Day: October 6, 2023
Wimpiest Director Statement of All Time?
According to 2023 Hamptons Film Festival correspondent and HE friendo Bill McCuddy, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, the co-director of Nyad, doesn’t believe in directorial authority, at least as far as her relationship with her lead actors is concerned.
She and her co-director husband Jimmy Chin were apparently more into the idea of allowing their Nyad costars, Jodie Foster or Annette Bening, to take charge on the acting and go wherever their instincts lead them, regardless of any possible directorial viewpoints.
“I would never tell Jodie Foster or Annette Bening what to do,” Vasarhelyi said during some kind of post-screening q & a. “But they are the difference between fiction and non-fiction. The emotional story, the instincts, the craftmanship are very similar. You just have a lot more resources in fiction.”
I immediately wrote McCuddy and asked, “Did Vasarhelyi actually say this?”
Can anyone in the HE community imagine David Fincher saying, “I would never tell Jodie Foster or Annette Benning what to do”?
What is Vasarhelyi, some kind of pushover or kiss-ass?
Nobody did double backflips over Nyad in Telluride, I can tell you. It was respected but no one was going “oooh! oooh! oooh!”
Freidkin’s Ghost Out For Revenge
Down here on earth, the RT consensus is that David Gordon Green‘s The Exorcist: Believer is a stinker.
Costner’s Western Epic
A pre- and post-Civil War saga of the expansion and settlement of the American West.
Or perhaps a 21st century version of How The West Was Won…something along these lines?
There’s been some confusion about how many parts but I guess it’s down to two.
An apparently questionable passage from Kevin Costner‘s Wiki page reads as follows: “In August 2022, Costner began production on Horizon: An American Saga, a Western epic that will be split into at least four films, each just under three hours in length“…uhhm, no?
“Costner plans on the films being released over a series of months,” the excerpt explained. “Costner will act as director of the project and said the film was [first] proposed as an event television series. Production on the first film was expected to last at least 220 days, but was completed by November 2022. Production of the next films was underway by May 2023.”
The Horizon Wiki page calls it “an upcoming two-part American epic Western film co-written, produced, directed by and starring Kevin Costner. Costner also leads an extensive cast comprising of Sienna Miller, Sam Worthington, Jena Malone, Abbey Lee, Michael Rooker, Danny Huston, Luke Wilson, Isabelle Fuhrman, Jeff Fahey, Will Patton, Tatanka Means, Owen Crow Shoe, Ella Hunt, and Jamie Campbell Bower.
“Described as a two-part event, Chapter 1 will be released on June 28, 2024. Chapter 2 will later be released on August 16, 2024.”
Rock’s MLK Biopic: Great Man With Feet of Clay
Chris Rock knows that his forthcoming Martin Luther King biopic, reported yesterday by Deadline‘s Mike Fleming, can’t be hagiography.
This partly means that it has to get into MLK’s infidelities with white women, which the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover, armed with with secretly recorded motel-room tapes, tried to blackmail King with.
Years ago Oliver Stone and Paul Greengrass wanted to explore this aspect in their own respective King biopics, but both projects stalled. (Greengrass’s was titled Memphis.) On 1.17.14 Fleming reported the skinny.
If Rock paints a saintly, over-reverent portrait he’ll put everyone to sleep. Surely he understands this.
The fact that Rock’s untitled film is based upon Jonathan Eig’s “King: A Life” suggests that Rock will be taking at least something of a warts-and-all approach.
The book has been described by its publisher as an “intimate portrayal of King as a courageous but emotionally troubled individual who demanded peaceful protest while grappling with his own frailties and a government that hunted him.”
An 8.14.23 Amazon review by Bill Emblom states that Eig’s book “covers the adulteries that King was involved in…[the ones] that Hoover wanted to ensnare him in through bugging his phone or room at the Willard Hotel in Washington.”
Football star and actor Jim Brown was into white women also. Was this due to Brown being a somewhat frail, emotionally troubled guy, or was it because his tastes simply led him in this direction? Remember that Spartacus scene in which Laurence Olivier‘s Marcus Licinius Crassus says he enjoys both snails and oysters? Were Crassus’s appetites an outgrowth of his being an emotionally unstable fellow? As J.J. Hunsecker once said, “Are we kids or what?”
Steven Spielberg will executive produce via his Amblin with Kristie Macosko Krieger producing.
Gentle Reminder
Five and two thirds years ago (1.14.18) I posted a piece called “New Oscar Bait Hinges on Tribal Identity,” in which I attempted to gauge the pulse of Hollywood’s award-season wokesters.
Stand-out comment #1 was from filmklassik: “A bit cheeky to say ‘never ever again’ (because who the hell knows?), but yeah, in this particular cultural moment it is all about Tribal Identity. And what’s disturbing is, we have a whole generation now for whom Tribal representation is, to use one critic’s word, numinous. The under-40 crowd has invested Race, Gender and Sexuality with a kind of cosmic significance. It doesn’t mean a lot to them — it means everything to them. Indeed, much of their conversation and writing seems to always come back to it.”
Stand-out comment #2 was written by Dan Gaertner: “Will Jeff Wells, Sasha Stone and Tom O’Neil be around in 5 or 10 years? To the new millennial film/award race culture, they’re dinosaurs from another dimension. They don’t approach film, art, or awards in the same fashion. They are tuned into a completely different frequency.”
HE to Gaertner [10.6.23]: Sasha and I are definitely still around, and to our way of thinking we aren’t dinosaurs but sensible, feet-on-the-ground realists and straight talkers. Tom O’Neil used to be a tough nut, but he joined the wokester cabal eight years ago when Jay Penske purchased Gold Derby. O’Neil became a Gold Derby consensus manager more than an occasional opinion guy.
Similar Performance Seven Years Ago
Nearly seven years ago I noted something about Lily Gladstone‘s emoting as Jamie, a lovestruck ranch hand, in Kelly Reichardt‘s Certain Women. I noted that Gladstone’s quiet performance, which won her a Best Supporting Actress prize from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association (LAFCA), “registers in a demure, low-key way,” but is “more or less a one-note thing, expressive but largely non-verbal.”
Does that description remind anyone out there of a more recent Gladstone performance?
[“Unrequited Love is The Only Kind That Lasts,” posted on 12.6.16] For one brief moment yesterday, Lily Gladstone‘s performance as a smitten horse stable worker in Kelly Reichardt‘s Certain Women became a thing. Okay, it’s still a thing today. Perhaps her pop-through will gather a certain esteem between now and the announcement of Oscar nominations in January. Gladstone’s performance certainly registers in a distinct, low-key way, and it’s at least conceivable that Academy and guild members will take notice and vote for her. If, that is, they can get through Reichardt’s film, which has struck some (myself included) as a “watching paint dry” experience.
I didn’t need reminding but I’ll bet a lot of people had never given Gladstone’s turn a second thought until the Los Angeles Film Critics Association gave her their Best Supporting Actress award — a decision that seemed questionable if not eccentric given that it necessitated a blow-off of Michelle Williams‘ world-class emoting in Manchester By The Sea.
I certainly realized that Gladstone was a big stand-out element after watching Reichardt’s film at last January’s Sundance Film Festival. But her performance is more or less a one-note thing, expressive but largely non-verbal — “I’m a Belfry-residing stable hand who’s sad and isolated but deeply intoxicated with the idea of having Kristen Stewart as my lover, and I can’t wait for her next biweekly law class so I can sit there and ignore her teaching so I can just sink into her beauty.”
Gladstone freaks when Stewart’s character decides to stop commuting from Livingston to teach the Belfry class, and so she drives all the way to Livingston herself to tell Stewart that she’s got it bad for her — a confession that Stewart obviously doesn’t want to hear, much less deal with.