Edgar Wright‘s Baby Driver deserves a salute for creating something that felt semi-original — a violent, fast-driving action musical of sorts. The presumed goal behind Wright’s recent campaign appearances has been to land a Best Original Screenplay nomination. In a fair and thoughtful world, that notion would still be in play. And maybe it still is. But I have a feeling that Kevin Spacey‘s radioactive dust might get in the way. Distractions should never matter, but this one might. I also suspect that if Wright hadn’t decided to inject Baby Driver with insanity serum during the last 15 or 20 minutes he would be in a stronger position now.

From “Seen Better Days,” posted on 9.28.17: Directed and co-written by Richard Linklater, Last Flag Flying (Amazon / Lionsgate, 11.3) is a moderately passable older-guy road movie — a doleful, episode-by-episode thing about three ex-servicemen and former buddies — Larry “Doc” Shepherd (Steve Carell), Sal Nealon (Bryan Cranston) and Richard Mueller (Laurence Fishburne) — assessing their lives and the world around them as they escort the casket of Shepherd’s soldier son, recently killed in Iraq, from some city in Virginia to some other city in New Hampshire.

This is roughly the same path, of course, that the original film followed when Badass Buddusky (Jack Nicholson) and Richard “Mule” Mulhall (Otis Young) escorted Larry Meadows (Randy Quaid) to the Portsmouth brig for the crime of having stolen $40 from a polio donation box. 

For whatever tangled reasons Linklater and original novel author and screenplay co-writer Daryl Ponicsan chose to re-name Buddusky as Nealon, Mulhall as Mueller and Meadows as Shepherd. This led to ignoring the Last Detail origin story and making the trio into Vietnam vets with a shared history.

The difference is that (a) Nealon-Buddusky, as played by Cranston, is now an intemperate, pot-bellied drunk, (b) Fishburne’s Mueller-Mulhall has become a testy, sanctimonious prig with white hair, and (c) Carell’s Shepherd-Meadows has gotten shorter with age and become a quiet, bespectacled grief monkey (and who can blame the poor guy?)

The film mopes along in a resigned, overcast-skies sort of way, and after about 30 or 40 minutes you start saying to yourself, ‘Jesus, this thing is going to stay on this level all the way through to the end, and I’m stuck with it.’

There are two performances that merit special praise — J. Quinton Johnson‘s as a young Marine escort, disciplined but observant, who travels with the trio to Portsmouth, and Deanna-Reed Foster‘s as Mueller’s compassionate wife.

The Last Detail was based on Ponicsan’s 1970 novel. Last Flag Flying is based on Ponicsan’s same-titled 2005 novel, the main difference being that the book used the names and history of the original characters.

7:30 pm Update: Netflix has whacked House of Cards star Kevin Spacey over numerous sexual assault and harassment claims. Does this mean they’re killing the show or what? They’d be crazy not to keep it going. All they have to do is rewrite the script so they can kill off Underwood, leaving Robin Wright to take over.

“Netflix will not be involved with any further production of House of Cards that includes Kevin Spacey,” a spokesman for Netflix said in a statement. “We will continue to work with MRC during this hiatus time to evaluate our path forward as it relates to the show.”

Earlier: I don’t know how far along the sixth and final season of Netflix’s House of Cards might be (on 10.31.17 it was reported that production has been suspended indefinitely), but Stephen Whitty‘s suggestion for how to deal with the Kevin Spacey matter makes sense. I would love to see Claire Underwood (Robin Wright) occupy the Oval Office. I don’t think I’m the only one.

This is a lively, engaging, well-cut trailer — congrats to the ad agency or in-house Paramount guys who cut it. I would go so far as to call it a knockout, which is ironic considering that Alexander Payne‘s Downsizing didn’t exactly knock ’em dead when it played two months ago at the Telluride Film Festival. It currently has a 65% and 74% rating with Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, respectively.

Because it’s Friday afternoon and I’ve just woken from a nap and the world could use a little warmth and kindness, I’m posting the following from my 9.2.17 Telluride review: “I am not ‘panning’ Downsizing. It’s definitely a major, highly original, award-season release that everyone will have to see. It will be a huge topic of conversation during the late fall and holiday period. I am in no way saying ‘don’t see this’ or ‘wait for streaming’ or anything along those lines. It’s smartly written, well acted, conceptually daring and certainly an awesome technical achievement.”

From 10.4.17 HE review: “Fatih Akin‘s In The Fade (Magnolia, 12.27) is a traumatic-loss-and-revenge drama starring Diane Kruger, whose performance won the Cannes Film Festival’s Best Actress award last May. It dispenses chilly, carefully measured hardball realism, and in a gripping, emotionally jarring way that I believed top to bottom. Taken on its own terms, it’s close to unassailable.

“Set mostly in Hamburg, Fade starts with Katja (Kruger), her clean-living Kurdish/Turkish husband Nuri (Numan Acar) with a drug-dealing past, and their young son Rocco in happy-family mode. That lasts less than ten minutes. A home-made nail bomb outside Nuri’s office explodes, and Katja is suddenly a child-less widow. She wilts under agonizing pain and a near-total emotional meltdown, and understandably decides to temporarily medicate with drugs, and then nearly ends it all by slitting her wrists.

“But a suspicion she’d shared with her attorney, Danilo (Denis Moschitto), about anti-immigrant Nazis having planted the bomb turns out to be accurate. Katja learns that evidence she had given the police has led to the arrest of Andre and Edda Moller (Ulrich Brandhoff, Hanna Hilsdorf), a pair of young neo-Nazis with international connections. There’s no doubt these two are the culprits — Katja had seen Edda leave a bicycle near her husband’s office two or three hours before the blast.

“Then comes a second-act portion dealing with a trial of the accused that doesn’t end satisfactorily, and finally a third act in which the acutely frustrated Katja travels to Greece to carry out her own form of revenge-justice.

I approved of James Franco‘s The Disaster Artist (A24, 12.1) in my 10.25 review, but at the same time I called it a curio — a decent stab at conceptual humor that generates a kind of chuckly vibe on a scene-by-scene basis.  Watching a clueless asshole (i.e., Franco’s Tommy Wiseau) behave like a clueless asshole isn’t all that funny if you’re watching what that’s like on a line-by-line, incident-by-incident, humiliation-by-humiliation basis.

Then something happened two or three days later. I began recalling a seriously weird moment from the film, and then it became an ear bug — playing over and over in my head. I’m speaking of a moment when Wiseau performs a spazzy, primal-scream thing during a San Francisco acting class. “Aagghhhh! Aaagghhhh! Aaaggghhhhh! For some reason I can’t get this screaming out of my head, which is probably an indication that Franco has done something right. Now I’m thinking it might be a classic bit.

I was reminded of the soft, grainy, slightly darker look of Lady Bird after catching it last night for the second time. I had assumed after seeing it in Telluride that it’d been shot on 35mm or super 16mm, but then I read this morning that it was actually shot digitally. So I asked to speak with dp Sam Levy sometime today. Luckily and unexpectedly, we were chatting less than an hour later.

Levy shot Lady Bird with Arri Alexa Minis, he said, but with “old lenses.’ The soft, grainy look began to be formulated when Gerwig said she wanted Lady Bird “to look like a memory.”

“A distressed, restrained muted palette”

“When she said that I knew what she meant,” Levy recalls. “Not too digital or clean or super-clear. The aesthetic of memory. Not too saturated or contrasty or electronic looking. We had an instinct to shoot it digitally but employ techniques that would result in a distressed, hand-made, xerox-copies-of-color-photos feeling…we always always trying to get this generation-removed aesthetic.”

I mentioned the grainy textures, which pretty much leap out at you. “Grain is an element, part of the distressed quality of the image,” Levy said, “but it’s not the whole story. The idea was to make it look not too resolved, not too sharp.

“We were looking for a restrained, muted color palette. We shot in 2K, which has a softer, more mellow quality. But even with 2K as opposed to 4K the colors are fairly saturated and robust, and so we were looking for ways to distress the image in an organic way…reminiscent of super 16mm, but the intent was to create something of our own. It isn’t clean and correct and super-clear but is slightly removed.”

Posted on 11.2, 11:19 pm: A chat between Phantom Thread director Paul Thomas Anderson and Entertainment Weekly‘s Kevin Sullivan was posted at 12:31 pm today. The money quote is when PTA mentions Alfred Hitchcock‘s Rebecca as an inspiration:

“It’s not your standard love story. It’s more peculiar for sure. A lot of directors have tried and failed to make Rebecca. I’m probably next in line, but it’s a different story. I’m a large aficionado of those large Gothic romance movies as the old masters might do them. What I like about those kinds of love stories is that they’re very suspenseful. A good dollop of suspense with a love story is a nice combination.”

In other words Daniel Day Lewis‘s Reynolds Woodcock is Maxim de Winter, Vicky Krieps‘ Alma is Joan Fontaine, and Lesley Manville‘s Cyril Woodcock is Judith Anderson or Mrs. Danvers. Or something in that realm.

Earlier today, posted around 5 pm: I’m starting to question a certain rumor about Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Phantom Thread (Focus Features, 12.25). The talk has been that it becomes a kind of 50 Shades of Grey thing in the third act (i.e., “a classier version of 50 Shades of Grey“). Yesterday a friend passed along a notion that “the current trailer is a kind of a bait and switch….that it looks like it’s going to be a relationship drama that gets darker as it goes on, but that it has an unhinged third act.”  No specifics but the trailer is said to be somewhat misleading, or so some suspect.

I replied that the “classier version of 50 Shades of Grey” rumor has been kicking around for a while now. The friend said he’d been told that it goes “completely crazy” at the end, and was wondering if I’d heard any specifics. So I asked a guy who hears things from time to time, and he passed along a different kind of heresay, which is that Phantom Thread “is not explicitly sexual.” He’s been told that “it’s akin to 50 Shades when it comes to the controlling power dynamics and the parameters of their relationship, which she both embraces and subverts. But there is a real struggle for dominance.”

The trailer suggests that the power struggle is a triangle thing — Daniel Day Lewis‘ Reynolds Woodcock vs. Vicky Krieps Alma with Reynolds’ sister Cyril Woodcock, played by Lesley Manville, butting in and warning Alma. “Leave my brother alone, let him tend to his creations, you’re asking for trouble,” etc.

Deciding not to campaign Kevin Spacey‘s performance as J. Paul Getty in All The Money in the World (TriStar, 12.22) is an obvious no-brainer, given recent charges about Spacey’s off-screen behavior and the current “me too” atmosphere. But what if, just to play Devil’s Advocate, his acting in this Ridley Scott true-life drama turns out to be seriously distinctive and perhaps even dazzling?

The Oscars are essentially a popularity contest and so Spacey is dead in a political sense — I get that. But sometimes venal or damaged people do really good work. Any mature understanding of the nature of talent bears this out.

Has anyone ever compiled a master list of great performances given by actors whose off-screen behavior and character have been alleged or documented to be deplorable? Or a tally of great films directed and written by people who have something to feel ashamed about in a personal or relationship realm? You’d be looking at a fairly long list, I’d imagine. Hell, flip the equation over and ask yourself “how many hugely talented people and Oscar winners have lived lives that would win the Boy Scout or Girl Scout seal of moral approval?”

I’m moving closer and closer to a firm opinion that 2017 has been a weak Oscar year, and I’m starting to think there’s a specific reason for that. In any artistic realm there’s only so much genius and excellence to go around, and the fact is that more and more talented people and good ideas are finding homes in cable and streaming these days, and that means that the movie realm, which has never been less interested in quality for quality’s sake in the history of the film industry, is no longer getting the cream of the crop and the pick of the litter in terms of talent and projects.

To rephrase, fewer dynamically talented people are trying to create high-quality movies for the theatrical realm, and more and more dynamically talented people and their passion projects are heading straight for Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and elsewhere in the streaming realm. It’s that simple.

I don’t know much about Steven Spielberg‘s The Post and Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Phantom Thread (and neither does anyone else), but I do know that when you look closely at the current Gold Derby favorites for Best Picture, there are are only three that deliver that X-factor wowness. Three films with that confident, fully charged, self-aware, ahead-of-the-curve, real-life-discovered quality that proclaims “this is truly one of the few.”

I’m speaking (as if regular readers didn’t know) of Dunkirk, Call Me By Your Name and Lady Bird. I could extend my list to include The Big Sick and The Florida Project because they also smack of discovery and originality, a vibe and a current that tells you “this is new, this is something else, you need to really pay attention.”

In terms of dazzling precision and extraordinary visual composition alone I would add the masterful War For The Planet of the Apes, although I know there are some who insist on pigeonholing it as a technically brilliant exercise and nothing more.

I’m not dismissing or marginalizing Darkest Hour, Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri, The Shape of Water or Get Out, and I wouldn’t argue all that strongly against them if anyone tried to pick a fight. All due respect, I don’t happen to believe these four films have that tingly, levitational quality that many Best Picture Oscar nominees have possessed in years past, at least in my own estimation. That’s not to say they’re not heading for a Best Picture nomination. They may well be.

I don’t believe that Star Wars: The Last Jedi (Disney, 12.15) is going to be the Empire Strikes Back of the current trilogy, as some have suggested or hoped for. I am so persuaded because that 1980 classic was essentially a film noir dressed up in Star Wars mythology and effects, and the creatives behind this forthcoming Disney release are, I strongly suspect, unwilling to create a middle chapter that will steer the narrative into a downish noirish direction that will things hanging. I just don’t see it happening.

I do, however, see myself crumbling under the atmosphere of sameness and repetition, of being fed the same-old, same-old for the umpteenth time. How many decades have we all been listening to dialogue about the dark side vs. the Force by way of first-run releases, Blurays, DVDs and whatnot? The answer is four. 40 years of hammering home that same either/or equation, over and over and over.

Will it wow the crowd? Yeah, most likely. It’s supposed to be a good script. Rian Johnson, Kathy Kennedy and the financing Disney execs know what they’re doing. They just don’t seem interested in a Hollywood Elsewhere-styled Star Wars film, is all. Not the end of the world. I’ll survive and so will everyone else.

Eight weeks ago I called Greta Gerwig‘s Lady Bird “the pizazziest, wisest, smartest, most emotionally resonant and complete film I’ve seen at Telluride ’17.” Here it is November 2nd, and I’m thinking those superlatives might apply to the whole year. And hardly anyone is dissenting. 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, 93% on Metacritic. Obviously a Best Picture contender, ditto Gerwig for Best Director, Saoirse Ronan for Best Actress, Laurie Metcalf for Best Supporting Actress.

Whipsmart, deeply felt, affecting, alive, shrewdly calculated. Really. Obviously.

And yet for the most part the Gold Derby gang has Lady Bird ranked behind Darkest Hour (an impassioned, well-made historical drama that could have been made in 1987), Three Billboards outside Ebbbing, Missouri (a wise, often eloquent film about letting go of anger and yet punctuated with rage and violence for 3/4 of its length) and The Shape of Water (a romantic, sensual fairy tale that charms but with a story that doesn’t quite hold up to logical scrutiny). Lady Bird may be “small” but it has no issues or blemishes. It completely understands itself and how to convey what it’s saying. It’s clever and canny and doesn’t miss a trick. For that you get demerits?

From A.O. Scott’s N.Y. Times review: “I wish I could convey to you just how thrilling this movie is. I wish I could quote all of the jokes and recount the best offbeat bits. I’d tell you about the sad priest and the football coach, about the communion wafers and the Sacramento real estate, about the sly, jaunty editing rhythms, the oddly apt music choices and the way Ms. Ronan drops down on the grass in front of her house when she receives an important piece of mail. I’m tempted to catalog the six different ways the ending can make you cry.”

For those who haven’t paid the slightest attention, Lady Bird is a comically anguished piece of self-portraiture in which the 34 year-old Gerwig recalls and reconstructs (and to some extent re-invents) her life in ’02, when she was finishing high school and dying to get the hell out of Sacramento. Mopey as this may sound, it casts one of those spells that take hold. It’s an amusing, touching, smallish film that glistens and scores and pushes that special button.

Said it before: “Lady Bird is Rushmore’s Daughter — a brainy, girl-centric indie that deals emotionally rounded cards, a Wes Anderson-type deal (sharply disciplined, nicely stylized, just-right music tracks, grainy film-like textures) but without the twee, and with polish and English and all kinds of exacting, soulful self-exposure.