“Guy gets on the MTA in LA…dies. Think anybody’ll notice?”
Tom Cruise‘s “hello, I’m looking for my wife” scene in Jerry Maguire still ranks first, but Vincent’s final line in Collateral [4:15 to 4:40] is first runner-up. In a way it’s almost more moving than the Maguire scene because you’re not expecting cynical, hard-case Vincent to emotionally reveal himself.
Late last week I was asked to tap out a response to Jeff Sneider‘s “Is Tom Cruise the Biggest Movie Star in the World?“, a 6.3 Los Angeles magazine piece. I was in the middle of my stuck-in-Toronto nightmare but I said “sure.” And then I forgot about it. Here’s what I would have written if Air Canada hadn’t made my life so briefly miserable:
“Tom Cruise is the Last Big Movie Star, of course. But there’s still something mechanized and energizer–bunny about the guy. We all know this.
“A real movie star doesn’t just sell tickets — he/she also reflects some rooted, grounded aspect of the culture on some level, or stands for the kind of person we are (or at least aspire to be) deep down. Everyone knew (or at least believed they knew) who the big stars were in the old days — Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, Robert Redford, Al Pacino, Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, Meryl Streep, Clark Gable, William Holden, Humphrey Bogart, Katharine Hepburn, Marlon Brando.
“But nobody really knows who Tom Cruise is, not really. Back in the couch-jumping days there was a suspicion that he might have gone around the bend, that he’d become a Scientology fanatic. That notion has since drifted away.
“And yet he’s been selling the hell out of that guy he’s been playing all along, and he certainly deserves credit for keeping that act going and that engine running for nearly 40 years. And for the most part his movies have long stood for quality.
“Cruise has been a major brand and a highly influential audience motivator since Risky Business (’83) and right now he’s obviously riding high off the response to Top Gun: Maverick (currently $291 million domestic and Cruise’s highest-ever grosser).
“So good for him and more power, but he’s always seemed a little too guarded for my tastes. For what it’s worth I’d like to see him play more guys in the vein of Vincent, that gray-haired assassin in Collateral, and that cocaine cartel pilot in American Made.”
I’m planning to finally watch Matt Walsh‘s What Is A Woman? doc, which has been streaming since June 1st. I happen to feel more in synch with Walsh’s views about gender ideology and slightly less in favor of gender positivism, which has been flirting with gender wacko-ism. I wouldn’t characterize my views as dismissive or transphobic — I’m more of a trans-questioning type of guy.
I’m completely down with Bill Maher’s “Along For The Pride” rant that he delivered two weeks ago. I think that Charles Durning‘s farm dad in Tootsie (“Bulls are bulls and roosters don’t try to lay eggs”) was a sensible-sounding guy. I think that the transgender swimmer Lia Thomas competing against natural-born women is tremendously unfair. And I don’t see what’s so awful about Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Act (aka “Don’t Say Gay”), which prohibits classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity from kindergarten to third grade….what’s wrong with postponing this shit until kids get a little older?
The rhetorical thrust of Walsh’s doc is obviously topical and seemingly sensible, and yet most the critics are ignoring it. That seems unfair and even punitive. I’m still succumbing to jetlag naps (I won’t be out of the woods for another two or three days), but I’ll give it a shot this afternoon.
HE correspondent “Eddie Ginley” recently saw Bong Joon-ho‘s Barking Dogs Never Bite (’00), and was struck by the “guy living in a hidden basement area without anyone noticing” subplot that was re-used in Parasite (’19). Ginley says he “can’t believe no one has ever mentioned this.”
But all filmmakers recycle ideas from time to time, and sometimes remake whole movies only a few years later. Michael Mann‘s L.A. Takedown was recycled as Heat six years later. Sometimes ideas germinate for years. The “stabbing of Louis Bernard” scene in The Man Who Knew Too Much (’55) was first dreamt up by Alfred Hitchcock in 1938.
Seven or eight years ago the late James Horner recalled his frustrating attempts at composing the score for Terrence Malick The New World (’05). Writing the score wasn’t the problem, he said, but Malick’s salad-toss approach to editing. We’ve all read and heard eccentric Terry stories over the years, but if you’re wondering why Malick’s latest, The Way of the Wind, is still being edited two and two-thirds years after completing principal photography, Horner explains it all.
“Way of the Wayward,” posted on 3.30.22: “Almost three years after starting principal photography in June 2019, Terrence Malick‘s The Way of the Wind is still shrouded in secrecy with no whispers, much less expectations, about any festival bookings this year.
“Definitely not Cannes, of course, and with the warm weather fast approaching you’d think the Venice/Telluride crowd would be hearing about possibly getting a peek at Malick’s film down the road. But no — ‘big circle of silence.’
“Malick tends to spend about two years in post-production on his films. Presuming that The Way of the Wind wrapped sometime in the early fall of ’19, the two years of post-production would have been completed last September or October, or five or six months ago.”
“Try It On For Size,” posted on 11.20.20: “In June 2019 Terrence Malick began shooting The Last Planet, which is some kind of Jesus movie. The cast includes Géza Rohrig as Christ, Matthias Schoenaerts as Saint Peter, and Mark Rylance as four versions of Satan. It was announced today that the title has been changed to The Way of the Wind.
Having missed the Sundance ’15 debut of Robert Egger‘s The Witch, I didn’t see it until a year later. Boy, was I won over! For me, the film’s critical praise and box-office success ($40 million gross vs. $4 million budget) crystalized my understanding that elevated horror had become a thing — a respectable sub-genre as well as an assurance that not all horror films needed to be aimed at primitives.
A year earlier Jennifer Kent‘s The Babadook had defined the 21st Century template; in 2018 Kent’s The Nightingale and Ari Aster‘s Hereditary fortified things, followed in 2019 by Aster’s Midsommar.
I have this idea that elevated horror was launched by the German expressionists (Robert Wiene‘s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, F. W. Murnau‘s Nosferatu) in the early 20s. Was Val Lewton‘s Cat People the first American-made flick to suggest creeps rather than show them? The prize for the best E.H. flick of the ’60s was split between Jack Clayton‘s The Innocents (’61) and Robert Wise‘s The Haunting (’63). The most explosively popular E.H. of all time, of course, was William Friedkin‘s The Exorcist (’73).
Anyway, last night I re-watched The Witch, and this time with subtitles. From my original review: “I’m very much looking forward to the subtitle option when the Bluray comes out. Ralph Ineson, blessed with one of those magnificent deep voices with a timbre that can peel wallpaper, was the only one I fully understood on a line-for-line basis. To my ears everyone else spoke 17th-Century dithah-moundah-maaaysee-whatsah.”
Now that I’ve “read” Eggers’ script, so to speak, my respect for The Witch‘s period-authentic language is greater.
More review excerpts: “This little creeper (which was projected last night at a 1.66:1 aspect ratio!) is set on an isolated farm in 17th Century New England, when the lore of witches and sorcery was at an all-time high. I was seriously impressed by the historical authenticity and the complete submission to the superstitious mythology of evil in the early 1600s and the panicky mindset of those God-fearing Puritans who completely bought the notion that demonic evil was absolutely manifest and waiting in the thicket.