Last December a Deadline story announced that The Spy Who Dumped Me, a coarse, no-holds-barred “adult” comedy with Mila Kunis and Saturday Night Live‘s Kate McKinnon, was being bumped from July 6 to August 3. Anthony D’Alessandro explained that August, regarded as a dumping ground in the ’90s, has become “a prime area for such R-rated comedy fare as Bad Moms, Girls Trip, Trainwreck, Sausage Party and We’re the Millers,” blah blah.
But hold on, wait a minute, c’mon. You can tell right off the bat that this is throwaway material — a flotsam and jetsam movie. There’s a shot of a guy leaping out of a second- or third-story window, and a CG shot of a coupla bodies flying through the air…it’s obviously crap. It should really be called Rough Night 2 or, better yet, Bad Spies.
Directed by Susanna Fogel (Life Partners, a New Yorker online contributor) but not, if the trailer forebodes, any kind of empowering thing as Kunis and McKinnon are clearly playing hysterical idiots. Will crowds be muttering that Melissa McCarthy‘s Spy was much better? Some of the jokes are on the level of Dane Cook. A friend says the plot “is lifted from Knight & Day with “North by Northwest thrown in.”
In this morning’s “Finest Trifectas” piece, several directors who made three, four or five hotties in a row were named. Michael Mann, Terrence Malick, Darren Aronofsky, John Carpenter, etc. Or seven, even, if you’re counting Rob Reiner — This Is Spinal Tap, The Sure Thing, Stand by Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally, Misery and A Few Good Men. But nobody except the legendary Howard Hawks (“three great scenes and no bad ones”) enjoyed a nine-film hot streak. It lasted a little more than a decade, from ’37 through ’48 — Bringing Up Baby (’38), Only Angels Have Wings (’39), His Girl Friday (’40), Sergeant York (’41), Ball of Fire (’41), Air Force (43), To Have and Have Not (’44), The Big Sleep (’45 and ’46) and Red River (’48 but mostly shot in ’46). Creatively and commercially, the best run any Hollywood director ever had.
Robert De Niro in Angel Heart, Ron Perlman‘s Hellboy, that Twilight Zone episode called “The Howling Man”, Ray Walston in Damn Yankees, that Beelzebub who got into Linda Blair in The Exorcist — all my life I’ve loved the fantasy of humans grappling with a literal devil from hell. Actual demons with green eyes, horns on their forehead, sharp tails, hooved feet, flicking tongues and howling voices…all very cool in a mythical fictitious form.
But you can’t expect me to believe that some Italian woman who underwent a series of exorcisms by the late Father Gabriele Amorth was actually possessed by Pazuzu….c’mon! She herself probably believed she was possessed and that’s half the game, but I don’t believe in actual demons. Any more than I buy the idea of God being some white-bearded guy in white robes or, you know, looking like Morgan Freeman. Fairy-tale stuff.
That aside, Friedkin has had some first-rate work done. He’s 82 and looks 62. Very impressive. I’d actually rather see a doc about Friedkin’s plastic surgeon than this exorcism thing, no offense.
The Orchard will release The Devil and Father Amorth on 4.20. Freidkin’s exorcist footage was shot in May 2016. Father Amorth died four months later at the age of 91.
I don’t know if The Association’s “Never My Love” is heard in David Robert Mitchell‘s Under The Silver Lake or it it’s just in the trailer, but the instant I heard the opening bars I knew that this neo-noir involving “a sinister conspiracy of billionaires, celebrities, urban myths and even pop culture as we know it” will be, at the very least, pretty good. Or maybe really good…who knows? The constantly victimized, whiny-voiced Andrew Garfield as Jeff Lebowski but without the bowling, the Hawaiian shirts or the White Russians. Costarring Riley Keough as Bunny Lebowski plus Topher Grace, Zosia Mamet, Jimmi Simpson, Luke Baines and Patrick Fischler. A24 opens it on 6.22.
I’ve been saying for years that the best CGI scenes are the ones you don’t notice.
Almost exactly 18 years ago I wrote a Reel.com piece about a sleight-of-hand car crash sequence in Steven Soderbergh‘s Erin Brockovich. No one spotted it at first, and yet, if you thought about it, the scene had to involve exceptional trickery because a single uncut shot showed Julia Roberts getting into her beater, driving toward an intersection and getting totally rammed and spun around by another car. Roberts would’ve obviously been badly hurt if she’d been driving and yet she wasn’t. So how did they pull it off?
The shot was achieved by seamlessly blending two pieces of footage — one of Roberts getting into the crummy-looking car and slowly driving off, and a second starring a Roberts dummy (wig and all) behind the wheel only this time in a radio-controlled duplicate of the same car. (Or it was all one car — what do I know?) The real Roberts transitions into the Roberts dummy right around the 41-second mark, or just as her car’s structural divide section (i.e., the metal section between the front passenger window and the back seat) passes in front of the camera.
An excerpt from my original article: The alchemist was Tom Smith of Cinesite, a leading visual-effects company known for creating certain highly convincing illusions in Wild Wild West, Message in a Bottle, Armageddon and For Love of the Game.
“It’s what we call the A and B side of a shot,” Smith explains. “The first shot is of Julia getting into the car, starting it up and driving into traffic. Right when the camera is looking at her as she passes by, we stretched and blended this with footage of the Julia dummy behind the wheel of the radio-controlled car. The transition happens over a small number of frames, then we stayed with the dummy car all the way until the accident.”
Viewers might be able to notice the transition between the two Julias and the two cars when they watch this scene next fall on the DVD, says Smith. “There are very subtle differences,” he says. “The Julia dummy has a couple of hairs in the wrong position, but you can barely tell.”
Yes, agreed — Francis Coppola delivered the greatest one-two-three with The Godfather (3.24.72), The Conversation (4.7.74) and The Godfather Part II (12.20.74). But directly behind is Roman Polanski‘s grand trio of Rosemary’s Baby (6.12.68), Macbeth (12.20.71) and Chinatown (6.20.74). (I’m ignoring What?, which no one ever mentions in any context.)
I agree with Mark Caro that Alfred Hitchcock‘s greatest trifecta was Vertigo (5.9.58), North by Northwest (7.28.59) and Psycho (9.8.60), but directly behind is Hitch’s WWII cavalcade of Saboteur (2.22.42), Shadow of a Doubt (1.12.43) and Lifeboat (1.11.44).
I’m not precisely recalling when I finally and fully understood the difference between counsel (“And I am counselling you”) and council, but it was probably during the first Student Council election that I paid attention to, which was either in sixth or seventh grade. I’m also thinking of Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly‘s It’s Always Fair Wether (’55).
Felix Van Groenigen‘s Beautiful Boy (Amazon, 10.12), a drama about a dad (Steve Carell) grappling with a meth-addicted son (Timothee Chalamet), probably won’t screen at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival. A person who attended a late January research screening says that Chalamet “acts circles” around Carell (“He’s got so much raw talent…we see him go from a well-adjusted kid through addiction to rehab and then relapse…he’s given a lot to do and he really makes it seem easy”) but that’s all I’ll share. I’ll only say that it doesn’t seem likely to screen a few weeks hence on the Cote d’Azur. The costars are Maura Tierney, Amy Ryan, Timothy Hutton and Kaitlyn Dever.
As mentioned, a friend and his wife are bound next week for Hong Kong, Cambodia and Vietnam. I’ve sent him a couple of suggestions about Hanoi (it’s simpler and cheaper to buy a Vietnamese SIM card when you arrive) and two restaurant recommendations — lunch at Bun Cha Dak Kim for the spring rolls, and dinner at Pho Thin, where they only serve bowls of clear stock, boiled beef, rice noodles, herbs, green onions and garlic.
Posted on 3.19.16: “Yesterday was one long bike-riding orgasm through the streets of Hanoi. It was heaven. There’s something rhapsodic about being one of hundreds of scooter riders, bicyclers, car, bus and truck drivers making their way down a major boulevard. There are no bike lanes — you’re just pedaling your way through it all, everyone making it up as they go along, and I’m telling you it’s like you’re part of some glorious, brass-band holiday parade.
“The difference here is that Hanoi pedestrians aren’t standing on the curbside and going ‘wow, look at that!’ They’re just shrugging it off, the usual rumble of daily life. But to me (and, I’m sure, to Jett and Cait) it was like being part of a huge skilled orchestra playing a great improvised symphony, and being part of it yesterday was absolutely one of the most delightful experiences of my life.”
Wes Anderson‘s Isle of Dogs opens on Thursday night. Several critics reviewed it yesterday (95% Rotten Tomatoes rating, 83% Metacritic), but I haven’t been invited to a single screening. Today I asked to be afforded that privilege. “Hi, guys…sorry to bother you, heh-heh, but any chance I could, you know, attend a last-minute screening of a film by a major-league guy whose stylistic signature is known worldwide, and whom I’ve personally known for close to a quarter-century?”
Wes and I have had a couple of spats, but not for several years. He’s always been polite and responsive whenever I’ve reached out. He’s never not wanted me to see Isle of Dogs, or at least he didn’t indicate this today. I don’t think this is on him. Okay, I’m not a great lover of animation, but I was cool with and fully respectful of old-fashioned stop-motion and the way this technique was used for Fantastic Mr. Fox so what’s the big issue? What critic goes invite-less if he’s been mixed or mildly negative about a couple of films by a certain director in the past?
Tuesday evening update: FS finally invited me to a screening — tomorrow night at the West L.A. Landmark.
I’ve known Wes for nearly 25 years. I wrote the first L.A. Times “Calendar” profile piece about Wes and Owen Wilson; it was published on 11.7.93. For over two decades I’ve been a respectful admirer (okay, with reservations) of his films. That respect has been reciprocated for many years. I attended Fox Searchlight’s Fantastic Mr. Fox junket in England in 2010, and their Grand Budapest Hotel junket in Berlin in ’14.
True, I’ve been nursing ambivalent reactions to Andersonville — i.e., that carefully tended, super-exacting realm of his — since The Royal Tenenbaums, which popped at the N.Y. Film Festival 16 and 1/2 years ago. On one hand I love (as always) the Anderson stamp…that feeling of dry but immaculate control of each and every element. And of wry humor. And of atmosphere and attitude. Andersonville is a place as distinct and precisely ordered and unto itself as Tati-land or Kubricktown or Capraburgh. And on the other hand I’ve sometimes felt frustrated by it.
Over the last 22 years my only serious Anderson loves have been Bottle Rocket, Rushmore and The Grand Budapest Hotel. The rest I’ve been mixed-positive or mixed on. But at least there were those three, and tomorrow’s another day.
Last night I saw Steven Soderbergh‘s Unsane (Bleecker Street, 3.23), an intriguingly creepy, Shock Corridor-like psychodrama about a smart, blunt-spoken businesswoman (The Crown‘s Claire Foy) coping with a sudden, bizarre imprisonment in a private medical facility in Pennsylvania. It also has to do with stalking, delusion and what I saw as mounting insanity.
Unsane is fairly pulpy — a genre wallow — but as a spooky and claustrophobic portrait of institutional oppression and psychological upending it isn’t half bad. It’s shocking, unnerving and…I don’t know, eerily nightmarish and drearily suffocating at the same time?
As with any Soderbergh film you’re always aware of a fine intelligence behind each and every creative impulse or decision — every shot, cut and line says “smarthouse.” Ditto the oppressively dark lighting and brownish-greenish colors. And at no time are you saying to yourself “oh for God’s sake, lemme outta here, this is awful”…as I’ve said in the midst of most many horror thrillers.
There’s a place in the realm for films like Unsane. I didn’t hate it. I was mildly intrigued. It’s a tolerable sit.
But with all due respect to Soderbergh and the Bleecker Street guys, I can’t honestly say that the story — what happens to Foy’s Sawyer Valentin once she realizes she’s been imprisoned by employees of the private clinic, and what she does when she realizes that a deranged fellow (Joshua Leonard) who’s been stalking her is strangely working at this clinic and continuing with the crazy — is all that satisfying. I’m not going to reveal it, but it doesn’t leave you with much. My whispered words as Unsane ended with a freeze-frame: “That’s it?”
My basic reaction as I shuffled out of the screening room was “why did Soderbergh go to such an effort to make this film look ugly?” He shot it on an iPhone 7 Plus in 4K, but that’s no excuse — you can make an iPhone movie look like Technicolor VistaVision if you want. Start to finish Unsane looks drained and murky and heavily shadowed, almost in a shitty shot-in-the-’70s-on-16mm way. The two main colors are a muddy dispiriting brown and a kind of sickly institutional green, along with some buttermilk walls and the occasional haze of bluish gray.
I get it, I get it — Soderbergh wants you to feel as turned around and psychologically tormented and forcibly sedated as Foy, and the color scheme is intended to reflect her states of mind. But I was two or three steps ahead of Soderbergh in this respect. The bottom line is that, yes, I was feeling Foy’s pain and disorientation, but I was also coping with my own lethargy and displeasure. I respect Soderbergh’s decision to cover Unsane in brown murk, but I hated the palette. Sorry but I did.
