Mentioning Randy Newman‘s “Rednecks” is pretty much verboten these days because the lyrics repeatedly use the “n” word. But it’s worth recalling that the song, released on a 1974 Newman album called “Good Old Boys,” was inspired by an incident that happened on the Dick Cavett Show on 12.18.70.
A 12.19.70 N.Y. Times story reported that Gov. Lester Maddox of Georgia “walked out of a taping of the Dick Cavett Show in a huff last night after demanding that the host of the program apologize for a remark about Mr. Maddox’s white supporters.
“Mr. Cavett was paraphrasing a question asked during a break in the show by Jim Brown, the black actor, who wanted to know if Governor Maddox had ‘any trouble with the white bigots because of all the things you did for blacks.’ On the air, Mr. Cavett substituted ‘admirers’ for ‘bigots.’ The Governor, saying the implication was that his supporters were bigots, demanded an apology.
“’If I called any of your admirers bigots who are not bigots, I apologize,’ Mr. Cavett said.
“Mr. Maddox rose and, after another exchange, left the stage with 10 minutes of the program remaining.”
Newman’s lyrics changed things around somewhat:
“Last night I saw Lester Maddox on a TV show” — check.
“With some smart-ass New York Jew” — Cavett is a witty Midwestern gentile with a dry sense of humor.
“And the Jew laughed at Lester Maddox” — Cavett never explicitly laughed at Maddox.
“And the audience laughed at Lester Maddox too” — true.
You may have read some dour assessments of J.C. Chandor‘s Triple Frontier (Netflix, opening today — streaming as of 3.13), a moralistic heist-gone-wrong adventure thriller. But it’s no wipeout.
It’s definitely a better-than-decent sit, and is certainly worth catching for the second half, or for the section that deals with how to escape with ill-gotten loot on the backs of donkeys, chopping your way through heavy jungle and over and down the Andes mountains.
The first half deals with five 40ish special forces veterans (Ben Affleck, Oscar Isaac, Charlie Hunnam, Garrett Hedlund, Pedro Pascal) deciding to rip off the fortress home of a South American drug dealer, and the second half is about trying to get away with it and not doing so well in this regard, and being forced to abandon more and more dough as the escape progresses.
The second half is about what happens when you’re carried away by greed and you forsake common sense. It’s more or less John Huston‘s Treasure of Sierra Madre meets William Friedkin‘s Sorcerer meets Eric von Stroheim‘s Greed.
I was into Triple Frontier during the first half, but not exactly gripped by it. We aren’t told very much about the five ex-commandos (Affleck’s character is sketched out to some extent — he’s fat, financially strapped, has an alienated daughter) and the general feeling is that the film is a stone skipping across the surface of a lake. Or, you know, more into treading water than actually swimming.
There isn’t enough texture, the heist isn’t planned with enough detail, there aren’t enough hindrances or security guards…it’s all kind of rushed along.
The key moment is when they discover that the drug lord has much, much more cash socked away in his jungle abode than expected. $250 million or something like that. If these guys could get away with $10 million each they’d obviously be doing just fine. Hell, they could make off with $20 million each. But no — cash-strapped Affleck suddenly wants a Kardashian-sized bank account. He not only loses his mind — let’s take it all, look at this, we’re loaded beyond our wildest dreams! — but everyone else falls in line.
The problem is that Issac has arranged for a large Russian-made chopper to take them over the Andes, but all that extra dough (bags and bags of it) weighs a hell of a lot, and they find out too late that the helicopter can’t manage to clear the 11,000-foot Andes peaks with all that weight. The chopper goes down, and then, finally, Triple Frontier gets interesting.
HE commenters were complaining two or three days ago that I’d erred by openly guessing that not all of the five make it out alive. Which is, in fact, true. I’m not going to say how many get away clean, but a typical action melodrama of this type would kill off at least two characters if not three. Suffice that Triple Frontier is atypical.
Affleck is so heavy in this film he’s almost Harvey Weinstein. All that bulk plus thatches of gray hair…you’re seriously wondering if his heart can take the strain and stress. Affleck is almost double the size he was in Gone Girl.
I was nonetheless favorably impressed by Triple Frontier. All in all it’s a solid B plus. And that ain’t hay.
Half-narrative re-enactment and half-documentary, Framing John Delorean wouldn’t work if Alec Baldwin (his gray-haired wig is roughly similar to the corn-yellow Trump wig he wears on SNL) didn’t closely resemble the late automotive tycoon who went down in flames. Oddly, curiously, Baldwin does resemble the Real McCoy, partly because he looks slimmer than his usual self. Directed by Don Argott and Sheena M. Joyce, Framing John Delorean will premiere at the upcoming Tribeca Film Festival before playing select venues on 6.7. We all recall the tale — the DeLorean Motor Company amassing a crushing debt of $175 million, unable to pay creditors, nobody wanting to buy the car because it cost $25K, DeLorean attempting a cocaine deal that might get him out of debt but being stung by the FBI, the Delorean “starring” in Back To The Future, etc.
In the late summer of 1982 I attended a Bobby Zarem press party for Kirk Douglas at Elaine’s. Douglas was around 65 at the time, and about as gamey and blunt-spoken as they come. We talked about Paths of Glory, which Douglas was naturally proud of, and his sometimes contentious relationship with director Stanley Kubrick, who had also directed Douglas in Spartacus. Douglas respected Kubrick immensely, but that day he called him “Stanley the prick,” in part because Kubrick had been ready and willing, Douglas said, to snag screenplay credit for Spartacus, even though it had been written, of course, by the then-blacklisted Dalton Trumbo. Douglas was incensed that Kubrick would even suggest such a remedy, but he did.
Kirk Douglas, Stanley Kubrick on the set of Paths of Glory.
Who could be pretentious enough to wear this overcoat? The collar is ridiculous.
Anyone who willingly visits a “crazy nine-day festival that only happens every ninety years” and in which the members all wear white and beatific expressions…anyone who joins this kind of eccentric community deserves every weird thing that happens to them and then some. It’s obviously not Burning Man, and probably involves slicing people open and making them scream. Wicker Man plus. If Ari Aster (Hereditary) wasn’t the director I’d take a pass. Costarring Florence Pugh, Jack Reynor Will Poulter, William Jackson Harper, Liv Mjones and Isabelle Grill.
The Triple Frontier review embargo goes up tomorrow morning, and I’m telling you right now that the film doesn’t really get good until the second half, and that’s when things start to go bad for the five commandos. “Eeeeeeee!,” somebody just screamed. “No spoilers until we’ve had a chance to see it! In fact, you’ve already spoiled it by saying things go badly during the second half…say nothing further…eeeeeeeee!” But there’s nothing to write about without discussing the second half, which I would call the Treasure of the Sierra Madre portion. So the hell with it — I’m just gonna post away and may the chips fall, etc. I just tried to use the standard spoiler html coding, and for some reason it doesn’t work.
“Captain Marvel might be the first blockbuster movie whose animating idea is fear. Every page of the script betrays terror of what people might say about the film on social media. Give Carol Danvers a love interest? Eek! No, women can’t be defined by the men in their lives! Make her vulnerable? OMG, no, that’s crazy. Feminine? What century are you from if you think females should be feminine?
“Toward the end of the movie, when a villain preparing for an epic confrontation with Carol, the fighter-pilot-turned-Superwoman, chides her that she will fail because she can’t control her emotions, there is no tension whatsoever. We’ve just spent two hours watching her be utterly unfazed by anything. Giving Carol actual emotions would, of course, lead to at least 27 people calling the film misogynist on Twitter, and the directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck are petrified of that.
“Just to be completely, unerringly, let’s-bubble-wrap-the-universe safe, Boden and Fleck decided to make Danvers stronger than strong, fiercer than fierce, braver than brave. Larson spends the entire movie being insouciant, kicking butt, delivering her lines in an I-got-this monotone and staring down everything with a Blue Steel gaze of supreme confidence.
“Superheroes are defined by their limitations — Superman’s Kryptonite, Batman’s mortality — but Captain Marvel is just an invincible bore. The screenplay by Boden, Fleck, and Geneva Robertson-Dworet, with a story by the three of them plus Nicole Perlman and Meg LeFauve, presents us with Brie Larson’s Carol being amazingly strong and resilient at the beginning, middle, and end. This isn’t an arc, it’s a straight line.” — from “Captain Mary Sue,” by Kyle Smith.
I am sick to death of superhero movies and origin stories in particular. I am sick sick to death of superhero movies and origin stories in particular. I am sick sick sick to death of superhero movies and origin stories in particular. Because they’re mostly the same flim-flam — the same synthetic, force-fed oatmeal.
I nonetheless saw a very sizable portion of Captain Marvel last night, and because I submitted for a full 80 minutes I think I deserve a pat on the back. Just as Yeshua of Nazareth so loved the human race that he submitted to their doubts and tortures and finally death on the cross, I sat through Captain Marvel out of dumb allegiance and devotion to the potential of movies to deliver something profound or thrilling or extra in some regard.
“Captain Marvel starts out awfully damn busy and time-shifty and flash-cutty,” I wrote last night, “teeming with characters who quip and deceive and spin riddles with the same dry-ironic, less-than-fully-invested tone that ALL superhero characters and villains have always trafficked in, and at the same time switching allegiances and adopting new identities and shape-shifting with ferocious conviction…where was I? Oh, yes, the subject of Captain Marvel vs. Hollywood Elsewhere.
“It finally settles down by going back to Los Angeles of 1995 (Blockbuster, Radio Shack) as Brie Larson‘s Carol Danvers teams up with a nicely CG youthified Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury (looking 36 or 37, smooth complexion, thinner, full head of hair)…at the same time Larson also runs into a grinning Stan Lee on a bus.
“80 minutes into this Deja Vu on top of another Deja Vu, a feeling of profound spiritual fatigue came over me…a voice that began to repeat over and over, ‘You have sat through this tightly sprung, time-trippy, CG-reliant action film before…well. a close relative of it with slightly less emphasis on progressive feminist attitude..it was called T2 and you saw it with your kids in Santa Monica back in ’91, except James Cameron did a better job with the script.”
This morning I am much more on the side of The Hollywood Reporter‘s Todd McCarthy than Variety‘s Owen Glieberman. McCarthy was basically bored while Gleiberman emerged in a respectful and even enthused frame of mind.
HE to Gleiberman: “The origin story as head game”? “Like someone trapped in a matrix,” Larson’s Danvers is “shaking off the dream of who she is in order to locate the superwoman she could be”?
Is the ability to enjoy superhero origin flicks some kind of hard-wired genetic thing? Were you into Marvel or D.C. comic books as a kid? I read comic books when I was nine, ten, eleven. I can remember my grandfather saying to my father, “It’s fascinating how they read these things…what do they see in them?” But then an amazing, life-transforming thing happened. I discovered movies and said to myself, “Wait…these are much better diversions!”
Every so often I’ll be posting a short, catch-as-catch-can video on HE plus instead of the usual 350-word post. The first one is after the jump. Today I had nothing to share except for (a) a slight feeling of trepidation about Captain Marvel, which will screen at the Arclight an hour from now, and (b) a concern about how to honestly review Triple Frontier (which I saw Sunday night but can’t post about until early Wednesday morning) without getting into spoiler territory.
I also have to figure a way to light myself without my glasses giving off that intense reflective glare. Video essays of this type are all about lighting — having something to say helps also.
A Kino Lorber Bluray of John McNaughton and Richard Price‘s Mad Dog and Glory pops this week. Beautifully written, superbly acted, and 27 years old. Shot by Robby Muller and cut to perfection — one of my all-time favorite ’90s films. And perfectly scored. The kind of film that big studios abandoned ages ago — the intelligent, adult-angled, middle-budget dramedy. Smooth and deft and finessed just so, and with a theme that adds up and makes sense.
Everybody looks so young in this thing. Robert De Niro, 49 during filming but looking more like 41 or 42, is Wayne, a.k.a. “Mad Dog” — a timid, lonely Chicago cop who specializes in forensics and crime-scene photographs. Bill Murray, 42 at the time, is Frank “the money store” Milo, a Chicago mob guy who becomes a big brother and “friend” of Wayne’s after the latter saves his life.
David Caruso, 36, was never better as Mike, a fellow cop and Wayne’s best friend. And Uma Thurman, 22, delivered one of her best early-phase performances as Glory, a cocktail waitress who falls in love with Wayne (and vice versa) after Frank (“the expediter of your dreams, pal”) brings them together.
Murray is a tough loan shark who’s a lot like Murray in many ways, just not internally. He’s angry and doesn’t really like himself or his friends or his life. He wants to be somewhere else. He’s seeing a therapist to try and deal with the hostility, and he performs a stand-up comedy routine at a place called the Comic-Kaze Club, which he owns. But he doesn’t want to lose the gangster life either.
Frank and Wayne’s connection begins when Wayne — joshingly called “Mad Dog” by his cop pals — saves Frank’s life during a grocery store holdup by calming down a jittery holdup man and sending him away without bloodshed.
Frank is initially appalled (“You’re a cop?”), but the next evening, realizing what Wayne actually did and starved for a friend, Frank tries to reciprocate by getting friendly over drinks. The next day he sends Glory, who works at the Kamikaze Club, over to Wayne’s place, the idea being for her to stay with him and take care of whatever for seven days.
The wrinkle comes when Wayne and Glory fall in love, and Wayne decides he doesn’t want her being Frank’s “favor girl” any longer. But Frank won’t let her go (Glory has offered her services in order to save her brother from being killed over a debt) unless Wayne coughs up $40K…fat chance.
The theme of the film is, basically, “no guts, no glory.” That sounds like macho crap, but it’s well sold.
I don’t know where Price’s script ends and Murray’s improvs begin, but Mad Dog and Glory is full of little Murray doo-dads. There’s his lounge-lizard rendition of “Knock Three Times,” crooned at the beginning of a tense scene. His addressing De Niro as “ossifer” (a term I hadn’t heard since I was a kid in New Jersey). The way he holds an air bugle to his lips and does a cavalry-charge bugle sound when De Niro’s cop friends come to his rescue at the finale.
There’s a scene in a diner in which Frank’s intellectually challenged top goon, Harold (Mike Starr), who’s sitting nearby with a supermarket tabloid, points at a middle-aged man sitting at the counter and whispers to Milo, “Hey, Frank? Isn’t that Phil Donahue?” A shot of the guy in question proves otherwise. Murray half turns in his seat and says, “Put the magazine down, Harold, before you hurt yourself.”
Consider the melancholy in Murray’s eyes after his fight scene with De Niro at the finish. This is a bright, sometimes funny guy who wants out and knows he won’t get there. He pulls a loose tooth out of his mouth, gestures at the gaudy Cadillac he’s sitting in and the gorillas he’s riding with, and says with a look of pure disgust, “This is my life .”
And Caruso’s Mike is his best feature-film riff ever. Mike is a sarcastic hardass, but a good man and loyal to the end. He has a bravura scene in which he faces down a bigger guy in a bar over a domestic abuse issue (the basher is another cop) and makes him back off. It’s a total classic. You can see why he had a lot of heat coming off this.
The film also has a couple of great Louis Prima tracks (“Just a Gigolo,” “That Old Black Magic”) that turned me into a fan.
Wayne: It’s the first time I pulled out my gun in 15 years. I pissed on myself. Mike: You know why? Because you’re a sensitive, intelligent indivdual. Wayne: You ever piss yourself? Mike: Look, I woulda walked in there and drilled the rat-eyed little bastard, and that’s just the way I am. On the other hand, if I ever had an intelligent thought it would die of loneliness so it all evens out, you know what I mean? (pause) Look, if it ever happens again…? The best thing is sex. You’re all adrenalized? You go off like a rocket. If it was me, I’d be on the phone with every girl I knew [that] wasn’t related by blood. Listen, don’t kid yourself — that was balls-up what you last night.
I’ve added John Crowley‘s The Goldfinch and Dee Rees‘ The Last Thing He Wanted. A follow-up to a 3.2 HE riff. 11 films so far. Again, what am I missing? Don’t mention Todd Haynes‘ Dry Run — began shooting five or six weeks ago, might not be ready, who knows?
The question now is where are the downmarket Joe Popcorn genre films that might be nominated — i.e., 2020 versions of Bohemian Rhapsody, Black Panther, etc.
1. Martin Scorsese‘s The Irishman (Netflix, sometime in October) — A mob hitman recalls his possible involvement with the slaying of Jimmy Hoffa. (Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci, Jesse Plemons).
2. Quentin Tarantino‘s Once Upon A Time in Hollywood (Sony, 7.26) — A faded TV actor and his stunt double embark on an odyssey to make a name for themselves in the film industry during the Helter Skelter reign of terror in 1969 Los Angeles. (Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Al Pacino).
3. Marielle Heller‘s A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood — The story of Fred Rogers, the honored host and creator of the popular children’s television program, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. (Tom Hanks, Matthew Rhys, Susan Kelechi Watson, Tammy Blanchard)
4. Greta Gerwig‘s Little Women (Sony, 12.25) — Four sisters come of age in America in the aftermath of the Civil War. (Florence Pugh, Timothée Chalamet, Emma Watson, Saoirse Ronan)
5. Jay Roach‘s Fair and Balanced (Lionsgate) — Fox honcho Roger Ailes and sexual harassment allegations that resulted in his resignation. (Charlize Theron, Nicole Kidman, Margot Robbie, John Lithgow, Allison Janney, Kate McKinnon, Malcolm McDowell, Mark Duplass)
6. Kasi Lemmons‘ Harriet (Focus Features) — A feminist 12 Years A Slave, based on the story of freedom fighter Harriet Tubman (Cynthia Erivo), her escape from slavery and subsequent missions to free dozens of slaves through the Underground Railroad in the face of growing pre-Civil War adversity. Cynthia Erivo, Janelle Monae, Joe Alwyn, Deborah Ayorinde, Clarke Peters, Leslie Odom Jr., Tory Kittles, Vondie Curtis-Hall.
In the summer of ’85 I served as unit publicist on Stephen Herek‘s Critters (4.11.86), a New Line sci-fi horror-comedy. It was a reasonably decent effort as far as tongue-in-check horror spoofs went, but nothing to actually write home about. My credit is at the very, very bottom of the cast and crew list — the very last guy.
I managed to persuade two or three journalists to come out and write stories. And I wrote the press kit, of course.
Critters was primarily filmed in a hilly, grassy area of Valencia, two or three miles southwest of Magic Mountain. A movie-set farmhouse and a barn had been built there.
Every couple of days I would drive out to the set and shoot the shit with the crew and buddy up with the cast. I was especially friendly with costars M. Emmet Walsh and Billy Greenbush. Greenbush reminded me of my paternal grandfather — the vibe between us was settled and relaxed. Weeks later Walsh hired me to engineer his campaign for Best Supporting Actor for Blood Simple. He wound up winning a Best Supporting Actor trophy from the Spirit Awards.
I remember the night that the main farmhouse was blown to smithereens. It was supposed to happen around 10 or 11 pm, but technical issues intruded. Then it was supposed to be midnight. And then 1 am. It finally happened just before dawn. Everyone who wanted to see it stayed up the whole damn night. I drove home with the morning rush-hour traffic.
Critters cost $3 million to make and earned $13,167,232 — a hit. There were four Critters films in all. 16 year-old Leonardo DiCaprio made his film debut in Critters 3 (’91), directed by Kristine Peterson.
