Day: August 27, 2016

I’ve seen but haven’t yet reviewed (and am not about to review here and now) Daniel Noah‘s Max Rose (Paladin, 9.2), the Jerry Lewis drama about aging, legacy and unfinished marital business, and Oliver Stone‘s Snowden (Open Road, 9.16). But I caught them both within the last two days (8.25 and 8.26) and they’re both surprisingly good, which I wasn’t certain would be the case.

The Snowden embargo lift isn’t for a while yet, but I can at least say that in my view it’s Oliver’s best film since Any Given Sunday — a return to form. It’s lean, sober, intelligent and well controlled. Yes, we all know the Snowden saga due to Laura Poitras‘s Oscar-winning Citizen Four, but this is a bracing, well-acted, highly engaging companion piece. I especially loved a brilliantly designed digital sequence that shows how NSA surveillance works on a personal, always expanding, ultimately global basis.

I’ll tap out something about Max Rose tomorrow morning.

I also spoke this morning to a person who caught Clint Eastwood‘s Sully, which will premiere at next weekend’s Telluride Film Festival, and he, a tough, no-nonsense critic, says it’s quite good. Efficiently edited (only 96 minutes) by Blu Murray, and a nicely structured saga about the battle between the value of air industry technology vs. seasoned piloting by crusty, gray-haired pros.

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I can’t imagine anyone being persuaded to vote for any Presidential candidate based on what Bruce Springsteen says or doesn’t say, but The Boss is apparently not going to be endorsing Hillary Clinton, to go from what he said at an 8.25 concert at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey. The quote is from an 8.25 post from Backstreets, a Springsteen-endorsed fansite: “But while Bruce was content to let his lyrics do the talking, tonight we get his first direct comments on this election season, which he calls ‘the ugliest I’ve ever seen.’ So many people, he reminds us, ‘have been hurt so hard by American de-industrialization, by globalism, by NAFTA — and that can get lost in all the noise.” Hillary is something of a pro-NAFTA globalist, right?

In the view of more than a few in the Hollywood community, Birth of a Nation director-writer Nate Parker has become Black Bart — a demonic figure whose lack of sensitivity during a Penn State episode 17 years ago resulted in a charge of rape (i.e., an unwanted menage a trois that the drunken victim properly regarded as a violation) and whose behavior may have contributed, certainly to some extent, to the suicide of the victim 13 years later. A rash verdict if you ask me, but the crowd wants what it wants.

The Birth of a Nation is almost certainly award-season toast — everyone seems to believe that. It even appears as if Parker himself might be persona non grata, industry-wise, for the next few months. But what he, Jean Celestin and the late victim got into during the 1999 incident in question was, however repulsive or appalling from her P.O.V., probably not hugely different from the bacchanalia that hundreds of thousands of inebriated college students got into in their dorm rooms going back to the mid ’60s, or the dawn of the libertine era.

Here, in an 8.27 interview with Ebony‘s Britni Danielle, is how Parker sees the differences between then and now:

Britni Danielle: “You started out tonight addressing the controversy, and you talked a lot about male culture and toxic masculinity. So I want to kind of compare. What, at 19, did you know about consent?”

Nate Parker: “To be honest, not very much. It wasn’t a conversation people were having. When I think about 1999, I think about being a 19-year-old kid, and I think about my attitude and behavior just toward women with respect [to] objectifying them. I never thought about consent as a definition, especially as I do now. I think the definitions of so many things have changed.

“Put it this way — when you’re 19, a threesome is normal. It’s fun. When you’re 19, getting a girl to say yes, or being a dog, or being a player, cheating. Consent is all about — for me, back then — if you can get a girl to say yes, you win.”

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One way or another you have to witness some kind of natural, jaw-dropping vista every two or three years, if not more frequently. If you don’t or can’t, you’re missing something primal. All three videos were shot during a May 2012 visit to Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland with Jett and Dylan. #1, a pan of the Bernese Alps that tower over the village (Eiger, Monch and Jungfrau) was taken during a day-long hike. #2 is a pan of Lake Brienze (Brienzersee). #3 is of Staubbach Falls.

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A capsule description of April Mullen‘s Below Her Mouth, a 2016 Toronto Film Festival attraction, from Toronto Star film critic Peter Howell: “Erika Linder and Natalie Krill play illicit lesbian lovers in a made-in-Toronto film that promises to push the boundaries for cinematic sex, as Blue Is the Warmest Color did before it. Shot by an all-female crew, the TIFF program calls it ‘one of the boldest and sexiest dramas of the year.'”

Wells thought: “If this scene was about (a) a guy attempting to make out with a cute girl in a bar, (b) the girl changing her mind and running outside and darting down an alley and (c) the guy chasing her down and more or less saying ‘wait, you can’t run away, I really want to fuck you’ and putting the moves on her again, a viewer might presume it’s about a predator engaged in a kind of aggressive date rape. But because it’s about lesbians, nobody raises an eyebrow.”

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