1. Damian Chazelle‘s La La Land (HE opinion: Definitely).
2. Denzel Washington‘s Fences (HE opinion: Without a doubt).
3. Theodore Melfi‘s Hidden Figures (HE opinion: What? The trailer clearly indicates this is a lightweight you-go-girl confection).
4. Ang Lee‘s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (HE opinion: Probably).
5. Barry Jenkins‘ Moonlight (HE opinion: 50-50 toss-up. Telluride foo-foos have over-praised this intimate, Boyhood-like saga of a black Miami gay guy, which may result in pushback when the schlubby-dubbies catch it).
There was a press & industry screening today of Terrence Malick‘s Voyage of Time: Life’s Journey, which is the 90-minute version narrated by Cate Blanchett. (There’s also a 40-minute IMAX version narrated by Brad Pitt.) I’m telling you straight and true that I never so much as toyed with the idea of attending. If I have absolutely nothing to do some future evening in Los Angeles and there’s an option of attending a press screening of the IMAX version on a really big screen? Even then I would think twice. God rest his gentle soul but Malick is finished. He’s airy-fairy’ed himself into oblivion.
Goliath boilerplate: “Billy Bob Thornton is Billy McBride, a washed-up alcoholic lawyer who takes on a wrongful death lawsuit against his former company, which is now one of the biggest law firms in the business. Billy and his small legal team soon uncover a deadly conspiracy that can win their case as well as bring down the giant enterprise at the same time.” Verdict boilerplate: “Paul Newman is Frank Galvin, a washed-up alcoholic lawyer who takes on a wrongful death lawsuit against one of the biggest law firms in Boston. But he eventually discovers a hidden conspiracy that wins the case and brings shame upon the Archdiocese.”
An eight-hour miniseries debuting 10.14 on Amazon Prime, Goliath costars William Hurt, Maria Bello, Molly Parker, Tania Raymonde, Olivia Thirlby, Sarah Wynter, Nina Arianda, Harold Perrineau and Dwight Yoakam.
For the rest of my life I’m going to remember what inept losers these guys are, what astonishing fuck-ups they’ve shown themselves to be. Scotiabank, Scotiabank…despised from the very depths of our souls. I don’t mind the climb at all — I bound up the stairs like an antelope — but everything changes when you get to the final landing. My legs begin to weep and moan, and my lungs begin to shriek.
I’m sorry to report that Tom Ford‘s Nocturnal Animals (Focus Features, 11.18) is an unappealing drag — a grim, adult-angled thing that few ticket-buyers will like and perhaps a trickle of elite critics (Manhattan foo-foos like Richard Brody, I’m guessing) will tumble for. Speaking as a big fan of Ford’s A Single Man, it gives me no pleasure to say this. I’m heartbroken for all concerned, but this is an ambitious, serious-minded double-tracker — half 21st Century elite ennui, half “fictional” flashback — that scores in a fleeting, in-and-out fashion but mostly sinks into mud.
Based on Austin Wright‘s “Tony and Susan,” Animals is mostly a glum critique of moneyed lifestyles and values. It’s also about different forms of cowardice. It’s enlivened in the fashion of a ’70s exploitation film (such as Wes Craven‘s The Hills Have Eyes) by a violent fictional side-story about a family being attacked in rural Texas by a trio of scumbags, but all this does is create an unwelcome odor.
On top of which the good old “standing waves” acoustical effect, an established characteristic of the Prince of Wales theatre, wiped out at least half the dialogue from my vantage point. But that’s okay — I’ll receive a Nocturnal Animals DVD screener sometime in mid to late November, and I’ll be able to watch it with subtitles.
I got what Animals was saying for the most part, but at the same time I was muttering “that’s it?”
The only keeper in the whole thing is the always dependable Michael Shannon, who scores as a cancer-ridden Texas lawman who just wants to put the bad guys away and to hell with due process. No matter who or what he’s playing, Shannon always nails it.
The film is basically about Susan (Amy Adams), a Los Angeles-based art gallery owner feeling drained by a failing marriage to a big-finance type (ArmieHammer), reading a manuscript of a forthcoming novel by her ex-husband Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal).
A brutal, Death Wish-like tale of an attack upon a husband (also played by Gyllenhaal in the film’s enactment), wife (Isla Fisher) and daughter (Ellie Bamber) in the Texas back-country and the revenge that follows, the book puts Susan through the ringer and takes her back to the reasons she left Edward when he was a struggling book-store employee.
I didn’t hate Nocturnal Animals. I’m fully aware that it’s an ambitious, experimental thing (certainly from a structural standpoint) but I never felt fully drawn in. It keeps you at a distance. Less than 15 minutes after it began I was saying to myself, “Uh-oh, this isn’t working.”
The depiction of Adams’ life is appropriately somber if not morose, but there’s no energy to it. An occasional witty line or smart-ass character (i.e., Jenna Malone‘s) pops up, but this portion of the film (the slow pollution of the soul in the midst of great wealth) felt to me like a flatline thing. The early ’60s films of Michelangelo Antonioni still own this milieu.
Animals is mostly about the Hills Have Eyes sub-section, but there’s very little satisfaction as Gyllenhaal’s within-the-book character, Tony Hastings, doesn’t exactly handle himself like Clint Eastwood or Vin Diesel. I don’t know what he could have done differently after the animals (led by Aaron-Taylor Johnson and Karl Glusman) strike, but he’s a wimp for the most part, and I generally don’t hold with candy-asses. Yes, a certain payback finally arrives but not in a way that I enjoyed or cared about.
But at least this portion gives Shannon an opportunity to saunter along and hold the film hostage with his steely glare and deadpan humor.
Friday morning email from journalist friend: “Didn’t I predict you’d hate The Magnificent Seven? I totally called it.” Me: “The movie is empty stinking bullshit from beginning to end, head to toe. Fuqua has a good eye for framing and a Sergio Leone-ish penchant for close-ups, but otherwise forget it.”
From “Heroism Isn’t Machismo“, posted on 4.10.16: “No offense but I don’t trust Antoine fucking Fuqua — he lacks discipline, he’s popcorn, he’s cheeseball and he damn sure is no Akira Kurosawa or John Sturges.”
Denzel Washington (l.) and Magnificent Seven costars (Chris Pratt, Ethan Hawke, Vincent D’Onofrio, Lee Byung-hun) on Princess of Wales stage — Thursday, 9.8, 6:45 pm.
I don’t want to overreact but this trailer for Ben Affleck‘s Live By Night is giving me Miller’s Crossing vibes. Extra care went into it. An artified gangster film. And the plot of Dennis Lehane’s 2012 novel has several twists and turns. The story, dialogue and pacing are yet to be sampled but the champs, right now, are dp Robert Richardson and editor William Goldenberg. Costarring Affleck, Chris Messina, Sienna Miller, Brendan Gleeson, Zoe Saldana, Chris Cooper and Elle Fanning. A big-city platform release in December followed by 1.13.17 wide release.
The Scotiaplex (i.e., Scotiabank Cineplex) is the site for all the Toronto Film Festival press & industry screenings. Let me tell you, things were really, really bad over there today. Bad thing #1: A climate of near suffocation if you happened to catch the 12:30 screening of Paul Verhoeven‘s Elle, which was shown in a theatre (#2) with zero air conditioning. Bad thing #2: The Scotiaplex’s three-story-tall escalator wasn’t working and under repair. Management waits until hundreds upon hundreds of journalists descend on this place for TIFF and then the escalator needs urgent repair? Not two weeks or two months earlier but on opening day? Bad thing #3: Last year TIFF provided temporary wifi for journalists and industry types in the upstairs lounge area, which is right off the main lobby, but no TIFF wifi this year. A Scotiaplex employee told me TIFF just isn’t on the case. I asked the TIFF press office about this a couple of hours ago, but no reply thus far.
Engineers doing what they can to re-activate the Scotiaplex escalator earlier today.
Paul Verhoeven’s Elle is one wickedly perverse, end-of-the-world, ice-cold erotic whodunit. It’s not really a thriller as much as a fascinating character study of Isabelle Huppert‘s Michele, a 50something owner of a Parisian videogame company that creates violent rape fantasies, and how a series of assaults and shocks that befall her character are reflective of Michele’s pathology and that of the general drift of social mores these days.
So Elle is partly social criticism and partly a kind of sex comedy. Except you can’t really call it comedic or farcical. Well, you can but the humor is flavored with a chilly, amoral undertow that smothers the hah-hah. But it’s constantly amusing. And the film is sharp, direct and fat-free — the best or least problematic Verhoeven film since Basic Instinct or even Robocop. It runs 130 minutes but feels like 100, if that.
Elle is partly a kinky sex fantasia (i.e., get to know your rapist), partly a twisted tale of perverse karma stretching back decades, partly a portrait of social dysfunction and moral indifference, partly a Verhoeven-styled wicked game movie (he’s always been into kinky abandon of one kind of another), and partly a woman’s empowerment saga. I found it completely pleasurable despite the fact that the air conditioning wasn’t working in Scotiabank #2. It was awful in there.
David Birke‘s screenplay is adapted from Philippe Djian’s novel, but it really feels like Satan wrote it. Satan in a dry, whimsical, fuck-all mood.
It starts with Michele, a resident of a tony Paris suburb, being brutally raped by some guy whose face is covered by a black head mask. This being a Verhoeven film, Michelle is shocked and traumatized and perhaps a little bit turned on by the attack.
I caused a ghastly mess this morning in my friend’s condo. All in an attempt to heat water for coffee. I’ve never been very practical or handy-minded, and sometimes I do incredibly boneheaded things. But that’s me. I’m the kind of guy who calls AAA to have a tire changed. Partly because I don’t trust my abilities (I so hate changing tires that I instantly reject the idea) and partly because I don’t want to get my hands greasy. My hands must be clean at all times. Kind of a Howard Hughes-type deal.
In any event I woke up in the usual unfocused state but relatively clear of mind. I wanted some coffee. I saw a silver heating pot sitting on a pad of some kind, but I didn’t think to notice (because I’m an alien from Tralfamadore) that the pot had a plastic connector heating device on the bottom. I have an electric water-heating pot at home so I know about filling it up and then pushing a button to start the process, but in the fog of the moment I just figured “okay, no button on the pot so I’ll just fill it and heat the water on the stove.” So like a donkey I put the pot on the stove for coffee, turned the heat up halfway and took a shower.
Four minutes later (my showers never last longer than that) the place was filled with smoke, and then the fire alarm went off. The plastic on the bottom of the pot had melted onto the stove. A torrent of smoke. Melted plastic on the stove and linoleum counter, on two green bath towels, on the kitchen rug and the wooden floor — the kind of thing only a flake whose thoughts are elsewhere much of the time could manage.
Hollywood Elsewhere arrived in Toronto yesterday afternoon around 2:30 pm. The weather felt like Panama in July. I was wearing a heavy leather jacket that was perfect for those cool nighttime strolls in Telluride, but inappropriate here. Sticky and sweating and lugging three heavy bags, I picked up my press badge and other materials at the Bell Lightbox.
Armed with a new iPhone 6,Plus, I was then forced to spend two hours with the AT&T guys because my unlimited data international plan …forget it, too tedious to recount.
I’m staying at an old friend’s place at TwentyGothic, a condo complex in High Park. He met me there around 5:30 pm, and then we did dinner. And then he left for the country.
I would have been up and watching my first TIFF film — Thomas Vinterberg‘s TheCommune — at 9:45 am. Alas, a small tragedy occured at 7:30 this morning. [See above.]
Five and a half years ago Deadline‘s Michael FlemingdescribedGold, which was then a Michael Mann project, as “a contemporary Treasure of the Sierra Madre-type treasure hunt about prospectors and speculators involved in a chase for gold.” Mann bailed in 2012, and then Spike Lee was going to direct until he quit, and then it finally became a Stephen Gaghan project. I don’t know what Gold is or what it will feel like as a feature, but the trailer [after the jump] is trying to sell a jaunty, scary-funny tale of outrageous fortune. The interest in making something in the vein of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre may have been sincere four or five years ago, but that notion has clearly gone out the window since. Matthew McConaughey (transformed), Edgar Ramirez, Bruce Dallas Howard, Corey Stoll, Toby Kebbell.
