Month: July 2017

I’ve been watching Atomic Blonde excerpts and trailers since last March, and the cartoonish cyborg quality in the fight scenes is starting to turn me off. I’m starting to weaken, slump over. The apparent “joke” is that Charlize Theron‘s lezzy Cold War agent isn’t quite human, but it doesn’t amuse — it numbs you out. Director David Leitch‘s refusal to show her getting winded or pausing to catch her breath is irksome. I didn’t really buy the robo-badass aesthetic in the John Wick films either, although I found the first installment (which Leitch co-directed) amusing here and there.

Yes, Charlize is more believable as a kick-ass queen than little Angelina Jolie was in Salt, but she’s still not Gina Carano in Haywire. What a thrill when I first saw that Steven Soderbergh film in 2011. Over the last six years no would-be female action star has come close to matching Carano in terms of believable toughness, much less besting her.

Last March HE commenter Abby Normal claimed that Leitch “supposedly hates bullshitty, unrealistic, Fast and Furious-style violence” and is “leading a movement back to coherent action sequences and that ole timey thing we used to call ‘blocking’ as opposed to ‘quick cut and who gives a fuck.'” Yes, Leitch is aiming for a greater degree of choreographed realism than what the Furious films deliver, but it still feels pushed to the nth degree.

I just can’t buy Charlize “demolishing big guys with blows to the face,” as Roger Thornhill noted, because she just doesn’t seem brawny or heavy or strong enough, not to mention those identical thud-whunk sounds every time someone gets hit.

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Last night on Facebook Paul Schrader asked if there’s any grotesque thing Donald Trump could do or say that would alienate his core supporters, or will they stick with him no matter what?

A guy named Sam Forrest wrote that Trump is “a fascist but I want to Make America Great Again.” Jordan Musheno wrote “maybe if he says Black Lives Matter.” Justin Allen said he “can deal with any sort of nonsense Don comes up with, but if he wears a tan suit I’ll register as a Democrat.”

A lot of morons out there are standing by Trump out of dumb pride, I suspect. Many of them voted for him not out of rapt admiration, but because their loathing of Hillary Clinton knew no bounds. And now they’re stuck with the fruit of this obstinacy.

I suspect that the only thing that would change their minds would be some kind of classic Lonesome Rhodes-Budd Schulberg truth-spill. Only if Trump directly insults their culture and values will they have a problem with him. He can shit all over the dignity of the office. He can accelerate the fossil-fuel ruination of the planet. He can scheme and personally profit from his job like Boss Tweed. He can lie and fabricate and fantasize until he’s blue in the face. He can Clown President to his heart’s content. The Bumblefucks are fine with all that. But if he does an Andy Griffith hot-mike Face In The Crowd thing, all bets are off. Then and ONLY THEN will the Trump faithful re-assess the situation.

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From today’s N.Y. Times story by Matt Apuzzo, Jo Becler, Adam Goldman and Maggie Haberman: “Before arranging a meeting with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer he believed would offer him compromising information about Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump Jr. was informed in an email that the material was part of a Russian government effort to aid his father’s candidacy, according to three people with knowledge of the email.

“The email to the younger Mr. Trump was sent by Rob Goldstone, a publicist and former British tabloid reporter who helped broker the June 2016 meeting. In a statement on Sunday, Mr. Trump acknowledged that he was interested in receiving damaging information about Mrs. Clinton, but gave no indication that he thought the lawyer might have been a Kremlin proxy.”

Obviously things look bad for Team Trump right now, but what if you, a senior guy with the Clinton campaign, had been told a year ago that a possibly dicey Russian source was ready to provide a video file containing what would later become known as the pee-pee tape? Would you want to at least meet with the guy, or would you say “no, this is unethical and slimey and I won’t do this, even if the tape turns out to be real, which it might very well be”?

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Business Insider‘s Jason Guerrasio and Michael’s Telluride Blog have recently indulged in some Telluride ’17 speculation, so I might as well offer my own two cents worth of hot air. Which is not to suggest that HE’s wish picks are total bullshit. I’ve heard some things and have good insect antennae, so what I’m guessing or suggesting has at least some relation to reality.

MTB’s list has included Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris‘ Battle of the Sexes, Denis Villeneuve‘s Blade Runner 2049, Darren Aronofsky‘s mother!, Luca Guadagnino‘s Call Me By Your Name, Garth Davis‘s Mary Magdalene and Aaron Sorkin‘s Molly’s Game. (He also mentioned Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Phantom Thread, but that’s highly, highly unlikely.)

Hollywood Elsewhere is hearing for sure that Todd Haynes‘ problematic Wonderstruck is a lock; ditto Sean Baker‘s The Florida Project and Sebastian Lelio‘s A Fantastic Woman, which popped at last February’s Berlinale.

I’m strongly hunching that Battle of the Sexes, Call Me By Your Name and Andrey Zvagintsev‘s Loveless (the last two being distribbed by Sony Pictures Classics, a longtime Telluride presence) are more or less locked, and I’d love to see mother! play there also, of course.

Other apparent likelies or good fits, some of which overlap with MTB: Denis Villeneuve‘s Blade Runner 2049, Aaron Sorkin‘s Molly’s Game, Richard Linklater‘s Last Flag Flying, Martin McDonagh’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, Ritesh Batra‘s Our Souls At Night, George Clooney‘s Suburbicon and John Curran‘s Chappaquiddick (excellent script and apparently finished, but that’s all I know).

These films playing at Telluride would make basic sense in terms of generating buzz and marketing prowess, although I haven’t asked what’s actually going on. I’m figuring it can’t hurt to run a few flags up the pole and see who salutes. No harm in a little spitballing.

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Chris Nolan‘s Dunkirk has passed the first critics-screening test with flying colors. The comments to keep in mind are (a) “Never seen anything like it,” (b) “Almost a silent film,” (b) “A VERY different Nolan film” and (d) “may be divisive.” I’m interpreting the last remark to mean that discerning types may like it more than the popcorn-munchers. Great if true!

Criterion’s 2K Bluray of Alfred Hitchcock‘s The Lodger popped on 6.27. This 1927 silent is regarded as the first Hitchcock film that showed stirrings of what would become his signature themes and obsessions (a wrongly accused main character, a serial killer hunt in the Frenzy mode, creepy erotic undercurrents under a tidy facade). I saw it two years ago in Prague, and feel obliged to warn anyone thinking of buying the Criterion version that The Lodger simply isn’t that good. Here’s what I wrote:

The Lodger is a vaguely kinky, London-based parlor drama about the terror caused by a Jack The Ripper-type killer, called “The Avenger,” who mysteriously murders attractive blondes on Tuesday evenings. (We’re not told if he’s a stabber or a strangler — maybe he just eyeballs his victims and they drop dead on the spot?) Suspicions quickly surface that a recent arrival at a London boarding house — a tall, good-looking but oddly behaving fellow (Ivor Novello) — may be the killer. Hitch encourages you to weigh this possibility for a good 75% of the film until revealing that Novello is just a queer duck who’s looking to find the man who killed his sister.

Novello’s innocence is first hinted at when Daisy (June Tripp), the daughter of the boarding-house owners as well as a model, begins to feel affection and attraction for him, which understandably infuriates her much-older detective boyfriend (played by Malcolm Keen, who was nudging 40 during filming but looked closer to 45 if not 50) and adds to…well, the uncertainty factor, I suppose.

The Lodger was the first Hitchcock film about an innocent man wrongly accused of a crime. It was also Hitch’s first commercial success (it pretty much launched his career) and was also the first film in which he performed a walk-on. (He’s seen from the rear during a scene in which the presses of a major newspaper are printing news of The Avenger’s latest killing.) But this is a rather stiff and primitive exercise — more “interesting” than good.

Portions are nicely framed and focused, and yes, Hitchcock manages to implant a notion that for certain wackos there’s a kind of erotic charge that accompanies the murder of pretty girls. But he was only 27 during filming with only two or three previous films under his belt, and he just didn’t have enough knowledge or polish at this stage in his life. Not enough, certainly, to satisfy a guy like me watching The Lodger 88 years hence.

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The usual grousing about the Oscars, posted last night by JR: “Who fucking cares what the Academy does? I am done with the Oscars, completely done. I am frankly embarrassed that I have given a damn about the Oscars for this long, literally more than 50 years of my life. There’s never been much common ground between my list of the year’s finest alongside the Academy’s Best Picture nominees, and lately the divide has grown much wider.”

Which required my usual patient response: “Once again, it’s not the Oscars as much as The Season. The Oscars are the final event, the grand crescendo, the last stop on the line. Agree with or ignore their picks, but they’re worth their weight in gold because they drive The Season, and thank God and glory hallelujah for that.

“For without The Season (Labor Day to late February) the reach, depth, character and quality of films would never rise above the level of Wonder Woman or the latest Kevin Feige or D.C. Comics fantasia or, at best, noteworthy genre exercises like Get Out. And I’m saying this as a genuine fan of Ant-Man, by the way, as well as one who respects and admires the other two as far they go.”

Yesterday I posted a riff about Scott Feinberg‘s 7.7 Hollywood Reporter article about the Academy expanding its membership with hundreds of filmmakers from foreign countries (“How the Globalization of the Academy Shakes Up the Race“). At the end I wrote the following kicker: “All hail the policies of inclusion, and down with the dominance of the proverbial 62 year-old white male who used to represent the typical Academy voter.”

This drew a complaint from “BadHatHarry,” to wit: “Does the obviously racist slant of this mean, if the harbinger here is true, that the day may come when one could vocally wish for the sidelining of the ‘proverbial minority female’ who now represents the academy? Or will they be the majority by then, freeing us to weep and gnash our teeth that we don’t hear enough white male voices?”

My reply: “I’m sorry, you’re right — it’s racist to denigrate the proverbial 62 year-old white guy and his supposed preferences as far as Best Picture contenders are concerned. I was just expressing the conventional view of the Hollywood herd, which is basically a healthy notion that the Academy needs to free itself from that 62 year-old white guy mentality by opening the gates to all tribes & agendas — women, people of various shades and ethnicities, LGBTQs, etc.

“At the same time we have to acknowledge that for quite a few years now (remember the early ’70s National Lampoon piece “Our White Heritage“?) the entire urban progressive culture of this country (i.e., hipsters, well educated wealthies, blue cities) has been frowning upon and pitying the history, legacy and attitudes of white culture. At least in terms of public discourse and now Twitter.

“It saddens me to acknowledge this, but the resulting narrative — i.e., it’s time for white culture to cede power to the multiculturals while accepting the lash for its horrid, corrupt history — is probably the single biggest factor (along with too many people hating Hillary) that led to Trump being in the White House. The 2016 election was mainly about race and to some extent misogyny, and was significantly propelled by rural & rust-belt under-educated whites pushing back against the p.c. elites & multiculturals.”

It can be assumed that between 19% and 20% of America’s population (the percentage of the country that voted for Donald Trump) believes this hooey. President Trump tweeted this video, which is basically Triumph of the Will minus the visual artistry, at 8:57 am this morning. The “Make America Great Again” song was written by Joy Villa, a practicing Scientologist who wore a Trump-inspired dress to the 2017 Grammy Awards, hails from Orange County, and is obviously a cultural traitor of the lowest order.

MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! pic.twitter.com/NVDVRrWLs4

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 9, 2017

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Nice concept. Mood and atmosphere succinctly conveyed.

Aura’s ashes were delivered today. Nice cottage but for $200 bucks you’d think they could paste her name right.

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