Month: October 2016

Yesterday Deadline‘s Pete Hammond quoted producer Irwin Winkler saying that Martin Scorsese‘s Silence (Paramount, 12.23) is “Marty’s best movie.” Okay, fine, but what else is he going to say? “This is one of Marty’s better films…maybe not his best but definitely one of his standouts”? Or “trust me, this one out-Kundun‘s Kundun!”

Hammond allows that Winkler “is high on the film because he produced it, but [he] also produced Scorsese classics Raging Bull and Goodfellas, so this kind of praise is not to be taken lightly.” Except the exalted reputations of Raging Bull and Goodfellas are carved in stone while Silence‘s rep is yet to be determined. Winkler loses nothing at all by calling it a better film than the other two.

Winkler also told Hammond that Silence‘s running time is down to 2 hours and 39 minutes, or over 20 minutes shorter than that three-hour-plus cut everyone wrote about last August.

Every word Michelle Obama said during that New Hampshire speech the other day was inspirational. Arrogant, thoughtless, pig-like behavior towards women has to be slapped down and corrected, and the more decisively the better. But you know what else? There’s an atmosphere today that seems to discourage almost any kind of male-to-female flirtatiousness or come-ons in any environment outside of a bar. I’m not saying that all you have do is say (i.e., type) the wrong kind of politically incorrect thing in the wrong way and you’ll be a dead man on Twitter in a matter of hours if not minutes, but it’s almost come to that. I just have this sense of a lot of guys walking on eggshells right now.

Trump was correctly and righteously ripped for that 2005 Access Hollywood hot-mike moment with Billy Bush, but who hasn’t said something lewd at one time or another (especially if alcohol was part of the situation) or stepped over some behavioral line? I’m pretty sure I did a few times in my randy 20s, back when I often pursued a certain boozy exuberance. How many tens of thousands if not millions of guys are guilty of some kind of poor behavior at one time or another? If even half of these moments were to be hot-miked and fed to online militants, a lot of these same guys would be swinging from the gallows right now.

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Everything that the loathsome Donald Trump says or has said, thinks or has thought, or does or has ever done is almost certainly evil. I understand that. But in the rush to reveal everything sleazy or odious he’s said about women, it was recently discovered that something he said to Howard Stern in 2004 always will be true, and it’s this: eccentric, manic or otherwise crazy women are usually astonishing in bed.

Yes, the man is crude, grotesque and short-sighted in more ways than you can shake a stick at, but he was right about this one thing.

I personally know this to be a dead-cold fact — I have the memories and the scars. In Husbands and Wives (’92), Woody Allen delivered a riff about kamikaze women [see below] in one of the interrogation scenes, and any guy who doesn’t understand exactly what Allen is talking about needs to get out more. Now we know that Trump (and I take no pleasure in acknowledging this) said more or less the same thing when he spoke to Stern in 2004:

“How come the deeply troubled women, you know, deeply, deeply troubled, they’re always the best in bed? I have a friend, Howard, who’s actually like a great playboy [and] he will only look for crazy women. [Because] for some reason, what I said is true. It’s just unbelievable. You don’t want to be with them for long term, but for the short term there’s nothing like it.”

The Trump quote was pointed out yesterday by Esquire‘s Megan Friedman.

I’m sorry but a stopped clock tells the correct time twice a day.

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I went into last night’s 6 pm screening of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk with high expectations for the 120 frames-per-second, 4K 3D photography (I’ve been a general fan of HFR for decades) and a slight sense of caution and uncertainty about the basic bones of the thing, which all along had sounded to me like an Iraq War rehash of Clint Eastwood‘s Flags Of Our Fathers (the gap between hollow patriotic pageantry and the harsh realities of war) and therefore nothing new.

And then I saw it and the cards got all shuffled around. The tech aspect impressed but also underwhelmed in certain ways. My eyes became used to the hyper-clarity after a while, and as the acclimation took hold I began to search for the usual nutritional stuff, and to my surprise Billy Lynn gradually sank in and delivered — not in a rock-your-world sense but in quiet, unforced terms. The story, acting and plain-dealing emotion bring things to a mid-level boil.

It finally hits home, I’m saying. Not so much from the easy-lay observations about hollow patriotism and pageantry and the atmosphere of official delusion but from the general feeling of bonding and, yes, fraternal love between combatants. The transitions between American celebration and Iraqi desperation grow in intensity, and the peripherals recede as the fundamentals apply. Your brothers in arms are all you can count on. I’ve felt this current in dozens of war films before, but it got me again.

So as I walked through Times Square station on my way to the Brooklyn-bound R train, I told a colleague in Los Angeles that “it’s a good film…not an audaciously original, blow-your-socks-off type of thing but a modestly good film…the material is the material (i.e., Ben Fountain’s 2012 novel), and the delivery is understated and effective.

“Is it a blindingly brilliant thing?,” I said. “No, but it’s not a wipe-out or a burn, and anyone calling Billy Lynn that” — my friend had been passing along some snarly-sounding Twitter reactions — “just isn’t paying sufficient attention…they aren’t letting it in.”

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I couldn’t be more pumped to see Ang Lee‘s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (TriStar, 11.11) this evening at 6pm. Mine eyes will feast on the clearest, sharpest, most eye-poppy 3D film ever projected in the history of mainstream cinema — intense, extra-clear, super-real. And yet, it’s been said, very calming because this is how everything looks to anyone with half-decent eyesight. And it’s all at 120 frames per second, start to finish.

Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk director Ang Lee at Essex House — Friday, 10.14, 10:35 am.

Here‘s a brief chat I had with Lee and Platt after the press conference. Here‘s my recording of the whole event.

This isn’t The Hobbit, I was told. This is reality, immersive…no fantasy, no special lighting, no makeup on the actors. Your sense of being there will take over and either you’ll go with it or you won’t. But the ultimate state, Lee hopes, is that you’ll “make love to it and then again, over and over and over.” And that the film, in turn, will make love to you. And then, like with any good orgy, you’ll get lost in the back and forth.

All this was explained this morning by Ang Lee, producer Marc Platt and New York Film Festival director Kent Jones at a Billy Lynn press breakfast at the Essex House. The film will screen twice tonight in the highest, sharpest, most needle-precise format ever — 3D, 120 — at the AMC Lincoln Square at 6 and 9 pm.

I’m especially excited about Ang’s intention to project Billy Lynn tonight with light levels that will be way beyond the industry 3D norm — 30 foot lamberts, he says. Most 3D films are shown at 3 foot lamberts, he said. (What he actually meant, I suspect, is that the light levels are diminished to 3 as you’re watching the film through 3D glasses.)

Billy Lynn will also be shown Los Angeles later this month within the super-duper 120 fps/3D format, but most U.S. theatres — i.e., all but two — will show it at slightly lesser or lower levels — 60 fps, 48 fps or 24 fps, and some delivering just plain old 2D. Almost no theatres are equipped to deliver the ultimate experience that viewers will see tonight, but them’s the breaks.

Jones speculated after the press conference that within five years, what we’ll be seeing tonight will be mainstream.

It’s 12:30 pm now. I’ll about to leave for the Elle screening at the Walter Reade in a few minutes, and then the press conferences. And then a two and 1/2 hour break and then

Billy Lynn producer Marc Platt, director Ang Lee, NYFF director Kent Jones inside Essex House dining room at the start of this morning’s press event.

Again, the quiet chit-chat with Lee and Platt, and the whole discussion, gavel to gavel.

As previously noted, tonight I’m catching an 8:30 pm screening (which almost never happens — screenings are usually at 7 or 7:30 pm) of a major November release. And then an early wake-up tomorrow so I can attend a 9 am Ang Lee press breakfast for Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. Then comes a 12:30 pm NYFF press screening of Paul Verhoeven‘s Elle, followed by a press conference with Verhoeven and star Isabelle Huppert. And then I’ll attend a 6 pm New York Film Festival screening of Billy Lynn at the AMC Lincoln Square. (Another follows at 9 pm.)

Two days ago a new Lionsgate Bluray of James Foley‘s Glengarry Glen Ross (’92) went on sale. As good as the performances are (particularly Al Pacino and Alec Baldwin‘s), I was never able to really sink into this thing because it wasn’t the play, and the play, I’m telling you, really was the thing. The play was way better. It got you high it was so good.

The Foley film? Not bad, decently rendered, respectable but too noirish and rainy — the glum mood is too on-the-nose. And for me it has no serious current except for Baldwin’s steak-knives speech, which wasn’t in the play.

Sometime around 3.25.84 I attended a Broadway pre-opening performance of the original Gregory Mosher-directed play with all the big-gun critics (Frank Rich, etc.) in the orchestra. Joe Mantegna‘s Tony Award-winning performance as Ricky Roma ruled — a performance as seminal and historic as Humphrey Bogart‘s Duke Mantee in the B’way stage version of The Petrified Forest. Not to mention Mike Nussbaum, Robert Prosky (a brilliant Shelley Levine), Lane Smith, James Tolkan, Jack Wallace and J.T. Walsh.

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Today Michelle Obama very possibly delivered the strongest, most on-target speech ever given by a FLOTUS, about dignity and decency and human values: “I can’t believe that I’m saying that a candidate for President of the United States has bragged about assaulting women…it has shaken me to the core [and] this is not something we can ignore, not just another disturbing footnote…this was a powerful individual speaking openly about sexually predatory behavior…the shameful comments about bodies, the belief that you can do anything you want to a woman…it is cruel, it is frightening and it hurts…that feeling of terror and violation…something that happens every single day…none of us deserve this kind of abuse…not for another minute, and not for another four years. This has got to stop right now.”

I’m posting this clip to remind the readership of two things: (1) Leonardo DiCaprio‘s Wolf of Wall Street performance as Jordan Belfort was, is and probably always will be his all-time greatest — way above his remarkably immersive performance in The Revenant; and (2) this speech is both a brilliant lampoon of the drooling predatory aesthetic of your average Wall Street killer and an inspirational motivator for anyone stuck in failure and a loser attitude. It’s neither one nor the other, but both simultaneously. And now it’s a third thing — an echo of a certain imploding Presidential candidate and the Genghis Khan conquering rationale he almost certainly believes in.

This morning Joe Scarborough questioned the sudden torrent of news stories about Donald Trump‘s alleged sexual shenanigans. He tweeted later than he’s “disappointed but not surprised by those twisting my words…I have no reason to doubt any of these accusations whatsoever.” These stories broke because of (a) fear of reprisal and the old safety-in-numbers calculation — victims keeping silent until they realize they’re not alone (which is what happened with the sudden outpouring of testimony against Bill Cosby), (b) the Access Hollywood/Donald Trump/Billy Bush “pussy” tape, (c) Trump’s statement during last Sunday night’s debate that he’s never been an assaultive masher, and (d) numerous women Trump allegedly made moves on got angry when they heard him say that. Simple.