Day: January 22, 2018

Variety‘s Gleiberman Agrees

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Yesterday (1.21) I posted a lament piece called “Sundance ’18 Feels Sluggish, Listless, Agenda-Driven.” It basically said that so far the festival feels like weak tea, and that there’ve been no knockouts, and that all the p.c. agenda films make you feel like you’re attending a socialist summer camp in the snow.

I spoke too soon, of course. This morning I saw a major-league indie breakthrough called We, The Animals, and last night I finally saw Lynne Ramsay‘s You Were Never Really Here, which is my idea of a brilliant arthouse thriller.

Today Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman followed suit with a piece titled “Sundance 2018: Where Are the Masterpieces? Sorry, There Are None.”

Excerpt: “Even if you forget the politics of awards season, my own feelings about any given year at Sundance, going back to the first time I attended (in 1995), tend to hinge on whether I find at least one special movie to fall in love with, a film that’s not just good but great.

“This year, five days into the festival, it’s been a place where I haven’t seen anything like that.

“What’s more, I’ve heard this sentiment echoed, over and over, from just about everyone I’ve spoken to. There doesn’t seem to be a movie people are getting high on. The home run hasn’t been hit. The Christmas tree lacks a star. I promise, that’s my last metaphor. But you get the point.”

Ashby File

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Earlier today I saw Amy Scott‘s Hal, a smart, comprehensive doc that sent some mixed signals. By which I mean it could or should have been a little tougher than it is. I’m not saying that a director pulling his or her punches is a great crime, but viewers can always sense when they’ve done this.

The story of Hal Ashby‘s Hollywood career — assistant editor in the ’50s, Norman Jewison’s editor in the ’60s, influential director of seven great films in the ’70s, an angry and declining director of mediocre films in the ’80s — is exhilarating, colorful and not, if you’re going to be honest (as Nick Dawson‘s “Being Hal Ashby: Life of a Hollywood Rebel” was and is), altogether tidy or pretty.

My sense of Hal, as much as I enjoyed it, is that every so often it’s a little too gentle.

Scott has covered the chapters in dutiful form, and spoken to a few people who really loved and admired Hal, or at least worship his legacy. Her film moves right along, pushes more than a few emotional buttons, and makes you feel as if you’ve come to know the guy pretty well. I liked it just fine, but a little voice kept whispering that Scott has softballed the extent of Ashby’s cocaine and booze problems during his career-decline period.

Yes, he rarely slept and probably worked harder than anyone, and he had an awful time with the corporate-minded studio heads in the ’80s (particularly with Lorimar). A lot of stress and struggle. I’m not saying Ashby was a total druggie, but no one dies at age 59 unless they’ve been doing something to hasten their decline.

Four days ago I wrote that “with any kind of half-fair perspective, Ashby’s decade of ’70s glory definitely out-classes and outweighs the tragedy of the ’80s and how the derangement of nose candy enveloped and swallowed the poor guy.” But you have to get into that downswirl stuff a little bit.

Scott’s film isn’t hagiography, but my sense is that roughly 90% is a touching, fascinating, no-holds-barred, this-is-who-he-really-was portrait and the other 10% is a little blowjobby here and there.

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“We, The Animals”: Drawn, Imagined, Ripe

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This morning Jordan Ruimy and I caught Jeremiah Zagar‘s We, The Animals, an imaginative, altogether excellent film about an unusual ’80s boyhood in Upstate New York. We had decided to attend this morning largely due to Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn having called it “this year’s Moonlight.”

Before the film began I briefly spoke to Cinetic’s John Sloss. He said that the Moonlight analogy had set the bar too high. But when it was over I was persuaded that We, The Animals, based on a 2012 Justin Torres novel, is trippier and more affecting than Moonlight ever dreamed of, and in a way that recalls Beasts of the Southern Wild with a little Tree of Life mixed in.

I re-read Kohn’s review as I was leaving the theatre, and I felt a little irked about his emphasizing the gay aspect. “As with Moonlight, Zagar taps into a cinematic toolbox for representing an outsider’s struggles,” Kohn wrote, “particularly as it pertains to a developing queerness within the confines of a world in which marginalization is baked into everyday life.”

My email to Kohn: “The analogy is not Moonlight, Eric, but magical realism, Beasts of the Southern Wild, flying above the trees, animated drawings, Malick-like impressionism a la The Tree of Life, family conflict, dreamscapes.

“The gay factor is incidental, almost negligible. Same-sex boners are not the thing here. It’s the levitation, the book of drawings, the careful editing, the apartness, the challenges faced by a ‘different’, artistic kid…the Malick of it all.”

This is easily the best film of Sundance ‘18 along with Lynne Ramsay’s plus those four docs I like (Ashby, Fonda, Williams, Studio 54).

Sundance boilerplate: “With a screenplay by Dan Kitrosser and Jeremiah Zagar, We, The Animals is a visceral coming-of-age story propelled by strikingly layered performances from its astounding cast, elements of magical realism and unbelievable animated sequences.”

The Way It Was

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The ironclad rule about gaining entrance to the original Studio 54 (i.e., Schrager-Rubell, April ’77 to the ’80 shutdown over tax evasion) was that you had to not only look good but dress well. That meant Giorgio Armani small-collared shirts if possible and certainly not being a bridge-and-tunnel guinea with polyester garb and Tony Manero hair stylings.

As I watched Matt Tyrnauer‘s Studio 54 I was waiting for someone to just say it, to just say that Saturday Night Fever borough types weren’t even considered because they just didn’t get it, mainly because of their dress sense but also because their plebian attitudes and mindsets were just as hopeless.

It finally happens at the half-hour mark. One of the door guys (possibly Marc Benecke) says “no, the bridge-and-tunnel people never got in“…never.” I can’t tell you how comforting it was to hear that again after so many years.

Another thing: Bob Calacello or somebody mentions how Studio 54 happened in a glorious period in American culture that was post-birth control and pre-AIDS. The film explains how liberal sexual attitudes were particularly celebrated by urban gay culture, which was just starting to sample freedoms that today are more or less taken for granted. Guys couldn’t hold hands on the street but they certainly could once they got inside Studio 54.

But one thing you can’t say in today’s climate (and which Tyrnauer’s film doesn’t even mention in passing) is that the ’70s were also a glorious nookie era for heterosexual guys. It was probably the most impulsive, heavily sensual, Caligula-like period (especially with the liberal use of quaaludes) to happen in straight-person circles since…you tell me. The days of Imperial Rome?

This kind of thing is now a verboten topic, of course, with the 2018 narrative mainly being about how guys need to forget “impulsive” and turn it down and be extra super careful in approaching women in any context. But things were quite different back in the Jimmy Carter era. I’m not expressing any particular nostalgia for those days, but the new Calvinism of 2018 couldn’t be farther away from what the social-sexual norms were 40 years ago. Just saying.

Stands Alone

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In an update to last night’s post about how Sundance ’18 so far feels inconsequential and weak-tea-ish (“Sluggish, Listless, Agenda-Driven“), I said that Lynne Ramsay‘s You Were Never Really Here (which I saw late last night) is easily the strongest film — half narrative, half fever-dream — I’ve seen so far in Park City, hands down.

“It’s bloody and gooey, bothered and nihilistic, but it’s so beautifully shot and unto itself, so self-aware and finely controlled — an arthouse rendering of a Taken-style flick.”

So even though it’s not so much a Sundance ’18 film as a Cannes ’17 hangover and apart from the three brilliantly conventional Sundance docs that I’ve admired so far (Studio 54, Jane Fonda in Five Acts, Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind), the Ramsay is far and away the strongest thing I’ve seen since last Thursday — the only Sundance ’18 film that has been applauded as the closing credits begin, the only one that has found the kind of acclaim that Call Me By Your Name and The Big Sick did last year.

It’s so good I wasn’t even bothered by Joaquin Phoenix‘s dad bod.