Month: April 2019

With Alex Ross Perry‘s Her Smell opening this weekend, a repost of my 9.17.18 N.Y. Film festival review:

“Her Smell is an audience-test movie — a kind of experiment to see how much in the way of undisciplined, pull-out-the-stops abuse viewers are willing to sit through.

“The tools of this abuse are wielded by Perry and star Elizabeth Moss, who gets to snarl and smile demonically and be all manic-crazy obnoxious as Becky Something, an edgy, drug-fueled grunge rocker (pic is set in the ’90s) who wears too much eye makeup and suggestively flicks her tongue and could stand to lose a few pounds. Five minutes with crazy Becky and you’re immediately plotting your escape. She’s Medusa-woman, lemme outta here, can’t do this…aagghh!

“Escaping wasn’t an actual option, of course, as I sitting in a New York Film Festival press screening at the Walter Reade theatre, surrounded by dozens of critics. If I’d bolted I would have never heard the end of it so I stuck it out like a man, but good God almighty.

“There’s one tolerable moment in the last third. I’m reluctant to use the term ‘third act’ as there’s no story in Her Smell, much less anything resembling story tension, although there are five chapters or sections, each announced by snippets of 1.37:1 footage. The moment I’m speaking of shows a sober Becky sitting down at the piano and gently singing Bryan Adam‘s ‘Heaven’ to her toddler daughter. Hollywood Elsewhere is very grateful to Perry for at least offering this small slice of comfort pie. Peons like myself (i.e., viewers who are unable to enjoy a film teeming with jabbering, wall-to-wall, motor-mouthed anxiety) need this kind of thing from time to time.

“85% to 90% of Her Smell is about enduring Becky’s rash, needling, abrasive behavior toward her bandmates (Agyness Deyn, Gayle Rankin), a trio of up-and-coming Seattle chick musicians (Cara Delevigne, Dylan Gelula, Ashley Benson), her ex-husband (dull-as-dishwater Dan Stevens), the record-label owner (Eric Stoltz, 56 during filming and eyeballing the big six-oh) and some kind of manager-agent character (Virginia Madsen, who was born only 20 days before Stoltz). They all regard Becky with the same expression, a non-verbal channelling of “oh, God…she’s gone over the edge…what can be done?” and so on.

“To sum up, Her Smell is Perry punishment. And an indulgent, highly undisciplined, 135-minute exercise in flamboyant behavior-acting for Moss. I will never, ever see it again.”

Random thoughts: (a) What is that, Wadi Rum again?; (b) Here we go again…more money, more legend-spinning, more earnest expressions; (b) I don’t get the leaping backwards into an oncoming bad-guy star fighter; (c) How come Oscar Isaac has no close-up?; (d) Nobody hates C3PO more than myself; (e) when, if ever, will Hollywood Elsewhere embark on a Lawrence of Arabia camel trip that will include camping in Wadi Rum for a couple of days?

HE to J.J. Abrams and Rian Johnson: Luke Skywalker lives within the realm of The Force, but is otherwise dead. Rey is the inheritor but not his daughter or any immediate blood relation. (Or did I miss something?) There are no other Skywalker descendants, no Skywalker army, no Skywalker cult or tribe.

So what the hell does “The Rise of Skywalker” mean?

If it means Kylo Ren (grandson on Darth Vader) is going to turn from the Dark Side and became a last-minute hero…I really don’t care. I feel zero investment in the guy, and could never understand why he wore that Vader mask in the first place.

One implication is that Luke will return from the dead like Lazarus or Jesus but c’mon…is there any end to this? When Obi-wan died, he stayed a spirit and didn’t “rise.” Is there any such thing as any super-character in any CG-driven tentpole fantasy EVER ACTUALLY DYING? (Han Solo doesn’t count — he’s mortal.) Storytellers have to respect for what each and every living thing (human, animal, vegetable) has confronted and come to respect as natural and immutable, which is that when death comes calling and the curtain comes down, THAT’S IT. But the infantilizing of the fantasy realm by the Sons of Lucas (the original infantilizer along with Spielberg) constantly defaults to “NO, HE/SHE ISN’T DEAD…HE/SHE LIVES AGAIN!”

If Luke is indeed toast and staying that way, then I take the last paragraph back. But if it he’s toast, what does “The Rise of Skywalker” mean?

To go by the trailer, an alternate title could be “The Rise of Carrie Fisher.”

It’s not the movie but the nitrate thang. I just want to be able to say that once, just once, I watched a first-rate projection of a black-and-white nitrate print. TCM Classic Film Festival copy: “Nitrate projection made possible through support of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, Turner Classic Movies and The Film Foundation in partnership with the American Cinematheque and the Academy Film Archive.”

After the show: Very handsome print with nice detail and texture, but the film looks better — sharper, a bit brighter, a bit more gleaming — when streamed at 1080p on 65” 4K monitor. Sorry but it does.

FIFOG (Festival Internationale du Film Oriental de Geneve) runs from 4.29 through 5.5, but who uses the “o” word these days? The last time was when Paul Schrader used it in a late March Facebook post (“I’ve written or directed films with a black lead, an oriental lead, a female lead,” etc.) Before that was during a viewing of What’s Up, Tiger Lily?.

Glenn Close is going to play some kind of Ma Bumblefuck in Ron Howard and Netflix’s Hillbilly Elegy…right?

Close is one of our greatest actresses and Lord knows she’s covered the waterfront with many disparate characters — long suffering literary wife, Jenny the nurse, Alex the psycho, Cruella de Ville, Albert Nobbs, etc. But she’s never played a rural, dispirited, mule-stubborn, Trump-supporting Okee from Muskogee with an Oxycontin habit. I’ll believe Close’s acting (I always have) but I’m going to have difficulty forgetting that Close, the refined, well-educated, WASPy actress from Connecticut, is pretending to be this kind of…uhm, person. It’ll be like Helen Hayes or Jeanne Eagels playing Daisy Mae from L’il Abner.

Amy Adams is also playing some kind of yokel type, or so I gather.

The screenplay, based on the respected book by J.D. Vance, is by Shape of Water co-screenwriter Vanessa Taylor. Howard is producing with Imagine’s Brian Grazer and Karen Lunder.

From Cineuropa‘s Fabien Lemercier by way of World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy about next month’s Cannes Film Festival: “Jay Roach‘s Fair and Balanced (Lionsgate, 12.20) rumored to premiere out-of-competition; ditto Armando Iannucci‘s The Personal History of David Copperfield.”

It would be highly unusual (if not unheard of) for a December release to debut in Cannes, but maybe the Lionsgate guys are thinking “we have to somehow out-splash The Loudest Voice,” the Showtime version of the Roger Ailes story that pops on 6.30. It costars Russell Crowe, Naomi Watts, Seth MacFarlane and Sienna Miller.

Fair and Balanced costars John Lithgow as Ailes, Charlize Theron as Megyn Kelly, Nicole Kidman as Gretchen Carlson, Margot Robbie as a fictional Fox News employee, plus Allison Janney, Kate McKinnon, Mark Duplass and Malcolm McDowell as Rupert Murdoch.

Lemercier is also claiming Pablo Larrain‘s Ema has been bought by Netflix but that the deal has yet to be finalized. Either way Cannes is a no-go, he’s reporting. (My understanding is that the Netflix story is smoke, but what do I know?)

Ruimy: “A major find for American cinema will be director Danielle Lesowitz‘ debut Port Authority, which is rumored to be in Un Certain Regard section. I’m hearing that Cristi Puiu‘s French-language Manor House is 199 minutes. Marco Bellocchio‘s The Traitor has major Godfather vibes.”

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I haven’t yet seen Amy Poehler‘s Wine Country (Netflix, 5.10), but I will soon. It may amount to more than a Napa Valley, gender-flipped Sideways blended with a late-40ish Bridesmaids, but you can tell in a heartbeat…no, you can’t. Trailers always mislead. But you certainly sense a lack of gravitas. No one’s going to get clobbered with a motorcycle helmet. Directed by Poehler (who also stars and co-wrote the original story), written by incidental costars Emily Spivey and Liz Cackowski. Costarring Maya Rudolph, Rachel Dratch, Ana Gasteyer, Paula Pell, Tina Fey, Jason Schwartzman, Cherry Jones.

Julien Assange, 47, obviously knew for some time that his ouster from the Ecuadoran embassy was imminent. But when the moment arrived this morning he looked breathless and anxious, and like an unwashed, tattered, 69 year-old Gandalf.

I would have manned up and submitted to the inevitable. I would have showered, shaved, gotten a haircut and a manicure, put on a freshly-pressed suit and a pair of elegant Italian shoes and walked out with British officials in handcuffs. Standing tall with a touch of dignity. Instead Assange looked and behaved like an asshole…”aaghhh, they’re carrying me out…aagghhh, these brutes!”

From Eileen Sullivan and Richard Pérez-Pena’s N.Y. Times report, posted this morning: “Assange, 47, has been living at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London since 2012. British authorities arrested him on Thursday, heavily bearded and disheveled. A dramatic video showed him shackled and being carried out of the embassy and forced into a police van. He was detained partly in connection with an American extradition warrant after he was evicted by the Ecuadoreans.”

Had it not been for Assange’s torpedoing of Hillary Clinton and the Democrats with those Wikileak-ed emails, she might well have won…no? This year she’d be facing primary challengers and looking like Jimmy Carter in ’79. But at least we wouldn’t have Trump.

If a cosmic wizard were to offer me a chance to re-live the first three or four decades of my life all over again, I’d immediately say “yes!” and jump into it like a swimming pool. As long as the wizard agrees, that is, that I could retain the knowledge, perspective and seasoning that I have in my head right now. Man, what a symphony of stimulation and smoothitude. The advantages! The foresight! Almost every day of my actual childhood and teenaged life was miserable in one way or another, but the re-boot would be a steady high. Well, most much of the time.

[Click through to full story on HE-plus]

Excerpt from video essay on Dragged Across Concrete Bluray: