Jeffrey Wells Around 2:30 am Tuesday morning a trio of guys wearing dayglo green hoodie parkas plus the usual snow gear were shoveling out the driveway of my Wilton condo community. I was awake anyway as I’d just updated my Web.com nameserver codes, but the sound of their snow shovels scraping the driveway surface…”guuhhrrutt!…guuhhrrutt!”…was an eye-opener.
Where would the movie realm be right now if Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert had never dreamt and maneuvered their way into a certain A24 orbit that has strangely transformed itself into a Millennial consciousness brand that is darkening many more brows than just my own?
Hard to say but boy, my heart is not only bleeding right now but staining the wood floors and certainly the carpets. And for some reason a lyric from a mediocre Jimmy Webb song is filling my head…”I don’t think that I can take it ‘cause it took so long to bake it, and we’ll never have that recipe again.” The bad guys are winning!
There are few events presently unfolding on the global stage that deliver more in the way of moral clarity than Ukrainians fighting tooth and nail against the rank evil of Vladimir Putin. If you can’t or won’t put aside peripheral matters and grasp which side is with the angels in this conflict, I don’t know what to say to you. Except that a certain moral fiber or awareness is clearly missing deep down — that your sense of humanity is minus an essential component.
Either you understand that Everything Everywhere All At Once represents not just an aesthetic pestilence but a terrible forced banality…a film that’s a good deal less about verse-jumping and spiritual dreamscapes and a lot more about pulp Marvelism and the relentless drumbeat of identity politics (Asian + queer), or you don’t. Or you do get this and you don’t care, in which case we’re all fucked anyway.
We all understand, sadly, that a certain either-or mindset, born of a certain malevolent social-media logic, has settled into award-season consciousness.
Last year at this time a fundamental shift of allegiance among the Academy middle-grounders happened…a moment when it became clear that a weird 1920s western about repressed queer desire and a refusal to bathe and an anthrax murder scenario just couldn’t be the Best Picture standard bearer, and that a generally decent but underwhelming family fable about singing, destiny and deafness had to replace it…my God, what a totally myopic, solitary confinement prison–cell choice that was!
But it happened, sadly, and what were we left with at the end? Nothing…nothing but a feeling of being surrounded and enveloped by mediocre minds (i.e., the degraded identity-politics principles that flooded the delta when SAG became SAG-AFTRA).
And this year and right now, we’re back in that same dank prison cell with a choice between a multiversian IRS audit-meets-queer politics Marvel film that has stymied and suffocated people of taste and perspective in every corner of the globe and certainly among the storied 45-plus community…a choice between a film by the makers of a metaphysical fart movie called Swiss Army Man and a smart, crafty, populist-pleasure machine that saved the film industry’s ass (in the view of no less a personage than Steven Spielberg).
God help us but the SAG-AFTRA philistines have apparently decided to choose, for the fifth time since the 2017 Oscar ceremony, identity politics symbolism over other considerations…again. Moonlight, Parasite, Nomadland, CODA, EEAAO.
Talk about The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant or The Bitter Tea of General Yen. Or, you know, anything using the word bitter.
…holding their Best Picture Oscars and taking a stab at earnest and eloquent, which will almost certainly come out impromptu and awkward. Maybe they’ll mention Swiss Army Man and slip in a reference to flatulence?
For me at least.
From Brett Easton Ellis’s recollection of seeing The Shining for the very first time on 5.23.80, at the Westwood Village:
As I began to glumly settle into an awareness of the kind of film Cocaine Bear is — a film that’s weirdly cottonball and barren but at the same time not a piece of shit and which is reasonably well-framed, cut, written and directed…as I took stock of what it was up to, I didn’t know what to make of it. Really…I was lost.
I can report that I laughed twice, which should count for something.
I honestly don’t know what to say except that CB is some kind of dopey–ass hybrid deadpan comic gorefest, and yet one that’s chortle-worthy at times and even touches bottom once or twice. “This is a wank, a waste of time,” I was muttering, “but it’s not that awful.”
I found myself lamenting, in fact, that director Elizabeth Banks and screenwriter Jimmy Warden had decided to go for dumb laughs — if they’d only committed to making some kind of dry, half-realistic ensemble docu-dramedy, CB might have amounted to something (though I can’t quite imagine what that would be exactly).
I’ll tell you this much — the late Ray Liotta plays it totally straight as a furrowed-brow drug dealer, and I felt really badly that he wasn’t allowed to play a nogoodnik of greater consequence, or at least that he wasn’t given better lines.
Alden Ehrenreich (whose hair is going gray already!) plays Liotta’s half-heartedly criminal son, and I swear to God he’s more compelling in this role than he was in Solo or Rules Don’t Apply.
The steadily low-key O’Shea Jackson Jr. is wasted, and that bummed me out. Ditto Keri Russell as a good mom searching the forest for her 13-year-old daughter (Brooklyn Prince, who of course looks nothing like Russell)…she also plays it straight like Ehrenreich and Liotta.
I just wish Banks hadn’t tried to goof her way through it. I wish she’d made this film in a Steven Soderbergh-type way. That’s all I’m saying.
Herewith David Thomson ‘s assessment of Tom Hanks, written 22 years ago. The words are mean but Thomson isn’t wrong. Except, that is, when he writes that Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia (‘93) and particularly Hanks’ “Andy Beckett” performance don’t really convey “courage, convictions, or some resolution of what [the film is] about.” Perhaps so, but you know who does bring that stuff? Denzel Washington.
Posted on 4.14.15:
So that’s a major, get-outta-here ixnay on Quills, a kind of grumpy wave-away when it comes to About Schmidt and a thanks-but-no-thanks in the matter of Vanilla Sky, Donnie Darko and American Psycho, and I can’t even remember Bully and Igby Goes Down. But approvals for the other eleven, and especially for Sexy Beast and Adaptation.
For the concept, the lighting, the wardrobe…each and every aspect. Usually you’re asking for trouble if you pose someone against hazy flooded sunlight, but this time it works.
I’m presuming that the film critic successor to A.O. Scott, whose decision to shift into book reviewing was announced on Tuesday (2.21), has already been decided upon by N.Y. Times management.
If not, one presumes or at least hopes that the decision will take into consideration the fact that the woke worm has turned, the crazy current is losing its strength and that the Times really needs a sensible, snappy–phrased, Bret Stephens-like cineaste, or someone who doesn’t hold with the wokester criteria that defined the Dargis–Scott Universe essays of the last three or four years.
Someone like Variety critic Owen Gleiberman, for example. A seasoned diviner of great 20th and 21st Century cinema and certainly no friend of the progressive Khmer Rouge, O.G. has always gotten the whole equation and writes entertainingly to boot.
For symbolism’s sake if nothing else, they need to hand Scott’s job to a critic who doesn’t necessarily buy into the “Woody Allen is Satan” narrative, as Scott more or less did five years ago. That article was an ignoble Times milestone, and they certainly don’t need another agenda-tied progressive like Dargis. The readership has had it with that shite.
If the decision is between Times contributors Wesley Morris and Glenn Kenny, I’d much rather see Kenny fill Scott’s shoes. As an act of defiance if nothing else. Because if Times honchos don’t hand the gig to Morris their hides will carry an R brand, right?
I know or suspect deep down that Morris will get the gig but I’ve never liked him. He’s an excellent writer but also an arch know-it-all and a somewhat fey elitist. In 2015 he chortled at the brilliant Love and Mercy. having sneered at it during the 2014 Toronto Film Festival. Like a good little woke Trotsky-ite Morris tried to kill the harmless, warm-hearted Green Book at a crucial stage in the Academy voting game. (Sorry that didn’t work out!) Instead of honorably engaging when I wrote him a few years back with a challenging opinion, Morris shrieked at the alarming fact that I had his email address. Pearl clutcher!
Ray of hope: Word around the campfire is that Morris may not want the job, as he allegedly prefers being a critic-at-large. Covering the waterfront as the Times’ co-lead film critic is a demanding task, etc.
Philippine director Isabel Sandoval has taken issue with Roger Friedman’s Showbiz 411 report (2.20) that Pedro Almodovar’s A Strange Way of Life, a 40-minute “short”, will open the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. For what it’s worth, Sandoval has tweeted that Martin Scorsese’s 200-minute Killers of the Flower Moon will open the festival.
The fact that the L.A.-based Sandoval runs with other filmmakers suggests that she may be onto something.
On the other hand, there’s always something about an opening-night Cannes booking that says “hmmm.” Ask any filmmaker — it’s always better to play within the festival. Being the opening-nighter always seems to suggest sone sort of difficulty or softness — it sends the wrong message in some odd way. [Thanks to Jordan Ruimy for passing along.]
