Over the last decade geiger-counter readings of the Noah Baumbach-Greta Gerwig creative partnership have been steady and consistent, but over the last few weeks they’ve abruptly changed.
Over the last 14 or 15 years Baumbach has been the grade-A guy who made smart movies that the film festival elites loved or liked a lot — The Squid and the Whale, Margot at the Wedding, Greenberg, Frances Ha, While We’re Young, Mistress America, DePalma, The Meyerowitz Stories — but which the popcorn munchers have been less than roused about.
With Greenberg Gerwig began carving a rep as Baumbach’s spirited soul partner, and stepped out big-time with the brilliant, co-written Frances Ha (’12) and Mistress America (’15). With Ladybird (’17), which she directed and wrote, Gerwig connected with the swells as well as the ticket-buyers in a much bigger way ($78.6 million worldwide gross) than any Baumbach film has managed.
But now the tables have suddenly (or at least seemingly) turned with Baumbach’s Marriage Story receiving great pre-festival-season (is there another film that’s playing Venice, Telluride, Toronto and New York?) while Gerwig’s Little Women, which has been testing for quite some time, is still being worked on and sidestepping the season.
Word around the campfire is that the first half meanders while the second half connects, and that Saoirse Ronan and Florence Pugh are the standouts.
The best man in the Democratic race for President — the smartest, the most pragmatically left-centrist and the most generationally dynamic guy to potentially succeed Donald Trump in 2021 — hasn’t the faintest prayer of winning because of African-American voters. A CNN poll released on 7.1 showed that Pete Buttigieg, the South Bend, Indiana mayor, has “continued to receive zero support” from this constituency.
By the same token Senator Bernie Sanders was also zotzed by African-American voters, particularly after winning only 14% of the black vote vs 86% for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 South Carolina primary. (In an inter-campaign memo read by the N.Y. Times, Sanders staffers wrote that “the margin by which we lost the African-American vote has got to be — at the very least — cut in half or there simply is no path to victory.”)
Basic math tells us that Buttigieg’s situation is even worse.
And so, because of African-American voters, we have three admirable but vaguely unsettling choices — Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren. All are fine in terms of who they are and the humanist policies they’d pursue, but a seat-of-the-pants feeling tells me that Warren and Harris, admirable as they are, might not prevail against Trump (although they also might), and that Typewriter Joe, if he wins, will be at best a doddering one-termer. Biden is a good man and a far better human being than Donald Trump, but he’s the wrong guy to steer the sip in the 2020s. Because baby, baby, baby he’s out of time.
Here’s a small but curious oddity in Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman‘s Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice, which will open just after Labor Day.
The film begins with footage of Ronstadt, 73, visiting the Mexican town of Banamichi, where her grandfather was born, and listening to a music festival. A significant portion of the doc is about Linda’s ethnic as well as musical identity. The last 25% is about Ronstadt’s decision to musically celebrate her Mexican heritage with 1987’s “Canciones de Mi Padre” as well as “Mas Canciones” (’91) and “Frenesi” (’92).
The film conveys a clear sense of Ronstadt having found spiritual fulfillment and completion by way of embracing her family’s history and traditions.
Except all through the ’60s, ’70s (her biggest commercial decade) and most of the ’80s nobody knew Ronstadt was of Mexican descent. For the simple and obvious reason that she has a German last name. In the doc media mogul David Geffen and fellow troubador Jackson Browne both say they didn’t know about Ronstadt’s Latin ancestry. Nobody did until she went ethnic in the late ’80s. All fine and good, but that’s a significant cultural-identity issue — German last name vs. Mexican heritage — so you’d think that Epstein and Friedman would include a line or two of explanation. But they don’t.
In a statement provided to Hollywood Elsewhere, the filmmakers said that “we only went back as far as her grandfather, the generation she would have personally been acquainted with. Otherwise it was just too much backstory to work in, and didn’t seem relevant to her musical story, which was our focus.”
I understand this answer, but ignoring where “Ronstadt” comes from still seems a bit odd. The Wiki fact is that Linda’s great-grandfather, graduate engineer Friedrich August Ronstadt (who went by Federico Augusto Ronstadt) “immigrated to the Southwest in the 1840s from Hanover, Germany, and married a Mexican citizen, eventually settling in Tucson.”
It’s a minor omission and unimportant in the greater scheme of Ronstadt’s musical life, but the decision to avoid mentioning Friedrich or Federico is still a head-scratcher.
So here’s a theory or, if you will, a suspicion. The reason Linda’s great-grandfather is completely ignored is because it would have been politically incorrect to have mentioned him. [Full disclosure: My mother’s family, named Grube, was half-German.] The arc of the last third of Linda’s life was about reconnecting with her Mexican family roots. The movie, as mentioned, is all over this aspect, but no one wants to hear about some knockwurst-and-sauerkraut guy from Hanover, Germany who came to this country 175 years ago. Even if a brief mention of same would have explained the basics.
Because whiteness, let’s be honest, isn’t especially cool these days. Certainly by the standards of the progressive community. The basic agreement in media circles is that white culture (whether descended from England, Germany, France, Russia or the Nordic countries) can be acknowledged but is better off ignored. Because we’re living in an era of positive progressive redefining in which non-white cultures are experiencing a significant upsurge, media-recognition- and ethnic-celebration-wise.
There are three things that bother me about Leonardo DiCaprio‘s Rick Dalton, the former TV star whose career is slipping and downswirling in Once Upon A Time in Hollywood.
The first is his yokel twang, which I hate the sound of — he sounds like a blend of Jim Nabors, Buck Owens and Clem Kadiddlehopper. The second is the proven fact that he’s bone stupid. And the third is that moment on the western TV set when he throws a styrofoam coffee cup onto the dusty main street.
But let’s focus on the dumb. How else to describe a TV actor who’s played a starring role in a hit TV series (i.e., Bounty Law), and then, after the series has been cancelled, has segued into playing a series of bad guys on this and that TV show, and somehow doesn’t realize that he’s degrading his image by doing so?
Every ’60s-era TV star in the industry knew it was better to be the cool guy who wins fights and shoots bad guys than to play guys who lose fights and get shot by the hero…c’mon!
Steve McQueen might not have been AlbertEinstein, but at the very least he knew that after playing Josh Randall on Wanted: Dead or Alive the worst thing he could have done was to play bad guys on The Fugitive, The FBI Story and such.
McQueen knew that, but somehow Dalton didn’t. Because Dalton’s brain-cell count was simply too low.
It was only when Dalton met his agent Marvin Schwarz (Al Pacino) for lunch at Musso and Frank in February ’69 that the clouds parted. Schwarz explained very calmly and logically that repeatedly getting beaten up and killed will condition the audience to think less of Dalton the ex-bounty hunter, and that it will be very tough to play a hero again.
Dalton has been playing TV bad guys for four or five years at that point, and yet somehow the reality hadn’t sunk in. It’s only when Schwarz says this isn’t the wisest career strategy that Dalton finally realizes “holy shit…things aren’t going so well!”
This, to me, is one dumb-as-a-fencepost actor. Especially one who can’t stop drinking or smoking or littering. Which is why I found Dalton a bit of a pain to hang with. Brad Pitt‘s Cliff Booth, on the other hand, is eternally cool.
Season 2 of David Fincher and Joe Penhall‘s Mindhunter series returns to Netflix on August 16th. Based upon or at least inspired by (I’m presuming) “Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit” by John Douglas and Mark Olshaker. Season 1 was set in 1977. Season 2 is set two or three years later and covers the Atlanta murders of 1979–81. It also includes an encounter with Charles Manson, once again played by Once Upon A Time in Hollywood‘s Damon Herriman.
As with season 1, Fincher has directed four of season 2’s 10 episodes.
I finally finished watching Netflix’s Mindhunter last night. All ten episodes. Wow. Precise, patient, unnerving, character-rich, exacting dialogue, blissfully intelligent. By far the most engrossing Netflix thing I’ve sat through this year, and that includes Okja, First They Killed My Father, Mudbound and The Meyerowitz Stories.
I’m really glad the second season has been approved as I couldn’t get enough of season #1. Really and truly riveted. A perfect thing to watch at the end of a long, vaguely depressing, anxiety-ridden day consumed by writing and researching and…you don’t want to know the rest.
Though Mindhunter I’ve come to know four…make that five actors I’ll never forget and want to engage with again — Jonathan Groff (Holden Ford), Holt McCallany (Bill Tench), Hannah Gross (Debbie Mitford), Anna Torv (Wendy Carr) and even Joe Tuttle, who plays God-fearing, goodie two-shoes FBI agent Gregg Smith, who ignominiously rats out Groff when he sends a Richard Speck interrogation tape to a pair of FBI internal affairs investigators.
Robert Eggers‘ The Lighthouse “is an absolute masterpiece — a tale of slowly burgeoning madhouse by way of isolation, booze, demons and nightmares. It contains Robert Pattinson‘s finest role and performance ever, but Willem Dafoe‘s old bearded sea dog matches him line for line, glare for glare, howl for howl.
“This 35mm black-and-white masterwork (projected in a 1:1 aspect ratio) is really about a battle of performances as well as a fight between earthly duties and the madness of shrieking mermaids and visions of King Triton. Nightmares au natural but full of ancient myths and fables. Totally 19th Century in terms of atmosphere, set design and especially in the Melville-like dialogue, co-written by Egger and his brother Max. Jarin Blaschke‘s cinematography is an instant classic in itself.” — from “This Way Lies Madness,” posted from Cannes on 5.19.19.
A24 will release The Lighthouse on Friday, 10.18.
Indiewire‘s Zack Sharf has written that the film will be presented “in Academy ratio,” which would mean 1.37:1. But this is incorrect.
Update: A24 informs that “in Cannes TheLighthouse was shown at 1.19:1” — an aspect ratio introduced in 1926 — and that “the trailer aspect ratio is 1.20 which matches the dailies. 1.37 is actually inaccurate.”
