Month: September 2016

Amazon and Bleecker have decided to wait another three months — 12.28 — to open Jim Jarmusch‘s Paterson. So cool your jets and bide your time. But know this: Paterson is one of those films that improve upon reflection. It doesn’t seem to be doing a hell of a lot while you’re watching it, but then it begins to expand. The next day you’re saying “yeah, still thinking about it…good film.” A week later you’re saying “wow, that was a really good film.”

From my 5.16.16 Cannes Film Festival review:

“Paterson is about a lanky young bus driver (Adam Driver) and his Iranian wife Laura (Golshifteh Farahani) who live with a subversive prick dog named Marvin in a small dumpy house in Paterson, New Jersey and generally follow routines of almost astounding modesty — not hanging with friends, not partying, not doing Manhattan clubs on weekends…none of that.

“Well, maybe Laura would like a little fun and frolic but Driver’s guy, who of course is also named Paterson, doesn’t even own a smart phone. All he wants is to write poetry in a little composing book. During work breaks, evenings in the cellar. Not to become ‘famous’ but to one day write one-half or even one-third as well as famed Paterson poet William Carlos Williams.

“The quiet writing life and a general reverence for poetry becomes more and more of a thing as the film develops. Paterson itself is trying to be a kind of small, minimalist poem.

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Jared Hess‘s long-delayed, finally-opened Masterminds is based on a real-life 1997 heist known as the Loomis Fargo Robbery. The humor is obviously broad and snide and driven by standard Hollywood mockery of rural dumbshits. So far Masterminds has ratings of 44% from Rotten Tomatoes and 47% from Metacritic.

Imagine if Zach Galifianakis‘s character were to address his co-conspirators (Owen Wilson, Kristen Wiig, Jason Sudeikis, et. al.) as follows: “Guys? We gotta face somethin’ here. We’re too stupid to pull off a robbery and get away with it. People like us always lose, always fuck up, always get caught. If we survive 19 years into the future we’ll all be voting for a guy named Donald Trump. We’re born to lose…face it.”

At which point Wilson’s character says, “God, man…maybe so but it’s the dream that matters. Sure, we’re dumb as fenceposts and the odds of succeeding are 99 to 1, but if we don’t at least try for the proverbial big score and maybe make some changes for the better, who are we? What are we? If we don’t try we’re worse than losers — we’re vegetables. Are you a vegetable, man? Well, I’m not. I’m a Butterscotch Stallion with red blood in my veins.”

Apart from the ghastly loss of life and dozens of injuries, this morning’s train disaster at the Hoboken Terminal has also destroyed a portion of one of the most richly atmospheric train stations in the country — that yesteryear vibe, the ghosts of Erie Lackawanna, the arched ceiling that affords natural light, the light-greenish turquoise paint. For this is the terminal where Faye Dunaway said goodbye to Robert Redford in a third-act scene in Three Days of the Condor (’75). Forgive me for processing this horror in movie terms, but the first thing I thought of when I heard the news was the climax of Silver Streak (’76) when the train plows into a terminal in Chicago.

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Every now and then it’s important to catch a certain interview or investigative piece on 60 Minutes. This Sunday (10.2) will be one of those occasions.

The only thing wrong with this Warren Beatty-Diane Keaton lovers quarrel scene in Reds is that it doesn’t last long enough. I wish I could have captured this in a way that does more justice to Vittorio Storaro‘s cinematography. It’s just my iPhone 6 Plus shooting an Amazon stream with shitty black levels. But I love the acrimonious energy. I had a couple of spats like this with a girlfriend just a few months before Reds opened in the fall of ’81. Her name, honest to God, was Louise. She had the most beautiful half-Asian eyes.

Is Reddit the ugliest major site around? It looks like it hasn’t been redesigned since ’98, if that. Rules Don’t Apply director-producer-star Warren Beatty is doing a Reddit AMA (i.e., “ask me anything”) chat tomorrow at 11:30 am Pacific. Beatty’s motivation is to convey to under-35s that Rules, which is largely set in 1958 Los Angeles, is not some crusty period piece but something pulsing and pertinent to right now. (Or so I’m told.) But honestly? If there’s one guy in the universe whose basic nature is less open to “ask me anything…go ahead, fire away” than almost anyone else, it’s Mr. Beatty. Especially when strangers are involved. I’m saying this with affection. You can ask him whatever you want, and he’ll always give you some kind of chess-move answer…intelligent, serious but side-steppy, always polite, charming…but he’s not really given to wide-open candor. But don’t let me stop you.

I can listen to Boys in the Band Trump all day long and into the night…

It’s around 10 pm or a bit later, let’s say, and I’m looking to wind down. What I’ll often do is put on a comfort movie — a good film I know backwards and forwards that I love to just bathe in, just settle into like steamed mud…yessss. I’ll only half-watch it as I write tweets or research something or fiddle around on Facebook or whatever, but a comfort movie is my friend, my pal, my blankey.

A comfort movie obviously can’t be too challenging or antsy or jingle-jangly. It has to give me a nice “all is well with the world” feeling. Make me feel so good and so secure.

Nobody worships sparkling, needle-sharp black-and-white films more than myself so I tend to favor monochrome comfort more than color, but not entirely. Comfort movie visuals have to downshift me and treat me like some kind of cinematic masseuse. They need to make me feel like…I don’t know, like I’ve just dropped a quaalude. That dates me, doesn’t it? Okay, a Percocet.

Favorite comfort movies: John Schlesinger‘s Sunday Bloody Sunday, Kathryn Bigelow (i.e., “Biggy”) and Mark Boal‘s Zero Dark Thirty, Martin Ritt‘s The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, Stanley Kubrick‘s Paths of Glory, Irving Reis‘ The Bachelor and the Bobby Soxer, the VUDU streaming copy (i.e., not the overly inky Criterion Bluray) of Howard Hawks‘ Only Angels Have Wings and Mark Robson‘s The Bridges of Toko Ri, Don Siegel‘s Charley Varrick, Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, Martin Ritt‘s Hud and Alfred Hitchcock‘s Notorious, to name but a few.

“Since The Arizona Republic began publication in 1890, we have never endorsed a Democrat over a Republican for president. Never. This reflects a deep philosophical appreciation for conservative ideals and Republican principles. [But] this year is different. The 2016 Republican candidate is not conservative and he is not qualified. That’s why, for the first time in our history, The Arizona Republic will support a Democrat for president.” — from yesterday’s editorial endorsement statement, the likes of which will almost certainly never happen again in our lifetime.

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On 3.20.15 I posted a piece about what a rich and legendary year 1971 was. 28 first-rate films and 23 that were at least fairly good — a significant tally. But I forgot to mention Peter Fonda‘s The Hired Hand, which was widely admired from the get-go. But I’ve never seen it so I bypassed it. That situation will soon be corrected with Arrow’s release of a Hired Hand Bluray on 11.21.

I don’t like the trailer [after the jump] but I trust the reviews by N.Y. Times critic Roger Greenspun and The New Yorker‘s Penelope Gilliatt:

Greenspun: “I don’t know just what I expected of [this] Peter Fonda western, but certainly not a film so sensitively appreciative of what might be possible in a western. A certain amount of what might not be possible also gets in, for The Hired Hand is a rather ambitious simple movie, with a fairly elaborate technique and levels of meaning rising to the mystical, which seems so much a part of the very contemporary old west.

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There are so many appalling, mind-boggling negatives that Donald Trump has wrapped around himself, but suddenly there’s this belief that the 1996 Alicia Machado Miss Universe thing, which Hillary raised during the debate and which Trump inexplicably doubled-down on yesterday, is going to penetrate and damage him badly with women who are STILL on the fence about the guy.

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Something I posted on Facebook last evening right before the debate: “God protect us from rural dumbshits who don’t give a damn about anything but their diminishing earning power and general rage at the present. And their primal fear of suddenly being a minority in terms of political power.  They are the animals of our time.”