Jeffrey Wells

Here’s a re-blending of HE’s Best of 2016 tally, including the not-yet-released festival films that really bonged my gong. There are a few I still haven’t seen, but this more or less represents my assessment of the first two-thirds of 2016 — ten biggies in all. Okay, make it eleven if you count Sausage Party. I’m presuming War Dogs (which I won’t see until next week) isn’t going to rank as a top-tenner.

Kenneth Lonergan‘s Manchester by the Sea (Sundance, Telluride, Toronto, NYFF) is still the king, and will definitely be among the top ten by year’s end, no matter what. The new #2 is David Mackenzie‘s Hell or High Water, which opens today. Olivier Assayas‘ Personal Shopper is #3, baby, and I don’t what some of the mainstreamers have said. This thing drilled right down and got me like no other film this year except for Manchester.

HE’s fourth best of 2016 is Luca Guadagnino‘s A Bigger Splash, followed by Robert Eggers‘ The Witch (#5) and Gavin Hood‘s Eye in the Sky (#6).

The third group includes Paddy Breathnach and Mark O’Halloran‘s Viva (#7), Karyn Kusama‘s The Invitation (#8), Bob Nelson‘s The Confirmation (#9) and Ben Wheatley‘s High-Rise (#10), which I saw 11 months ago in Toronto.

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At first I was only marginally interested in David Mackenzie‘s Hell or High Water (CBS Films, 8.12), mostly due to the familiar genre feelings contained in the first teaser. Bank-robbing desperadoes, low-key sardonic cops on their trail, sunbaked Texas plains. Then I saw it in Cannes and went “whoa, better than expected, the buzz is correct.” It’s a 2016 social undercurrent drama disguised as a cops vs. bank-robbers movie. The social undercurrent element refers to mass hurt — i.e., the financial blight afflicting the hinterland struggling class (in this case rural Texas), caused by 2009/10 meltdown and worsened by banksters — and the need to pay off a mortgage. Hence the bank robberies by a couple of hard-luck brothers (Chris Pine, Ben Foster).

Then I saw it again Wednesday night at the Arclight, and was able to savor a bit more of the dialogue (I’m sorry but the sound system at the Arclight is a notch better than that of the Salle Debussy) and it all just clarified and upticked and grew in my head.

Just call me woke: Hell or High Water is the best film of 2016 as things currently stand. I don’t care what happens between now and 12.31.16 — it deserves a place at the Best Picture table. It opens today with a 99% Rotten Tomatoes rating and an 88% rating on Metacritic.

On top of which I can easily see a little Best Actor action for Pine and/or gurgle-speak Jeff Bridges, and definitely some Best Supporting buzz for Foster, whose working-class scuzziness — chunky physique, scratchy face, seriously thinning thatch — put me off at first, but then I manned up and got past that. At least Foster owns the beer-swilling, two-week-beardo thing, and I was marvelling at the careful English he gave to each and every line. By the finale Foster is quite the tragic working-class hero — a malcontent who has to go down but is nonetheless selfless, sacrificing, a good ole brother with a gun. Hell, he’s almost Ray Hicks in Who’ll Stop The Rain.

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If I was Seth Rogen and Bill Simmons had asked me to reflect on the Sony hack, I wouldn’t have mentioned concerns about personal emails being revealed or even poor Amy Pascal getting whacked. I would have definitely mentioned the shameful corporate cowardice factor — the way Sony and theatre chains trembled before anonymous hackers and let their cheap threats dominate the situation. Until the indie chains stood up and pushed back. The candy-ass corporate guys showed what they were made of, all right, and it wasn’t true grit.

Posted on 12.16.14: “Deadline‘s Jen Yamato is reporting that Sony has more or less folded in the face of a blustery, probably full-of-shit threat from the Sony hackers who have warned of 9/11-style attacks upon theatres that play Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg‘s The Interview.

“‘Sony isn’t yet cancelling the Christmas release of The Interview,” Yamato wrote, ‘but the embattled studio has given its blessing to concerned theater owners who choose to drop the controversial comedy.’

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I respect the Rogue One screenwriters, Chris Weitz and Tony Gilroy, and I’m presuming that Disney’s decision to put Gilroy in charge of five additional weeks of shooting and give him final editing authority over original director Gareth Edwards was well motivated. The multicultural makeup of the characters feels p.c. minded, but what else is new? Felicity Jones and Diego Luna have a certain panache, but the rest of the cast feels second-stringish. Okay, Forrest Whitaker excepted.  Let’s leave Ben Mendelsohn alone for now. The Chinese characters/actors — Jiang Wen‘s Baze Malbu and Donnie Yen‘s Chirrut Imwe — were naturally written and cast to energize the Chinese market.  Cold calculation.

I’ve just been through nine hours of soul-draining tedium — a Florence Foster Jenkins review that took forever to get right + increasingly sluggish systems on all three Macs (two Pros, one Macbook Air) + a mutiple ad-loading problem that’s been slowing the site down to a crawl (but which is being fixed as we speak). It was awful, the whole day. And then things suddenly brightened when the UPS guy dropped off two packages — a British Bluray of John Schlesinger’s A Kind of Loving (which I ordered last June) and a pair of saddle shoes that aren’t Tony Curtis-approved but aren’t too bad.

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Stephen Frears‘ Florence Foster Jenkins (Paramount, 8.12) is about the willingness of people to tolerate a musical atrocity in the name of kindness and compassion, but mainly because the titular offender — a real-life millionaire socialite (Meryl Streep) who couldn’t sing a lick but nonetheless insisted on performing opera in front of elite audiences from 1912 until her death in late 1944 — was stinking rich.

Because Jenkins was flush her common-law husband, St. Clair Bayfield (Hugh Grant), protected her from the truth. Because his lifestyle depended on it and because his attitude was “well, she loves music so where’s the harm?” That’s all the movie is, boiled down — a harmless indulgence. Bayfield indulged Florence, and now you, the audience, get to indulge Florence Foster Jenkins. I’ve seen it twice, and I’m not down on it. It’s a curiosity, and yet nimble and nicely made. Not precisely my cup but not bad. No animus.

The most winning performance is given by Simon Helberg as Cosme McMoon, Jenkins’ patient and compassionate pianist. Rebecca Ferguson, Nina Arianda and John Kavanagh costar.

Streep’s performance is well honed and appealing, in part because she allows you to feel that Jenkins was merely a deluded music fan and not, as I suspect was the case in real life, one of the most arrogant non-singers in world history. Streep will probably be nominated for Best Actress, but Grant almost certainly won’t be Best Supporting Actor nominated, as a Janelle Riley story in Variety suggested earlier today. It’s just too slight of a role.

You could say that Frears’ film is about an extremely perverse definition of love and sensitivity. It basically says that if a woman you care for a great deal is (a) absolutely dreadful at singing opera, (b) unable or unwilling to recognize how bad she is, and (c) insists upon singing for audiences nonetheless, the truly loving husband or friend will not only avoid confiding the awful truth but will do everything in his/her power to allow the singer to live inside her fantasy bubble, mainly by shielding her from honest reactions.

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All this week the cool kidz have been flutter-chatting about Barry Jenkins‘ Moonlight (A24, 10.21), which will probably play Telluride before Toronto and New York. A publicist last night after Hell or High Water screening: “Have you seen it?” Me to myself: “No…other journalists have?” (I’m told that a small New York critics screening happened on 7.22.) Is it okay to mention something that the cool kidz would never discuss? It’s not exactly breaking news that the African-American community has been reluctant to offer accepting attitudes toward gays. Especially among males. (The Birth of a Nation‘s Nate Parker being one alleged example.) So while it looks like Moonlight is going to do quite well among the award-season cognoscenti, it may not do as well among non-Anglo, non-industry ticket buyers. I was told last night, by the way, that the standout performance belongs to Naomie Harris.

Todd Philips‘ War Dogs is screening for elite reviewers in Manhattan this evening. Junket critics have already seen it. N.Y. Times profiler Molly Young has seen it. The consensus seems to be that Jonah Hill really delivers but the film is…well, okay. I wish I could attend the L.A. premiere next Monday evening (I’ve pleaded, I’ve cajoled, I’ve emailed), but I may be forced to wait until the L.A. all-media next Wednesday, 8.17. Which of course will be only 24 hours before it opens late Thursday evening. Hey, Todd or Jonah — if you guys are reading this…aah, forget it.  Not that big of a deal.

This is just a rehash piece about the apparent financial disappointment of Ghostbusters. I’m posting because I’m not much of a numbers-cruncher and maybe there’s something I’ve missed…who knows? Paul Feig‘s film opened on 7.15 or 25 days ago. Right now Boxoffice Mojo has the tallies as follows: $118,099,659 domestic, $62,800,000 foreign for a total of $180,899,659.  It’s nearly dead but let’s be generous and say it’ll end up with $200 million total.

On 7.29 a TGG article by Kenay Peterson titled “Paul Feig´s Ghostbusters 2016 flops really hard at the box office” was posted. Peterson quoted an assessment by a reader that seemed valid to him. It seems valid to me also but it would help if other estimates and opinions could be shared.

The basic assessment is that Ghostbusters needs to make between $375 and $400 million worldwide to break even. If it doesn’t get any higher than $200 million it will lose around $200 million, making it “one of the biggest flops since Johnny Depp‘s The Lone Ranger.” Does this sound about right?

Quoting from the article: Production costs are said to have been $144 million. Marketing/advertising/distribution was roughly $150 million, bringing the final cost to around $300 million. A film doesn’t get all the box office receipts. The take is usually between 1/2 and 2/3 of the domestic. If a film makes $200 million, the company actually takes in somewhere between $100 million and $135 million depending on the length of its run, etc.

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Why haven’t I re-watched Martin Scorsese‘s The Color of Money in the nearly 30 years since it opened (10.17.86)? Okay, I’ll tell you why. Because it’s not very good, that’s why. Because it’s widely regarded as one of Scorsese’s weakest films. Yes, Paul Newman‘s performance as a graying, moustachioed Eddie Felson won him a Best Actor Oscar, but all I remember are the fake-outs. Ignoring advice about how to lose, intentionally losing, winning too fast or slow, making bets, losing money, trying too hard…God! It’s playing tonight and tomorrow night at the New Beverly, which of course I don’t attend because I don’t like watching movies with aging film bums dressed in Converse sneakers and faintly soiled T-shirts. I like to watch movies with engaged, well-dressed people who wear Italian leather shoes and…you know, people up to something snazzy. So I decided to rent it on Amazon. The very beginning of The Color of Money is the only great moment — nothing that follows measures up.

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Hillary Clinton has always brought the mucky-muck. Daisy Buchanan, Ma Clinton, etc. She’ll never play it completely clean, there will always be little shit trails, her enemies will never stop and the investigations will go on, etc. It’s her good fortune that Donald Trump is who he is, and that yesterday he blithely speculated about Second Amendment guys shooting her. Otherwise this would be a big story right now.

I was rather surprised by how much I enjoyed the last half…okay, the last 40 minutes of Sausage Party, which I caught last night at the big Westwood premiere. (It runs 88 minutes.) You’re presumably aware that the title refers to a festive, combative gathering among supermarket foodstuffs that leads to revolution against the humans and finally an X-rated food orgy…hot dogs, buns, pears and tacos harpooning and going down on each other like the friends of Sasha Grey or…whatever, sunglass-wearing actors in a 1950s black-and-white stag film.

Yeah, I know — idiotic and dopey but “out there,” nervy, stoned, spirited, fourth-wall-breaking, committed.

It’s the first non-indie, corporate-funded animated laugher I’ve been more or less okay with since…God, I’ve been off the animation boat for so long I can’t remember. I can’t honestly say that I laughed very much at Sausage Party. But I was more and more impressed by the audacity of it. It’s an original, and you don’t come out of animated films saying that very much these days.

I expected to half-hate it because of the ludicrous premise (packaged, corporate-processed foodstuffs with voices, personalities, emotions, lives, souls, dreams) and the bone dumb set-up about the “Great Beyond”, which is a myth among foodstuffs that something awesome and adventurous happens when food is bought and taken home by humans. The grim reality eventually settles in among the foodies, and then it becomes “are we going to take charge of our own lives and push back against the giants who want only to crush us with their disgusting teeth and jaw muscles and swallow us and turn us to stomach mush and God-knows-what-else, or are we going to fight back?”

It’s completely ridiculous but I went with it. I submitted. And then comes an orgy that might raise the staff of the 87-year-old Radley Metzger, who, yes, is still with us.

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