From a 9.17 Air Mail piece, written by Jonathan Dean, about Moonage Daydream director Brett Morgen:

I wrote this last summer, but it was precisely Morgen’s “clear set or rules” that gradually put me off Moonage Daydream when I caught a Cannes midnight showing on 5.23.22. Now that Neon’s Moonage Daydream is finally playing here and there, I’m wondering what the HE consensus might be.

Here’s how I put it:

Here’s a wise comment from Justin Michael Ptak, posted on 5.234.22:

“I realized a way to reinvigorate the band/artist biopic. The filmmaker cannot go through their entire, randomly ordered, rags-to-riches-to-rags to rehab to rejuvenation to what-come-may tale, but instead focus on one specific, seminal moment in that artist’s/bands creative/destructive life and just allow the audience to soak that in and bring them along for a ride in that specific time and place.

“One can think of any number of tales told about this artist or that band that would make a very cool, condensed retelling if kept to those constraints.

“George Gershwin and his Rhapsody in Blue moment, Jimi Hendrix realizing he can really play guitar in his own stratospheric way, Brian Wilson creating Good Vibrations, Bob Dylan‘s transition from folk to electric, the Beatles making Revolver, Ronnie Van Zant insanity surrounding Sweet Home Alabama, Pat Benatar‘s Battlefield of Love, Spike Jonze shooting the Beastie Boys Sabotage video, any 48 hours with Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr.’s J Mascis connecting with Lou Barlow, a week in Athens, Georgia with Jeff Mangum and Neutral Milk Hotel, etc.

“Tie these creative sagas into the on goings and vibe of the period and times a la Quentin’s Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, and you have yourself a pretty chill picture.”

A difference of opinion has arisen about The Woman King‘s immediate prospects.

On one hand you’ve got Showbiz411‘s Roger Friedman all but calling Gina Prince-Bythewood‘s historical action drama dead in the water, and on the other Forbes‘ Scott Mendelson is going “wooh-wooh!!…The Woman King had a nice promising Thursday night and will probably do decently if not better by Sunday night….break out the champagne!”

Friedman: “The much touted Gina Prince-Blythewood film took in just $1.7 million last night at 3,271 theaters. That’s just $520 per screen…ouch! You could tell from the seat maps at major AMC theaters across the country that there was no enthusiasm for the much praised Viola Davis action film. Sony simply failed to make it exciting in any way.

“Now comes the actual weekend, so word of mouth should be good enough to lift the numbers. But if Sony had any Oscar expectations other than Viola for Best Actress they’d better turn on the charm fast.”

Mendelson: “In what could hopefully be an end to the post-Bullet Train slump at the domestic box office, Sony’s The Woman King earned a promising $1.7 million in Thursday previews. The showings began as early as 3:00 pm and suggest that the $50 million action drama would make anywhere from $13.5 million to $22.5 million over its domestic debut. Splitting the difference would be around $17 million, a debut on par with Sony’s female-targeted Where the Crawdads Sing from back in July.”

Halle Bailey as Ariel in Disney’s new live-action The Little Mermaid film (5.26.23)? It recently became a thing.

My basic reaction was “whatevs…Bailey is a beautiful, cocoa-skinned Rachel Zegler type, and a professional singer to boot and can presumably act pretty well so why not?…nobody’s going to hire a white girl in this punish-bad-whitey climate so why fight it?…and if Malcolm X had reddish hair why can’t Bailey’s mermaid have the same?”

Matt Walsh argues that racism is racism is racism (which it is) but he refuses to acknowledge today’s woke institutional position, which is that racism that favors BIPOCs is cool because (a) whites have it coming and (b) new social terms and dynamics need to be established.

In terms of casting movies and plays, woke racism (replacing historically or previously white characters with BIPOC actors) is, in the eyes of the terrified corporate establishment, a corrective measure that will not get them into trouble. In other words, a little reverse racism is okay and even cleansing because it counterbalances decades and centuries of racism by whites.

But in the same light casting James Franco as Fidel Castro is, according to wokesters, the same old racism that resulted in Jack Palance being cast as Fidel a half-century ago, in Richard Fleischer‘s Che (’69).

That’s the set-up and that’s the deal and Walsh knows this, of course, so why doesn’t he just say it? Because to do so would make him sound like an angry racist reactionary, so he lays out the situation with logic and lets the chips fall.

[From a comment thread assessment posted late last night]:

I paid to see Greg Mottola & Jon Hamm’s Fletch film this evening. The title is Confess, Fletch but it really, REALLY should be called Fletch Whatevs, and that’s not a putdown in the slightest. I counted five people in the theatre (AMC Danbury) but I liked it. It’s certainly a much better, more adult-minded Fletch package than whatever was provided by those Chevy Chase films in the ‘80s.

Fletch Whatevs is an agreeably quirky, mildly entertaining time killer…a low-key, loose-shoe Boston runaround stolen-art caper thang. It’s all jizz-fizz and that’s fine. I had a better-than-okay time but why couldn’t the AMC guys have heated the popcorn?

Hamm is totally cool and knows exactly how to project the right kind of laid-back Fletch attitude. (His personality mantra is — you’ll never guess this — “whatevs.” Which is fairly close to the personality mantra that Elliott Gould swore by in The Long Goodbye, or “ladies, it’s okay with me.”) The supporting cast (Marcia Gay Harden, John Slattery and Kyle MacLachlan are standouts but partly because their names are easier to remember as I write this) take their cues from Hamm.

There are only three problems. Okay, make that four. One, Hamm lifts his bare feet right in front of the camera in one early scene — a big no-no in the HE manual. Two, he’s gained a little weight since the Mad Men heyday. (He could’ve easily tread-milled himself back into Don Draper if he wanted to.) And three, Hamm should have put mousse or Brylcream in his hair.

The fourth thing is that Fletch Whatevs should have spent more time in Rome. I really love it there.

I’m not really “complaining” because there’s no point in dismissing such a cool, witty, unassuming jack-off movie with several spunky, spirited and relatable supporting characters. The movie is good company in an inconsequential hang-out way. No bad things happen, and there are no energy drops or pacing issues except for a single strange, overly broad scene with Annie Mumolo…don’t ask.

Incidentally: Somebody said there was only enough money to shoot for a single day in Rome. I’m not sure I believe that. There’s a breezy montage sequence of a helmeted Fletch scootering all over town. (The helmet looks dorky.) There’s a two-minute dialogue scene overlooking some ancient Roman ruins. There’s a chatty cafe sitdown scene (Hamm orders a Negroni) in Piazza Navona. They didn’t shoot all that in just one day. Two or three days, I’m guessing.

Eight months after debuting at Sundance ‘22, Julian Higgins’ God’s Country (IFC Films, 9.16) is finally peeking out. Call it a violent socio–political allegory + a slow-build American gothic melodrama — patiently paced, melancholy, sparely crafted, and even thoughtful.

It’s basically about an ex-New Orleans cop (Thandiwe Newton), woke and angry, butting heads with Montana bumblefucks over a relatively minor territorial matter. And before you know it things escalate into a blood feud. Straw Dogs minus the sexual factor and the Peckinpah slow-mo. A touch of The Limey, a hint of High Plains Drifter.

The only film I felt completely elevated by at the ’22 Telluride Film Festival was Sam Mendes‘ Empire of Light (Searchlight, 12.9). I was actually amazed that I fell for it as I was more than somewhat skeptical going in.

Empire is set roughly 42 years ago in rural England (it was shot in Margate) and is primarily about an unstable, somewhat schizzy movie theatre manager named Hilary Small (Olivia Colman, brilliant as always) and a brief, furtive affair she has with Stephen (Michael Ward), a theatre employee of color who’s exceptionally good looking and at least 20 years younger than Hilary.

Colin Firth is a crusty theatre owner who exploits Colman sexually, casually, off and on. But this eventually goes south, partly due to Stephen and partly due to Hilary going off her meds.

As I wrote on 8.24, I found it initially difficult to believe that Hilary-Stephen would happen in such a racially volatile period (I visited London in ’76 and ’80 and could absolutely smell the enraged skinhead vibes).

“However unbalanced and erratic, Colman’s character would have had to nurse a streak of serious self-destruction to engage in a May-December affair like this,” I wrote. And why, I added, “would a smart, good-looking dude like Stephen be interested in an unstable white lady on the far side of 45? What about all those foxy 20something girls running around town? I don’t get it.”

And yet the relationship gradually seems palatable and even endearing, and you start to realize as the film unfolds that Empire is about more than just Stephen-and-Hilary, an affair that doesn’t last all that long anyway. For it’s also a misty, memory-lane valentine to moviegoing and a golden, long-eclipsed era and, if you will, a certain kind of spirituality and way of life, even, for cinema devotees.

It dawned on me after seeing Empire that Mendes, born in ’65, had partly based it on his own hopes and dreams and movie-related experiences as a 15 year-old in 1980 and ’81, but that (and I’m guessing here) he decided the story would seem more au courant (i.e., woke) if Hilary’s lover wasn’t a pale-faced teenager but a 20something black dude, and from there he was off to the races.

Wokester critics have been shitting all over Empire of Light because of the Hilary-Stephen dynamic, which they certainly don’t approve of. They’re not buying the idea of even a brief sexual attraction between the two, and they resent the notion of an older, unstable, jagged-edge Hilary peering into Stephen’s soul and vice versa. White wokesters, after all, have been put on this earth to defend the dignity of POCs and to indict any white-male-created scenario that doesn’t say or do the right thing in their regard.

But Hilary and Stephen are both outsiders in a sense (Hilary of the temperamental variety and Stephen of a bruised and guarded shade due to white nationalist fervor) and that’s the basis for their mutual understanding. I bought it. It worked for me.

I realized within 15 minutes of the beginning that Empire of Light was an exquisitely composed yesteryear film, so perfectly acted and calibrated and moving. (I was especially blown away by Tanya Moodie‘s brief performance as Stephen’s mom.) The sorehead critics still have the upper hand, but once it starts showing around everything will change — trust me.

Empire is easily one of the best films of the year, and a just-posted review by Vanity Fair‘s Richard Lawson supports this view.

Empire of Light is “a humble little tale of human connection,” he writes. “[It’s] the director’s most delicate, a wistful short story about two people seized by circumstance who help one another find their way through life. It’s an achingly lovely film — the best Mendes has yet made.

“Whatever Mendes’s [personal] connection to the material, he’s made something humane and nourishing, a picture of rare thoughtfulness and decency.

“Viewed from some angles, the film looks rather strange: as Hilary loses her grip on her well being, Empire of Light takes on surprising new dimensions. It’s a shock to see the movie break its dreamy spell, as Colman suddenly turns the volume of her performance way up. Mendes’ calm and steady film stays upright throughout these jarring thrashes — and as Stephen is violently thrashed at — building toward a conclusion of staggering poignance.

“What remains [at the end] is a deep and refreshingly heart-on-its-sleeve compassion, a humbled and awed appreciation for the majesty of learning from another person.”

For several decades Fritz Lang‘s Metropolis (’27) has been tinted, colorized, re-scored and razmatazzed. This latest upgrade, posted earlier this month, is colorized (which we’ve seen before) but the 4K, 60fps quality makes a difference.

I would honestly love to re-watch all the ’20s classics this way. To my eyes it makes them more real, more intriguing, more biologically relatable.

The original black-and-white version is protected — what does it matter if people like me want to watch an uprezzed coior version? You have to admit that the colorizing (much more accurate than the standards of ten years ago) is very seductive

I’m also getting a strong echo of Damien Chazelle‘s Babylon, most of which happens around the time when Metropolis was shot and released (i.e., mid ’20s). Brigitte Helm, quite the sex symbol of her time, was only 19 or thereabouts when Lang began filming.

[Initially posted on 3.9.21]

In all my decades of movie-obsessing, only one film has given me pause in the matter of male anatomy. Pause and a slight feeling of discomfort.

I must have been 14 or 15 when I first watched this scene from Mr. Roberts in our family TV room, and I distinctly remember saying to myself, “Jesus, you can see Jack Lemmon‘s twin gonads right through his Navy khaki pants.”

It wasn’t so much distasteful as distracting — I stopped listening to the letter that Lemmon was reading. I didn’t hear a word of it.

If I’d been directing (not sure if it was John Ford, Mervyn LeRoy or Joshua Logan shouting “action” and “cut” when this scene was shot), I would have pulled Lemmon aside and told him to duck into wardrobe and put on one of those metal jockstraps that baseball catchers wear. That or stuff his underwear with a big wad of toilet paper, Mick Jagger-style.

I couldn’t be the first person to notice this, I told myself. Mister Roberts played everywhere in 1955, and was considered family-friendly for the most part. But not this part.

HE’s all-time favorite Lemmon performances: Operation Mad Ball, Some Like It Hot, The Apartment, Days of Wine and Roses, The Fortune Cookie, Save the Tiger, The China Syndrome, Missing, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, JFK, Glengarry Glen Ross, Short Cuts, Off the Menu: The Last Days of Chasen’s (13).

Late last night I streamed B.J.Novak‘s Vengeance (for $20 bills!) and was seriously, genuinely impressed. How the hell did the Blumhouse animals get involved with this? It’s way, way above their usual crude-horror level. And at the same time it’s a Focus Features release, and I was asking myself “what the hell happened with the marketing on this thing?” I’d barely heard of it until Sasha Stone urged me to see it yesterday afternoon.

The Texas-based Vengeance is VERY sharp and savvy, and at the same time one of those rare films with the capacity to settle down and “listen to the grass grow” (a line from Hud, another rural Texas drama) and even feel a semblance of generosity and human compassion for the lives and values of red-state primitives, which is to say folks who aren’t so appalling once you get to know them. Come to think of it I don’t just mean the Texas rurals but also Novak’s “Ben Manalowitz”, whom we also get to know in ways we don’t see coming.

This semi-dweeby 30something who’s played by the star (as well as the director and screenwriter) is a bright, low-key, entirely rational Brooklyn horndog type, way ahead of himself in some ways and at the same time on the emotionally stunted side, and what he experiences in Vengeance is part Brigadoon, part Local Hero and part…well, not quite The Long Goodbye but something that certainly flirts with that realm.

My initial assessment was to call Vengeance a culture-clash dramedy — an extremely social-media-attuned Brooklyn hipster & writer/podcaster & hook-up artist vs. more-than-initially meets-the-eye, family-anchored rurals in Bumblefuck, Texas.

Except it’s not really a “dramedy.” The satirical humor is so dry and under-stated and nuanced and even drill-bitty at times, punctuated as it occasionally is by curiously wise reflections about liberal social media perceptions and ways of living and relating that one could describe as empty or at least lacking in a smartphone-oriented sense vs. under-educated, trailer-park Whataburger Texas primitives, and delivered with a near-total absence of conventional schtick that I didn’t know where to put it.

But I knew for sure that I was watching something real and refreshing. Plus it conveys a learning curve and emotional growth on Novak’s part. And it gives Ashton Kutcher his best-written, most quietly charismatic role ever.

The problem comes at the very end when Novak delivers a surprise ending that was seemingly stolen from, as mentioned, Robert Altman‘s The Long Goodbye, and I’m telling you that it really, REALLY doesn’t work, even though Novak declares early on that he’s not a Texas-styled vengeance type of guy, which is a set-up for an ironic finale. Ben Manalowitz isn’t Shane or Charles Bronson in Death Wish, and there’s no way a guy like this will suddenly morph into an angel of moral justice…no way in hell. I would go so far as to call what I’m half-describing as a train-wreck ending, although Novak manages it throw in a few grace notes after the big surprise. There were four or five ways to go at the very end, and Novak chose the absolute worst option.

That aside (and it’s only a short bit at the very end), Vengeance is WELL worth seeing and thinking about the next day, I’m actually considering giving it a re-watch later this week. There’s no question that Vengeance, which sounds like a primitive actioner in the Mel Gibson mode, is a completely shitty title considering what it’s actually about. Whoever said “wait, let’s call it Vengeance!” should be put into a paddock for seven days and be made to suffer the ridicule of being hit with tomatoes and rotten bananas. Okay, that might be too harsh. But they should at least go on an apology tour and try to explain what their thinking was.

One small thing: Within the Texas family that Ben Manalowitz spends a fair amount of time with is a foxy airhead-y teenage blonde, played by Dove Cameron. Her character, “Kansas City Shaw”, just wants to be “famous”, she says, and for a while you’re thinking “okay, where’s this going to go?” Is she going to hit on Ben in hopes of his inviting her to visit Brooklyn? (She delivers a line early on that alludes to oral predilection.) Is she going to post Instagram videos of herself interacting with Ben or something? But nothing happens. We all like hot blondies but Novak drops her like a bad habit. There’s a second-act family feast scene at Whataburger, and we can see the back of Cameron’s blonde head, but Novak doesn’t give her a line or even a quick insert close-up. She’s part of the family but has been, in a manner of speaking, erased. A curious call.