Who will be bold and brave enough to attend the 2020 South by Southwest Film Festival, and in so doing risk catching the coronavirus and possibly dying as a result? Dying like a dog, coughing and hacking and spitting up phlegm and wheezing your last in a ratty motel room with a single bare bulb swinging back and forth from the ceiling.
I’m kidding. Only 11 cases of COV-19 have been confirmed in Texas and coronavirus only kills old people, but people are bailing on SXSW (3.13 through 3.22) regardless. Netflix has cancelled five film screenings and a panel. Apple has pulled out also, canceling three screenings. Amazon announced its withdrawal last night, cancelling screenings of two films. Mashable, Facebook, Twitter, Intel and TikTok will also be avoiding Austin.
Hollywood Elsewhere will fearlessly attend for a few days regardless. I have my own sanitary towelettes.
I’m sorry but I found Guiseppe Capotondi‘s The Burnt Orange Heresy strangely sodden and downish. I didn’t hate it and actually respected it for what it is — a heart of darkness tale about the wealthy and insincere. It’s a “good” film, I suppose **, but I’ll never watch it again. I felt vaguely drained when it ended.
It basically left me uncharmed and un-intrigued and wondering who would be so bone stupid as to try and dispose of a body in three or four feet of water? And in the daytime yet! And who, for that matter, would allow a certain dangerous fingerprint to be seen and inspected and wondered about by untold hundreds or thousands of art-gallery browsers?
Based on the same-titled 1971 book by Charles Willeford (who also wrote Miami Blues), Heresy is a kind of moral depravity drama about the fine fakery of art or the artfulness of fine fakery. Art forgery, pretension, specious assessments that persuade certain wealthy people to part with immense sums for this or that object d’art, empty myth and the general film-flammery of it all…fuck all or fuck off or whatever.
It’s basically a four character thing, and all it does, really, is hover. It never lands (not really) or generates much in the way of intrigue or suspense. It does give you a certain queasy feeling. Which is something.
The main protagonists, Milan-based art critic James Figueras (Claes Bang) and a watchful Minnesota tourist named Berenice Hollis (Elizabeth Debicki) are, for lack of a better term, the main protagonists. They meet at the very beginning and quickly fuck, and before you know it are cruising west in Figueras’ Range Rover to visit the super-wealthy Joseph Cassidy (Mick Jagger) at his Lake Como villa.
Figeuras has an ethically questionable past, it seems, and Cassidy has discovered this, which is why he’s invited the Man from Milan to discuss a slightly dicey proposition.
A bearded J.D. Salinger-like painter named Jerome Debney (Donald Sutherland) lives on the grounds nearby, and Cassidy wants Figueras to steal one of his fabled paintings, even though Debney hasn’t sold or even shown any paintings in years. (He’s painted a few but has burnt them all, apparently.) And so the keenly ambitious Figueras, still with the stork-like Hollis, is soon chatting with Debney and before you know it…a surprise. A great feeling of disappointment, in fact, that knocks Figueras for a loop.
And before you know it there is great anger, flames, a forgery, a sudden disappearance, a death by stupidity (the victim, I mean, is too stupid to understand that expressing fierce moral outrage at an art crime is not the brightest idea when confronting the perpetrator) and a certain after-feeling of “uh-oh, I wasn’t smart enough to play my cards in such a way that I won’t get caught.”
Jagger gives the most amusing and flavorful performance. That Cheshire cat grin of his. I loved Bang in The Square and this time…well, he’s good enough. I didn’t get the wonderfulness of Debicki when I saw her in Widows, and I still don’t. Sutherland is okay as the reclusive painter but he doesn’t (i.e, isn’t allowed to) radiate much.
There isn’t a huge amount of Lake Como footage, but what little I saw I enjoyed. I’ve never actually been there — the closest I came was when I visited the nearby Locarno Film Festival in ’03. It was in the middle of a brutal heat wave, and the boys and I swam in Lago Maggiore every day.
I guess I was kinda hoping that Elizabeth Warren would, despite her hopeless situation, stick it out and thereby split the left progressive vote, or at least siphon some of that support from the Bernie Sanders campaign. And I’m saying this as someone who loves Warren and would love to see her win the nomination and beat Trump. But she can’t, of course. She won’t. She just isn’t popular enough, and under-educated bumblefucks don’t seem to like her at all.
Filed at 3:49 Pacific by The Washington Post‘s Annie Linskey and Sean Sullivan: “Top surrogates and allies of Senators of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are discussing ways for their two camps to unite and push a common liberal agenda, with the expectation that Warren is likely to leave the presidential campaign soon, according to two people familiar with the talks.
“The conversations, which are in an early phase, largely involve members of Congress who back Sanders reaching out to those in Warren’s camp to explore the prospect that Warren might endorse him.
“They are also appealing to Warren’s supporters to switch their allegiance to Sanders, according two people with direct knowledge of the conversations who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss delicate discussions that are supposed to be confidential.
“The whirlwind of activity reflects the rapid changes in a Democratic primary that is still very much in transition. As late as Tuesday, many Warren allies believed she would stay in the race until the Democratic convention, despite her poor showing to date in the primaries, in hopes of retaining her clout and influencing the eventual nominee.”
Last Friday I mentioned something I’d heard about Gavin O’Connor and Ben Affleck‘s The Way Back, a sports redemption drama about an alcoholic basketball coach. The thing that I heard (and that I shared) is that “it’s not Hoosiers.” I saw it the night before last, and it isn’t.
But you know what? In some ways Brad Inglesby‘s script is as dramatically reputable as Hoosiers — it’s rooted in a real, recognizable, occasionally unfair world of fundamentally decent but occasionally flawed people. And O’Connor’s direction is respectably lean and dutiful, pared-to-the-bone and bullshit-free.
And Affleck’s lead performance…well, he certainly knows what it’s like to be a middle-aged drunk, doesn’t he? That authority and experience filter through. The cynicism, the swearing, the hair-trigger eruptions, the lethargy.
And the film itself is definitely decent. Not levitational but sturdy. I’m giving it an eight. Not an eight-point-five but an honest eight.
Because, for the most part, it isn’t Hoosiers. It’s a step-by-step story about a guy with a serious problem, and while it’s embroidered and punctuated with basketball issues and strategies and the usual ups and downs, it doesn’t turn on the game. It turns on what Affleck’s character, a divorced construction worker who gives up boozing after taking a coaching gig for the same South Bay basketball team that he gloriously played for in the early ’90s, does about his addiction.
It’s not a “let’s man up and put our problems behind us so we can win the playoffs” drama — it’s an emotional (and psychological) saga of a guy who’s furious about something ghastly that happened to him and his ex-wife, and about how he copes with this terrible scar on his heart and soul.
Does he (or more precisely can he) leave the past where it is and live as best he can in the present? Or not? That is the question.
I loved how The Way Back isn’t afraid of Jack’s rage and subliminal longing for self-destruction — it digs right down into that pit. It isn’t the least bit tidy or sanded down or escapist.
What didn’t I like about The Way Back? The horrible San Pedro atmosphere, for one — the blue-collar resignation, the sight of distant harbor cranes and the constant sound of drilling and construction machinery and the hilly typography and the faintly run-down pre-war bungalows and the atmosphere of fog and moisture and the faint flickerings of despair. What a ghastly town in which to exist! (Notice I didn’t say “live” — the best you can do in a town like San Pedro is mark time and hope for a “get out of jail” card.)
If I was somehow stuck in San Pedro (or wherever the hell the film was shot…Carson? Signal Hill?) with no chance of escape, I wouldn’t embrace alcoholism but I’d be sorely tempted to find some form of escape. The whole ugly South Bay sprawl…later.
Another thing that bothered me is a decision to use a certain family tragedy, conveyed around the halfway mark, to explain Affleck’s boozing, and, we’re told, why he had turned to the bottle before and why it only takes a little sharp prodding to make him jump back in. It’s called “laying it on a bit thick” or, you know, overly precise cause-and-effect plotting.
Back in the early ’90s I passed along a boozing story (not my own) to my father, who’d became an AA devotee in ‘75. He found it darkly amusing. It was about a mild-mannered AA dilletante who’d been in and out of sobriety for years, but who notably began bending the elbow again because things were going so well in his life. He felt that the Gods were being so nice to him and so amazingly gracious and charitable that he could celebrate this fact without paying the price. “Wow, the sun is shining and things are going so great…I can start drinking again and have a lot of fun in the evenings, like I did in high school and college!” Hilarious.
Critic pally: “That’s not only a great story but it’s quite typical of something. Drinking because you think things are going just great is one of the best excuses for (functional) alcoholism out there. You’ve mastered your life, and you will master the drinking! Insidiously, that’s part of how it masters you.”
SPOILER:
I admire the way Inglesby’s 115-page script (which I read last night) waits until page 100 to send Affleck’s Jack Cunningham into the hole and then bring him back out again…in 15 pages! And the way it ends is quite nice also. Experience it in a theatre, if you care to. It’s definitely a decent film.
Matt Reeves‘ new Batmobile is straight out of a Burt Reynolds redneck movie from the ’70s and early ’80s. Mostly, I mean. With certain variations and upgrades. I don’t know muscle cars very well — I’m certainly not a fan of the whole rural, beer-guzzling culture that worships stripped-down studmobiles with loud colors and no mufflers — but the design of Rbatz‘s new ride is pure bumblefuck, pure Daytona 500.
Reeves seems to be saying to the fan base that while Bruce Wayne/Batman may be a rich guy (i.e., inherited wealth) and a one-percenter, his taste buds are fully in synch with Talladega Nights: the Ballad of Ricky Bobby. HE applauds this departure from the usual-usual– at least it’s not same old shite.
Bruce Wayne to fanbase: “Yeah, I’m loaded and so what? What matters is that I understand you guys…I love this kind of rumbling, chooga-looga blue-collar beast, and it makes me feel good to drive this kind of ride…it means I’m a regular Amuhrican dude…yeehaw!”
Yesterday I tried cancelling my Airbnb rental for the Cannes Film Festival, which will probably be the next domino to fall. The guy didn’t respond, and now I’m thinking I may have to appeal to Airbnb corporate. COV-19 and the attendant freakouts are a “force majeure” element that should be accepted as a valid reason to withdraw from an apartment rental.
Instead of a mid-April debut, No Time To Die will now open in the U.S. on 11.25.20. (11.12 in England.) Wiki excerpt: “On 4 March 2020, MGM and Eon Productions announced that ‘following careful consideration and thorough evaluation of the global theatrical marketplace’ due to the coronavirus, they had postponed the theatrical release of No Time to Die until 12 November 2020 in the UK and 25 November 2020 in the US.”
Millions have bailed on cable TV over the last decade or so. Only old-schoolers think of cable viewing as a necessary default. I lived without cable TV for a couple of years, but in early ’19 I weakened and re-ordered it. Mainly for (a) the ability to watch Real Time with Bill Maher on Friday evening (it wasn’t showing up on HBO Now until Saturday) and (b) the MSNBC white noise that helps me write. Pathetic, huh? Frum’s point is that Biden voters are older, moderate and live better-regulated lives, and Bernie voters are more emotional, impulsive and fringe-minded. He’s correct.
“Joe Biden appeals to people who pay their cable bills on the day they arrive. Bernie Sanders appeals to people who may forget to pay their cable bill entirely…. the first group is more reliable.”
