Day: September 5, 2019

Deep Drill

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Gut reactions to this Waves trailer would be greatly appreciated. It gets you or…?

Posted three days ago: “Trey Edward Shults directed and wrote Waves, and without his emotional and stylistic imprints it could have been just another tragic teen drama. Bad stuff suddenly happens, we have to collect ourselves and try to heal and forgive, etc. But there’s a certain honed-down clarity and skillful applications of emotional frankness that elevate it, and the acting is right there on the plate and vibrating in every scene.

“Waves is definitely the second-best film of the Telluride Film Festival, right after Marriage Story. It will gather more steam when it plays Toronto. Is it an Oscar player? It is as far as Taylor Russell is concerned, yeah. A solid Best Supporting Actress contender. Otherwise Waves might be a Spirit Awards thing. Too early to tell.

“There’s something a teeny bit underwhelming about the softer and gentler second half, but it’s certainly worth catching regardless. I would go so far as to call Waves an essential watch.”

A24 will open Waves on 11.1.

“Whole Wounded Madhouse Of Our Times”

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Roughly 20 months after the initial street date, I’ve finally bought Twilight Time’s Bluray of The Hospital. I don’t know why as I own an HDX** version on Vudu, and the disc is damn near identical.

Posted on 3.22.06: “I came across two dialogue files by accident this morning — two clips from Paddy Chayefsky‘s The Hospital (1971), and it hit me all over again how wonderfully particular and penetrating and needle-sharp these soliloquies are.

“George C. Scott‘s confession to a colleague about what a wreck his middle-aged life has become is about as masterful and genuine-sounding as this sort of thing gets, and I love the the cadence he brings to some of the lines. (The almost imperceptible pause he inserts between the words “pushing” and “drugs” is sheer genius.) And the “murder by irony” confession by wacko doctor-patient Barnard Hughes is a wow, particularly at the end when he recites a litany of medical ailments (one after another after another…no end to it) that comprise, metaphorically or otherwise, “the whole wounded madhouse of our times.”

“There’s always a fair amount of good dialogue at any given time, but the super-pungent, intellectually flamboyant stuff that Chayefsky used to write — a little show-offy at times but pleasurable as hell — has…well, maybe it’s out there and I’m just not running into it. Or maybe it’s just gone.”

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Spoke Too Soon

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In yesterday’s post about Dustin Hoffman‘s 15 finest films I failed to mention that he’s costarring in Into The Labyrinth, a forthcoming Italian-made crime thriller that will open in Italy on 10.30.

Directed and written by Donata Carrisi, it costars Toni Servillo (whom I presume is playing the lead), Valentina Bellem, Stefano Rossi Giordani and Katsiaryna Shulha.

Boilerplate #1: “A private investigator on the verge of death revisits a cold case after the victim turns up alive. A terrifyingly dark chase, where no one knows who is the hunter and who is the prey.” Boilerplate #2: “With the help of a special investigator and a doctor and special investigator, a woman tries to recall the circumstances of her abduction and imprisonment.”

I’ve corrected the opening line in yesterday’s post as follows: “Although the legendary Dustin Hoffman is costarring in Into The Labyrinth, a forthcoming Italian-made film, he hasn’t been in any U.S.-produced films since The Meyerowitz Stories (’17).”