You suggest a certain film for the evening. “What’s it about, who’s in it, when was it made?” etc. You give her all that. She has a problem with overly theatrical acting styles and believes that only films made in the ’80s and beyond have genuine, real-deal acting behavior, so you assure her that the acting isn’t fake. And then maybe mention the music or the cinematography or your history with the film, etc.
“How many times you see it?” I don’t know, five or six times, ten or twelve times, more than a few. “And you want to see again?” I can see great films over and over, it doesn’t matter, besides it kinda makes it new in a way when you see it with a virgin. “And what’s the title?” You give her that and after endless skepticism and vague reluctance she says “okay, let’s go.”
And then you insert the Bluray into the tray or you go to the American Cinematheque Egyptian (or the Aero in Santa Monica), and then the movie starts and five or ten minutes later she says, “Oh, I’ve seen this!”
When Paul McCartney alluded earlier today to the shooting death of John Lennon with the phrase “one of my best friends” I immediately flashed on that Lennon line from a 1971 Rolling Stone interview, in which he described the disapproving McCartney and George Harrison (they didn’t initially care for Yoko Ono) as “some of our beast friends.”
Three separate harassment claims surfacing at the same moment struck me as odd, and so I asked if the three persons (women, I presumed) had “come forward as a group, or did the harassment complaints surface of their own volition and time clock, and just happened to arrive at roughly the same time?”
In an in-house memo sent yesterday (Friday, 3.23) to Academy staffers, Bailey stated that the whole magillah is about one woman — not three apparently — complaining about a single incident that happened more than a decade ago. It concerns his having “attempted to touch a woman inappropriately while we were both riding in a transport van on a movie set,” according to Bailey’s memo. He added, “That did not happen.”
Bailey may or may not have inappropriately touched (or attempted to inappropriately touch) a woman during a ride to a movie set in a van more than a decade ago. I wasn’t there. I know nothing. And it’s possible that something more than touching actually went on, I realize.
As I said in an 11.1.17 piece called “Past Predators,” I was inappropriately touched once at age 19. After a night of drunkenness I woke up in bed with an old fat guy — bald, blubbery, smelling of booze — in a New Orleans hotel room. I bounded the fuck out of bed and got dressed in a hurry, going “jeez” and “good God” and mostly feeling icky rather than assaulted. Definitely distasteful, but not exactly a case of lingering traumatic shock.
Genius is the title of a National Geographic anthology series. The first product of this anthology was a feature about Albert Einstein (popped on 4.25.17); the second (due to air on 4.24.18) is about Pablo Picasso. But the title is so bad. A Picasso biopic could be theoretically called Picasso or, if you insist, Genius, but calling it Genius: Picasso sounds like the musings of a drooling moron. Exec produced by Ron Howard and Brian Grazer, pic costars Antonio Banderas, Alex Rich and Clemence Poesy. Picasso was quite the salivating hound, as we all know. Every day his ghost kneels and gives thanks to the Gods for having been spared the wrath of #TimesUp and #MeToo.
This morning I happened to re-read a nearly six-year-old essay titled “Ways In Which Jaws Faintly Blows.” And I was saying to myself “whoa, this isn’t half bad!” I know I should wait until the summer months to repost stuff like this, but I’m not a wait-for-the-right-season type of guy. If something’s good, it’s good. Here it is:
I’m not calling Jaws a problem film. It obviously isn’t and never has been. But it’s the movie equivalent of a lightweight beach read. Engrossing, highly accessible, fun to follow, entertaining. It’s like a great dinner — zesty, well prepared, exhilarating in a sense — but like all great dishes it fades upon reflection. And it may not even be that.
It’s actually more like a great dessert. Made with confidence bordering on swagger (young Spielberg was as good as it got in this realm) and summer-movie attitude, but all you remember at the end of the day are the bits, the tricks, the cherry and the whipped cream.
Add up all the parts and you’re left with a collection of parts. There’s no real muscle tissue, no wholeness, no gravitas, no “things that are not said” and no metaphor other than “uh-oh, life can be occasionally scary or threatening because of the existence of predators…wooooh.” It has several great bits (the severed leg, the fake-looking dead guy’s head, the chumming and the Bruce pop-out, “you’re gonna need a bigger boat”) and that one great moment when Robert Shaw‘s Quint talks about being in the sea with the survivors of the sunken U.S.S. Indianapolis.
It’s just a summer movie that made a lot of money and played a seminal role in the ruining of the great era of Hollywood achievement that began in the late ’60s and ended in the early ’80s. (It took a while.) If you want to buy the Jaws Bluray to have and hold, fine. If it still works for you, fine. I just don’t hold with calling it a great or even an especially sturdy film. It’s merely an effective one.
I never believed the opening scene. I’ve always been impressed by it, sure, but only as a movie bit. I never believed that a shark would pull a naked girl back and forth across the water’s surface so she can shriek and scream for our delectation. (I suspect that shark death is probably much worse and a good deal less cinematic than this.) Again — I’m not putting it down. I’m just saying that like almost everything Spielberg does, it’s unreliable and manipulative.
In a 3.20 interview with England’s UTV News, Steven Spielberg said that Netflix should compete for Emmys and not Oscars. “Once you commit to a television format, you’re a TV movie,” he said. “If it’s a good show it deserves an Emmy, but not an Oscar. I don’t believe films that are just given token qualifications in a couple of theaters for less than a week should qualify for the Academy Award nomination.”
On one hand, I half agree. And on another hand, I wonder. Theatrical belongs to the Oscar realm, and direct-to-streaming is an Emmy thing. But isn’t this kind of an early-aughts, George Bush administration way of looking at things? Obviously the lines are getting hazier and hazier these days.
Consider how the big distributors have deliberately degraded theatrical over the last decade or so. Theatrical used to be the big leagues, the blue-chip realm, the ultimate destination of the best films being made by the best people. But in today’s world, the adult goodies appear in theatres only during the last two or three months of the year, and sparingly at that. For the most part the theatrical realm of 2018 means “mainly for morons.” Idiot-brand superhero franchise comic-book CG Asian-market, etc.
The stuff they preview these days at Cinemacon, the biggest exhibition convention of all, is the proof in the pudding. 10 or 15 years ago, when Cinemacon was called Showest, the studio previews would be…what, half or two-thirds popcorn and maybe one-third prestige? Now they don’t even preview ambitious adult films — Cinemacon just focuses on the high-impact, Dwayne Johnson-starring popcorn crap.
In the same interview Spielberg said, “A lot of studios would just rather make branded, tentpole, guaranteed box-office hits from their inventory of branded, successful movies rather than take chances on smaller films.”
And then Spielberg acknowledged something significant: “The smaller films that the studios used to make routinely are now going to Amazon, Hulu and Netflix. And by the way, television is the greatest today it’s ever been in the history of television…better writing, better direction, better performances, better story…television is really thriving with quality and art. But it poses a clear and present danger to film culture.”
In other words, Spielberg allowed, approximations of the small or smallish theatrical prestige movies that occasionally won nominations and awards in the old days — On the Waterfront, Marty, Twelve Angry Men, Room At The Top, To Kill A Mockingbird, Lilies of the Field, Hud, Midnight Cowboy, Zorba The Greek, Dr. Strangelove, Alfie, Blow-Up, Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, The French Connection — are now being made (or at least trying to be made) by Amazon, Hulu, Netflix, AMC, National Geographic and a few others. And presumably Apple when that operation goes into full swing.
John Bolton‘s bushy white moustache reigns supreme. It is everything, the all of the guy, the whole magilla. You can explain it away as an aesthetic decision that Bolton made decades ago, privately, most likely in his bathroom. He simply decided he looked better with it, but what’s “better” in this context? There’s something staunch and strutting and ultra-adamant about that ‘stache, something militant and even San Juan Hill-ish, amounting to a kind of declaration of independence from calm, sensible assessments of the intentions of foreign powers.
“Famously hawkish” is a common description of the man; I would say “fiendishly” based on my gut sense of who he really is.
Bolton is, of course, Donald Trump‘s new National Security Advisor-designate. He’ll reportedly begin the job on 4.9.18.
From Michael Wolff‘s “Fire and Fury“: “[Bolton is] a bomb thrower,” said Roger Ailes. “And a strange little fucker. But you need him. Who else is good on Israel? Flynn is a little nutty on Iran. Tillerson just knows oil.”
“Bolton’s mustache is a problem,” snorted Bannon. “Trump doesn’t think he looks the part. You know Bolton is an acquired taste.”
“Well, he got in trouble because he got in a fight in a hotel one night and chased some woman.”
“If I told Trump that,” Bannon said slyly, “he might have the job.”
Consider the Bolton assessments by syndicated columnist Mark Shields and mildly conservative N.Y. Times columnist David Brooks on last night’s PBS News Hour with Judy Woodruff:
Shields: “John Bolton is not just ideologically fixed where he’s been. Unlike his apparent foes within the administration, Jim Mattis, secretary of defense, and Joe Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, he has never comforted anybody dying in battle. He’s never written to a next of kin. He avoided military service himself.
All hail Spike Jonze‘s Being John Malkovich, now 18 and 1/2 years old. I haven’t seen it in almost that long, but I’ll be watching it again this weekend. From Janet Maslin’s N.Y. Times review: “Without spoiling what follows, let’s just say that Being John Malkovich features a fine cast of dryly comic actors who are very much in on the joke. That can even be said of Charlie Sheen, who turns up for some wicked self-parody in a film that also features cameo appearances by Sean Penn, Brad Pitt and the New Jersey Turnpike.” Pitt has a cameo in this?
If Isle of Dogs makes one thing unmistakably clear, it’s that director-cowriter Wes Anderson truly adores Japanese culture. The food, the clothing, the ancient drums (“taiko”), the language, the architecture….you can just feel how much he enjoys the immersion.
How strange, then, that Wes is getting beaten up for not enjoying Japan in the right way. Or, more to the point, in the wrong way. His crime, it seems, is (a) not using subtitles when his Japanese characters speak and (b) creating a blonde American activist character, Tracy Walker, voiced by Greta Gerwig, who plays a significant role in bringing about the rescuing and re-acceptance of the Trash Island dogs. What didn’t he invent a fucking Japanese activist instead?
The crime is cultural appropriation, and at least four name-branders have been slapping Wes around for this since yesterday — L.A. Times critics Justin Chang and Jen Yamato, Slant‘s Steve McFarlane and Washington Post critic Ann Hornaday.
Anderson’s reply: “The movie is a fantasy, and I would never suggest that this is an accurate depiction of any particular Japan…this is definitely a reimagining of Japan through my experience of Japanese cinema.”
Roughly ten months ago (or around 5.10.17) the Cannes Film Festival announced that Netflix releases would not be screened in competition at the 2018 festival and beyond unless, you know, Netflix changed its mind about sidestepping theatrical and opening straight-to-streaming. Netflix never changed its mind and so, just to underline last year’s announcement, the no-no Netflix policy has apparently been re-announced or at least re-filed by The Hollywood Reporter‘s Rhonda Richford.
Cannes honcho Thierry Fremaux has said that the streamers (Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Hulu) can show their films out of competition during the festival, but those who sidestep theatrical exhibition can’t win a Palme d’Or.
Amazon is not at all in league with Netflix on this issue. As a friend points out, “Every single one of Amazon’s films gets a full-scale theatrical release with the minimum 90-day window required to play in the major chains before going to VOD — and are sold to local theatrical distributors all over the world, and for this reason can play in competition at Cannes.”
Due respect and no offense, but I couldn’t help but flinch when I heard Richford say “Cannes”, which should be pronounced “caahhnn” but which she pronounces in the usual American way — i.e., synonymous with “tin can” or “Dan Rather” or “Peter Pan.” Listen to her pronunciation — it’s not way off but it’s not right either. I’m sorry but I can’t let this stuff slide.
