I feel obliged to attend a 6 pm screening this evening of Roar Uthaug‘s Lara Croft (Warner Bros., 3.16) at the Arclight. God help me. Imagine the feeling of going to see a movie directed by a guy named “Roar.” I’m not going to joke about a sister named “Meow” or a brother named “Rowlf”, but what kind of sadistic couple, really, would name their kid “Roar”? That’s like naming him “Sue” or “Cyclops.”

I would love to enjoy a gripping, well-made actioner in the vein of Steven Spielberg‘s Raiders of the Lost Ark (which didn’t defy physics as much as the next three films in the series), but of course the big-budget, whoo-hoo action film aesthetic went over the CG cliff years ago. Nobody except for a relative handful of directors (Kathryn Bigelow, George Miller, Steven Soderbergh, Michael Mann, J.C, Chandor, Doug Liman and a few others) care about real thrills. The fantasy-superhero-bullshit aesthetic has murdered the concept of great reality-based physical action. Killed it dead.

Posted two months ago: Nobody leaps off a sinking ship in the middle of a raging typhoon and lives. Nobody grabs hold of an overhanging tree limb at the last second and thereby escapes going over a super-tall jungle waterfall. What kind of fingernail-chewing moron would pay money to watch this shite? CG stunts of this sort aren’t worth spit in the realm of real-deal physics. Yes, I realize that’s a dirty concept these days.

A little more than six years ago I posted a piece called “To Hell With Physics“:

In 1987 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 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. 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.

Yesterday came an announcement that Pearl Street Films, the production company headed by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, will be totally supporting “inclusion riders” (i.e., a diversity-hiring provision) on their forthcoming projects.

A friend writes: “I have friends who work with Ben and Matt, and I know Matt is trying to get a new movie off the ground as we speak, going around this week pitching it. (He’s over at Fox today.) So on the eve of trying to get this movie set up, they announce this inclusion-rider thing. The strategy seems kinda transparent.”

Translation: We get what’s happening — include us in — fund us — onward!

A producer pal: “Two guys who have skirted by on the #metoo block” — i.e., have narrowly dodged the Robespierre guillotine — “are now going to embrace the #metoo theology a la Frances McDormand‘s suggestion? No surprise.” He added, however, a fun fact: “No idea how such a rider would be enforceable!”

Yesterday “Page Six”‘s Richard Johnson reported in the N.Y. Post that a “source” is claiming that Martin Scorsese‘s The Irishman, the likely swan song of Scorsese’s career as far as mafia wise guys are concerned, may cost $175 million, and that’s without marketing.

On 2.9.18 Deadline‘s Anita Busch reported that “we are now hearing from multiple sources that the film’s budget is well over $125M and more in the $140M range (and climbing).” In late February Forbes‘ Scott Mendelson echoed Busch’s report that the Irishman is costing $140 million or thereabouts.

Al Pacino, Robert De Niro during filming.

Add the standard marketing costs (usually $85 to $100 million for a major feature) to Johnson’s $175 million figure and the total Irishman tab is in the vicinity of $250M. Add the same to Busch/Mendelson’s $140M and you’ve got $225M or thereabouts.

Being a Netflix release that almost certainly won’t have an extensive theatrical run, The Irishman isn’t subject to the usual financial arithmetic of a typical feature from a mainstream distributor, but $175M or $225M or $250M tabs are certainly stand-outs in the realm of a non-fantasy, straight-goombah period drama.

Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci, Bobby Cannavale, Harvey Keitel and Ray Romano are the Irishman costars. Anna Paquin is apparently the only actress of any note in the film.

Netflix is flush enough to handle the Irishman tab without breaking too much of a sweat. It’s interesting nonetheless to consider that Cleopatra‘s $31 million budget, which broke 20th Century Fox in ’63, inflates into roughly $248M in 2018 dollars. ($100 in 1963 = $800 in 2018.)

Last July former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson allegedly called President Trump “a moron” in private, and when the remark was reported over four months later Tillerson didn’t directly address or deny it, saying only, “I’m not going to deal with petty stuff like that.”

I concluded then and there that Tillerson was toast — it would just be a matter of how much distance Trump wanted to put between the “moron” quote and Tillerson’s dismissal. If I’d been in Trump’s shoes I would probably have said to myself, “Gee, maybe Rex is right…hell, he probably is right…I am kind of a moron asshole narcissist sociopath. Maybe for the good of the country I should resign?” But that’s me. Okay, that’s not me but whatever.

Nonetheless the white-haired Tillerson, whose deep, Texas-accented voice and Raymond Burr-like girth always suggested a lifelong Big & Tall patronage despite the fact that he’s only 5’10”, lasted until today.

I’m glad he’s gone — now what about the rest of the cabinet? And Trump’s long-overdue resignation for that matter? Throw Mike Pence into a pit filled with starving wolves, but let him die with a sword in his hand like Ernest Borgnine in The Vikings.

After suffering a crushed skull during a rodeo, Brady Blackburn’s riding days are over as one more fall could kill him. He can still train horses (or so I recall — I saw it more than six months ago) but he’s mainly looking at dull, retail-store work for the rest of his life, and you feel really badly as the poor guy sulks and laments because he can’t do what he loves. And that’s pretty much it. I should be upfront and admit I wasn’t giving Chloé Zhao‘s film my undivided attention. I wasn’t dozing but I wasn’t riveted. It had my respect — it has an honest, real-deal vibe — but at the same time I was muttering “is this story gonna go anywhere? The guy’s in a bad spot — I get that — but is he going to find a way out of this predicament or off himself in the manner of Mickey Rourke in Darren Aronofsky‘s The Wrestler or what?” The Rider has an 85% Metacritic score.

My recollection of Jan Egleson‘s A Shock To The System (’90) is that it was a deliciously dark satire about a harried, middle-aged, losing-his-mojo advertising executive (Michael Caine) who decides to stop being the victim and play hard and dirty with all the people who’ve been threatening his job, injecting anxiety and otherwise making him miserable.

The film basically allows you to snicker along with Caine as he savors the meaning of the phrase “revenge is a dish best served cold.”

I’m writing this because I watched this trailer a while ago and went “what the?…this isn’t some dippy, feel-good comedy for morons…it’s about the satisfaction of giving bad people a taste of their own medicine.” The trailer is so full of shit that it reminded me of that online Shining trailer from 10 or 12 years ago that tried to sell Stanley Kubrick‘s 1980 horror film as a heartwarming family comedy.

From Owen Gleiberman‘s Entertainment Weekly review: “At the beginning of the exhilarating corporate satire A Shock to the System, the voice of Michael Caine comes on the sound track, soothing and seducing us as it has so many times before. That voice, with its halting cockney sparkle, its tones of ironic civility, is one of the most delicious sounds in movies, as unmistakable a comic signature as Chaplin’s bowlegged shuffle.

“Once again, Caine is playing a sneak, a rogue, and drawing the audience into a conspiracy with him-the way he did in Alfie (’66), the movie that made him a star, and then 20 years later in Hannah and Her Sisters. Only this time, his character is going to go farther — much farther.

“A Shock to the System is a black comedy played very, very close to the bone. Written by Andrew Klavan, and directed by the veteran independent filmmaker Jan Egleson, it’s a head-on satire of greed and power that’s also one of the most enticingly intimate portraits of American corporate life ever put on-screen.

I wanted to see Boots Riley‘s Sorry To Bother You (Annapurna, 7.6) at last January’s Sundance Film Festival because of Lakeith Stanfield, but then I began to think that a director whose first name was “Boots” might be more into diversion and razmatazz and shuffling the deck than dealing straight cards.

But The Guardian‘s Jordan Hoffman saw Sorry and said it “shows a great deal of spirit and promise” and that “it may even become a cult classic.” Those are critical code terms for “doesn’t quite do it or get there but maybe next time.”

On the other hand a 70% Metacritic score means you’ve gotten…well, a few things right.

Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn said it’s “loaded with capricious details that shimmer with the exuberance of inspired social commentary at hyperspeed”….huh? Variety‘s Peter Debruge complained that “the more ridiculous Riley’s gonzo social critique gets, the more boring it becomes, to the point that its out-of-control second half starts to feel like some kind of bad trip.” Financial Times critic Damon Wise said “it has its moments…but Riley’s vision needs a little more refining.”

During last year’s pre-Cannes Manhattan stopover I caught a screening of Tony Zierra’s Filmworker, a doc about Leon Vitali, the one-time actor who served a Stanley Kubrick’s right-hand-man for roughly 20 years. Several days later it screened at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, under the Cannes Classics subsection. And then I sat down with Vitali and Zierra at the Grand Hotel. Now, ten months later, it’s been announced that Kino Lorber will open Filmworker at the Metrograph on 5.11, and at West L.A.’s Nuart on 5.18, “followed by a national rollout.”

And yet for some reason there’s no online trailer. Why? Where is it? Don’t tell me one hasn’t been cut.

My HE review was posted on 5.23.17: Tony Zierra‘s Filmworker, a 94-minute doc about the legendary Stanley Kubrick assistant and confidante Leon Vitali, is the juiciest and dishiest capturing of Stanley Kubrick‘s backstage life and career ever assembled. It’s about Vitali’s life, but by way of Kubrick’s.  (Or is it the other way around?)  21 or 22 years of deep focus, late hours, nose to the grindstone, passion, obsession, total commitment and almost no days off, ever.

Vitali began working for The Great Stanley K. in various capacities a year before The Shining began shooting, and then stayed with him to the end (i.e., 3.7.99). Researcher, gopher, go-between, driver, casting assistant, print cataloguer and (after Kubrick’s death) restoration consultant. The film is a completely satisfying record and assessment of that servitude, that era, that history, that ongoing task.

The photos and behind-the-scenes film clips alone are worth the price, I can tell you. Great stuff. On top of which I was reminded that Vitali played not one but two roles in Kubrick films — Lord Bullington in Barry Lyndon (’75) and “Red Cloak” in Eyes Wide Shut (’99).

Vitali said to himself early on that he’d like to work for Kubrick. What he didn’t expect was that once that work began Kubrick would want Vitali at all hours, all the time…focus and submission without end. If the early sentiment was “I’d give my right arm to work for Stanley Kubrick.” Kubrick’s reply would be “why are you lowballing me? I want both arms, both legs, your trunk, your lungs, your spleen, your ass and of course your head, which includes your brain.”

Leon Vitali — star of Filmworker, Stanley Kubrick confidante and right-hand-man for 21 or 22 years, former actor and controversial aspect-ratio debater — and Vera Vitali, the Stockholm-residing actress, at Cannes Grand hotel last weekend.

It is axiomatic that trade critics will be as hospitable as honesty allows when it comes to major studio releases, especially those aimed at fantasy geekboys and especially when directed by a legend like Steven Spielberg. And so Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman is most likely fulfilling expectations in his review of Ready Player One, which premiered last night at SXSW.

But even under these conditions OG offers terms like “banal” and “slippery mutating synthetic digital imagery” and — this is probably key — “more occupied than invested.” OG was gripped by RPO, but his review also indicates that the general SXSW reaction (“We’ve found God! The entire crowd was levitating…shrieking with pleasure!”) was over-the-top.

And yet I love hearing that there’s a sequence in which Tye Sheridan‘s Parzival, Olivia Cooke‘s Art3mis and a Shrek-like avatar named Aech visit Stanley Kubrick‘s Overlook hotel.

“In Ready Player One, everything you could call virtual is clever and spellbinding,” he writes, “[and] everything you might call reality is rather banal.” Spielberg’s “dizzyingly propulsive virtual-reality fanboy geek-out” is “an accomplished and intermittently hypnotic movie [but],” he qualifies, “you may feel like you’re occupied more than you are invested.”

“Ready Player One tells a breathless and relatively coherent story — essentially, the future of civilization is riding on the outcome of a video game — but the movie, first and foremost, is a coruscating explosion of pop-culture eye candy. Never is that more spectacularly true than in the irresistible sequence in which [three virtual leads] enter the Overlook Hotel from The Shining.

Never accept ecstatic reactions from a South by Southwest crowd about any kind of geeky, sci-fi, gamer or comic-book movie at face value. SXSW devotees are whores for fanboy stuff. Take their expressions of wondrous delight and slice them in half if not by two-thirds, and that’ll be the likely reality of things when the film opens commercially.

Robert Aldrich‘s The Legend of Lylah Clare (’68) is one of the worst inside-Hollywood movies of all time. And yet it has Ernest Borgnine‘s flamboyant Barney Sheean, a vulgar studio boss who despises the idea of making “films.” In Act One he yells at his studio executive son (Michael Murphy), “I don’t want to make films — I want to make movies. What do you think we’re making here, art?”

Tonight at Austin’s South by Southwest Festival, Steven Spielberg made an audience cheer by proudly trumpeting the Barney Sheean ethos. As he introduced his latest film, Ready Player One (Warner Bros., 3.29), Spielberg proclaimed, “This is not a film we’ve made — this is a movie!

Steven Spielberg! #sxswpic.twitter.com/hiXJjQoXt7

— Monica Castillo (@mcastimovies) March 12, 2018