Day: August 7, 2020

“Contagion” Again

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Tatiana had never seen Contagion so we watched it last night — my fourth or fifth time, but God, such a brilliant film, and so far ahead of the curve it wasn’t funny. It did fairly well financially, but it failed to catch on as a Best Picture contender. It should have. It didn’t predict the future — it knew it cold. This message appears at the very end of the credits:

“Contagion Reboot,” posted on 11.19.11: Last night Warner Bros. publicity made a spirited, gung-ho attempt to re-launch Steven Soderbergh‘s Contagion among award-season cognoscenti and to put it into “the conversation,” so to speak. They invited journos like myself to a pleasant, talent-populated soiree (Soderbergh, Benicio del Toro, Garry Shandling, Contagion producers Michael Shamberg and Stacey Sher, screenwriter Scott Burns) inside the Clarity lobby-rotunda, and followed this with a screening of the film.

The pitch was basically “this is an undeniably gripping, highly intelligent, superbly-made socio-political-scientific thriller“” — no argument from me — “so why isn’t it being mentioned a bit more in terms of awards chatter, best-of-the-year lists and so on?”

The best response I can think of is that Contagion is going on a best-of-2011 list…mine, I mean. My second response is that with Contagion having made about $75 million domestic, what’s the beef? And my third response is that it’s about a subject — social devastation caused by a pathogen — that unsettles people on a very deep level, perhaps more than they know going in, and so I’m guessing they’d rather just leave it at that and not revisit the Contagion reality any more, thanks.

I mean, I was scratching my face all through last night’s screening, and half-wondering if there was something wrong with me because of this, absurd as that sounds. I don’t mind seeing Gwynneth Paltrow die horribly, but I don’t want to go the same way…please.

On top of which Warner Bros. decided to open Contagion in early September. This conveyed to all that (a) they were going for the money (and a $75 million haul is nothing to sneeze at) and (b) the studio felt it was good enough to release in a quality-friendly portion of the calendar but that it wasn’t necessarily an awards contender or they would have opened it in late October or November or December.

There are three other factors: (1) Contagion is an intellectual-technical chiller (as opposed to an emotional drama of some kind) and is therefore regarded as a kind of “genre” film, and that kind of distinction rarely leads to awards chatter; (2) To some extent Contagion is, let’s face it, emotionally dry or reserved, like many of Soderbergh’s films (a quality I’ve always rather enjoyed and in fact praised); and (3) It doesn’t contain one of those thematic echoes or undercurrents that Oscar-season films tend to have, nor does it deliver some basic recognizable truth.

Yes, it says that “it’s entirely possible that millions of us might suddenly die some day due to a runaway virus” but that’s not a basic recognizable truth. If it happens, that would be an anecdotal fact.

Here’s my early September review. I love Contagion. It’s going on my best-of-the-year list, no question. And I especially loved the performances by Jennifer Ehle (her bedside scene with her ailing dad is one of the few genuinely affecting emotional moments), Kate Winslet, Jude Law, Matt Damon, Elliott Gould and Laurence Fisburne. And I can’t wait for the Bluray, and I wish it would be longer when it comes out in that format.

“All Right, Curly…Enough’s Enough”

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“You can’t eat the Venetian blinds…I just had ’em installed on Wednesday.”

Deadline‘s Justin Kroll, filed at 1:40 pm: “After earning some of the best reviews of his acting career for The Way Back, Ben Affleck is ready to make his return behind the camera, and he looks to have zeroed in on his next directing job. We are hearing that Affleck has signed on to direct The Big Goodbye for Paramount, an adaptation of the Sam Wasson book “The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood.”

“Affleck also would write the script. SNL’s Lorne Michaels pursued the rights to the book and brought it to the studio and will produce along with Affleck.

“The novel tells the behind-the-scenes story of the 1974 film noir classic starring Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway. From Roman Polanski’s directing and Robert Towne’s Oscar-winning script to the twist ending that shook filmgoers to their core, Chinatown joined the long list of films to make their mark during the 1970s. Looming over the story of the classic movie is the imminent eclipse of the ’70s filmmaker-friendly studios as they gave way to the corporate Hollywood we know today.”

Idle HE thought #1: Neat idea and a potentially a great emotional movie, but who plays Jack Nicholson? I’ll tell you who plays Nicholson. No one, that’s who. Idle HE thought #2: I thought Roman Polanski was persona non grata these days, even retroactively. It will be a tough casting call for Affleck as whomever he hires to play Polanski may, I’m supposing, have a tough time politically with progressive industry women. At the very least the Polanski actor will get the slant-eye all over town.

Crude Sexist Cliches

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If a magically younger Mel Brooks were to somehow make Young Frankenstein for the first time today, he would become a #MeToo pariah — instant Roman Polanski hate vibes. And no distributor would touch the film with a 10-foot pole…”Blucher!”

Behind The Times?

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The forthcoming Hulu series Woke is about a mild-mannered African American cartoonist (“keep it light”) who becomes ultra-attuned to systemic racism after he gets beaten up by cops. Everywhere he looks and everything he hears tells him that the world is not what it seems and that “the fix is in” against people of color. Or something close to that.

This is a righteous concept, but it’s a bit out-of-time to call the series Woke because black-dude woke was a thing about…what, eight or ten years ago? We all know that since Trump’s election in late ’16 “woke” stopped alluding to hip-black-guy consciousness and became a “white progressives committed to destroying the careers of non-wokesters in order to stop the twin scourges of racism and sexism” thang…Khmer Rouge, cancel culture, Left Twitter, resurrecting the legacy of Maximilien Robespierre, the New McCarthyism in academia, etc.

So I’m sorry but Woke is out of step with the times. I’m not saying that hip African Americans embracing a “woke” perspective isn’t valid. Obviously it is. I’m saying that the term “woke” began to be co-opted by the white lunatic progressive left four years ago.

Woke arrives on Hulu on September 9. Lamorne Morris plays Keef, the lead character. Sasheer Zamata, Blake Anderson and T. Murph costar.

“Vertical Cinema” Comments

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One, I’ve said over and over that leaping off tall buildings isn’t allowed any more because too many hack directors have done it. (Damien Chazelle is obviously not a hack so I don’t get it.) Two, it’s okay to rescue a character from terrible death at the last instant, but the manner of rescue has to make some kind of spatial sense. If a guy is about to become instant hamburger on the pavement due to falling 50 stories, he can’t be saved at the very last instant (10 or 15 stories before impact) by a woman who wasn’t in the scene to begin with. You have to set this shit up, and then pay it off. And three, you can’t just stop a body falling at 200 mph by hugging them. This is cartoon stuff, Road Runner vs. Wile E. Coyote.

“Enemy” Experience

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Wolfgang Petersen‘s Enemy Mine (20th Century Fox, 12.20.85) still ranks as one of the biggest disasters in Hollywood history, or certainly by ’80s standards. It was a parable about brotherhood between enemies, but it basically boiled down to The Defiant Ones in space. A lunkheaded human with a limited emotional range (Dennis Quaid) and a hermaphroditic “Drac” named Jeriba Shiga (Louis Gossett, Jr.) are forced to get along and defend each other against hostiles on a sandy windswept planet, blah blah.

I attended an Enemy Mine all-media screening in Westwood with a friend, and said to her as we began to slowly exit the theatre, “That was a baahllagghhd mooovie!” I conveyed this opinion in the gurgly, rolled-tongue patois of Gossett’s “Jerry” character. Here’s a recording of how I sounded.

From David Friendly‘s 12.30.85 L.A. Times story, titled “One Studio Has Seen The Enemy, And It Is Costly“: “Originally budgeted at about $17 million when the movie received the green light to go into production in 1983, Enemy Mine wound up costing the studio more than $40 million in production and marketing costs. (One insider insists the total price tag is closer to a whopping $48 million.)”

The studio (20th Century Fox) naturally hoped for a big first-weekend opening. The film made only $1.6 million at 703 theaters nationwide. As of Christmas day, it had taken in $2.3 million. When asked exactly how much the movie would have to take in during its theatrical run to make its money back, an executive with Fox replied, ‘It doesn’t really matter because it’s not going to do it.'”

Again, the mp3.

A streaming rental of Enemy Mine costs $3.99.

“Who Am I Now?”

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Joe Rogan around the 51:05 mark [“Joe Rogan Experience,” #1520 w/ Dr. Debra Soh / Aug 5, 2020]:

“We’re living in a very confusing time in terms of the blowback people get [for a dissenting opinion] and in terms of when you are compliant the support that you get …[this is] all influencing the way that people behave. This willingness to go along with that narrative because you’re terrified of being criticized or you’re terrified of being attacked **…this is where we find ourselves.

“This is not the left that I know. This is what’s so strange. I guess I’m old. I’m 52. When I was young, the left was tolerant and open-minded and absolutely committed to freedom of speech. That doesn’t seem to be where we’re at now. We’ve gotten into some really radical place where the left is now. They’ve almost weaponized a lot of left-wing ideological values to combat right-wing values. It’s like they’ve gotten more loony to deal with loony people on the right, and they don’t even realize they’ve become their own enemy.

“When I was a young person the left was always the most tolerant of the groups, and that just doesn’t seem to be the case now. It seems that they’re only tolerant if you follow the ideology that they follow, and if you don’t, there’s no discussion about it. You’re a hateful person and there is this immediate hot take — you HATE. It’s bigotry, etc. There is no room for discussion, for information, no room for actual science, no room for understanding the nuance of psychology and of human beings.

“There are so many of us that are on the left that are so confused now. We feel like we’re people without countries.” HE interjection: Which is why we call ourselves “sensible left centrists.” Back to Rogan: “It’s like, who am I now? I’m not these people who want to defund the police and light the federal buildings on fire so what am I? You have to be that to be left [these days].”

** 95% of today’s film critics think and behave this way when they review a film made by POCs or women, or which deals with wokester values. Some know who and what they are (i.e., straight out of Bertolucci’s The Conformist) and some don’t even realize it.