I was promised a ticket to a 9 pm public screening of Peter Landesman‘s Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down The White House (Sony Pictures Classics, 9.29), but the publicist didn’t show up. A very long line had formed outside the Scotiabank plex, with everyone waiting to see a 44% Rotten Tomatoes rating. I went home. Life is short.
I, Tonya‘s Margot Robbie. (I think.)
(l. to r.) Boogie Nights friendos Melora Walters (36), John C. Reilly (31), Paul Thomas Anderson (26), Don Cheadle (32), Mark Wahlberg (25).
“For a start, we get Carrey, today, speaking to us via interrotron and looking a lot like late-period Jim Morrison. At first, his recollection of his early career is lucid, but when he starts giving rich, psychoanalytical readings of his 90s comedies, and discussing how an artist has to live ‘up here’ at all times, it’s clear that he’s gone a little off the rails. Unless he just wants us to think that…
“The material of him on set is unbelievable. Watch him annoy the hair and makeup people with loud music, watch him crash cars on the lot and trespass into Steven Spielberg’s office. Gaze on with wonder as this pompous and very talented clown refuses to answer to the name Jim. Co-star Danny DeVito thinks it’s funny but Judd Hirsch is just not having it.
“When Kaufman’s foe, wrestler Jerry Lawler, comes to set playing himself, all hell breaks loose. Carrey refuses to break character, and it results in an injury. (Maybe — who knows if any of this is real?) Forman looks exasperated, but Carrey is the star and if this is what Carrey sees as his process, Forman will have to put up with it.
From a 9.13 USA Today interview with mother! star Javier Bardem, written by Andrea Mandell: “Darren Aronofsky is the opposite of my character [in mother!]” says Bardem. “He’s more into Jennifer [Lawrence]’s character than my character. When I met him I was like, ‘Where is this darkness coming from?’ Because he is the opposite of that. He’s nice, caring, generous, funny, very creative.
“But then I saw when he works, he doesn’t expect anything [less] than perfection. He is relentless.”
Certain contenders have fallen off the map after Telluride and the first six days of the Toronto Film Festival. Here’s how I honestly see things now via my most recent Gold Derby picks. Tell me what I’m missing or overlooking. I’ll be seeing The Wife tomorrow night so we’ll know soon enough if Glenn Close is in fact a new contender in the Best Actress race. The below boxes are as follows from the top down: Best Picture (boxes 1 & 2), Best Director (box 3), Best Actor (4), Best Actress (5), Best Supporting Actor (6) and Best Supporting Actress (7).
It was reported yesterday that that Drafthouse CEO Tim League has decided to show a little compassion and largesse to Devin Faraci, the Birth.Movies.Death editor who lost his job amid allegations of a long-ago incident of sexual assault. League said that in light of Faraci having “entered recovery” and embraced sobriety since the allegations were made, he’s offered Faraci some work — copywriting at Alamo Drafthouse and writing blurbs for the Fantastic Fest guide.
“Seeing the work that Devin has been doing to acknowledge his faults, to address his addiction, and to better himself, I thought it was important to contribute to his recovery process by helping him with some means to earn a living,’ League said.
Speaking as one who became sober on 3.20.12 and who knows a little something about the clarity of mind and sense of stability that sobriety can bring, I think it’s great that Devin has taken this path. You have to show a little love in this world, we all make mistakes, people deserve second chances, etc.
Certain voices on Twitter have voiced disagreement with League and actually called for reprisals. People like this make me want to vomit. I know that Devin has some enemies and that maybe he’s earned their enmity, but journos who call for the utter ruination of fellows in their own trade are, in my opinion, grotesque. I pray that God will bring an appropriate dose of counter-karma into their lives.
I would never, ever come within 100 feet of a guy like Wiseau. Who in their right mind would? So you have to wonder about Dave Franco‘s character…where could he possibly be coming from? How many brain cells is he bringing to the table? I missed The Disaster Artist screenings here in Toronto. A24 is distributing, opening on 12.1…no invites in the inbox.
From Guy Lodge’s Variety review of Our Souls At Night, posted from Venice Film Festival on 9.1.17: “Fonda and Redford play this potentially sleepy material with spry, generous adroitness, genuinely listening and subtly playing off each other’s reactions and body language. This is hardly the most testing work of their careers, but even when Our Souls doesn’t require them to dig especially deep, their enjoyment of each other’s onscreen company is warmly palpable, and thus infectious: We share their pleasure in hanging out together, and duly miss them when they miss each other.”
I didn’t attend this morning’s 8:45 am screening of Bjorn Runge‘s The Wife, but The Guardian‘s Peter Bradshaw did, and his review goes nuts for Glenn Close‘s performance as a “charming, enigmatically discreet and supportive wife” of a world-famous author and New York literary lion (played by Jonathan Pryce.
Close’s performance as Joan Castleman “may be [her] career-best,” Bradshaw says, and “a portrayal to put alongside Close’s appearances in Dangerous Liaisons and Fatal Attraction.” He describes her character as “unnervingly subtle, unreadably calm, simmering with self-control…a study in marital pain, deceit and the sexual politics of prestige.”
That sounds like something strong enough to launch Close into the Best Actress derby, but we’ll need to hear from a few more critics before going down that path. No Rotten Tomatoes entries as we speak.
Hollywood Elsewhere is going to try to attend a 6:30 pm screening of The Wife on Thursday evening at Roy Thomson Hall. So dar I can’t find a publicist who’s repping the film. If anyone knows anything and could lend a hand, please get in touch.
Close and Pryce aside, The Wife costars Christian Slater, Annie Starke, Max Irons, Elizabeth McGovern and Harry Lloyd.
If you count the Telluride adventure (and I do) Hollywood Elsewhere has been doing heavy-travelling and film-festival hours for nearly two weeks straight. Like it or not, I’m feeling exhausted by the pace and the demands (14-hour work days, the usual column demand of four or five stories daily), and so I decided today to back off for the next three days and maybe see one or two Toronto Film Festival flicks per day…no more hard-charging between now and Friday, which is when I fly back to Los Angeles. I might squeeze in a dinner with Jordan Ruimy but no more parties or running around and getting five hours a night, if that.
Plus I felt so destroyed and depressed by I, Tonya today and particularly by the fact that everyone loves it and I’m the only one who’s sane enough to hate it, and so I just trudged back to the pad at 2 pm and flopped on the bed. I slept for four hours. Go away, leave me alone.
About getting into I, Tonya this morning: I arrived at the Scotiabank plex 25 minutes before the start of the 10:45 am I, Tonya press screening, and the line was like “you’re fucking kidding me.” All the way down Richmond and then all the way down John and around the corner to Adelaide. I walked back to the front to speak to Wilson Morales, and as we were chatting the line began to move and — what the hell — I kind of slipped in next to Wilson. Just before entering the theatre a TIFF volunteer was asking for little paper stubs that had been handed out to the legit line-waiters, and I just said “uhm, I think I was using a bathroom when they handed them out” and the guy let me slide.
So I was able to see I, Tonya….yaaaay! But wouldn’t you know it made me feel really bad and alienated and out of sorts. If I never see another movie like I, Tonya ever again it’ll be too soon.
Abuse begets more abuse, and abused victims sometimes (often?) seek out fresh replacement abusers. And so Tonya Harding‘s bitter, chain-smoking mom, Lavona, beat and belittled her daughter from age of 7 onward, and as teenaged and then 20-something Tonya ascended in the figure-skating realm she became a ferociously angry abuser herself with a huge chip on her shoulder…what else?
Tonya married and then separated from an abusive, moustache-wearing asshole, Jeff Gillooly, who conspired to have Harding’s skating rival Nancy Kerrigan temporarily disabled with a police-baton blow to the knee, and with many presuming, fairly or unfairly, that Harding was aware of Gillooly’s plan and was more or less down with it.
Craig Gillespie‘s I, Tonya, an exaggerated, pugilistic black farce that some are calling grimly comedic, is all about the Harding catastrophe, and it’s definitely the Toronto Film Festival movie to see and get walloped by right now.
I, Tonya press-screened this morning at 10:45 am. Well, actually 11:05 am because it took so long to get everyone in. I was there and dealt with the long, horrible, hope-crushing line that stretched east along Richmond and south down John Street. I saw it and I ate it, suffering the blows and bruises and the eye-popping realization that I, Tonya currently has a 100% Rotten Tomatoes rating.
The cool kidz love it, but I’m telling you that unless you have a strange liking for the company of losers, abusers and total dipshits, you’ll definitely want to steer clear of this cesspool exercise. It lasts 119 minutes, and it feels, trust me, like 139 or 149.
When it ended I turned to the guy next to me and said, “How long was that?” “Two hours,” he said. “Good God,” I replied.
Am I the only honest, straight-shooting journo-critic in Toronto right now? I, Tonya is cinematic abuse, pure and simple. It’s an ugly pill from hell — a violent, vulgar, relentlessly profane assembly of lower-middle-class white-trash types beating on each other and smoking and swearing and losing their tempers and causing cuts and swellings. It’s a tacky portrait of American self-loathers, brawlers, grotesques, hungry-for-famers, human garbage, etc.
I tweeted the following just after 1 pm today: “I, Tonya is an ugly, abusive, lower-class tale about a demimonde of ugly, abusive, lower-class people. A movie full of rage and resentment. A toilet-bowl downswirl of wretched, lower-middle-class misery.
Thirteen months ago I threw some praise at a 5.11.16 draft of Taylor Allen and Andrew Logan‘s Chappaquiddick. I tore through it in no time. It’s the kind of well-finessed backroom melodrama that I love — no bullshit, subdued emotions, no tricks or games. It’s tense and well-honed, and, like I said on 8.18.16, a nightmare that had me shaking my head and muttering “Jesus H. Christ”.
Like the script, the film (which I saw this morning at 8:30 am) is a damning, no-holds-barred account of the infamous July 1969 auto accident that caused the death of Kennedy family loyalist and campaign worker Mary Jo Kopechne, and which nearly destroyed Sen. Edward Kennedy‘s political career save for some high-powered finagling and string-pulling that allowed the younger brother of JFK and RFK to more or less skate.
Jason Clarke as the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy in John Curran’s Chappaquiddick.
Just about every scene exudes the stench of an odious situation being suppressed and re-narrated by big-time fixers, many of whom are appalled at Ted’s behavior and character but who do what’s necessary regardless.
There’s no question that director John Curran, dp Maryse Alberti and editor Keith Fraase are dealing straight, compelling cards, and that the film has stuck to the ugly facts as most of us recall and understand them, and that by doing so it paints the late Massachusetts legislator and younger brother of JFK and RFK in a morally repugnant light, to put it mildly.
All along I’ve been hoping that Curran would just shoot the script efficiently, minus any kind of showing off or oddball strategies that might diminish what was on the page. This is exactly what he’s done. Curran has crafted an intelligent, mid-tempo melodrama about a weak man who commits a careless, horrible act, and then manages to weasel out of any serious consequences.
Chappaquiddick may not be the stuff of monumental cinema (stylistically it feels like a respectable HBO-level thing), but it’s a frank account of how power works (or worked in 1969, at least) when certain people want something done and are not averse to calling in favors. EMK evaded justice by way of ingrained subservience to the Kennedy mystique, a fair amount of ethical side-stepping and several relatively decent folks being persuaded to look the other way.
