Month: June 2017

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.”

Amazon Studios will open Woody Allen‘s Wonder Wheel, a 50s-era drama set in the vicinity of Brooklyn’s Coney Island amusement park, on 12.1.17. Last February I determined that at least some of the action takes place in the summer of 1950. The proof, I noted, was in a lobby poster shown in a Wonder Wheel still that featured costars Kate Winslet, Justin Timberlake and Juno Temple. The poster was for Anthony Mann‘s Winchester ’73, which opened on 7.12.50. The Brooklyn-raised Allen was 14 on that date.

Allen is currently casting his next film, which will skew younger. A movie per year, no time to lose, total workhorse.

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At the beginning of Feud: Bette and Joan, 43 year-old director Robert Aldrich (portrayed by 64 year-old Alfred Molina) is a fearful, verging-on-desperate journeyman whose most recent film, Sodom and Gomorrah, is considered an embarassment. He’s on the ropes, in need of a hit.

But in the mid ’50s, and particularly in the wake of the commercially successful Vera Cruz and the hard-bitten Kiss Me Deadly, Aldrich was a comer, a prince of pulp, a stylist extraordinaire. Six months after his apocalyptic detective noir opened in May ’55, Aldrich’s hard-hitting adaptation of Clifford Odets‘ The Big Knife hit theatres. Two and a half months earlier Knife had won the Venice Film Festival’s Silver Lion award. The costars are Jack Palance, Rod Steiger, Shelley Winters, Ida Lupino, Jean Hagen and Everett Sloane.

Arrow’s region 2 Bluray version, the result of a new 2K restoration from original film elements, pops on 8.28.

From “Unexepected Brigsby Admiration,” posted on 5.25.17: This is a little film, made by three childhood pals (director Dave McCary, co-writer and star Kyle Mooney, co-writer Kevin Costello), that really believes in its own alchemy, and particularly in dorkiness, hip-pocket filmmaking, piles of VHS tapes, geek dreams and deliriously cheesy visual effects.

Brigsby Bear develops its own realm and attitude, but influence-wise is basically a mixture of Room, Michael Gondry‘s Be Kind Rewind, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl and the twee sensibility of Wes Anderson (and particularly that of Moonrise Kingdom).

Sony Classics is opening Brigsby Bear stateside on 7.28. The costars are Mark Hamill, Claire Danes, Greg Kinnear, Andy Samberg, Matt Walsh, Michaela Watkins and SNL‘s Beck Bennett (i.e., Vladimir Putin).

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“The most dangerous villain in the piece, though, is the rampaging Roman mob, its allegiances flapping like a weathervane, its hatreds quickly stoked, its rages easily redirected to perceived enemies. Although no one among the rabble actually chants ‘Lock her up!’ or ‘Trump that bitch!’ or ‘Kick him out!’, the echo of mobs past hangs in the air.” — from Marilyn Stasio‘s 6.12 Variety review of the Trump-reflecting (and Delta Airlines disapproving) Julius Caesar at the Delacorte in Central Park.

Mike Nichols took an eight-year break from dramatic features after the back-to-back failure of The Day of the Dolphin (’73) and especially The Fortune (’75). In fact Nichols had slipped into a funk. He was in a gloomy, self-doubting place. The guy he’d been during the mid ’60s to early ’70s heyday had gone into hiding if not eclipse.

When he finally returned with Silkwood in ’83, Nichols was a different man in terms of a certain aesthetic signature that he’d used between ’67 and ’75 — that studied, carefully choreographed, long-take visual scheme that defined The Graduate, Catch 22, The Fortune and particularly Carnal Knowledge. Nichols didn’t use this shooting style as much in Dolphin and Fortune, but when Silkwood appeared it was obvious the classic Nichols scheme was no more.

A Silkwood Bluray pops on 7.25.17

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I didn’t have a great longing to see Sean Baker‘s The Florida Project (A24, 10.16), a lower-depths mother-daughter saga set in low-rent Orlando, when it played in Cannes. Yes, I wanted to see the follow-up by the guy who made Tangerine, for sure, but the hard truth is that I didn’t want to see it enough to push aside other stuff I wanted to get to. The Florida Project was always in third or fourth place on the list.

Why? I didn’t like that fucking title.

Brooklynn Prince, Bria Vinaite in Sean Baker’s The Florida Project.

If you read any smart comprehensive review of the film (Owen Gleiberman’s, for example) and the story it tells, there’s no way The Florida Project alludes to any part of it. If Baker was shooting in Orlando and hadn’t yet figured out a title, calling it The Florida Project would have been cool. But releasing it months later with that title is just smug bullshit on his part. It’s a lazy-ass moniker that Baker chose because nobody told him he couldn’t. And now we’re stuck with it.

Update: “The Florida Project” was the working title for Disney World when it was under construction, and the motel where most of the action takes place is a borderline housing project. Make of that what you will.

Imagine if George Lucas had been stuck for a title when he was shooting principal photography on Star Wars, and so he called it Big Wookie and then, out of boredom, Overcooked Pasta. Then he gradually fell for the former, in part because execs at 20th Century Fox (including Alan Ladd, Jr.) never argued for a more commercial title. Big Wookie opened on 5.25.77, never quite reaching blockbuster status but becoming a mid-sized cult hit.

This is what The Florida Project is — Sean Baker’s Big Wookie.

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In a realclearscience.com article titled “12 Possible Reasons We Haven’t Found Aliens”, Ross Pomeroy elaborates on reason #4, or a theory called “intelligent life self-destructs.” The notion is that “whether via weapons of mass destruction, planetary pollution or manufactured virulent disease, it may be the nature of intelligent species to commit suicide, existing for only a short time before winking out of existence.” The term “short time” being relative, of course. Homo sapiens has been a going species for about 200,000 years, which is only a few moments in the cosmic span of things. And then along comes Donald Trump and the millions of dipshits who voted for him, and the suicide thing accelerates big-time.

Newsmax Media exec Chris Ruddy, a longtime pally of President Donald Trump, has told Judy Woodruff that Trump is thinking about firing Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating possible collusion between the president’s campaign and the Russians. Ruddy told the NewsHour host that Trump “is considering, perhaps, terminating the special counsel…I think he’s weighing that option.” This is an orchestrated move, of course — theatrical sabre rattling — with the objective of intimidating Mueller. It would be appalling and perversely beautiful on a certain level if Trump was to actually do this.  It would (a) echo President Nixon’s firing of special prosecutor Archibald Cox in 1973 and (b) would intensify calls for Trump’s impeachment.