Month: November 2016

The Bleecker Street guys will soon host a couple of events (a party, a luncheon) for Matt Ross‘s Captain Fantastic, which everyone spoke highly of when it opened on 7.8.16. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on 1.23.16, was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival and then opened theatrically a few weeks later. I didn’t review it until late July:

“This is one of the most complex and provocative dramas about parenting and passed-along values that I’ve seen in a dog’s age. I didn’t love it, partly because it unfolds in such an exotic and woolly realm (I don’t hold with killing deer or living without deodorant or applications of Aqua Velva) and partly because the last 10 or 12 minutes seem more fanciful than grounded, but I admired it. I certainly found it intriguing. It warrrants a thumbs-up.

Ross’s fascinating scheme is to acquaint us with an unorthodox good guy like Viggo Mortensen‘s Ben Cash — a brilliant, willful, Noam Chomsky-worshipping father of six, an Allie Fox type who’s highly independent, disciplined and obstinate. And then show us that he can also be a selfish prick and even a tyrant. But one who also has the decency to recognize his faults and the humility to pull back when life has told him to do so. But he’s still bull-headed. But he cares. He even shaves his beard off at the end.

With his wife in failing health, Ben and his six kids — three older teens named Bodevan (George MacKay), Kielry (Samantha Isler) and Vespyr (Annalise Basso), the tweener-aged Rellian (Nicholas Hamilton) and Zaja (Shree Crooks) and a little towhead named Nai (Charlie Shotwell) — have been living for ten years like survivalists in a Pacific Northwest forest, hand-to-mouthing it like Swiss Family Robinson, killing game and growing vegetables while immersing themselves in martial-arts training, Esperanto lessons and campfire sing-alongs.

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Billy Wilder‘s One, Two, Three (’61), one of my all-time favorite comfort films, has disappeared from Amazon streaming. Fans were never permitted to purchase a streaming copy — only rent one. But now that’s over. Which means, I presume, that a Bluray will hit the market sometime before long. But there’s no news of one. I love watching this 1961 film late at night, starting around 10:30 or 11 pm. Relaxing, soothing, like a glass of warm milk.

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I don’t have issues with Christianity. I have issues with right-wing hinterland Christians, and particularly those who haven’t the backbone to oppose Donald Trump. The Romans may not have thrown Christians to the lions in ancient times (as famously depicted in Cecil B. DeMille‘s Sign of the Cross and Chester Erskine‘s Androcles and the Lion) and if they did do this it was terribly wrong. People should be free to worship freely, and having your throat torn open by a lion with bad breath is a ghastly way to die. That said, I understand why the Romans were so motivated.

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I always liked Bill Simmons as a columnist, especially when he deigned to talk about movies and cultural matters. As a writer he has a relaxed guy vibe, a certain swagger and authority, but I never watched Any Given Wednesday more than once or twice because Simmons doesn’t exude that swagger thing on camera. My impression, in fact, was that his default thing was to be too much on the mild side. A grinning, laid-back, non-confrontational kiss-ass approach. Simmons is obviously a smart fellow but his voice is a little too high pitched. That on top of his slip-on sneakers (he should’ve worn cowboy boots or brown suede Bruno Maglis), those too-narrow shoulders, those flannel shirts and his glistening, close-cropped silver hair….later. One look at those grayish-blue eyes and you knew butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. And now HBO has pulled the plug on Any Given Wednesday because of shitty ratings. The last episode will air on Wednesday, 11.9.

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Spencer Ackerman‘s 11.3 Guardian story about the FBI having more or less become a pro-Trump rogue operation committed to sabotaging Hillary Clinton with misleading innuendo and bad smoke (“The FBI Is Trumpland”) was an eye-opener.

Hillary has one option when she takes office in January — all the bad FBI eggs have to be either fired or demoted and sent to regional offices in Bumblefuck territories. They’re finished. Tear off their stripes, break their sabres in two. And FBI director James Comey has to be axed also.

“Deep antipathy to Hillary Clinton exists within the FBI, multiple bureau sources have told the Guardian, spurring a rapid series of leaks damaging to her campaign just days before the election,” Ackerman’s story reads.

“Current and former FBI officials, none of whom were willing or cleared to speak on the record, have described a chaotic internal climate that resulted from outrage over director James Comey’s July decision not to recommend an indictment over Clinton’s maintenance of a private email server on which classified information transited.

“‘The FBI is Trumpland,’ said one current agent.

“This atmosphere raises major questions about how Comey and the bureau he is slated to run for the next seven years can work with Clinton should she win the White House.

“The currently serving FBI agent said Clinton is “the antichrist personified to a large swath of FBI personnel,” and that “the reason why they’re leaking is they’re pro-Trump.” The agent called the bureau ‘Trumplandia’ with some colleagues openly discussing voting for a GOP nominee who has garnered unprecedented condemnation from the party’s national security wing and who has pledged to jail Clinton if elected.”

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I had slight forebodings about whether Jeff Nichols‘ Loving (Focus Features, 11.4), a dramatization of the once-controversial interracial marriage between Mildred and Richard Loving would amount to anything more than a rote retelling. Well, the film is better than I expected. A warm, measured, adult-level thing. I wasn’t doing handstands in the lobby but I was telling myself “hmmm, okay, not bad.”

On the other hand the cricket mafia has given Loving a 92% Rotten Tomatoes rating and a 77% on Metacritic.

Joel Edgerton, Ruth Negga in Jeff Nichols’ Loving.

Loving is a bit slowish and less fact-specific than I would have preferred, and there’s the usual emphasis on emotional rapport and interplay and fine, nicely underplayed performances, my favorite being Ruth Negga‘s as Mildred. And at 123 minutes it feels maybe 15 minutes too long. And if you’re at all familiar with the facts or if you happened to catch Nancy Buirski‘s The Loving Story, a 2012 HBO doc, it’ll be hard to avoid a feeling of being narratively tied down.

But Loving is a compassionate, plain-spoken, better-than-decent film that will amost certainly pick up some award-season acclaim, particularly some Best Actress talk for Ms. Negga’s kindly, sad-eyed wife and mom.

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As opposed to offering glancing impressions or hors d’oeuvres-like samplings, this La La Land trailer (which I ignored yesterday) comes very close to compressing the full experience of this amazing, spirit-lifting, near-perfect film. I’ve seen it twice and I’m at least good for another two or three viewings before Oscar night. I still say that Manchester By The Sea is richer, heavier and more formidable, but La La Land got better the second time I saw it (at the Savannah Film Festival) and that means something. The only problem I have is that Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone‘s singing voices aren’t what they could or should be. But it’s not that much of a problem.

I’m only just getting around to watching Bill Maher‘s “Whiny Little Bitch” show, which was performed last night (Wednesday, 11.2) at Largo while live-streaming on Facebook Live. (I was at the Paramount preview event last night.) I’m not all that worried about the election — it’ll be tighter than expected but Hillary will win — but Maher makes me feel better about…well, everything.

Ezra Edelman‘s O.J.: Made in America has more or less been annointed as the reigning kingshit documentary of 2016, and Ava Duvernay‘s 13th has been deemed the runner-up. That’s the basic takeaway from the first annual Critics Choice Documentary Awards, which will probably influence the outcome of the documentary Oscar race. 

The award show happened tonight in Brooklyn at BRIC, and if you weren’t there you were probably square. I would’ve gone if I’d been in the vicinity, but we can only spread ourselves so thin.

Edelman’s doc won four awards — best documentary, best director of a theatrical feature doc, best sports documentary and best limited documentary series. Duvernay’s widely praised film about the U.S. prison system won for best political documentary as well as best documentary and best director in the TV/streaming categories.

The Best First Documentary award went to Jack Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg‘s Weiner. The Best First Documentary award (TV/streaming) was split between Everything Is Copy (Jacob Bernstein, Nick Hooker) and Southwest of Salem: The Story of the San Antonio Four (Deborah Esquenazi). The Best Music Documentary award went to The Beatles: Eight Days a Week — The Touring Years. Tne Most Innovative Documentary award went to Keith Maitland‘s Tower.

Of all the Hollywood hotshots I’ve interviewed or played verbal tennis with since I got going as a journalist in the early ’80s, Warren Beatty has been far and away the most fun to fritter away the time with. Because as good as they taste, Beatty chats always feel nutritional on some level after they’re over. And you always feel good about having spoken to someone as silky-polite and considerate as he.

I’ve never actually “interviewed” Beatty, but I’ve been shooting the shit with him for 25 years. Off the record, I mean. And yet our very first chat (a discussion about the limited marketing effort on behalf of Reds) happened in the fall of ’81. There’s no seminal figure like Beatty, no one who has greater stories, who’s more personally charming, whose life more fully reflects and encompasses the most tumultuous and fascinating era in American history (early ’60s to the present), who knows or has known nearly every person of consequence in this town and in Washington, D.C. combined for the last 55 years, and whose apparent disinterest in not wanting to write a great Balzacian novel of the 20th Century is…well, on one level I’m sorry but on another level, fine, whatever.

Beatty has recently been inviting journalists to his Mulholland Drive home to discuss Rules Don’t Apply, including Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson, Deadline‘s Pete Hammond, Vanity Fair‘s Sam Kashner, The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg, L.A. Daily News guy Bob Strauss and N.Y. Times profiler Cara Buckley. The process will continue until the film opens on 11.23. This 18 year-old Charlie Rose Show discussion [above] is worth revisiting. At the tail end Rose asks Beatty if he’ll ever make his Howard Hughes film. Beatty says yes, but…I’ll explain later.

Whatever’s happening in a personal, one-on-one sense between Darren Aronofsky and Jennifer Lawrence, it began with their work on Mother, an ensemble relationship drama that they shot last summer. Directed and written by Aronofsky, it’s about how “a couple’s relationship is tested when uninvited guests arrive at their home, disrupting their tranquil existence.” Lawrence and Javier Bardem are the couple, I’m guessing; the costars are Michelle Pfeiffer, Domhnall Gleeson and Ed Harris. Wikipedia says that Paramount will distribute.

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