Day: June 27, 2017

Guillermo Attempts To Sell A Bill of Goods

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In the twittered view of the great Guillermo del Toro, Edgar Wright‘s Baby Driver “is a fable, complete with its very own Disney prince and princess, but is also rock n’ roll. Meaning [that] the magic exists in a dirty, genre-tainted world. The film is incredibly precise, [and] flawlessly executed [down] to its smallest detail: breathtaking Russian arm shots, real-world car mount and foot chases executed with the vigor and bravado of a Gene Kelly musical. This is An American In Paris on wheels and crack smoke.”

Everything GDT says is perceptive, excitingly phrased and, by my perceptions, accurate as far as it goes, but like the South by Southwest critics who couldn’t stop wetting themselves when they saw Baby Driver last March, Guillermo sidesteps the final truth of the matter, which is that Baby Driver, after sticking to a buoyant musical-fairytale scheme that feels right for 90 minutes or so, assassinates itself with an injection of foam-at-the-mouth, logic-free, crash-bam-boom insanity over the last 15 or so minutes.

I explained it all last Friday. It’s certainly worth catching for the portion that works (roughly the first five-sixths), but be prepared for that horrible moment when the wheels come off and Baby Driver spews all over itself.

Cigarette Regrets

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Eight years ago Michael Nyqvist was the 48 year-old star of the hugely successful Girl With The Dragon Tattoo trilogy (Tattoo + The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest), playing the conflicted good-guy journalist Mikael Blomkvist with skill and feeling. (Daniel Craig played the same character in David Fincher‘s 2011 Tattoo remake.) He went on to play lead villains in Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol (as Kurt Hendricks) and John Wick (as Viggo Tarasov). Now he’s dead — a victim of lung cancer. Only 56 years old.

Street Animals

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From “Dear Cops — Please Capture or Shoot These Assholes,” posted from Cannes on 5.26.17: “Yesterday nearly every Cannes critic went apeshit over Benny and Josh Safdie‘s Good Time, a visceral, high-crank crime drama about a couple of low-life, bank-robbing brothers, Robert Pattinson‘s Connie and Benny Safdie‘s Nick, running around Queens. Nick is basically Lenny from Of Mice and Men, and right away I was going ‘oh, Jesus, I have to hang out with some stammering…I’m sorry, challenged guy for the next 100 minutes? This guy can’t put two sentences together without sweating from the mental strain.’

“Then it turned out I didn’t have to — fine. But I was definitely stuck with Pattinson’s Connie, whose brain cell count is only slightly higher than his brother’s.

“The Safdie brothers know how to whip action into a lather and keep the kettle boiling, and there’s no doubt that Good Time felt like the punchiest and craziest film to play during the festival, which is why so many critics, feeling underwhelmed by a relatively weak lineup, responded with such fervor. But I can’t abide stupidity, and after 40 minutes of watching these simpletons hold up a bank and run around and ruthlessly use people to duck the heat I was praying that at least one of them would get shot or arrested. I can roll with scumbags and sociopaths, but I need a little something I can relate to or identify with. If the repulsion factor is too strong, I check out. And that’s what I did in this instance. And good riddance.”

McEnroe Steps In It

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Leave women athletes alone. Don’t go there. They have their own realm, and it is what it is. Don’t try and crash it with an unfair comparison. Yes, Serena Williams might not measure up to a lot of young male tennis players today….so? Note to McEnroe: You’re only 57, dude. You could stand a little touch-up work, the kind no one would notice. Just saying.

Big Broadcast of 1987

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I caught The Big Sick for a third time last night (Tatyana hadn’t seen it), and in the Cinerama Dome yet — not a good place to see almost anything due to that image-distorting Cinerama screen. (Remember that Alan Parker had a less curvy screen installed before he’d allow Evita to play there in ’96.) The Big Sick plays very nicely the third time. Nothing felt the least bit tired or overbaked — it still feels fresh and natural and sharp as a tack. On top of which I understood more of it this time. There’s a lot of tossed-off vocal-fry muttering going on (especially from Zoe Kazan), but the Cinerama Dome sound system was good enough to overcome the psst-psst-nep-nyep tonalities.

We were talking about how much we liked Holly Hunter as Zoe’s mom. When we got home I persuaded Tatyana to watch Broadcast News (’87), which she’d never seen and in which Hunter gave her career-best performance.

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Great Merciful Bloodstained Gods!

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Yesterday Page Six reported that Daniel Day Lewis‘s post-Phantom Thread game plan is to become a dressmaker or, you know, possibly a dress designer of some sort. The 60 year-old actor fell for the art of making women’s dresses while researching haute couture fashion in preparation for playing the legendary Charles James. James is the focus of Paul Thomas Anderson’s film, which Focus Features will open on 12.25. It’s about James’ high-time career in the ’50s. While James operated out of New York City during that decade, Phantom Thread is strangely set in London.

DDL’s career-switch decision makes perfect sense, of course. Instead of building upon a brilliant body of work as a universally admired actor of unquestioned genius, he will henceforth devote himself to dressmaking, a notoriously fickle and demanding profession that only a relative few have truly excelled at, and as a journeyman at that.

Question: From my moron perspective I’m presuming that dressmaking is more or less about literally constructing dresses on your hands and knees with sewing needles between your teeth, and that dress designing is where the inspirational part comes in…right? And that DDL has opted to be a grunt who handles the material and thread and whatnot? Or is he looking to design dresses as James did? I’m presuming he’s intending to primarily design but also roll up his sleeves when the occasion demands and literally cut and stitch the damn things together. I don’t know anything. I love high-end men’s fashion (particularly shoes) but I never cared about women’s stuff. What straight guy does?

Who said Lewis is particularly gifted as a designer? Who has told him “you have promise, young man…you should develop your skills!” Where are DDL’s original designs so we, the popcorn-munching audience, can assess whether he’s just as talented in this new calling as he is at acting? I respect Lewis’s willingness to explore new terrain at an advanced age, but c’mon, dude…what are the odds that you’re the new Yves Saint Laurent or Christian Dior or Stella McCartney?

John Malkovich has a suit-designing business.

Boil it down and this is the latest what-the-fuck?, should-he-stay-with-the-same-medication-or-see-a new-doctor? move from an actor known for his mercurial eccentricity.

Remember that Lewis quit acting for five years in the 1990s to become a Florence-based shoemaker under the tutelage of Stefano Bemer.