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.
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.
In my book, the very first stirrings began in the early ‘80s (i.e., tits and zits). Things got worse in the ‘90s, especially with the release of deplorable crap like Jan DeBont’s Speed 2: Cruise Control. But the most corrosive and definitive dumb-down began with the ascent of Marvel and D.C. in the early 20teens.
Things have been dumbing-down all over…
It is my conviction that there are no awful discourses on Hollywood Elsewhere. Okay, now and then but mostly never. Even when the wokesters are repeating their broken-record bullshit (or, alternately, pleading with me to post only about movies and leave cultural politics out of it), there is always the eloquent, brilliantly phrased filmklassik ready to jump in at short notice.
It was around dusk and peaceful in the ancient section of Rome on 6.2.17. My Macbook Pro was sitting on a small round table on a narrow cobblestoned street. I was using the wifi from a cafe called Barnum Roma (Via del Pellegrino, 87, 00186 Roma, Italy), and for a moment I stopped and stood up and took a slow-pan video, and as God is my witness it was one of the happiest moments of my life.
It doesn’t matter how long my Barnum Roma time lasted (an hour or so) — what matters is how serene and in-the-pocket I felt when I was standing there. It still gets me off just to watch this.
I’ll always be a fan of Al Pacino‘s big speech at the end of The Devil’s Advocate, but Keanu Reeves makes a re-watch so difficult. He’s stuck with all the clunky lines, of course, but the yelling, the anger and denial and pulling out the gun with that dumb glare on his face….everything he says and does is truly terrible.
This tediously moralistic Taylor Hackford film is 25 years old now, and if you ask me Pacino’s John Milton was at least partly based upon Donald Trump. (The producers rented Trump’s apartment for a scene, I’ve read.) The screenwriters were Jonathan Lemkin and Tony Gilroy, but the maestro behind Pacino’s big soliloquy was Gilroy, or so I’ve always understood.
I just want Ana Faris to know that I understand and support her journey, present and past. Life is hard and Hollywood is a jungle, and no one should ever regard the slapping of an actress’s ass as anything but wildly inappropriate, and that the perpetrator should have his own ass paddled until it’s pink and sore.
If I had been cast in a supporting role in Ivan Reitman‘s My Super Ex-Girlfriend (’06), and if Reitman had yelled at me, as he did with the 26-year-old Faris on the first day of shooting, my feelings would have definitely been hurt. I might have even been ““angry, hurt and humiliated,” as Faris recently told Lena Dunham on her Unqualified podcast.
If Reitman had slapped my ass, I would have been mortified. No, wait…I wouldn’t have been mortified. I would have reared around and slapped him across the chops, as Dustin Hoffman‘s Dorothy does to Dabney Coleman‘s sexist pig director in Tootsie (’82). Reitman surely saw Tootsie and understood that ass slapping isn’t cool, and yet, according to Faris, he did it anyway.
Faris to Dunham: “One of my hardest film experiences was with Ivan Reitman. I mean, the idea of attempting to make a comedy under this, like, reign of terror, he was a yeller. He would bring down somebody every day…and my first day, it was me.”
Posted on 3.22.16: “The single most terrifying film about death is Michael Tolkin‘s The Rapture (’91). Not death itself but the kind envisioned by fundamentalist Christian wackos. One look at that film and you’ll be able to at least consider the idea that hardcore Christians have taken something naturally serene and peaceful and created a terrifying new-age mythology that would give Satan pause.
“I need to amend what I just said, in fact — The Rapture is one of the most most terrifying films ever, about anything.”
