Month: July 2020

Most of us are willing to buy into a time-travel scenario. All we ask is that the filmmakers supply some kind of half-believable premise (a speeding DeLorean with a flux capacitor, a spinning-wheel time machine built by H.G. Wells) that doesn’t make us choke.

Seth Rogen, Simon Rich and Brandon Trost‘s An American Pickle (HBO Max, 8.6.20) doesn’t even try to respect the basic rules. By insisting on the ridiculous — that a bearded Yiddish immigrant becomes mummified in 1920 after falling into a vat of pickles (i.e., brined alive, escaping death) — they’re more or less giving the friendly finger to HBO Max subscribers.

Basic message: “We could’ve come up with a better time-travel device but we couldn’t be bothered, and you guys don’t give a shit anyway so what does it matter?”

Does anyone care about a relationship between a couple of Jewish dudes separated by 100 years? A Jewish guy who falls into a vat of pickle juice in 1965 might’ve worked. Then you’d have a culture-clash scenario between a young boomer and his Millennial-aged nephew or grandson. People could relate to that on some level, but who cares about an old-school guy from Eastern Europe (basically a riff on the married Yiddish guy from the beginning of A Serious Man)?

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Who knows if anyone would want to remake The Rock (celebrating its 25th anniversary next year), but if they tried the dialogue would make absolutely no mention of small-town prom queens being deflowered by ruggedly macho winners.

That whole upscale, sirloin-steak, smart-ass ’90s guy-film genre, pioneered by Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer (Bad Boys, Crimson Tide, The Rock, Con Air, Armageddon, Enemy of the State, Gone in Sixty Seconds), flourished for only five or six years. It reps a fairly dinosaurish aesthetic by today’s standards. You can’t go home again.

A great, innovative, fresh-water musical, but the moment (i.e., late Obama) has passed and that’s that.

For years I’ve been awaiting the end of superhero megaplex dominance…for the twin giant squids of formulaic entanglement and corporate piss-soaking (DC Extended Universe, Marvel Cinematic Universe) to lose their mojo and crash into the streets like the Martian space ships in George Pal‘s War of the Worlds.

Native microscopic organisms killed the aliens in that 1953 classic, and the same kind of biological process has brought a temporary halt to the annual superhero summer onslaught…thank God.

Would superhero flicks be absent without the intervention of COVID-19? No, but the DC/Marvel machine does seem to be slowing down. Either way we’re in the midst of the first spandex-free summer in a dozen years (2008 being the summer of Iron Man).

From A.O. Scott‘s “A Summer Without Superheroes“, posted on 7.1.20: “Popular culture and politics exist on the same wavelength and work together to shape our shared consciousness. The fantasies we buy into with our attention and money condition our sense of what it is possible or permissible to imagine. And the imagination of Hollywood in the franchise era — the age of I.P.-driven creativity and expanded-universe cinema — has been authoritarian, anti-democratic, cynical and pseudo-populist.

“That much of the politics of the past decade can be described with the same words is hardly an accident.

“[But] maybe, as we use this time to rethink many of the other systems that have seemed so immutable, so natural, so much a part of the way things just are, we can reflect on why we thought we needed all those heroes in the first place, or how they were foisted on us. Eventually, we’ll go back to the movies, but maybe we’ll be less docile, less obedient, when we do. I’m not necessarily saying that we should abolish the Avengers or defund the DC universe, but fantasies of power are connected to the actual forms that power takes. What feels like a loss in this superhero-free summer might be liberation.”

What Scott seems to be saying (unless I’m misreading) is that the current surge of BLM, #MeToo and cancel-culture activism by way of loony-left absolutism (i.e., progressive wokester Khmer Rouge enforcement by way of SJW guilt, Robespierre finger-pointing, safe-spacing, editorial fanaticism, Woody Allen sliming and statue tear-downs) may be spawning some kind of psychological antidote to the mass market docility of the superhero era (’08 to ’19)

Clarification: HE doesn’t regard Todd Phillips‘ The Joker as an example of smirking dipshit suffocation — that was an urban noir one-off. And The Batman won’t be this kind of film either, if I know anything about the cinematic inclinations of Matt Reeves.

Four years ago I posted a short list of allegedly classic comedies that have never been funny, and a list of some that have always been funny in the eyes of anyone with half a brain and half of a yen to laugh. Please tell me which films need to be added to either list — thank you.

HE’s Eternal Funnies: Superbad, Groundhog Day, Planes, Trains and Automobiles, The Graduate, Dr. Strangelove, Slapshot, The Big Lebowski, Duck Soup, A Night at the Opera, Bringing Up Baby, The Awful Truth, Rushmore, The Lady Eve, Some Like It Hot, Sullivan’s Travels, School of Rock, all of the earlier funnier Woody Allen comedies (What’s Up Tiger Lily to Annie Hall), A Fish Called Wanda, In The Loop, Pardon Us (1931 Laurel & Hardy prison comedy), The Producers, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, North to Alaska.

HE’s No Longer Funnies: Ghostbusters (NEVER funny), The Blues Brothers (NEVER funny), Mrs. Doubtfire (NEVER funny), Coming to America (NEVER funny), Three Amigos (NEVER funny), none of the Pink Panther comedies, Porky’s, The Philadelpia Story, Pillow Talk and Lover Come Back (Rock Hudson, Doris Day sexual comedies stopped being funny once the sexual revolution took hold in mid ’60s), none of the ZAZ comedies, Howard Hawks‘ Monkey Business, the broader sexual jokes in Billy Wilder‘s One, Two, Three, Irma La Douce and Kiss me Stupid, The Golden Child (NEVER funny), Withnail & I (NEVER funny).

Wokesters and BLMers regard him as Satan. My late father hated him for his rightwing politics. And Lord knows The Green Berets was a seriously ignorant pro-Vietnam War fantasy. But all things considered, John Wayne was well liked and regarded as a decent human being by those who knew him.

Wayne could be thorny in some respects, yes. And his assessments of who and what people of whatever ethnic stripe may have amounted to were obviously crude in some respects, and certainly don’t pass muster by today’s measure. But I’ve always heard he was a fundamentally humane fellow.

Recent statement by Ethan Wayne, the Duke’s 58-year-old son: “The truth is, as we have seen in papers from his archives, [my father] did not support ‘white supremacy’ in any way and believed that responsible people should gain power without the use of violence.

“Those who knew him, knew he judged everyone as an individual and believed everyone deserved an equal opportunity,” Ethan added. “He called out bigotry when he saw it. He hired and worked with people of all races, creeds, and sexual orientations. John Wayne stood for the very best for all of us — a society that doesn’t discriminate against anyone seeking the American dream.”

“[It] would be an injustice to judge him based on a single [Playboy] interview, as opposed to the full picture of who he was.”

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By all appearances, Bernice Kavinoky‘s “We Burn Like Candles” was a vaguely tawdry pulp romance. The hot cover art alone says that. It was published in paperback on 1.1.54. I can’t find a book review so I’m guessing it wasn’t much. I can’t even find a mini-bio of Kavinoky. But the title is excellent. Because it has a ring, and especially because there isn’t a single earth-residing person to whom this description doesn’t apply.

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I realize that in real life weak sisters will occasionally throw up when they feel upset or overwhelmed or repulsed by whatever. But in movies, hurling has become a cheap trick — downmarket emotional shorthand.

I’m sorry but Hollywood Elsewhere has always had a problem with characters who do this. Bit-wise, it’s the equivalent of lead protagonists (including superheroes) doing swan dives off the tops of buildings and tall cliffs. So when characters spew, I’m out and that’s final. And if a director isn’t smart enough to realize that hurling is verboten, it’s certainly not my fault.

Boilerplate: Charlize Theron stars as a badass immortal mercenary in The Old Guard (Netflix, 7.10), which is baed on an “acclaimed” graphic novel “about a covert group of impossible-to-kill warriors who for the last several centuries have fought to make the world safe and just for all humanity”, blah blah.

Costarring Kiki Layne (the spewer!), Matthias Schoenaerts, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Marwan Kenzari, Anamaria Marinca, Luca Marinelli and Veronica Ngo.

As we all know, there is serious talk among Sioux Nation leaders as well as white-guilt wokester progressives to actually remove — dynamite — the Mount Rushmore monument.

It goes without saying that Roger Thornhill, Eve Kendall, Philip Van Damm and Martin Landau’s Leonard are alarmed, to say the least. Not to mention the ghosts of Alfred Hitchcock and Gutzon Borglum.**

The potential trashing of Mount Rushmore is an expansion of the “tear down all offensive statues” movement, which began with Confederate generals (appropriately) and then moved on to not-so-baddie-waddies like Ulysses S. Grant, Francis Scott Key, an abolitionist or two. Even a statue of poor George Washington was defaced.

It is therefore odd that this new Lincoln Project ad mentions Mount Rushmore without even acknowledging the tear-down conversation.

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Ghislaine Maxwell, former associate of sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein, has been arrested “for helping to procure and groom young girls for the late financier, including instructing them on how to pleasure Epstein sexually.”

Maxwell is facing several charges (including two involving perjury).

The conventional view is that the same dark forces that engineered the “suicide” death of Epstein will now try to murder Maxwell.

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N.Y. Times critic Glenn Kenny approves of Rod Lurie‘s The Outpost. He wasn’t obliged either way, of course, but fine. Ands yet his review runs only five paragraphs, and the first two are about the sons of famous guys (the established Scott Eastwood and the wet-behind-the-ears Milo Gibson, James Jagger, Will Attenborough) “who have made their own war films.”

Only paragraphs #3 and #5 offer critical judgments — how an initially commonplace approach evolves into “something more complex and illuminating” and how “two members of the ensemble who are not sons of celebs, Orlando Bloom as a determined commander and Caleb Landry Jones as a wound-up specialist, also deliver near-career-high performances.”

I’m blaming Kenny’s editor. Kenny has never shied from perceptive analysis or expanding on odd critical tangents, so the editor must have said “sorry, Glenn, but we’re short on print space and have to cut it down to five graphs.

Best sentence: “James Jagger’s father, Mick, while more a stage than screen figure, sometimes still sings of riding a tank and holding a general’s rank.” Not to mention “while the blitzkrieg raged and the bodies stank.”

A teaser for Respect, the Liesl Tommy-directed biopic with Jennifer Hudson as Aretha Franklin, popped on 12.20.19. At the time (pre-COVID) the theatrical release date was 10.9.20.

Now it’s 12.25 — six months from now and, if they’re honest, largely a matter of wishful thinking. Three days ago a Respect “trailer” appeared, but it’s basically a teaser-plus. Same you-go-girl message as before with added paint dabs of character. The real trailer will probably surface in September or October.

“Instant Best Actress Nominee,” also posted on 12.20.19: “Signed, sealed, delivered, done — Jennifer Hudson as Aretha Franklin for Best Actress. Unless, you know, Respect (United Artists, 10.9) turns out to be on the same level as Kasi Lemmons‘ Harriet and is more or less dismissed. But if it turns out to be even half-decent, Hudson is a lock — Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles all over again.

“Respect will presumably include a depiction of how the recording of ‘I’ve Never Loved A Man’ came together at Alabama’s Muscle Shoals recording studio. The savior was session man Spooner Oldham, who came up with the Wurlitzer riff that made that song work from the get-go. If Respect doesn’t have this scene, forget it. The episode was passed along in Magnolia Pictures’ Muscle Shoals, a 2013 documentary.”

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