Year: 2017

I would seriously pay to see a movie about Will Smith trying to get along and stay cool in a hood, cleaning his house, trying to sell it, swinging a push broom, wearing a maroon bathrobe, jawing with the locals, fixing himself breakfast, etc. If it stayed on that level, I mean. But another buddy cop flick, slightly rearranged or re-fitted with Orcs, serving the old saw about racial disharmony and distrust and pushing past resentments? Naah. No unholy alliance of David Ayer and Max Landis for me.

Last March a research-screening guy expressed measured enthusiasm for Joseph Kosinski‘s Granite Mountain, which at the time was a Lionsgate film slated for a 9.22 release. Now it’s a Columbia film called Only The Brave, and slated to open on 10.20. Josh Brolin, Miles Teller, Jeff Bridges, James Badge Dale, Taylor Kitsch, Jennifer Connelly, et. al. Don’t jump to conclusions. Kosinski is a strong, above-average director. 

From my 5.25.17 Cannes Film festival review: “Brigsby Bear espouses a belief in clinging to adolescent dreams and oddball weirdnesses as a way of keeping reality at bay. It doesn’t advance the idea that integrating into ‘normal’ society is a particularly good thing. It insists, in fact, that feeding and sustaining obsessional realms can actually be a recipe for emotional health, and that normal realms are healthier, happier places for understanding and celebrating outsider sensibilities. Or something like that.

“Brigsby Bear isn’t about going for breakneck hilarity or building up a head of steam, but it does understand itself, and it sticks to that. It has a certain patch of ground that it proudly owns, and you either get that or you don’t. Again — I’m the farthest thing from a geek type or any kind of pre-indoctrinated member of the Brigsby Bear society, but I got this film. I went in with a guarded attitude, but I had a smile going by evening’s end.”

Sony Pictures Classics is opening Brigsby Bear on 7.28.

If I took the time to dredge my memory and think it through, I could come up with 20 or 30 movies that I found riveting and pulse-quickening when I first saw them in my teens and 20s, but felt like pale, under-energized remnants when I re-watched them as a wise but creased adult. But I haven’t the time right now. (I have to leave at 10:30 am for an 11 am screening.) The best I can come up with are two letdowns I’ve already written about — Steven Spielberg‘s Close Encounters of the Third Kind and John Sturges‘ The Great Escape. Surely there are scores that qualify in the thorny minds of HE readers.

Over the past decade or so I’ve devoted more than a little ink to Abbott & Costello Meet The Mummy. Let no one doubt this is a highly unimaginative, under-budgeted B-level thing — the best term is tedious — but for some curious reason I’ve always found its silliness comforting on some level. A couple of years ago I mentioned the old saw about how the bottom has fallen out of badness in movies, and that basic levels of scriptwriting have been dropping, certainly when it comes to CG-driven tentpolers, since the turn of the century if not before. I’ve also been saying with some irony that there are “relatively few big-studio whammers that are as well-ordered and professionally assembled as Abbott & Costello Meet The Mummy, as silly and inconsequential as that 1955 film was.”

In a Daily Beast interview with Tim Teeman, playwright Tony Kushner confirms that Steven Spielberg really is planning a big-screen remake of West Side Story, and that Kushner is working on the screenplay.

The story will still be set in Manhattan’s Upper West Side in the ’50s, he said, and Leonard Bernstein‘s classic score won’t be touched. “I’m interested that we see love at first sight, as opposed to lust,” Kusher says of his version. “By the time they’re singing ‘Maria’ and ‘Tonight,’ things are at a much deeper plane than just two horny kids.”

Kushner is a wonderful writer, but I tremble with dread at what Spielberg will do with this sad Romeo and Juliet-inspired tale.

Read more

I’ll be ignoring the forthcoming Bluray of Journey To The Center of The Earth, the dismissable 1959 adventure flick with James Mason, Pat Boone and Arlene Dahl. The Eureka release will pop on 9.18.17. But I’ll always remember the film for two elements: (1) A line in Charles Brackett‘s screenplay, spoken by Thayer David‘s “Count Saknussemm”, in which he describes our nightly slumber ritual as “little slices of death.” (Which is true — going to sleep is like dying in a sense, and waking up the next morning is a little like being reborn.) And (2) Bernard Herrmann‘s musical score. Other than these, forget it.

Roughly nine months ago I posted a favorable reaction to a West Los Angeles research screening of Martin McDonagh‘s Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri (Fox Searchlight, 11.10). It came from an anonymous HE reader whom I trust as far as it goes. At the end of his remarks the guy wrote that FS “will probably launch Three Billboards during next year’s fall festivals…probably Toronto, since Seven Psychopaths played there…and then come out in the fall.” Apparently this guy knew or had heard something. Apparently McDonagh’s ties to Team Toronto are still in place. Because word around the campfire is that Billboards is more likely to debut at Toronto than Telluride, presumably with a big gala during the first three or four days. Nothing confirmed, just hearing, etc.

Read more

DVD Beaver‘s Gary W. Tooze has posted an interesting screen capture within a review of an upcoming Bluray of Arthur Penn‘s Mickey One. It’s a shot of Warren Beatty walking in front of Chicago’s Wood theatre while Otto Preminger‘s The Cardinal was playing there. Preminger’s low-tide drama opened on 12.12.63 so you’d have to figure this was captured in February of ’64. (Or maybe a bit later to judge by the Woods’ “nominated for 6 Academy Awards” proclamation.  As The Cardinal began playing on a reserved-seat basis and was therefore regarded as a high-prestige film, it wouldn’t have been unusual to linger at the Woods for a few months.) But Mickey One didn’t open until 9.27.65, which obviously indicates a prolonged and difficult post-production period. Under routine circumstances it would have opened in late ’64 or at the latest in early ’65.

Warren Beatty, 26 at the time, striding under the Woods marquee, mostly likely in early ’64.

The Cardinal billboard in Times Square on New Year’s Eve, 1964 — the arrival of the Beatles and the beginning of the general turning of the culture was only a month and a half away.

Read more

Read more