Month: June 2017

Yesterday Deadline‘s Mike Fleming reported that Baby Driver‘s Ansel Elgort will play John F. Kennedy in a new version of P.T. 109, titled Mayday 109. I immediately rolled my eyes. Elgort would have made a note-perfect Han Solo — he’s got the slightly brash attitude, the smug assurance and the guy-ness. Han Solo directors Chris Miller and Phil Lord, not to mention producer Kathy Kennedy and the Disney brass, were dead blind not to see this. (Instead they hired a 5′ 9″, beady-eyed Rabbinical student with a gloomy countenance.) But as JFK? Probably not.

No one can play the 35th President and emerge fully unscathed. They either don’t look right or they overdo the accent or both. Elgort’s main advantage is that he’s matinee-idol handsome and slender like Kennedy, although he’s slightly disadvantaged by being too tall at 6′ 3″, or three inches higher than the Real McCoy. On top of which no one has ever quite gotten the voice, and I doubt if anyone ever will. The only way to do it properly is to (a) digitally edit and reconstitute audio recordings so that JFK himself “speaks” the dialogue or (b) hire a gifted JFK mimic to dub Elgort a la Vincent D’Onofrio‘s as Orson Welles in Ed Wood.

Why does anyone want to remake P.T. 109 in the first place? The story isn’t that riveting, for one thing. It’s just about an accidental WWII collision (Kennedy’s P.T. boat getting sliced in half by a larger Japanese ship in the dead of night) followed by some marathon swimming and then carving out an S.O.S. message on a coconut shell, blah blah. By current action-thriller standards it has next to no juice. It even seemed tepid and low-energy by the standards of 1963, which is when the original Cliff Robertson version was released. Jack L. Warner presumed it would be commercial due to JFK’s Oval Office occupancy, but who the hell cares now except for long-of-tooth boomers?

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As a title, Baby Driver is definitely too literal-minded. It would have been cool if Ansel Elgort‘s character wasn’t literally called “Baby” and if he wasn’t a gifted getaway driver, but this is precisely the case in Edgar Wright‘s film. Baby Driver isn’t quite on the painful level of John Singleton‘s Poetic Justice (’93), but it’s close.

The tendency to literalize or de-poeticize movie titles hit me for the first time in ’84 when Taylor Hackford decided to drop the original Out of The Past title by calling his remake Against All Odds. Out of the Past stirs and haunts; Against All Odds promises some kind of pitched battle or macho grudge match. If only Witness had been titled Amish Hide-Out: Be Careful Among The English or One-Eyed Jacks had been called Rio Settles Score.

Today’s assignments: (a) Name other titles that have embraced explicit references rather than metaphors or allusions and (b) name titles that were too metaphorical or vague, and could have used simpler, plainer terminology.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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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I’m doing a phoner tomorrow with Oliver Hirschbiegel about his latest film, 13 Minutes, which is about a failed attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Naturally I’ll have to ask if he’s accepted the likelihood that his greatest claim to fame will be that Hitler rant scene in Downfall, which has given birth to hundreds upon hundreds of YouTube parodies. There may be as many as 1500 variations out there. I’m sorry but I’ve never seen this 2012 interview with Bruno Ganz before. He’s not happy about the parodies but he has no choice but to graciously accept them. His pained expressions are hilarious.

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My head began to throb as I watched an extended Cinemacon product reel for Nikolaj Arcel‘s The Dark Tower (Sony/Columbia, 8.4). I was going to say “there’s nothing more boring than battles between absolute good and evil,” but then I remembered Shane (’53), which is almost a black-and-white thing. But not quite as it acknowledges, like any decently written story, that we all have our reasons. Even Donald Trump, the most flagrant manifestation of evil this side of ISIS, has a motive or rationale of some kind.

This Cosby juror, 21 year-old Bobby Dugan, said this morning on Good Morning, America that while he personally believed Cosby was guilty, the jury’s deliberations became about “he said, she said…what it really comes down to is who you gonna believe more? That’s all it was.” In other words, the two holdouts on the jury believed Bill Cosby‘s version rather than Andrea Constand‘s. Insufficient evidence, he says, but c’mon. The jurors who bought Cosby’s version almost certainly did so out of pre-trial allegiance or favoritism, or — to put it more simply — denial.