Day: October 20, 2022

For what it’s worth, I didn’t see this coming. I doubt if anyone did. Then again…

If I had been on the jury, I would have felt piqued by the time factor. The alleged incident happened in ‘86 when Kevin Spacey, now 63, was 26, and his accuser Anthony Rapp, now 50, was 14. I would have said “why are we dealing with this so many years after the fact? It happened 36 years ago.”

I experienced a few awful, hurtful things in my teens. Do I still feel angry or wounded about some of them? Yeah, but they happened a long-ass time ago. Move on, be here now.

Based on a Wikipedia link to figures from the California Film Division, I recently reported that Damien Chazelle’s Babylon (Paramount, 12.23) cost $110 million. That’s wrong, I was told today by a Paramount spokesperson. The tab was actually $78 million. Okay then.

Despite my admiration for all things Tony Gilroy, I still have yet to watch the seven-episode Andor. It is my solemn belief that doing so would be bad for my soul. Plus I don’t care for brown-and-beige color palettes.

Prince Charles and Lady Diana were the same height — 5′ 10″ — but not so much in Season 5 in The Crown (Netflix, 11.9).

Dominic West, who plays Charles, stands six feet even while the stork-like Elizabeth Debicki tops him by three inches. The obvious solution would have been for West to wear elevator shoes. Apparently that option was discarded.

The previous four Crown episodes have always been strong, classy and well-sculpted, but after Spencer who among us doesn’t feel Diana’ed out?

“Like 1917 before it, and like the better films that continue to inspire a concentratedly grisly mode of war picture (the epochal Russian film Come and See is explicitly referenced at least once, as is the more recent, and more problematic, The Painted Bird), All Quiet on the Western Front is state-of-the-art in shoving your nose in realistic-seeming carnage and possibly inducing hearing damage in laying on the ear-splitting aural experience of a firefight.

“The in-the-trenches tracking shots that Stanley Kubrick crafted for Paths of Glory (a movie that culminated in a point that actually made sense, unlike this muddle) are now steady hand-held digital panoramas of exposed viscera and agonized writhing. Filmmakers have arguably lost the plot, turning ‘war is hell’ into a ‘can you top this?’ competition.” — from Glenn Kenny’s 10.14 review.

Netflix will begin streaming Edward Berger‘s All Quiet on the Western Front on 10.28.22.

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But without street gangs or guns, and probably without a violent ending. Hanks’ Otto to new neighbor: “Ever notice how every once in a while you come across someone you shouldn’t be fucking with? That’s me”….not.
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Sony will release A Man Called Otto on 12.25. Produced by Hanks, Gary Goetzman and Rita Wilson, and directed by Marc Forster. Based on a 2015 Swedish film A Man Called Ove, directed by Hannes Holm. Shot earlier this year in Pittsburgh.

I for one really admired Antoine Fuqua and Denzel Washington‘s The Equalizer 2 (’16), and I have no problem with them making another one. We’re all cool, I’m presuming, with The Equalizer 3 currently filming on the Amalfi Coast — Atrani, Ravello, Minori. Bring it on, bruh.

There’s nothing wrong with being a respected, Sam Fuller-ish or Robert Aldrich-y hack who does genre films and efficiently at that**.

But it’s fair, surely, to ask if this might reflect upon the presumed prestige factor that some are attaching to Fuqua’s allegedly Oscar-calibre Emancipation (possibly “Fuqua’s best” according to Variety‘s Clayton Davis)? Runaway slave saga on one hand, whupass on the other…what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

** Although I hated, hated, HATED Fuqua’s The Magnificent Seven.

If only failed or otherwise repudiated chiefs of state could be ejected this swiftly in the U.S. Here’s a N.Y. Times recap.