Month: March 2017

The following is the final line from Manohla Dargis‘ N.Y. Times review of Kong: Skull Island, 90% of which reads like a spirited, half-joyous rave: “Alas, beauty no longer has her beast, the beast no longer has his beauty and this darkness has no heart even if it will have a sequel.”

While the Apocalypse Now echoes are incessant and Kong: Skull Island is clearly paying tribute to the jungle-thrills portion of the original King Kong, it is more similar to the friendly-monkey tone of Son of Kong. Why am I the only one saying this? King Kong was a tragedy about the perversion of naturalism and the heartbreak of obsessive love while the lightweight Son of Kong was mostly about goofy adventures on Skull Island and the making of a fast buck. The previous 12 words are as precise a description of Kong: Skull Island as you could possibly come up with.

Olivier Assayas‘ Personal Shopper, HE’s favorite 2017 film hands down, has opened to largely favorable reviews — currently at 77% on both Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic. A 67% or 71% rating means a modest degree of difficulty, but 77% basically means that a film has been judged as very, very good except for the complaints of naysayers who don’t or can’t get it.

I was blown away in particular by Tony Scott’s beyond-brilliant N.Y. Times review. It’s so on-target and revelatory that I felt spellbound as I read it. Scott doesn’t just understand and accept this immaculate and mesmerizing film; it’s almost as if he wrote or directed it himself and has taken to reviewing to explain it to the pissheads and tomato-throwers.

Kristen Stewart in Olivier Assayas’ Personal Shopper.

The “perpetually displaced nomad set” amid “the drift and mystery of modern life”…yes!

Read it on the Times site or here in its entirety, but this is about as bull’s-eye as it gets:

“Like many other characters in the films of Olivier Assayas, Maureen, a young American woman living in France, belongs to a relatively privileged slice of the international nomad class. The old-fashioned term ‘jet set,’ with its connotations of glamorous indolence, doesn’t quite fit. Mr. Assayas’s world is populated by figures in perpetual transit: actors, corporate executives, terrorists. Their identities have been dissolved by perpetual displacement. We remember their faces (which are often the faces of movie stars), even if we’re not quite sure who they are.

“Maureen, who works as a personal shopper for a spoiled celebrity named Kyra, certainly brushes up against glamour, and occasionally tries on a piece of Kyra’s borrowed couture. But she dwells mostly in a benumbed, stressed-out limbo, in frenzied motion from one nowhere to the next. Her human connections are often mediated by screens. She video-chats with her boyfriend, a tech consultant on assignment in Oman. She exchanges feverish texts with a stranger on a train from Paris to London and back. When asked what she’s doing in Paris, Maureen answers, ‘I’m waiting.’

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In just under three months the 50th anniversary of the 6.1.67 debut of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band will be upon us. A half-fucking-century ago. The first Beatle event that shocked boomers worldwide was when John Lennon died — 12.8.80. Methinks Pepper‘s 50th will register as a similar jolt. There’s no stopping time, but I wish there was some way to slow it down a bit.

If Terrence Malick‘s Song to Song (Broad Green, 3.10) turns out to be a critical bust, will his string have finally run out? In the view of the Guardian‘s Danny Leigh, quite possibly. “Of course, there are diehards to whom [Malick] remains sacred,” he writes. “For a certain kind of movie star too, he is still the one director for whom they will risk the raw indignity of being dropped from the finished film.”

But truth be told, The Tree of Life (’11) is the last film in which Malick got away with his darting, flakey-mystical, twirling-barefoot-maiden Emmanuel Lubezki bullshit. The critical deaths of To The Wonder and Knight of Cups within the last four and a half years have taken their toll on Malick’s rep. “The catcalls have increased,” Leigh writes, “[and] the graph of public opinion has become a ski-slope.”

3.9 comment from HE reader “JR”: “What has Malick done since his hiatus? Gone into the same well of voice-over, nature porn, floating camera, natural light, running water, whispering, twirling camera bullshit, no script…hoping Emmanuel Lubezki‘s gorgeous cinematography would save him from not having a story. He doesn’t have anything else. He’s 70 so he’s not going to change or try NEW things, he sure as hell isn’t going to get better because he’s set in his ways, so he’s going to rehash his old tricks, being abhorrently inferior to his past greatness, trotting along on the endless road of self-parody.”

“All Hail Bert Schneider,” posted on 12.13.11: “Bert Schneider was the last producer to semi-successfully micro-manage Terrence Malick and keep him from his own self-indulgent tendencies, and [in so doing] persuaded Malick to keep Days of Heaven down to a managable 94 minutes. After Heaven, Malick never made a lean, well-honed movie again. When he returned to filmmaking in the ’90s it was all pretty photography and leaves and alligators and voice-over and scrapping dialogue and expansive running times. Mister, we could use a man like Bert Schneider again.”

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Four days in Paris for the purposes of general chilling + adjusting to European time before taking the train to Cannes. 40 rue de Saintonge — Friday, 5.12 thru Tuesday morning, 5.16.

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Someone — Variety‘s Will Thorne, to be exact — has finally adopted the Hollywood Elsewhere term for Kong: Skull Island. “With ’70s rock tunes blaring and the dark figure of a life-sized King Kong looming in the background,” Thorne wrote today, “Wednesday night’s L.A. premiere truly felt like Apocalypse Kong.”

But director Jordan Vogt-Roberts flat-out misinforms when he calls his film “Apocalypse Now meets King Kong, this idea of a Vietnam War movie mixed with a creature feature.” 

As I said yesterday, the 120-foot tall ape in Kong: Skull Island is more or less human-friendly (except when it comes to Samuel L. Jackson‘s asshole Army guy or being attacked by military helicopters) and is much closer in temperament to the 15-foot-tall gray ape in Son of Kong, the 1933 sequel.

Filed by N.Y. Times Coral Davenport earlier today: “Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, said Thursday that carbon dioxide was not a primary contributor to global warming, a statement at odds with the global scientific consensus on climate change.

“Speaking of carbon dioxide, the heat-trapping gas produced by burning fossil fuels, Pruitt told CNBC’s Squawk Box that ‘I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact, so no, I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see.

Just so we’re clear: Pruitt is a shill for the fossil-fuel industry — a kneepad-wearing fellating whore.

“’But we don’t know that yet,’ he added. ‘We need to continue the debate and continue the review and the analysis.”

“Pruitt’s statement is not consistent with scientific research on climate change, including decades of research by federal agencies. His remarks may also put him in conflict with laws and regulations his agency is charged with enforcing.”

Focus Features p.r. chief Adriene Bowles has a new gig as president of publicity for Megan Ellison‘s Annapurna Pictures. I sent her a congrats along with a question about Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal‘s Untitled Detroit Riots Project, on which she’ll be riding shotgun.

“Good for you, Adriene, but why is Annapurna releasing Untitled Detroit Riots on 8.4.17?

“You can’t say ‘because it’ll be the 50-year anniversary of the start of the ’67 Detroit riots’ because (a) 8.4.17 isn’t the anniversary of anything plus (b) nobody cares about the damn anniversary anyway. The Detroit riots were over and done with on 8.4.67. They ignited on 7.23.67 and ended on 7.27.67 so the half-century anniversary is smoke.

“Three interpretations: (a) Detroit Riots is a good movie-movie and not an award-season thing, and that’s cool — nothing wrong with being a solid people-level thing; (b) Detroit Riots is an award-season thing but Annapurna is looking to throw out or more precisely defy the rulebook by ignoring the traditional Venice-Telluride-Toronto scheme but scoring nominations regardless; or (c) Annapurna would rather go for the late-summer revenue potential than endure the award-season gauntlet, which is another way of saying that (a) is the basic reality.”

“Some of the claims in a controversial dossier linking Donald Trump to the Russian government appear to have been verified by U.S. media outlets,” The Independent‘s Lucy Pasha-Robinson reported on 2.7. On top of which former MI6 guy Christopher Steele (aka author of Trump pee-pee dossier) has come out of hiding and is back at work in central London. “One of the allegations set out in [Steele’s] document claimed a senior Russian diplomat, Mikhail Kalugin, was withdrawn from Washington to avoid exposing his involvement in U.S. presidential election operations,” Pasha-Robinson writes. “McClatchy has reported [that] two sources with knowledge of ‘multi-agency investigations’ into Kremlin influence on the US elections have confirmed that Kalugin was under scrutiny when he departed.”

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For five years I’ve despised this photo of Rooney Mara and Neon Indian‘s Alan Palomo, and for reasons that don’t add up. It was snapped during Austin’s SXSW music festival in March 2012, and more particularly during filming of a scene from Terrence Malick‘s Song to Song (which back then was being called Lawless). Every so often I’d click on it and mutter to myself, “God, that photo”…Rooney’s too-short bangs, Palomo’s chill convivial manner as he whispers something in her ear, the HE perception about Neon Indian being an oodly-doodly band, etc. In defiance of logic and buttressed by my own perversity, it’s been a source of faint distress over the entire span of the second Obama term, all through the 2016 election cycle and two months into Trump. Worse, Pitchfork‘s Amy Phillips reported a couple of days ago that Palomo’s speaking role hasn’t been cut out of Song to Song (Broad Green, 3.17). Footage or scenes containing footage of Arcade Fire, Iron & Wine and Fleet Foxes have been deep-sixed along with whatever Christian Bale did when the camera was humming. Phillips didn’t mention whether appearances by Cate Blanchett, Haley Bennett, Val Kilmer, Benicio del Toro and Holly Hunter have been kept or discarded, but you know Malick.

Last night I finally watched episode #1 of Feud: Bette and Joan, and I was suddenly transformed into an old-school gay guy…laughing and chuckling and revelling in the tempest and the claws…the flamboyant bitchiness of two proud but faded Hollywood snapdragons (Bette Davis, Joan Crawford) and their intense loathing (and suppressed mutual pity) for each other during the making of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?…flared nostrils, arched eyebrows, daggers, saber teeth…a series about the fear of oblivion, a fear that begins to haunt everyone at a certain age. Each and every performance is just right and spot on…Jessica Lange and Susan Sarandon flick their tongues as Crawford and Davis (who were 58 and 54, respectively, when Baby Jane was shot in mid ’62) and hold back just enough to keep the tone from tipping into camp…Alfred Molina is perfect as Robert Aldrich (whom I met during the ’82 press junket for All The Marbles), portraying a guy who’s genuinely scared about career slippage but nonetheless able to get down and sharpen his game…Stanley Tucci‘s Jack L. Warner is a hoot and a howl (the Baby Jane deal-negotiation scene with Molina is an instant classic)…the under-used Judy Davis is hilarious as Hedda Hopper…the only not-quite-right note is an all-but-unrecognizable Catherine Zeta Jones as Olivia De Havilland.

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“Described by Werner Herzog as ‘a daydream that doesn’t follow the rules of cinema,’ Salt and Fire (XLrator, VOD/iTunes 4.4) may be rule-breaking, but the result is one of the director’s least appealing adventures. Ranging from whimsical to facetious to corny without ever properly engaging its theme of looming ecological disaster, the improbable story about a U.N. scientific delegation (Veronica Ferres, Gael García Bernal) abducted by the visionary executive of a multinational company (Michael Shannon) never convinces for a minute. One wishes the filmmaker had applied his sharp, insightful documentary skills (Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Into the Abyss) to the pic’s extraordinary landscape, instead of belaboring this stillborn adaptation of a novel by Tom Bissel.” — from Deborah Young’s Hollywood Reporter review, filed from the Shanghai Film Festival on 6.14.16.