Month: August 2022

A press release has gone out about Rian Johnson‘s Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (Netflix, 12.23). The film, partly set on the Greek island of Spetses, will star Daniel Craig as Detective Benoit Blanc and costar Edward Norton, Janelle Monáe, Kathryn Hahn, Leslie Odom Jr., Jessica Henwick, Madelyn Cline, Kate Hudson and Dave Bautista.

One of the two photos in the Glass Onion press release is a shot of director-writer Johnson and Monae. Which suggests that Monae, Craig aside, has the lead protagonist role. Which means she’s probably playing an equivalent of the Ana de Armas role in the original Knives Out — a pure of heart, relatively innocent, non-white woman up against a demimonde of scurvy, slimy skunks and serpents.

Norton, I’m guessing, has the Chris Plummer role, except given Glass Onion‘s Mediterranean vacation vibe…well, let’s just use our imagination and presume that Norton’s character is at least partly inspired by the cruel, manipulative James Coburn character in The Last of Sheila. Or something in this vein. Why hire the rapscallion Norton if you don’t want him to play edgy and a tiny bit wicked?

Sheila, which played with the same kind of Agatha Christie “whodnit?” formula that the Knives Out films are modelled upon, was shot along the French Cote d’Azur.

Which reminds me: how come Johnson and his producers chose Spetses for their Greek location when Maggie Gyllennhaal and Olivia Colman‘s The Lost Daughter shot there only a couple of years before? Of all the hundreds of exotic Greek island locations they chose the same damn island?

Netflix paid $468 million for rights to both Knives Out sequels, but the actual production budget (per Wiki) was only a little more than $40 million with over $100 million in fees paid to Johnson, Daniel Craig and producer Ram Bergman for their work on both productions. (Nice payday!) That totals out to $140 million and change, maybe a bit more. Call it $150 million.

That leaves roughly $318 million in expenditures for the second sequel. What is Johnson going to shoot in that second sequel? Will he sink a 300-foot yacht a la Titanic and then stage a battle between the cast and the Kraken from Clash of the Titans?

Sorry but I’m only going by the numbers in the Wiki page.

The $468 million paid by Netflix (a result of a bidding war) is humungous, historic. Last year a well-placed source told Variety‘s Claudia Eller that “the math doesn’t work…there’s no way to explain it…the world has gone mad…it’s a mind-boggling deal.”

As one who knew and even hung a couple of times with Leon Vitali, the former actor and devoted Stanley Kubrick associate throughout the ’70s, 80s and’ 90s, and as one who badgered him a few times during the Barry Lyndon aspect-ratio brouhaha of 2011, I’m very sorry to hear that he’s passed.

I loved Filmworker, Tony Zierra‘s 2017 documentary about Leon and his historic life. I’ll probably watch it again tonight.

Leon was a fine fellow and a true believer. He understood hardcore devotion as well as anyone I’ve ever known in this racket has.

Longtime HE readers will recall the Barry Lyndon aspect ratio contretemps, which ranged between 5.23.11 and 6.21.11. Retained by Warner Home Video as a technical consultant on a spate of Kubrick Blurays, Vitali insisted that the WHV Lyndon Bluray be issued at 1.77:1 rather than 1.66:1, an a.r. previously adopted when WHV released the 1975 classic on laser disc.

I hit the roof when I read about this. I argued, howled, seethed.

Then Glenn Kenny posted a 12.8.75 “smoking gun” letter, leaked by Jay Cocks and written by Kubrick and sent to U.S. exhibitors. It stated that Barry Lyndon had been shot in 1.66 and should ideally be projected this way.

The Lyndon debate was of the most bitterly fought and not incidentally triumphant a.r. battles in Hollywood Elsewhere history, the other being the Shane a.r. battle of 2013.

It took me a few months to catch up with Eskil Vogt‘s The Innocents. I finally streamed it last night, and wow…easily one of the most unusual and strikingly rendered creep-out films I’ve ever seen. A series of eerie, first-rate jolts that accumulate into a feeling of being sucked in and tied down. And yet a film that leads to a moral reckoning.

It definitely ranks alongside The Witch and The Babadook and films of that ilk, films aimed well above the heads of your average horror-loving sloths who prefer the usual formulaic slasher crap. I’m not, however, calling it a slice of elevated horror because Vogt, who also co-wrote the screenplay of Joachim Trier‘s The Worst Person in the World, never allows the film to step into flat-out psycho screamville. But he certainly gives you the willies.

And I loved the fact that The Innocents focuses entirely on four pre-pubescent children living in a high-rise Oslo apartment complex, and what they’re seeing, feeling, channelling and manipulating by way of ESP, mind-reading and telekinesis, and how their parents never realize what’s actually going on. Start to finish the parents don’t have clue #1.

It’s about one of these kids (Sam Ashraf‘s Ben, a ten-year-old of Indian descent who lives with his single mom) having discovered the ability to move small objects via telekinesis, and Ben revealing this gift to Ida (Rakel Lenora Flottum), a quietly observant lass of relatively few words (or certainly when her mom and dad are around) who seems around eight years old. Ida has an older sister, Anna (Alva Brynsmo Ramstad), who’s suffering from non-verbal austism, and yet once Ben allows them to marvel at his special abilities Ida and Anna start to acquire a vague form of ESP and mind-reading on their own.

Soon added to this equation is Aisha (Mina Yasmin Bremseth Asheim), an eight-year-old neighbor with vitiligo who intuitively “reads” Anna, who in turn gradually starts to communicate and even talk as she picks up on the tremor-like powers of the vaguely weird Ben.

Alas, Ben soon reveals himself to be a demonic little sadist who doesn’t blink an eye as he drops Aisha’s cat from a high stairwell, and then crushes the poor thing’s head. And that’s just the beginning of the killings. I won’t reveal Ben’s other victims, but I did find fault in the matter of a certain adult who winds up dead on a kitchen floor. Ben is no dummy, and he surely understands that dead bodies have to be buried or burnt or they’ll stink the place up. I don’t know why Ben (i.e., Vogt) doesn’t attend to this basic no–brainer situation.

Telekinesis, thought transference…you can sense early on that increasing weirdness is right around the corner, and that Ben will eventually turn into a version of that little Twilight Zone shit from 60 years ago who flatlined people he didn’t like and turned one alcoholic neighbor into a jack-in-the-box and then buried him 50 feet under a cornfield.

This is a very effective, highly original, low-key children’s tale that puts the hook in (it actually feels like a kind of serum) and never lets up.

Ben and his mom, of course, are immigrants of color (ditto Aisha and her mom). If and when The Innocents is remade for American audiences there’s no way the evil Ben character will be played by a young actor of color, and certainly not by a kid of African-American descent. Non-white actors of whatever age cannot play demonic killers. Okay, it’s possible, I suppose, but highly unlikely.

The Innocents premiered in Cannes under the Un Certain Regard program, but I wasn’t there. Nor was I at Austin’s Fantastic Fest when it showed there in September ’21. IFC picked it up but did the film no favors by labelling it as an IFC Midnight thing, which suggests it’s a genre film aimed at low-rent horror fans. It’s much better than that — it’s an elegant, odd little spooker that could have been a Jack Clayton or Roman Polanski film in the mid ’60s.