Day: January 8, 2018

Last night Barbra Streisand recalled a major event in her career and in the annals of women directors — winning a Best Director Golden Globe award for Yentl, which she also produced, co-wrote and starred in. It happened 34 years ago, or in January 1984. Since then, she lamented, no woman has won a Best Director Golden Globe.

In any event Glenn Kenny vented this morning about some MSNBC pundit failing to recall how good it was. (Or something like that.) For the first time in many decades I began to think back to my one and only viewing of Yentl, recalling what I could of it, thinking about Mandy Patinkin‘s confused attraction for Streisand’s Yentl Mendel, whom he’s been told is a young boy.

I’ve looked at some clips since replying to Kenny, and plot points are coming back. Almost everyone had a favorable opinion of Yentl back then, but I’ve never wanted to re-watch it. Has anyone?

Read more

Just now a strange compulsion led me to buy a British Bluray of Jerzy Skolimowski‘s The Shout. I did so despite knowing that it’s not very good. It creeped me out when I first saw it at the 1978 New York Film Festival, but it also left me hanging. After it ended I felt as if bees were buzzing in my head. I looked at a friend and said, “Can you tell me what the fuck that was about?”

In his 11.9.79 N.Y. Times review, Vincent Canby called it a “vivid, piercingly loud movie as well as an almost totally incoherent one.

“The story starts off well, like almost any ghost story made up by a child, but then it becomes so full of loose ends, contradictions, cryptic symbols and close-ups of objects that…one eventually tunes out of the narrative, much as one does when the child’s ghost story becomes too hopelessly muddled for even the child to unravel.

The Shout “is an elegant looking movie, nicely performed, but because it leaves one knowing less than one did at the beginning, it is easily forgettable. Except for the sound. Apparently to prepare us for the scene in which Charles screams his aboriginal scream, the producers seem to have sharpened or heightened the soundtrack in such a way that even ordinary sounds — the wind, for example — take on a painful sibilance.”

That’s the odd thing — Canby called it “easily forgettable” but I’ve never forgotten it. And now I want it again. Go figure.

Read more

Posted on 9.14.17 or roughly four months ago: Angelina Jolie‘s Evelyn Salt was trained as a child in a tough Russian Academy for lethal super-spies also…no? And then she went on to become a kind of double-agent? Red Sparrow (20th Century Fox, 3.2.18) is obviously a kind of retread. Director Francis Lawrence, the director of not one or two but three Hunger Games movies, is everyone’s idea of a hack, a journeyman, a well-paid stooge. In short, the perfect guy to helm Red Sparrow. Jennifer Lawrence looks either miserable or emotionally shut down or a combination of the two. I can’t wait to suffer through this thing.

“Drafted against her will to become a ‘Sparrow,’ a trained seductress in the service of Russian intelligence, Dominika is assigned to operate against Nathaniel Nash, a first-tour CIA officer who handles the CIA’s most sensitive penetration of Russian intelligence. The two young intelligence officers, trained in their respective spy schools, collide in a charged atmosphere of tradecraft, deception, and, inevitably, a forbidden spiral of carnal attraction that threatens their careers and the security of America’s most valuable mole in Moscow.” — from Amazon summary of Jason Matthews ‘Red Sparrow’ trilogy.

Read more

Oprah Winfrey‘s energy, compassion, discipline, business acumen and progressive views…her positivism, reach-out attitude, brains, confidence, phenomenal wealth…all of this would make her an excellent antidote to the Donald Trump poison if she were to run for President in 2020. Because she would almost certainly win.

I’d vote for Oprah without hesitation, without blinking an eye. Compared to the grotesque horrors emanating from the current White House occupant, President Winfrey would be a huge relief, a godsend…water from a mountain stream. Another headstrong leader, yes, but a sane one.

In mid-November ’16 Michael Moore said that Democrats “would be better off if they ran Oprah or Tom Hanks or…why don’t we run beloved people? I mean, we have so many of them. The Republicans do this.”

But at the same time I’m a little scared. Because Winfrey is a political neophyte, and she’d probably be looking at a steep learning curve, certainly in terms of D.C. relationships and practical politics. Remember how she said that she felt “hope” when President-elect Trump meet with President Obama 14 months ago? That was embarassing. Plus her ass has been steadily smooched by big media and tens of millions of fans since the mid ’80s, and keeping her cool and mounting a defense once the Republicans bring out their heavy artillery would be a new skill set for her.

We all know Oprah is brilliant and that she actually reads and is probably 25 times more knowledgable than Trump about the major issues, but I haven’t actually heard her specific views on anything. Maybe she should expound a bit on taxes, health care, military strategy, alternative fuels, climate change and North Korea before we all jump off the cliff?

Boiled down Oprah is the same kind of high-profile personality and political journeyman that Trump was/is — a self-made billionaire business person and a magnetic TV personality with a huge following. Winfrey would be the hopeful, progressive and inclusive side of this equation, but she’d be seen by many as a fundamentally Trump-ish candidate in the sense of being a political outsider with no I.O.U’s held by special corporate interests, etc. Okay, she’s in tight with liberal progressives, of course, but somehow this clan doesn’t feel as odious, at least not from my perspective.

Read more

What defines a really successful comedy? Being funny, of course, and preferably in a way that’s not too coarse or lowbrow. Clever, witty, feel-goody. You want it to be accessible enough for Joe and Jane Popcorn to have a good time with it, but you also want film critics to stand up and salute. And you definitely want it to turn a healthy profit. Some comedies do well with critics but not so much at the box-office. Or vice versa. And some fizzle all around the track — cruddy reviews, low grosses, unpopular with popcorn munchers, etc. Very few comedies hit it on all four burners.

Not everyone realizes that Amazon’s The Big Sick, which opened on 6.23.17 after debuting at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival, has done exactly that. And this, by any fair standard, drops it into the Best Picture realm.

A dryly amusing indie comedy about ethnic issues affecting a relationship between Kumail (Kumail Nanjiani), a laid-back Pakistani comic, and Emily (Zoe Kazan), a spunky, willful white girl, The Big Sick managed a 98% Rotten Tomatoes rating and sold a shitload of tickets to Average Joes. It cost $5 million to make and earned $55 million worldwide, excluding ancillary revenue. Even if you throw in the “Hollywood bookkeeping” factor, you’ll still be well in the black.

The Big Sick has even become a top award contender in recent weeks. Holly Hunter‘s performance as Kazan’s mom has snagged several Best Supporting Actress nominations (the Independent Spirit Awards, several critics groups); ditto the screenplay (co-written by Nanjiani and wife Emily V. Gordon, and based on their actual romantic history) as well as the film itself being Best Picture-nominated by the Critics Choice Awards, the Satellite Awards and the Producers Guild of America.

Four burners plus the awards action makes five. Do I hear six?

I’ve seen The Big Sick three times, and each time it’s felt fresh and natural and sharp as a tack. It gains. After seeing it in Park City I called it droll humor for smarties and hipsters as well as dry and diverting. You never really know where it’s going, and that’s just how I like it. I loved the terrorist jokes (no, seriously), and it really does come together emotionally during the last 25%.

Nanjiani embroiders with a unique tone and sensibility, certainly within the realm of a modern American love story. He and Kazan hold things together for the first 40%, but it’s Hunter and Ray Romano (as Kazan’s dad) who bring it home.

Zoe Kazan, Kumail Najiani.

Read more

The only thing that really “happened” this evening was that Sam Rockwell and Allison Janney were energized in their respective Best Supporting categories. Dafoe isn’t as inevitable as he seemed earlier this evening, and Janney is aggressively snipping at Laurie Metcalf‘s heels. The snubbing of Call Me By Your Name (Timothee Chalamet and Armie Hammer, not to mention the film itself) made the HFPA seem timid and a bit dim. I don’t know how to assess the snubbing of The Post except to lump it in with the SAG and DGA blow-offs. Chris Nolan‘s brilliant Dunkirk was also dismissed, probably over the same old complaint about an ostensible lack of heart. For me the shunning of Jordan Peele‘s Get Out felt like a welcome respite from the incessant p.c. largesse-ing of recent weeks, and those candids of Daniel Kaluuya‘s subdued, almost forlorn expressions (“I’m good but let’s not get carried away”) won my respect.

Read more