It was presumptuous of Bill McCuddy to say that “we” have all voted for Jessica Chastain for the Most Makeup Best Actress Oscar, or that we’re at least rooting for her to win. I’m not saying she won’t win, mind — her Tammy Faye Bakker was a pretty good performance, all things considered — but I didn’t care for McCuddy’s tone.
Jay Silverheels’ Tonto to Clayton Moore‘s Lone Ranger, “What you mean ‘we’?”
A week ago I reported that I’d seen the first five episodes of Elizabeth Meriwether‘s The Dropout, and that as good as Amanda Seyfried‘s performance as the discredited tech fraudster Elizabeth Holmes was and is, “I kept asking myself ‘who would be stupid enough to go into business with this creepy character…a woman who, had she been born in the 1940s, could have played an alien on The Twilight Zone episode ‘To Serve Man’? Or Ray Walston‘s alien girlfriend in My Favorite Martian?”
“Meriwether’s dialogue is reasonably pro-level for the most part,” I said, “but I can only reiterate that I couldn’t believe in the story because I found it impossible to believe in Seyfried’s Holmes. She’s just too looney-tunes, too ‘off the planet.'”
I’ve since moved past that reaction. I saw episode #6 last night and now I’m mesmerized. I have to admit that the prospect of seeing this bizarre performance artist finally receive her just desserts over the final two episodes (“Heroes“, airing on 3.31 and “Lizzy“, 4.7) seems incredibly delicious. I can’t wait to see her go down, and yet five minutes ago I was afraid to admit this for fear of accused of being accused of harboring misogynist feelings. So just to be safe, I’m going to say…uhm, how should I put this?
You have to give Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter credit for ruling this particular roost — maternally speaking it’s easily the most despairing and melancholy of the 11 films in question. It’s the first semi-mainstream film to say “some women just don’t have kid-friendly instincts” or “some women are just too caught up in their creative struggles to make room for mundane mothering.” [Chart created by Vulture.]
According to a 6.1.20 article in the Daily Nexus (the paper of the University of California Santa Barbara), hotshot elevated horror helmer Ari Aster (Midsommar, Hereditary) offered a brief description of his next film. It was in the script stage back then but is now completed, I’ve read, and titled Disappointment Blvd.. A24 will release it later this year.
Aster: “All I know is that it’s gonna be four hours long, and [span] 17 years.” Aster has also also called it a “nightmare comedy” or “horror comedy” or words to that effect.
The presumably deceptive logline describes Disappointment Blvd. as “an intimate, decades-spanning portrait of one of the most successful entrepreneurs of all time.” being played by Joaquin Phoenix.
For most of us, the words “starring Joaquin Phoenix” means a film about some kind of obsessive, extreme psychology or behavior…something intriguingly weird and a bit wackazoid. Phoenix used to have the ability to play normal guys but that’s gone — he’s almost a Nic Cage-like figure in the sense of being consumed by his own persona.
Disappointment Blvd.-wise, the odds strongly favor that Phoenix will play a guy who’s so internal and ultra-sensitive that he’s become paranoid and removed from the Average Joe community…this is who Joaquin is, what he’s become…a guy who plays alien locoweeds.
I’m mentioning Disappointment Blvd. because yesterday World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy reported that Aster’s film is (a) “ready” and (b) “now a possibility for Cannes Film Festival competition.” If this happens, great — you know it’ll be an insane film that everyone will have fun with, and that Phoenix (if and when the film appears) will be a prime contender for the festival’s Best Actor award. Let’s just hope that Aster has somehow whittled Disappointment Blvd. down to three hours instead of four. Or better yet, two and a half. hours.
Ruimy adds that A24 might make also bring Kelly Reichardt’s Showing Up to Cannes as a competition title. Another potential A24 title, he adds, could be Joanna Hogg’s The Eternal Daughter.
Tom Hagen at Jack Woltz‘s dinner table — the 2008 Robert Harris-Gordon Willis version on top, the 2022 4K “restoration” version below. There’s nothing particularly “wrong” with preferring the 2022 version — the oranges, candles, pale amber lampshade and carved wood panelling have good color, but Hagen’s skin tone is a little pinkish…sunburn, sweat. In the 2008 version his skin has a warmer shade. More importantly, it blends in with the general color scheme of the frame. This is why I stand with the 2008 version, which Mr. Willis helped to create anyway so where’s the argument?
Originally posted on 2.1.22, then immediately paywalled: I’ve said from the beginning that casting of The Offer (4.28), the Paramount + series about the making of The Godfather, would be extra difficult because everyone knows the players so well — faces, voices, mannerisms. Each and every performance would have to deliver a masterful impersonation for the film to really work. The new trailer makes it clear this aspect was a bridge too far.
I’ll tell you right now that Dan Fogler portraying Francis Coppola in The Offer…any Fogler casting in anything is a problem as he always seems to play slovenly, dregs-of-the-gene-pool types, but casting him as Coppola is a jape, an insult. For one thing Coppola has a certain voice that Fogler doesn’t even come close to imitating, plus Coppola was a bit stocky but not a fatass.
I knew that the instant I heard Fogler-as-Coppola speak the famous line “I believe in America”…I knew right away that Fogler was the wrong guy to hire.
My second reaction was “good God, what’s happened to poor Giovanni Ribisi?” He’s turned into a beach ball! This is almost as upsetting as the Bridget Fonda thing. If he wanted to bulk up to play Joe Colombo, he could have gone with a fat suit, no?
As for Miles Teller as Godfather producer Albert Ruddy…well, he doesn’t look anything like early ’70s Ruddy, a 40ish Canadian Jew with graying hair. The 34 year-old Teller, who stepped into the role when Armie Hammer was deep-sixed and soon after caused on-set worries when he refused to be vaccinated, has dark, thick hair and seems closer to his early 30s than early 40s.
Matthew Goode as Robert Evans might be okay.
The one possibly hopeful note is that Michel Tolkin is the screenwriter. The director is Dexter Fletcher (Rocketman).
I still say that Darrell Easton’s I Believe in America is the best “making of The Godfather script” I’ve ever read.
According to L.A. Times film staffer Jen Yamato, the fallout from that Licorice Pizza hiccup in which succeeding Asian wives of a character named Jerry Frick (John Michael Higgins) were made into an Asian punchline…the fallout from this is “bigger than the Oscars.”
It is? Strange as that thing was, it’s over and forgotten now — the ship has sailed. Nobody cares. Oh, and who thinks the 94th Oscars are “big”? Last time I checked the buzzword was “diminished.”
I realize that I’m expected to know who Jacob Elordi is. I’ve seen a couple of episodes of Euphoria so I guess I do. I’m also aware that he’s tall (6’3″) and hunky with 13 million Instagram followers. At least he has something to do with movies, which is more than you can say for DJ Khaled.
Through residing in some kind of cosmic cine-realm, the spirit of Gordon Willis has nonetheless gotten wind of the ecstatic reactions to the digitally reordered 50th anniversary Godfather. I would like to think that he’s pleased about the following statement, which Willis wrote several years ago, having been posted this morning on Home Theatre Forum:
“Apparently restoring the Godfather [films] is becoming more difficult than the original task of making them.
“The main thing is to reflect on the word RESTORE, which in the simplest possible terms, means PUT IT BACK THE WAY IT WAS.
“I realize how difficult it is for people not to fall in love with ‘THE PROCESS’… whatever it might be. Digital reconstruction of the Godfather films should be held to remounting the film in its ORIGINAL visual structure.
“That means NO sharpening, NO grain reduction and NO reshaping of of the visual interpretive levels. The period work in Part 2 will be especially affected, or maybe I should say INfected.
“How this picture was shot, regarding the lighting, and the color was well thought out…don’t change it. I realize it’s everybody’s instinct to reduce or expand things to a level they understand, but the job is to PUT IT BACK THE WAY IT WAS. The tools that are available to do that now, are miraculous. They are, however a means to an end… not an end in themselves.
“These films have been made already. People working on them should give them the respect that’s necessary to bring them back to life, which means not changing one damn thing.”
Blue-chip restoration guru Robert Harris , who guided the definitive 2007-08 restoration of The Godfather, a version approved not only by the film’s dp, Gordon Willis, but the entire chorus of winged Movie Godz, recently posted the following on Home Theatre Forum.
Please note the use of the term “death knell” in the fifth paragraph:
A HTF comment:
