“The bad guys don’t suffer pratfalls, but rather various forms of bodily mutilation and destruction that definitely earn the film’s R rating. The way they keep pursuing Rambo through [a maze of underground tunnels under his home] as the body count rises instead of beating a strategic retreat is unintentionally comical. The conclusion to the carnage proves that when Rambo promises to rip someone’s heart out, you can take him at his word.” — from Frank Scheck‘s Hollywood Reporter review of Rambo: Last Blood (Lionsgate, 9.29)
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You know what would have been a truly awesome title for this film? Rambo: Vast Blood. I’m serious.

In the previous post I mentioned a certain forehead-slapper in James Gray‘s Ad Astra (Fox/Disney, 9.20). But it’s not the only one. There are actually three. The first, which has been spoiled all over the place, is a Mad Max-like dune-buggy car chase on the moon. Then comes the curious biological presence thing. Then comes another lunar moment in which Brad Pitt attempts to surreptitiously board a Mars-bound space vehicle…all right, forget it.

There’s a lot to “admire” in Ad Astra. I didn’t believe a frame of it, but I approved (and still do approve) of the adult-friendly attitude. I appreciated the effort that Gray made in this regard.

Okay, portions were made for the intellectually stunted or disengaged, but otherwise it’s a reasonably tidy, pro-level, not excessively long (124 minutes) space drama with some very cool VFX. All through it I was feeling a certain amount of respect mixed with a certain indifference. It didn’t turn me on but it’s not a flagrant burn.

Ad Astra is basically about how an emotionally brusque, middle-aged astronaut (Brad Pitt) travels all the way to Neptune to find his presumed-dead-but-actually-alive astronaut dad (Tommy Lee Jones) way the hell out at the edge of the solar system. And thereafter settle or solve some important matters.

Dad has been missing or at least out of contact for 30 years, and, we eventually discover, is living aboard a massive Neptune-orbiting space craft. The voyage he launched three decades earlier was called the Lima Project (pronounced like the city in Peru, not the bean). Pitt’s primary goal is to somehow stop the generating of destructive energy surges (or pulses) that have been causing terrible havoc and killing thousands on earth. I didn’t get the science of it and didn’t really care, to be honest, but the surges have originated from Neptune so maybe Jones is somehow culpable.

Pitt to TLJ: “C’mon, dad, cut the shit. You’re hurting people and really fucking things up.”

By the conclusion Brad seems to have partially resolved some paternal issues he’s been carrying around for decades. Stuff like “okay, you tutored me in math and we watched black-and-white movies together, but otherwise why were you such an aloof workaholic prick, dad, and why did you abandon our family? Why didn’t we take more walks, have more catches on the front lawn, watch more football games, go on camping trips?”

My basic thought as I left the theatre last week was “not a bad film…annoying and stupid, yes, but not fatally so…and certainly satisfying from a VFX standpoint. But my God, what an awful long way to go (not to mention the spending of untold billions if not trillions) just to allow a guy to come to terms with his complex feelings about his father and perhaps achieve some kind of closure.”

This in turn would allow Brad to henceforth build a warmer, more trusting relationship with his wife, Eve, once he returns to earth. Eve is represented more than “played” by Liv Tyler, as she doesn’t say a word. Or not as I recall.

It took Voyager 2 about 12 years to reach Neptune (launched on 8.20.77, arrived in Neptune orbit on 8.24.89). The return trip to earth would presumably take another 12 years, for a grand total of 24 or 25. And so Pitt, who’s supposed to be in his mid 40s as the film begins, would be pushing 70. He’d be Rip Van Winkle with a white beard. But in the movie he’s not noticably older when he returns. The only difference is that he now has a moderate-length beard, but it’s not gray or white. (It might be salt and pepper-ish.)

There’s a “drop-out moment” in Ad Astra (Fox/Disney, 9.20), and once it occurs — once you’ve experienced the shock of it and muttered “wait…what the hell was that?” — there’s no getting back in the groove, as it were. Ad Astra has thrown you through a window. You can continue to watch it, of course, but the damage has been done.

I’ve put quotes around “drop-out moment” because it’s a famous William Goldman term. The late screenwriter-author has owned it for years. Most problematic films deliver drop-out moments of one kind or another, he explained, and “when they do the viewer stops believing.” The faith has been shattered. And “when belief goes, caring is right behind.”

Two and a half years ago I offered my own definition. Drop-out moments are “when something happens in a film that just makes you collapse inside, that totally anesthetizes or at least startles and yanks you right out of your suspension of disbelief, and thereby disorients. You might stay in your seat and watch the film to the end, but you’ve essentially ‘left’ the theatre. The movie had you and then lost you, and it’s not your fault.”

I can’t technically spoil the Ad Astra moment in question because at least one prominent critic (Variety‘s Owen Glieberman) has already done so. It’s in paragraph 6, if you’re curious. For all I know others have also mentioned it.

I can at least say that it involves a certain biological presence, and more specifically Brad Pitt encountering said presence. For me there’s a faint echo in a certain Christian Slater film from the early ’90s. It’s a forehead-slapper, I can tell you that. A friend had a reaction similar to mine. She actually began to giggle and had to stifle herself immediately for fear of distracting viewers who were sitting nearby.

…I’ll snap a beach-vicinity shot in an attempt to mimic this famous Barton Fink image. I came close once when I was hanging on the main Shutters balcony, facing the beach and the sea. But that’s all I’ll ever do — come close (at best). Creating an original image that sinks in on some kind of timeless basis is not an easy thing. But the Coen brothers sure managed it.

via GIFER

To augment his portrayal of real-life corporate attorney Robert Bilott, a decent guy who undergoes a change of heart when he learns about rural poisoning by DuPont, Mark Ruffalo packed on a few pounds. The idea was to suggest corporate complacency, a flush lifestyle, perhaps a certain laziness.

I’m wondering because the real-life Bilott is relatively trim for an older guy. Or he was, at least, when he posed for a Nathaniel Rich’s N.Y. Times Magazine story (“The Man Who Became Dupont’s Worst Nightmare”), which appeared on 1.6.16.

No trailer is 100% trustworthy, but I’m sensing above-average skills applied to a standard, fact-based “good eventually prevails over evil” saga. We know how it will unfold, what it will be, how it will end. And that’s fine.

Anne Hathaway is Bilott’s emotionally stressed-out wife. Bill Camp (who played Carey Mulligan‘s small-town lover a couple of years ago) is a justifiably angry Uriah Heep-like farmer. Victor Garber is playing a heartless DuPont guy, and Tim Robbins is playing Bilott’s law partner Tom Terp.

Dark Waters (Focus Features, 11.22) is cut from the same honorable cloth that produced Steve Zallian‘s A Civil Action and Steven Soderbergh‘s Erin Brockovich, which were released 21 and 19 years ago, respectively. I for one am looking forward to this. I’m sensing the right kind of vibes.

All hail Todd Haynes, who needs everyone to forget Wonderstruck and remember Carol, I’m Not There, Far From Heaven, et. al.

Hollywood Elsewhere fears that, per longstanding tradition, the good people at Warner Bros. publicity won’t allow me to attend a Joker screening until the week of the 10.4 opening. That’s okay. Ya gotta roll with this stuff.

Remember Anthony Minghella‘s Cold Mountain (’03), which came to be regarded as “a movie about a man walking through the woods”? And how some wags referred to it as “J. Crew Mountain” because of the stylish-looking garb (especially the hats) worn by costars Nicole Kidman and Renee Zellweger?

Well, a similar stylish look has been adopted by Cynthia Erivo in her portrayal of the great Harriet Tubman in Kasi Lemmons’ biopic.

Harriet was basically killed by critics (59% on Rotten Tomatoes, 63% on Metacritic) when it premiered last week at the Toronto Film Festival.

Harriet Tubman sometime in the 1880s or thereabouts.

In the film Erivo’s Harriet mostly wears the tightly-wrapped headgear that Tubman herself wore when photos were taken of her during the late 1800s and early 1900s.

But in the Harriet poster Erivo is decked out like a kind of Annie Oakley figure, wearing a very cool-looking widebrim hat, a red scarf underneath, and a nifty-looking suede jacket with a shoulder strap of some kind. There’s also an insert shot of Harriet holding a musket that she’s either recently fired or is about to fire….blam!

Just as your typical Civil War-era female farm owner was never dressed as fetchingly as Nicole Kidman, Harriet Tubman was never dressed like a rootin’ tootin’ star of a hit western TV series.

Did Harriet actually shoot guys with a musket? Her Wikipedia bio says yes. “Tubman also carried a revolver, and was not afraid to use it,” it says. “The gun afforded some protection from the ever-present slave catchers and their dogs; however, she also purportedly threatened to shoot any escaped slave who tried to turn back on the journey since that would threaten the safety of the remaining group.

Friend: “The whole ‘wokester’ thing is just beating the world’s deadest horse. It’s become tiresome, pedantic, repetitious, relentless, a drag, a bore, a distraction. Perhaps you’ve got a traffic report that tells you something good, but I hate those traffic reports. I would follow the instinct to serve and protect. Focus on films, filmmaking, awards season, the business, releases, cultural trends…anything but the same daily sledgehammer on this obsession. I say this as a daily reader of your site and a fan of your depth of knowledge and passion for all things film-related. Whatever, moving on…”

HE to friend: “Nobody wants to be an obsessive sledgehammer, but punitive wokeness and cancel culture have become a cancer and a pestilence. On top of which I’m reading a note from a literary agent to a certain screenwriter, written in the spring of 1951: “This whole ‘complaining about the persecution of leftist screenwriters for past Communist ties in the 1930s’ is just beating the world’s deadest horse. It’s become tiresome, pedantic, relentless, a drag. Get past it.’

“But I hear you and intend, as always, to focus on the beauty, the art, the death, the pizazz and the eternal uplift of cinema. As always. But we are living through siege times, through an actual, real-life political nightmare. I don’t see how it benefits anyone to hide their heads in the sand about this.”

The other day a friend mentioned the failure of Late Night, which made a lousy $19 million after Amazon paid $13 million for distrib rights last January. The reason, we both agreed, was that Mindy Kaling‘s character, hired as a comedy writer for Emma Thompson‘s talk show, wasn’t the least bit funny. She wasn’t even interested in funny. All she cared about was being respected in the work environment and not being treated as a token POC hire, which of course she was.

Kaling didn’t care if she was funny, and neither did director Nisha Ganatra. Neither did Emma Thompson or the other writers in the room. Nobody cared about “funny” at all. Because the movie was really about friendship between opposites. Would it have killed Ganatra if Kaling’s character had talked and behaved like a typical comedy writer? Someone with irreverent, smart-ass, “you may not like me but I’m funnier than you are” attitude? Apparently it would have.

From “Late To Late Night Table“, posted on 6.10.19:

I “liked” Nisha Gantra and Mindy Kaling‘s Late Night (Amazon, 6.7) as far as it went. It’s a chuckly, congenial consciousness-raiser for the most part — a feminist relationship story about a bitchy, flinty talk-show host of a certain age (Emma Thompson‘s Katherine Newbury) who’s panicking about being cancelled, and a newly hired comedy writer (Kaling’s Molly Patel) who seems more interested in workplace sensitivity and considerate behavior than in being “funny”, at least as I define the term.

Why is it a struggle to believe that Molly (who has never before written professional-grade comedy and has mostly been hired because she’s a woman as well as a POC) is a comedy writer worth her salt? Because most jokes that “land” and actually make people laugh are always a little cutting and sometimes flirt with cruelty. A certain pointed irreverence is essential.

The breezy bullshit attitude is rank, stifling, nauseating. I know — how else would you play it if you were an actor hired to be in this stupid thing and everyone else was saying their lines, like, “ironically”? You’d have to go along, right? There’s only one way to perform in a zombie spoof, and that’s to adopt the attitude of an actor performing in a production of Hamlet at the Old Vic.

Of course it’s a great poster. Or, you know, a brilliant one. It hums with dread, tension, anxiety…all that good shit. Scorsese-brand atmosphere to burn.