“We’re really moving along…we’re bringing back our jobs…we’re making American great again…ending the war on coal…no more easy welfare for immigrants,” etc. What’s a nice, concise term for beyond toxic, world-class contemptible, nauseating, forehead-slapping, rhetorically suffocating?
Last August I reported that Chappaquiddick (dated 5.11.16, 131 pages), a blistering Ted Kennedy melodrama written by Taylor Allen and Andrew Logan, would begin filming just after Labor Day. It did so. John Curran directed with a cast that toplined Jason Clarke (as EMK), Kate Mara (Mary Jo Kopechne), Ed Helms (Joe Gargan), Bruce Dern (the immobile Joseph P, Kennedy), Jim Gaffigan and Taylor Nichols.
I figured Chappaquiddick might turn up at Toronto in search of a distribution deal, but it wasn’t included in the first batch of titles. A friend who’s seen it says it’s “good…Jason Clarke really captures the Teddy vibe of that era but it’s Bruce Dern that is the power of the film as father Joe.”
Maybe it’ll be announced as a Toronto title in a week or so, and maybe it’ll open commercially sometime in the late winter or spring of ’18. I know a good script when I read one so here’s hoping.
The other qualifier has to do with Stephen Chbosky‘s Wonder (Lionsgate, 11.17). The trailer suggested it might be a tad cloying, but you can never tell anything from a trailer. I reported on 3.30 that a Lionsgate spokesperson had told the Cinemacon crowd “that Wonder has gotten the highest test scores of any Lionsgate film ever.” And so the original release date, 4.7.17, was changed last February to 11.17.
But that didn’t mean that Lionsgate believed that Wonder has the Oscar nuts. All it meant, I’ve been told, is that Lionsgate knew they had a strong family film and so they wanted to open it near Thanksgiving to capitalize on that. Make of this what you will.
As I understand it, working-class Mexicans and residents of Spain speak the same language in the same way that natives of rural Arkansas and Cambridge-educated Brits both speak English. I wouldn’t know, but street-level Mexicans allegedly speak Spanish with mumbled, guttural inflections. Long ago I read that the word huevos (eggs), which Spaniards pronounce as “WAYvos”, is pronounced as “werewolves” in non-tourist regions. So the next time you’re ordering breakfast in Monterrey or Vera Cruz you need to say “werewolves rancheros.”
I mentioned this a couple of years ago in a piece about the Riviera Maya Film Festival. I first learned about real-deal Mexican pronunciations in Robert Sabbag‘s “Snowblind: A Brief Career in the Cocaine Trade,” which I read…oh, probably around ’77 or thereabouts. (The hardbound edition popped in ’76.) Sabbag’s dealer character, Zachary Swan, mentions that a Mexican waiter didn’t understand him when he ordered “dos huevos,” and a friend explains he would’ve been perfectly understood if he’d said “dos werewolves.”
If an engrossing, well-made film contains a theme or side-plot that I find tedious or distasteful, I’ll simply erase it in my head. Or, you know, I’ll put it into a box, and then put the box under the bed — problem solved. Example: I completely ignored the allegory about faith in M. Night Shyamalan‘s Signs (’02) and just concentrated on the excellent direction of the scary alien scenes (on the roof, in the cornfield, in the pantry).
Mel Gibson‘s Graham Hess had renounced God and the priesthood after his wife was killed in an auto accident, and I brushed that shit off like dandelion pollen. Hess’s faith is restored at the end after his asthmatic son (Rory Culkin) has been spared and the aliens have been vanquished, and I couldn’t have cared less. I remember a dispute with David Poland about this. He was saying “but it’s a religious allegory…it’s all about God and faith,” and I would say “if that’s what defined the movie for you, knock yourself out, but for me the faith stuff was like a fly buzzing around the kitchen…swat, swat.”
Signs was an absolutely top-tier alien movie, period. End of discussion group.
