Jeffrey Wells …at Westport’s AMC Royale, and so far (5 pm) 31 seats have been sold. What does this tell you? It tells me that this James Mangold film will only do decent business this weekend…okay, better than decent, perhaps even brisk. But nothing to write home about.
But Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One (Paramount, 7.12) is totally wowser — a shot of grade-A adrenalin and nothing but breathtaking elements top to bottom, plus some of the action sequences struck me — this was surprising — as almost Buster Keaton-ish in a welcome way. But the Austrian train wreck finale is in a knock-your-socks-off category by itself — an INSTANT CLASSIC.
Subhead for Eliana Dockterman’s 6.27 Time cover story about Greta Gerwig’s Barbie (Warner Bros., 7.21): “The year’s most surprising movie finds humanity in the iconic doll.”
“Surprising,” in this context, means that rather than celebrating and reveling in flush-pink, girly-girl materialistic splendor, which is what 97% of the film’s audience will be gleefully anticipating and paying to see, Barbie will unfurl feminist-inclusive-gay-trans colors.
It will not only push a satiric attitude of the pinker-than-pink aesthetic but perhaps (if the new Time cover story is any indication) even endorse a soulful renunciation of same. Those retro-fest values are strictly in the packaging and will not be fulfilled. Surprise! Barbie is Maoist wokey-wokey.
But of course, as anyone who routinely visits TikTok can and will tell you, Barbie’s bottom-line message is going to be ignored nationwide and worldwide. Because the most ardent Barbie fans are going to enjoy it, as I’ve recently stated, for “the wrong reasons.”
HE sadly notes the passing of Frederic Forrest, 86. For most of us, Forrest’s best and biggest role will always be “Chef” in Apocalypse Now (‘79), a colorful supporting character whose head was chopped off by Marlon Brando’s Colonel Kurtz.
Forrest had starring roles in One From The Heart (‘81) and Hammett (‘82) — neither took off.
Or: the pitfalls of cohabitation with Major General Dimitri Strelnikov in the early spring of ‘21.
In keeping with the general wokester view that older white guys are evil, and especially so if they’re wealthy, Melissa Hung recently complained about receiving three N.Y. Times alerts about the lost (and apparently still missing) OceanGate submersible vs. zero alerts about the week-old (4.26) drowning of 55 Libyan migrants after their boat capsized and sank.
Hung’s lament sounds like a close relation of that classic joke about what to call a thousand lawyers at the bottom of the ocean. Answer: A good start.
It’s now 5:30 pm eastern on Wednesday, 6.21. The oxygen supply aboard the Titan is due to run out around 10 am on Thursday morning. If they’re still alive, the five trapped travellers (British billionaire Hamish Harding, OceanGate honcho Stockton Rush, French explorer Paul-Henry Nargeolet, Pakistani billionaire Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood) have about 16 hours of breathable air left as we speak. To the best of my knowledge the submsersible hasn’t even been located; the odds of finding it and somehow hauling it to the surface seem astronomical.
It’s been estimated that the Titan, the small, deep-sea, Titanic-spotting submersible that went missing early Sunday morning, can sustain the lives of five on-board travelers for 96 hours, or four 24-hour days.
The 23,000-pound Titan began descending around 4 am on Sunday, or roughly 53 hours ago. (It’s now 9 am eastern.) Start to finish Titanic dives last ten hours, including a 2 and 1/2 hour descent to the wreckage some 13,000 feet below.
If the five aren’t rescued by early Thursday morning, an agonizing finale awaits. The clock is ticking — at most rescuers have the remainder of today (Tuesday, 6.20) and all-day Wednesday.
This paragraph, from a N.Y. Times report, conveys the bottom line:
This also:
