Day: April 12, 2017

Pick Her Up Just To Say Hello

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Until I saw Miguel Arteta‘s Beatriz At Dinner (Roadside / Film Nation, 6.9), I never realized how short Salma Hayek is. Look at her compared to her female costars in this trailer — she’s like a munchkin. I’m not saying this to be a dick, but to mention that her church-mouse proportions serve as a metaphor when Beatriz, a spiritual healer and massage therapist, has an unfortunate encounter with a group of Orange County synthetics. Poor Beatriz seems beaten from the start.

From 1.17 HE Sundance review: “Beatriz drives down to Newport Beach to give a massage to Cathy (Connie Britton), a rich client. But then Beatriz’s car dies, and so Cathy invites her to stay for the party. She first has to overcome the small-minded objections of her husband (David Warshofsky) because the dinner is basically about business deal with a rich, Donald Trump-like monster (John Lithgow). Also attending are Strutts’ wife (Amy Landecker) and are a smarmy Orange Country couple (Chloe Sevigny, Jay Duplass).

“But then Beatriz starts blowing it by ignoring the conservational flow and trying to pass along a moral or spiritual lesson whenever there’s a lull. Then she starts to drink too much wine. Then she throws a cell phone at Strutt over his disdain for society’s lessers. Then she insists on playing a song on her guitar. And then she begins to wonder if she might have a moral duty to stab Strutt in the neck. Then she has some more wine.

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Ballhaus With The Godz

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Michael Ballhaus, the renowned visual composer best known for his long and fruitful partnerships with Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Martin Scorsese, has passed at age 81. His most famous accomplishment is the long Goodfellas tracking shot in which Ray Liotta and Lorraine Bracco slip into the Copacabana through the kitchen, but God, I loved so much of his work. Ballhaus knew from steam, smoke, shadows, reddish glows and sunlight piercing down through windows…all the impressionist tricks of the trade. And above all about gliding movement.

The headliners: Fassbinder‘s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, Fox and His Friends, The Marriage of Maria Braun, Lili Marleen. Steve Kloves‘ The Fabulous Baker Boys. Nancy Meyers‘ Something’s Gotta Give. James L. Brooks‘ Broadcast News and I’ll Do Anything. Mike Nichols‘ Working Girl, Postcards From The Edge and Primary Colors. Wolfgang Petersen‘s Air Force One. Francis Coppola‘s Dracula. Scorsese’s After Hours, The Color of Money, The Last Temptation of Christ, The Age of Innocence, Gangs of New York, The Departed.

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Stepped Into It

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In a nutshell, Sean Spicer‘s Hitler gaffe was a claim that Nazi Germany’s immortal monster “was not using the gas on his own people” like Syria’s Bashar al-Assad “was doing…[not] in the way that Assad used them, where he went into towns, dropped them down [on] innocents…in the middle of town.” Remember that everyone is calling this much-apologized-for statement a gaffe — an accidental, inappropriate slip of the tongue that either reveals something truthful or (in this case) the mindset of the speaker. For what Spicer meant (and is now very, very sorry for having said) is that European Jews were not Hitler’s people, that they were the subversive, non-patriotic “other”, as Hitler and his Third Reich henchmen repeatedly described them in the ’30s. This indicates that Spicer himself, speaking from his 2017 Trumpian perspective, has bought into the same notion about European Jewry not being real Germans. He can apologize, but he can’t un-say what he said.

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A Fine Madness

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We’re approaching (i.e., are five months away from) the fifth anniversary of Rodney Ascher‘s Room 237. I don’t know what it’s earned on video/streaming since, but the fact that it only made a lousy $296,359 theatrically indicates hundreds of thousands if not millions of X-factor filmgoers never gave it a tumble. And it’s one of the best LQTM movies I’ve ever seen. Not “no laugh funny” like Ishtar but genuinely hilarious — just not in a way that makes you slap your thighs as you go “hah-hah.” Why such a small audience? Because (and I’ve heard this over and over) the people who saw it told their friends that it was bullshit — that Stanley Kubrick never faked the moon landing and never intended to insert all of those veiled allusions in The Shining and therefore the doc was a waste of time — an interpretation that is truly staggering in its stupidity. I just re-watched the below clip, the first time since mid ’13, and was chuckling all over again.

Oceans Of Time

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Paramount’s Cinemacon presentation included a 15-minute-long sampling of Michael Bay‘s Transformers: The Last Knight (6.23), and the general reaction was (a) “whoa, complex…intense post-apocalyptic dystopia meets some kind of time-trippy Knights of the Round Table scenario shot in England,” (b) “nice effects” and (c) “this is gonna be a long-ass film…140, 150 minutes, something like that.” Neither the just-released trailer not the previous assemblies tell the tale as clearly as the Cinemacon reel, and that in itself wasn’t entirely clean and concise. Ambitious, obviously, but with layers upon layers upon layers. Not a sandwich or fast-food meal, but what felt to me like a potentially exhausting 10-course banquet. Mark Wahlberg, Isabella Moner, Anthony Hopkins, Laura Haddock, Stanley Tucci, Josh Duhamel, Tyrese Gibson, John Turturro, et. al.

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Elegant Editing, Finely Judged

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A couple of weeks ago three beautifully-cut assemblies of a select roster of Annapurna films were posted. “America”, “Photograph”, “Hustle” — to which I only paid attention this morning. They should have included clips from Detroit, Downsizing and the Untitled Paul Thomas Anderson fashion-in-the-’50s film, but otherwise very nice. Annapurna (along with Amazon, Netflix and Scott Rudin) believes in ’70s films made for 21st Century moviegoers, and thank God for that. Lawless, The Master, Killing Them Softly, Zero Dark Thirty, Her, Foxcatcher, Joy, Everybody Wants Some!, Wiener-Dog, Sausage Party, The Bad Batch, 20th Century Women, et. al.

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“It’s Time We Knew”

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50 years later, the fire that time. Memory detour, flashpoint, cuts and close-ups, an inferno rekindled. A jarring, presumably riveting descent into hell. Directed in the usual bracing, deep-dive fashion by Kathryn Bigelow. Written by the intrepid Mark Boal. Shot by the legendary Barry Aykroyd (The Hurt Locker, United 93). Edited by the masterful William Goldenberg (Zero Dark Thirty, The Insider). A possible…call it a presumed award-season headliner that dares to open on August 4th. Go bold, break the mold.

“One of the bleakest chapters in American history — four days that stunned a nation and left scars on a great city that are still seen and felt today.” — from a 7.22.12 Time.com article showcasing the Detroit riot photos of Lee Balterman.

From Wiki page: “The 1967 Detroit riot, also known as the 12th Street riot, was a violent public disorder that turned into a civil disturbance in Detroit, Michigan. It began in the early morning hours of Sunday, July 23, 1967. The precipitating event was a police raid of an unlicensed, after-hours bar then known as a blind pig, just north of the corner of 12th Street (today Rosa Parks Boulevard) and Clairmount Avenue on the city’s Near West Side.

“Police confrontations with patrons and observers on the street evolved into one of the deadliest and most destructive riots in the history of the United States, lasting five days and surpassing the violence and property destruction of Detroit’s 1943 race riot.

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