a very animated style for its graphics, likening it to ‘Schoolhouse Rock!’ The look, a vast departure from the Sunday show, brings a fun and playful patriotism to MTP Daily.”

If there was a semblance of a mature, grown-up attitude within Donald Trump and particularly his campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, the March 8th arm-grabbing incident between Lewandowski and former Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields would have gone away weeks ago. All Lewandowski had to do was (a) apologize for being overzealous in trying to shield Trump and (b) offer to cover Fields’ medical costs and traumatic discomfort expenses — which is almost a silly notion considering that all Fields received was a very slight arm bruise. But Trump/Melandowski weren’t mature and sensible in their responses to the incident, denying and dismissing and downplaying, and now Melandowski has been arrested in Jupiter, Florida, for battery. The new video tells the tale. Melandowski responded to Fields grabbing Trump’s arm like a thuggish bodyguard with an alcohol problem. Trump said today that he’s standing by Melandowski because he doesn’t want the guy’s life to be “destroyed” by this incident, which I understand on a certain level. But immature blustery behavior creates and perpetrates its own karma.

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If you have any kind of half-decent film on your hands, the standard approach is to start screening it for elite critic-journos a few weeks beforehand, and then show it to the all-media crowd nine or ten days in advance of the commercial opening. For whatever reason Paramount dismissed this strategy when it came to Richard Linklater‘s Everybody Wants Some, which opens tomorrow (3.30) but technically starts showing tonight for Landmark ticket-buyers. The Everybody all-media also happens tonight at the Paramount lot, and before this there was only the South by Southwest debut. The usual routine of showing it to choice critical elites didn’t happen here. (A friend who always gets early-bird invites was only invited to tonight’s all-media.)

This morning a producer friend told me about how Jack Nicholson saved Jim Harrison‘s financial ass in 1978 with a loan of $15K. The late author-poet (whose recent death prompted yesterday’s post) became friendly with Nicholson through novelist and screenwriter Thomas McGuane, who had written The Missouri Breaks (’76) . McGuane and Harrison had met from their mutual base of Livingston, Montana. Harrison published three books in the early to mid ’70s — “Wolf: A False Memoir” (’71), “A Good Day to Die” (’73) and “Farmer” (’76), but the income from these works was negligible and by ’78 he was “broke and all but starving,” the producer relates. Harrison was working on “Legends of the Fall” (which was actually three novellas — “Revenge,” “The Man Who Gave Up His Name” and “Legends of the Fall”) and so Nicholson, advised by McGuane of Harrison’s desperate situation, stepped in with the $15K, which gave Harrison enough breathing room to finish. “Fall” was published in ’79. It became Harrison’s biggest success of his life at the time, and he lived more or less comfortably after that. Here, by the way, is a nice Outside piece on Harrison (“The Last Lion,” published on 8.31.11) by Tom Bissell. Curious milestone: 13 months from now Nicholson will turn 80. Salud!

Los Angeles-based actors whose careers have briefly surged and then receded based on the impact of their film and TV work know what it’s like to have had a fairly glorious peak period and then more or less treaded water (i.e., struggled, hung in there, did the dog paddle) for the rest of their lives. But at least they had that peak period, which few of us have tasted, to look back upon with pride and to some extent dine out on for decades. Not a bad life, all in all. And in the late Patty Duke‘s case, a robust and healthy one as far as it went.

I’m not saying Duke flatlined after the one-two surge of (a) playing Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker (both on Broadway and in the 1962 film version opposite Anne Bancroft‘s Annie Sullivan, and both times under director Arthur Penn) and (b) playing plucky twins on ABC’s The Patty Duke Show (September ’63 to April ’66). But after that period her career never caught the big wind again. And yet those seven years (’59 to ’66) were phenomenal.

Duke, who died this morning from a ruptured intestine, was a lifelong bipolar sufferer/grappler, and she was ruled, abused and financially exploited as a teenager by unscrupulous talent managers John and Ethel Ross until she turned 18 in December ’64. She wasn’t diagnosed and specifically treated for her illness until 1982. Duke became the first celebrity to go public with her bipolar disorder diagnosis, largely through her autobiography, Call Me Anna, which popped in ’87.

The general view is that Duke’s campy performance as the addicted and trampy Neely O’Hara in Valley of the Dolls (’67) was a temporary career killer at the time. Her Wiki bio says she also did herself no favors four years later when she rambled and slurred her words while accepting an Emmy award for her performance in a made-for-TV movie, My Sweet Charlie.

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As a longtime, fully confirmed Zak Snyder hater, I attended a Monday night 3D screening of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice at the Grove with negative expectations. I expected to experience irritation, pain, pique, torment and physical nausea all through it. And most of the film delivered on this stuff, for sure. It’s a tedious, dirge-like thing. The brownish-downish mood from start to finish is really like a virus of some kind. But a few moments struck me favorably, believe it or not, and one in particular — the scene in which Henry Cavill‘s Superman saves the little Mexican girl and is then surrounded and worshipped by a crowd, some wearing Day of the Dead facial makeup — actually melted me down. I was reminded of that scene in Treasure of Sierra Madre when Walter Huston is worshipped for having saved a little boy’s life. There’s another shot of a stranded woman reaching upwards toward a levitating Superman — a shot that reminded me of The Leftovers — that added to a feeling about Superman being a kind of religious figure, which other Superman flicks have run with but never matching the effect that Snyder delivers here.

And I was again won over by Cavill — something about his vibe, even in a role as simplistic as this one, is just easy and embracable. And it’s true — Gal Gadot really does steal her scenes and generally wake the film up. And there’s a passage or two when Hans Zimmer‘s heavy score really turned me around and rocked my ribcage. The Doomsday monster was just another ridiculous Hulk-like Extremo…get the fuck outta here.  But Jesse Eisenberg‘s Lex Luthor is quite spirited and a bit of fun (I was relieved that he doesn’t shave his head until the very end), and Jeremy Irons‘ Alfred is a lot cooler than Michael Caine‘s, no offense. And I have to admit that Snyder really knows how to stage a funeral scene…actually a double funeral. But the last shot in the film — bits of dirt briefly levitating on top of a plain wood coffin — is shameless. If you’re going to kill someone off and bring his long arc to an end, stick to it already. Don’t waffle, don’t fiddle-faddle — play your death card straight.

This is a dated topic, but I just got back into things today. Early this morning I wrote the following about Bernie Sanders and the little bird on Facebook: “I honestly believe that the little Bernie bird was ‘a sign from God.’ Do I believe in a moralistic rooting-for-humanity God? No, of course not. So what am I saying? I’m saying that no matter what you believe or don’t believe in, that little bird was some kind of a spirit vessel or symbol of goodness, compassion, serendipity and bonne chance. I think the bird sensed the right kind of vibes. There’s zero chance this would’ve happened at a Trump or Cruz rally. Here’s the Facebook thread.

Criterion’s Odd Man Out Bluray popped last April. “This is one of the saddest and most tragic noirs of all time. I saw it a couple of times on laser disc in the mid ’90s, and I have indelible memories of a sweating, barely conscious James Mason (as IRA combatant Johnny McQueen) and of constantly falling snow in a darkened Belfast. The exquisite photography is by Robert Krasker, who also shot Reed’s The Third Man. The harbor finale with Mason and Kathleen Ryan leaning against the iron fence with the cops slowly approaching in the snow…wow. And Robert Newton‘s performance as the gesticulating alcoholic painter…forget about it.” — from a 5.22.12 HE post.

Odd Man Out was Mason’s breakout film. What isn’t widely known is that he’d been acting since 1933 or thereabouts, when he turned 24. He was 37 — no spring chicken — when Reed’s film was shot in mid ’46.