Day: March 29, 2017

Blood, Sweat and Tears

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So how is Gary Oldman‘s performance as Winston Churchill in Joe Wright‘s Darkest Hour (Focus Features, 11.24)? Or, more precisely, how good or commanding does his Churchill seem in the Darkest Hour trailer that was shown today during a Focus Features presentation inside Caesar’s Palace? Oldman is very, very good. It’s not Churchill himself come back to life (the voice doesn’t quite have that trademark snap, that Winnie-tude), but a genetic splicing of Oldman, Churchill and Wright. It’s somewhere between 85% and 90% of what I’d hoped to see and hear, and considering the expectations that’s pretty damn good. Obviously a locked-in Best Actor thing. Due respect to Brian Cox and Johathan Teplitzky‘s Churchill (which will open in early June), but Oldman’s Winnie is more commanding. Ditto John Lithgow‘s Churchill in The Crown.


Gary Oldman as Winston Churchill in Joe Wright’s Finest Hour (Focus Featuyres, 11.24).

Paramount and Focus Slates Aside, Cinemacon Has Been Largely About Promoting Idiot Cartoon Jackhammer Movies

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Hollywood Elsewhere staggered out of Universal‘s Cinemacon presentation a little more than an hour ago. I’d still be there if I hadn’t decided to avoid watching F. Gary Gray‘s The Fate of the Furious (Universal 4.4.17), which is showing as we speak.

For whatever reason Team Universal decided to avoid even mentioning three releases that comprise their fall ’17 slate — Doug Liman‘s American Made, Tomas Alfredson‘s The Snowman (10.13.17) and Jason Hall‘s Thank You For You Service)l.

They focused instead on promoting five jackhammer, bass-thump, super-coarse, high-velocity movies opening between early April and late July — The Fate of the Furious, The Mummy (6.9), Despicable Me 3 (6.30), Girls Trip (7.21.17) and David Leitch‘s Atomic Blonde (7.28). Because slam-thunk moron movies make more dough that those aimed at 25-and-overs.

I’m not saying this is all exhibitors care about, but…well, this is more or less where they live and what seems to concern them the most. Morons and concessions.

If you didn’t know that Universal, a longstanding studio with a proud tradition, has a modest fall slate and that it’s making only the above-mentioned spring and summer movies [which it isn’t), you’d be under an impression that Universal has all but sold its soul to the devil.

Not just Universal, actually, but to a considerable extent Sony, Disney, STX and Warner Bros. Because they’re all making the same movie these days — the same assaultive, gutslamming, ear-splitting, cartoon-like experience that I’m calling generic superjizz.

And yet, curiously, Paramount is to some extent on another planet, at least as far as three of its 2017 films are concerned — Alexander Payne‘s obviously brilliant Downsizing, George Clooney‘s Coen-esque Suburbicon and Alex Garland‘s spooky Annhilation.  And don’t forget Darren Aronofsky‘s Mother, which wasn’t promoted here but will also pop in the fall.

Focus Features, which will stage a Cinemacon luncheon and presentation less than an hour from now, also resides on this planet Atomic Blonde aside, they’ll be releasing four adult-level standouts this year — Sofia Coppola‘s The Beguiled (6.23), Stephen Frears‘ Victoria and Abdul (9.22), Joe Wright‘s Darkest Hour (11.24) and Paul Thomas Anderson‘s untitled fashion drama with Daniel Day Lewis (opening on or near Christmas ’17).

Besson’s Valerian Doesn’t Seem Punchy, Different Enough

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At best Dane DeHaan is a marginal industry star whom the public has little feeling for, much less recognition of. This alone may pose a domestic problem for Luc Besson‘s Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (STX, 7.21). Besson has been trying to launch this adaptation of the French sci-fi comics series Valérian and Laureline for many years. He “reportedly scrapped an earlier version of the script after he saw James Cameron‘s Avatar for the first time.” The trailer feels generic. Clara Delevigne costars; backup perfs from Rihanna, Ethan Hawke, Clive Owen, Alain Chabat, Mathieu Kassovitz, Kris Wu, Herbie Hancock, John Goodman and Rutger Hauer.

Tipping Point

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Posted from Park City on 1.19.17: I’ve just seen Al Gore, Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk‘s An Inconvenient Sequel, a sequel to the nearly eleven-year-old, Oscar-winning doc that he and director Davis Guggenheim created. And I’m afraid that the general opinion is “nice film but meh…we know the climate crisis is mostly worsening, the 2015 Paris climate accords aside, so what else is new?”

That’s what a critic friend was saying at least (“I’ve seen a lot of climate-change docs, and good as this was it’s basically more of the same”), and even though I liked Sequel I couldn’t argue all that strenuously. It’s a nicely done, intelligently assembled film but it is more or less a rehash of the original brief, which is that we’re all doomed unless climate criminals (primarily the leaders of India, China and other developing countries) wake up, man up and begin the process of switching to renewable energy sources.

The difference between An Inconvenient Truth and An Inconvenient Sequel is that the latter (a) takes a fresh look at what’s going on now (i.e., things are worse), (b) provides hope by focusing on the Paris Agreement, which Gore was very much a part of, and (c) admits to a certain despair by acknowledging that a climate-change-denying beast is about to move into the White House.

Form-wise Sequel is well finessed. It’s a good thing that it was made, and that Paramount Pictures is releasing it sometime this summer, and that who-knows-how-many-thousands of more minds will probably be changed, etc.

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Tight Fit

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It’s 7:45 am — been up since dawn. Next to no filing time this morning with Universal‘s Cinemacon presentation, 9:15 am to 12:15 pm (why three hours?), breathing down my neck. It’ll be quickly followed by a combination luncheon & presentation thrown by Focus Features from 12:45 pm to 2:30 pm. A two-hour break and then the 90-minute Warner Bros. presentation kicks off at 4:30 pm.

Cannes Festival Posters Often Default To Mid-20th Century Icons

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Over the last decade or so a few official Cannes Film Festival posters haven’t focused on some classic, iconic film star of the ’50s or ’60s — Faye Dunaway, Marilyn Monroe, Ingrid Bergman, Monica Vitti, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. But they’ve been in the minority. Juliette Binoche adorned a Cannes poster six or seven years ago. For the 2007 festival, which celebrated the 60th anniversary, several world-class directors (Almodovar, Inarritu, etc.) posed for a group shot. But this year, the festival’s 70th anniversary, it’s another ’60s head-turner — Claudia Cardinale. Born in ’38, her hot-career phase included Mario Monicelli‘s Big Deal on Madonna Street (’58), Luchino Visconti‘s Rocco and His Brothers (’60), Girl with a Suitcase (’61), Federico Fellini‘s 8 1/2 (’63), Visconti’s The Leopard (’63), Blake Edwards‘ The Pink Panther (’63), Richard Brooks‘ The Professionals (’66 — flagrantly unbelievable as a Mexican) and Sergio Leone‘s Once Upon a Time in the West (’68).