Day: July 17, 2022

Congrats and best wishes to the newly-betrothed Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez, but getting hitched in Las Vegas…I’m sorry to say this but Las Vegas is no place to exchange vows.

A place this devoid of spirit and romance is bad karma. Getting married in a small-town city hall in Iowa is cool. Or on a rural Tuscan hilltop at magic hour. Or in a small chapel in Paris. Or on a beach in Kauai at dawn. Marriage is not a game of chance — it’s a game of trust. Exchanging vows isn’t about “wheee!” — it’s about “okay, this shit just got real.”

Affleck, a serious poker and blackjack player, has a seemingly ardent affection for Las Vegas, but the central metaphor of that town is about fairy tales and visions of power and dominance, and it always boils down to “did you beat Las Vegas or did it beat you?”

My point is that there’s something delicate and solemn and even mystical about getting married — it’s like saying a prayer together or co-writing a poem. If there’s one place on the planet earth where delicacy, solemnity and mysticism are in short supply, it’s fucking Las Vegas.

The U.S. debut of Park Chan-wook‘s Decision to Leave (MUBI, 10.14) is a few months off, and I’m sure his devoted fans will celebrate every shot, cut and camera move of this slow-moving noir. From a technical standpoint it’s masterful, but it was understood by a certain percentage of Cannes Film Festival critics (i.e., the honest ones) that it didn’t go much further that that.

The Park Chan-wook cabal has insisted for years that the usual narrative elements that define most first-rate films don’t count as much when it comes to PCW, that he’s a world-class auteur because of his high style and excellent chops and that’s all — the same kind of rationale that floated Brian DePalma‘s boat for so many years.

Just remember what I was saying last May, which is that Decision to Leave is a beautifully shot slog if I ever saw one.

Posted on 5.23.22: With all due respect for Park Chan-wook’s smooth and masterful filmmaking technique (no one has ever disputed this) and the unbridled passion that his cultish film critic fans have expressed time and again…

And with respect, also, for the time-worn film noir convention of the smart but doomed male protagonist (a big city homicide detective in this instance) falling head over heels for a Jane Greer-like femme fatale and a psychopathic wrong one from the get-go…

The labrynthian (read: convoluted) plotting of Park’s Decision To Leave, though intriguing for the first hour or so, gradually swirls around the average-guy viewer (read: me) and instills a feeling of soporific resignation and “will Park just wrap this thing up and end it already?”

Jesus God in heaven, but what doth it profit an audience to endure this slow-drip, Gordian knot-like love story-slash-investigative puzzler (emphasis on the p word) if all that’s left at the end is “gee, what an expert directing display by an acknowledged grade-A filmmaker!”

There’s a lyric in Paul Simon‘s “Slip Slidin’ Away” that’s always rubbed me the wrong way. Maybe you know what I mean and maybe you don’t…”God only knows, God makes his plan…the information’s unavailable to the mortal man.”

To which I would reply, “What information would that be exactly?”

We’re all familiar with the Christian sentiment about how we mustn’t condemn God for orchestrating horribly cruel fates for so many millions of people, and that we can’t hope to know or understand the grand scheme…oh, yeah? You think?

If you want to conceive of God as some kind of magnificent multiversian…an all-seeing, all-knowing, semi-sentient being with a personality and a deep voice not unlike the one that Charlton Heston converses with during the burning bush scene in The Ten Commandments…if you insist upon that kind of definition of God then you’ve no choice but to accept His absolute indifference to human suffering. Which he impassively lays on at every turn. With relish.

He doesn’t give a shit, in short, and the most frequently deployed tool at his command, as Aeschylus reminded, is “pain that falls drop by drop upon the heart.” Boy, does it ever!

All of this reminds me of a wonderful scene in Rabbit Hole (’10), about a couple grieving over a deceased young child. Nicole Kidman and husband Aaron Eckhart are in a group therapy session, and listening to a couple who’ve also lost a child. They’re sharing the notion that God has a plan and He needed their child so he could have an extra angel in heaven, blah blah, and Kidman just shoots that shit down like Sgt. York. Perfect.

“Life is a comedy written by a sadist” — Woody Allen.

Last night I saw portions of Scott Derrickson‘s The Black Phone (Universal, 6.26). Okay, I watched the first 30 or 40 minutes, then I began nodding off, in and out. I finally gave up and escaped. It was Jett and Cait‘s decision to rent it, and I didn’t have the character or the courage to argue or suggest an alternative. I sat there in an uncomfortable position on the couch (looking up and to the left), and submitted. I have no excuse.

The Black Phone struck me as fairly awful in a hand-me-down way. And I find it hugely depressing that it’s made $105 million so far. Millennial and Zoomer-aged horror fans have no taste — they’ll sit through anything. Oh, how I hate those Blumhouse horror chops — mulchy, derivative, eye-rolling.

My feelings of distaste quickly grew into repulsion, and very early on, I should add. And this 103-minute prsogrammer is composed of horror elements I’ve seen before and didn’t think anyone would have the guts to recycle — late ’70s suburban milieu, a child-killing, mask-wearing fiend in the Pennywise/Buffalo Bill/Freddy Krueger mold (aka “the Grabber,” a take-the-money-and-run performance by Ethan Hawke), a good-hearted but cowardly young hero (Mason Thames), a young girl with Shining-like psychic abilities (Madeleine McGraw), a cellar dungeon where the Grabber imprisons his victims (The Silence of the Lambs), doltish detectives, a boozy and abusive dad (Jeremy Davies). And it’s based on a short story by Stephen King‘s 50-year-old son, Joe Hill.

Derrickson and co-screenwriter C. Robert Cargill push every button and yank every lever they can think of, and very little amounts to anything I would call unnerving or even half-scary. Talking to The Grabber’s dead victims on a dead phone isn’t scary at all — it’s just “oh, okay, a device.” I counted two mild jolt moments. (Or maybe I dreamed them.) The feeling of being fed the same old mid-teen suburban horror tropes is terrible…it makes you feel trapped and drugged and humiliated. I wanted Davies’ scum-dad to somehow die, and I consider it ludicrous that (according to the Wiki synopsis) he ends up apologizing for his brutality.

The fact that moviegoers routinely buy into films of this calibre…I don’t want to think about it. But anyone who watches this film and says “hey, not bad”…that person is not in a good place, cinematically speaking.