Day: September 23, 2016

Alex Lehmann and Mark Duplass‘s Blue Jay (The Orchard, 10.7), which I saw at the Toronto Film Festival, is an affecting relationship piece about a pair of former high-school lovers (Duplass, Sarah Paulson) re-igniting when they run into each other in their hometown. It explores the usual stuff — changes, regrets, old longings — with delicacy, and the black-and-white cinematography (Lehmann served as his own dp) is a nice touch. But the story is familiar. There might be a little of the old spark still going on and maybe one of the parties is hurt by how it all ended 12 years ago, but you can’t go home again. I think we all know that and so, decent as Blue Jay is on its own terms, I was less than fully intrigued.

You know what hasn’t been seen before? What would be a little different? If a guy and a girl who knew each other in high school but were never romantically linked meet near their old hometown, and the woman, we learn, is about to get married in a week or so. Great guy, big wedding, all the trimmings. And they talk all about their lives and go for drinks and dinner and maybe get into an adventure or two, and an attraction takes hold and they wind up going to his hotel room. The sex is gymnastic, gasping, religious. The next morning they realize they really like each other and that in another realm this might be the start of something awesome, but not this time. With more than a little sadness she shakes it off and kisses him goodbye in a parking lot and that’s that, and then he goes back to his okay but somewhat lonely life.

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Two or three days ago I was on my bike and approaching an intersection without a stop sign or stoplight. There was a guy in an SUV on my left, easing out and looking to cross the intersection as I was approaching it. I was looking to drive straight through so who would go first? You know how these things work — you slow down, improvise, try and gauge what the other guy is going to do. The SUV guy was assessing me just like I was assessing him. I was cool with him crossing first but he kept sitting there, waiting for me to make a move so fuck it, I gunned it. But when I was ten feet away from the intersection, or almost right in front of him, the SUV guy suddenly tapped the gas and came right for me, forcing me to swerve to the right to avoid being hit. It wasn’t a heart-attack thing but a major dick move on his part. Again, it’s not like I was being pushy and saying to him “get out of my way, here I come.” I didn’t make a move until I was sure he’d decided to let me go first, and then he changed his mind and forced me to swerve to avoid being hit. Asshole!

That three-day-old report about Angelina Jolie having learned from a private investigator that Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard were having it off during the filming of Allied has been denied by Cotillard. On top of which it’s none of our damn business.

But I can at least mention how things work when an affair ignites between the stars of a film. Such things happen with more regularity than you might think, and between big names.

The general rule is a variation of “what happens in Las Vegas, stays in Las Vegas.” Nobody says anything when a power couple is up to something, and when the movie wraps so does everything else. Those are the rules that almost everyone understands and lives by.

Every now and then an on-set relationship will spill over into real life (Meg Ryan and Russell Crowe, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton) but for the most part, they tend not to.

in a just-posted Rolling Stone interview, Bruce Springsteen has called Donald Trump a “moron.” Yo, Bruce — you don’t wanna go out on a limb! Here’s a fuller quote: “The republic is under siege by a moron. Without overstating it, it’s a tragedy for our democracy.

“When you start talking about elections being rigged, you’re pushing people beyond democratic governance. And it’s a very, very dangerous thing to do. Once you let those genies out of the bottle, they don’t go back in so easy, if they go back in at all. The ideas he’s moving to the mainstream are all very dangerous ideas — white nationalism and the alt-right movement. The outrageous things that he’s done — not immediately disavowing David Duke? These are things that are obviously beyond the pale for any previous political candidate. [In another era] it would sink your candidacy immediately.”

Asked by interviewer Brian Hiatt if Springsteen is feeling “a lack of enthusiasm for Hillary,” the 67 year-old singer said, “No, I like Hillary. I think she would be a very, very good president.”

A couple of hours ago Gold Derby‘s Chris Beachum reported that Paramount has committed to a December release date for Martin Scorsese‘s Silence, a religious persecution period drama set in 17th Century Japan. “While [a specific release] date is not set in stone, we’ve had enough of a confirmation that it will indeed be released in December,” Beachum wrote. I immediately wrote Paramount for specifics — true or not, what date if true, how many theatres? If Beachum is correct, I’m guessing Silence will have a NY-and-LA opening in early to mid December, and that it’ll screen for critics either just before or just after Thanksgiving.

Disney marketing is throwing a debate-watching party on Monday night in West Hollywood. The idea is to remind attendees (i.e., mostly keyboard-tappers like myself) of the echoes between the social/political currents in Disney’s Zootopia, which is eyeballing an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Feature, and the first official face-off between Hillary Clinton vs. Donald Trump. There won’t be any filmmakers or executives attending, just some Disney p.r. guys. Just a nice place to hang while catching the debate. No interviews, no pressure.

I didn’t beat a path to see Mel Gibson and Jean-Francois Richet‘s Blood Father because it felt like too much of a rage-driven exploitation retread — a grizzled, tattooed dad with a criminal past protects an alienated, errant daughter from drug dealers. I figured it might be another Get The Gringo, which no one paid attention to. Yes, it managed an 88% Rotten Tomatoes rating when it opened on 8.12, but I still resisted. I figured at least some of the critics were giving Gibson a sympathy pass or paying tribute to the charismatic big-bucks hotshot he used to be.

Well, I was wrong. I finally watched Blood Father last night (it’s streaming on Amazon prior to the 10.11 Bluray debut), and damned if isn’t a highly efficient action-exploitation flick, like something Don Siegel might have made in his prime. It’s tight and well-layered, the writing is character-driven and flavorful and often amusing, the action is grounded and realistic (credit Richet, who directed those excellent, similarly grounded Mesrine flicks from ’08) and the performances deliver well above the usual for this kind of fare, especially in Gibson’s case.

It just works all around and never feels cheap or sloppy or self-mocking. It was clearly assembled by pros who were committed to making something smart and extra-punchy.

Some critic called it “a small gem…a good old-fashioned chase picture, thickened with pulp.” But that makes it sound like it’s mainly an adrenaline flick for the animals. Which it is to some extent, but Blood Father (which is based on a 2006 Peter Craig novel) is also a first-rate character study of a classic bad hombre (ex-con, rage monster, former alcoholic) trying to walk the straight and narrow as well as a mildly affecting father-daughter relationship thing.

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Like lemmings, you and your pallies will pay to see Antoine Fuqua‘s The Magnificent Seven starting tonight. Despite the fact that you know it more or less blows, as indicated by the 63% and 54% ratings on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, respectively.

“When a lazy wank-off flick like The Magnificent Seven comes along and makes you feel drained and nauseous, people like Denzel Washington and feature writer Lewis Beale say ‘hey, relax…it’s just a movie!’ But there’s no relaxing when a film is flagrantly empty except in terms of the photography (Mauro Fiore‘s lensing is first-rate), and has nothing in the way of cleverness or fresh attitude up its sleeve.” — posted on 9.11.16.

“It is written in the Hollywood playbook that the personalities and speaking styles of action-film heroes have to be wry, cocky, self-amused. So completely confident about their badassery that nothing rattles them. No edge, no anxiety. Pretty much every threat is an opportunity for casual dispatch, gun-twirling and deadpan one-liners.” — “The Smug Brothers,” posted on 7.18.16.

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