Month: August 2018

In a just-published Hollywood Reporter interview by Stephen Galloway, First Man director Damian Chazelle indicates that his approach to this saga of Neil Armstrong and the first manned landing on the moon was about veering away from the cinematic swoonings of La-La Land. Like Dustin Hoffman‘s decision to play the scuzzy Ratso Rizzo in the wake of his breakout success as the clean-cut Benjamin Braddock, Chazelle wanted to switch gears and not repeat himself.

“Instead of turning to similarly themed films — even ones he admired, such as Apollo 13 and 2001: A Space Odyssey — Chazelle drew inspiration from documentaries like For All Mankind and Moonwalk One, where hard facts and precise details were ‘baked into the archival.’

“‘We watched movies like Battle of Algiers and The French Connection,” says editor Tom Cross. ‘A lot of our conversations had to do with the Maysles and D.A. Pennebaker and Frederick Wiseman [all celebrated documentarians], and those cinema verite documentaries of the 1960s — how they were put together and the ways you could join shots in such a way that it felt emotionally continuous, but actually wasn’t.”

First Man (Il Primo Uomo) will have its first-anywhere showings on Wednesday, 8.29, at the Venice Film Festival.

“On Tuesday afternoon, the American public was treated to an astonishing split-screen moment…as [President] Trump’s former campaign chief was convicted by a federal jury in Virginia of multiple crimes carrying years in prison at the same time that his longtime personal lawyer pleaded guilty in federal court in New York to his own lengthy trail of criminality, and confessed that he had committed at least some of the crimes ‘at the direction of’ Mr. Trump himself.

“Let that sink in: Mr. Trump’s own lawyer has now accused him, under oath, of committing a felony.

“Only a complete fantasist — that is, only President Trump and his cult — could continue to claim that this investigation of foreign subversion of an American election, which has already yielded dozens of other indictments and several guilty pleas, is a ‘hoax’ or ‘scam’ or ‘rigged witch hunt.'” — from 8.21 N.Y. Times editorial, “All The President’s Crooks.”

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Sink into that Hold The Dark vibe, that feeling of fog and dread, Jeffrey Wright‘s getting-grayer-and-grayer beard, the atmosphere of damp, drippy snow covering everything, “oowwwwooooohhh!”

A statement from Asia Argento about that N.Y. Times sexual assault-and-payoff story was posted this morning by New York‘s Ashar Ali. She denies she ever had any sexual encounter or relationship with Jimmy Bennett, claims that Bennett is/was a financially unstable shakedown artist and asserts that she and late boyfriend Anthony Bourdain (whom she names as “Antony” at one point in the statement) decided to pay Bennett off anyway to keep the allegedly spurious allegation out of the press.

Who gives an alleged shakedown artist over $300K? And what’s that final paragraph about? N.Y. Times columnist Bari Weiss doesn’t address it, but her general take on L’Affaire Argento is worth reading.

Yesterday HE’s Paranoid Bush tweeted that someone like myself “could write an entertaining if deeply inane Bill Simmons-y article about how the major romcom actresses of the 1990s, and how no one back then would have predicted Sandra Bullock would have the most significant staying power.”

At 54, Bullock has lasted longer in the box-office limelight and is still a fairly big draw, but romcom-wise all actresses age out. Most female romcom (or straight romance) stars enjoy a 10 to 15-year run until they hit 40 or thereabouts, and then their younger replacements move in.

Bullock became a marquee name in the mid ’90s with Speed, and then built her romcom (or straight romantic) brand with While You Were Sleeping, Two If by Sea, Hope Floats, 28 Days, Miss Congeniality, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, The Lake House and The Proposal. Since that 2009 film she’s been more of a comedy star with occasional dramatic detours.

The top three ’90s romcom stars were Bullock, Meg Ryan and Julia Roberts. Ryan torpedoed herself with bad plastic surgery, of course. Roberts’ ’90s romcom run lasted from Pretty Woman (’90) to Runaway Bride (’99). She eventually graduated into somewhat older or middle-aged woman roles (mothers, detectives, business executives) starting around a dozen years ago.

Bullock, Ryan and Roberts’ contenders were Alicia Silverstone, Julia Stiles, Drew Barrymore and Cameron Diaz.

Silverstone peaked with Clueless, of course, and that was pretty much it. Stiles has a three-year romcom run in the late ’90s with 10 Things I Hate About You, Down to You and Save the Last Dance. Barrymore’s run was a late ’90s-to-late aughts thing — The Wedding Singer, Home Fries, Never Been Kissed, Riding in Cars with Boys, 50 First Dates, Lucky You, He’s Just Not That Into You. Diaz launched in the mid ’90s with The Mask, My Best Friend’s Wedding and There’s Something About Mary and kept it going into the early to mid aughts with The Sweetest Thing, In Her Shoes and The Holiday.

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I for one am keen to see Noah Baumbach‘s untitled divorce movie, which Netflix will release…you tell me. Costar Ray Liotta provided a capsule synopsis in a Business Insider interview that ran a couple of months ago.

“Yeah…I’m a lawyer in it,” Liotta said. “Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson‘s characters are going through a divorce, he comes to me and I’m a lawyer who explains all these ways we can get stuff out of her in the divorce, and he’s, like ‘No, that’s too aggressive.’ So he ends up going to court, and there he realizes that Scarlett has a lawyer who’s really aggressive. So then he’s, like, ‘Oh, shit’ and he comes back to me to represent him.”

That Norman Mailer quote: “You don’t know a woman until you’ve met her in court.”

Principal photography happened between January and March earlier this year. Laura Dern also costars.

Less than a month into Donald Trump‘s presidency, Meryl Streep tore into that sociopathic blowhard during a wonderfully feisty speech at a Human Rights Campaign event in Manhattan on Saturday, 2.11.17. And this was more than eighteen months ago — things are much worse now.

If any of the apparent female contenders for the Democratic president nomination (Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand) were to deliver a speech today with even half of Streep’s passion, oratorical precision and pizazz, she/they would have the nomination all but sewn up. But of course, none of them are in Streep’s class. Aspiring but no cigar.

If Streep were to run for president…I’m just saying. We had a former B-level actor in the Oval office in the ’80s. We have a reality TV huckster in the White House now. What about an Oscar-winning actress? Why not?

The SJW admonishers and virtue signallers were out in full force yesterday. When an ethical-moral issue surfaces (such as Asia Argento having reportedly paid off a now 22-year-old actor over an apparent issue of sexual assault when he was a minor, and her apparent #MeToo hypocrisy in having done so), the Twitter police immediately huddle and establish the p.c. perimeters, usually within two or three hours of such a story breaking.

Soon after the Argento story popped last weekend, the tut-tutters had articulated the proper public (i.e., social media) posture. Once that process was completed, posting a view that diverged even slightly from their own was likely to attract slings and arrows.

In my case I was pummelled for suggesting that the victim in question had reacted to Argento’s alleged sexual manipulation in a way that diverged from the generally understood behavior of most teenaged actors, from my own teenaged experience and from that of Mickey Rooney. I basically expressed the same view as a certain SNL skit on a similar subject. In almost no time I became in some circles the poster boy for the “wrong” way to assess the Argento matter. I show you the times in which we live.

Ben Brafman, attorney for accused rapist and former Hollywood hotshot Harvey Weinstein, released a statement today about an 8.19 N.Y. Times report about Asia Argento having paid off a 22 year-old ex-actor after he accused her of sexual assault five years ago, when he was 17:

“This development reveals a stunning level of hypocrisy by Asia Argento, one of the most vocal catalysts who sought to destroy Harvey Weinstein. What is perhaps most egregious, is the timing, which suggests that at the very same time Argento was working on her own secret settlement for the alleged sexual abuse of a minor, she was positioning herself at the forefront of those condemning Mr. Weinstein, despite the fact that her sexual relationship with Mr. Weinstein was between two consenting adults which lasted for more than four years.

“The sheer duplicity of her conduct is quite extraordinary and should demonstrate to everyone how poorly the allegations against Mr. Weinstein were actually vetted and accordingly, cause all of us to pause and allow due process to prevail, not condemnation by fundamental dishonesty.”