Day: July 5, 2022

We’ve all read about director-screenwriter Paul Haggis (Crash, In The Valley of Elah) having been detained by Italian authorities pending an investigation into sexual assault.

Haggis has a sexual history that I won’t get into, but according to a posting by Variety‘s Naman Ramachandran and K.J. Yossman, the accuser’s story is looking a bit dicey. The initial accusation and house-arrest got the headlines, but this refuting or questioning of the accuser’s account isn’t going to going to attract as much attention.

Haggis’ lawyer Michele Laforgia to The Associated Press: Haggis “remains in Italy while prosecutors decide whether to pursue their investigation into claims that he allegedly had sex with a woman” — British, 28 years old — “without her consent over two days.”

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I can’t recall if I’ve tried to launch a thread along these lines within, say, the last five or so years, but last night I was re-reading a 12.15.05 HE review of Terrence Malick‘s The New World, and I guess I’d forgotten how amazed and delighted I was with this film until the last 30% or 35%, when it betrays the audience and dies on its own vine.

I’ve pasted half of the review below, but please forward any significant films that seemed, in your judgment, to be unfolding wondrously or delightfully or thrillingly until the final act or the second half…looking good, feeling right…oh, no…wait, whoa, what’s happening?

Here’s half of my review: Much of Terrence Malick’s The New World (New Line, 12.25) is masterful, and I’m not just blah-blahing. It’s sensually mesmerizing and caressed with my idea of real genius. It is also, commercially speaking, a kind of kamikaze film, in part because of a certain call made by Malick regarding the love-story plotline.

We’re ten days from its Christmas Day opening and if I know anything, The New World is fixin’ to die. Plus there’s no critics-group awards to sustain interest among the cinefiles or any hope of above-the-line Oscar nominations in January. But forget all of this because The New World should absolutely be seen.
 
It’s the kind of half-great movie that is more than worth the ride because of it has so many wondrous elements. The photography and textures and aromas are nearly all, and for a while they’re nearly enough.  The New World may leave you feeling betrayed, but you won’t feel undernourished.
 Endings are everything, and the final third of this film (lasting roughly 40 minutes) doesn’t make it at all. Because Malick, gifted but mule stubborn, is off in his own realm, and the task of supplying a story that you and your friends might want to see isn’t worth his heavy-cat consideration.

The New World‘s drawn-out, epilogue-like final act is, in fact, an example of abrupt story betrayal and audience abandonment. It should be picked over in filmmaking classes at USC and NYU in years to come as a lesson in what a director looking to survive in the world of commercial filmmaking should never ever do.


A few weeks ago The New World producer Sarah Green told The New York Times that “first and foremost we’ve created a love story.”

This is unmistakably true for the first 100 or so minutes, and in a near-revolutionary sense.  The legendary, historically fanciful saga of British explorer John Smith (Colin Farrell) and the teenaged Pocahantas (Q’orianka Kilcher) in early 1660s Virginia feels vital and pulsing and re-imagined as a gentle culture-clash love story…largely non-verbal, visually haunting…primal atmosphere seeping out of every frame.
 
Green also told the Times, “We’re definitely not doing a historical piece. We try to set it properly…we try to give that background and that feeling, but we focus on the love story.”

As far as the last act is concerned, that’s a distortion.  The Farrell-Kilcher love story is totally abandoned (and in a very brusque and alienating way at that) and the film pretty much sticks to the historically accepted story of Pocahantas’ life for the last third — marriage to a wealthy English tobacco grower named John Rolfe (Christian Bale), bearing a child, travelling to England to meet the King and Queen, and an early death.  The failure of The New World ending is entirely due to the fact that this final section plays like a postscript.

But during those first two thirds, The New World is a truly rare animal and movie like no other…a feast of intuitive wow-level naturalism that feels as fresh and vitally alive as newly-sprouted flora.  This is the forest primeval, all right…the native Americans (“naturals”) and English settlers eyeballing each other amid the murmuring pines and hemlocks and low-lying marshlands, and then prodding, spearing, shooting and finally accepting each other in an evolving, step-by-step cultural passion play.

I’ve respected Terrence Malick as a genius all of my filmgoing life. I knew that before but I was reminded once again when I sat down with this film in late November. And I’m truly glad to live in a world that gives up a Malick film every five or six years.

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I’ve known a few lower-level drug dealers in my time, and apart from the idiots who got high on their own supply, my general impression was that most of them just wanted to do business with a minimum of drama. They were careful and at times a bit paranoid, but only because they feared dealing with immature fools who might rat them out to narcs.

I’m no expert on the drug-dealing world, but I’ve never once heard of anyone on the verge of a big buy trying to rip off the buyer, like this pool-room scene in Carlito’s Way or the famous chainsaw motel scene in Scarface.

The bottom line (and we all know this) is that director Brian DePalma always cared more about delivering his big, carefully choreographed set pieces with knockout camera moves than he did about capturing realistic situations and characters that you can recognize and believe in. But that’s the DePalma tradeoff. You’ll never buy a lot of the stuff that happens in his films, partly because they all seem to happen inside some kind of odd, unreal membrane, but when the big set pieces happen you’ll be wowed.

Jordan Peterson to parents [3:32]: “You have to understand that you’re a danger to your children no matter what. You can let them go out into the world and be hurt, or [like your mostly boomer and older GenX parents of Millennials] you can over-protect them and hurt them that way. That’s your choice — to allow your children to become competent and courageous, or you can make them safe. But you can’t make them safe because life isn’t safe. So if you sacrifice their courage and confidence on the altar of safety then you disarm them completely, and all they can do is pray to be protected.”

I wasn’t over-protected by my parents, or at least not in the Millennial way. I definitely encountered a lot of bruising, withering judgments from “friends” and teachers, not to mention the bumps and slapdowns any younger person gets from the general rough and tumble.

I definitely felt scolded and over-policed by my parents, but that’s a different thing. There was definitely too much “no, no, no, no” throughout my childhood — “You’re being bad again,” “Didn’t I tell you not to do that?” and so on. By the time I was 14 or 15 my general feeling was that life in the New Jersey suburbs — the day-to-day boredom, regimentation, challenges, cruelties, limitations, humiliations and horrible social pressures from the guys I hung out with and, obliquely, from the women I wanted to get to know — I felt that life as a 15 year-old really sucks, and it took me a long time to climb out of that.

But by the time I was 20 or 21 I had been toughened, so to speak, and able to handle random blows and traumas (like getting tossed into a podunk Southern jail for two days over a suspicion of murder). For all the anguish and misery that I went through in my tweener and teen years, at least I didn’t turn out like a fucking Millennial, whining about needing my safe spaces and taking offense at almost everything and cancelling people who don’t walk the walk in the right way.

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Between 15 and 20 years ago (or possibly even in the Reel.com or Mr. Showbiz era of the late ’90s and very early aughts), I distinctly recall suggesting that a drinking talk show — one in which the host and guests would sip whatever and get faintly bombed as the show progressed — would be a lot of fun, and that someone should do it.

This, to me, is what defines Bill Maher’s “Club Random” podcasts — Maher and his guests getting slightly ripped or “happy” and therefore talking with less restraint or inhibition than on a straight talk show.

I’m presuming that are other such podcasts; I just don’t know any off the top of my head.

What I was talking about a couple of decades ago, actually, was a movie discussion talk show with mixed drinks. That, I swear, would be something to follow.

The problem, of course, is that the vast majority of your Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic members wouldn’t have the courage or the character to do this. They’re too cautious, too guarded, too damp-finger-to-the-wind to risk any kind of public inebriation. They know that many if not most Average Joes despise them and that they generally tend to defer to a woke Planet Uranus way of processing not just movies but cultural values, and are afraid of showing their true colors.

I couldn’t do it myself because I don’t drink or get high.

From Scott Mendelson’s 7.5 Forbes review of Taika Watiti‘s Thor: Love and Thunder: “[Pic] tells a tale of a title character who has lost his drive, his purpose and his mojo. Frankly, it shares those core problems and becomes a metaphor for Marvel’s entire ‘Well, what now?’ Phase Four.

“It has the feel of a party that no one wants to be at, or a film that only exists because Marvel needed a safe sequel amid franchise starters, with the head DJ furiously shouting at the guests to dance, laugh and act like they are having a fun time.

“Like X-Men: The Last Stand, Thor 4 attempts to adapt two fan-favorite comic arcs into a single too-short (110 minutes plus credits) feature and gives both short shrift. It mistakes abstract concepts for deep-dive storytelling. It is fatally hobbled by a super heroic lead who has become cringe-inducingly incompetent since his last adventures.

“Thor: Love and Thunder is an unnecessary sequel, existing only because its predecessor was unusually well-received even by those who weren’t all-in MCU fans. Like too many of the most recent MCU projects, it only exists because Disney can’t afford to stop this train. Christian Bale, Tessa Thompson and Guns and Roses tunes aside, this fourth Thor is a real chore.”

From Promising Young Woman to Rebecca Hall‘s Passing to Resurrection, a forthcoming thriller in which a mother (Hall again) tries to protect herself and her daughter from an abusive ex-boyfriend (Tim Roth), movies today are leaning heavily on a dependable villain trope — the quietly seething, morally indifferent white guy, otherwise known as the gift that keeps on giving.

White guys who are racist, misogynist, entitled and/or corrupt…Anglo Saxons have it covered.

And who can blame filmmakers for repeatedly drawing water from this fair-skinned well? Angry, older and especially rural white guys represent the most socially incendiary douchebag element in society today — Trump supporters, reportedly ready for armed insurrection, sociopathic D.C. legislators (Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, “Gym” Jordan).

In the ’80s and ’90s the bad guys were arrogant white teens, greedy Wall Street traders, conniving yuppie scumbags (James Spader in Wolf, Paul Reiser‘s “Burke” in Aliens, Jay Mohr‘s “Bob Sugar” in Jerry Maguire).

But post-#MeToo all-purpose white-guy shitheads have taken the lead. And they don’t even have to be a bumblefucks as long as they’re palefaced. Cold-eyed whiteys of any profession or position or motivation will do….#whiteguysblowchunks.

One of the first impactful social dramas featuring ignorant white guy baddies was Mervyn LeRoy‘s They Won’t Forget (Warner Bros., 7.14.37).

But the table was mainly set between the late ’40s and the mid ’50s by three award-calibre dramas about racism, and two of these, both produced by Dore Schary, about racially-motivated killings. They were seminal films — the original racially woke trio.

First came Schary and director Edward Dmytryk‘s Crossfire (’47), about an anti-semitic murder. In Richard Brooks‘ 1945 source novel, “The Brick Foxhole“, the victim wasn’t Jewish but gay. The Crossfire killer was played by Robert Ryan; the good guy was played by Robert Young.

Next was Mark Robson and Carl Foreman‘s Home of the Brave (’49), about black-white racism among American troops in the South Pacific during World War II.

The third and arguably the most penetrating was Bad Day at Black Rock (’55), produced by Schary, directed by John Sturges and starring Spencer Tracy. The subject was a covered-up murder of a Japanese-American by a group of angry, resentful white guys, the leader of whom was played by Ryan.

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Suspected Highland Park mass murderer “Bobby” Crimo, a nutbag Trump supporter and aspiring rapper (“Awake”) who “left a long trail of tributes to mass shootings on social media platforms,” is being described as an unemployed loner who, before his arrest, lived in a basement unit.

Of course he did! And of course he was “quiet! Everything about the guy (especially his videos) screamed “ticking time-bomb dweeb living on his own secluded planet and probably up to no good.” Any bets on Crimo being an incel? And of course his family “noticed nothing amiss.” Of course!

Plus he looks like…well, not exactly “a wrong one” (a term used by “California Charlie” in Psycho) but certainly an oddball. My first association was Lon Chaney’s “Mr. Wu.” I was also reminded of Ethan Darbone’s “Lonnie” in Red Rocket. Trust me — if I had run into Crimo in a Highland Park 7/11 I would have definitely taken a step or two backwards and muttered “whoa.”