I’m not speaking disparagingly or disrespectfully of the crowds who are surging into theatres this weekend to see Spider–Man: NoWay Home with the above headline. Well, maybe a little.
I’m just referencing that old showbiz or advertising maxim about how you can’t make dogs eat a certain brand of dog food if they don’t like how it tastes. (Famous Sam Goldwyn variation: “If people don’t want to see something, you can’t stop them.”) This morning’s Spider–Man numbers tell us that thereverseissuddenlyandstartlinglytrue right now, even with Omnicron hovering over everyone and everything.
You know what this tells me, above and beyond the cheering crowds? It tells me that aside from your older fraidy cat moviegoers, Omnicron didn’t have that much to do with the flopping of West Side Story. Italso tellsmethatyoungeraudiencescouldstandtoupgradetheirtastebudsandletalittleShakespeareandmusicintotheirlife.
Questlove’s Summer of Soul is an engaging, well-cut documentary about a series of Harlem Cultural Festival concerts held in Marcus Garvey Park during the mid to late summer of 1969. It’s not my idea of a thematically unified, shoot-and-assemble “documentary” as much as a savoring of found footage — footage that sat in a cellar for decades, and was finally restored and cut just right and punctuated with talking heads.
I love theperformances — Stevie Wonder, The 5th Dimension, The Staple Singers, Nina Simone, Gladys Knight & the Pips, Mahalia Jackson, Sly and the Family Stone, Chambers Brothers). You can feel the heat and humidity and smell the beer and cigarette smoke. It’s a living, breathing cultural document. A sampling of the mood and politics of ’69. An atmospheric high.
But let’s not kid ourselves — Summer of Soul has been winning Best Documentary awards left and right because critics and industry types want to vote for the right thing. Because it’s not really a doc as much as great-looking found footage plus commentary. I wouldn’t say the award-givers are afraid not to honor a half-century-old celebration of black culture, but they know SummerofSoul is the easiest choice to make from a political perspective, and that they’ll all earn virtue points. So there it is.
I don’t want to make too much of the faintly similar endings of Heaven Can Wait and Spider-Man: No Way Home. It should be said upfront that Heaven‘s ending is a bit more stirring and heart-melty, and it pays off better. And Tom Holland…all right, let’s not go there. But the unrecognized and unspoken recognition thing exists in both. That’s all I’m saying.
“West Side Story’s unsuccessful release tells us that we have undergone a fundamental shift in how we watch movies in America. And the entertainment industry should see it for what it is. Many thought as the pandemic spread and the theaters closed that it would all snap back as soon as the pandemic was over. People would flock back to do what they’ve been doing for more than a century, not only out of habit but tradition: They’d go out to the movies.
“But a technological revolution came; the pandemic speeded up what had already begun, just as it speeded up the Zoom revolution that is transforming business and office work.
“People got streaming services and watched movies at home. They got used to it. They liked it. They’d invite friends and stream new releases together. Or they stayed in their pajamas and watched it.
“I never thought movie theaters would go out of style, but I see that in the past few months, since New York has loosened up and things are open, I have gone to Broadway and Off-Broadway shows five times and to a movie not at all, except this week for this column. Like all Americans, I really love movies. But I can watch them at home.
“The old world of America at the movies, of gathering at the local temple of culture, the multiplex, is over. People won’t rush out to see a movie they heard was great but that’s confined to theatrical release; they’ll stay home knowing it will be streaming soon.
“Movie theaters won’t completely go out of business; a good number will survive because people will fill them to go to superhero movies and big fantastical action films. People will want to see those on the screen together and hoot and holler. But it will never again be as it was, different generations, different people, coming together on Saturday night at the bijou. The bijou is at home now, on the couch or bed, streaming in UHD.” — from Peggy Noonan‘s “West Side Story and the Decline of the Movie Theater,” Wall Street Journal, 12.16.21.
For the sin of praising Dave Chappelle and TheCloser, Terry Gilliam was recent hammered on British Twitter by wokesterinquisitionStalinists (i.e., the “Old Vic 12”). You don’t want to bore yourself with all the ins and outs; suffice that Gilliam has rebounded, Chappelle is alive and well, and wokester witch-hunters gonna hunt like they used to do back in Salem, Massachusetts.
Sutton Wells is today celebrating her month-old life — cupcakes, candles, party hats. Born on 11.17.21. Now that she’s looked around and lived a little, she has some perspective to draw upon.
WorldofReel‘s Jordan Ruimy is hearing that TheMatrix Resurrection, which was tweeted about last night, is “not fan service at all…in some quarters Matrix fans are PISSED.” Press screenings are happening this morning.
HE: “So the fans want a certain thing from Neo or his arc, and it doesn’t give them that?” Ruimy: “It apparently doesn’t give them any of that. Some fans feel that Lana’s gone cuckoo.”
10:45 pm: My fears and premonitions about Jon Watts, Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers‘ Spider-Man: No Way Home were unfounded.. I’m not saying that a big chunk of it, particularly during the first 60 to 65 minutes, didn’t numb me out and at times bore me to death. I looked at my watch at 9:15 pm and went “oh, God, another whole hour to go!” But a tiny bit later everything started to change and advance and coagulate, and the trippier, hall-of-mirrors aspects of the “multiverse” plot started to kick in, and the movie got quieter and more reflective and then joyful…the crowd broke out in cheers three times…and I was suddenly going “holy shit, this is really working!”
Ridiculous as this may sound, it is HE’s conviction that McKenna and Sommers’ SM:NWH script has resulted in one of the most cosmically out-there meta-Marvel experiences ever, not to mention one of the most emotional Marvel sink-ins (and that includes Avengers: Endgame).
As much as I hate to admit this, Spider-Man: No Way Home — despite all the flash-bang-jizz-whizz-whomp-thromp crap that occupies much of the first 60 to 65 minutes, which I hated — is easily one of 2021’s best films. It actually should be nominated for Best Picture because it turns the proverbial magic key — it turns audiences on. I was there and I felt it, dammit. Thisiswhatpeoplegotothemoviesfor. It even ends a little bit like Warren Beatty‘s Heaven Can Wait…almost. At the finish everyone applauded.
Yes, the early sections are an unfortunate lesson in FX chaos action editing, and at times the film felt like a fan-service mechanism, a machine, a greatest hits service tray. But the last 45 to 50 minutes are really good. I was totally sold. Call me flabbergasted.
..to the teaser for Ben Stiller and Dan Erickson‘s Severance (Apple TV+, 2.18.22) is something along the lines of “this is obviously a dry and intelligent limited series, and I’m there.” Getting a bit of a Downsizing meets 1984 meets THX-1138 vibe…who wouldn’t? About a mass man (Adam Scott) willfully submitting to corporate-think — “a group of office employees who have agreed to have their memories severed through an experimental medical brain procedure that will permanently separate their work and personal lives.,” etc.
Costarring John Turturro, Britt Lower, Patricia Arquette, Christopher Walken. Exec producer Stiller directed some episodes.
I was a huge admirer of Potter’s 1978 original presentation (critics adored it), and my reaction to the Ross (which I reviewed for The Film Journal) was something along the lines of “as remakes go this is truly a brave and striking effort, and almost as good as the BBC version. I adore many of the musical sequences, but something feels wrong…it’s a film about how grim and draining and merciless life was for so many during the Depression, yes, but it’s also a kind of heavy-sauce mood trip, almost a horror film…a feeling of walls closing in.”
Ross and Potter’s versions were pretty much identical. A struggling Depression-era loser named Arthur Parker (played by Steve Martin in ’81, Bob Hoskins earlier) lives in a fantasy retreat of popular songs in order to keep his spirit going and endure life’s constant misery. The contrast between the harsh reality of Arthur’s actual life vs. the the dreamworld songs that fill his head (and those of costars Bernadette Peters, Christopher Walken, Jessica Harper and Vernel Bagneris) either moved you or sank you, but how could anyone fail to admire the audacious concept?
I’ve always been a fan of what Pennies From Heaven was about and how it got there. Brave and highly inventive, honoring the Potter while advancing its own signature, etc. Martin and Bernadette Peters were excellent. The black-and-white homage to a Fred Astaire + Ginger Rogers dance number in Follow The Fleet was pretty great, as I recall. I remember being extra impressed by Walken’s big dance number. But I haven’t once re-watched it over the last four decades. Not once.
Because somewhere around the halfway or two-thirds mark Pennies From Heaven drops a pill into your system that feels more dispiriting than anything else. It keeps leaning in the direction of despondency, death and doom. It’s a movie that says “most of us are rats on the treadmill, and the game is totally rigged against us so you may as well resign yourself to the endurance of it all…in all likelihood the only respite you will experience with any regularity will be in the realm of fantasy.”
Lars von Trier‘s Dancer in the Dark (’00), which I’ve seen three or four times, used pretty much the exact same premise. This time Bjork was the tragic and incorrigible daydreamer who, like Martin and Hoskins before her, ended up on the gallows.
Pennies From Heaven was a bust — $22 million to produce, $9.1 million in theatrical revenues. My pet peeve was the way Bagneris’s accordion player was initially portrayed as another sad but sympathetic loser, and then he turns out to be a rapist and a murderer of a young blind girl. Bagneris seemed like a weirdo to begin with, and for some primal reason I was repelled by the idea his character turning into a secret maniac, and of Martin being convicted for Bagneris’s crime…this was my big drop-out moment a la William Goldman.
Could Netflix or Amazon or Hulu be persuaded to fund a remake today? Or a similar musical tragedy with the same basic premise?
82 year-old Fred Astaire on Ross’s film: “I have never spent two more miserable hours in my life. Every scene was cheap and vulgar. They don’t realize that the ’30s were a very innocent age, and that [the film] should have been set in the ’80s. As is it’s just froth. It makes you cry it’s so distasteful.”
Why would Brad Pitt degrade his brand by costarring in a obviously ham-fisted, aimed-at-blithering-idiots, piece-of-shit adventure comedy like The Lost City (Paramount, 3.25)? It’s been 37 years since Romancing The Stone and nobody will give a shit anyway, but that’s more or less the template. (Or, if you will, Romancing The Stone meets a slightly less bullshit-stuffed Jungle Cruise.) Kathleen Turner played a reclusive romance novelist back then and Sandra Bullock is playing a romance novelist now. Channing Tatum is the new Michael Douglas, a brawny hero with feet of clay. Beware of directors Adam and Aaron Nee.
I will not watch this film. If I do, I will hate it.
Mr. President — Ever since you began posting your best-movies-of-the-year lists (when was that, late ’16 or early ’17?), Hollywood wags have doubted that they represented your own personal tastes. The assumption was that younger folks on your staff chose the right “tasteful” films and you signed off on them. I, for one, have always (naively?) trusted that your lists represented your own actual preferences, so I’m going to address my comments directly to you, the 44th president of the United States. Here they are…
(1) I’m going to assume you haven’t seen Pedro Almodovar‘s Parallel Mothers. Because if you had, there’s no way you would have omitted it in favor of Old Henry (who’s even seen that film?) or Passing (c’mon…a 1920s Manhattan-Harlem drama, one that barely had a pulse, about a completely unbelievable interracial marriage…the film’s admirers pretended that Ruth Negga‘s facial features could have passed as European-descended, even to a toxic racist husband who was hyper-attuned to such matters) or Pig (a movie about great organic cooking for the ages vs. blandly catering to to the know-nothings). These are all passable or pretty good films, but Almodovar’s is masterful. Did you not see it or something?
(2) Why did you choose 14 films? Why not 15? Why not 10? Nobody chooses their top 14 films of the year.
(3) Did you honestly feel that Drive My Car needed three hours to make the points that it made? Did you think that the director’s wife had betrayed him just that one time (which is what N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott thought) or did you come to realize that she had numerous other sexual partners as a way of coping with the death of their child?
(4) Hat tip to your including The Worst Person in the World and Quo Vadis, Aida — both triple-grade-A, European-made films.
(5) In The Power of the Dog, did you honestly understand what had happened to Benedict Cumberbatch‘s Phil Burbank during the final reel? Because I didn’t. I had to ask friends and research it before I realized what had happened. Director Jane Campion certainly didn’t make it plain to the dumb people in the audience. This, to me, is not the mark of a triple-A film.
(6) Did you honestly think that the Robert Bresson-like prison ending of The Card Counter worked? Did you honestly think there was a compelling romantic current between Oscar Isaac and Tiffany Haddish? Did you really believe Haddish “was” who she was playing, a sharp casino talent scout?
(7) I thought you would have included the excellent King Richard on your list of 14, but it didn’t make the cut. Why not? It’s the only 2021 film that said “this is what it takes to make it in a difficult realm….onlythedevotedandhighlydisciplinedsucceed.” Plus it has a fascinating lead character, which is arguably Will Smith‘s best performance. You can’t tell me you saw King Richard and didn’t greatly admire it.
(8) In sum, no King Richard and no Parallel Mothers constitute, no offense, a pair of glaring WTFs.
