Month: September 2018

I didn’t know what to make of the advance word on Steve McQueen‘s Widows, but it sounded a little hazy and thereby gave me the willies. Well, the word-givers were dead fucking wrong — the complex, Chicago-based, super-riveting Widows is one of the best heist films I’ve ever seen. It grabs you from the get-go and never lets go. Thank God almighty that it’s intensely opposed to the aesthetic of the aggressively empty Ocean’s Eight (i.e., another all-women heist flick) and is much, much better than, say, Steven Soderbergh‘s Logan Lucky, which was diverting but now seems piffly in retrospect.

The basic Widows plot may sound like a lot to swallow (wives of four dead thieves without any criminal experience pull off a difficult robbery) but I believed every minute of it.

I swear to God that Widows is on the level of Rififi, The Asphalt Jungle, Nine Queens, Ronin and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels…that line of country. That’s not an opinion but a fucking fact. McQueen may have in fact been slumming when he made Widows, but he really knows how to shoot gutslam action, and his general aesthetic about setting movies “in the world of real, recognizable human beings” (as quoted in Owen Glieberman’s 9.9 Variety review) makes all the difference.

I don’t have much time to explain as I have to leave for a 6 pm screening of Barry Jenkins‘ If Beale Street Could Talk, but Widows is the shit. It’s about protagonists who are scared and desperate (including the secondary bad guys), and is full of echos and currents that reflect the dark urban nightmare of present-day Chicago, and that’s what gives it such a formidable punch.

And I’m dumbfounded, I must say, by Gleiberman’s lament that McQueen might have perhaps played his cards in a “more irresponsible” fashion — i.e., more whoo-whoo escapist. McQueen not doing this is what makes Widows such a real-world, high-voltage thriller. This movie does not fuck around.

The Wikipedia logline for McQueen’s film is incorrect, as it turns out. “Four armed robbers (Liam Neeson, Garret Dillahunt, Jon Bernthal, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) are killed in a failed heist attempt, only to have their respective widows (Viola Davis, Cynthia Erivo, Elizabeth Debicki, Michelle Rodriguez) step up to finish the job.” They do not “finish the job” — they pull off another job that their husbands never got around to.

Widows is based on Lydia LaPlante’s Widows mini-series that ran on British television in ’83 and ’85.

Widows also stars Colin Farrell, Robert Duvall, Daniel Kaluuya, Jacki Weaver, Lukas Haas and Brian Tyree Henry.

And yes, no question — Viola Davis is more or less a slamdunk for a Best Actress nomination. She grabs it, takes hold, wrestles it to the floor, opens herself up, toughs it out.

I’m sorry but Felix Van Groeningen‘s Beautiful Boy (Amazon, 10.12) just lies there. It does a good job of pretending to be alive and human as far as the drug-addiction genre allows, but it has no pulse, no campfire-tale hook, no currents that pull you along.

Based on a pair of best-selling memoirs by journalist David Sheff and his son Nic, Beautiful Boy is a sensitive, well-intentioned, steady-as-she-goes saga of meth addiction. But the decision to tell the tale from the elder Sheff’s perspective, or that of Steve Carell‘s mopey-dope performance, was lethal. Because Carell is boredom personified here; ditto the other grim-faced adult characters played by Maura Tierney, Amy Ryan, Timothy Hutton, etc.

The only thing that could have saved Beautiful Boy would have been to shift the POV to Timothy Chalamet‘s Nic — to follow the lead of Otto Preminger‘s The Man With The Golden Arm by sinking into Nic’s secret subterranean life of copping, shooting, evasions, lying, low-downing and evading the law, etc. As is, the camera rarely buddies up with Nic and his girlfriend Lauren (Kaitlyn Dever) and their scumbag pallies, and the sense of fatigue that comes from hanging with dull-as-dishwater Carell becomes oppressive. And then numbing.

I was inwardly screaming last night as I sat in my balcony seat alongside Dave Karger and several other journos. HE mantra: “I’m dying…I’m sinking into boredom quicksand.”

Who thought that making a movie out of these books would be a good idea? This movie is going to expire and disappear so quickly it won’t be funny. Dead, dead, deader than dead.

Yes, Chalamet (whom I ran into at the Soho House after-party…”yo, bruh!”) is very convincing as Nic — he’s a highly skilled and charismatic actor who digs right in — but all you can feel as you’re watching the poor guy is pity. Because he’s trapped in a dull movie, and the only thing that can save him in this context is for the movie to fucking end.

I have an hour to tap out reactions to Bradley Cooper‘s A Star Is Born before my next screening, and I have two basic things to say.

One, Variety‘s Kris Tapley oversold the situation three days ago when he wrote that the Warner Bros. release has “the muscle to win all five major Academy Awards (picture, director, actor, actress, and screenplay)…it’s that kind of accomplishment.” And two, Cooper’s version of this age-old tragic romance (this being the fourth version and the third remake) struck me, no lie, as the most engaging, least problematic, best acted and most skillfully assembled of them all.

That sounds like a contradiction, right? The most satisfying and well-tuned Star Is Born I’ve ever seen that’s nonetheless been over-hyped by a certain columnist?

What I mean is that Cooper’s film is the kind of ace-level production that will seem hugely impressive to Academy members who are pre-disposed to tumble for this kind of thing sight unseen, who love the idea of a swoony pop massage-weeper, and who aren’t cultured or hip enough to realize that as technically assured and emotionally affecting as A Star Is Born is, it’s still a rehash of an old romantic tale, and you just can’t call it crackling or new or reach-for-the-heavens in a 2018 sense. Well, you can try but it won’t sell.

Put another way, A Star Is Born can’t hope to sink into our souls or our anxious, Twitter-jitter, Trump-besieged ADD culture in a way that’s truly head-turning in a right-now way. At the end of the day it’s still a classic cheese casserole, still A Star Is Born, still the same basic sappy saga (alcoholic star launches fresh talent, sinks into worsening addiction, gets in her way, decides to off himself) that was shot and released in ’37, 54′ and ’76, blah blah.

It’ll be Best Picture-nominated for sure, but only the easy lays and none-too-hips are going to say “whoa, Tapley was sooo right!…this is not only the best film I’ve seen all year but it might win five Oscars!”

How good is Lady Gaga as Ally, the new Esther Blodgett? Pretty damn good, I’d say — she gives the kind of carefully measured, open-hearted performance that you can’t help but succumb to. For the first time since she became a major brand, I feel I know who Lady Gaga is deep down.

How good is Cooper as Jackson Maine, the 2018 version of Fredric March and James Mason‘s Norman Maine, not to mention the version played by Kris Kristofferson? Excellent — some have called it his best performance ever, although I have a special place in my heart for Cooper’s unstable, self-deluding protagonist in Silver Linings Playbook.

How good is the screenplay, which was co-written by Cooper, Eric Roth and Will Fetters? It’s very well honed, very believable, often eloquent, nicely understated. A pro-level job top to bottom.

So what am I saying? A Star Is Born is a very well-done musical drama, and will wind up being nominated in a few categories, but it’s not (to use a classic Steve Pond term) “the one.” It’s an expertly assembled film for what it is, but keep in mind that it’s basically big-studio schmalz of a very high, very hip and musically pleasing order.

Kris Tapley wasn’t wrong about a certain kind of Academy member falling for this film, but after everyone sees it they’ll need to step back and take a breath. They’ll need to look in the mirror and ask themselves, “Do I really think that a reconstituted high-end romantic tragedy that works all around the track as far as it goes…do I really think this is the absolute cat’s meow?” Some people will say “yes!” without thinking, but others will think twice.

Said it before, saying it again: everyone needs to calm the eff down.

What grade am I giving A Star Is Born? Somewhere between an A-minus and a B-plus. It’s very good but it’s a remake that throbs with wall-to-wall music, for God’s sake. Control yourselves.

A journalist colleague said last night that “people tend to over-estimate musicals…they don’t often play across the board…they touch people who want to be touched by them, but that’s not everybody.”