Following yesterday afternoon’s Slamdance screening of Steven Soderbergh‘s High Flying Bird, I walked outside to find Soderbergh chatting with fans. I strolled over to tell the 56-year-old powerhouse auteur that I was an admirer of his basketball film and that I regard it as much his own story as that of Andre Holland‘s Ray character. (Here’s my review.)
As I walked up Soderbergh, who knows me from way back and apparently reads Hollywood Elsewhere from time to time, started things off with a mock greeting:
Soderbergh: “So, the pariah!” HE: “No, no, things are cool. I’m getting into films. No issues.” Soderbergh: “With Slamdance, you mean.” HE: “No, Sundance. Publicist friends are taking care of me. I’m seeing what I want to see.” Soderbergh: “Okay.”
High Flying Bird director Steven Soderbergh, Slamdance co-founder Peter Baxter prior to Sunday afternoon’s screening.
“Despite allusions to The Twilight Zone and constantly cutting back to a faux tube TV perspective, Andrew Patterson‘s The Vast of Night never quite reaches that level of shock value or philosophical preponderance that made The Twilight Zone what it was.
“The climax is beautiful, to be sure, and the effects work is excellent given the low budget, but it doesn’t have much more meaning than is presented on its face, and the resulting feeling is one of hollowness in the face of the potential for so much more.
“Still, if one is looking for a mood of existential dread and bragging rights for seeing some of the industry’s next great talents’ early work, The Vast of Night certainly delivers on that front.” — from a 1.26.19 review by Leigh Monson on birthmoviesdeath.
Hollywood Elsewhere apologizes for having not yet watched The Vast of Night via streaming link. I plan to do so soon. Certainly by Tuesday or Wednesday.
“Pete Davidson and comedian John Mulaney recently reviewed The Mule on SNL’s’Weekend Update’, which they’d like to make into a reoccurring segment. ‘We just saw Mary Poppins last weekend,” Davidson said. ‘I walked out halfway through.'” — from Ramin Setoodeh‘s 1.28 Variety riff on Pete Davidson’s recent Sundance press op.
I was fairly shocked when Bradley Cooper‘s A Star Is Born lost the SAG ensemble award last night. I also heard a resounding THUD sound. Because this, to me, seemed like the final kiss of death — i.e., SAG being unable to give this popular musical drama a “poor baby, we still love you” award.
An obviously well made, convincingly performed and hugely successful romantic tragedy, ASIB had consistently failed to win anything big — no Best Picture or directing or acting awards — at the Golden Globes, the Critics Choice Awards or the Producers Guild Awards. So before last night the thinking was “okay, no Best Picture Oscar and no acting Oscars for Cooper or Lady Gaga, but SAG members surely feel sorry for A Star Is Born, and so they’ll probably give it a Best Ensemble award as a kind of consolation prize.”
Nope!
Obviously no one knows anything for sure about the final Oscar tallies, but the Academy Award ambitions of Cooper’s grand musical opus are almost surely dead, dead, deader than dead.
So what killed the award-season chances of what had seemed — on paper at least — like a film that might do exceptionally well with award-season voters and handicappers — a film that was obviously well crafted, expertly refined, beloved by audiences and extraordinarily successful all over ($206 million domestic, $413 million worldwide).
In a phrase, A Star Is Born was way overhyped in the early stages, and that avalanche of pre-release praise produced feelings of irritation (at least as far as Hollywood Elsewhere was concerned) and a kind of “oh, yeah? show us!” attitude among many others.
That plus the fact that it just seemed wrong, wrong, WRONG to give a Best Picture Oscar to a remake of a remake of a remake of a 1932 original.
Warner Bros. publicity, obviously, was the architect of the overhype. Their hubris bears the responsibility.
The first clue came when Warner Bros. decided not to show ASIB in Telluride — a decision that said “we know this is basically a hoi polloi popcorn movie, so we don’t want any critical slams coming out of an elite rarified setting.”
But if you want to focus on overhyping faces and personalities, A Star Is Born was primarily killed by the Murderer’s Row quartet of Robert De Niro, Sean Penn, Variety‘s Kris Tapley and Barbra Streisand.
I for one admired Ryan Gosling‘s minimalist approach to playing Neil Armstrong in First Man. Armstrong, yes, was an allegedly dull and undemonstrative fellow, at least according to some, but in my eyes (and surely in the eyes of director Damien Chazelle) Gosling was conveying a complete emotive universe…all kinds of feeling, anxiety, ache and seasoned-pilot attitude, but with the tiniest and fleckiest of paint dabs.
I found it a fascinating and courageous performance because Gosling and Chazelle had made a conscious choice to not use the standard-issue emotional strategies that Ron Howard and others have resorted to in similar “solitary man vs. incredible challenge” dramas.
Obviously the ticket-buying public didn’t agree; ditto the industry when it came to handing out awards and acting nominations. File the Gosling-Chazelle experiment under “noble but unsuccessful.”
But another angle on this failure came to light when I read Owen Gleiberman‘s 1.24 review of Apollo 11, the CNN documentary that screened a few days ago at Sundance ’19.
“Even as a die-hard First Man believer, I have to say [that] while Ryan Gosling’s clean-cut, clear-eyed terseness matches up neatly with Neil Armstrong’s, the documentary confirms what I’d always remembered: that Armstrong’s face was frequently graced with the angelic hint of a smile — he was the Eagle Scout as Mona Lisa. Maybe he was just that way for the cameras, but I somehow doubt it.
“In Apollo 11, he comes off as genial and inviting, the very soul of a more optimistic America. I think if he’d come off that way a bit more in First Man, the movie might have won more fans.”
Shocker! The members of the Screen Actors Guild were so mixed or mezzo-mezzo or underwhelmed by Bradley Cooper‘s A Star Is Born that they couldn’t even give it a Best Ensemble consolation prize (i.e., Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture).
Instead, the winner of that coveted trophy (the equivalent of SAG’s Best Picture award) was Black Panther.
And the SAGgies didn’t give their Best Actress award to Lady Gaga but to The Wife‘s Glenn Close…she wins again! And Rami Malek won the Best Actor prize, and in so doing is poised to possibly take the Best Actor Oscar, or at the very least give Vice‘s Christian Bale some very stiff competition.
Mahershala Ali again won a Best Supporting Actor trophy for his Green Book performance. He’s obviously winning the Oscar in this category.
Emily Blunt, of all people, won the Best Supporting Actress prize for her performance in A Quiet Place. Who the hell was even fantasizing about Blunt’s all-but-silent turn winning anything at all? If there was any speculation on her behalf it was a smattering of Best Actress buzz for Mary Poppins Returns.
I could say something rude about Kris Tapley‘s prowess of an estimator of Oscar power, but I’ll let it go.
Steven Soderbergh‘s High Flying Bird (Netflix 2.8) is a whipsmart, talk-heavy sports film (written by Moonlight‘s Tarell Alvin McCraney) that may try your patience at first (especially if you’re a professional sports dumb-ass like myself), but which totally comes together in the last third and finally packs an exciting revolutionary punch.
It’s a mostly-POC film about tough negotiations during an NBA lockout over the high-value services of a certain big-time basketball rookie (Melvin Gregg), and how his manager-agent Ray (Andre Holland) gradually out-strategizes the NBA skinflints in a way that challenges the whole damn system.
There’s a great line toward the end in which an NBA bigwig says about Holland’s new game plan — “You know what I hate about all this? This is exactly what I’d do if I were him.” Or words to that effect.
You have to pay close attention to the dialogue, and there may be a few slowboats like myself who will prefer to watch it with subtitles when it begins on Netflix, but at the end it finally hits you what a knockout package this is — what a revolutionary narrative, I mean.
It barely contains any footage of basketball playing (just two or three snippets) and is the kind of film that shows lovers putting on their clothes after having sex (Gregg and Zazie Beetz) rather than depicting or suggesting the deed itself — Soderbergh has never been much of a sensualist.
And it’s mainly (THIS MAY BE A SPOILER) about delivering the up-the-league-owners theology of a classic 50-year-old book about the politics and business of sport — Harry Edwards‘ “Revolt of the Black Athlete” (published in September 1969). And yet it feels very right now or very what’s-coming-next.
And it’s probably the most visually striking iPhone-shot film I’ve ever seen — it delivers clean and vivid wide-angle compositions within a Scope aspect ratio, and I for one was going “wow, I love this…it’s A Clockwork Orange within a 2.39 to 1.”
It’ll mean nothing, nothing, NOTHING when and if AStarIsBorn wins the SAG ensemble award tonight. Oscar-wise BradleyCooper and LadyGaga‘s hugely successful musical drama is finished.
After catching yesterday afternoon’s screening of A.J. Eaton and Cameron Crowe‘s David Crosby: Remember My Name, I sent the following email to Crowe:
“Triple grade-A doc…the antithesis of a kiss-ass, ‘what a great artist’ tribute, but at the same time a profoundly moving warts-and-all reflection piece…hugely emotional, meditative, BALDLY PAINFULLY NAKEDLY HONEST…God! There’s a special spiritual current that seeps out when an old guy admits to each and every failing of his life without the slightest attempt to rationalize or minimize…’I was a shit, I was an asshole, how is it that I’m still alive?,’ etc. Straight, no chaser.
“And this isn’t because I’m partial to boomer nostalgia flicks or because so many are being shown here, or because I grew up with the Byrds (12-string twangly-jangly), JoniMitchell, Crosby, StillsandNash and thatwholelonglyrical–frazzledhistory. It’s about the tough stuff and the hard rain…about addiction and rage and all but destroying your life, and then coming back semi-clean and semi-restored, but without any sentimentality or gooey bullshit.
“For me David Crosby: Remember My Name has EASILY been the most emotional experience of the festival thus far. Not to mention [Crowe’s] best creative effort since Almost Famous.”
Crowe: “SO HAPPY you were there, thrilled at your reaction. How amazing that Crosby got up there [after the screening] and shared his total shock at what we’d put into the movie. Such a real moment. He was emotionally devastated up there for a good three minutes — I don’t know if you could see that. Felt like the audience wrapped their arms around him at that point, and then he was okay. Amazing.”
From Steve Pond’s Wrap review: “As much as the film celebrates Crosby’s creativity and gazes unflinchingly at his failings, it also functions as a valedictory, almostarequiemofsorts. Think of it as the film version of the final albums made by Leonard Cohen and David Bowie, who made wrenching final statements that they likely knew would be their last.”
Posted by Deadline‘s Mike Fleming: “I had done a long interview with Green Book‘s Mahershala Ali and Viggo Mortensen, where those actors kept saying they found the handle on their characters by listening to a series of audio tapes featuring the actual voices of Dr. Donald Shirley and Tony “Lip” Vallelonga.
“I thought tracking down and publishing them might help swing the narrative of Green Book back to the road trip as they sat in that car together and were the only ones who witnessed the events and the institutional racism and hatred they encountered in the Jim Crow South. I got my hands on these tapes and, with the help of an editor, put them in the digestible soundbites you can hear below.
“It takes a while to get through them, but you might want to do it soon. I got them on the sly, and have no idea if I’ll be told to take these down.”
I really don’t care for the kind of wailing emotion, upper-register “aaaahh love you babeeee!” shriek songs favored by pop divas (Lady Gaga, Rhianna), mainly because they have the voices that can handle all that vocal stress.
I’m sorry but I like songs that I can hum or sing along to without a great herculean effort, and lyrics that aren’t necessarily about how deep or heavy or transforming my feelings are, blah blah. Turn it the eff down, will ya?
Incidentally: Bradley Cooper looks better with his longish Jackson Maine do than with his current flat-toppy brush cut.
