Month: March 2018

Lightly Stoned vs. Zonked

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With Joel and Ethan Coen‘s The Big Lebowski having opened 20 years ago (3.6.98), everyone’s celebrating the anniversary. I was an instant fan but I might be Lebowski-ed out, having seen it at least 14 or 15 times. I could still have fun with another viewing or two, I guess, but I know the dialogue and the performances too well. It’s kinda fun to watch it Rocky Horror-style, mouthing the dialogue in synch with the film, but everyone does that, right?

I first heard about the Monica Lewinsky scandal during the same Sundance Film Festival (January ’98) that Lebowski had its big sneak preview at. I felt awful about missing that screening; didn’t see it for another three or four weeks.

I’m starting to think that my favorite stoner comedy might be Curtis Hanson‘s Wonder Boys (’00). Back in my pot-smoking days I used to prefer what I called a nice “light stone” as opposed to being totally ripped. This is what Wonder Boys is — a subtle pot high laced with middle-aged whimsy and meditation. It’s goofy and trippy but embroidered with an aura of accomplishment or at least ambition, and therefore a whole different bird than Lebowski.

And it sure has its own atmosphere. Each and every Wonder Boys shot, it seems, is covered in fog and murk and Pittsburgh dampness, and it contains my favorite Michael Douglas performance to boot.

Alas, Wonder Boys was a financial bust — cost $55 million to make, earned $19 million domestic and $33.5 million worldwide.

Some of the critics who didn’t quite get Lebowski‘s lost-in-the-haze, stoned-humor, where-is-this-movie-going? spirit (including senior L.A. Times know-it-all Kenneth Turan, Variety‘s Todd McCarthy, the San Francisco Chronicle‘s Edward Guthmann, The New Yorker‘s Daphne Merkin, Palo Alto Weekly‘s Susan Tavernetti, Chicago Reader‘s Jonathan Rosenbaum, Deseret News‘ Jeff Vice (“This uneven screwball comedy — a disjointed and half-hearted attempt by the Coen brothers to return to the Raising Arizona style — is bound to underwhelm even their most fervent admirers”) and the S.F. Examiner‘s Barbara Shulgasser) have recanted. But Turan isn’t one of them. He’s told the Washington Post‘s Eli Rosenberg that he hasn’t rewatched it and is sticking with his initial reaction.

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I Went Through This Once

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You can make fun of the San Francisco touch-down scene in William Wellman‘s The High and the Mighty (’54), and particularly Dimitri Tiomkin‘s angelic-choir music that amplifies the emotion. You can call the Christian symbolism tacky, I mean, but I went through something similar once in a private plane as we landed in St. Louis under heavy fog, and it looked and felt exactly like this. (Yeah, I wrote about this seven years ago and what of it?)

It happened in the mid ’70s. I had hitched a ride across the country (Van Nuys to LaGuardia) in a four-seat Beechcraft Bonanza. The pilot was a Russian pediatrician named Vladimir, and he agreed to take me and a guy named Gary in exchange for gas money. We left in the early morning, stopped for gas and lunch in Tucumcari, New Mexico, bunked in a St. Louis airport motel that night, flew out the next morning and arrived at LGA by the early afternoon. Anyway…

The fog was so thick as we approached St. Louis that the air-traffic-controller had to talk us down. I was sitting shotgun and the air was pure soup, and I quickly fell in love with that soothingly paternal, Southern-accented voice, telling us exactly what to do, staying with us the whole way…”level off, down 500, bank right,” etc. When we finally got close to the landing strip the fog began to dissipate and the landing lights looked just like this, I swear. And the feeling was the same.

Talk about the welcoming glow of Christianity. It was almost enough, during that moment and later that night as I thought about it, to make me think about not being a Bhagavad Gita mystic any more and coming back to the Episcopalian Church.

The Morning After

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Just before crashing last night I chugged a can of Diet Ginger Lime Coke. I fell asleep easily but the chemicals and the toxins flooded my system, and within an hour I was dreaming about being near a nuclear explosion site somewhere in the desert but without goggles or a foxhole or any way to protect myself, and the heat blast and torrential winds and the blinding white light were just awful. And then I woke up at 1:30 am with this feeling of some kind of lime amphetamine in my bloodstream. I tried to sleep again but I couldn’t get to the bottom of the pond. I kept waking up and dropping off, waking up and dropping off. And all because a single can of effing Diet Coke…thank you!

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Famous Last Words

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Last month Deadline‘s Michael Fleming reported that Danny Boyle had pitched a strikingly different idea for the 25th James Bond film (i.e., 007 resigns, shaves his head, becomes a Hare Krishna devotee and embarks on a quest to crawl on his belly across the entire continent of India), and that he might actually agree to direct Hare Rama if John Hodge’s script, which should be completed next month, is good enough.

Okay, I’m lying about the Hare Krishna stuff but Boyle and Hodge are cooking up Bond 25, and maybe it’ll happen. But hold up a minute. Boyle and Hodge aren’t cinematic super-wizards — they’re just a couple of talented, hard-working guys who hit the motherlode 22 years ago and have decided that an opportunistic paycheck attitude at a relatively late stage in their careers (Boyle is 61, Hodge is 53 or 54) wouldn’t be such a bad option. And it wouldn’t be.

Boyle to himself, stuck in London traffic: “People will call me Danny ‘Paycheck’ Boyle, sure, but this is just a one-off. And then I can move on to the next legit film, whatever that might be. The elite press will understand that I had to do this. The last time I was really in the game and the groove was 127 Hours, and that was eight fucking years ago. Trance was minor except for that Rosario Dawson nude scene, Steve Jobs didn’t really work because a lot of people hated Fassbender, and nobody paid much attention to T2 Trainspotting. I have to get back in the big game and this is one way to do that.”

Five years ago Boyle was asked by Collider‘s Sheila Roberts whether he’d ever direct a Bond film. “They’re not really for me,” Boyle replied. “The budgets are too big. I’m better working at a lower level of money really because I like that discipline of not having enough money to pull off whatever it is you want to pull off. So I wouldn’t be the best person to do those…no.”

Snowblind

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This was snapped in Brooklyn (I think) a couple of days ago, or whenever the most recent snowfall began. It ranks in my mind as one of the coolest inclement-weather snaps I’ve seen in a long time, largely because it’s almost entirely monochrome except for (a) the glowing stoplight, (b) the brake light on the truck, (c) the half-obscure STOP sign, and (d) the faintly fleshy color of the legs of the dude with the umbrella. I’ve seen young guys in shorts during Sundance blizzards, and, as I’ve said before, this is strictly a 21st Century Millennial phenomenon. No other generation in the history of civilization has distinguished itself by wearing shorts in this kind of weather.

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Son of Future Oscar Hotties

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Following the 3.6 posting of “Likeliest ’18 Best Picture Contenders“, I asked five or six publicists to tell me what I’d missed or should remove. Two of them said that I need to include Black Panther as a Best Picture contender, and more than a few HE commenters said the same. I agree — Black Panther will most likely be nominated but mainly for cultural and representation reasons. Because by the measure of cinematic merit alone, it’s not good enough until the last hour.

That said, Black Panther is a stronger, more satisfying film (at least in my book) than the absurdly over-praised Get Out.

I realize that Dexter Fletcher took over as director of Bohemian Rhapsody after Bryan Singer was canned for being AWOL a few times and clashing with the cast and crew, but it would seem awfully weird for Fletcher to be given sole credit, no? Even with Singer’s hothead rep.

I am very, very disappointed that Martin Scorsese‘s The Irishman will, in fact, open sometime in ’19, and most likely during that year’s award season. The reason is extensive de-aging CG work. Steven Zaillian‘s screenplay (based on Charles Brandt’s “I Heard You Paint Houses“) is allegedly a series of flashbacks that will show the titular character, Robert DeNiro‘s Frank Sheeran involved in bad-guy activity over several decades. DeNiro will reportedly appear as a 30-year-old in one of these sequences.

One authority is hearing “terrific early word on Beautiful Boy — extraordinarily well done, beautifully acted.” They’re also hearing that Adam McKay’s Backseat “is going to be killer.” This same source has seen Dan Fogelman‘s Life Itself (Amazon, 9.21 — Oscar Isaac, Olivia Cooke, Antonio Banderas, Mandy Patinkin, Samuel L. Jackson, Olivia Wilde, Annette Bening) and calls it “very charming” with a stellar cast and a “great” screenplay.

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Schlumpy Ballgame

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While promoting Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story yesterday, Susan Sarandon explained the Hollywood casting basics. “In my business it’s all about your sexual currency,” she said. “People hire women they want to be with and men they want to be, and anyone who falls in between is a character actor.”

What Sarandon didn’t acknowledge (and this is not new for HE regulars) is that sexual currency standards have significantly changed over the last decade or so, and that the principal change-agent in this shifting landscape has been Judd Apatow. Producers and directors will always “hire women they want to be with,” but the guys they want to be used to be traditional or at least semi-traditional leading-man types, and now (and roughly since Apatow’s The 40 Year-Old Virgin) they’re not.

Here’s how I put it on 8.15.14: “Guys who got the girl used to look like guys who got the girl. And girls who attracted a lot of guys used to look like girls who attracted a lot of guys. But no longer. By today’s standards any homely, marginal, bearded or overfed guy or girl can hook up with good-looking types and nobody bats an eyelash.

“Blubbery Seth Rogen getting lucky with and impregnating Katherine Heigl in Knocked Up…uh-huh. Rogen married to and boinking Rose Byrne every which way in Neighbors…if you say so. Mark Duplass making sensitive-guy moves on Melissa McCarthy in Tammy…really? The bulky, nearly bald Steve Zissis connecting with Amanda Peet on HBO’s Togetherness…right. Anne Hathaway being sufficiently taken with Rafe Spall to move in with him in One Day…remarkable. The obviously desirable Anna Kendrick and Keira Knightley finding dweeby twee-male Mark Webber attractive and beddable in Lynn Shelton‘s Laggies and Joe Swanberg‘s Happy Christmas…huh?”

“In short, Apatow’s rules of attraction have been sinking in for years and we’re all buying it.

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Grainstorm Horror?

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Nothing makes my blood run colder than to read the words “much richer grain textures” in a DVD Beaver Bluray review. But that’s what it says in Gary W. Tooze‘s assessment of Criterion’s forthcoming Bluray (4.17) of Leo McCarey‘s The Awful Truth.

That’s pretty damn close to Tooze’s assessment of Criterion’s His Girl Friday Bluray (“it has more, and consistent, grain”), and I’ve learned through hard experience what this actually means. Tooze also reports that the Awful Truth Bluray “looks wonderfully film-like“…good God.


CU of DVD Beaver frame capture of Criterion’s Awful Truth Bluray, streeting on 4.17.18

I bought Criterion’s His Girl Friday Bluray and discovered that it’s “completely smothered in digital grain mosquitos,” as I said in a 1.13.17 review. “I kept thinking to myself ‘poor Ralph Bellamy, playing that poor dope from Albany and having to sit there and suffer as those billions of mosquitoes crawl all over his head and neck and hair, not to mention Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell and all the rest besieged by the same swarm.”

This plus the DVD Beaver screen captures of the Awful Truth disc show that this 1937 screwball classic has been grainstormed to a fare-thee-well.

I’ve said it 10,000 times, but I don’t like heavy grain. No one does except for grain monks (i.e., perverse aficionados) like Tooze. Call me a plebian but I prefer my older black-and-white films to be tastefully DNR’ed — I want them to look as sharp, clean, unfiltered and un-muddied as possible, and that means no swarms of Egyptian mosquitoes covering each and every frame.


Ditto.

Now Would Be Perfect

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Right now (i.e., the post-Oscar season blahs) would be a great time for A24 to release Paul Schrader‘s First Reformed, which everyone went nuts for six months ago. March, April and May films have always lacked nutritional value; it would be wonderful to settle into Schrader’s best film in years right now. Alas, First Reformed won’t open until 6.22.

From my 9.1.17 review: “First Reformed, a spare, Bresson-like, thoroughly gripping piece about despair, environmental ruin, moral absolutism and sexual-emotional redemption, is completely rational and meditative and yet half crazy. But in a good way.

“On top of which it’s been shot in a 1.66:1 aspect ratio, which itself is cause for modest celebration.

“I can’t over-emphasize how amazing it feels to watch a fully felt, disciplined, well–ordered film by a brilliant guy who had seemingly lost his way or gone into eclipse, only to be startled when he leaps out from behind the curtain and says ‘Hah…I never left!’

“First Reformed is so Schraderian, so moralistic in almost a Travis Bickle kind of way, so tortured and yet fully engrossing. Everyone has been calling it Taxi Driver meets Diary of a Country Priest with a little Hardcore and Rolling Thunder thrown in.

“Set in upstate New York, it’s Reverent Toller (Ethan Hawke), an ex-military chaplain turned small-town minister, who gradually succumbs to the idea — don’t laugh or recoil — of moral absolutism by way of becoming a suicide bomber.

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Fat Man and Rocket Man

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One reason that North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un is okay with meeting President Donald Trump next May, I suspect, is that they’re peas in a pod — a pair of overweight, cult-of-personality authoritarians who have reflexively turned to bluster when challenged — and that a certain form of blowhard-to-blowhard, asshole-to-asshole, takes-one-to-know-one communication will probably kick in.

That’s probably the instinctual motive on both sides, come to think of it.

What may result is another matter. There’s ample cause for skepticism. A 3.9 N.Y. Times analysis piece by Max Fischer (“7 Big Things to Understand About Trump’s Talks With North Korea”) covers most of the bases.

Korea-watcher Jeffrey Lewis c/o Middlebury Institute of International Studies: “Kim is not inviting Trump so that he can surrender North Korea’s weapons. He’s inviting Trump to demonstrate that his investment in nuclear and missile capabilities has forced the United States to treat him as an equal.”

From a 3.9 Economist piece, “The Pros and Cons of a Summit Between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un”:

“Skeptics are also right to fear that Mr Trump — a man who boasts about his television ratings, and who is bored by briefings and scornful of foreign alliances — could end up being played like a gold-plated violin.

“There is nothing new about a North Korean despot proposing a meeting with an American president, or expressing warm words about denuclearization in return for security guarantees, by which the Kim regime usually means the withdrawal of American troops from the Korean peninsula and the breaking of treaty alliances with South Korea and Japan.”

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Avoidance Instinct

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I wouldn’t see Nash Edgerton‘s Gringo with a knife at my back, no offense, and I’m starting to think I might be better off not seeing Ava DuVernay‘s A Wrinkle in Time. This adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s Y.A. fable smelled like trouble months ago. I’ve written that I “missed” my only chance to attend a Wrinkle screening last week, but the truth is that I was terrified of submitting to it and so I decided (with some domestic pressure) to attend J.J. Abrams‘ Oscar Wilde party instead. No regrets.