Month: November 2017

I approved of James Franco‘s The Disaster Artist (A24, 12.1) in my 10.25 review, but at the same time I called it a curio — a decent stab at conceptual humor that generates a kind of chuckly vibe on a scene-by-scene basis.  Watching a clueless asshole (i.e., Franco’s Tommy Wiseau) behave like a clueless asshole isn’t all that funny if you’re watching what that’s like on a line-by-line, incident-by-incident, humiliation-by-humiliation basis.

Then something happened two or three days later. I began recalling a seriously weird moment from the film, and then it became an ear bug — playing over and over in my head. I’m speaking of a moment when Wiseau performs a spazzy, primal-scream thing during a San Francisco acting class. “Aagghhhh! Aaagghhhh! Aaaggghhhhh! For some reason I can’t get this screaming out of my head, which is probably an indication that Franco has done something right. Now I’m thinking it might be a classic bit.

I was reminded of the soft, grainy, slightly darker look of Lady Bird after catching it last night for the second time. I had assumed after seeing it in Telluride that it’d been shot on 35mm or super 16mm, but then I read this morning that it was actually shot digitally. So I asked to speak with dp Sam Levy sometime today. Luckily and unexpectedly, we were chatting less than an hour later.

Levy shot Lady Bird with Arri Alexa Minis, he said, but with “old lenses.’ The soft, grainy look began to be formulated when Gerwig said she wanted Lady Bird “to look like a memory.”

“A distressed, restrained muted palette”

“When she said that I knew what she meant,” Levy recalls. “Not too digital or clean or super-clear. The aesthetic of memory. Not too saturated or contrasty or electronic looking. We had an instinct to shoot it digitally but employ techniques that would result in a distressed, hand-made, xerox-copies-of-color-photos feeling…we always always trying to get this generation-removed aesthetic.”

I mentioned the grainy textures, which pretty much leap out at you. “Grain is an element, part of the distressed quality of the image,” Levy said, “but it’s not the whole story. The idea was to make it look not too resolved, not too sharp.

“We were looking for a restrained, muted color palette. We shot in 2K, which has a softer, more mellow quality. But even with 2K as opposed to 4K the colors are fairly saturated and robust, and so we were looking for ways to distress the image in an organic way…reminiscent of super 16mm, but the intent was to create something of our own. It isn’t clean and correct and super-clear but is slightly removed.”

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I’m moving closer and closer to a firm opinion that 2017 has been a weak Oscar year, and I’m starting to think there’s a specific reason for that. In any artistic realm there’s only so much genius and excellence to go around, and the fact is that more and more talented people and good ideas are finding homes in cable and streaming these days, and that means that the movie realm, which has never been less interested in quality for quality’s sake in the history of the film industry, is no longer getting the cream of the crop and the pick of the litter in terms of talent and projects.

To rephrase, fewer dynamically talented people are trying to create high-quality movies for the theatrical realm, and more and more dynamically talented people and their passion projects are heading straight for Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and elsewhere in the streaming realm. It’s that simple.

I don’t know much about Steven Spielberg‘s The Post and Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Phantom Thread (and neither does anyone else), but I do know that when you look closely at the current Gold Derby favorites for Best Picture, there are are only three that deliver that X-factor wowness. Three films with that confident, fully charged, self-aware, ahead-of-the-curve, real-life-discovered quality that proclaims “this is truly one of the few.”

I’m speaking (as if regular readers didn’t know) of Dunkirk, Call Me By Your Name and Lady Bird. I could extend my list to include The Big Sick and The Florida Project because they also smack of discovery and originality, a vibe and a current that tells you “this is new, this is something else, you need to really pay attention.”

In terms of dazzling precision and extraordinary visual composition alone I would add the masterful War For The Planet of the Apes, although I know there are some who insist on pigeonholing it as a technically brilliant exercise and nothing more.

I’m not dismissing or marginalizing Darkest Hour, Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri, The Shape of Water or Get Out, and I wouldn’t argue all that strongly against them if anyone tried to pick a fight. All due respect, I don’t happen to believe these four films have that tingly, levitational quality that many Best Picture Oscar nominees have possessed in years past, at least in my own estimation. That’s not to say they’re not heading for a Best Picture nomination. They may well be.

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I don’t believe that Star Wars: The Last Jedi (Disney, 12.15) is going to be the Empire Strikes Back of the current trilogy, as some have suggested or hoped for. I am so persuaded because that 1980 classic was essentially a film noir dressed up in Star Wars mythology and effects, and the creatives behind this forthcoming Disney release are, I strongly suspect, unwilling to create a middle chapter that will steer the narrative into a downish noirish direction that will things hanging. I just don’t see it happening.

I do, however, see myself crumbling under the atmosphere of sameness and repetition, of being fed the same-old, same-old for the umpteenth time. How many decades have we all been listening to dialogue about the dark side vs. the Force by way of first-run releases, Blurays, DVDs and whatnot? The answer is four. 40 years of hammering home that same either/or equation, over and over and over.

Will it wow the crowd? Yeah, most likely. It’s supposed to be a good script. Rian Johnson, Kathy Kennedy and the financing Disney execs know what they’re doing. They just don’t seem interested in a Hollywood Elsewhere-styled Star Wars film, is all. Not the end of the world. I’ll survive and so will everyone else.

Eight weeks ago I called Greta Gerwig‘s Lady Bird “the pizazziest, wisest, smartest, most emotionally resonant and complete film I’ve seen at Telluride ’17.” Here it is November 2nd, and I’m thinking those superlatives might apply to the whole year. And hardly anyone is dissenting. 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, 93% on Metacritic. Obviously a Best Picture contender, ditto Gerwig for Best Director, Saoirse Ronan for Best Actress, Laurie Metcalf for Best Supporting Actress.

Whipsmart, deeply felt, affecting, alive, shrewdly calculated. Really. Obviously.

And yet for the most part the Gold Derby gang has Lady Bird ranked behind Darkest Hour (an impassioned, well-made historical drama that could have been made in 1987), Three Billboards outside Ebbbing, Missouri (a wise, often eloquent film about letting go of anger and yet punctuated with rage and violence for 3/4 of its length) and The Shape of Water (a romantic, sensual fairy tale that charms but with a story that doesn’t quite hold up to logical scrutiny). Lady Bird may be “small” but it has no issues or blemishes. It completely understands itself and how to convey what it’s saying. It’s clever and canny and doesn’t miss a trick. For that you get demerits?

From A.O. Scott’s N.Y. Times review: “I wish I could convey to you just how thrilling this movie is. I wish I could quote all of the jokes and recount the best offbeat bits. I’d tell you about the sad priest and the football coach, about the communion wafers and the Sacramento real estate, about the sly, jaunty editing rhythms, the oddly apt music choices and the way Ms. Ronan drops down on the grass in front of her house when she receives an important piece of mail. I’m tempted to catalog the six different ways the ending can make you cry.”

For those who haven’t paid the slightest attention, Lady Bird is a comically anguished piece of self-portraiture in which the 34 year-old Gerwig recalls and reconstructs (and to some extent re-invents) her life in ’02, when she was finishing high school and dying to get the hell out of Sacramento. Mopey as this may sound, it casts one of those spells that take hold. It’s an amusing, touching, smallish film that glistens and scores and pushes that special button.

Said it before: “Lady Bird is Rushmore’s Daughter — a brainy, girl-centric indie that deals emotionally rounded cards, a Wes Anderson-type deal (sharply disciplined, nicely stylized, just-right music tracks, grainy film-like textures) but without the twee, and with polish and English and all kinds of exacting, soulful self-exposure.

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Posted on 11.2, 11:10 pm: Here’s a screen grab of Rotten Tomatoes’ Bad Moms Christmas page from Wednesday, 11.1, and early Thursday, 11.2. Note info inside red circle:

Posted on 11.2, 1:21 pm: Earlier today I wrote Rotten Tomatoes editors Tim Ryan and Grae Drake about a brief but curious situation involving Bad Moms Christmas (STX, 11.1). I told them that I recognize that Bad Moms Christmas is currently rated 28% on RT. (The Metacritic score is 42%.) But last night a critic friend from a major Eastern newspaper pointed something out, and so I asked if they could clarify.

“A Bad Moms Christmas, the terrible quickie sequel to Bad Moms, opened all across North America today,” the friend wrote. “There are all kinds of reviews online, as a Google search shows. Yet there’s no score on Rotten Tomatoes yet. When you go to the RT page for the film, there’s a note on it that says [RT is] “waiting until 9 p.m. Pacific for the ‘Tomatometer reveal‘”.

“I’ve never seen Rotten Tomatoes do this before,” he explained. “It means that the movie, likely to be judged ‘rotten’ by critics, gets a full-day free pass with no aggregated scores on RT. This is exactly what studios want, right? What do you think RT is up to?”

Three possibilities. One, my critic friend imagined that he saw the ‘waiting until 9 pm” notice. Two, Rotten Tomatoes posted the “waiting until 9 pm for a Tomatometer reveal” statement and then thought better of it. Three, it was some kind of accident or glitch.

Anyway, like I said, RT’s Bad Moms Christmas page is up and flashing so (a) whatever happened, happened and (b) it’s water under the bridge. But why they did they have that “wait until 9 pm” thing up? I doubt that my friend is the “seeing illusions” type. Two hours have elapsed since I sent my email to the RT editors; they haven’t responded.

Completely pathetic girlymen vs. serious, leather-wearing studs. Wimpy dorky candy-asses vs. muscular rightwing rogues and scamps.

Jon Peters is obviously a dinosaur by the standards of today’s p.c. Twitter mob, but this is a really good tale. Frank, straight, no tip-toeing around. Yeah, I know — it’s been up since mid-August but I only just saw it today. I wish it would last an hour and that Peters would tell all the stories. I wish he’d talk more about his hairdressing days. Wasn’t he supposed to be the real-life model for Warren Beatty‘s George Roundy character in Shampoo? Sarah Silverman‘s tale is pretty great also.

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I was briefly stunned to read about Ed Douglas’s suspension from the Tracking Board earlier today because this seemed to indicate, at least for a moment, that something he might’ve done years ago had caught up with him. But no — Douglas was attacked by a Twitter mob yesterday after he went on an epic non-p.c. rant about various sexual assault accusers who have come forward in recent days. The veteran critic should have thought twice before saying what he said, but this is an example of how easily you can get yourself in big trouble these days if you aren’t careful. Again — Douglas hasn’t been canned, just suspended. The situation will be evaluated tomorrow during a chat with Tracking Board honcho Jeff Sneider. “I also have a staff full of women to worry about, including a survivor of sexual assault,” Sneider explained this afternoon. “Ed is fine with the decision so case closed. We’re moving on, and he’ll be back when he’s back.”

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Late last night Tatyana and I roamed among the Halloween revellers on Santa Monica Blvd. The main activities were picture-taking, mingling and greeting, drinking. No biggie, nothing different, happens every year, etc.

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