Month: July 2017

Thanks But No Thanks

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The new Wrinkle In Time trailer begins with Chris Pine asking “what if we are here for a reason? What if we are part of something truly divine?” HE answer: Don’t be tedious. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Okay, you could call the relentless, never-ending cycle of creation, destruction and renewal a divine thing if you want, but the only reason any of us are here boils down to mere chance. In other words, we got lucky. Ava DuVernay and Jeffrey Wells were born on this blue planet for exactly and precisely the same reason that a certain blade of grass sprouted on a large fairway at the Bel Air Country Club last March. Why did this particular blade of grass happen to punch through the soil? Because God has a plan.

Seriously, this teaser feels like a mystical mumbo-jumbo hodgepodge. It gave me a stomach ache. In part because Oprah Winfrey plays Mrs. Which, Reese Witherspoon plays Mrs. Whatsit and Mindy Kaling plays Mrs. Who. (The latter is rumored to be the great granddaughter of Who, the baseball player from the Abbott & Costello “Who’s On First?” routine.)

“The Hateful Family”

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I’ve put quotes around the above headline because it came from Variety critic Owen Gleiberman during a back-and-forth we had this morning about Quentin Tarantino‘s Manson Family movie. The subject was Gleiberman’s 7.15 essay about same — “Quentin Tarantino Does Manson? That’s News That Should Thrill Cinema Lovers.”

The 12th paragraph gets to the nub of it: “Tarantino wants to tell a story about how the age of free love morphed into something horrific — a transformation that still has disturbing implications today. Will he play it straight or Tarantino-ize it? My instinct (or maybe it’s just a hope) is that Tarantino can’t reduce the Manson story to another of his concoctions. I mean, he can, of course, but it wouldn’t feel right, and it wouldn’t be inspiring cinema.”

 
 

HE opinion: As intriguing as this project sounds, Tarantino is incapable of playing it even semi-straight. He’s not a docu-dramatist — he’s a creator of alternate Quentinworld fantasies. His last three films have mined the past — Inglourious Basterds, Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight — and each time he’s reimagined and re-dialogued history in order to transform his tales into his own brand of ’70s exploitation cinema. Why should QT play his cards any differently with the Manson family?

Gleiberman said this morning that location-wise he wants Tarantino to deliver an exact duplicate of everything we know about the Manson geography (Spahn ranch, Haight-Ashbury, etc.) but “make it feel new.”

“Alas, Tarantino is not a realist,” I replied. “Never has been, never will be. His Paris neighborhood set in Inglorious Basterds looked exactly like that — a phony sound stage realm. And remember that he reimagined an anti-Semitic, Jew-hunting Nazi Colonel as a witty talk-show showoff who loved to giggle at his own jokes. Remember also that in the same film Tarantino gave a French country farmer the name of ‘Bob.'”

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Happiness Pills

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Daisy Ridley gives the best quote about Rian Johnson‘s Star Wars: The Last Jedi: “Rian has written a story that is unexpected but right. Some of the stuff that happens, people are going to go ‘oh my God!’ Even though everybody knows it’s the second in a trilogy, it’s its own thing. I’m sure that if Cary Grant were still with us, he’d strongly approve.”

Can you feel the joy and the warmth from this teaser? The Last Jedi may or may not deliver unforeseen plot complexities or unexpected gravitas or sobering undercurrents a la The Empire Strikes Back. But to judge by this behind-the-scenes smorgasbord one thing’s for sure, and that’s that everyone involved in principal photography — cast, crew, craft services, drivers, gophers — channeled alpha vibes start to finish. They were in such states of alpha bonhomie that a couple of them actually levitated. They smiled so much that their facial muscles began to ache.

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Downsizing For Telluride…Right?

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With today’s announcement that Alexander Payne’s Downsizing will open the 2017 Venice International Film Festival on 8.30, there’s a 95% chance that Payne and his cast (Matt Damon, Kirsten Wiig, Laura Dern, Christoph Waltz, Jason Sudeikis) will fly to the Telluride Film Festival a day or two later. In my recently posted Telluride spitball piece, I wrote that Downsizing looked like a nope — “Too late in the year, too much FX tweaking, too much finessing and re-editing.” And I was wrong. That happens from time to time.

After watching several minutes of footage from Downsizing last March at Cinemacon, I wrote that “the undercurrent felt a teeny bit spooky, like a futuristic social melodrama in the vein of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

“In its matter-of-fact portrait of middle-class Americans willing to shrink themselves down to the size of a pinkie finger in order to reap economic advantages, Downsizing doesn’t appear to be the sort of film that will instill euphoric feelings among Average Joes. It struck me as a reimagining of mass man as mass mice — a portrait of little people buying into a scheme that’s intended to make their lives better but in fact only makes them…smaller. A bit like Trump voters suddenly realizing that their lot isn’t going to improve and may even get worse.

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Handsomest Betrayal Dupe In Decades

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A little more than two years ago I noted that David Jones‘ Betrayal (’83), a note-perfect adaptation of Harold Pinter’s 1978 stage play, was still not available via Bluray, DVD or streaming. At the time (5.30.15) the only way you could see it start to finish was to watch a murky version on YouTube. But on 6.4.17 a Russian woman named Alexandra Alexandrova uploaded a visually tolerable version (1.37 aspect ratio, probably taken from a musty CBS Fox Video VHS) to YouTube. Who knows how long it’ll last before the lawyers pounce so if you’ve never seen a passable copy, now’s your chance. Why the rights holders have refused for 30-plus years to license this brilliant infidelity drama to distributors is beyond me.

Scorsese’s Last Goombah

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Martin Scorsese‘s The Irishman, a gangster saga about the guy who allegedly iced Jimmy Hoffa, will begin shooting next month. I’m not expecting the 74 year-old Scorsese to retire any time soon, but given his appetite for varied subjects it’s all but certain that The Irishman will be his last urban crime film featuring goombah types. By my book Scorsese has directed four goombahs — Mean Streets (’73), Raging Bull (’80), Goodfellas (’90) and Casino (’95). The Departed (’06) is urban crime but with Boston micks. The Wolf of Wall Street (’13) is obviously an urban crime flick minus goombah street seasoning, and the 19th Century Gangs of New York ain’t goombah at all.

The Irishman, which will costar Robert De Niro (as Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran), Al Pacino (Jimmy Hoffa), Bobby Cannavale (Joey Gallo), Joe Pesci (Russell Bufalino), Harvey Keitel (Angelo Bruno) and Ray Romano (Bill Bufalino), will begin shooting later this month. With DeNiro, Pacino, Pesci and Keitel in their ’70s and Romano turning 60 in December, I’m calling this Oldfellas until further notice.

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The Two Dees

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Hollywood Elsewhere is grateful for having been invited to see Dunkirk on Monday, 7.16, at 7pm. As it happens I’ll also be catching Detroit a few hours earlier. I’m glad that Sasha Stone and others in the elite fraternity got to see it this morning. That’s all I’m going to say.

What Are SAG’s Refuseniks Waiting For?

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There is still, we’re told, a contingent of old-school SAG conservatives who are again determined to ixnay a CG-augmented Andy Serkis performance in the realm of Best Actor nominations. His latest and greatest, I mean. The unqualified raves for Serkis’ Caesar in War For The Planet of the Apes make this alleged SAG recalcitrance and obstinacy seem all the more embarassing. SAG naysayers can dismiss or marginalize Serkis’s soul-stirring performance but critics and ticket buyers know the truth of it, as history soon will.

Wake up, Academy and guild members — great acting is great acting. Filmmaking in 2017 is ten times more digitized than it was ten years ago, and 50 times more than it was in ’97 and so on. The bouquet of roses and aroma of strong coffee is in the air. You can’t continue to say “what coffee smell?” year after year after year. This is reality, Greg.

“Andy Serkis’s performance as Caesar is one of the marvels of modern screen acting…the motion-captured, digitally sculpted apes [in War] are so natural, so expressive, so beautifully integrated into their environment, that you almost forget to be astonished by the nuances of thought and emotion that flicker across their faces.” — from War review by N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott.

“If he weren’t acting with dots on his face to be replaced by a detailed computer simulation of an upright chimpanzee, it would be all but impossible to deny Serkis an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor.” — BFI critic Kim Newman.

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Chalamet, Fanning in Next Woody

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Woody Allen‘s weeks-old decision to cast Call Me By Your Name star Timothy Chalamet and Elle Fanning in his next film was officially reported this morning by Tracking Board‘s Jeff Sneider.

The Chalamet-Woody thing was being passed around eons ago, but agents involved in the deal kept saying “not yet” and “hold your horses” and “sorry but we have to do this thing properly”…zzzzz. Woody’s casting decisions are often attuned to hot new flavors and currents, so it tells you something about Chalumet’s rising potency (and the buzz that’s been chasing Call Me By Your Name since last January’s Sundance Film Festival) that he’s the new Woody pick.

Chalamet played Matthew McConaughey’s son in Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (I was too busy hating that film to notice), and then attracted modest attention with his performance in Julia Hart‘s Miss Stevens, which I thought about catching but didn’t. Then Call Me by Your Name arrived in Park City — bang! Chalumet will also be seen in Scott Cooper’s Hostiles, Plan B’s Beautiful Boy and Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird.

Everyone knows Elle Fanning.

Tribute To A Guy Whose Ass Has Been French-Kissed For Over 40 years

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If there’s one thing we need in this world, it’s an HBO-produced, star-studded documentary about the power, glory and immaculate wonder of Steven Spielberg. Directed and produced by Susan Lacy, Spielberg will debut on Saturday, 10.7. I’m not saying the point of Lacy’s doc is to warm up the atmosphere and fluff up the bed on behalf of Spielberg’s The Papers (20th Century Fox, 12.22), but it certainly won’t hurt in this regard.

Lacy talked to Spielberg for 30 hours while collecting insights and recollections from J.J. Abrams, Leonardo DiCaprio, Richard Dreyfuss, Ralph Fiennes, Harrison Ford, David Geffen, Tom Hanks, Dustin Hoffman, Holly Hunter, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Ben Kingsley, Kathleen Kennedy, George Lucas, Liam Neeson, Martin Scorsese, Oprah Winfrey and Robert Zemeckis. Is there a chance that even two or three of these guys will share something that isn’t totally obsequious and kiss-assy?

Imagine if Lacy’s doc was given to brutal honesty and was titled Super-Hack, and was basically about selling the idea that throughout his life Spielberg’s default instinct has never been anything more profound than wanting to get a rise out of Joe Popcorn, and that aside from E.T., Schindler’s List, Lincoln and maybe four or five other exceptions to the rule, there’s nothing wrong with banging out commercial movies or being the most talented and financially successful hack in Hollywood history. Celebrate that! Own it! No apologies!

Spielberg knows his craft like few others, but 85% to 90% of his films have mostly been free of any kind of singular passion or deep-rooted beliefs about human nature and how the world works or an underlying current of any kind. Spielberg is a Capra-esque suburban sentimentalist who believes in the goodness of American families, small-town neighborhoods, emotional moms, chubby kids, aliens cute and ferocious, happy endings, carefully choreographed action and wow-level spectacle. For over 40 years Spielberg has shoveled and the public has bought, and that’s why honest film historians of the future will regard him in the same light as Cecil B. DeMille and Mervyn LeRoy. Which is fine as far as it goes. By the way, whatever happened to Robopocalypse?

Slight Logan Lament

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No one is happier than myself that the great Steven Soderbergh has returned to directing with Logan Lucky (Fingerprint/Bleecker, 8.18), which is just around the corner. That said, for the last few weeks I’ve been reluctant to share a slight concern about this blue-collar caper comedy set in North Carolina, but it won’t leave me alone so maybe it’s not as slight as I thought.

My concern is that the guys — Channing Tatum, Daniel Craig, Adam Driver — are too beefy-looking. Call me neurotic but I don’t want to watch a redneck movie in which the actors look like they’ve been inhaling chili dogs and french fries and chugging beer all day long. I want to see a fantasy redneck movie in which the actors look lean and muscular and well-buffed, like they flew in from Los Angeles a few days before the start of principal photography, and with their trainers in tow.

I’m not certain that Soderbergh told his male cast members to load up on working-class food for the sake of verisimilitude, but they sure as hell look it. I’ll do what I can to get past my discomfort with this aspect (Tatum’s bulk in particular — he looks inflated) but I will have to work my way past this…just saying. Did Burt Reynolds pack on the pounds when he made all those redneck movies that wound up destroying his career? No — he kept himself in shape.

The publicity guys are just starting to screen Soderbergh’s film, by the way. The first showing, set for Monday at 5 pm in Beverly Hills, conflicts with a hot-ticket IMAX screening of Dunkirk that evening so I guess I’ll have to wait a bit.

Say Goodnight To The Amiable Guy

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David Ayer’s departure from the new Scarface remake has reminded me of a thought that occured several months ago. I don’t want to see Diego Luna as the new Tony Montana, and I’m not saying this to be pricky or sound like an asshole. Luna is just not gangsta. Going back to Y Tu Mama Tambien he’s always been the mild-mannered amiable guy. He was steady and satisfying in Rogue One, but he doesn’t have that hungry animal quality that Paul Muni and Al Pacino had in their respective versions. What Latin actor would I prefer to see in the role? Gael Garcia Bernal, whose best role was in Pablo Larrain‘s No and who really lit the furnace in Alejandro G. Inarritu‘s amores perros. The new film, written by Jon Herman and the Coen brothers, will be set in Los Angeles. The producers are Dylan Clark, Scott Stuber and Martin Bregman.