Month: July 2016

The latest polling shapshot, provided by New York Times/CBS News, shows that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are now more or less even. The poll showed that while Clinton avoided an F.B.I. indictment for her “extremely careless” email behavior while Secretary of State, this makes no difference with voters. They don’t like her “with a large and growing majority saying she’s not honest and not trustworthy,” says the Times piece.

“Get the stretcher, nurse, and a strong sedative. Voters are saying that the most ludicrously unqualified candidate for President in the history of the U.S. is no worse or no better than Hillary Clinton, which indicates she could actually, theoretically lose. This possibility is just starting to sink in for the first time, and she’s going into shock.”

No question about it — Hillary is a wounded candidate. She’s on the ropes. She’s everything that angry voters don’t want is this turbulent election season. We’re in one of those “throw the bums out” moments, and roughly half the electorate wants to give her the heave-ho.

But if Hillary chooses Elizabeth Warren as her vp running mate, all the mud will start to fall away. Warren could be Hillary’s great cleanser or spot-remover. Tim Kaine is an amiable go-along guy, a career politician, a liberal pudgeball with thinning hair and a basketball-shaped head. His presence on the ticket says “more of the same.” And you know Kaine’s presence won’t wash away or dilute Hillary’s sins. But Warren’s could.

Read more

Do you think the words “rules” and “apply” are mentioned often enough in this spritzy new trailer for Warren Beatty‘s Rules Don’t Apply (20th Century Fox, 11.23)? As well as “crazy”? It doesn’t feel so much like a “dramedy”, which is what Beatty has been calling it, as a restrained screwball comedy, like something Carole Lombard, James Stewart and John Barrymore might have made in the late ’30s. The background music (a little like “Tequila”) reflects the late ’50s era in which the story unfolds, but Beatty also uses some ’40s big-band swing. Either way a tone of old-school, high-strung wackiness has obviously been threaded in. Which is cool.

The audience will skew somewhat older, of course — forget the Millenials — and because of the classic screwball-farcical tone I’m presuming that the know-it-alls will mutter that it’s not audacious, deep or heavy enough to warrant award-season chatter. Ask any seasoned Oscar campaigner — funny stuff always gets elbowed aside.

But the story drops anchor in the third act, I can tell you. I know what happens chapter and verse, and just hearing it got to me. And it is about values and the things that endure. And it is doing something unusual — arguably novel in the year 2016 — and that at the very least warrants attention and respect.

My strongly held view is that the best way to ignite positive chatter about Rules Don’t Apply and thereby launch it with an attractive narrative is to take it to the Telluride Film Festival. Not Toronto, mind, but friendly, cozy, convivial Telluride, where Beatty can roam around and work the crowd.

Read more

I was wondering this morning when I’d be hearing about screenings of John Lee Hancock‘s The Founder, which until today was slated to open on 8.5. Now The Weinstein Co. has bumped it to December. The drama about McDonald’s honcho Ray Kroc (played by Michael Keaton) is slated to open limited on 12.16 and wide on 1.20. That’s an award-season slot, of course, but I can’t quite accept it in that reagrd. I can’t erase the fact that the Weinsteiners were cool with August 5th for months and months. But I guess I can re-orient my thinking. (When the 8.5 date was announced Harvey Weinstein said that he hoped it would prove that “award-caliber movies [can] open any time of year and be successful.”) The Founder was originally slated to open 11.25.15.

One thing you’ll never see explored or even mentioned in any historical film is the level of hygiene available to the main characters. I realize that nobody wants to hear this stuff, but can I at least write one short article about it? We’re all so accustomed to living in total hygienic splendor (huge bathrooms, dynamic showers, soaps, deodorants, perfumes, facial cremes, hair gels) that we tend to forget or ignore how unclean and smelly things were in the old days, especially before the 19th Century.

It follows that historical films, none of which have ever been captured or projected with Aromarama-like technology, have never gotten into this. Until fairly recently (i.e., before intensely realistic pics like The New World and The Revenant) everyone in every historical film from whatever century has always been presented as looking relatively clean and well-groomed, and by inference agreeable smelling. But the fact is that most people stunk like animals in centuries past.

As I mentioned four years ago there wasn’t even a White House bathtub with hot running water until Abraham Lincoln’s first term. And when you’re talking about ancient Rome and especially Judea, which will be represented a few weeks hence in Timur Bekmambetov‘s Ben-Hur, forget it.

By our standards almost everyone except the wealthiest ancient Romans almost certainly had odor issues to varying degrees. The other day while sitting in an outdoor food court I noticed that a young guy sitting nearby (I’m not allowed to mention his ethnic heritage) smelled pretty gamey, and so I moved four or five tables away. If I was time-machined back to ancient Rome or Judea the stench would probably give me a heart attack.

Read more

A new Quinnipiac Poll has Donald Trump ahead of Hillary Clinton in Florida and Pennsylvania, which of course is all about the FBI saying she lied to some extent about the email thing. Maureen Dowd‘s latest N.Y. Times column summed up the general lament: “It says a lot about our relationship with Hillary Clinton that she seems well on her way to becoming Madam President because she’s not getting indicted. If she were still at the State Department, she could be getting fired for being, as the F.B.I. director told Congress, ‘extremely careless’ with top-secret information. Instead, she’s on a glide path to a big promotion. And that’s the corkscrew way things go with the Clintons, who are staying true to their reputation as the Tom and Daisy Buchanan of American politics. Their vast carelessness drags down everyone around them, but they persevere, and even thrive.” If on top of this she picks no-pizazz Tim Kaine as her vp, her stock will drop even lower. I personally will be crestfallen. Warren, Warren, Warren…for God’s sake, wake up.

Elizabeth Wood‘s White Girl (Film Rise/Netflix, 8.26) is one of those Sundance ’16 films that I was half-taken by but didn’t review because I didn’t feel strongly enough one way or the other. Set in New York City and “loosely” based on Wood’s own experience, the selling point is a kind of Larry Clark-like focus on hot sex scenes (rooftop and nightclub fucking, an office blowjob), drugs and danger. Leah (Morgan Saylor), a newly-arrived student, is portrayed as a naive and careless fuck bunny. The story is mainly about how her involvement with a drug-dealing Latino dude from Queens (Brian Marc) gradually leads to darker and darker intrigues after he’s busted and imprisoned. She tries to save him by selling a stash of cocaine, and then hiring a savvy attorney (Chris Noth, whom she has to eventually fuck, of course). But things are never that simple. A scary fat-fuck dealer (Adrian Martinez) wants his dope back but of course Leah has to play it sloppy and stupid. She stumbles from one Fellini Satyricon situation to another. Pic is well assembled as far as it goes, and props to Saylor for showing no restraint in playing a mentally challenged protagonist. But as I watched this in the Park City Library I was telling myself “this actually isn’t bad but it’s primarily exploitation…when it opens LexG will be there with bells on.”

A young boy (Lewis MacDougall) with a sick mom (Felicity Jones) gets to know a friendly tree giant whom no one else can see, at least not initially. The giant, of course, is a metaphor for the fervent imagination of a boy coping with grief and the cruel pestering of classmates. Will the audience that said “no” to The BFG say “yes” to A Monster Calls? At least the tree giant doesn’t resemble the creepy Mark Rylance. 

Patrick Ness‘s 2011 novel is a respected fable about a kid’s internal life. The film’s just-released trailer suggests once again that a subtle approach hasn’t been chosen. Clearly aimed at the family idiot trade.

As I noted last April, A Monster Calls seems to lack the quiet spookiness of Guillermo del Toro‘s somewhat similar Pan’s Labyrinth, and seems a far cry from the the carefully layered, exquisitely underplayed The Orphanage (’07), which is Bayona’s masterpiece.

Read more

Will you listen to this scumbag? Christie, I mean. Trotting out Richard Nixon‘s 1968 message of “lawnorder” — ordinary, law-abiding citizens need to be kept safe from the unruly element within (read: Black Lives Matter) by a president who will not tolerate lawlessness in any form, from the powerful or the unpowerful. No mention of AR-15s or “no fly, no buy” — the main problem, he’s implying, are the troublemakers who may inspire another Micah Xavier Johnson to murder cops.

The first teaser for Damian Chazelle‘s La-La Land (Summit, 12.2) arrived this morning. A Los Angeles love story about a jazz pianist (Ryan Gosling) and an actress (Emma Stone) whose bond is tested by the usual pressures (ambition, hustling). It sounds as if Gosling can sing as well as I can when I’m imitating Mose Allison. Or as well as Ewan MacGregor sang in Moulin Rouge!.

The mood, thank God, is less Baz Lurhmann-y (cranked, glitzy) and more in the vein of Jean Negulesco‘s Daddy Long Legs. Not so much a tribute to classic ’50s musicals as a reimagining of that aesthetic, a fusion of then and now. I’m sensing that the dancing (none of which is shown here) will be kind of Fred Astaire-ish with a bluesy, slouchy ‘tude.

La-La Land‘s music — cool, jazzy, laid-back — is by Justin Hurwitz, who previously collaborated with Chazelle on Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench, which also did the “MGM musical with jazz influences” thing.

Gosling, Emma Stone, John Legend (glimpsed in one shot), J. K. Simmons, Finn Wittrock, Rosemary DeWitt.

The feral public is going to have to be massaged and instructed before La-La Land opens in early December, the same way an emcee or comedian will warm up an audience before the headliner comes out. It will need film festival elitists to sing its praises for months on end, hence the debut at the Venice Film Festival and, I’m presuming, its likely appearance in Telluride, Toronto and New York.

Read more

Okay, I wasn’t exactly leaping out of my seat when I wrote last Saturday that while Ghostbusters costar Kate McKinnon “is the most internalized of the four, I’d love to see her as a lead in something…a smart lesbo or hetero romcom? I’m good either way.” But I meant what I said. The gist was that McKinnon popped larger than the other three, as Kyle Buchanan’s Vulture praise piece underlines all to hell.

Right after the recent Dallas tragedy I was thinking about tapping out a piece that analogized the twisted fury that sent Micah Xavier Johnson on an anti-cop killing spree and the obviously justified rage that sparked Nat Turner’s 1831 slave rebellion, which of course is the subject of what is probably the most Oscar-baity film of the moment — Nate Parker‘s The Birth of a Nation. I was wondering if the Dallas shootings had made Parker’s film a stronger, more inevitable Best Picture contender, or on some level a slightly less inevitable one.

But I wimped out. I was all but guillotined last January by the p.c. hounds when I shared some candid comments about Parker’s film during Sundance, and I figured the Twitter dogs would somehow spin this article, had I posted it, into an accusation that I was somehow trying to tarnish or diminish Parker’s film.

Don’t kid yourself — right now each and every critic and Oscar forecaster is being very careful about Birth. Certain persons are tippy-toeing or hiding their true opinions about it, at least for the time being. I’m no exception.

So hats off to Variety columnist Kris Tapley for stepping where I, candy-ass that I can sometimes be, feared to tread.

Excerpt: “Following a screening of Sundance prize-winner The Birth of a Nation last week, I took out my phone and saw the horrifying news coming out of Dallas. After watching the events of Nat Turner’s 1831 slave rebellion unfold on the screen — depicted with impassioned grace by director Nate Parker — a wave of thoughts and emotions was crashing inside.

“Of course, it would be intellectually careless to equate the actions of Dallas shooter Micah Johnson with the retaliation of slaves against their oppressors. They’re not at all one and the same. But there is shared DNA between the emotions that sparked the two events.

Read more

Obviously no documentary about John F. Kennedy, Jr. can be complete without two things. One, asking the question “why is he dead?” And two, answering it candidly and fully. Because the doc wouldn’t have been made if he didn’t accidentally (you could say recklessly) kill himself in a 1999 plane crash. The doc in question may come to grips as suggested, but the trailer indicates otherwise.