Day: October 27, 2022

Austrian Lethargy

by

After debuting last May in Cannes and hitting several film festivals and opening worldwide over the last three or four months, Marie Kreutzer‘s Corsage (IFC Films) will open stateside on 12.23 — one of the last significant commercial bookings.

Third to last actually.  The historical drama opens in England on 12.30.22, and in France on 1.25.23.

“Royally Uninterested,” posted on 5.20.l22: “I regret reporting that Corsage, which screened at 11 am this morning, didn’t sit well. I found it flat, boring, listless.

“The Austrian empress Elizabeth (Vicky Krieps) is bored with her royal life, and the director spares no effort in persuading the audience to feel the same way.

“Krieps plays up the indifference, irreverence and existential who-gives-a-shit?.  

“Somewhere during Act Two a royal physician recommends heroin as a remedy for her spiritual troubles, and of course she develops a habit. I was immediately thinking what a pleasure it would be to snort horse along with her, or at least during the screening.

“Corsage is unfortunately akin to Pablo Larrain‘s Spencer and Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette — stories of women of title and privilege who feel alienated and unhappy and at a general loss. I’m sorry but this movie suffocates the soul.

“In actuality Empress Elizabeth was assassinated in 1898, at age 51. For some reason Kreutzer has chosen to end the life of Krieps’ Elizabeth at a younger point in her life, and due to a different misfortune.

“This is one of the most deflating and depressing films I’ve ever seen.”

Movies That Have Ended Friendships

by

Everything’s cool now (I think), but for three or four days a close friend was giving me the cold-shoulder treatment because I’m not a fan of Martin McDonagh‘s The Banshees of Inisherin.

The truth is that I am a fan of some of it but I couldn’t abide the idea of a significant fiddle-playing character mutilating himself in order to emphasize to a former friend (a non-musician) that he really, really doesn’t want to chit-chat anymore.

I’m sorry but I found this behavior to be incomprehensible, not to mention repugnant.

HE to friendo: “Banshees obviously has its virtues and charms and its pictorial beauty and whatnot, but the [afore-mentioned nihilism] is ridiculous. THR‘s Scott Feinberg isn’t demonic for sharing my reaction or vice versa. There are many sane people out there who’ve found this film mystifying. I really don’t think I deserve to be shunned or banished for feeling this way. I respect many things about it. It’s not ‘bad’ as much as infuriating.”

Observational friendo #2: “[Sometimes movie lovers] will invest the year-end movie contest with an unreasonable ideological fervor. And thus Banshees, like Belfast, is somehow praised as a great film with traditional, classic, old-fashioned and in some ways masculine virtues…a film that that all good people must rally behind. In disliking Banshees you were pissing on The Cause.

“We’re all looking for an Oscar movie to keep The Dream alive. But once a special film is discovered and praised in certain quarters, people who don’t like it are somehow annihilating the dream.”

HE regulars are asked to recount stories about friendships and relationships that went through a bad patch or were even torn asunder due to a major disagreement over a film.

Still Tiptoe-ing Through Wakanda Tulips

by

On 2.6.18, I stated a bedrock emotional truth that few others would cop to, which was that white critics were afraid to not praise Black Panther. Ryan Coogler’s 2018 Marvel blockbuster is being celebrated right now as a better film than Wakanda Forever, but don’t forget that the first 75 minutes of Black Panther weren’t all that great, and the final hour was the only part worth writing home about.

My article was titled “Critics Are Tip Toe-ing Around Black Panther Truth“:

On 1.31 I posted a qualified capsule rave of Ryan Coogler‘s Black Panther (Disney, 2.16). More precisely I raved about the final hour while lamenting that the first 75 minutes are largely lacking in narrative tension and are mostly about set-up, diversion, pageantry and obligatory battle and car-chase action sequences for their own sakes. All through the first hour-plus I was worried. I was asking myself “when is this film going to get it together and start moving purposefully in a direction that we all want it to go in?”

And then it finally does that, and it’s all exuberant, pedal-to-the-metal, forward-motion engagement. But you’ll need to scrutinize the recently-posted Black Panther reviews with a fine tooth comb to find even a hint of acknowledgment that it waits and waits and waits to really rev up the T-bird and put the rubber to the road.

Read more

Big Curtis Night

by

Early next year, Roger Durling‘s Santa Barbara Film Festival will present the 2023 Maltin Modern Master award to Jamie Lee Curtis. Not because of her legendary scream queen rep (recently underlined by her starring role in Halloween Kills) but because of her broad performance as a wackjobby IRS agent in A24’s Everything Everywhere All At Once**.

We all respect the endurance (persistence?) of Curtis’s career, but the truth is that Everything Everywhere aside she hasn’t been in any reasonably good films in over 20 years. I’m not being mean — that’s just factual.

Curtis’s peak years were from the late ’70s to mid ’90s, and principally in the ’80s. Her three finest films, in this order, are Charles Crichton and John Cleese‘s A Fish Called Wanda (’88), John Landis‘s Trading Places (’83) and James Cameron‘s True Lies (’94).

Other noteworthy JLC vehicles, listed sequentially, are Halloween (’78), The Fog (’80), Love Letters (’83), James Bridges‘ Perfect (’85), Diane Kurys‘ A Man in Love (’85), Kathryn Bigelow‘s Blue Steel (’90), John Boorman‘s The Tailor of Panama (’01) and Rian Johnson‘s Knives Out (’19).

HE to Durling: The perfect presenter of the actual award would be John Carpenter, to whom Curtis owes her entire breadwinning career.

** The perfect ending aside, I mostly loathed this curiously successful film. but that’s water under the bridge.

Read more

That’s Correct, Frosty — I Don’t Believe You

by

All hail the truth-telling, no-holds-barred, non-ass-kissing Scott Mantz…a movie-obsessed Colossus of Rhodes among men!

Mantz #1: “WAKANDA FOREVER isn’t as good as BLACK PANTHER (I mean, how could it be?), but even so, it’s still a mixed bag. The first half is slow, hard to follow and lacks focus, but it gets better as it goes [along], and the last 30 minutes are great with an emotional payoff.”

Mantz gave WAKANDA a B grade but we all know what that probably means, given the usual “let’s be polite since we were invited to the premiere” factor — it means C for “not bad but sorta kinda faintly blows except for the ending.”

Scott Mendelson, Forbes: “WAKANDA FOREVER entertains but spends way too much time setting up future MCU projects and coping with its non-fiction tragedy. It also often feels like a mix-and-match of prior (frankly inferior) Marvel movies. Works best when it’s just allowed to be Black Panther 2”

I’d like to ask the HE faithful a question, and while I understand that wokesters are incapable of actual honesty, I’d really appreciate honest answers from the East Berlin truth-tellers. Are you sincerely interested in hauling your blubbery asses down to a megaplex so you can immerse yourself in “a beautiful study of grief” that lasts 161 minutes?