Although I’m not a down-on-my-knees fan of Baby Driver, it’s nonetheless an exuberant, mad-style movie that warrants applause for delivering something fresh and inspired and seriously nutso. Which is a miracle in today’s realm. I saw it again tonight at the Academy, and enjoyed the hell out of Cameron Crowe‘s post-screening interview with director-writer Edgar Wright and supervising sound editor Julian Slatter.

Another chunk of of my 6.28 review: “Baby Driver is one of the most strikingly conceived, purely enjoyable fast-car crime flicks I’ve ever seen. With Ansel Elgort as a Ryan Gosling-level getaway driver who needs the right kind of song playing in his ear buds in order to make it all come together, Baby Driver is a kind of action musical -— cray-cray car chases and ferocious gunplay synchronized with the sounds and vice versa. To some extent it reminded me of Drive, and at other times of Thief, Gone In Sixty Seconds, Bullitt…that line of country. At times undisciplined and often quite mad, but a great visionary action-and-music flick.”

(l.) Director-writer Cameron Crowe speaking with Baby Driver director-writer following Tuesday night’s Academy screening.

If I wasn’t trying to read the general mood of the crowd I’d have Call Me My Your Name, Lady Bird, The Square, War For The Planet of the Apes, Baby Driver and The Florida Project in my top six slots on a quality-grade alone. If I take Dunkirk out of first place, what do I replace it with? My gut tells me The Post will probably be nudging into first place within five or six weeks. Maybe. I’m also starting to feel a little foolish keeping The Greatest Showman on my list, as 20th Century Fox hasn’t screened anything since that razzle-dazzle Cinemacon presentation last March. Wonder Wheel screens this coming Friday so we’ll see how that goes.

(More…)

“Does mother! have to be explained? What about the experience of watching it? It was so tactile, so beautifully staged and acted — the subjective camera and the POV reverse angles, always in motion…the sound design, which comes at the viewer from around corners and leads you deeper and deeper into the nightmare…the unfolding of the story, which very gradually becomes more and more upsetting as the film goes forward.

“The horror, the dark comedy, the biblical elements, the cautionary fable — they’re all there, but they’re elements in the total experience, which engulfs the characters and the viewers along with them. Only a true, passionate filmmaker could have made this picture, which I’m still experiencing weeks after I saw it.

“Good films by real filmmakers aren’t made to be decoded, consumed or instantly comprehended. They’re not even made to be instantly liked. They’re just made, because the person behind the camera had to make them. And as anyone familiar with the history of movies knows all too well, there a very long list of titles — The Wizard of Oz, It’s a Wonderful Life, Vertigo and Point Blank, to name just a few — that were rejected on first release and went on to become classics. Tomatometer ratings and Cinemascore grades will be gone soon enough. [Or] maybe they’ll be muscled out by something even worse.

“Or maybe they’ll fade away and dissolve in the light of a new spirit in film literacy. Meanwhile, passionately crafted pictures like mother! will continue to grow in our minds.” — posted in The Hollywood Reporter on 10.10.

Wells to Scorsese: I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for “the light of a new spirit in film literacy”…not in this Godforsaken culture.

Right now I’m wearing a $200 non-battery, handwound Swatch…good enough. Sidenote: Yesterday I was bullied and terrorized by the thought police for having written about a slow-reacting overweight person. It was a true story but I took it down because I was scared of what the thought police might do to me. Well, here’s another true story. When I was living in Westport in the late ’70s I knew an overweight guy who would roll into the kitchen and use the bathroom from time to time but who mainly sat on his couch and watched TV. One day he bought a self-winding watch, the kind that would wind itself if you engaged in a little natural movement. This guy was so sedentary that his watch stopped, or so his wife told me. This really happened.

There’s a special Academy screening of Edgar Wright‘s Baby Driver this evening. I’m taking Tatyana because she’s never been to the Academy, and because I honestly like the first 90 minutes. A q & a between Wright and Cameron Crowe will happen post-screening. Someone (me?) needs to ask Wright the following question: “Why, after maintaining a sense of rhythmic and musical control over Baby Driver for almost the whole film….why did you go nuts during the last 15 minutes? You had things more or less together and then you went crazy and sent your movie over the side, off a bridge, into the river…WHY?”

From my 6.23.17 review: “Wright decides to send Baby Driver off the freeway around…oh, the 90-minute mark. And the last 15 or so minutes are flat-out insane and then infuriating. I was sitting there with my face contorted as I silently screamed, ‘What the fuck are you doing?…you fucking asshole! You really had something going there, but now you’re ruining the movie…you’re making it into some kind of bullshit Vin Diesel cum milkshake with a pop-fantasy ending made of dingleberries and drooling saliva. Why? Do you have a creative death wish?”

HE to director friend this morning: “I just saw Baby Driver last night….a wowser, near-great action musical for the first 80% or 85% followed by a ridiculously absurd, overly violent, catastrophically stupid finale that all but destroys the current and the vibe. A friend said ‘the wheels come off at the end‘ but they come off because Wright got under the car and loosened the lug nuts. Rarely have I seen a popcorn film as inspired and well-made as Baby Driver just blow itself up and shatter into pieces at the very end…a shame and a tragedy.”

The legendary Jane Goodall, the British primatologist and anthropologist commonly regarded as the world’s foremost expert on chimpanzees, has been interviewed and profiled countless times over the last 50-plus years. Everyone loves and admires her, and we all want to be as sharp, lucid and healthy as Goodall when we hit 83, which is where she is now.

Brett Morgen’s Jane (National Geographic, 10.20) is merely the latest filmed tribute to Goodall’s devotional calling, which began in Gombe, Tanzania in 1960 or ’62 or something like that, and continued into the 21st Century. The film covers her upbringing, how she got started at a chimp-watcher, her principal primate observations, anecdotes about her personal life, etc.

Does Morgen’s doc pass along anything new about Goodall? As far as I can discern, nope. It does, however, unspool a trove of heretofore-unseen 16mm color footage of of Goodall studying chimp behavior, shot during the ’60s and early ’70s by her then-husband Hugo van Lawick. The footage is luminous, well-framed and apparently was always shot around magic hour — Lawick had an eye, knew his craft.

On top of which Jane has been scored by Phillip Glass, whose symphonies always sound similar and I don’t care. (I know his Fog of War soundtrack backwards and forwards.) And it contains a lot of recent footage of Goodall talking to Morgen about pretty much everything.

Jane is a good and moving film. It has spirit, love…a glow about it. There have been many filmed studies of Goodall and her work, but this is the first smoothly composed, bucks-up, Hollywood-friendly version. Glass’s score encourages you to feel a bit of what Goodall probably felt or sensed as she began her studies. The film is comprehensive but not excessively so. It ignores a ton of material, but it only runs 90 minutes so whaddaya want?

I saw Jane last night at the Hollywood Bowl, at the invitation of National Geographic Films. Goodall and Morgen came out before the show began and shared a few words. Glass’s score was performed live as the film showed on a fairly large screen. The air was warmish, the sky was clear — a very soothing atmosphere. Will Jane be nominated for a Best Feature Documentary Oscar? Sure — why not?

Sidenote: A picnic bag of free food was provided to every invitee. The vittles included roast beef, watermelon and goat cheese salad, a sesame seed baguette, mixed berries and sweet cream, shrimp and a pint of shrimp sauce, a bottle of red and white wine, etc. I was concentrating on the shrimp and the shrimp sauce, and that was my undoing. At some point I shifted in my seat the wrong way and the open container of sauce flipped over and kerplopped on my lap. I moaned like a wildebeest being eaten by wild dogs. My right jeans leg was covered in red glop; both suede shoes, my socks and my black jacket got fuck-smeared also. “Ohhh, God…this is disgusting!” I went off to the bathroom and used about 75 paper towels to try and remove most of the shrimp sauce. It took me about 45 minutes to emotionally recover.

Did I let the shrimp-sauce disaster get in the way of my respect for Ms. Goodall or my admiration of her work or my enjoyment of Jane? Of course not. I’m not a six-year-old. On the other hand I’d be lying if I said I won’t think of that gloppy red goo every time I think of Goodall henceforth or consider a photo of a chimpanzee.

A guy who knows nothing says that a full-boat trailer for Phantom Thread was recently test-screened or focus-grouped, and that the title given in this trailer was The Phantom Thread, which of course sounds godawful. I can’t emphasize how much I hate the unnecessary use of “the” in any context or capacity. I don’t even like the “the” in “the end” — I prefer “finis.”

Ronan Farrow‘s New Yorker report about Harvey Weinstein‘s sexual misdeeds popped this morning. It alleges incidents of forced oral sex and outright vaginal rape. The story contains on-the-record accounts from Asia Argento, Mira Sorvino and Rosanna Arquette, among others.

It’s beyond ugly. How could Weinstein have believed he could act this cruelly and savagely for so many years and not have to eventually pay the piper?

Farrow: “Sixteen former and current executives and assistants at Weinstein’s companies told me that they witnessed or had knowledge of unwanted sexual advances and touching at events associated with Weinstein’s films and in the workplace. They and others describe a pattern of professional meetings that were little more than thin pretexts for sexual advances on young actresses and models. All sixteen said that the behavior was widely known within both Miramax and the Weinstein Company.”

I don’t know that Star Wars: The Last Jedi (Disney, 12.15) is even going to approach the occasionally haunting, vise-grip efficiency of The Empire Strikes Back, but if any of the three 21st Century Star Wars sequels have a chance of being this kind of “holy shit” restoration of faith, The Last Jedi, being the middle chapter, has the only chance. But can this happen? Make no mistake — The Last Jedi is Rian Johnson‘s shot. If he succeeds, the rest of his life will take on a certain glow. If he under-delivers or God forbid fails…don’t ask. But Kylo Ren bothers me. He was a problem in The Force Awakens, and he’s likely to be a problem again.

I’m not beginning to suggest that anyone try to make commercial or award-season hay out of the pain and trauma of sexual abuse, but the fact is that John Curran‘s Chappaquiddick (Entertainment Studios, 12.8) is suddenly a film of the moment, and for recently developed reasons that its makers couldn’t have anticipated. What it’s about fits right into the current clamor.

A damning portrait of arrogant male power and the ultimate abuse of a female subordinate, Chappaquiddick was made last year for its own reasons, and is its own raison d’etre.

The story of the 1969 Chappquiddick tragedy is well-known and has been well-investigated, but Curran, producers Mark Ciardi, Chris Fenton and Campbell McInnes and screenwriters Taylor Allen and Andrew Logan wanted to deliver a concise but unequivocating version of this cold, tragic tale in a narrative form.

A critic friend who saw it last summer called it a “hit piece,” but Chappaquiddick has the cojones to call a spade a spade about a late, much beloved political figure, a respected liberal deal-maker and the most powerful and longest serving representative of what was, for decades, American’s premiere political family — the closest thing we ever had to a version of the British royals.

But since last month’s Toronto Film Festival and almost out of the blue, Chappaquiddick has arguably become an unwitting expression of a strong payback movement among tough female journalists and film industry progressives railing against the abusive use of male power, and not just in the form of odious sexual behavior.

Without design or intention, what Chappaquiddick said last year during its making, the portrait it created of a world-famous power abuser and blame-shifter suddenly fits right into what’s happening now with this and that alleged sexual abuser being taken to task and made to walk the public plank — Devin Faraci, Cinefamily’s Shadie Elnashai and Hadrian Belove, Harry Knowles and now Harvey Weinstein and — wait — Honest Trailer‘s creator Andy Signore..

Yeah, I know — who could have ever foreseen Faraci or Knowles being written about in the same sentence with the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy? But here we are and facts are facts. There have been many legit complaints lodged against the afore-mentioned, but who has ever been more heinously abused than Mary Jo Kopechne? During an estimated two-hour period while Kopechne was still alive and gasping for air inside an upside-down Oldsmobile, EMK wasn’t calling for help (a local diver could’ve had her out of the car in minutes) but deciding that reporting the incident would result in his being found guilty of drunk driving, and so he didn’t call local authorities until the next morning.

Yesterday Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman posted a piece about what he describes as obsessive fanboy worship of Ridley Scott‘s Blade Runner, and how that purist fervor found its voice in Blade Runner 2049.

The key element in Scott’s 1982 original, Gleiberman argues, “is its transcendental mystique — the fact that it now plays like the sci-fi blockbuster equivalent of slow food. Its storytelling longueurs have been inflated into the very signifiers of its artistry. It has become not just a movie but a symbol: the anti-Star Wars.”

Key observation: “I remain a fan of Blade Runner, but to be in the cult of Blade Runner is to celebrate the purity of its vision, and to join in a conspiracy theory about the forces that would obliterate that purity.” Gleiberman doesn’t specifically call director Denis Villeneuve a cultist, but he kinda does.

My argument with the piece is in this passage: “[Scott’s Blade Runner was] a majestic science-fiction metaphor, beginning with its opening shot: the perpetual nightscape of Los Angeles in 2019, the smog turned to black, the fallout turned to rain, the smokestacks blasting fireballs that look downright medieval against a backdrop of obsidian blight. Blade Runner wasn’t the first — or last — image of a desiccated future, but it remains one of the only movies that lets you feel the mechanical-spiritual decay.

“There’s a touch of virtual reality to the way we experience it, sinking into those blackened textures, reveling in the details (the corporate Mayan skyscrapers, the synthetic sushi bars, the Times Square-meets-Third World technolopolis clutter), seeing an echo of our own world in every sinister facet.”

But how much of an echo? Scott’s film was a noirish ecological forecast of where we all might be headed, and I fully understand that vision-wise there’s no upside to low-balling whatever horrors the future might bring. But at the same time if you’re predicting…okay, imagining a world as horrific as Blade Runner‘s from a 1982 vantage point, or 37 years into the future back then, shouldn’t you have to pay some kind of piper if your vision has been proven to be way, way off? If what you foresaw hasn’t even begun to manifest?

Scott’s Blade Runner milieu — nightmarish, gloom-ridden, poisoned — is obviously a trip in itself and fun to wallow in, but it was set less than two years from today, in 2019, and as I said last weekend the sprawl of real-world Los Angeles has exposed that realm as absolute noir-fetish fanboy bullshit.

“Blade Runner 2049 is, of course, a prophecy of ecological run to come, and that’s where we’re definitely heading with criminals like Scott Pruitt running the EPA,” I wrote, “but BR49‘s idea of what Los Angeles will look like 32 years hence is almost surely just as ludicrous as Scott’s.