Month: November 2018

You may see a breezy, hah-haayyy! Hollywood Reporter cover shot of the Vice trio — director-cowriter Adam McKay, costars Amy Adams and Christian Bale. And you may be chuckling over Bale’s decision to skinny himself down to his Machinist weight after becoming a lardbucket to play the Ultra-Luciferian Dick Cheney. And you may enjoy McKay’s head-rest sitting posture during the video chat. And your interest in seeing Vice may be greater as a result. All to the good!

But what I see, mainly, is the Los Angeles community (and the Annapurna marketing team in particular) saying to the New York film journalist community, “Aaahh, being first out of the gate is so nice! We’ve seen the film, talked about it, sussed it out. Some of us may even be dipping in for seconds. You New Yorkers will see it soon, don’t worry, but in the meantime it feels so good, so top-of-the-world to be the first responders.”

Herewith is Hollywood Elsewhere’s second flaky stab at a list of adult-friendly, quality-aspiring 2019 films — possible critical faves and perhaps even award-season contenders. Yesterday’s post contained about 30; I’m posting 30 more today and the final 30 will appear tomorrow. The comes the process of weeding out the chaff, and then deciding which belong in the top 20 or 25.

32. Jordan Peele‘s Us — Plot unknown; described as a “social horror-thriller” — Bob Strauss champing at the very bit. (Lupita Nyong’o, Anna Diop, Elisabeth Moss, Kara Hayward)

33. William Nicholson‘s Hope Gap — A family deals in the aftermath of the shock revelation that a husband plans to end his 29 year marriage to his wife. (Annette Bening, Bill Nighy, Josh O’Connor, Aiysha Hart)

34. Aaron Schneider‘s Greyhound — During World War II, an international convoy of 37 Allied ships, led by Commander Ernest Krause (Tom Hanks), cross the treacherous North Atlantic while being hotly pursued by wolf packs of German U-boats. (Tom Hanks, Elisabeth Shue, Karl Glusman, Stephen Graham)

35. Dan Gilroy‘s Velvet Buzzsaw — American horror thriller film, written and directed by Gilroy. (Jake Gyllenhaal, Rene Russo, Zawe Ashton, Natalia Dyer, Tom Sturridge, Daveed Diggs, Toni Collette, John Malkovich and Billy Magnussen)

36. Sam Mendes‘ 1917 — World War I saga, plot unknown. (George MacKay, Dean-Charles Chapman)

37. Untitled Miranda July Project — A woman’s life is turned upside down when her criminal parents invite an outsider to join them on a major heist they’re planning.
(Evan Rachel Wood, Gina Rodriguez, Debra Winger, Richard Jenkins)

38. Ciro Guerra‘s Waiting for the Barbarians — A Magistrate working in a distant outpost begins to question his loyalty to the empire. (Johnny Depp, Robert Pattinson, Mark Rylance, Harry Melling)

40. Jim Jarmusch‘s The Dead Don’t Die — Deadpan comic zombie film (Tilda Swinton, Adam Driver, Caleb Landry Jones, Chloë Sevigny)

41. Casey Affleck‘s Far Bright Star — Set in 1916, an aging cavalryman leads a team of men to hunt down the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa. However, after an ambush in which most of the men are killed, the cavalryman must struggle to survive in the desert. (Joaquin Phoenix)

42. Josephine Decker‘s Shirley — A famous Horror writer finds inspiration for her next book after she and her husband take in a young couple. (Elisabeth Moss, Michael Stuhlbarg, Logan Lerman, Odessa Young)

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I’ve been humming, or more precisely sinus-throbbing, bass notes for most of my life, going to back to when I was 10 or 11. When I say sinus-throbbing, I mean that my bass guitar is inside my head, or more precisely inside my ear drums and to a lesser extent my nasal cavity. When I “play my bass,” so to speak, I’m the only who hears it properly. The vibration is magnificent. I should’ve learned how to play bass instead of becoming a mediocre drummer.

“Almost all music is centered around chords. Chords define the harmonic structure of each song and tell you which notes will sound good and which won’t. If you study music theory, you’ll spend a lot of time learning about what the different chords are and how they lead from one to another. Guitarists and pianists play full chords, simultaneously sounding every note that makes up each chord. They are the ones who really fill out the harmonies.

“But as a bass player, your relationship with chords is a little different. You don’t play every note in a chord, but your deep, low tones ground the chord and help define its sound. Your primary job as a bass player, besides rhythmic support, is to provide the foundation for the chords. Your low notes really give a solid tonal grounding to guide listeners’ ears in following the shifts of harmony. For the most part, this means playing the roots of the chords.” — from “How to Play Along With Chords on Bass” by James Porter, posted on 6.10.18.

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You may see a breezy, hah-haayyy! Hollywood Reporter cover shot of the Vice trio — director-cowriter Adam McKay, costars Amy Adams and Christian Bale. And you may be chuckling over Bale’s decision to skinny himself down to his Machinist weight after becoming a lardbucket to play the Ultra-Luciferian Dick Cheney. And you may enjoy McKay’s head-rest sitting posture during the video chat. And your interest in seeing Vice may be greater as a result. All to the good!

But what I see, mainly, is the Los Angeles community (and the Annapurna marketing team in particular) saying to the New York film journalist community, “Aaahh, being first out of the gate is so nice! We’ve seen the film, talked about it, sussed it out. Some of us may even be dipping in for seconds. You New Yorkers will see it soon, don’t worry, but in the meantime it feels so good, so top-of-the-world to be the first responders.”

At the end of the comment thread for “The Haters Are Due on Maple Street,” which is about how p.c. zealots are doing everything they can to take down Peter Farrelly‘s Green Book, I wrote something that I should have included in the original piece:

“Isn’t every film finally about where its heart is, whether it’s been made in a 20th or 21st Century way?”

Not every great film has a discernible heartbeat of one kind of another, but the ones that people love and reference decades later all share that emotional seep-in thing —Ikiru, Manchester By The Sea, Brokeback Mountain, The Seven Samurai, The Best Years of Our Lives, La Strada, Call Me By Your Name, Au Hasard, Balthazar, etc. It really shouldn’t matter if the film in question is attuned to contemporary mindsets or to the way people felt and thought 20 or 30 years ago or whatever. All that really matters is whether or not a film knows itself — whether or not it’s settled and confident in its own shoes — and delivers accordingly. In the end that’s all that counts.

Back to my thread comment: “Whether or not the p.c. assholes want to acknowledge this, Green Book has a good heart and it knows from restraint and the value of high craft, and it applies exactly the right kind of just-so emphasis, the right kind of tone for this kind of story.

“God, I hate the p.c. zealots…I hate them the way Marlon Brando’s Colonel Kurtz hated those nabobs.”

Glenn Kenny response: “‘This is a wonderful movie about humanity, compassion and mutual respect, and anyone who says different I wanna see dead’ is peak HE, I guess. This season’s meltdown promises much entertainment. It’s nice to see Jeff and Sasha doing the Jack Klugman/Anita Gillette bit from the “Quincey” anti-punk-rock episode here, too.”

Wells to Kenny: “Touche — that’s a semi-fair point. But of course, p.c. zealots aren’t ‘people’ — they’re radicalized rhetorical constructs walking around with arms, legs and heads.”

I’ve seen all eight episodes of Ben Stiller‘s Escape at Donnemara (Showtime, debuting tonight), and it certainly delivers in an unexpected way. By that I mean it does a very unusual and fairly ballsy thing in the home stretch — a move that I totally respected.

It’s an appropriately grim, throughly-delved-into saga of the Clinton Correctional prison break of 2015, and the schemings of convicted murderers Richard Matt (Benicio del Toro) and David Sweat (Paul Dano), and about the help they got from miserable prison worker Tilly Mitchell (Patricia Arquette), a married, middle-aged woman with whom both convicts had a sexual thing with.

Everyone’s read the news accounts and can probably recall some of the basic plot points. Stiller’s film digs into every nook, cranny and orifice, and mines the feelings of lethargy and resignation for all they’re worth.

Escape at Dannemora is composed in spare, straight fashion — utilitarian, not overly shaded and certainly not arthousey, unpretentious. And oh boy, did I feel gloomed out by those bright green walls everywhere. If only state-prison walls were dark olive drab.

Despite suggestions and metaphors contained in the word “escape”, Stiller’s film is mainly about the planning of the break. The first five episodes, to be exact, while simultaneously focusing on Matt, Sweat and Mitchell’s triangulated relationship. Don Siegel and Clint Eastwood‘s Escape From Alcatraz was also primarily about planning, but of course that whole film ran only 112 minutes.

I honestly felt that this portion went on too long — that Stiller was more into keeping me locked up than offering what I wanted from the beginning, which was to savor those little tingles of freedom, however brief and despite the wrong kind of company. We all want to tag along when the door swings open.

The sixth episode is about the escape itself, the seventh episode stops the narrative cold in order to explore Matt, Sweat and Mitchell’s back-stories (i.e., the gutsy strategy that I spoke of earlier) and the final episode is about Matt and Sweat trying to elude a $23 million dragnet as they struggle and scramble their way through the woods, and scrounge what they can in a couple of abandoned cabins.

What is Escape at Donnemara really about? Grim lives and grim fates and how trapped and depressed the lower-middle-class bumblefucks feel, especially by the likelihood that they’ll never climb out of it. It’s nonetheless about people desperate to break out, even if that only amounts to daydreams.

Escape at Dannemora is mainly Arquette’s film (she’ll be nominated for an Emmy) with Del Toro and Dano delivering like the natural-born pros they are every time at bat. The final episode will air on 1.6.19.

Some may recall an early ’60s Lenny Bruce routine about Shelley Berman and the Chicago Shtarkers. It was about Berman performing on-stage at Mr. Kelly’s, a famed Chicago club, and getting more and more irritated by a couple of deep-voiced mafiosos who wouldn’t stop talking and interfering with his act.

Berman didn’t know they were mob guys, but that might not have mattered. In any event he finally blurted into the mike “Jesus, somebody shut these hoodlums up!”

Berman might’ve gotten walloped in a back alley, but the mob goons didn’t “hear” the insult. They may have physiologically heard the words “shut these hoodlums up” but psychologically they didn’t penetrate because “nobody would ever talk to them that way,” Bruce explained. So the taunt bounced off and Berman lucked out.

I’m mentioning because in a certain sense I was a mafia guy this morning as I was planning to attend a 10 am screening of Vice. The emailed invite said it would happen on Sunday, 11.25. (And it still will.) But like those Chicago goons, the 11.25 date (seven days hence, three days after Thanksgiving) struck me as so nonsensical that I waved it off like a house fly.

I did so because Los Angeles journos saw Vice yesterday, and why, I asked myself, would Annapurna delay showing Vice to New York City journos for eight (8) days? Nobody and I mean nobody handles an award-season roll-out this way.

You can’t offer a special peek to the L.A. crowd and then turn around and say to their NYC counterparts, “Just sit tight, fellas…we’ll show it to you next weekend so hold your horses for eight days.”

This isn’t the 1950s. Early showings of big-deal movies are always even-steven or favored-nation as far as the two coasts are concerned. So the date was a “mistake”, I told myself, and so I emotionally and psychologically rejected it.

I can be an occasional ditzoid about screenings, granted, but this was something else.

Herewith is Hollywood Elsewhere’s first flaky stab at a list of adult-friendly, quality-aspiring 2019 films— possible critical faves and perhaps even award-season contenders.

I realize that the market for “adult-friendly films that aren’t aimed at idiots” is getting smaller and smaller as the culture devolves and that the governing motto behind 90% of theatrical fare (or at least films released between January and Labor Day) is “you don’t have to be a drooling moron to enjoy this crap but it’ll probably help.” But we all have to hang in there and hope for the best.

We all understand that limited and longform series on cable and streaming are delivering much of the dramatic satisfaction these days, but nothing will replace top–tier theatrical features — i.e., those films which require a special vision and artistic discipline and have to deliver the whole package between 100 and 140 minutes, for the most part.

Things are always hazy at this stage but here are some 2019 stand-outs listed on the IMDB — listed partly in order of interest, and partly randomly. Please understand that I know nothing — I have double-checked only a few titles, and this is purely a paste job at this stage. Research, commentary, corraboration — it’s a process that will take several days to get right:

1. Martin Scorsese‘s The Irishman — A mob hitman recalls his possible involvement with the slaying of Jimmy Hoffa. (Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci, Jesse Plemons).

2. Quentin Tarantino‘s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood — A faded TV actor and his stunt double embark on an odyssey to make a name for themselves in the film industry during the Helter Skelter reign of terror in 1969 Los Angeles. (Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie).

3. Ang Lee‘s Gemini Man — An over-the-hill hitman faces off against a younger clone of himself. (Will Smith, Clive Owen, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Benedict Wong).

4. Jon Favreau‘s The Lion King — CGI and live-action re-imagining of the 1994 Disney classic. (Voice-acting by Seth Rogen, Donald Glover, Alfre Woodard, Chiwetel Ejiofor).

5. Darren Aronofsky‘s Untitled Artificial Intelligence Courtroom Project — Allegedly about an artificial intelligence court case.

6. Woody Allen‘s A Rainy Day in New York [in limbo at Amazon, allegedly streaming sometime in ’19)

7. Untitled Harriet Tubman Project — The life of Civil War-era activist Harriet Tubman, who worked to liberate slaves in the American South by developing an a secretive system that allowed them to escape to freedom. (Viola Davis, Mike Gassaway)

8. J.C. Chandor‘s Triple Frontier — Five friends team to take down a South American drug lord. (Charlie Hunnam, Ben Affleck, Pedro Pascal, Oscar Isaac.)

9. Mia Hansen-Løve‘s Bergman Island — An American filmmaking couple who retreat to Faro for the summer to each write screenplays for their upcoming films in an act of pilgrimage to the place. (Mia Wasikowska, Vicky Krieps, Anders Danielsen Lie, Joel Spira.)

10. John Crowley‘s The Goldfinch — A boy in New York is taken in by a wealthy Upper East Side family after his mother is killed in a bombing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. (Nicole Kidman, Sarah Paulson, Finn Wolfhard, Ansel Elgort)

11. David Michod‘s The King — (Timothée Chalamet, Joel Edgerton, Ben Mendelsohn, Robert Pattinson)

12. Garth Davis‘s A House in the Sky — A young journalist is captured in Somalia and held in captivity for more than a year. (Rooney Mara)

13. Untitled Danny Boyle/Richard Curtis Project — Believed to be musically themed and be set around the 1960s or 1970s. (Lily James, Ana de Armas, Kate McKinnon, Lamorne Morris)

14. J.J. Abrams‘ Star Wars: Episode IX — The conclusion of the new ‘Star Wars’ trilogy. (Daisy Ridley, Adam Driver, Domhnall Gleeson, et.al.)

15. Marielle Heller‘s You Are My Friend — The story of Fred Rogers, the honored host and creator of the popular children’s television program, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood (Tom Hanks, Matthew Rhys, Susan Kelechi Watson, Tammy Blanchard)

16. Robert Eggers‘ The Lighthouse — The story of an aging lighthouse keeper named Old who lives in early 20th-century Maine. (Robert Pattinson, Willem Dafoe)

17. Pedro Almodóvar‘s Dolor y gloria — A film director reflects on the choices he’s made in life as past and present come crashing down around him. (Penélope Cruz, Antonio Banderas, Cecilia Roth, Asier Etxeandia)

18. Jonathan Jakubowicz‘ Resistance — The story of a group of Jewish Boy Scouts who worked with the French Resistance to save the lives of ten thousand orphans during World War II. (Clémence Poésy, Ed Harris, Jesse Eisenberg, Edgar Ramírez)

19. Richard Linklater‘s Where’d You Go, Bernadette? — After her anxiety-ridden mother disappears, 15-year-old Bee does everything she can to track her down, discovering her troubled past in the process. (Cate Blanchett, Judy Greer, Kristen Wiig, Laurence Fishburne)

20. Benedict Andrews‘ Against All Enemies — An ambitious young F.B.I. Agent is assigned to investigate iconic actress Jean Seberg when she becomes embroiled in the tumultuous civil rights movement in late 1960s Los Angeles, California. (Kristen Stewart, Zazie Beetz, Vince Vaughn, Jack O’Connell)

21. Armando Iannucci‘s The Personal History of David Copperfield (Tilda Swinton, Ben Whishaw, Gwendoline Christie, Hugh Laurie)

22. Joe Wright‘s The Woman in the Window — An agoraphobic woman living alone in New York begins spying on her new neighbors only to witness a disturbing act of violence. (Amy Adams, Wyatt Russell, Gary Oldman, Julianne Moore)

23. Pablo Larraín‘s The True American — A Bangladeshi Air Force officer looking to make his way in the United States is shot by an American terrorist out to kill Muslims in the aftermath of September 11th.

24. Scott Z. Burns‘ The Torture Report — In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, CIA agents begin using extreme interrogation tactics on those they think were behind it. (Adam Driver, Jon Hamm, Jennifer Morrison, Maura Tierney).

25. Dee Rees‘ The Last Thing he Wanted — A journalist quits her newspaper job and becomes an arms dealer for a covert government agency. (Anne Hathaway, Ben Affleck, Willem Dafoe, Toby Jones)

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Focus Features is releasing Asghar Farhadi‘s Everybody Knows on 2.8.19. The official trailer popped a couple of days ago. Here are excepts from my Cannes Film Festival review, posted on 5.8.18:

“Everybody Knows isn’t a bust but by Asghar Farhadi’s lofty standards it’s something of a shortfaller, particularly due to how the third act unfolds. It sure as hell isn’t About Elly — I can tell you that. It’s more on the level of The Past, although The Past, which some said suffered from a layered-onion plot that felt too soap-opera-ish, is a more satisfying film. And it’s slightly below The Salesman, and way below A Separation.

“But it’s still a Farhadi film, and that always means a character-rich, complexly plotted, proceeding-at-its-own-pace family-community drama — smartly written, always well acted — in which deeper and deeper layers of the onion are gradually peeled until the truth comes out.

“Set in rural Spain, it’s about the sudden disappearance of a character but it’s not an About Elly-level thing. At all. It’s actually about a kidnapping but that’s all I’m going to divulge. But Everybody Knows follows the Farhadi form by focusing on a large community of family members, friends, co-workers (i.e., a wine farm) and whatnot, and everyone, we soon realize, knows everyone else’s secrets. Well, most of them. And by the end, everything comes out in the wash

“But the story and especially the ending don’t echo all that much in a social-fabric or social-portraiture sense. All the loose ends are tied up for the most part, but it doesn’t quite get there. The film doesn’t expand or begin to play a bigger game.

“If a friend were to ask, I would say “actually it’s pretty good…it’s not Farhadi’s best and is probably his least commanding, but he’s such a brilliant, high-calibre filmmaker that even his second-tier movies are fully involving, always believably acted and quite the meticulous ride.”

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Earlier today the first wave of Los Angeles critics and columnists saw Adam McKay‘s Vice (Annapurna, 12.25). The tweets say that Christian Bale is great as the demonic and Machievelllian Dick Cheney (but then we all had that idea from the trailer) and that the film itself is quite nervy, audacious, provocative.

Variety‘s Kris Tapley: “Christian Bale might be in line to receive his second Academy Award to date, for his uncanny portrayal of former Vice President Dick Cheney [and] the film packs an infuriating punch as McKay writes history with lightning yet again. The question [is] whether we’re ready to dissect it all.

“Is the movegoing audience — indeed, are Academy voters — ready to take stock of all this chapter in history with [today’s] depressing news glowing up at us from our mobile devices on a daily basis? It would be a hell of a time to hand someone an Oscar for portraying this particular man, and that takes nothing from Bale’s brilliant work.

“By the same token, Vice could be argued as the most urgent and important film in the race this year. One just wonders if the stomach is there for it.”

Indiewire’s Anne Thompson: “No matter what happens to Vice in the public arena, actors will adore this crazy political movie.” In other words, Thompson foresees possibly adverse reactions from Joe and Jane Popcorn, and possibly even from certain critics.

Some day, of course, there will be a rich, juicy Donald Trump movie for everyone to savor.