Month: January 2018

What are the big takeaways from this morning’s Producers Guild of America nominations? Apart from the obvious, I mean, or the fact that 11 films — The Big Sick, Call Me By Your Name, Dunkirk, Get Out, I, Tonya, Lady Bird, Molly’s Game, The Post, The Shape of Water, Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri and Wonder Woman — were nominated for the PGA’s Best Picture trophy, which they call the Darryl F. Zanuck Award.

Takeaway #1: After being blanked by SAG and the WGA, Steven Spielberg‘s The Post has been saved from the guillotine. If it hadn’t been nominated for a Zanuck award, people everywhere would be saying “well, that’s it…The Post is dead meat.” But it was nominated, thank fortune, and so everyone’s now saying “it’s not dead!” Given that it’s the best Spielberg film since Saving Private Ryan, the SAG and WGA blowoffs seemed odd, to say the least. But now it’s back in the game, at least to some extent.

Takeaway #2: Anyone who looks you in the eye and tells you that Molly’s Game isn’t a punishing thing to sit through is a flat-out liar. There’s not enough oxygen, Jessica Chastain‘s brittle performance is a chore, and Aaron Sorkin‘s machine-gun dialogue talks you to death. So why was it nominated? I know some people who respect it but nobody loves it.

Takeaway #3: Why was Wonder Woman nominated? Because it made a lot of money and because the PGA wanted to …what, acknowledge two woman directors instead of one as gesture of support in this, the year of #MeToo pushback?

The PGA’s Documentary award nominees are Chasing Coral, City of Ghosts, Cries from Syria, Earth: One Amazing Day, Jane, Joshua: Teenager vs. Superpower and The Newspaperman: The Life and Times of Ben Bradlee.

There are pack rats (i.e., people who never throw anything out and who gradually choke to death on the clutter) and those who throw a lot of stuff out but hang on to a few remnants. I’m one of the latter. The past will consume you if you let it.

Mark Pellington‘s Nostalgia (Bleecker Street, 2.16) was acquired during last year’s Sundance Film Festival, but it’s debuting at this year’s Palm Springs Festival. Pic “follows several people as they mutually come to a pivotal moment in their lives where they must rid of old family belongings,” etc.

The trailer indicates that Nostalgia has no story. It appears to be an acting-class format that allows several characters (played by Ellen Burstyn, Jon Hamm, Catherine Keener, John Ortiz, Bruce Dern, Amber Tamblyn, James LeGros) to share about the sentimental value of bric a brac they don’t want to part with.

Confession: I’ve never seen Andrei Tarkovsky‘s Nostalghia (’83).

I’ve always been intrigued by Walt Disney‘s Lady and the Tramp (’55) because it’s the only animated feature to be shot and projected at 2.55:1 — i.e., the early to mid ’50s Fox Scope aspect ratio that was phased out in favor of 2.39:1 in ’56 or thereabouts. To the best of my knowledge all other widescreen animated features have been presented in either 2.39 or, in the case of Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, Super Technirama (2.25:1).

There’s a new extra-laden Disney Bluray coming out on 2.27, but you can order a region-free British Bluray right now for less than $20.

The newbie has a ton of extras [see below], but not the one I’d like to see — a 1.37:1 version that was created for theatres that still hadn’t installed CinemaScope screens by mid ’55.

Eight years ago Fox Home Video released a Bluray of The Robe (’53), the first Hollywood feature shot in CinemaScope. The Bluray contained an alternate 1.37:1 version that was shot concurrently out of concern that the CinemaScope version might be a huge flop. As it turned out the 1.37 version never saw the light of day.

From Lady and the Tramp Wiki page:

“Originally, Lady and the Tramp was planned to be filmed in a regular full-frame aspect ratio [i.e., 1.37:1]. However, due to the growing interest of widescreen film among moviegoers, Disney decided to animate the film in CinemaScope making Lady and the Tramp the first animated feature filmed in the process.

“[But] problems arose as the premiere date got closer and [an awareness dawned] that not all theaters had the capability to show CinemaScope at the time. Upon learning this, Walt issued two versions of the film: one in widescreen, and another in the Academy ratio. This involved gathering the layout artists to restructure key scenes when characters were on the edges of the screen.”

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Is Variety‘s Dave McNary a Get Out “woker”? Look below and consider how he structured his lede for this morning’s story about the WGA nominations. Do you detect a very slight note of favoritism in his decision to state that Jordan Peele‘s script has nabbed a Best Original Screenplay nom “along with” four others? Just a teeny-weeny bit of a “yay, team” attitude?

Imagine, for example, if McNary had written “Emily Gordon and Kumail Nanjiani’s The Big Sick has landed a Writers Guild of America nomination for top original screenplay, along with Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird, Guillermo del Toro and Vanessa Taylor’s The Shape of Water, Jordan Peele’s Get Out and Steven Rogers for I, Tonya.”

Or, better yet, imagine a lede that reads “Steven Rogers‘ I, Tonya has landed a Writers Guild of America nomination for top original screenplay, along with Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird, Guillermo del Toro and Vanessa Taylor’s The Shape of Water, Jordan Peele’s Get Out and Emily Gordon and Kumail Nanjiani’s The Big Sick.”

On second thought don’t imagine alternate ledes because they never would’ve happened.

If you’re going to indicate special approval for a nominee by listing it first and foremost among a group of five, you have to first consider the political climate, and it seems to me that not only McNary but Variety editors are “woke.”

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From a portion of Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury,” titled “Donald Trump Didn’t Want to Be President” and excerpted in the current issue of New York. The following comes from former White House deputy chief of staff Katie Walsh:

“As soon as the campaign team had stepped into the White House, Walsh saw, it had gone from managing Trump to the expectation of being managed by him. Yet the president, while proposing the most radical departure from governing and policy norms in several generations, had few specific ideas about how to turn his themes and vitriol into policy. And making suggestions to him was deeply complicated.

“Here, arguably, was the central issue of the Trump presidency, informing every aspect of Trumpian policy and leadership: He didn’t process information in any conventional sense. He didn’t read. He didn’t really even skim. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semi-­literate. He trusted his own expertise — no matter how paltry or irrelevant — more than anyone else’s. He was often confident, but he was just as often paralyzed, less a savant than a figure of sputtering and dangerous insecurities, whose instinctive response was to lash out and behave as if his gut, however confused, was in fact in some clear and forceful way telling him what to do.

“It was, said Walsh, ‘like trying to figure out what a child wants.'”

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I haven’t discussed Guillermo del Toro‘s The Shape of Water since it opened three and a half weeks ago. I posted my review exactly four months ago during the Telluride Film Festival. A day later I posted a back-and-forth discussion with a film critic friend, called “Shape of Water Pushback.”

Now that everyone’s seen it, I’m re-posting my initial response and asking for comments:

I wouldn’t describe myself as head-over-heels in love with Guillermo del Toro‘s The Shape of Water (Fox Searchlight, 12.8), but I certainly approve as far as it goes.

A sweet Guillermo fable through and through, I agree 100% that it’s definitely his best film since Pan’s Labyrinth — one of his smaller-scale creations that aims above and beyond the fanboy realm. Shape is a sci-fi period thing, a trans-species love story, a swoony romantic fantasy and an E.T.-like tale about a merging of disparate hearts and souls.

It also accommodates a darkly paranoid story about the forces of absolute badness looking to dissect and destroy an exotic life form. It’s a little stiff and overbearing at times, but generally mature and tender-hearted and ten times better than Okja, which used a similar storyline.

This is an adult fantasy piece full of heartache and swoony feelings, lusciously and exactingly composed, painted with early ’60s period detail and production design to die for. A movie completely dominated and in fact saturated with its Guillermo-ness.

I saw Shape late last night. The screening began at 11:20 pm and ended two hours later, and I was 100% alert and wide-eyed start to finish. This is what good movies do — they wake you up and keep you in a state of anticipation until the closing credits. Oh, and the headline I went with three days ago after the first Venice showing — Douglas Sirk’s Creature From The Love Lagoon — still stands.

Set in 1962 Baltimore, The Shape of Water is about a current that quickly develops between Elisa (Sally Hawkins), a mute and lonely but sensually attuned dreamer who works as a cleaning woman inside a government-run scientific laboratory, and a gentle, large-eyed aqua-creature with God-like healing powers (Doug Jones) who’s recently been captured in South America and brought to the lab for study and eventual dissection.

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I began explaining my lack of interest in the Palm Springs Int’l Film Festival two years ago. I respectfully blew it off again this year, and will most likely do the same again next year. Who cares? It’s just a big glossy event that mainly attracts red-carpet media types. No culture, no intrigue, too many limos, not for me.

“I’ve been attending the Palm Springs Film Festival for the last few years,” I wrote on 1.3.16, “and at the end of every one I’ve asked myself ‘was that really worth it?’ I used to think of the PSFF as a warm-up for Sundance. Now it’s basically a big-media paparazzi pigfuck that every significant Oscar contender is obliged to attend, and all you can do as a columnist is…well, not much. Write observations, attend the events, listen to try-out acceptance speeches, snap a few photos.

“You drive all the way out there and stay in some old-style place for two or three nights for $400 or $450 bucks and for what? It’s a tax write-off and not entirely unpleasant (Variety‘s Sunday brunch party is always agreeable), but I decided to ignore it this year. Too much grief for too little yield.

A 2015 HE headline said it all: “Puttin’ On Ritz in Chilly Corporate Bunker Once Known as Palm Springs.”

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