Jeffrey Wells

I knew after watching last February’s two-hour Vinyl pilot that it was toast. If asked I would’ve told HBO executives to pull the plug then and there. But no — they hung in there, tried to create buzz by offering free episodes on HBO Now, approved a second season and then changed their minds and pulled the plug.

Here’s what I wrote 17 weeks ago: I sat through Martin Scorsese‘s two-hour Vinyl pilot last night, and I’m sorry, man, but it didn’t quite cut it for me. Here and there, yes, but overall no. The greatest rock music era was not the glitter-trash early ’70s but the mythical explosion-and-transformation period between ’64 and ’68 — the arc that began with Motown, early British invasion (Beatles, Stones, Kinks, etc.), schmaltz and bubble-gum succumbing or getting swallowed or pushed aside by Bob Dylan and folk rock finessings and then the Yardbirds and the Velvet Underground and early-to-advanced psychedelia. (And don’t forget the Boxtops!)

I’m also unable to believe in a loud, crude, non-levitational guy named Richie Finestra (Bobby Cannavale) as a kind of electric talent-spotting, trend-spotting savant. Cannavale has been playing none-too-bright New Jersey goombah types for too long to attempt this kind of transition, and I just didn’t care what happened to him or what he lucked into or what new rock group is about to restore his faith in rock ‘n’ roll. I don’t mean to sound harsh or dismissive but I didn’t like or care about anyone.

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This Benicio del Toro Heineken commercial (which is over three months old) is all but ruined by two things. One, the tourist couple with the GoPro camera gleefully announcing that they’ve run into Antonio Banderas and two, the parenthetical statement that “this is not Antonio Banderas.” If the whole Banderas thing had been dropped and if the couple knew it was Benicio, the look of deflation and disgust on Benicio’s face would have been perfect because it would have said “God, I hate tourist low-lifes who take selfies and can’t contain themselves.” Instead it says “Jesus, I thought I was well-known but not so much, I guess.” The contempt-for-humanity thing is hilarious because we all feel the same way. (Okay, I do.) But the “gee, I’m not as famous as I thought I was” is on the level of a Bob Hope one-liner from the ’50s.

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It feels like decades since Kathryn Bigelow (Zero Dark Thirty, The Hurt Locker) directed a major narrative film. It’s actually been three and a half years since ZDT, but it feels like a whole lot longer. First there was talk about Bigelow and producer-writer Mark Boal (i.e., the entity once known as “Biggie-Boal”) collaborating on Triple Frontier, a South American drug dealing movie that might’ve starred Tom Hanks, but that went south. Then she was planning to direct a Bowe Bergdhal film but who wants to watch a movie about a flaky deserter who was held by the Taliban for five years? In any event the Bergdahl thing has been temporarily shelved in lieu of his court martial yet to happen and his story being incomplete.

Bigelow and Boal are currently planning a 1967 Detroit riots film — presumably shooting this summer or early fall for an Oscar-bait release next year. Why am I doubting that a 2017 release will happen? Because John Boyega was just announced as a cast member, and it’s nearly July. The Detroit riots happened in mid-summer weather.

When’s Bigelow going to start shooting? I’m told that “Untitled Kathryn Bigelow Film” has been casting day players and soliciting background in Boston via CP Casting, and that the shoot is slated for late July thru September. Then again the last few years have taught us that Bigelow works in slow-mo time. Prepare fully and painstakingly, dig in, get it right. If I were around I would be whispering in her ear like that slave whispering to the Roman conqueror, “All glory is fleeting….life is short, hubba-hubba, no slacking off.”

I saw Jaume Collet-Serra‘s The Shallows (Columbia, 6.24) last night at a Grove all-media screening. The review embargo is in place until tomorrow morning (6 am Pacific), but I can at least mention the following without getting into any specific reactions.

(1) Besides star Blake Lively there are five male supporting characters (two surfers, a local guy with a jeep, a little kid, a fat drunk), but the most distinctive supporting performance is given by a seagull who becomes Lively’s pal, and whom she nicknames “Steven Seagull.” I haven’t read anything about this bird attending the Shallows press junket, but if I was working on the p.r. side I would have definitely brought him in. “Steven Seagull” is almost as emotionally important to The Shallows as “Wilson” the volley ball was to Cast Away.

(2) Lively played the lead in Age of Adaline but here she delivers an impressive stand-alone. For what it’s worth it’s her most noteworthy performance since her supporting perf in The Town. Yes, she interacts with the supporting cast but only briefly — mostly it’s just her, her leg wound, the water, a buoy and a big-ass shark.

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Last night I posted what I called an “Open Letter to Personal Shopper Loyalists.” I asked the critics who had strongly or at least respectfully praised Olivier Assayas‘s film after its debut at last month’s Cannes Film Festival to explain the strange schism between admirers (of which they are many) and dissers (ditto). What’s going on here and why? I asked. Variety and Time Out critic Guy Lodge replied a little while ago. Here’s what he wrote:

“Like you, I’m disappointed by the number of dismissive reviews out there for Personal Shopper, though pleased it has a distinguished core of champions — a group I’m sure is going to grow over time. Assayas’ Clouds of Sils Maria (of which I wasn’t actually a big fan) also played Cannes to mixed reviews, though by the time its U.S. release rolled around, there had definitely been an uptick in its reception.

“I’m not surprised, however, by the Cannes dissenters. Within the opening minutes of the film, I had a strong instinct that (a) I would really be into it, and (b) that it would receive boos.

“The ectoplasm in the possibly haunted house was the giveaway for me: many Cannes critics like genre when it’s postmodern or symbolically self-aware or otherwise above convention, but when Assayas starts engaging directly and sincerely with ghost-story tropes, those critics sneer.

“There are still critics who regard fantasy, however intelligently imagined, with a degree of snobbery, just as there are those who still see Kristen Stewart as the girl from Twilight. Most of the boos at Cannes came from critics who fall into either or both of those camps.

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Andrea Arnold‘s American Honey is a kind of Millenial Oliver Twist road flick with Fagin played by both Shia Labeouf and Riley Keogh (Elvis’s granddaughter) and Oliver played by Sasha Lane…but with some good earthy sex thrown in. There’s no question that Honey stakes out its own turf and whips up a tribal lather that feels exuberant and feral and non-deodorized. It doesn’t have anything resembling a plot but it doesn’t let that deficiency get in the way. Honey throbs, sweats, shouts, jumps around and pushes the nervy. (Somebody wrote that it’s Arnold channelling Larry Clark.) It’s a wild-ass celebration of a gamey, hand-to-mouth mobile way of life. And every frame of Robbie Ryan‘s lensing (at 1.37:1, no less!) is urgent and vital.” — from my 5.14.16 mini-review. A24 will presumably open Honey sometime in the fall.

Once upon a time I was part of Team Independence Day. Back when it was shooting in ’95, I mean. I loved the concept, I knew producer Dean Devlin to some extent (he was good at talking up journalists), and at Dean’s invitation I once visited the Playa del Rey Independence Day set with Jett and Dylan when they were six and five, respectively. Then the big premiere happened in Westwood the following summer…thud. I mostly hated it. Nobody loved it. I remember walking through the UCLA campus on the way to the after-party and listening to a talent agent, walking nearby, tell a friend or colleague that it was “bad, bad, bad.”

I decided that night that I’d never again see Independence Day, and I never did. And that I’d never see a sequel. And so I’ve never had any intention of seeing Independence Day: Resurgence (20th Century Fox, 6.24) in any format — no all-media, no paid-ticket screening, no Bluray, no streaming…nothing. Shitty idea. Horrific prospect. Eraserhead.

From Peter Bradshaw‘s 6.21 Guardian review: “Joyless and tedious, a reboot quite without the first film’s audacity and fun. The plot’s potentially interesting dependence on the idea that there are aliens who are allies as well as enemies is lost in a tiresomely written muddle — an all-but-plotless melee of boring digital carnage. The first film was a creature of the pre-digital age when the spacecraft on screen were mostly physical models, but it can’t be entirely the fault of our digital age that this film has no real sense of excitement and awe. It’s a movie that is going through the intergalactic motions.”

The official The Birth of a Nation trailer, posted today by Fox Searchlight. I’m told that some CG shots of smiling angels, which I didn’t care for at all when I saw Nate Parker‘s film last January, have been cut. That’s a good thing.

A new film by John Michael McDonagh (The Guard, Calvary) demands attention, and there’s no disputing the fact that War Against Everyone did well when it premiered last February in Berlin. “Imagine if Quentin Tarantino directed Starsky and Hutch and didn’t mess it up with his whole malignant misanthropic, misogynistic look-at-me thing. The result would be McDonagh’s snort-milk-out-your-nose-funny buddy cop comedy. Michael Peña and Alexander Skarsgard play Bob and Terry, co-dependent corrupt Albuquerque pigs snorting and shooting their way to tumble a supercilious English Lord (Divergent‘s Theo James) into horseracing, heists, and kiddy porn.” — from a non-bylined Vanity Fair review filed from Berlin.

I won’t be seeing Gary Ross‘s Free State of Jones (STX, 6.24) until Wednesday night, but as of this morning six respected reviewers have trashed it — Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman, The Hollywood Reporter‘s Todd McCarthy, TheWrap‘s Robert Abele, Indiewire‘s David Ehrlich, Entertainment Weekly‘s Joe McGovern and Screen International‘s Tim Grierson.

The general beef seems to be that the film is mainly interested in (a) delivering a dry history lesson and (b) deifying Matthew McConaughey‘s real-life Southern rebel. A Civil War-era drama that only last week was being positioned by Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson as a possible Best Picture “contender” appears to be headed for the rocks. Gleiberman: “A misfire…shot with the boxed-in functionality of basic cable television.” Abele: “One of those historical dramas with a script that’s big on crowning lines of moral fervor and not so big on nuts-and-bolts detail.” If you count Interstellar as a problem movie (and I do, hugely), this is the third stinker in a row for McConaughey. Perhaps Stephen Gaghan‘s Gold, in which he stars with Edgar Ramirez, will turn things around.

The white hinterlanders supporting Donald Trump have never had significant problems with his racist attitudes, blustery braggadocio or lack of interest in coherent, fact-supported viewpoints. But they respect the fact that he’s rich, and I suspect their support would diminish if it were shown that he’s not quite the financial titan and skillful wheeler-dealer that he’s portrayed himself as all along.

Well, that possibility is suddenly being kicked around and explored. Last night’s N.Y. Times story about his lean campaign finances and “crippling money deficit“, based on Monday’s campaign finance report, along with the newly trending hashtag #TrumpSoPoor, punches a hole in the notion that he’s a crafty, bucks-up insider who knows all the angles.

Who is Trump if not Daddy Warbucks, Auric Goldfinger with a coif, Mr. Swagger with the “don’t worry, I know how to negotiate great deals” attitude? Indications are that he’s something of a miser, an Uncle Scrooge, a guy who squeezes the nickle until the buffalo shits.

The Times story states that Trump currently has the “worst financial and organizational disadvantage of any major party nominee in recent history.” His campaign raised only $3.1 million in May, he had to lend himself more than $2 million, and his campaign had only $1.3 million as June began while Hillary Clinton had around $42 million at the same juncture. The campaign report coupled with campaign manager Corey Lewandowski getting sacked yesterday are obvious indications of damage in the hull.