Day: November 19, 2016

Yesterday morning there was an Academy member screening of Damian Chazelle‘s La La Land, and then a buffet luncheon at Craig’s on Melrose. A few hours later producer Jonathan Dana wrote on Facebook that he felt “fortunate to experience La La Land, one of the leading contenders for Oscar in about a dozen categories. When you see talent like this at play, it’s hard to stay totally bummed, at least until you pass a TV tuned to any sort of news. Go see this movie. Soon. It will enliven your spirits.

“And the filmmakers are the nicest people. And Emma Stone? Beautiful, smart, engaged and endearing. Lunch was great too. Lucky me.”

Jonathan Dana, La La Land star Emma Stone during yesterday’s luncheon at Craig’s on Melrose.

Nobody is a bigger fan of La La Land than myself, and while I’ve never chatted with Stone Dana is 100% correct in describing Chazelle as an entirely likable guy. I know Chazelle very slightly and can say he skillfully hides the fact that, like all accomplished artists, he’s a bit of a fretter and a worry wart. But also a straight shooter. Chazelle looks you in the eye and seems to actually mean what he says, which is unusual in Hollywood circles. But to Hollywood Elsewhere the word “nice” is like chalk on a blackboard.

Wells to Dana: “Sorry I missed the luncheon. One question, Jonathan: The La La Land guys are ‘the nicest,’ you say. Good to hear. We should all strive to be nice every day of our lives and twice on Sundays. But what else are they gonna be at an Oscar-season luncheon? Snippy? Snide? Sullen? Saying they were ‘the nicest’ is like saying the snowfall that fell last night in Moscow is ‘the whitest.'”

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“Seven days may not be enough time to fully assess any new leader, especially in the case of Trump, whose first week was marked by seeming chaos in his efforts to put together an Administration. But what we’ve learned so far about the least-experienced President-elect in history is as troubling and ominous as his critics have feared. The Greeks have a word for the emerging Trump Administration: kakistocracy. The American Heritage Dictionary defines it as a ‘government by the least qualified or most unprincipled citizens.’ Webster’s is simpler: ‘government by the worst people.'” — from recently posted Ryan Lizza column in The New Yorker, “Donald Trump’s First, Alarming Week As President-Elect” (11.16.16).

I blame Jimmy Fallon for this, to some extent. I really do. Fucking Jimmy Fallon. And the older, under-educated black voters who gave Bernie Sanders the back of their hand in the Southern primaries. And the more I think about it, the more I blame Hillary “Apocalypse-bringer” Clinton for being such a lethally non-charismatic candidate and more precisely the jaded and entrenched Democratic National Committee elites, primarily personified by the loathsome Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who worked and schemed so hard against Bernie.

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Yesterday I did a phoner with Kevin Costner, who brings a settled, fair-minded authority and decency to his performance as “Al Harrison” in Ted Melfi‘s Hidden Figures (Fox Searchlight, 12.25). There are some older actors who can just walk into a room without saying a word, and right away you relax. Because there’s something square and sensible about them. Costner is definitely one of those guys, and in every one of his Hidden Figures scenes, you know things will be more or less okay. Or that fairness will eventually come to pass.

Kevin Costner as Space Task Group honcho “Al Harrison,” a composite character partly based on the late Robert Gilruth.

Based on Margaret Lee Shetterly‘s same-titled book, Hidden Figures (which everyone likes) is a Kennedy-era tale of three female African-American mathematicians– Taraji P. Henson‘s Katherine Johnson, Octavia Spencer‘s Dorothy Vaughan, Janele Monae‘s Mary Jackson — who earned respect and advancement in the early years of America’s space program. In particular Johnson’s laser-like assessments were key to the success of John Glenn‘s historic 1962 orbital flight.

They all worked under NASA’s Space Task Group, which Harrison, in the realm of the film, the big boss of. And good old Kevin, a slightly bulky, mild-mannered figure in glasses, white dress shirt and skinny tie, is the guy who gives Johnson/Henson a fair shake and a respectful salute. 

The standout moment is when Harrison singlehandedly desegregates the white vs. colored bathroom system at the Space Task Group’s headquarters (which was located in Langley, Virginia) with a sledgehammer or crowbar or something along those lines.

And yet Harrison isn’t presented as some heroic lead-the-charge type. He’s just a pragmatic technician-politician who wants to get the job done fast and accurately, and who therefore respects anyone with the brains and know-how to substantially help in that effort.

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Posted five days ago (11.14) on Daily Kos:

In an 11.18 N.Y. Times piece by Ben Kenigsberg (“The Images in Billy Lynn? Razor Sharp. Your Eyes? Bewildered”), high-def pioneer Douglas Trumbull says he was unhappy with the venue for the 120-frame-per-second projection of Billy Lynn during the New York Film Festival. “I was really upset…that it was in a very narrow, small-screen theater,” Trumbull says.

My feelings exactly. “I felt crestfallen when I walked into the almost shoebox-sized AMC Lincoln Square theatre that Billy Lynn was projected in, ” I wrote on 10.15. “It was as if I was sitting in some nondescript megaplex in Tampa or Baton Rouge.”

I remain stunned that the critical elite dismissed Billy Lynn with such uniformity. The Heaven’s Gate-Like rejection of Ang Lee‘s film happened without remorse, without even an expression of mixed feelings. Critics and public alike dumped it like a McDonald’s Big Mac wrapper in a trash bin. For me Billy Lynn‘s HFR format elevated what would have otherwise been just another modest, dialogue-driven, Playhouse 90-styled drama. Is there anyone who found the 120-frame-per-second version at least interesting?

Trying again: at the very least all theatrically-aimed films should be shot in at least a 30 fps format, and all CG fantasy crap should definitely be captured in HFR (60 or even 48 fps would suffice). Action footage is always more mesmerizing if you remove the blur factor.

“I knew that she couldn’t close,” Steve Bannon tells The Hollywood Reporter‘s Michael Wolff, referring to Hillary Clinton. “They out-spent us 10 to one, had 10 times more people and had all the media with them, but I kept saying it doesn’t matter, they got it all wrong, we’ve got this locked.”

Because, as Bannon explains, Donald Trump connected big-time with “people without a college education…high school people…that’s how you win elections.” As in: The under-educated none-too-brights, the ADD crowd, the xenophobes, the macaroni-and-cheese eaters. Look at jowly, unshaven, pot-bellied Bannon — yes, a brilliant, highly-educated Machiavellian schemer par excellence (albeit from Hades), but he looks like an alcoholic who manages an East Tampa trailer park.

With a straight face Bannon describes Donald Trump as “the greatest orator since William Jennings Bryan, coupled with an economic populist message and two political parties that are so owned by the donors that they don’t speak to their audience. But he speaks in a non-political vernacular, he communicates with these people in a very visceral way. Nobody in the Democratic party listened to his speeches, so they had no idea he was delivering such a compelling and powerful economic message. He shows up 3.5 hours late in Michigan at 1 in the morning and has 35,000 people waiting in the cold. When they got [Clinton] off the donor circuit she went to Temple University and they drew 300 or 400 kids.”

Perhaps the key image or metaphor of Trump’s message to the portly masses was that moment in Richard Donner‘s Superman (’78) when Chris Reeve‘s Man of Steel, howling with grief over the death of Margot Kidder‘s Lois Lane, zooms into orbit and reverses the west-to-east spinning of the globe and in so doing reverses time itself, and this allowing him to save Lane while still alive.

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