Day: June 29, 2016

Wikipage excerpt #1: “Chesley Burnett ‘Sully’ Sullenberger (born 1.23.51) is a retired airline captain and aviation safety consultant. He was hailed as a hero when he successfully landed US Airways Flight 1549 upon NYC’s Hudson River on 1.15.09, after the aircraft was disabled by striking a flock of Canadian geese during its initial climb out of LaGuardia Airport. All of the 155 passengers and crew aboard the aircraft survived.”

Wikipage excerpt #2: “In a 60 Minutes interview, Sully was quoted as saying that the moments before the crash were ‘the worst, sickening, pit-of-your-stomach, falling-through-the-floor feeling’ that he had ever experienced. Speaking with Katie Couric, Sully said: ‘One way of looking at this might be that for 42 years, I’ve been making small, regular deposits in this bank of experience, education and training. And on January 15 the balance was sufficient so that I could make a very large withdrawal.”

Wikipage excerpt #3: Sullenberger testified before the U.S. House of Representatives’s Subcommittee on Aviation of the Committee on Transportation & Infrastructure on February 24, 2009, that his salary had been cut by 40 percent, and that his pension, like most airline pensions, was terminated and replaced by a ‘PBGC’ guarantee worth only pennies on the dollar.

“Sullenberger cautioned that airlines were ‘under pressure to hire people with less experience. Their salaries are so low that people with greater experience will not take those jobs. We have some carriers that have hired some pilots with only a few hundred hours of experience…there’s simply no substitute for experience in terms of aviation safety.’ Sully also mentioned his pay cut in a 10.13.09 appearance on The Daily Show.”

This morning I was re-reading a nearly three-year-old review of Paul Greengrass‘s Captain Phillips, and I think I said a few things back then that were right on-target. Please review these excerpts and answer two questions — (1) did everyone go just a little too easy on Phillips? and (2) have you re-watched it any time over the last three years?

Excerpt #1: “It does an interesting thing by inserting a slight vein of sympathy or measured compassion by depicting the Somali hijackers as desperate, dirt-poor losers who are entirely outflanked and out of their league when they attempt a takeover of this scale. Because boiled down Phillips is about a team of well-funded, corporate-backed cargo-ship guys supported by the might of the U.S. military vs. four jerkoffs in a motorboat carrying guns.”

Excerpt #2: “Phillips is not quite up to par by the measure of Greengrass’s past works. It’s not as bracing or emotionally affecting as Greengrass’s United 93 or Bloody Sunday, his two previous dramatic recreations of melodramatic real-world events. Nor does it challenge the jolting tone and hardcore immediacy in Zero Dark Thirty, which was/is more gripping and intriguing as far as this sort of thing tends to go.”

Excerpt #3: “It’s not the filmmaking chops, which are always excellent with Greengrass at the helm. It’s not the integrity that clearly went into the making of it. It’s the material — the necessary emotional punch and dramatic juice simply aren’t there. I’m not saying Captain Phillips doesn’t cut it. It does and then some, but only as far as the material and those Greengrass moves allow.”

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Ben Younger‘s Bleed For This, the overcoming-tragedy story of middleweight boxing champ Vinny Paz, is obviously a movie-movie. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. All the hallmarks of a strong boxing flick including a flirting-with-nutso lead performance, given by Miles burn-it-down Teller (who also got into a bad auto accident in Whiplash). Bleed has already been shown to a select few, and will be screening for a few more this summer. I don’t know about a Telluride appearance but it’ll definitely play Toronto. Open Road will debut it commercially on 11.4.

I’m reading that Owen Wilson, Julia Roberts and Jacob Tremblay will costar in Wonder, an adaptation of the R.J. Palacio young adult novel. Except Palacio’s book isn’t aimed at teens but readers in the 8-to-12 range…Jesus. The story’s about Augie, a kid with a facial deformity going to public school for the first time, and of course dealing with all the loathsome shit that elementary school kids give to anyone odd or different. Problem #1: Any Y.A. adaptation gives me the willies. Problem #2: I’m all Tremblayed out from last year’s Room campaign…later. Problem #3: I’m not much of a fan of Owen playing dads. I want him to be that insincere Wedding Crashers man-child for the rest of his life. Problem #4: The director is Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower).

“At first glance I was a little afraid of David MacKenzie‘s Hell or High Water (CBS Films, 8.12), as it seemed B-movieish. It turned out to be not just a tight and forceful bank robbers-vs.-cops drama, but a wry and eloquent one also. It has guns and loot and getaway cars, but the real subject is the tapped-out hinterland economy and how it all seems to be about despair and downhill attitudes out there in shitkicker country. The wise, sometimes funny and sometimes solemn screenplay, written by Taylor Sheridan (Sicario), is the saving grace. Jeff Bridges, Chris Pine and Ben Foster (who’s looking a lot beefier than he did five or six years ago) bring their own moods, voices and energy currents.” — filed from Cannes on 5.17.16.

When Dwayne Johnson is starring in a film, you know there’s a decent chance that Johnson’s character will smash through a plate-glass window and drop three or four stories to the ground without injury. You know the film will be crude, submental, loud, never good enough. Every single film he’s starred or costarred in over the last 15 years has been the stuff that headaches are made of.

Be Cool (’05) was half decent, but Johnson’s casting in that F. Gary Gray film was a cosmic accident. Since then he’s shown an instinct for shit that few have even approached, much less rivalled.

Dwayne Johnson

Which is why I’m posting this — what other big star has a more bottom-of-the-barrel record? Whose name at the top of the poster is a more reliable assurance of a mind-numbing, kill-me-now experience? I’m asking.

None of this matters in terms of success and swagger, of course. The megaplexers seem to love the guy, and making shitty movies haven’t slowed him down yet. Johnson is worth between $125 and $160 million, and that figure will almost certainly double or triple or better before his string runs out.

Johnson is the new Schwarzenegger, but he’s totally ignored the game plan or pattern that Schwarzenegger followed by occasionally making smart, semi-entertaining, half-decent films — The Terminator (’84) Predator (’87), Total Recall (’90), Kindergarten Cop (’90), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (’91), True Lies (’94), Eraser (’96), Batman and Robin (’97), etc.

How many years did ago did the culture completely accept that anyone saying “ohmyGod” in any conversational context needed to be automatically written off, or at least take a serious hit on the NASDAQ? I’ve been flinching at OMG for at least a decade, but when Brad Pitt‘s health-club trainer said the magic words eight years ago in Joel and Ethan Coen‘s Burn After Reading, I figured “okay, now the outre factor has been explicitly stated in a mainstream film — now the awareness is unavoidable.” But under-educated, slow-on-the-pickup women still use it without blinking an eye. I heard it last night at a party and I went “okay, that’s it…this person’s future is laid out…she might be happy or loaded but she’ll never be accepted by people in the cool, cultured realm.”

I’m as much of a sucker for the Warren Oates mythology as the next guy. I just rented Race With The Devil for $3.99, and I would have never gone there were it not for the prospect of Oates’ supporting performance. Last month I bought a Bluray of John Milius‘s Dillinger because I’d never seen it and felt it was time to finally savor Oates’ gangster swagger. But man, what a glum, soiled attitude he had — always a couple of days away from the last shower, resentful, too grubby and cigar-smelly to get laid except in Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia, small-minded, always bitching or seething.

And yet…this is the thing that anchors many of Oates’ performances…he always suggested a kind of decency and even tenderness under the crust.

I understand the argument that The Wild Bunch isn’t “a Warren Oates film.” But when I think of that 1969 groundbreaker I always go right to the screaming, mortally-wounded Oates firing that machine gun at the very end. He all but owns that Sam Peckinpah film, and yet the geniuses at the Film Society of Lincoln Center have decided not to include Bunch in “Warren Oates: Hired Hand,” a retrospective that runs from 7.1 through 7.7.

I can imagine standing in the lobby and casually eyeballing the indifferently dressed, over-50 film bums that will attend. If LexG lived in the New York area (what a thought!) he’d be among them.

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