Month: July 2022

Anthony and Joe Russo, directors of The Gray Man (Netflix, 7.22), have said that William Friedkin‘s To Live and Die in L.A., (’85) was an influence in the making of their new film, which struck me as wholly uninvolving and spiritually dead in a Grand Theft Auto sort of way.

Late yesterday afternoon a friend and I caught a screening of Friedkin’s film at Netflix’s flagship theatre in Manhattan, the Paris on 58th. It was my third or fourth viewing but my first in a theatre since ’85, and I was fairly blown away by the clarity of the screenplay, which was co-authored by Friedkin and Gerald Petievich.

Not only can you actually hear and understand the dialogue but — bonus! — you can follow the story on a plot point-by-plot point basis. The vast majority of today’s action thrillers are deliberately written in order to keep the viewer “behind” the narrative — you’re never completely on top of what’s going on, the nagging questions are never answered until the end and sometimes even a climactic windup isn’t enough due to sloppy confusion or loose ends.

To Live and Die in L.A. employs the same narrative discipline that Friedkin used in The French Connection, The Exorcist and Sorcerer. Shot in late ’84 or early ’85, but every inch a “’70s film.” At least by my understanding of that term.

And everyone is so young. William Petersen, pushing 70 as we speak, was 31 or 32 during filming, but he looks a good five years younger than he did as FBI agent Will Graham in Manhunter (’86). Willem Dafoe was 29 during filming, but he looks like a teenager. I didn’t like John Pankow‘s candy-ass treasury agent when I first saw this, but I still don’t like him today…he’s playing a wimpering little girl. Costar Dean Stockwell was in his late 40s. As Petersen’s blonde, hard-luck girlfriend, Darlanna Fluegel was intense and believable. Her career was in good shape throughout the ’80s and early ’90s, but she was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s in ’09 and died in 2017 at age 64.

…and the whole jerkwater girly-glam, gender-fluid fashion thing that he’s been statement-izing for a year or two…I guess I was interpreting this as a detour or phase of some kind…an exhibition thing that he wanted to embrace and which would run its course and then on to the next thing…but Styles and others seem to be settling into this anti-straight, anti-traditional-dude, embrace-the-pink-and-the-frilly fashion attitude, and I for one am feeling a bit irked and even (do I dare say this?) angry. I’m sick of his wearing pearl necklaces and transparent black-net sleeves and I don’t care if I sound harumphy. Harry Styles can honestly go fuck himself, and this, to me, has nothing to do with sexuality or gender issues. It has to do with simply being sick of this shit…okay?

Pics stolen from Vincent Boucher’s “Hollywood Men Are Having A Vibe Shift,” a 7.9 Ankler article.

Variety’s Gene Maddaus has posted a 7.18.22 article that summarizes recently unsealed 2010 transcripts about the decades-simmering Roman Polanski case, and more particularly the critical views of retired prosecutor Roger Gunson.

The gist is that 12 years ago Gunson believed that Judge Lawrence Rittenbrand (now deceased) was a bad apple who had rashly reneged on a plea deal with Polanski’s attorneys.

Is there anything new in these transcripts? Not if you’ve seen Marina Zenovich’s Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired (‘08) and her follow up doc, Roman Polanski: Odd Man Out (‘12). The whole Gunson critique and the Rittenbrand history is contained, explained and examined every which way.

Maddaus excerpt:

The long and the short is that the facts about Rittenbrand’s mishandling of this case have been available for well over a decade and damn near 15 years. It was mainly a matter of watching the first Zenovich doc; the second was dessert.

Frank Capra‘s Arsenic and Old Lace (’44), a broad macabre farce set in a Brooklyn rooming house, began as a hit Broadway play that opened in January 1941. (Here’s Brooks Atkinson’s N.Y. Times review.) Capra’s film shot sometime in late ’41 or early ’42, and was originally slated to open on 9.30.42. But the contract with the play’s producers stated that the film would not be released until the Broadway run ended. The play ran for for three and a half years (or until the summer of ’44), so the film wasn’t released until 9.1.44.

I first watched the Capra flick as a kid, and found it okay. I streamed a 480p version two or three years ago, and while I enjoyed Raymond Massey‘s performance (in the part created on the New York stage by Boris Karloff) and Peter Lorre‘s, I found it hyper and strenuous. It charges you up at first, but then it gradually wears you down. And how many thousands of times has the play been performed in high schools?

Criterion is releasing a “new 4K digital transfer” Bluray version on 10.11.22. It’ll look better than ever before, I’m sure, but would want to shell out $31 and change for a copy? Not I.

Chris Nolan wasn’t always a big-deal, big-budget, IMAX-fortified mythologist whose movies were invariably greeted as events. Once upon a time he was just a clever, regular-guy filmmaker. We’re talking about a five-year period when he made Following (’98), Memento (’00) and Insomnia (’02). That Nolan no longer exists, of course. He became CHRIS NOLAN in ’05 with Batman Begins and never looked back. But I miss the 29-year-old Memento guy…I really do.

Barbet Schroeder‘s Reversal of Fortune (’90) delivers one of my all-time favorite endings, which isn’t an “ending” as much ironic commentary about the mindset of a rich, very blase sociopath (Jeremy Irons‘ Claus von Bulow) and the difference between the “little people” and the Fifth Avenue elites who occasionally pop into this or that store. The scene happens between :50 and 1:25. HE comment: The checkout clerk had it coming because she was so unsubtle when she stared at the front page of the New York Post. She did it so blatantly that she forced Von Bulow to respond.

Mainstream media reporters and editors are generally forbidden…okay, discouraged from filing the kind of straight-from-the-shoulder Monkeypox report that Donald McNeil, the highly respected chronicler of pandemics who reported for The New York Times for decades, has posted on Common Sense.

Excerpt #1: “At the moment, unless you are a gay man with multiple or anonymous sex partners, you are probably at not much risk.”

Excerpt #2: “There are two effective vaccines for this disease and one solid treatment, [so] why are we losing the fight? I blame shortages of vaccines and tests, the initial hesitancy by squeamish health agencies to openly discuss who was most at risk, and the refusal of organizers of lucrative gay sex parties to cancel them over the past few months, even as evidence mounted that they are super-spreader events.”

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.