Day: June 14, 2017

The world premiere of Jeff Beana‘s The Little Hours (Gunspower & Sky, 6.30), a nunsploitation comedy based on a tale in Giovanni Boccacio‘s The Decameron, happened at last January’s Sundance Film Festival.

I missed it by choice, although I did catch Margaret Bett‘s Novitiate, the other erotic-nun flick at Sundance ’17. But wait — I finally saw The Little Hours last night, or around 1 am rather, on the Macbook Pro. I did so in order to take part in a Little Hours press day starting at 3 pm.

The Little Hours is set in 14th Century Italy, but the actors all talk and behave like they time-traveled in from 2017 America. This is the basic joke — nobody’s really part of this realm, screw verisimilitude, pretending to be Italian nuns from 700 years ago will just get in the way, they’re just acting in Baena’s film for three or four weeks.

It’s not too bad if you don’t care that much. If you’re willing to just sit back, I mean, and say “fuck it…these guys are just goofing off, making a 21st Century American colloquial version as no one would pay to see a straight-faced version.” Or something like that. And they’re right — nobody would pay to see a 14th Century version.

The Little Hours Wiki synopsis reads as follows: “A young servant (Dave Franco) flees from his master (Nick Offerman) and takes refuge at a convent full of nuns.” Wiki doesn’t explain that Franco initially pretends to be “deaf and dumb”, and that he gets to boink most of the nuns. But he does both of these things.

The Little Hours runs 90 minutes, but — this is the interesting part — almost the exact same tale was told in ten minutes’ time in Pier Paolo Pasolini‘s The Decameron (’71).

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The thesis of Nick Broomfield‘s Whitney: Can I Be Me (Showtime, 8.26, 9 pm) “is that part of the reason Whitney was so unhappy was that she was unable to come out as a lesbian; and that once [her apparent lover] Robyn Crawford left the team, the singer crumbled. Having grown up in a gospel-singing New Jersey Baptist church, she was unable to face the condemnation of her family and community.

“Her strong-willed mother, Cissy, confirms in an interview with Oprah Winfrey after her daughter’s death that she would have been horrified if she had come out as gay. Broomfield also quotes Bobby Brown, who says that despite his many differences with Crawford “I really feel that if Robyn was accepted into Whitney’s life, she would still be alive today.” — from a review by the Sydney Morning Herald‘s Paul Byrne.

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“Ninety-nine percent of the people who see Rough Night (Columbia, 6.16) will have no idea that it lifts its premise, and much of its flavor, from an edgy and overlooked 1998 movie called Very Bad Things, which starred Christian Slater and was Peter Berg’s first film as a director.

“It was about a group of guys who accidentally kill a prostitute during a bachelor party in Vegas; what they do to hide the disaster is hideous but — as Berg staged it — creepily plausible, and the film, though it never caught on, had a queasy power as a foray into the dark side of the male psyche.

“Rough Night is a lighter entertainment. It’s Very Bad Things with the sexes reversed, but also with (a) a harmless synthetic dollop of the Hangover films, (b) a replay of the best-friend-of-the-bride jealousy drama of Bridesmaids and (c) a touch of Weekend at Bernie’s. It’s all been mashed together in the comedy compactor, yet the best thing about Rough Night is the feisty, claws-out spontaneity of its competitive banter between ‘sisters’ who love and hate each other.” — from Owen Gleiberman‘s Variety review.

I’ve only been back in Los Angeles since Monday night, but did I even get invited to see this thing? Of course not. Could I have wangled an invite if I’d politely written and asked? Probably. This is the way things have been for a while now. Half the time Hollywood Elsewhere has to ask to be invited, at least as far as your coarse, lowest-common-denominator, big-studio popcorn flicks are concerned.

How do you respond to the non-fatal shooting of Steve Scalise, the House Majority whip who has a very strong pro-NRA voting record and has been an intensely loyal Trump supporter?

The first thing you need to say is “thank God Scalise will survive — he was only shot in the hip.” The second thing is “thank God Scalise wasn’t shot in the head like Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords or Reagan staffer James Brady — he will go on to push fiendish rightwing agendas, wound or no wound.” The third thing is “here we go again, another random shooting by another American wackjob who shouldn’t have had access to firearms,” etc.

But in this respect and regarding this shooting in particular, you can’t quite say that Scalise was an “innocent” victim. You can’t quite say that.

It would be wrong — harsh, indecent — to say that karma played a role in this morning’s shooting, so I won’t say that.

And I won’t come within 100 yards of mentioning that joke about 100 persons from this or that predatory profession chained together at the bottom of the ocean being “a good start.” Because that would be wrong.

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Whoever told residents of London’s Grenfell Tower not to evacuate and to hold tight when fire concerns began to be heard, as has been reported, deserves the most severe punishment imaginable. The Telegraph is reporting that “up to 600 people are believed to have been inside Grenfell Tower’s 120 flats when the blaze tore through the 24-story building in the early hours. Six are confirmed dead, but that figure will rise. 74 injured people were taken to hospital. But many are still missing after residents were left trapped on upper floors as flames rapidly ripped up the block after initially being told to stay in their homes.”