Month: July 2016

Wives are always giving their husbands shit about something. You’re insensitive, you always wait too long to take out the garbage, you’re too randy, you’re too work-obsessed, you’re not randy enough, you could be a better provider, you don’t spend enough time with the kids, you lack sensitivity, you’re flabby. But wait until you hear the complaints in The Infiltrator, an ’80s cocaine-trade thriller about a real-life customs agent Robert Mazur (Bryan Cranston) who infiltrated the ranks of Pablo Escobar associates by pretending to be a flashy money launderer. They’re lulus.

They can be summed up as (a) “You put too much gusto into your impersonations when drug dealers are around” and (b) “The agent who’s pretending to be your wife in the field is too hot, and that’s entirely your fault.”

The already famous waiter-brutalizing scene in The Infiltrator — (l. to r.) Pablo Escobar associate, waiter getting head pushed into birthday cake, Robert Mazur (Bryan Cranston), Mazur’s rock-stupid wife Evelyn (Juliet Aubrey).

The gripes are on the idiotic side, but that’s…I was about to say irrational complaints are to be expected in any marriage but let’s be fair and balanced. And yet the fact is that Cranston absorbs some highly negative criticism from Juliet Aubrey (as Mazur’s wife Evelyn) — late in the second act, early in the third — that is forehead-slapping dumb.

93% of the film is about Cranston’s Mazur pretending to be slippery financier Bob Musella. If Mazur’s performance isn’t note-perfect the drug barons will smell a rat and kill him. Surely he’s told his wife this basic fact, and surely she understands that if he runs into one of these guys unexpectedly, he has to instantly and convincingly become “Bob Musella.” Obviously.

And yet when Mazur and his wife are out celebrating their anniversary at a nice restaurant, one of the Escobar guys strolls over and says “hey!”, and so Mazur, naturally, goes right into his act. And soon after he angrily chews out a waiter for serving a wedding anniversary cake (which in fact he had ordered) and not a birthday cake. Then he grabs the waiter and shoves his head into the cake. If the Escobar guy had suspected Mazur/Musella had, in fact, ordered an anniversary cake, the jig would be totally up.

Read more

“As [Donald] Trump prepares to claim the Republican nomination for president this week, he and his supporters are sure to laud his main calling card — his long, operatic record as a swaggering business tycoon. And without question, there will be successes aplenty to highlight, from his gleaming golden high-rises to his well-regarded golf resorts, hit TV shows and best-selling books.

“But a survey of Mr. Trump’s four decades of wheeling and dealing also reveals an equally operatic record of dissembling and deception, some of it unabashedly confirmed by Mr. Trump himself, who nearly 30 years ago first extolled the business advantages of ‘truthful hyperbole.’ Indeed, based on the mountain of court records churned out over the span of Mr. Trump’s career, it is hard to find a project he touched that did not produce allegations of broken promises, blatant lies or outright fraud.” — paragraphs #3 and #4 from David Barstow’s 7.16 N.Y. Times piece, “Donald Trump’s Deals Rely on Being Creative With the Truth.”

Today’s Baton Rouge cop killings (three policemen dead, one shooter killed) looks to everyone like a Dallas copycat thing. It feels to me like yet another indication that we’re back in the spring and summer of 1968. Obviously awful in human/social/political terms, but now we’re faced with the possibility (God forbid) of still more sniper cop-killings in the future, subsequent mayhem inspired by the Dallas shootings and now today’s.

In short, is this an indication of a malevolent hate-trend (if that’s not too insipid or shallow of a usage) or flash-fire, a version of an arguably similar self-destructive martyrdom that we’ve seen in the Middle East time and again. Or is it just bad luck for everyone that two guys (one in Dallas, another in Baton Rouge) had the same idea? God help us all if this keeps happening.

1:38 pm Pacific: CBS News is reporting that the shooter has been identified as a black male named Gavin Eugene Long of Kansas City, Missouri. He was born on July 17, 1987.

I have a peripheral thought (and I’m mentioning this with the usual presumption that the Twitter dogs are going to bark and howl): how might these cop killings affect the reception to Nate Parker‘s The Birth of a Nation (Fox Searchlight, 10.7)?

Read more

Neon Demon without the Refn or the cannibalism? Right away I suspected that Mads Matthiesen‘s The Model (Brainstorm Media, 8.12 theatrically — 9.6 iTiunes/VOD) would be more palatable, more grounded, my kind of thing. Set within the Paris fashion realm, and apparently some kind of bad-boyfriend tale. Maria Palm is the new Elle Fanning; Deadpool‘s Ed Skrein plays the shithead. Incidentally: Looking-to-make-it actors used to adopt screen names if their given name was tongue-twisty or creepy sounding. If your last name was Skrein, wouldn’t you do something about it?

I know that disconnecting is a path to a better, more spiritual life, but I can’t do that. More to the point, I honestly don’t want to. What am I gonna do with “time off”? This is the happiest period of my life, and all due to my daily 14-hour enslavement to Hollywood Elsewhere. HE is the fountain that brings joy and security and washes all wounds. You can call that a no-life life, but it doesn’t feel that way. Really. And it’s not like I never disengage. I have hiking time, hanging-with-friends time, cat love at odd hours, weekend biking, Pavillions time, West Hollywood Wonton-slurping time, evening screening time, Bluray time, motorcycling-along-Mulholland time plus the travel, the festivals, New York, Europe, Vietnam, etc. Plus I get lucky once in a while. Sorry.

I was kidding, of course, about Ben Mendelsohn breaking out the Marlboros and working up a good, greasy sweat for his Rogue One performance as the cruel but brilliant Orson Krennic, an Imperial Military Director obsessed with the completion of the Death Star project. I know the scheme — Imperial villains are always cool, crisp fellows, and only members of the rebellion are allowed to perspire. But Mendelsohn needs to sweat and chain smoke. It’s who he is, what keeps him going. If fortune smiles Mendelsohn will one day be cast in an HBO miniseries as Ben Sweat, a pervy Southern plantation owner and the grand-nephew of Ben Quick, the Long Hot Summer barn-burner played by Paul Newman.

Criterion’s Bluray of Terrence Malick‘s The New World pops on 7.26. My copy arrived yesterday. Three versions — a 172-minute extended cut, the 150-minute “first cut” (which I saw in a New Line screening room and which was given a brief theatrical run) and the 135-minute theatrical version that New Line insisted upon because the 150 struck some as overly ponderous. I’ll be doing the 172, of course. A serious commitment.

Posted on 8.26.09: “I never felt that the story told by Terrence Malick‘s The New World really worked, particularly the last third, but I’ve always been in love with the primeval splendor of the thing. During those first two thirds, The New World is a truly rare animal and movie like no other…a feast of intuitive wow-level naturalism that feels as fresh and vitally alive as newly-sprouted flora.

“Despite the disappointing last-third The New World is one of the greatest dive-in-and-live-in-the-realm movies of all time. A movie clearly uninterested for the most part in telling a gripping story but one that atmospherically mesmerizes in such a way that it feels like someone put mescaline in your tea.

Read more

Here’s the shakedown on the missing headphone jack on the bottom of the iPhone 7, which a just-leaked video has apparently revealed. Apple is looking to force iPhone users to buy its special new headphones, which will plug into the traditional charging receptacle at the phone’s bottom-center. Everyone knew some kind of (probably pricey) Apple headphones would be coming when they bought Dr. Dre’s Beats headphones in May 2014. So that’s the plan — eliminate the jack, force millions to buy special Apple headphones. Third-party entrepeneurs will sidestep this, of course.

The Turkish military coup collapsed yesterday (or last night), and followers of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan took to the streets to celebrate, but not in the usual rowdy, haphazard, catch-as-catch-can way but almost theatrically. Their slogan-chanting reminded me of the pro-Peron crowds marching through the streets of Buenos Aires in Alan Parker‘s Evita. In the beginning and end of this video, I mean.

From 7.16 N.Y. Times editorial about the downish after-effects of Erdogan’s victory:

“It was ironic that, as members of the military launched a coup against him on Friday night, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey resorted to guerrilla media tactics — broadcasting via the FaceTime app on his cellphone — to urge Turks to oppose the plotters. Mr. Erdogan has been no friend to free expression, ruthlessly asserting control over the media and restricting human rights and free speech. Yet thousands responded to his appeal, turning back the rebels and demonstrating that they still value democracy even if Mr. Erdogan has eroded its meaning.

Read more

Mick Jagger, 72, and 29-year-old American girlfriend Melanie Hamrick will be welcoming a child next year. A 7.15 piece by The Telegraph‘s Patrick Foster reports that “friends of the star said yesterday that he is unlikely to move in with Hamrick, whose pregnancy was said to have been unplanned.”

If this pregnancy was “unplanned” I’m a monkey’s uncle. I’m presuming one of two possibilities: (1) Hamrick, possibly sensing a lull in the relationship and wanting to fortify things, “accidentally” got pregnant and subsequently declared it was time for motherhood, or (2) sensing the same lull, she told Jagger that things can’t just drift along and that she wanted something joyous and lasting out of their union or else, in response to which Jagger, after a couple of attempts at avoidance, relented.

Read more

People aren’t that different, that particular. They tend to fall into groups, genres, patterns, familiar behaviors. The only times I’ve been taken aback by people with truly unexpected or surprising “never heard that before” viewpoints is when I’m talking to (a) people in pajamas who’ve recently escaped from insane asylums or (b) brilliant iconoclasts, fickle neurotics, spirited crazies, X-factor creatives, etc. Most of whom tend to live in the same cities and even hang with each other at the same bars and cafes.

Produced in part by James L. Brooks (whose name used to mean a hell of a lot in the ’90s), The Edge of Seventeen (STX, 9.30) seems sharper and more angsty than your typical “miserable 17 year old girl trying to find a semblance of peace or satisfaction” dramedy. Directed and written by Kelly Fremon, pic costars Hailee Steinfeld (who’s now actually 19!), Haley Lu Richardson, Blake Jenner, Woody Harrelson and Kyra Sedgwick. Harrelson’s teacher character telling Steinfeld’s that “you need to watch out for run-on sentences” is what sold me.