Camilla Gibb‘s “Sweetness in the Belly“, a culture-clash love story, was initially published 12 years ago. It’s a tantalizing title for a book — right away you want to know what it means. But it’s not a movie title. The producers are asking for trouble by sticking with it. Your average megaplex bruh or couch surfer is going to mutter “maybe the girlfriend but not me” and move on. The British-made drama has been directed by Zeresenay Berhane Mehari. The cast includes Dakota Fanning, Wunmi Mosaku, Kunal Nayyar and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II. It’s debuting at the Berlinale.
Three or four days ago director Rod Lurie (The Outpost) stated on Facebook that his love for Warren Beatty, Buck Henry and Elaine May‘s Heaven Can Wait (’78) hasn’t faded. Lurie saw it at age 16, and said that no other film since has made him feel so good.
He’s referring, of course, to the last 20 or 25 minutes. Specifically from the moment that Jack Warden‘s Max Corkle bolts out of the Leo Farnsworth mansion for the Super Bowl game at the USC coliseum, and until Beatty (playing Rams’ quarterback Joe Pendleton as well as billionaire Leo Farnsworth, so to speak) and Julie Christie (i.e., Betty Logan) walk off to share a cup of coffee.
Before those final 20 or 25 Heaven Can Wait is diverting as far as it goes. The applicable terms are “chuckly, pretty good, deft, likable, lively remake,” etc. It’s an amusing, vaguely meta thing by way of a reincarnation plot. And not especially deep or mystical at that. The humor is dry and deadpan. Beatty, Christie, Jack Warden plus Charles Grodin, Dyan Cannon, James Mason, Vincent Gardenia and everyone else — the schtick they’re working with is turned way down.
But there is a scheme in mind, and you just have to wait for the payoff.
The first 75 minutes of Heaven Can Wait are, of course, a set-up for the final 25. And during that final 25 HCW sells the audience on two great notions — (1) people who’ve fallen for a certain someone in actuality can somehow sense or recognize them in a subsequent incarnation, and (2) there’s a celestial system in place, and rule #1 is that nobody really dies, or certainly not in the sense that most of us recognize it (i.e., eternal lights-out without dreams).
HE: “And I really think Rami Malek is going to win Best Actor. Don’t you? I really believe that’s locked at this stage.” Hotshot: “He’s got it, yes. Ditto Glenn Close.” HE: “Agreed. And Alfonso [Cuaron], for sure, is winning Best Director.” Hotshot: “Yep.” HE: “But I’m not entirely sure Roma will win the Best Picture Oscar. It might win, but I don’t know.” Hotshot: “It’ll be Roma or Green Book.” HE: “I suspect voters will probably feel better about themselves the morning after, and certainly six months or a year after, if they give it to Roma. People love Green Book‘s feel-good vibes — I felt them last September in Toronto — but Roma is a higher arthouse achievement, and more of a ‘2018 film’ than Green Book. They both address Trump’s racial ugliness, but Roma addresses the wall thing besides.”
“The Oscar race has become an annual embarrassment. The self-absorption in this half-year spectacle could choke Thanos himself. We need to stop talking about ourselves and start looking for new stories, new ways to entertain the world. Taken properly, the #MeToo and representational questions offer us ways to do that. But they can also become fixations about themselves, a chance for us to squabble endlessly about our own problems and divisions until those squabbles drown out the mission we’re here for.
“Imagine if people turned on the Super Bowl and were told that instead of a football game, we’re going to have a televised debate about kneeling during the national anthem. That’s what the Oscars have become, what Hollywood is becoming.” — also from the latest Ankler edition, written by Richard Rushfield.
From Richard Rushfield‘s latest Ankler edition, “The Showbiz State of the Union”: “Deeper and scarier is the question posed by YouTube, whose viewership dwarfs Netflix, Amazon, and every studio and network in the history of humanity times a million. While box office is roughly steady, there is a generation rolling our way that doesn’t think of Netflix as TV — it thinks of YouTube as all entertainment.
“It’s a very open question whether a generation that has been taught for ten years now to inhale multiple screens at every waking second will have the patience to watch episodes of TV, much less movies.
“The effects of the smartphone on the brain are just beginning to be understood, but there’s every reason to be terrified that after total screen immersion since birth, sitting through a traditional TV show will seem like water torture to [Generation Z]. Which is why this would be a wonderful moment for Hollywood, led by a new generation, to be searching outward into the world, finding new ways to communicate, new formats, new stories that connect with the coming age, instead of…well, that brings us to our problems at home.”
“The 20,000-word article goes on and on, but basically Mallory invented two fake ph’ds, fake executive jobs, fake brain cancer, his parents fake death, his brother’s fake suicide plus he scammed the entire NYC publishing industry into buying his first novel, which they promoted to number one on the bestseller list, only to discover that it might be plagiarized.”
HE to friend, sent this morning: “The article is initially fascinating. Then it gradually starts to feel a bit complex, and then labrynthian and exhausting, and then it continues and continues. I’d love to read the shorter version.
“A talented writer, Mallory is a lying, fabricating, fantasizing bullshitter in his personal and business relationships. He’s a relentless spinner of creative tales — a genetic brethren of former TNR writer Stephen Glass or N.Y. Times reporter Jayson Blair. The bullshit climbs, compounds itself, swirls, reaches for the sky. Mallory is Tom Ripley, a smooth criminal, a sociopath extraordinaire.”
Hollywood Elsewhere attended and enjoyed last night’s SBIFF Virtuosos event. Quickie interviews with A Star is Born‘s Sam Elliott, Eighth Grade‘s Elsie Fisher. First Man‘s Claire Foy, Can You Ever Forgive Me? costar Richard E. Grant, Leave No Trace‘s Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie, BlacKkKlansman‘s John David Washington and Burning‘s Steven Yeun. (Roma‘s Yalitza Aparicio was billed but didn’t attend.) Spirited, amusing…a good time. Dave Karger moderated.
HE impressions: (a) Grant won the competition — he was by far the wittiest and most electric — the most vivid, spritzy and dryly urbane; (b) The laconic, laid-back, deep-voiced Elliott came in second, (and I’m very sorry he didn’t attend the after-party as I wanted to ask him about Lifeguard and his poker-game cameo in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid); (c) Fisher came in third — enthused, bubbly, tingly, “up”; (d) The others — Foy, Washington, McKenzie, Yeun — came off as likable and crackling as far as it went, but basically shared the fourth-place slot.
“
