Day: September 26, 2024

Two or three nights ago I watched Judd Apatow‘s Trainwreck again. God, what a cleverly written and affectingly acted hip romcom…loved it for the fourth or fifth time!

Amy Schumer is wickedly hilarious and a total pistolero, and that she also shifts into downshift mode and opens herself up emotionally in ways that truly floored me. I love how you can read each and every flickering emotion and thought that passes through her lightning-fast brain — all at the drop of a hat.

Schumer tears up and touches bottom and whacks the ball just as hard and long as Jennifer Lawrence did in Silver Linings Playbook, and we all know what happened there. She’s delivering something brand new (obviously based on her standup persona and whomever she is deep down) but at the same time channelling the freshness of Judy Holliday and Jack Lemmon during his peak period in the late ’50s and early ’60s.

Trainwreck is dryly hilarious and smoothly brilliant and damn near perfect. It’s the finest, funniest, most confident, emotionally open-hearted and skillful film Apatow has ever made, hands down. I was feeling the chills plus a wonderful sense of comfort and assurance less than five minutes in. Wow, this is good…no, it’s better…God, what a relief…no moaning or leaning forward or covering my face with my hands…pleasure cruise.

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I finally saw Wolfs yesterday, and I found it…uhm, moderately absorbing. It’s a dry, droll “crime comedy” (i.e., the kind you might snicker at) that unfolds in grade-A fashion, and while I was never riveted or excited it never pissed me off.

The laid-back, wiseacre performances from George Clooney and Brad Pitt are quite skillful and effective, and the supporting cast (which includes Austin Abrams, a dorky-looking guy I’d never heard of, and Zlatko Buric, the fat, white-haired Triangle of Sadness guy) are certainly interesting. Plus the production values are above-average.

I therefore felt placated except at the very end when the soundtrack played Bill Withers‘ “Just The Two Of Us“…fuck you! Take your cloying suggestion that a Wolfs sequel might be a good idea….ram it sideways!

There’s a nifty little scene in which Richard Kind, playing Abrams’ oddball dad, goes into a riff about Frank Sinatra‘s notorious unwillingness to perform more than one take while shooting a scene. Kind talks about Sinatra refusing to fully give it up for the shooting of the stacked-deck Queen oF Hearts sequence in The Manchurian Candidate (’62) despite the dp (Lionel Lindon) having informed director John Frankenheimer that he’d screwed up the shot by failing to capture Sinatra in sharp focus. This was appalling behavior on Frank’s part. The blurry MCU of him talking to Laurence Harvey throws you off every time. Your mind keeps saying, “Why is Harvey in focus but Sinatra isn’t?”

And I really, really don’t care about what may be darkening the brow of Angelina Jolie.

In yesterday’s (9.25) Deadline piece about award-season hotties thus far, Pete Hammond explained the particular appeal of Ali Abassi’s The Apprentice, which HE has been steadily praising since last May’s Cannes Film Festival:

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The Wild One’s Wikipedia page includes no mention of Hot Blood as an alternate title, but it was clearly in mind when the below publicity photo featuring Marlon Brando and costar Mary Murphy was captioned. I for one have never heard Hot Blood mentioned as a Brando-adjacent thing.

“Hot blooded” generally refers to erotic passion, which has little to do with what is dramatized in The Wild One.

HE to friendly tipster: Okay, thanks much — I’ll certainly watch but you know something? I’m sick of this noise. There are too many streaming shows, too much content, too many urgent, over-the-top claims of this or that eight-episode limited series allegedly radiating a kind of greatness that hasn’t been felt before…a cross between an amazing discharge and “wait, hold up, I can’t breathe”…there’s just too damn much digital information surging in like a broken water main and suffocating the soul, and after a certain point of endless saturation this gradually results in an instinct to reject almost all of this shite because the avalanche of content-content-and-more-fecking-content instills a terrible feeling of emptiness and busy-ness…a feeling of chaos..a drowning of the spirit…a sense that there’s no real clarity in the air…a feeling of unchecked insanity.

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