Day: June 27, 2016

The following description of Jeff Goldblum‘s darting, in-and-out, constantly self-conversing way of being or behaving, written by New Yorker critic Anthony Lane and included in his review of Independence Day: Resurgence, may be the most on-target description of the guy I’ve ever read.

“I will watch Goldblum in anything,” Lane begins.  “That stop-start delivery, all ums and hums, combines with his smile — so winning, yet so quick to die — and his buggy eyes to suggest a soul both hyper and hazed over.  You never quite know how he will respond to any predicament, nor, you sometimes feel, does he.”

Every good film ever made has conveyed the same thing to viewers everywhere, which is that the key creatives made it for reasons above and beyond wanting to get paid and further their careers. They made it because they’d either lucked into or developed something really good, and it really turned them on to work their tails off and assemble it just so and put it on a screen. I don’t have a hint of an inkling of a glimmer of that notion from this Rogue One trailer. All I’m detecting is Disney’s desire to milk that Star Wars cow big-time. Couple that with (a) the presence of Ben Mendehlson and (b) director Gareth Edwards telling EW ‘s Anthony Breznican that he wanted to “pinch” himself when he met James Earl Jones and I’m left feeling…what’s the term, dispirited?

Aftermath: There was incessant wailing yesterday (Monday, 6.27) from fanbabies about my having posted a Rogue One fan-created trailer rather than the official one. (One of them was a Baby Huey-sized critic from a site I won’t mention.) I didn’t think it mattered that much as the vast majority of the fan trailer was/is from Rogue One — there was no ambiguity. And I didn’t “screw up.” I just posted it because I fucking felt like it. But God, Jesus, fine. I didn’t get around to switching it during my Vegas/McCarran stopover late last night, but I’ve done it now. Anal much?

“I didn’t see Knight of Cups when it came out because, I told friends, all I needed to do was close my eyes and imagine it. I already knew it by heart. But time and VOD and an ex-critic’s sense of obligation forced my hand and tonight I watched it. All of it. I can be as much of a cinema snob as the next fellow. I even have soft spots in my heart for Brackage and Tarr. But really?” — Paul Schrader, Facebook-posted on 6.25.16.

Schrader responder: “The film reminds me of what Brando did when he parodied himself in The Freshman. He was saying ‘fuck you, I never cared about any of it’.” [Wells intervention: Which is a complete lie. Of course Brando cared during his Streetcar-to-Waterfront heyday & again during his early ’70s comeback period (Godfather, Tango) — he began to lose interest after that but he was obviously invested before.]

“It’s easy to forget that Days of Heaven was considered experimental and non-linear and people reacted to it by saying it was incredibly boring to sit through.” [Wells intervention: No, it wasn’t. Not by people with brain matter. It was generally regarded as a close relation of Badlands, lovers on the run fused with that dreamy, pastoral thing. Anyone who called Days of Heaven “boring” when it opened in ’78 was immediately discredited.]

“Similarly 50 years from now people will consider Knight of Cups to be supremely narrative and not experimental in the least.” Wells interjection: Bullshit.

“Malick is also saying ‘fuck you’ to the people who’ve been rejecting him for decades.” Wells interjection: “Decades”? The Great Malick Rejection began with To The Wonder and reached gale force in the wake of Knight of Cups.

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I never received invite #1 to see Steven C. Miller‘s Marauders, which of course is opening on Friday (7.1). The Falco guys invited me to a NYC screening, but no LA-based publicist has invited me to jack squat. Has the premiere already happened? Is there a screening this week? I feel concerned about the participation of Dave Bautista. I feel deflated when I hear/see women weeping during a bank-robbery sequence. I feel conflicted in general. In your hands…or not.

The Hillarybots (i.e., a crowd vividly repped by Sasha Stone) who keep saying it’s time for Bernie to persuade his followers to vote for Hillary have some kind of entitlement complex — “She won the most delegates so shut up, bow down and get in line.” Hold on, hold on — it’s on Hillary to bring these people in, not Bernie. But one way to totally smother enthusiasm among the Berniebots will be for Hillary to choose Tim Kaine, a go-along Virginia Senator and liberal-humanist establishment politician, as her vp. Hillary will never be a levitational candidate, but Hillary + Kaine….good God, welcome to the ’90s. 

“Curiosity is the lifeblood of creativity, and when we lose curiosity I think we lose, entirely, inventiveness and we start becoming old.” — Guillermo del Toro. On August 1st a portion of GDT’s “Bleak House,” which I was given a tour of in December 2012, will be on view for nearly four months (8.1 thru 11.27) at a Los Angeles County Museum presentation called “Guillermo del Toro: At Home With Monsters.” The show will present 450 objects, or roughly 10% of GDT’s entire collection.

Actors starring in smaller-scale films tend to seem recognizably human, but when they appear in blockbusters they exude a narcotized aura, as if their organs (including their brain) have begun to shut down. So it is with Chris Pine. I realized he was an interesting actor seven years ago when I saw him in a Geffen Playhouse production of Farragut North. Pine was at least semi-engaging in Unstoppable, Z for Zachariah and Into The Woods, and his performance as a Texas bank robber in David Mackenzie‘s Hell or High Water, which I saw in Cannes last month, may be his best yet. But mostly Pine makes big-budget CG action crap, and movies like this send me into the cave of hell. I will do nothing but submit and suffer when I see Star Trek Beyond, all so I can go home and explain how it feels to nod off from a lack of oxygen, and how many times I retreated to the lobby to check messages, etc.