In his 9.18.17 review, Indiewire‘s David Ehrlich called Susanna White‘s Woman Walks Ahead (A24, 6.29) “a listless but lustrously shot biopic that suffers from its slippery grasp of history, all of its narrative thrust slipping through the cracks between fact and fiction.
“The scenes between Catherine Weldon (Jessica Chastain) and Chief Sitting Bull (Michael Greyeyes) are pleasant enough, as both actors have the charisma required to power through the many dull stretches of Steven Knight’s patchy script, which always feels a bit too much like a first draft.
“Would this have been a better film if it didn’t pretend that Sitting Bull didn’t have a wife, erasing her in favor of some unresolved sexual tension? It’s hard to say, but it certainly would have been a more interesting one. As it stands, the two characters form a tenuous bond that the movie doesn’t have the courage to test; we just take it for granted that Sitting Bull should care more for this wayward white lady than he does any of his own people.
Less than ten minutes into Anthony and Joe Russo‘s Avengers: Infinity War (Disney, 4.27), I felt as if Josh Brolin‘s Thanos had leapt out of the screen and was sitting on my chest and blowing his stinking breath into my face. I also felt like a little kitten about to be given a bath in the kitchen sink. “Mew, mew…I don’t want to endure this…nooooo!”
But I had to because I wanted to experience the latest big Marvel flick, and I was seriously excited about…well, who knew but the death of Robert Downey, Jr.‘s Tony Stark had been rumored, and I wanted to at least celebrate this. Please. I was down with Iron Man a decade ago, but then Downey became the Reigning Marvel Paycheck Whore and for that he must pay.
I promised yesterday that I wouldn’t spoil any deaths in this film, but can I at least say that (a) the wrong guys die, (b) not enough guys die, and (c) you can’t trust a Marvel film to deliver death with any finality because Kevin Feige doesn’t respect death any more than comic-book creators respect it, which is not at all? Or woundings, for that matter? The MCU mostly regards death and serious physical injury as a tease, a plot toy, something to fiddle or fuck with until the apparently dead character comes back to life, etc.
So fuck this movie in general for slamming and pounding and gouging the Avengers all to hell with next to no consequence, and for taking 150 minutes to deliver, and fuck Thanos (I prefer to call him Thermos or Thorax) and his stupid ugly alien henchmen for failing to simply rip the heads off their opponents. Wanna kill someone? Simple — separate their heads from their bodies and then eat their inner organs like African wild dogs. Do that and they’ll never come back to life.
The press people at my 10 am screening were laughing, whooping, giggling and occasionally even cooing. “Hoo-hoo…hah-hah…oooh! oooh!” I hated sitting near them. I hate that there’s this whole culture of people who live for this Marvel crap. Okay, not all Marvel films (I’m an Ant-Man fan) but this one’s a bear to sit through. Too many characters, and the sound system at the El Capitan obscured a good 60% of the dialogue, and I was cupping my ears left and right. I’m also dismayed to report that poor Chris Pratt looks fat again. Jesus God, this guy can’t fucking control himself. He looks like Mr. Cheeseburger and fries with a pint of Ben and Jerry’s.
Marvel superhero dialogue formula: (a) Announce recent occurence or plot turn in a serious, grim-faced way, (b) somebody replies to serious, grim-faced announcement with their own doleful, “this isn’t funny” assessment of the situation, (c) the first guy says that what’s happening is really fucking bad and maybe worse than that, (d) somebody who’s listening or who was speaking about the bad thing earlier drops a deadpan wisecrack of some kind, and (e) people at Los Angeles press screenings howl with laughter. Wash, rinse, repeat.
When I was 19 I was beaten up by three or four goons in a diner once. Punched, kicked, gouged. I took the first swing but I went down fast. There were three or four guys with me so it was the Jets vs. Sharks. I remember being on the floor and looking up at everyone punching and shoving as my head began to swell to twice its size. I was amazed how much it hurt. In the decades that followed I never felt so beaten to a pulp. Until this morning, that is.
That fucker Feige stomped on my ass. Feige, the Russos, Thorax, Downey, Chris Evans…they don’t fight fair, and they don’t know when to quit. I felt bruised, broken. Between blows I looked at my watch at least three if not four or five times. I felt as it I was dying of cancer. The sixth time I looked at my watch I realized there was another half-hour to go. “God help me!” I said out loud.
Last year’s Cinemacon wasn’t entirely about promoting the kind of entertainment that I call “generic superjizz” — the same assaultive, gutslamming, ear-splitting, cartoon-like, aimed-at-apes experience that constitutes 90% of movies these days. But that’s what most of the Las Vegas-based exhibitor convention was about — jackhammer, bass-thump, super-coarse, high-velocity idiot movies for lowest-common-denominator rubes and families.
I still like going to Cinemacon but it happened so late this year (right now rather than mid-to-late March), and I couldn’t see attending a week before leaving for New York, Paris and Cannes. The Ankler‘s Richard Rushfield went, however, and has filed a report. [I’ve pasted the whole thing below.] The highlight was reading about yesterday’s Quentin Tarantino and Leonardo DiCaprio visit to the Caesar’s Colosseum stage to promote Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, which won’t even begin filming until sometime in June.
After reading Rushfield’s report I sent him the following letter:
“Cinemacon is fantasy, denial and mass delusion. And they mostly show trailers and stage promotions for BIG CRAP CG SPRING & SUMMER MOVIES, often ignoring the quality-aspiring titles that will open in the fall and holiday seasons. Which, coupled with the decision to stage it in late April, is why I decided against going this year. Okay, I also wanted to save a few bucks.
“Cinemacon honcho Mitch Neuhauser and I used to work together at The Film Journal in NYC (1600 B’way) — ’81 to ’83.
“Quentin Tarantino‘s Once Upon A Time in Hollywood has been described by QT as ‘the closest thing to Pulp Fiction that I’ve made [since Pulp Fiction]” Or words close to that. Remember the mannered, at times offbeat comic and even metaphysical stuff in that 1994 film?
“DiCaprio, who will play a struggling actor, called it a film about Hollywood and then drew a vague analogy to Singin’ in the Rain. He seemed to be saying that on some level it’ll deliver a form of hooray-for-our-culture escapism.
“These were two strong hints that Once Upon A Time in Hollywood is going to deal fantasy cards along with the usual “hangin’ out with loquacious Quentin-styled bigmouth” cards. Which means, as I’ve written before, that Leo and Brad Pitt’s characters, who, as QT said several weeks ago, “live right near Sharon Tate” (although he didn’t mention that Sharon and Roman Polanski lived there together)…it means that the film is probably going to end in a fantasy way. Leo and Brad’s characters are going to save Tate (along with Abigail Folger, Wojciech Frykowski and Jay Sebring) from the Manson gang.
“I’m not saying that Once Upon A Time in Hollywood will be about the Manson gang and their murder spree, but it will definitely intersect with the Manson gang and, most likely, the Tate home invasion on August 9, 1969.
“Your remark that ‘it’s not a Manson film in the least’ is almost certainly incorrect.
A first-rate cast — Tom Hardy, Michelle Williams, Riz Ahmed — under Zombieland‘s Ruben Fleischer, and with grade-A production values. I’m just sorry they got together to make a Marvel flick. Actually a horror-action thing, “loosely set in the same world as Spider-Man: Homecoming, although not officially within the Marvel cinematic universe”…whatever that means. Sony will release Venom on 10.5.
Hollywood Elsewhere is sitting down Tuesday morning (10 am) with Avengers: Infinity War (4.27). The word on the street is that a lot of Marvel superheroes are going to be squished and splattered by Thanos (Josh Brolin) and his henchmen. How many? Your guess is as good as mine, but I’m figuring as least five or six out of a cast of…how many? I don’t care.
I’d be lying if I said I’m not rooting for Robert Downey, Jr.‘s Tony Stark/Ironman to buy the farm. My loathing for this rich, smart-ass quipster has been growing over the years, and now I can almost taste it.
Of all the Marvelinos the one I least want to see killed is Paul Rudd‘s Ant-Man, mainly because I’m a major Ant-Man fan and I can’t wait for Ant-Man and the Wasp, etc. Is Rudd even in this thing? Possibly but maybe not. What do I care?
Before I go any further the readership needs to know that I will not spoil about any deaths. At all. I will totally keep my yap shut. Unless, of course, everyone else starts spoiling.
Boiled down, the Phils are figuring Stark, for sure, along with Steve Rogers/Captain America (Chris Evans). They’re also saying Bruce Banner/The Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) had better watch his back.
CBR.com has a similar prediction piece up, and they’re saying definitely Captain America along with Tom Hiddleston‘s Loki. They’re also claiming Gwynneth Paltrow‘s Pepper Potts is toast. Works for me! Will death’s honesty catch up wih Don Cheadle‘s War Machine and Benicio del Toro‘s The Collector?
The Phils are also calculating that Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman), Black Widow (Scarlett Johnasson), Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), Falcon (Anthony Mackie), Bucky/White Wolf (Sebastian Stan), Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch), Wong (Benedict Wong), Spider-Man (Tom Holland), the Wasp (Evangeline Lilly) and most of the Guardians of the Galaxy will escape with their lives.
My first thought when I laid eyes upon that canary-yellow tunic worn by Solo‘s Lando Calrissian (i.e., Donald Glover) was that it’s…what, too flowery? Too lemon custard? Too Cliff Gorman from The Boys In the Band? I just don’t hold with dandelion shirts. And if that’s not enough of a dissuader, yellow Lando is way too close to William Shatner‘s yellow-mustard pullover that he wore during the first couple of Star Trek seasons. Even if you like the idea of Lando Calrissian channelling Paul Lynde on The Hollywood Squares, this kind of starship uniform was launched by Shatner and Gene Roddenberry. You can’t cross-pollinate between the Stars Wars and Star Trek universes! It’s just not done.
Someone who’s seen BradleyCooper‘s A Star is Born has told a friend that during the first part of the film “Lady Gaga’s rather plain, un-glamorous features work incredibly well for the mission statement of the title. You see her transform within the movie. She’s molded, manufactured and launched into a splashy goddess, so there’s a degree of My Fair Lady in play.”
The source also confides that Gaga/Germanotta is “playing a performer closer to SherylCrowe than Gaga’s own persona”
This photo of Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi was taken, I’m guessing, right after the 1931 debuts of James Whale‘s Frankenstein and Tod Browning‘s Dracula, which put both middle-aged men on the map. (Born in 1887, Karloff was 44 when Frankenstein made him a star; Lugosi, born in 1882, was nearly 50 when Dracula premiered.) They were obviously at a formal gathering of some kind, but who wears gray socks with a tuxedo? I’m presuming that Karloff realized as he was dressing earlier that evening that his one lonely pair of black evening socks were being laundered — this in itself tells you his financial ship hadn’t yet come in. Lugosi’s sin is almost as bad — black evening socks that aren’t high enough or held up by leg garters, thereby revealing Lugosi’s bare calf. For men of that era, there were few sartorial failings worse than these.
“There have been four Hollywood films made under the name and/or with the basic story of A Star is Born. The definitive version may be the one starring Judy Garland, directed by George Cukor in 1954; the most reviled version is the one starring Barbra Streisand, made in 1976 and produced by Barbra’s hair dresser-turned-boyfriend Jon Peters.
“In the middle of the New Hollywood 1970s, when American film was supposedly engaged in a mass project of questioning establishment myths, Streisand and Peters embraced Hollywood’s oldest, most institutionalized myth and appropriated it as a way to build a enormous (and enormously un-self-aware) monument to their own lives and their real-life romance.
“The result was both a huge success, and a disaster. It paved the way for Streisand’s future directing career and Peters’ future as a Hollywood mogul, while also branding both with bad reputations — partially thanks to an expose on the production of the movie published by its jilted director.” — from Karina Longworth‘s introduction to episode #21 of “You Must Remember This,” titled “The Birth of Barbra Streisand’s A Star Is Born.”
Wikipedia defines hypogonadal (or hypogonadism) as “diminished functional activity of the gonads — the testes or the ovaries — that may result in diminished sex hormone biosynthesis. In layman’s terms, it is sometimes called interrupted stage-one puberty.”
“Not that I don’t love the movies,” Cameron went on. “It’s just, come on, guys, there are other stories to tell besides, you know, hypogonadal males without families doing death-defying things for two hours and wrecking cities in the process.”
During a recent discussion of Stanley Kubrick‘s Full Metal Jacket “Reverent and free” wrote the following: “To this day Vincent D’Onofrio‘s performance as Pvt. Pyle is oddly unsung. Which is really weird. No one can ignore the character [as] Pyle is the heart of the boot camp section, and it’s one of the most nuanced performances in Kubrick’s filmography, and yet it’s rarely talked about.”
HE response: “D’Onofrio’s Leonard ‘Private Pyle’ Lawrence always struck me as contradictory in a sense. In the very first scene he’s amused by Sergeant Hartmann‘s brutal harassing, which suggests an ironic sense of humor. Obviously a fellow with a thought or two in his head. Everyone else (Joker excluded) is too scared to do anything but obey. But Pyle can’t help himself. After being threatened by Hartmann he tries to repress the smirk, but fails. Obviously bright and perhaps even sophisticated to some extent.
“Unfortunately that character disappears after that first scene. For most of the remainder of the Parris Island section Pyle drops the irreverence and turns into a slow-witted simpleton. He stares. He self-pities (‘Everyone hates me now’). He weeps. He struggles. He repeats himself.
“Then a third Pyle emerges after the middle-of-the-night beating by his fellow trainees. He goes into full-dark zombie mode. In the climactic latrine sequence he speaks in a ridiculously theatrical slowed-down manner, and makes demon faces. And then shoots himself.
“All to say it’s not ‘one of the most nuanced performances in Kubrick’s filmography’ as much as inconsistent and lacking in subtlety. And at war with itself. Pyle being one guy in the opening scene and some kind of intellectually devolved goober for the rest of the film, and then a goober possessed by Satan. I never bought it.”
