Month: August 2018

Road Trip

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In the interest of saving a few bucks, next week I’ll be driving to Telluride with hotshot Variety music reporter and AARP magazine film critic Chris Willman. We’ll begin our return trip on Monday, 9.3.

The Telluride Film Festival begins on Friday, 8.31, but you have to get your pass, buy groceries and get squared away the day before. We’ll be departing in the early morning of Wednesday, 8.29. The idea is to reach Gallup, New Mexico by dusk or thereabouts, and then cruise easy to Telluride the next day or Thursday, 8.30.

Chris has made this trip this several times and is therefore The Authority, but this is how it seems to me:

El Lay to Gallup is an estimated 9 and 1/2 hours, according to online authorities. Obviously the idea is to avoid L.A. rush hour traffic. That means leaving no later than 7 am or waiting to leave at 10 am. 7 am departure = 5:30 or 6 pm arrival with allowances for an extra 90 minutes for gas, rest stops, maybe a lunch. A 10 am departure = 8:30 or 9 pm arrival in Gallup with same allowances.

Right now we’re both leaning toward an early morning departure. Our current plan is to stay in Gallup’s Econo-Crap Lodge. Seriously, we’re looking at the El Rancho.

The Gallup-to-Telluride trip is estimated at 3 hours, 45 minutes. Call it four, four and a half hours with gas stops and whatnot. Leave at 9 am, arrive at 1:30 pm.

The webmasters of the Telluride Film Festival website are still running last year’s data, and the ’18 gathering begins 12 days from now. Hubba hubba, get the lead out, etc.

Congrats In Order

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Vulture‘s Hollywood guy Kyle Buchanan is the new “Carpetbagger” for the New York Times. He’ll be the fourth to carry that brand, the previous three being Cara Buckley, Melena Ryzik and the late, great David Carr.

The carpetbagger term fit Carr because he was basically a brainy, independent-minded New York guy (lived in Montclair) who never really played the Hollywood game. Buchanan, on the other hand, has been playing it all along, Los Angeles-based in more ways than one, schnorring and observing his way through the six-month-long award season with the rest of us.

Buchanan will launch his Times coverage with the early fall film festivals — Telluride, Toronto, New York. This morning I asked Buchanan who will succeed him as the new Vulture award-season person. “To be determined,” he said.

It always bothered me when Buckley and Ryzik would declare that Oscar season begins in December….no! It begins with Telluride and ends with the Oscar telecast, which this year will take five and a half months. Get that through your heads.

Buchanan quoted by Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson: “I’m excited to cover Hollywood out of Hollywood. Mostly, though, I hope to bring the same wit and curiosity to the job that my predecessors did. Yes, there are a lot of silly things about the Oscars — and trust, I love covering the silly things too — but I believe that when you really understand awards season, this is a continually exciting and surprising beat where the stories lend us a prism through which we can better know the world. Even a simple snub isn’t always just a snub: It can tell us a lot about what we canonize as a society and reveal where our blind spots still lie.”

Well said, Kyle. This is what L.A. Daily News critic and Oscar disser Bob Strauss is either incapable of understanding or refuses to consider.

Should Have Had Kids

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Are The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions (both released in ’03) the least satisfying, most ruinously awful sequels ever made? Not just because they blew chunks on their own terms, but they tarnished the reputation of The Matrix (’99), the perfect, almost-jewel-like original that launched the mini-franchise.

This led me to contemplate a list of stand-alone films that never should have given birth to a sequel or sequels or a spinoff TV series. The Jaws movies after Steven Spielberg‘s 1975 original. The Jurassic Park sequels. The Hangover sequels. The Terminator sequels. A voice is telling me Jim Cameron should have left Avatar alone and not gone on to commit to…what is it, three sequels? But of course everyone has written about these.

What about the reverse? What first-rate films that never inspired any follow-ups should have spawned a sequel or cable series? I honestly would’ve loved to see a Michael Clayton series on Showtime, Hulu or HBO, perhaps not with George Clooney in the title role but then again why not? He arguably delivered his career-best performance in Tony Gilroy’s 2007 legal thriller, and the film itself is surely his finest ever. I would’ve been down with a mid ’80s TV series about the continuing legal adventures of Frank Galvin, the wounded Boston attorney played by Paul Newman in The Verdict.

Which others?

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Argento and Hypocrisy

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An 8.19 N.Y. Times story reports that Asia Argento paid a go-away fee of $380K to former child actor Jimmy Bennett after the latter accused her of sexual assault in 2013, when he’d just turned 17. Argento is being called a hypocrite for having this episode under her belt while strongly promoting a #MeToo agenda vis a vis her assaultive encounters with Harvey Weinstein. But what she went through with Harvey — oppressive sexual intimidation that resulted in something like a form of Hollywood date rape — doesn’t sound remotely analogous to what happened between her and Bennett.

My limited understanding is that Argento manipulated the youth into submitting to oral sex and then rode him like Hopalong Cassidy. As in “come over here, kid.” Okay, maybe Bennett wasn’t into it. Maybe he found getting blown to be traumatic. Maybe on some level what Argento did with Bennett was vaguely akin to Kevin Spacey’s reported assault of Anthony Rapp. I wouldn’t know.

I have to be honest — my first reaction was “manipulated”? Five years ago Bennett was a teen actor trying to land parts. Has anyone ever heard of a male actor of any persuasion who wasn’t randy, particularly one in his hormonal prime? Has there ever been a young actor in the history of the planet whose basic attitude was “gee, I’m not sure if I’m ready for sex”?

Has anyone ever read about what Mickey Rooney was up to in the 1930s, when he was in his mid teens? Were there any half-willing older female actresses whom Rooney ran into that he didn’t have it off with? When he was 24 Rooney reportedly had a longish affair with 14 year-old Liz Taylor. Imagine what the twitter comintern would’ve done with that, etc.

I was 17 once. I got shitty grades in school because I spent half my day dreaming about some older ravenous hottie having her way with me. I started dreaming about older naked women when I was nine or ten. I couldn’t get laid to save my life in my mid teens — I was a teenage incel before anyone knew the term — and it was a very sad and lonely time, let me tell you. I don’t mean to sound callous or indifferent, but my understanding of “assault” does not include notions of some Asia Argento-level woman winking and saying “come over here, Jeffie” when I was 17.

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The Color of Money

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I want credit for enduring Crazy Rich Asians this afternoon. I paid, I saw, I suffocated. But it took 45 or 50 minutes before the oxygen ran out. Asians actually begins in a reasonably sharp and springy fashion. Peter Chiarelli and Adele Lim‘s clever dialogue, Vanja Cernjul‘s handsome lensing, Myron Kerstein‘s fleet editing, etc. I was saying to myself “hmmm…this has a good vibe.”

It’s a satire of the aggressively shallow values of the highly insecure moneyed classes of southeast Asia, but the satire doesn’t cut very deep because the film shares these values and in fact adores them. Each and every shot is about showcasing obscenely flush, over-the-top flamboyance (clothes, homes, interior designs), and by the one-hour mark the spirit weakens and the nausea kicks in.


Henry Golding, Constance Wu in Crazy Rich Asians.

The story tries to have it both ways by having the fate of the two main characters, Constance Wu‘s Rachel Chu (the actress is 36 and no spring chicken) and Henry Golding‘s Nick Young, turn on matters of soul, substance and parental heritage. But director Jon M. Chu is more in love with grotesque abundance.

As Rachel is driven up the driveway of the mega-mansion owned by Nick’s parents, Brian Tyler‘s swelling score tells the audience that this is a huge, huge moment. It says “oh my God, look at this…Rachel is approaching heaven!” It’s like Jerry Goldsmith‘s score in Star Trek: The Motion Picture when William Shatner‘s Captain Kirk is first approaching the Enterprise and his eyes begin to moisten.

Eventually I began to telepathically beg for mercy. “Please, Jon…can we have a quiet, unfettered scene on a simple beach somewhere or maybe at an inexpensive roadside foodstand?” I whimpered. “Do you have to pour your maple-syrup wealth porn all over everything at every goddamn turn?” Answer: Yes, he does.

By the end I was hating Crazy Rich Asians as much as any of the more recent Fast and Furious sequels.

Costly Dry-Cleaning Bills

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I don’t know much about real-life murderers and serial killers, but I’ll bet very few if any were ever splattered with drops of victim blood, and if they were they washed the evidence right off or changed clothes PDQ. Also that aside from Jeffrey Dahmer and Ed Gein and maybe one or two others, no murderer in the history of murder has ever been smeared with the stuff like strawberry jam.

But almost every movie character who commits a close-up killing in a film these days becomes a son or daughter of Leatherface — i.e., painted with red vino. And they never wash it off. A bullshit affectation. New HE rule: the more bloodspots on an actor’s face or clothing, the worse a violent movie is. I recall Dustin Hoffman being a tad blood-spattered in the last act of Straw Dogs, but Anthony Perkins never got a drop on him in Psycho.

The most famous real-life person to not wash blood off or change clothing after a killing? Jackie Kennedy.

Blurt It Out

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34 years ago I was working as a non-staff regular for the p.r. department at the Samuel Goldwyn Company, writing press kits and whatnot. One day we all watched Michael Radford‘s Nineteen Eighty-Four, which hadn’t yet found a distributor. (Or so I recall.) The general consensus was that it was a respectable, well-performed thing (by John Hurt and especially Richard Burton), etc. My own view was that alongside THX-1138, which covered similar turf, it was overly dark, slow and funereal. Not much of a pulse.

After the screening we were asked for our impressions, going around the table like in Twelve Angry Men. During the screening I could feel acute frustration from a sales distribution guy, but when his turn came he played it safe and said “good film, great performances, possibly tough sell,” blah blah. When it was my turn I called it “a movie for dead people.” Somebody coughed. Later that afternoon the marketing guy motioned me into his office, gave me a brah poke and said “Thank you, Jeff, for saying that.”

Nobody ever said what they really felt at that fucking company. About anything. More than half of the daily energy went into playing political whisper games. Staffers scheming and plotting against other staffers in order to strengthen their position. It was a wonderful place to work.

Blabbersuit

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Tom Cruise: “I want the truth!”
Rudy Giuliani: “Truth isn’t truth, Tom! Seriously. Truth is a thread that you first have to fit into the eye of the needle, and then it gets even more complicated. You don’t wanna know.”
Tom Cruise: “That’s your answer?”

Heard This Before

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In the comment thread of yesterday’s “It’s A Little Early But…” post, esteemed Los Angeles Daily News critic Bob Strauss facetiously remarked that it’s “so exciting that all these movies nobody’s seen are gonna win Oscars…snore.”

HE reply: “Mr. Strauss knows exactly what knowledgable, insect-antennae spitballing is about. He knows that, as with every early Best Picture forecast, some will fall out, many will hold and one or two will surge. He knows that five or six films — Roma, The Favourite, Backseat, Green Book, A Star Is Born, First Man — will almost certainly become Best Picture contenders. He KNOWS this, and yet he pretends that it’s all hot-air guesswork and flim flam and gas. What he means is that he doesn’t care for the game, which is totally fine. But I know what’s going on here for the most part. I can spot the bread crumbs, sniff the vapor trails and sense what will probably come down the pike. For I am the Great Carnovsky, complete with robe and wizard hat.”

Grim Resignation

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I’ve been putting off seeing John Chu‘s Crazy Rich Asians for the last two or three weeks. Now it’s Sunday and I can’t dodge it any longer. I’ll be seeing it this afternoon. Dentist’s office, root canal, chalk on a blackboard, etc. The opening weekend gross for this all-Asian, Singapore-set comedy is likely to be $25.2M and $34M over five days. It’ll easily top $100M before all is said and done. Quite the historical landmark.

The idea of sitting through a real-estate porn movie filled with scheming family members fills me with dread. I will, of course, report otherwise if it turns out to be tolerable or half-enjoyable or whatever.

From Kate Taylor‘s Globe & Mail review: “Generously you might say Crazy Rich Asians is a satire of Chinese family values and the social strata of the overseas Chinese — as well as a major spoof of the ornate decorative tastes of the moneyed class — but the larger society is missing from the picture. [And] as the obscenities of wealth accumulate while a large cast of Asian and Eurasian actors render their many silly characters, the source of the laughter becomes troubling.

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A Little Early But…

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Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil has asked the usual panel of Oscar experts to spitball their Best Picture predictions. Except he hasn’t created an experts chart so I’ll pass for now. I’ll say four things. One, a couple of films on this list of twelve haven’t a chance. Two, Peter Farrelly‘s Green Book may need to be added — we’ll see. Three, Spike Lee‘s BlackKKlansman is in because Spike’s been slamming hits for 35 years without an Oscar, much less a Best Director nomination, to show for it. And four, it’s probably going to boil down to Roma vs. The Favourite vs. Backseat vs. A Star Is Born. Or something like that.