Day: June 22, 2017

Apologies to David Lowery and A24 for forgetting to include A Ghost Story in my recent rundown of the best 2017 flicks thus far. It belongs and then some. I’m putting A Ghost Story just below The Square but above Get Out, which was in sixth place until a few minutes ago but is now in seventh.

The new ranking: (1) Luca Guadagnino‘s Call Me By Your Name, (2) Michael Showalter’s The Big Sick (Lionsgate/Amazon, 6.23), (3) Matt Reeves‘ War For The Planet of the Apes, (4) Andrey Zvyagintsev‘s Loveless, (5) Ruben Ostlund‘s The Square, (6) Lowery’s A Ghost Story and (7) Jordan Peele‘s Get Out.

From my 1.25.17 review — “Odd, Minimalist, Engagingly Trippy Ghost Story“:

“David Lowery‘s A Ghost Story (A24) lives on the opposite side of the canyon from Olivier Assayas and Kristen Stewart‘s Personal Shopper, a ghost tale which is all kinds of different and original but seriously scary from time to time. It has to be said upfront that Lowery’s film isn’t all that scary. Okay, two or three moments put the chill in but this isn’t the game plan, and that’s what’s so cool about it. Really. Either you get that or you don’t.

“For this is basically a story about a broken-hearted male ghost (or formerly male) who doesn’t know what to do with himself, and so he mopes around and says to himself ‘Jesus, I feel kind of fucked…where am I?…what’s happening?…am I gonna stand around watching humans for decades or even centuries? I don’t know what the hell to do.’

Read more

There’s no way to not speak highly of Matthew Heineman‘s City of Ghosts, which premiered at Sundance ’17 and which I saw last night at a special screening at CAA. It’s a melancholy doc about a team of brave Syrian dudes who’ve been filing online reports since early ’14 about the atrocity-filled occupation of Raqqa, their home town, by the ideological fiends known as ISIS. 

Hands down, all the critics are swearing by Heineman’s doc and bowing down. I’m an admirer also, but I have a few questions.

Co-founded by the 26 year-old Abdalaziz Alhamza, the group has been posting about the medieval brutality of ISIS (killings, beheadings, torture, deprivations) via their website, Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently or RSS. Initially based in Raqqa and then Turkey and finally Germany, they’ve passed along reports (which have occasionally included photos and even videos) from brave citizen correspondents. If ISIS could get their hands on any these guys they’d be quickly killed, just as surely as their friends and family have been shot or beheaded without mercy.

Following last night’s CAA screening, a discussion of Matthew Heineman’s doc with RSS co-founder Abdalaziz Alhamza sitting at far left.

Who doesn’t know that ISIS is one of the rankest manifestations of absolute evil in the history of the species, and that the only righteous solution is to herd the entire army and particularly its leaders into a huge, 300-foot-deep hole in the Syrian desert, and then bury them alive under thousands of tons of sand? Everyone understands this, no one disputes, settled issue.

Nonetheless your heart goes out to the RSS guys. You feel almost nothing but admiration and respect. Anyone reading this who wants to help out should send money to RSS. I myself am planning to send a little coin. If nobility and bravery count for anything, City of Ghosts, which has been playing the festival circuit for six months now, will almost certainly be nominated for a Best Feature Doc Oscar.

But here’s the thing, a criticism that none of us are supposed to mention. Too much of City of Ghosts is about lethargy and resignation and guys sitting in front of computer screens with glum expressions. Yes, I know — who can blame them? What’s been happening to their home city is almost too brutal to ponder. But the fact remains that too much of this film is about a kind of semi-passive contemplation of the seemingly unstoppable horror of ISIS. Yes, the RSS guys are fighting them but there’s no hint that the tide may be turning when in fact it is.

The truth is that Heineman’s doc doesn’t leave you much at the end of the day. It fills you with sadness and despair. I for one believe it should do better than this, and it could start by bringing the story up to date.

Read more

Stronger (Lionsgate/Roadside, 9.22), David Gordon Green‘s film version of Jeff Bauman‘s “Stronger” (co-written by Bret Witter), is obviously cut from a different cloth than Peter Berg and Mark Wahlberg‘s Patriots Day. It’s a kind of “Neitszche, fuck yeah!” film, or rather a feature-length echo of the German philsopher‘s famous quote along these lines.

In a nutshell: How I survived and built past the loss of my legs after the 2013 Boston marathon bombing.

How can Jake Gyllenhaal‘s performance as Bauman not translate into a major Best Actor bid? You can tell he’s dug pretty deep. The only way this wouldn’t ignite is if reviewers and Academy types start moaning “what, another triumph of the spirit over trauma and adversity thing? We’ve seen this story 20 or 30 times.”

My first thought was that Gyllenhaal’s resemblance to Bauman is fairly striking, but my second was that he’s still Jake Gyllenhaal and is therefore too good-looking for Tatiana Maslany, who plays Bauman’s girlfriend (and later wife) Erin Hurley. Look at them together — she’s just not in his league. I’m sorry to irritate everyone by reminding that birds of a feather almost always flock together. If you look at photos of the real Bauman and Hurley [after the jump] you’ll see they’re closely matched.

I’m presuming that the end of the film will dramatize the fact that Bauman and Hurley decided earlier this year to get divorced. (The Hollywood Reporter‘s Pamela McClintock reported this last February.) A closing-credit acknowledgment won’t do — Gyllenhaal and Maslany have to act it out.

The CG leg-removal effects are obviously state of the art.

Read more

On 5.12.17, or three days after he fired FBI Director James Comey, President Trump tweeted that “Comey better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!” During his 6.8 testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, Comey said “I’ve seen the tweet about tapes…Lordy, I hope there are tapes.” Orange Orangutan refused to confirm or deny if recordings exist of his conversation[s] with Comey. Today he tweeted the following: “With all of the recently reported electronic surveillance, intercepts, unmasking and illegal leaking of information, I have no idea whether there are ‘tapes’ or recordings of my conversations with James Comey, but I did not make, and do not have, any such recordings.”

You contemptible bullshitter, you swaggering phony. You make me sick with your empty taunts and braggadocio.

From CNN.com: Ten of the 12 jurors in Bill Cosby’s recent assault trial voted to convict the comedian on two counts of aggravated indecent assault, but the case was declared a mistrial because two people on the panel continued to hold out, a juror told ABC News.

The jury consisted of four white women, six white men, one black woman and one black dude. Since the mistrial announcement my assumption has been that the two hold-outs (i.e., refusing to convict) were either among the four white women or the six white guys. Seriously — the applicable phrases are (a) tribal dynamic and (b) do the math.

Cosby faced three counts of aggravated indecent assault. CNN reports that the vote was 10 to 2 to convict him on charges that he digitally penetrated Andrea Constand in January 2004 without her consent, and 10 to 2 that he gave her drugs that substantially impaired her ability to resist, the juror told ABC Wednesday. The vote was 11 to 1 to acquit Cosby on a charge that he digitally penetrated her while she was unconscious or unaware.

Read more