A few off-the-cuff, random-ass Vimeo words about Guillermo del Toro‘s tweet about The Last Duel. Plus a confession about a certain weakness for orangeade-flavored and strawberry-lemonade Monster. Of course it’s bad for me, but at least I’m not snorting heroin.
Peter Bogdanovich‘s The Last Picture Show opened a half-century ago plus a day — 10.22.71. Bogdanovich was 32 when it opened, and in the weeks that immediately followed he became the hottest director on the planet. Or certainly one of them. He owned everything, ruled the realm…he planted his feet, looked people in the eye and told the truth.
Posted on 5.31.20: After his three-year, three-picture hot streak (The Last Picture Show, What’s Up, Doc?, Paper Moon), Peter Bogdanovich injured himself and his career in three significant ways.
One, the smug and arrogant thing, which seemed to intensify after Peter and Cybill Shepherd were the focus of a 5.13.74 People cover story. Two, Bogdanovich seemed to give up on the idea of substantive, reality-driven subjects after The Last Picture Show (post-’71 he never delivered another poignant scene that touched bottom and emotionally penetrated like “Sam the Lion at the swimming hole”). Three, he concurrently began to over-invest in the mythology of nostalgia and old-time Hollywood — the result was a one-two-three punch (Daisy Miller, At Long Last Love, Nickelodeon) that totally took the wind out of his sails.
Saint Jack, They All Laughed and Mask (a director-for-hire gig) restored some of the lustre, but the magic dust had evaporated.
If Bogdanovich had decided to switch horses right after Paper Moon and directed a couple of films that delivered reality currents (some kind of divorce drama or a paranoid political thriller or maybe a Rainman-type family thing) that were tethered not to the ’30s but the ’50s, ’60s or ’70s, things might have turned out differently.
Plus for all his acumen as a director-writer and film historian, Bogdanovich’s social-political instincts were not brilliant.
…and walking out of a film can be beautiful. For there is nothing like the feeling of wonderful, ecstatic liberation when you do this. Fuckthatmovie fuckthatmovie fuckthatmovie…freedom!
“For years I’ve been getting roasted in this space for my occasional walkouts. ‘How dare you?,’ ‘You call yourself a critic?,’ ‘You have to see the whole thing!,’ etc. But everyone does it from time to time, and there’s nothing dicey about saying ‘I saw this much of a given film and then I bailed, but here’s what I thought about the portion that I saw.’ In my own small way perhaps I’ve helped to make the world a bit safer for those who wish to write this.” — posted on 5.22.14.
I didn’t just walk out of Roger Kumble‘s The Sweetest Thing — I did so at the six-minute mark. I could see in a flash it was a reprehensible confection.
Hollywoodandfine‘s Marshall Fine has written the following: “I seldom walk out on movies, [but] I ankled after a half-hour of The Secret of Kells. It looked like a ’70s throwback, with limited animation, ersatz psychedelia and an earnest story about early Christians furthering the written tradition. They do it in the face of invading heathen Viking hordes and with the assistance of the spirits of nature and the creatures of the forest (or so I’m guessing, based on what I saw).
“What I saw was so lifeless and flat that I fled into the winter afternoon, invoking the life-is-too-short-for-this-shit clause in my contract. It’s something I really ought to do more often.”
Piss-sprayer to HE: “Your inability/refusal to sit through an entire film at a film festival is why I think your term “l’movie Catholic’ is so appropriate. Like any Catholic, your ‘religion’ is only sacred when it suits you.”
HE to piss-sprayer: I honestly don’t think that’s it. I honestly feel that life is too short and precious to sit through shit.
Piss spray cousin: “If you want to approach movies with a true religious fervor, the absolute baseline for any level of devotion to movies is realizing it’s not just you and your precious time, and the movie you’re seeing deserves consideration from the first to last frame, not just the sections you deem worthy of your attention. And when you don’t give a movie that consideration, then your opinion on it is no better than the guy in the front row who was tweeting during the middle of it.”
Krazyeyes: “There is absolutely nothing wrong with walking out of a crappy movie that is severely not working for you at a film festival. There’s just too many other good things you could be doing with your time. I’m fine with Jeff in this regard. He’s always struck me as a straight-shooter.”
Posted on 9.4.08: I just stumbled out of a screening of Rian Johnson‘s The Brothers Bloom (Summit, 12.19), a sumptuous but impossibly silly and logic-free jape in the vein of…frankly, the movie it most reminded me of was the 1967 Casino Royale, which still reigns as one of the emptiest wank-off movies of the mid to late ’60s.
It’s an elaborate, European-set con-artist movie that imparts none of the fun or the thrill of the game. I didn’t know what was going on half the time, and I stopped caring around the 45-minute mark. Rachel Weisz, as a rich mark named Penelope, is lovely and delightful to hang with — I’ll give her (and the movie) that. But Adrien Brody, as the conscience-wracked half of The Brothers Bloom (sick of being a con man, wants a real life, etc.), is glum and doleful and enervated, and infuriating for that.
Brody’s character’s last name is Bloom, as is his brother Stephen, who’s played by Mark Ruffalo…and yet Brody is repeatedly addressed as “Bloom” and Ruffalo is called “Stephen.” I fell in hate with the movie over this point alone.
I hated the relentlessly sullen poseur crap delivered by Rinko Kikuchi, who plays an appendage named “Bang Bang.” I wanted to see her knifed or shot or pushed into the ocean. All I could think when I watched Robbie Coltrane, who plays “the curator,” was “my God, the man has to lose some weight!” He’s really gone past the tipping point in terms of excess tonnage.
I lasted a little less than an hour, and I was reeling from the preciousness, the overdone continental cutesiness, the feeling of being simultaneously mauled, tickled, fucked with and drugged by the impossibly faux-Wes Anderson style of the damn thing.
Rian obviously wants to be Wes, but this movie makes The Life Aquatic look like Yasujiro Ozu‘s Floating Weeds.
Some will say that The Brothers Bloom is lush and stylistically mesmerizing and beautiful to bathe in, in the empty sense of that term. But this is the kind of movie that appeals to 30-something Entertainment Weekly or New York magazine feature writers who have no taste to speak of.
It’s ravishingly composed and oh-so-poised with a sense of old-world European train-car romance (as it once existed 50 or 60 years ago) , and yet so stuck on its cleverness that I wanted to reach out and strangle the movie — pull it right off the screen, leap on top of it like a 350-pound wrestler and choke the life out of the damn thing.
I counted at least 22 walkouts before I finally gave up. When I left two volunteers said to me, “Is it over? There are so many people leaving!” We all had a good laugh.
The identity of Rust‘s female armorer, the person primarily responsible for the safety of prop guns used on the set of the tragedy-plagued Alec Baldwin western, has been revealed in a 10.23 Daily Mail story.
The Santa Fe Reporter‘s Jeff Proctor declined to name her yesterday as she hasn’t been accused or charged in a crime; ditto Indiewire’s Chris Lindahl in another 10.22 story. But the Daily Mail team — Lauren Lewis, Jennifer Smith, Keith Griffith, Dhawn Cohen, Elizabeth Ribuffo — charged right in and blew the bloody doors off.
The armorer is Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, the 24 year-old daughter of “legendary” gunsmith Thell Reed. Rust‘s assistant director — the guy who shouted “cold gun” before handing the loaded weapon to Baldwin, who subsequently and by way of a purely foolish accident shot and killed the film’s director of photography, Halyna Hutchins — is Dave Halls (Fargo, The Matrix Reloaded).
The Mail reports that Gutierrez-Reed’s last job was as head armorer for The Old Way, a Nicolas Cage western. She allegedly stated after that film wrapped that “she wasn’t sure if she was ready to be a head armorer,” and that “she found loading blanks into a gun ‘the scariest’ thing because she did not know how to do it and had sought help from her father to get over the fear.”
It’s been reported elsewhere that various concerns (safety, long hours, a refusal to pay for nearby motels) resulted in a production crew walking off the set of Rust on Thursday morning. “When the crew began to pack up, they found a team of non-union workers waiting to replace them,” the story reports.
It’s also been reported that firearms were accidentally discharged three times — including once by Baldwin’s stunt double who had been told the gun was not loaded, and twice in a closed cabin.
Friendo: “In all that’s been written about the tragic gun incident, one question has strangely not once been posed: Why was Alec Baldwin pointing the gun directly at the director and cinematographer?”
HE to Friendo: “I gather that the shot called for Baldwin to fire almost directly into the lens. That’s been done a few times on other films, or so I gather. The bullet hit Hutchins in the upper chest, exited through her back and hit the director, Joel Souza, in the clavicle area (i.e., the bone that connects the breastplate to the shoulder).
No family-friendly media outlet will speculate about how and when Brian Laundrie died. What’s the most likely scenario? A few weeks ago I speculated that Laundrie might wade into a river with the hope of being eaten by a crocodile, but that’s way too gruesome. Then again his remains were allegedly submerged in water for some time.
In the space of a few short weeks Laundrie, who apparently strangled his fiance Gabby Petito somewhere in Wyoming last August, became one of the most despised killers in U.S. history. But give him this. He was apparently so consumed with guilt that he took his life, or allowed a crocodile to take it for him.
This at least indicates that he wasn’t a total sociopath, that he understood morality and knew that he’d done a terrible thing.
The apparent fact that Laundrie killed himself, in short, means that he was capable, in the final analysis, of thinking and acting morally.
The name of the Rust armorer who may be primarily responsible for failing to make certain that the Colt pistol fired yesterday by Alec Baldwin was “cold” and therefore not loaded, has been named in a search warrant affidavit that’s been obtained by Santa Fe Reporter ‘s Jeff Proctor.
In the story Proctor states that while the name of Rust’s assistant director and armorer are included in the affadavit, “SFR is not identifying them because neither has been accused or charged with a crime.”
A 10.21 Daily Mail story suggests that the armorer may be (or may have been) female.
Indiewire’s Chris Lindahl has reported that he also has the name of the armorer, having obtained Thursday’s call sheet. But mum’s the word.
Until it is reported there was an element of anger or aggression in yesterday’s accidental killing of Halyana Hutchins on the set of Rust, reporters and twitter wolves need to get stop trying to heartlessly link this tragedy to Alec Baldwin‘s reputation as Mr. Temperamental.
The poor guy is totally destroyed about this, but to the best of my knowledge what happened yesterday afternoon was purely a technical accident. It’s on the non-IATSE propmaster or armorer, whose name has not been released.
Jordan Ruimy: “Apparently the armorer [i.e., the gun person, different that the propmaster] went off set between takes and shot live rounds out of the Colt .45. The armorer apparently forgot to clear the weapon, so there was still a live round chambered. This is absolutely fucking unacceptable. The armorer is the one who should be held accountable.”
The Daily Mail is reporting that the armorer may be female, by the way.
I am now the proud owner of my very own R*O*T matchbook. Sent from England, arrived yesterday.
I intend to carry the matchbook in a show of solidarity against the anti-North by Northwest exhibit at “woke house” — i.e., the Academy museum. If you’re a late ‘50s Manhattan advertising man, announcing that “rot” is your personal trademark conveys a certain ironic cool. Only someone who’s supremely confident and at peace with himself could admit to having a putrid, decaying, shriveled-up essence.
