Paul Dano‘s Wildlife is a sluggish but otherwise strongly directed middle-class horror film — cold, creepy, perverse. I didn’t hate it because of Dano’s visual discipline (handsome compositions, a restrained shooting style, extra-scrupulous 1960 period design) and because of Carey Mulligan‘s fascinating performance as a youngish cheating mom in a small Montana town. But it’s a funereal gloom movie, and it makes you feel like you’re sinking into a cold swamp.

On top of which I was appalled — astonished — by the cruel, self-destructive behavior of this sad 34 year-old woman, whose name is Jeanette, and particularly by her decision to invite her 14 year-old son Joe (Ed Oxenbould) to almost participate in some extra-marital humping with a rich, small-town fat guy (Bill Camp) while her irresponsible husband Jerry (Jake Gyllenhaal) is off fighting a forest fire with local volunteers.

Yes, the screenplay (by Dano and Zoey Kazan) is an adaptation of a 1990 Richard Ford novel so blame Ford, right? But who dreams up stuff like this? And what kind of mother has ever injected this kind of sexually odious poison into her son’s life?

Infidels hide their affairs, particularly from their kids. But Jeanette more or less whispers in her son’s ear, “I dunno but I kinda like this balding Uriah Heep…he’s rich and definitely not your father, and so I’m feeling flirty and thinking about…well, I’ve said enough.” And the kid just stares at her like she’s some kind of conniving ghoul from a Vincent Price flick. Later she says she’s miserable and almost ready to kill herself, but that doesn’t negate the earlier thing.

So Wildlife is partly admirable, yes, but mostly an endurance test. The feeling of watching it is something like “all right, this is grim and getting grimmer but I can handle it…I certainly love Mulligan and Gyllenhaal’s acting but Oxenbould…the kid is torture. He doesn’t look like Carey or Jake, of course — familial resemblance almost never happens in movies — but he wears the exact same expression in every scene in the film…a look of intimidation, anxiety, quiet horror, shock, dread…every damn scene.”

But Dano knows how to visually compose and hold to a certain austere style, and Mulligan is always peak-level, no matter the role.

I dropped by the Grey Goose lounge yesterday afternoon to speak with HE’s own Jonah Hill. His performance as a quietly gay trust-fund kid who mentors alcoholics in Gus Van Sant‘s Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot (Amazon, 5.11) is, for me, a knockout — emotionally open and “real”, not a single amount of digressive humor, straight cards.

Hill said he wasn’t sure what “quietly gay” means but yeah, whatever — a growth thing, a workout, a dig-in.

I hadn’t seen Van Sant’s film when we spoke, but a journalist friend had called it (as noted yesterday) “a really good 12-step movie,” which I agree with, having seen it late last night. Jonah said it’s more than just a 12-step procedural (and he’s half-right) but the film is entirely about the how late cartoonist John Callahan (touchingly rendered by Joaquin Pheonix) overcame his alcohol addiction and eventually found a way to forgive, including his absent mother and even the guy (Jack Black‘s “Dexter”) whose drunk driving caused Callahan to become a quadraplegic.

Snapped upstairs at Park City’s Grey Goose lounge — Friday, 1.19, around 4:15 pm.

There’s a third-act scene in which Jonah delivers one of those “this is who I really am and I’m actually not so great” monologues. It’s easily the most emotionally ballsy or vulnerable thing he’s ever done.

I’m sure that for every person out there who will feel as I do after seeing the film there will be ten others who will complain about Hill not doing funny material any more, or not enough of it. I mentioned the “new Calvinist climate” (which I didn’t try to get Hill to talk about), and said that the Hill performances I’ve loved the most (Wolf of Wall Street, Superbad, War Dogs, Get Him To The Greek) are rooted in an obsessive-indulgent lifestyle mindset that suddenly seems antithetical to the current mood, and that I hope he never loses touch with that current.

Hill is currently editing Mid 90s, his semi-autobiographical directing debut, and that he hopes to have it ready to screen at Telluride, or seven and a half months hence. He’s no longer on board with Uncut Gems, a Benny and Josh Safdie film that presumably has something to do with larceny. His departure was mostly about scheduling issues. The script for the Richard Jewell movie is currently undergoing rewrites at the direction of helmer Ezra Edelman, who “wants to make it his own thing,” Hill explained.

Here’s our brief discussion. The recorder was right next to Jonah, and yet for some reason it sounds like he’s sitting five feet away.

There’s a small food shop adjacent to the main lobby of the Park City Marriott. I picked up a granola yogurt cup this morning (8:25 am) after snagging a ticket to a Sunday night Sundance showing of Lynne Ramsay‘s You Were Never Really Here. But before the sale the checkout girl wanted to make sure I knew the score.

Checkout Girl (pointing to yogurt cup): Uhm, this is seven dollars.
HE (mild, droll): Yeah, you’re pricey, you charge a lot, sure.
Checkout Girl: So is that okay?
HE: Yeah…what do you mean?
Checkout Girl: Is that okay?
HE (slightly confused): Well, no but (a smile) I’ll pay it!
Checkout Girl: I’m sorry. I don’t set the prices.
HE: Sure you do. You’re the mastermind. You’re the Ernst Stavro Blofeld of yogurt pricing.

The checkout girl (a throughly decent person) didn’t get it at all. I shouldn’t have used such an obscure reference. Too early in the morning. Why couldn’t I have let well enough alone and just muttered “no worries”? I’ll tell you why. Because she not only warned me about the high price, and because she asked me for a reaction. I tried to keep things light, but I messed it up with an obscure reference to a couple of late ’60s Bond films.

On last night’s Real Time with Bill Maher, Fire and Fury author Michael Wolff said that a woman whom Trump is currently boning is identified towards the end of the book. “Somebody he’s fucking now?,” Maher asked. “It is,” Wolff answered. But he didn’t identify because he didn’t “have the ultimate proof — I didn’t have the blue dress.” If I had to guess, I would say Hope Hicks…right? Wolff said the woman’s identity is indicated by “reading between the lines” in a section near the end of the book. “Now that I’ve told you,” Wolff said, “when you hit that paragraph you’re going to say ‘Bingo.’ “

I’ve just come from a screening of Marina Zenovich‘s Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind. I was presuming it would be a sad, moving experience going in, and Zenovich hasn’t disappointed. Her film is simple, touching, direct — not a softball portrait that avoids the pitfalls and dark places, but a very comprehensive story of a fascinating whirling dervish and comic firecracker for whom the bell tolled.

Who didn’t love the guy (at least during his 20-year peak period), and who didn’t feel the thud in the chest when his suicide was announced on 8.11.14?

I have to hit Gus Van Sant‘s Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot (which a critic friend has told me is “a very good, very well acted 12-step movie”) but with Williams on my mind I thought I’d re-post a couple of riffs from the HE archives.

8.11.14: Robin Williams, 63, has been found dead of asphyxiation. In other words by his own hand. I’m very, very, very sad about this.

The poor guy had been wrestling with severe depression, probably in part because his heyday was clearly over and he was on a kind of career downswing. I hate to say this but he was. [Update: Also Lewy body dementia.] Life can feel so awful and cruel at times when the heat leaves the room and the candle starts to flicker. The weight can feel crushing and oppressive. And for a guy who seemed to burn a lot more brightly than most of us, certainly in the late ’70s, ’80s and ’90s. A genius improviser, gifted madman and comic superstar for at least…what, 30 years or so?

Williams hadn’t been landing the greatest films or roles over the past decade or so but from the peak of Mork and Mindy fame until One-Hour Photo…what a run! But this…this hurts. It reminds us that we’re all hanging by a thread in a sense, some thinner or stronger or more resolute than others.

Williams’ best films and performances: The World According to Garp (’82), Moscow on the Hudson (’84), Good Morning, Vietnam (’87), Dead Poets Society (’89), Awakenings (’90), The Fisher King (’91), Aladdin (’92), Mrs. Doubtfire (’93), Jumanji (’95), The Birdcage (’96), Good Will Hunting (’97), Insomnia (’02) — 12 films in all.

In the ambitious but mediocre Blindspotting, the sympathetic, Oakland-residing Colin (Daveed Diggs) is trying to stay out of trouble over the final three days of his parole status. Unfortunately, his longtime best friend is a violent, hair-trigger, gun-wielding asshole named Miles (Rafael Casal) so right away you’re wondering “is Colin as stupid as he seems, or is he just temporarily stupid?”

Even more unfortunately for the audience, Casal, a 32 year-old playwright and performance poet, relies on a broad caricature of Oakland street blackitude — machismo shit talk, constant strut, a mouthful of gold fillings, flashing pistols, drop-of-a-hat hostility, etc.

In the view of Hollywood Reporter critic Todd McCarthy “the volcanically emotive Miles” is “a character so brainlessly compulsive and violent that he becomes pretty hard to take after a while.”

White guys adopting the posture of angry, ready-to-rumble street brahs is an old bit. Hip white kids have been pretending to be urban desperados since at least the early ’90s. Gary Oldman as Dretzel in True Romance (’93). Josh Peck in Jonathan Levine‘s The Wackness (’08). The best comic reversal of this was Richard Pryor‘s imitation of dipshit white guys in Richard Pryor — Live in Concert (’78).

Casal’s Miles is easily the most irritating variation I’ve ever seen. I was hating on him 15 minutes into the film.

Colin Firth has told the Guardian that he “wouldn’t” work with Woody Allen again, blah blah. So Moses Farrow is lying…right, Colin? The bottom line is that Firth, like Timothy Chalamet and other character-challenged thesps, is simply too scared to say anything else. In a 1.19.18 Guardian piece, Los Angeles p.r. crisis expert Danny Deraney says that working with Allen now would be “extremely toxic, and why would you want to surround yourself and your career with potential damaging consequences? I don’t think your performance will be taken seriously. Everyone will be [asking] why did you do it?” We’re living through bad times, scoundrel times.

Right now (and I’m using that term loosely) the plan is to catch two Sundance ’18 films plus do an interview. I’m blowing off a screening of Reinaldo Marcus Green‘s Monsters and Men at 12:15 pm, but am definitely chatting with Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot costar Jonah Hill at the Waldorf Astoria Canyons. Then comes Marina Zenovich‘s Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind at the MARC (5:30 pm), and then I won’t be seeing Jessie Peretz‘s Juliet Naked (6:45 pm) — publicists can’t help with a ticket (!). Finally there’s a 9:45 pm screening of Gus Van Sant‘s Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot. And if I really want to burn both ends, there’s a Don’t Worry midnight after-party at the Grey Goose.

As noted, the first-ever screening of a full-boat version of Orson Welles‘ The Other Side of the Wind happened last Tuesday night (1.16) at Santa Monica’s Ocean Ave. screening room. The reconstituted, inside-the-industry, early ’70s montage-hodgepodge will presumably be refined a bit more before debuting at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival.

HE to friend who attended Tuesday’s screening: “Is it…what, a fascinating but surreal early ’70s timepiece? Is it a slipshod, free-associative whatsit without a narrative spine, or does it sorta kinda have something going on? Orson was a near-genius at times, and he obviously did his very best and worked his fingers to the bone, but be honest — is it some kind of visual dazzler, an interesting piece-of-shit or a major discovery or what? Can you give me a thought or two or a hint or two about how it plays, how it feels?”

Cruddy, bleachy image of scene from The Other Side of the Wind with costars Peter Bogdanovich, John Huston.

Friend to HE: “[The film we saw Tuesday] is very much in the spirit of the pre-existing 42 minutes of cut footage, which have been around forever. DP Gary Graver used to regularly screen it. Are you familiar with that material?”

HE to friend: “Naah, never saw it. So the whole movie feels like an expanded version of 42 minutes of cut footage? It doesn’t have shape, narrative tension, thematic clarity, a second-act pivot, a strong ending…NONE of that stuff? Just a grab-bag of cut footage, only longer? That doesn’t say much for the editors, does it? All this work, all these years and all this trouble and expense, and it’s a sprawling cut-footage wank-off? C’mon, there has to be more to it than this. Orson Welles is listening from above.”

Friend to HE: “No, what we saw is not a longer version of the 42-minute cut footage. Josh Karp wrote an entire book about the film which lays it all out. But in a nutshell, this is not just ‘expanded footage'” This is not a short film which has been made longer.

“Orson had a feature script. He shot that movie, infamously, over a period of years. Then he fine-cut the 42-minute version. Then he got busy, got distracted and then died. The 42 minutes were scenes from different parts of the story. The 42-minute reel is famous because its cutting style is so radical — Orson was trying to reinvent editing and shooting styles, as collage.

“The only thing I can compare it to would be parts of JFK, decades later, where Oliver Stone and Bob Richardson were intercutting lots of film stocks and jumping around, to keep you off-balance.

HE to Mira Sorvino, Greta Gerwig, David Ehrlich, Eric Kohn, Timothee Chalamet, Rebecca Hall, Griffin Newman, Reese Witherspoon and all the other Woody condemners: Speaking as a committed, like-minded community of gentle souls, what can we do to stop or at least strongly discourage this kind of cruel, unscrupulous lying in a public forum, especially about a matter that deeply concerns us all?