Month: January 2023

Origins of Bullshit Fantasy Combat

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1.27.23 press release: “A stunning 4K restoration of Ang Lee’s masterful Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon will open in theatres on Friday, 2.17. More than a breathtaking martial arts film, CTHD is a tragic romance and a touchstone of female empowerment.”

I loved Crouching Tiger and all, but it’s no secret there are more ardent fans of martial-arts movies than myself. I like aerial chop-socky the way I like musical numbers in a ’50s Arthur Freed musical — visually exciting and beautifully performed, etc., but if there’s too much exposure to restricted worlds of this sort you can start to go a bit nuts. Sublime choreography, Chinese mythology, inspired cutting…I get it but alright already.

Makers of idiotic steroid action films have been ignoring the basic laws of physics for a good 20 years or so, particularly since the wowser debut of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (’00) and the use of “wire guys” to allow heroes to leap anywhere from anything and land in a cool way like Superman.

In the HE book there is only one way to go with action films, and that is the path of mostly believable, bare-bones, “this could actually happen in the real world” physicality adhered to in Nicholas Winding Refn‘s Drive, Steven Soderbergh‘s Haywire and Peter Yates‘ Bullitt. All the rest is bullshit and you know it.

35 years ago Lethal Weapon used a funny jumping-off-a-building gag. Ragged-edge cop Mel Gibson is sent to the top of a four-story building in West Hollywood to talk an unstable guy out of making a suicide leap. Gibson winds up cuffing himself to the guy and jumping off the building, and they’re both falling to their deaths…not. They land on one of those huge inflated tent-sized bags…whomp!…that cops and firemen use to save people. All is well.

Flash forward to another jumping-off-a-building scene in Brad Bird and Tom Cruise‘s Mission: impossible 4 — Ghost Protocol (’11). An American operative is being chased over a rooftop by baddies in Budapest. He fires some rounds, kills a couple of guys, and then escapes by leaping off the building, continuing to shoot as he falls four or five stories to the pavement below. He’s saved, however, when he lands on a modest air mattress that’s about one-tenth the size of Lethal Weapon‘s tent-sized bag.

Where did this miracle air mattress come from? We’re not told. In what physical realm does a guy leap backwards four stories onto an air mattress that’s a little bit larger than a king-sized bed and live? I’ll tell you what realm. The realm of Mission: Impossible 4 — Ghost Protocol and its brethren.

Big-budget acton movies have ignored the laws of what happens when you jump or fall from any kind of height for so long nobody cares any more. You can do any stupid thing you want — jump off any building or bridge or moving airplane — and you can land safely, and audiences will still buy their tickets and eat their popcorn. Nothing matters.

And a good portion of this is Ang Lee’s fault.

Riseborough Convulsions

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If Hollywood Elsewhere had Roger Durling‘s job as director of the Santa Barbara Int’l Film Festival, right now I’d be doing everything I could to add Andrea Riseborough to the SBIFF Virtuosos panel. She has to be included…no debate!

The current Virtuosos lineup includes Austin Butler (Elvis), Kerry Condon (The Banshees of Inisherin), Danielle Deadwyler (Till), Nina Hoss (Tár), Stephanie Hsu (Everything Everywhere All At Once), Jeremy Pope (The Inspection), Ke Huy Quan (Everything Everywhere All At Once), and Jeremy Strong (Armageddon Time).

The Academy’s statement, by the way, is merely about straddling the gulf between (a) ass-covering and (b) placating the conversation.

Read Pete Hammond’s excellent “Much Ado About Nothing” assessment.

Slim Pickens

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The only February ’23 releases I’m vaguely looking forward to are M. Night Shyamalan‘s Knock at the Cabin (2.3), Steven Soderbergh‘s Magic Mike’s Last Dance (2,10) and Elizabeth Banks‘ Cocaine Bear (2.24), although the premise of the latter seems repulsive — deriving laughs and thrills from the accidental torture murder of an innocent bear, which actually happened in the ’80s.

I’m told that Benjamin Caron‘s Sharper might be worth a watch. I’m not looking forward to Neil Jordan‘s Marlowe (2.3), as it allegedly stinks, but I’ll see it regardless.

Imagine Having The Temerity or Gall

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…to post this Sandra Bullock pull quote within Jessica Pressler’s Vanity Fair profile of Channing Tatum (“Magic Man”). I mean, that is a really terrible observation. I don’t care if Bullock said this with sincerity. It just reeks of bullshit.

The article is about promoting Magic Mike’s Last Dance (Warner Bros., 2.10.23), in which Tatum revives his most iconic role. He also produced. Steven Soderbergh directed.

It was reported last April that Tatum had fired MMLD costar Thandiwe Newton during production in London. It apparently had something to do with a fierce (if seemingly ridiculous) argument that Tatum and Newton had gotten into over the then-recent Will Smith Oscar slap. Tatum replaced Newton with Salma Hayek. I naturally expected Pressler to explore what actually happened and maybe deliver some blow-by-blow, but nope.

Tatum looks good — I’ll give him that.

Severance, Sloane, Monkey Bar, etc.

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We’ve all been touched by that haunting Citizen Kane moment when the elderly Mr. Bernstein (Everett Sloane) recalls glimpsing a beautiful young lass in a white dress on the Staten Island ferry. No conversation or eye contact — just a glancing whatever when Bernstein saw her and melted, and then the ferry pulled out and that was it…”I only saw her for one second and she didn’t see me at all, but I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since that I haven’t thought of that girl.”

Being the impressionable type and certainly a lot more impressionable than Bernstein, I’ve experienced several such moments over the decades. Probably dozens. But there was one in particular…oh, man. Early Clinton era, ’93 or ’94…yours truly inside West Hollywood’s Monkey Bar (8225 Beverly Blvd.), a highly magnetized, hard-to-get-into joint that had opened in October ’92 with a general understanding that Jack Nicholson liked to drop by now and then…probably the hottest place in California or maybe even the world that night. How do you calculate this stuff?

And suddenly my gaze fell upon actress Joan Severance, a total smoke show and a reasonably decent actress who was known for Red Shoe Diaries and Lake Consequence…around 35 at the time. Severance had risen from her seat at a well-located table and was staring at something or someone across the room, and my first thought was “she’s standing there because she knows everyone is looking at her and she loves the attention, and who can blame her?”

But my God, the beauty…those eyes, the cheekbones and that mouth, that exquisite jawline and the perfect hair and tanned skin…nothing happened and she certainly didn’t notice my marginal journalistic ass, standing at the bar some 30 or 40 feet away. But here we are 30 years later and this moment is a memory tattoo.

One reason I want to see Frances O’Connor‘s Emily is because of Emma Mackey, who has a bit of that Severance thing going on. She plays the titular role of “Wuthering Heights” author Emily Bronte.

Riseborough Pile-On Veers Into Realm of Dicey Accusation

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As I’ve said two or three times, I didn’t feel a great deal of affection for or emotional alignment with Andrea Riseborough’s performance as an all-but-incorrigible drunk in To Leslie, which relatively few have seen. Released by Momentum Pictures on 10.7.22, the film has earned a bit more than $27K so far.

To Leslie is, however, being re-released this weekend in the wake of Riseborough landing a Best Actress nomination, which was totally surprising and seat-of-the-pants. But there’s an odd (do I mean oddly hysterical?) side angle to this.

Hold onto your hats, but certain industry voices and at least one industry analyst are viewing the Riseborough insurgency with a degree of SJW alarm, suggesting that there was something (no invention or exaggeration) bluntly racist about it. “Racially-tinged cronyism”! A grass-roots campaign fortified by “a network of powerful (and, let’s be honest, white) friends in the Academy”!

From Matthew Belloni’s latest “What I’m Hearing” column:

If you have any sporting blood you have to at least half-admire the fact that Team Riseborough (led by actress Mary McCormack, wife of To Leslie director Michael Morris, with vigorous assistance from Frances Fisher) managed to land Riseborough a Best Actress nomination. They basically mounted a grass-roots social-network campaign, but one that may have been “illegal,” according to Belloni.

If the general consensus was, in an alternate universe, that the Riseborough campaign had elbowed aside a couple of deserving paleface actresses instead of Viola Davis and Danielle Deadwyler, does anyone think that Belloni or anyone else would be talking about illegality?

Renegade Oscar campaigns go all the way back to The Alamo’s Chill Wills. It’s sometimes a rough and tumble game, and there are always questions and quibbles about tactics and line-crossings. But from this moment on, Andrea Riseborough is a name, a star, even a legend.

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Excellent Lede!

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Did I not say a few days ago that I smelled trouble after watching the trailer for Shrinking (Apple, 1.27)?

From Martin Robinson‘s recent review:

“The big question that comes from watching the new therapist comedy Shrinking, is: are there therapists who can help those who watched Shrinking?

“Oh boy, this is…bad. Which is very disappointing, because it looked great on paper. Jason Segel — has there been a more likeable actor ever? Harrison Ford — has there ever been a more beloved film icon? And though they may try hard (well, Segel tries hard; Ford phones it in, but that’s to be expected, he practically invented phoning it in the moment an Ewok starting hugging his leg in Return of the Jedi), the show has a death wish with regards to sentimentality: every pithy or mildly bruising encounter is followed by a plunge off a cliff into yet another musical montage of people bonding.

“Shrinking is about a therapist called Jimmy (Segel) whose wife has died, leading him into a breakdown in which he starts telling his clients what he really thinks about them and their problems. Much to the disdain of his curmudgeonly boss at the clinic, Paul (Ford), who has Parkinson’s and his own grief to deal with.

“It’s not a bad set-up, and you could imagine, say, Vince Gilligan bringing out all the darkly funny shades within that story. But here, Segel along with fellow co-creators Brett Goldstein (Ted Lasso) and Bill Lawrence (Scrubs), can’t seem to help but keep things easy and breezy and outright nauseating.

“So while our first sight of Jimmy is of him drinking and doing prescription drugs in his pool with two prostitutes while his teenage daughter is asleep inside the house, he’s really nice and shuts everything down when his neighbor complains, and… well, that’s the last we see of him doing anything self-destructive on the drink or drug related. That’s some addiction.”

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