I’m feeling fairly confident about Harris’s chances tomorrow, especially after that shocking Selzer poll out of Iowa, but I’m also continuing to feel quite antsy about Pennsylvania, where, outside of Philly, Scranton and Pittsburgh, the breathtaking, mule-stubborn, Alabama-mindset legions reside…truly dumber than a box of rocks.
I’d like to say something positive about Robert Zemeckis’ Here (Sony, 11.1), a bizarrely stilted adaptation of Richard McGuire’s 1989 graphic novel, and it’s this: the de-aging of Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, accomplished through Metaphysic Live, is much, much better than the de-aging of Robert DeNiro and Joe Pesci in The Irishman. Serious points for this.
But if you’re going to focus primarily on a location — a living room in a suburban New Jersey home — and secondarily its various residents over the span of roughly 100 years (early 1900s to early 21st Century), which is basically an Our Town-ish concept (people come and go but the relentless, ever-expanding scheme of life pushes on), I think it’s a really, really bad idea to lock your camera into a single, static unmovable shot. I know…that’s the bravery aspect but it’s tedious all the same.
The nicest thing you can say about Here is that it’s an ambitious concept, although it would’ve worked better on-stage.
Who cares about dinosaurs stomping around millions of years earlier? Nobody. And William Franklin, the illegitimate son of Benjamin Franklin, radiates the same indifference.
Zemeckis shows a young, attractive Native American couple making out in the 1700s and a black family moving into the home in the 1980s or ‘90s because woke Hollywood rules demand diversity.
Would a typical American family on February 9th 1964…would they have had their black-and-white TV tuned to The Ed Sullivan Show and the debut performance of The Beatles in particular but ignore this because of some domestic issue they happened to be focusing on?
The Dean Martin Show (‘65 to ‘74) was broadcast in color so you can’t show it playing in the same family’s living room in black-and-white. It just wasn’t a black-and-white show…c’mon.
Due respect to the Forrest Gump gang (Zemeckis, Hanks, Wright, screenwriter Eric Roth, dp Don Burgess) for having given Here the old college try, but it’s one of the most shoulder-shrugging, close-to- embarrassing “who cares?” flicks I’ve ever seen.
It should’ve been a play.
Snapped at 8:16 am, 11.3.24.
In a fair and just world James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown (Searchlight, 12.25) would just be a film and that’s all…an experience to be judged and savored and possibly enjoyed according to how good it is, period..,how straight and true and honest it feels on a no-bullshit, deep-down, character-driven basis.
But of course it won’t be processed that way.
For Mangold and Jay Cocks’ Bob Dylan biopic is arriving at the tail end of the boomer nostalgia era, which arguably began 41 years ago with Lawrence Kasdan’s The Big Chill (‘83) and peaked with Robert Zemeckis ‘ Forrest Gump (‘94).
HE commenter Eddie Ginley posted this yesterday:
Throw in Zemeckis’ Here (Sony, 11.1) and the forthcoming Jeremy Allen White-Bruce Springsteen biopic and you have to admit that the hour has probably come for boomer sagas and sentimentalists to give it a rest and sorta kinda go away…to hand the mythological movie torch to GenXers and even, God forbid, Millennials, some of whom who are now in their early 40s and are probably nurturing sentimental looking-back notions of their own (i.e., Eminem, Korn, Limp Bizkit).
A friend insisted this morning that no matter how crafty or admirably well-written or emotionally affecting or compellingly performed A Complete Unknown turns out to be, the younger Academy members and particularly the mutants who adored Parasite and Everything Everywhere All At Once are too dug into their boomer hatred, which is why Steven Spielberg’s The Post was blown off.
If a generational yardstick has to be used, a fair way to frame A Complete Unknown would be as the last noteworthy boomer flick…the last ambitious ‘60s atmosphere film….an auld lang syne to the pot and protest and sexual revolution generation (nookie from the late ‘60s to early ‘80s was really and truly astounding) in the same way that Saving Private Ryan, Flags of Our Fathers and The Fog of War were seen as farewell-to-the-greatest-generation movies.
She’ll be Best Actress-nominated, of course, but in the blink of an eyelash our tectonic plates have shifted and…wait, what’s happening?…identity campaigns are no longer a compelling poker hand.
Or so says an 11.2 N.Y. Times article by Jeremy W. Peters and “Identity Trap” author Yascha Mounk in particular.
If you ask me Killers of the Flower Moon’s Lily Gladstone losing the Best Actress Oscar vote earlier this year to Poor Things’ Emma Stone was an early indication of this cultural-turning-the-road thang.
Eat shit, wokesters!
Fascination, intrigue, recognition, emotional alignment, spiritual uplift, a reflection of a cultural-political era, etc.
Kris Tapley has allegedly seen A Complete Unknown, but David Poland apparently hasn’t. I’m completely serious about the “Poland curse” — whatever James Mangold’s film turns out to be, I don’t want it to suffer because of this write-up. It wouldn’t be fair.
Last night in Glendale, Arizona, Donald “king of beasts” Trump summoned a violent fantasy by seeming to threaten Liz Cheney with a potential shooting…”nine barrels aimed at her.” But not so fast.
To be fair Trump was using the same kind of hypothetical that a late ’60s or early ’70s anti-war protestor might have been suggested in the cases of Robert MacNamara or Henry Kissinger during the Vietnam War — “If Kissinger or MacNamara were suddenly thrust into combat duty in Vietnam, the war would very quickly come to an end” or words to that effect.
Trump mentioning the idea of Cheney facing bullets was obviously a rogue, stupid, inflammatory thing to say, and once he said this you can bet that a sizable contingent of gun-toting rightwing wackos immediately began to imagine Cheney being shot. But Trump, I think, was mainly trying to buttress his argument that Cheney is a “radical war hawk”, apparently because she favors supporting Ukraine in its long war against Russia.
I’m not running for elective office so I can blurt out the raw truth of it. Most semi-educated, hungry-for-knowledge people hate the lazybone bumblefucks — the rural Pennsylvania ones in particular — and their grunting, shuffling, “why can’t I live like a fabulous wealthy person?” attitudes.
I didn’t mean to say “stupid” — I meant ineducable.
I am personally soothed and even delighted to hear that so many of these overweight, poorly-dressed, gold-toe-sock-wearing life forms are frustrated and unhappy. Because they deserve to suffer. Because God wants them to…really. It’s their fate, their Biblical burden. The world is for the few.
I’ve rarely said this out loud as it makes me sound like a misanthrope, but the misery of these grumbling mope-heads kinda warms the cockles of my heart. I won’t express this in social situations, of course. Socially I smile and say “thank you” and show deference, but my deep-down feelings are a different story. Especially when I’m visiting the “Alabama” sections of Pennsylvania.
