Month: September 2021

Return to PTA Land

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Last night a guy named Jack Yonover (@jyonnie18) raved about a projected 35mm trailer for Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza (seen in what theatre?). He was impressed by the “texture and feel of the ‘70s.”. Which was what Inherent Vice looked and felt like (simulations of dirt, scratches, reel-change marks) and nobody was particularly mesmerized. It was just “okay, PTA is conveying that celluloid ‘70s vibe”…whatever.

Another guy, Andrew Bundy (@andrewjohnbundy), saw the same trailer and was impressed by Sean Penn‘s excited portrayal of a ‘70s Nazi (in Los Angeles?) and Bradley Cooper kneeling between red and blue muscle cars while holding hammers in a way that reminded Bundy of PTA’s Punch Drunk Love.

In short Yonover and Bundy were taken with the mood, visual stylings and atmospheric minutiae of the trailer. Which suggests that the trailer cutters may have decided against conveying a hint of a basic story. Which suggests…

Great Compressed Performances

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Jose Ferrer made it clear that he regarded his brief performance in Lawrence of Arabia as his best-ever screen work. Quote: “If I was to be judged by any one film performance, it would be my five minutes in Lawrence.” I can’t think of any other non-comedic, cameo-level performance as good as Ferrer’s — can anyone?

Sean Connery‘s cameo as King Richard the Lionheart at the end of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves wasn’t on Ferrer’s level. Connery was showboating, taking a bow.

Comedically speaking, Tom Cruise‘s Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder and Bill Murray‘s walk-on performance as a pretend zombie in Zombieland are obvious stand-outs. But it’s easy to be amusing in a quickie context.

Too Young or Old

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Earlier today I mentioned the disastrous casting of 27 year-old Ben Platt as a sensitive high-school guy in Dear Evan Hansen — too old. In the comment thread “brenkilco” complained that Robert DeNiro and Joe Pesci seemed too old to be playing their Goodfellas characters when young — not a problem, they passed muster. On the other hand James Stewart as Ransom Stoddard in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and as Charles Lindbergh in The Spirit of St. Louis — definitely too old.

Anyway I decided to switch sides and try to recall actors who either (a) seemed too young for their roles or (b) more or less fit them even though they were actually younger that they appeared.

So far I can only come up with two actresses and no actors. 36 year-old Angela Lansbury as the 33-year-old Laurence Harvey‘s mother in The Manchurian Candidate (’62). And 31 year-old Rosemary DeCamp playing 42 year-old James Cagney‘s mom in Yankee Doodle Dandy.

It’s been said that Jessie Royce Landis‘s performance as the mother of Cary Grant‘s Roger Thornhill in North by Northwest doesn’t work because they were born only eight years part (Landis in 1896, Grant in 1904). But it does work. Grant was 54 when NXNW was shot but looked 45 or 46 while the 62 year-old Landis appeared a bit older. So it worked if you imagined that Landis was an under-aged mom (17 years old, say) when Roger came along.

“For Once, We Agree”

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This 104-second passage is, I feel, the greatest ending of a feature-length documentary ever assembled. Particularlv between the 1:00 and 1:25 marks. Neil Young‘s “Keep On Rockin’ In the Free World” never sounded so glorious as it did in this instance. Fahrenheit 9/11 opened in Cannes on 5.17.04 and won the Palme d’Or, opened theatrically on 6.25.04, earned $222.4 million domestic, and George Bush was re-elected.

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Underenthused “Duel” Reviews

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As we speak Ridley Scott‘s The Last Duel (20th Century Studios, 10.15) has a failing (60%) grade on both Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic. Plus Hollywood Reporter critic David Rooney has called it “an uneven Middle Ages #MeToo epic.” And Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman has described it as “sort of medieval, anachronistic, and more than a bit concocted.”

From Gleiberman’s 9.10 Variety review: “The plot turns on an act of sexual assault, and in the second segment the movie flirts, however briefly, with treating that act the way that Kurosawa’s Rashomon did: with supreme ambiguity.

“But that would be a dicey thing to do in our era, so the film backs off from any ambiguity. Morally, that leaves it in good standing. But dramatically, it leaves it sort of just sitting there.

“We get de Carrouges’ [i.e., Matt Damon‘s] version of the events. Then we get Le Gris’ [Adam Driver‘s], which is just different enough to tease us. Then we get Marguerite’s [i.e., Jodie Comer], which matches up entirely with de Carougges’. By then you feel the wind going out of the movie’s sails.

“There are entertaining bits throughout. Ben Affleck plays the count as a supercilious, foul-mouthed libertine who likes to bed four women at once, and you feel how much fun the actor is having playing someone this piggish in his arrogance. Jodie Comer makes her mark, holding the screen with a calm fire. And though it’s occasionally hard to distinguish the intentional from the unintentional awkwardness in Damon’s performance, it’s amusing to see him stray so willfully out of his comfort zone.”

When Damon was co-writing and then acting in The Last Duel, he probably wasn’t anticipating that a Variety critic would describe his performance as partly “amusing.”

Gleiberman: “The climactic duel, a re-enactment of the last one ever sanctioned in France, is certainly a slash-to-the-death rouser in that Gladiator-in-chain-mail way.”

A Touch of Spielberg Nepotism In The Night

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The Wikipage for Licorice Pizza (UA Releasing, 11.26), Paul Thomas Anderson‘s L.A.-based ’70s drama, includes the following cast members:

Bradley Cooper as Jon Peters
Cooper Hoffman as a child actor and high school student
Skyler Gisondo
Benny Safdie as Joel Wachs, a politician running for office.
Ben Stiller as Cowboy Carl

Plus: Alana Haim, John C. Reilly, Christopher Walken, Joseph Cross, Nate Mann, Sean Penn, Tom Waits, Maya Rudolph, Mary Elizabeth Ellis and Destry Allyn Spielberg.

Don’t Listen to “Spencer” Whores

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Even among those who didn’t care for Pablo Larrain‘s Spencer (like myself) there’s a fairly broad consensus that Kristen Stewart‘s performance as Diana, the tormented Princess of Wales, will probably snag a Best Actress nomination.

And yet a post-TIFF-screening tweet by senior CBC entertainment reporter Eli Glasner avoids praising the film (he merely describes what Spencer is like) and says that Sally Hawkins‘ performance as a royal maid whose big dramatic moment arrives when she quietly announces her sapphic love for Diana…Glasner ignores Stewart’s acting and tweets “Hawkins for the win.” What does that tell you?

Concentrated Denial

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The 20th anniversary of the 9.11 attacks is tomorrow, and many of us, I suspect, are once again watching the catastrophic footage. I’ve been watching standard samplings of coverage as it happened, and one thing stands out. The determination to steer the conversation away from the obvious was somewhere between mind-bending and surreal.

CNN commentators had been told that a commercial jet had slammed into the North Tower around 8:46 am, but even mentioning the possibility of terrorism was verboten. What were the odds that a commercial jet had plowed into the side of a building due to some kind of bizarre pilot error? It was obviously a suicide move, but what kind of demonic pilot would decide to murder hundreds of innocent victims while offing himself? And yet the news guys relentlessly pondered the possibility that the impact might have somehow been accidental.

Even after the second plane hit the South Tower at 9:03 am, three or four commentators said “this appears to be on purpose” but others bit their tongues.

The reaction of ABC’s Peter Jennings to the collapse of the South Tower is almost poignant. Raw live footage of the South Tower disintegrating had been aired plus a nearby eyewitness had told Jennings on-air that the entire building had been reduced to rubble, and Jennings’ response was “the side of the building has collapsed?” No, came the reply — the whole building. “This is the entire South Tower?” Jennings asked, refusing to believe what he’d seen and had been told by a sane-sounding person standing four blocks away.

Good Review

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Born on 9.24.93, Benjamin Platt was 23 when he played the titular role (a high-school senior, aged 17 or thereabouts) in the Broadway version of Dear Evan Hansen, which opened in December 2016.

But his playing of the same lead role in Stephen Chbosky‘s Dear Evan Hansen, which was shot in late 2020, happened when Platt was turning 27, and by that point he was just too damn adult-looking. And in the wake of last night’s disastrous Toronto Film Festival screening nobody is buying it. Platt and Chbosky have been all but tarred and feathered for this titanic miscalculation of casting.

Nate Jones‘ Vulture review, titled “How Old Does Ben Platt Look in Dear Evan Hansen?“, is a withering dissection and a very pleasurable read.

Greatest Sad Endings

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On 9.7 I posted a short riff about the ending of Sydney Pollack‘s The Way We Were, which I’ve always regarded as one of the saddest ever. The scene also contains one of Robert Redford‘s finest acting moments.

A friend has forwarded five of her saddest ending picks — Letter from an Unknown Woman (d: Max Ophuls>) with Joan Fontaine; Waterloo Bridge (d: Mervyn LeRoy) with Vivien Leigh; Madame Bovary (d: Vicente Minnelli) starring Jennifer Jones; Anna Karenina (d: Clarence Brown) with Greta Garbo; and Dr. Zhivago (d: David Lean) w/ Julie Christie and Omar Sharif.

Please forward titles of films that measure up in your own regard. Extra points if your submissions are outside the usual realm.

Tragedy of “Detroit”

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Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal‘s Detroit (Annapurna, 7.28 and 8.4) opened and died a bit more than four years ago. It flopped, I feel, because it felt more like crude torture porn than an urban thriller, and not enough like Gillo Pontecorvo‘s The Battle of Algiers or Costa-Gavras‘s Z, both of which seemed like adaptable models for dramatizing the 1967 Detroit race riots.

Primarily a reenactment of the Algiers Motel incident, Detroit mainly felt like a bludgeoning. I’ll never give it another go (I saw it twice before it opened), but perhaps someone in the community has? And if so, how did it play?

HE really misses the vision and discipline of director Kathryn Bigelow, who also helmed The Hurt Locker (Best Picture winner of ’09) and Zero Dark Thirty (’12). The failure of Detroit was undoubtedly painful, but life is short and you have to get back on the horse. Bigelow is too good of a filmmaker to sit on the sidelines. The first woman to win a Best Director Oscar needs, in fact, to return and do it again.

“Detroit Broke My Heart,” posted on 7.23.17: Detroit is a raw-capture history lesson hoping to arouse and enrage, but it mostly bludgeons. I’m saying this with a long face and heavy heart as I like and admire these enterprising filmmakers, but there’s no getting around the fact that they’ve made a brutal, draggy downer. Detroit lacks complexity and catharsis. It doesn’t breathe.

I was hoping that this blistering docudrama, which isn’t so much about the 1967 Detroit riots as the bloody Algiers Motel killings, would play like Gillo Pontecorvo‘s The Battle of Algiers, but alas, nope. Failing that I wanted Detroit to be an investigative political thriller in the vein of Costa Gavras‘s Z, but that wasn’t the scheme either.

No one is more beholden to Bigelow-Boal than myself; ditto their magnificent Zero Dark Thirty and The Hurt Locker. But after these two films I’ve become accustomed to brilliance from these guys, or certainly something sharper, leaner and more sure-footed than this newbie.

At best, Detroit is a hard-charging, suitably enraged revisiting of what any decent person would call an appallingly ugly incident in the midst of a mid ‘60s urban war zone. And of course the system allowed the bad guys to more or less skate or not really get punished. What else is new?

The Algiers Motel incident happened, all right, to the eternal discredit of Detroit law enforcement system back then. But guess what? It doesn’t serve as a basis for an especially gripping or even interesting film.

Detroit has good chaotic action, street frenzy, bang bang, punch punch and lots of anger, and I really didn’t like sitting through it and I watched it twice, for Chrissake. For they’ve made a very insistent but air-less indictment film — militant, hammer-ish, screwed-down and a bit suffocating.

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