Month: July 2019

With this morning’s announcement of the 2019 Venice Film Festival slate plus last Tuesday’s Toronto announcements, a good portion of the Telluride rundown looks like this **:

Ford v Ferrari, d: James Mangold
Judy, d: Rupert Goold
Uncut Gems, d: The Safdies
Motherless Brooklyn, d: Edward Norton
The Truth, d: Kore-eda
Ad Astra, d: James Gray
Wasp Network, d: Olivier Assayas
The Two Popes, d: Fernando Mereilles
Portrait of a Lady on Fire, d: Celine Sciamma
Pain and Glory, d: Pedro Almodovar
Parasite, d: Bong Joon-ho
Varda by Agnes, d: Agnes Varda

Definitely not going to Telluride:

Jojo Rabbit, The Goldfinch, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, The Laundromat, Harriet, The Personal History of David Copperfield.

Venice Competition:

The Truth, d: Hirokazu Kore-eda
The Perfect Candidate, d: Haifaa Al-Mansour
About Endlessness, d: Roy Andersson
Wasp Network, d: Olivier Assayas
Marriage Story, d: Noah Baumbach
Guest of Honor, d: Atom Egoyan
Ad Astra, d: James Gray
A Herdade, d: Tiago Guedes
Gloria Mundi, d: Robert Guediguian
Waiting for the Barbarians, d: Ciro Guerra
Ema, d: Pablo Larrain
Saturday Fiction, d: Lou Ye
Martin Eden, d: Pietro Marcello
The Mafia Is No Longer What It Used to Be, d: Franco Maresco
The Painted Bird, d: Vaclav Marhoul
The Mayor of the Rione Sanità, d: Mario Martone
Babyteeth, d: Shannon Murphy
Joker, d: Todd Phillips
An Officer and a Spy, d: Roman Polanski
The Laundromat, d: Steven Soderbergh
No. 7 Cherry Lane, d: Yonfan

Out of Competition – Fiction:

Seberg, d: Benedict Andrews
Adults in the Room, d: Costa-Gavras
The King, d: David Michod
Tutto Il Mio Folle Amore, d: Gabriele Salvatores

Out of Competition – Special Screenings

The New Pope, d: Paolo Sorrentino
Never Just a Dream: Stanley Kubrick and Eyes Wide Shut, d: Matt Wells

** per calculations from World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy.

28 years ago James Cameron‘s T2: Judgment Day delivered a classic high-velocity action sequence, set in a Los Angeles riverbed of concrete and chain-link fences, punctuated by shotgun blasts and physics-defying vehicle leaps. Robert Patrick‘s T-1000 in a sheared-off truck cab vs. Arnold Schwarzenegger‘s Terminator-on-a-Harley with Eddie Furlong hanging on for dear life. The action pushed the limits of natural law but audiences bought it because it was cyborg vs. cyborg.

In a just-posted trailer for Ang Lee‘s Gemini Man (and specifically between the :04 and :10 mark), there’s a vaguely similar high-speed sequence involving Will Smith‘s Henry Brogen vs. Smith’s “Junior” (i.e., himself as a young man), both on motorcycles and firing weapons at each other. What happens to Junior defies any standard of half-assed credulity, of course — action films have become increasingly hostile to the laws of physics over the last 20-plus years — and this time there’s no cyborg exception. The two Brogens might as well be in a Road Runner vs. Coyote cartoon.

The fact is that CG bullshit is detectable in every standout action moment in the Gemini Man trailer. It goes without saying that Ang Lee is no second-tier genre hack. He’s a serious, grade-A filmmaker, and it follows that I’d like very much to believe in each and every aspect of this visually ambitious thriller. But the trailer is telling me that’s not in the cards.

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Respect and affection for the late Rutger Hauer, who passed a few days ago at age 75.

A grand, gentle fellow with a flirting-with-extremes personality, Hauer will always be remembered for two iconic ’80s roles — Roy Batty in Blade Runner (’82) and the creepy John Ryder in The Hitcher (’86) — along with his last hoo-hah performance in Hobo With A Shotgun (’11). I’m not forgetting or dismissing his ’70s work with Paul Verhoeven — Turkish Delight (’73), Soldier of Orange (’77) and Spetters (’80) — but the above three are the keepers.

Hauer was taking cigarette breaks when I interviewed him in Park City eight and a half years ago for Hobo. He was 66 then, and we all know that you can’t smoke at that age. If you need to go there smoking is for your teens, 20s and 30s. You have to quit by age 40 — no negotiations.

From “Shotgun Superstar,” posted on 1.26.11:

My Rutger Hauer encounter this morning was smooth and mellow. Hobo With A Shotgun, which I saw directly after, is a relentlessly low-rent Troma splatter film — another ’70s grindhouse flick in “quotes.” (You don’t mind the awful dialogue spoken by the bad guys, right? Of course you don’t!)

But the title and the whatever-you-want-to-make-it metaphor are brilliant, and Hauer, 66, is reaping the benefits. His scumbag-blasting bum is the most iconic role he’s played since The Hitcher (’86), and before that Roy Batty in Blade Runner (’82).

If I was a director-writer, I’d write something for Hauer in which he plays the absolute opposite of an enraged, socially-avenging hobo. I would cast him as a rich, hip sculptor who lives in lower Manhattan — a guy who meditates and writes poetry, knows how to prepare Northern Italian cuisine and has his grandkids over on weekends. I would leave the hobo behind and never look back.

Hauer is gentle, polite, considerate. Being a famous actor he’s used to a certain amount of attention. And (I mean this in the most admiring way possible) he’s a bit of an eccentric. He talks about whatever mood he might be in. He goes outside to smoke. He politely declined to drink Bloody Marys with everyone else. (Discipline!) He wore black Converse lace-up sneakers — very cool.

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Two months ago I wrote that I was getting an Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close vibe from John Crowley‘s The Goldfinch (Warner Bros., 9.13). I tend to have difficulty with trauma-recovery dramas, especially those involving terrorism. And I have to be honest — I don’t like sensitive little boys who wear glasses.

Nothing has changed with the new trailer.

Based on Donna Tartt’s 2015 novel and set for release during the Toronto Film Festival. Ansel Elgort, Oakes Fegley, Aneurin Barnard, Finn Wolfhard, Sarah Paulson, Luke Wilson, Jeffrey Wright, Nicole Kidman. I’m sorry but it feels like a no-go.

The “whoo-whoo” backing vocals on “Sympathy for the Devil” were added when Keith Richard‘s girlfriend, Anita Pallenberg, chimed in during a take and the Stones liked how it sounded. Pallenberg sang it on the record along with Richards, Brian Jones, Bill Wyman, Marianne Faithfull and Stones producer Jimmy Miller.

Miller: “Pallenberg was the epitome of what was happening at the time. She was very Chelsea. She’d arrive with the elite film crowd. During the recording of ‘Sympathy For The Devil’ when I started going ‘whoo, whoo’ in the control room, so did they. So I had the engineer set up a mike so they could go out in the studio and whoo, whoo for real.”

I find the phrase “there are five second acts in this movie” totally fascinating. I’ve never once assessed or evaluated that a film has this problem. (If in fact it is one.) Multiple second acts! Hollywood Elsewhere-wise, this is an entirely fresh analytical construct. I can’t even think of a film that has multiple second acts, but that means nothing as I’m still grappling with this. Perhaps the HE community could point out examples of well-known films that have multiple second acts.

The trailer for Kasi Lemmons‘ Harriet (Focus Features, 11.1) feels a little too on-the-nose. The obvious gold standard in this agony-of-slavery realm is Steve McQueen‘s 12 Years A Slave, but I’m not sensing a similar degree of investment and authenticity. Tonally it reminds me a little bit of Nate Parker‘s Birth of a Nation. (In that 2016 film the hateful young white slave owner was played by Armie Hammer; here the same type of character is played by Joe Alwyn.) I loved Cynthia Erivo in McQueen’s Widows, but Janelle Monae isn’t exuding “period” vibes. Harriet will play the Toronto Film Festival, but not Venice or Telluride. I’d love to see Harriet become an important, must-see film, if for no other reason than the Trump administration’s reported decision to delay the Harriet Tubman $20 dollar bill until at least 2026.

Based on Christine Leunens‘ “Caging Skies“, Taika Watiti‘s Jojo Rabbit (Fox Searchlight/Disney, 10.18) is a satirical absurdist comedy — a jape, a goof. The trailer makes it clear that Watiti (Thor: Ragnarok, the forthcoming Thor: Love and Thunder) has zero interest in investing in the reality of early 1940s Vienna or anything else in that cultural, historical or geographical vein. It’s as if the Max Fischer Players had adapted Leunens’ book. The idea is to lampoon and have a general giggle about the absurdity of Naziism, anti-Semitism and racism itself.

“There are just three simple yes-or-no questions Congress should ask Robert Mueller:

“Mr. Mueller, the president said your report found, in his words, ‘no collusion, no obstruction, complete and total exoneration.’

“First, did your report find there was no collusion?

“Second, did your report find there was no obstruction?

“Third, did your report give the president complete and total exoneration?

“That’s it. That’s the ballgame.”

— from “With Three Simple Answers, Mueller Can Speak Volumes,” a 7.22 N.Y. Times op-ed piece by Obama administration action solicitor general Neal K. Katyal.

In a nutshell, The New Yorker‘s Jane Mayer has begun the process of rescuing former Minnesota Senator Al Franken from #MeToo banishment, ignoble obscurity and the loneliness of Moses in the desert.

I’m waiting for a flight with no time to unpack the laptop, but the gist of Mayer’s thoroughly reported article is that (a) Franken’s chief accuser, Leeann Tweeden, is unreliable and certainly suspicious in terms of her rightwing associations, (b) a number of U.S. Senators who called on Franken to resign are now sorry they did so, and (c) perhaps it’s time to consider evaluating each case of alleged inappropriate sexual behavior by its specific merits instead of a carte blanche “believe all women” response.

Kneejerk #MeToo lynchings serve no one. Be fair, be prudent, examine all pertinent info.

Read the piece: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/07/29/the-case-of-al-franken