Month: January 2022

Jiminy Cricket’s Uncle in Fascist Italy

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How curious that a new teaser for Guillermo del Toro‘s animated re-telling of Pinocchio focuses not on Geppetto or his carved-wood son Pinocchio or the kids turned into donkey slaves, but on a sophisticated insect Sebastian J. Cricket, obviously related in some way to Jiminy Cricket.

What has a fucking cricket to do with all this, especially a tale that considers the shadow of Benito Mussolini??

Guillermo’s “dark, twisted retelling of the famous Carlo Collodi fairytale, about a wooden puppet who comes to life and dreams of becoming a real boy, takes place in 1930s Fascist Italy. When Pinocchio comes to life, he turns out not to be a nice boy, causing mischief and playing mean tricks. But at its core, Pinocchio is “a story of love and disobedience as Pinocchio struggles to live up to his father’s expectations.”

God in Heaven

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I’ll tell you right that John Cameron Swayze Mitchell looks too skin-and-bones to play Joe Exotic, who’s always had roundish, semi-jowly features. Kate McKinnon as Joe’s nemesis Carole Baskin…I’m fine with that. With McKinnon, not the show. I hate watching egoistic with horrible taste in clothing and hairstyling lowlifes make their lives even lower.

HE Endorses Slovakian AirCar

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From Sam Tonkin’s 1.24.22 story in London’s Daily Mail, “Futuristic flying ‘AirCar’ that can transform from a road vehicle into a plane in under THREE MINUTES is certified to fly after passing safety tests in Slovakia“:

“AirCar certification opens the door for mass production of very efficient flying cars,” said Professor Stefan Klein, AirCar’s inventor, the leader of the development team and test pilot. “It is official and the final confirmation of our ability to change mid-distance travel forever.”

“The project’s co-founder Anton Zajac said: “Fifty years ago, the car was the epitome of freedom. AirCar allows us to be free again.”

“King Richard” Is Different, You Bet

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Click here to jump past HE Sink-In

Reinaldo Marcus Green and Zach Baylin‘s King Richard has been in the award-season swirl of things since 11.19.21, but the buzz began at the Telluride Film Festival on 9.2.21. And since that debut I’ve been among those who’ve said “this is it!…the big Will Smith moment!…his best performance ever!” and so on.

I wasn’t wrong to jump on this horse, hoopla- and column-subject-wise, but within the last couple of weeks I’ve been giving King Richard a re-think, and I’ve realized that it’s bigger — more — than just an historic Will Smith triumph. It’s a genuinely great film about a family, and that doesn’t mean (let’s be clear about this!) a “family film.” King Richard is way beyond that realm.

This realization didn’t hit me at first. For ever since I turned 15 or 16, I’ve disliked the idea of movies made for or even about families. For decades the notion of films made by the old-time Disney factory — movies that felt a bit sappy and wholesome and formulaic — made me uncomfortable. (Except, that is, for the Jeffrey Katzenberg-led animated films of the ‘90s, which were exciting and joyful.) But otherwise family-friendly films were something to avoid. For me at least.

And yet King Richard is arguably the most thrilling (and I mean spiritually) film about the struggles of an ambitious family of the 21st Century. And not in the usual sort of way. It’s not so much about emotions and hugs and serendipity and God’s good fortune, but teamwork, discipline, self-respect and tenacity.

It’s also one of the smartest, most complex and most character-driven sports films ever crafted, and the credit for that goes to Green, who just buckles down, cuts out the superfluous b.s. and tells this hard-fought success story with the drill-sergeant discipline of…well, Richard Williams.

Story-wise, King Richard is clean and crafty and radiates authority, and credit for that aspect can also be shared by screenwriter Zach Baylin. The result is a genre-defying “family film” because it’s not aimed at the usual suspects. It’s aimed, really, at movie lovers and filmmakers who can appreciate what first-rate craft and storytelling are really about

What emerges are three movies in one. It’s a tennis-boot-camp-run-by-a-tough-dad family film. A strong-mom family film, due to the knockout performance by Aunjanue Ellis. And a family saga that plays like one of the greatest, down-in-the-trenches competitive tennis films ever made.

Seriously — name a film about the world of professional tennis — the tennis “racket”, if you will — that feels more real or recognizable or satisfying in a socially attuned, business-is-business way. And name a family-oriented film about strength and waking up early and working hard and thinking right…name another such film that behaves less like the usual product.

The Williams sisters — Venus (Saniyya Sidney) and Serena (Demi Singleton) — are sunny and mellow and well-behaved and glorious on the courts, and their mom, Oracene “Brandy” Price (Ellis) is a model of domestic steel and maternal resolve.

And the film is about rigor and devotion and absolutely no relaxing or kicking back. It’s about “if you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” It’s about “only the strong and gifted who get up early and go to bed at a reasonable hour succeed.”

So it’s not just a Will Smith film (although it is) — it’s a Reinaldo Marcus Green film, an Aunjanue Ellis film, a proud Black family film, a no-slacking-off film, a “show me the money” film, a Saniyya Sidney and Demi Singleton film, a Tony Goldywn and Jon Bernthal and Dylan McDermott film. In short, a team effort about the very tough discipline of filmmaking as well as tennis.

It’s finally a film about faith and belief and the kind of persistence that must not and cannot quit.

 

One of Greatest Musical Scores & Theme Songs

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…for a film that’s reasonably decent and excitingly composed and a nice atmospheric New Orleans spooker, but which feels at times a teeny bit too lurid and sexualized for comfort, to the point of almost feeling like an exploitation film….almost.

That would be Giorgio Moroder‘s Cat People score and especially David Bowie‘s Cat People song vs. Paul Schrader’s 1982 erotic thriller, which I watched last night on Amazon.

I hadn’t seen Schrader’s remake in many years, and it’s really not that bad for the most part. But the music is what really seizes you. My very first viewing of Cat People was in a smallish Manhattan screening room, and the sound was so weak and faint (due to mixing or volume?) you could barely hear the percussion under Bowie’s singing. The sound in this music video is perfect.

The boyish Nastassja Kinski (now 61) with the taut muscular bod and oddly shaped lips and funny European feet, and those sex scenes with the late John Heard…I don’t know what to say except that schtupping and eroticism were weighing very heavily on Schrader’s mind back then. (He was having it off with Kinski at the time.) I was also thinking a lot about eroticism and whatnot at the time, but who cared? I was just a critic in the third or fourth row.

Schrader, by the way, is back in New Orleans as we speak, shooting The Master Gardener with Joel Edgerton.

Name other extraordinary scores that were composed for reasonably decent films, and wound up being the most affecting or exciting or profound element. I’ll name three that outshone the films they were meant to enhance — Miklos Rosza‘s scores for Ben-Hur, King of Kings and El Cid.

Attending With Trepidation

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I haven’t seen Frank Perry’s Play It As It Lays (‘72), easily one of the greatest Hollywood-is-hell films of all time and certainly one of the finest jaded, glum-minded ‘70s dramas about affluent perversity…I haven’t seen it projected on a big screen for at least 15 years. (It played at the American Cinematheque’s Hollywood flagship theatre…uhm, sometime around ‘06 or ‘07.). I’ll be catching the 1.28 showing at the Los Feliz Cinematheque, but I’m extremely worried that the 35mm print will be faded (i.e., “pink”) or damaged all to hell. This movie is now a half-century old. If this happens I’m going to be very, very upset.

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Hawk Swoops Down, Carries Away Prey

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Three days ago I stated that Jamie Dack‘s Palm Trees and Power Lines, a Sundance Film Festival Dramatic Competition entry, is among the festival’s three best films.

I actually didn’t convey my true, deep-down feelings, which is that in the realm of stories about young girls dealing with predatory relationships and the sexual issues that always come with that, Dack’s film is one of the most shocking and upsetting that I’ve ever seen — period.

I’ve already reported that it’s about a hugely creepy relationship between a fatherless 17 year-old (Lily McInerney) and a 34 year-old opportunist and latent scumbag (Jonathan Tucker), and that what happens would make any decent person gag. Without divulging specifics I should add that the film contains what I regard as the most odious and grotesque sex scene in motion picture history. And the ending is completely shattering.

A friend doesn’t believe the ending, which again I can’t be specific about. But I can at least state that each and every dude in this film is either a dog or a beast. We’re talking implications of sexual cruelty, brutality and animality in every scene featuring a male of any age.

I recently described the plot to a female friend with a 20something daughter, and she said, “This is basically how younger Millennials and GenZ see all white cis men…they think they are all rapists and assaulters.”

I’m not disputing that many if not most younger males (late teens to mid 30s) are animals in terms of their sexual behavior. This view or judgement is certainly out there, so it wouldn’t be the craziest thing in the world for Dack to share this opinion.

The shocking part of Palm Trees and Power Lines is the degree to which McInerney’s character is seemingly off-balance and emotionally starved for paternal attention and affection. Because right away you’re wondering how and why McInerney would go out with Tucker in the first place (there are all kinds of red flags). By the end of the film you’re left with an even more perplexing question. I thought McInerney might be safe at the end, and then she does something that made me go “oh my God!”

You can argue that what she does is not entirely believable, but for me the dramatized horror outweighs the credibility.

Friendo to HE: “I could totally buy that [McInerney] is damaged and would get seduced by this guy’s tricks…all of it. But as the movie portrays it, what she goes through in that motel room is so horrific, and in both that scene and the aftermath she is so filled with fear, that I just thought: The fact that she’s got daddy issues is going to transcend that?

“Her mother” — a good performance by Gretchen Mol — “seemed nice enough, not perfect but loving. Why would she be so alienated from that home situation?”

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Zoom Chats Are About Happiness, Special-ness & Being Supported

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Is there some reason other than virtue-signaling that the organizers of this Zoom chat have a sign-language person while they also have subtitles, which YouTube puts on automatically?

Why does this feel like a meeting of super-loyal Stalinist apparatchiks in the 1930s? The “safe” alpha woke-think vibes coming out of this thing are sorta kinda suffocating.

Laser Blazer Daze

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This Guillermo del Toro snap was taken in the hallowed aisles of Laser Blazer — the Pico Blvd. location, I mean — sometime in ’00, possibly in ’01. Guillermo had either just finished shooting The Devil’s Backbone or was preparing to do that or…oh, hell, I can’t specifically recall. I could be off by a couple of years. It could have been ’04 or ’05.

Laser Blazer was where my heart was…it was my home, my soul haven. It began in ’88 just as laser discs were starting to happen; it finally died in ’11.

By Next Year Biden Needs To Decide

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Speaking as a Joe Biden supporter, it has to be acknowledged that if he can’t get his approval numbers to significantly improve by, say, the spring of 2023 or certainly by the summer, he has to consider the option of cutting bait.

Biden saved our country from a second Trump term, but God help us all if he runs again and Trump somehow wins. Or if the Trump forces manage to cheat or coup d’etat their way back into the White House. Plus, as was noted earlier today, no one is really cool with the idea of a U.S. President being only four years shy of 90, which is what Biden would be by late ’28.

And what if, God forbid, Biden gets re-elected in ’24 but doesn’t live out the full term? (This is a reasonable question to ask.) Nobody but nobody wants Kamala Harris moving into the Oval Office. The fall-out would be catastrophic.

Bret Stephens, from “Joe Biden Would Like to Know What Your Problem Is,” posted on 1.24.22: “If the fourth year of the Biden administration resembles the first, particularly when it comes to inflation, I’ll be hard-pressed to vote for him. And so, I suspect, will many of the people who supported him last time.

“Which brings me to my latest hobby horse, which is to get Biden to announce early that he won’t run again so other Democrats can start exploring a run. Critics of the idea think it turns him into a lame duck, but I think it would look statesmanlike and actually strengthen his hand.

“Isn’t every re-elected president an automatic lame duck, because they can’t run for a third term? Biden can still get a lot done in 35 months, without sitting on the rest of the Democratic Party like a wet blanket on a cold day. And we can all stop pretending that we’re totally okay with the idea of an 86-year-old president, which is what Biden would be at the end of a second term.”

Dishonest Topography

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Few things throw me out of a film more than bad backdrops or wrong-looking topography. A location has to more or less look the part or forget it.

I’ve no problem with the Philippine jungle standing in for Vietnam in Apocalypse Now, or Spain’s Almeria section subbing for the Old Southwest in those Sergio Leone westerns, or David Lean building a temporary set at Spain’s Playa del Algarrobico as a stand-in for World War I-era Aqaba. The locations seemed right plus I didn’t know any better so no worries. But if I do know better, watch out.

The “Florida” setting of the Seminole Ritz hotel in Some Like It Hot, for example, is impossible. Southern Florida is flat as a pancake, and yet we can see the hills of San Diego’s Point Loma in the distance during the “Cary Grant in a sailor hat meets Sugar” beach scene.

I hated it when Robert DeNiro, John Cazale, John Savage and those other factory-mill goons went hunting in rural Pennsylvania, and they wound up near the rocky peaks of Mount Baker in the state of Washington. I immediately checked out of that awful film when I saw those effing mountains.

One of the worst all-time offenders is Franklin Schaffner‘s Planet of the Apes. Charlton Heston‘s rocket ship crash lands in what might be Arizona’s Lake Powell or maybe somewhere in the Mexican Sonoran desert. And then we’re at the Fox ranch in Malibu Canyon, and then we journey to the high-cliff California coast and suddenly we’re in what remains of New York City…adjacent to Zuma State Beach at Point Dume.

As Evelyn Mulwray‘s Japanese gardener says about her salt-water pond and how it affects nearby plants, “Velly velly bad.”

And yet I don’t go out of my way to be a hard-ass. If a film is set in Oklahoma, the scenery only has to resemble Oklahoma. Which is why Fred Zinneman‘s Oklahoma! (’55), which was actually shot in the green-grass sections of Arizona, passes muster.