A few days ago Esquire‘s Nick Schrager listed his best-of-the-year-so-far list. I agree with him here and there but some of his other choices…Jesus. The Rider doesn’t develop, doesn’t go anywhere. It’s a movie about waiting for death, about “the thing that you love you can’t do, and so you’re fucked.”
Here’s HE’s latest best-of-the-year roster — a grand total of 21, and in this order:
Tied for first place: Bjorn Runge‘s The Wife (Sony Pictures Classics, 8.17) and Paul Schrader‘s First Reformed; 3. Ari Aster‘s Hereditary; 4. Stefano Sollima‘s Sicario — Day of the Soldado; 5. Chris McQuarrie and Tom Cruise‘s Mission : Impossible — Fallout; 6. John Krasinski‘s A Quiet Place; 7. Eugene Jarecki‘s The King; 8. Lynne Ramsay‘s You Were Never Really Here, 9. Tony Zierra‘s Filmworker, 10. Andrej Zvyagintsev‘s Loveless, 11. Jeremiah Zagar‘s We Are The Animals, 12. Tony Gilroy‘s Beirut, 13. Wes Anderson‘s Isle of Dogs; 14. Bo Burnham‘s Eighth Grade; 15. Won’t You Be My Neighbor; 16. Ryan Coogler‘s Black Panther; 17. Matt Tyrnauer‘s Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood; 18. Betsy West; Julie Cohen‘s RBG; 19. Spike Lee‘s BlackKKlansman; 20. Antoine Fuqua‘s The Equalizer 2; and 21. John Curran‘s Chappaquiddick.
Not bad, liked ’em well enough, half-liked ’em, mezzo-mezzos: Jason Reitman‘s Tully; Andrew Haigh‘s Lean on Pete; Chloe Zhao‘s The Rider; Steven Spielberg‘s Ready Player One; Armando Ianucci‘s The Death of Stalin; Greg Berlanti’s Love Simon; Clint Eastwood‘s The 15:17 to Paris; Samuel Maoz‘s Foxtrot (all from Sony Classics), Ziad Doueiri‘s The Insult (Cohen Media Group) and Alex Garland‘s Annihilation.
Still Haven’t Seen ’em: Sally Potter‘s The Party, Joel Francis Daley‘s Game Night, Cory Finley‘s Thoroughbreds and what else?
There’s your rectangular-block, tidy-front-lawn suburbia (exemplified by my boyhood small town of Westfield, New Jersey), exurbia (the leafy, winding-road environs of Westchester and Fairfield counties — Wilton, Weston, Ridgefield, New Canaan, Chappaqua, Bedford) and finally your seriously serene Andrew Wyeth rich-folk farmland regions like the Berkshire foothills, where I was yesterday. Southfield, New Marlborough, Monterey, Sheffield, Stockbridge, Lenox.
I hadn’t visited this Western Massachusetts region since the mid ’80s, and had forgotten how quiet, how disarming, how completely far-from-the-madding-crowd it is. “Gently intoxicating” is one way to describe it The murmuring pines and hemlocks, and the occasional farm-fresh food stands by the roadside. There are whole regions in which your iPhone connectivity totally disappears, and you almost don’t mind. All you can hear is the grass growing.
Don’t get me wrong — I’m still a city boy at heart (and by that I mean Paris, Prague, Rome or Hanoi), but yesterday I felt as if I was 10 years old and sitting on a patch of tree-shaded grass and listening to a nearby waterfall.
“All Quiet on Fondamente de l’Arzere,” posted 14 months ago: There’s a soul-soothing atmosphere of quiet throughout the Dorsoduro and San Croce districts after dark. No scooters, no sirens, no thumping bass tones emanating from clubs, no half-bombed 20something women shrieking with laughter…just the barely-there sound of bay water lapping at pier pilings.
“There are many places, I’m sure, that are just as quiet when the sun goes down. But there are very few where you can’t even hear hints of civilization, where traces of the usual nighttime rumble aren’t at least faintly audible. I can sit at home in West Hollywood and feel cool and collected, but I’ll always hear the occasional helicopter or motorcycle whine or subwoofer speakers thumping in someone’s car or louche party animals roaming nearby. Venice is dead-mouse quiet, especially after 10 pm or thereabouts. You can hear a pin drop.
Restoration guru Robert Harris and I spent most of today (Friday, 8.10) visiting the legendary Douglas Trumbull — special-effects designer and innovator (Close Encounters, Blade Runner, Tree of Life), director of Brainstorm and Silent Running, the Thomas A. Edison of knockout movie concepts and visuals — on his sprawling estate in Southfield, Mass.
The highlight was experiencing (watching sounds too bland) Trumbull’s Magi, a mindblowing digital 3D projection system that delivers images at 120 frames per second and hefty woofer shake under your seat, and which turns you around in a way that feels pretty damn unique.
Douglas Trumbull, Robert Harris outside Magi projection facility.
Harris picked me up this morning at the new Danbury train station. (The old train station, located 150 feet to the east, is where Robert Walker‘s Bruno Antony disembarked in “Metcalf” in Alfred Hitchcock‘s Strangers on a Train.) We drove up interstate 84, over to Route 8, northwest on 44 and then due north on 272.
We pulled into Southfield a little after noon. We stopped at the Southfield Store for a rest and a light lunch, and arrived at the huge Trumbull compound (four or five large residences, a “mad genius” workshed, a couple of soundstages, a projection facility, a couple of garages, meadows with grazing donkeys and goats and towering trees all around) at 12:45 pm, give or take.
The Trumbull compound seemed larger than George Lucas‘s Skywalker Sound facility in northern Marin County. Try 50 acres. It’s homey and at the same time a kind of high-tech village. You need to drive to get from one end to the other.
Full of energy and sharp as a tack, Trumbull led us over to a “Magi pod” theatre, which seats 60 and uses a large, curved concave screen. He explained that Magi integrates virtual reality and augmented reality (seat rumblings), and that it’s the kind of thing that could re-energize moviegoing in an era of fading cinema attendance.
Boilerplate: Magi captures and projects images in 3D, 4K HD and 120 frames per second. Trumbull has developed a prefabricated “Magi Pod” theater, as most theatres are incapable of delivering the right stuff. Magi Pods can be shipped and assembled in a week. Each seat faces the center of a 36-foot-wide by 17-foot-tall screen. A 32-channel, surround-sound system provides strong, needle-sharp audio. The system produces a picture that’s way more immersive than regular 3D or IMAX.
Trumbull and a collaborator are writing a script called Lightship. I didn’t grill him on the specifics, but it’s some kind of high-tech, high-dynamic, eyeball-popping hair-raiser. Trumbull intends to direct Lightship with most of the principal photography to be captured in the compound.
Harris and I pushed on a little after 3 pm, and were both back at our respective homes less than three hours later.
Are high-school kids really this cruel? You bet. Is there anything unhealthy about being obese? Maybe, but don’t discuss it. Is there anything wrong with launching a Netflix series about weight issues and fat-shaming? Yup, there is.
“When the trailer for the new Netflix series Insatiable arrived in July, it was met with fierce criticism on social media and elsewhere; a Change.org petition calling for it to be pulled from release has over 200,000 signatures as of this writing. The objection was over the show’s basic premise: A bullied teenager named Patty (Debby Ryan) seeks revenge when she loses weight after an incident forces her to have her mouth wired shut.
“The cast and producers of Insatiable, including the actress Alyssa Milano, have offered rebuttals to the accusations of body-shaming. Ms. Ryan shared her own struggles with body image on Twitter, writing, ‘I was drawn to this show’s willingness to go to real places about how difficult and scary it can be to move through the world in a body.’” And Cindy Holland, Netflix’s vp for original series, has defended the show as a satire meant to critique the act of fat-shaming.”
James Bond franchise producer Barbara Broccoli has reportedly said “it is time” for an ethnic actor to star as 007, and she is certain “it will happen eventually”. This view was passed along by director Antoine Fuqua (Equalizer 2) and published by Daily Star reporter Robin Cottle.
If it’s “time” for the leading black candidate, Idris Elba, to step into the coveted role, why is Broccoli saying it’ll happen “eventually”? Her assessments don’t jibe. If she’d said “it’s not quite time but it’ll happen eventually,” then the statements would agree. It sounds to me like Broccoli is saying “yes, today’s movie culture is totally ready for and perhaps even clamoring for a black 007 — I get that — but I’m not sure I want to push that button just yet.”
Esquire‘s Matt Miller has written that Broccoli’s quote “isn’t much, but it’s a good sign that Bond producers are at least leaning in the right direction.” Which indicates that in Miller’s mind, there’s a wrong direction. I presume that means that a traditional studly British white guy in the Sean Connery mold — Henry Cavill, say — would be the “wrong” way to go.
From a certain perspective, Miller is right. It is time for Elba, but Cavill really has that naturally muscular X-factor quality, Glenn Kenny will call me a grand wizard for saying this, but Cavill is a better “traditional” fit than Elba. Traditional as in “to the manor born.” Cavill’s villain role in Mission: Impossible — Fallout convinced me of this. He has wit, looks, clarity and presence, and he’s an above-average actor.
I totally agree that Elba would be a great, forward-looking choice — tall, strapping, good-looking, dignified, that air of dry irony. But Cavill is Connery II, and more so than Lazenby, Moore, Dalton, Brosnan or Craig. Ask the rabid fan base who’s been the best Bond ever. The majority will still say Connery.
I didn’t hate The Meg, but I didn’t believe a second of it. But then you’re not supposed to.
Everyone knew that Steven Spielberg‘s Jaws was just a scary summer movie, but audiences were nonetheless persuaded that what they were seeing could be half-real. Spielberg did everything he could to make it suspenseful and flavor it up, throwing in clever tricks and diversions and making at least some of it stick to the ribs.
Meg director Jon Turtletaub has no such inclination. His weightless, stone-skimming film is part put-on, partly a Jaws competition piece and partly a $150 million theme-park jizzathon. It’s assembled like an early ’50s MGM musical, the shark encounters being the musical numbers, of course, and the dialogue scenes providing the usual connective filler.
I didn’t seethe and twitch as I sometimes do during bad movies. I sat there and guffawed from time to time, which I guess is a good sign.
The Meg definitely isn’t scary. It’s too dopey for that. It’s all about wank, wank, wank, wank, wank, wank, wank, wank, wank, wank, wank, wank, wank, wank, wank…”we have your admission and candy money…we don’t care so why should you?…eh, that wasn’t too bad…that one half-worked, the other one didn’t…please have all fat guys get eaten by the Meg…oh, look, a fat 12 year old kid…can the Meg eat him too? O joy and rapture!”
Every single guy with even a slight weight problem in this film becomes Meg food, or so I recall. Does Page Kennedy get eaten? I think so but I’m not 100% sure. I was zoning out during the last third — i.e., awake but glazed over.
Three Hollywood Elsewhere rules for shark movies: (1) Feel free to kill off fat guys and all fathers and secondary characters, but (2) no feeding women to the shark or you’ll have the MeToo! movement on your ass, and (3) never kill off an entertaining character who has a sharp-tongued, irreverent attitude thing going on.
You don’t want to hear about the plot or the set-up, which is all hand-me-down, by-the-numbers crap.
Jason Statham is the studly tough guy who has an early traumatic run-in with the Megalodon, a 75-foot-long prehistoric shark, in a kind of Octopus’s Garden in the Phillipine trench. An underwater research facility funded by a mildly overweight billionaire nerd (Rainn Wilson) with fairly atrocious taste in footwear. Oceanographers exploring a hidden ecosystem in the trench, blah blah, but the Meg tries to eat a submersible piloted by Statham’s ex-wife (Jessica McNamee) blah blah. There’s also a fetching marine biologist (Li Bingbing) who quickly develops the hots for Statham. Her oceanographer father (Winston Chao) is bland boredom personfied.
There are maybe five or six “musical numbers” during the first two acts (whew, that was close, almost got eaten!). In act three the Meg decides to chow down on a crowded swimming area a la Jaws….hors d’oeuvres! And then the big finale in which Statham singlehandedly dominates and defeats.
There are lots of homages to other water-logged films. There’s a scene in which a giant squid wraps itself around a submersible a la 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea. There’s a “reviving an apparently drowned pretty woman” scene a la The Abyss. There’s a scene with a little flop-eared white poodle called Pippin getting eaten, just like another dog named Pippin got eaten in Spielberg’s film. There’s a cable-drag scene out of Jaws. At one point Statham mounts and rides the Megalodon like Gregory Peck‘s Captain Ahab in Moby Dick (’56), and there’s even a close-up shot of the Meg’s eye looking right at Statham — an exact copy of Moby Dick doing the same with Peck.
I wasn’t able to catch a Manhattan screening of John Chu‘s Crazy Rich Asians (Warner Bros., 8.15). I can’t honestly say that I’m sorry about that, despite the excellent reviews. I realize it’s a big representation thing (i.e., the first all-Asian film to get a big opening since 1993’s The Joy Luck Club) but I have some issues. I have a problem with any film of any ethnic persuasion that sells itself with an image of an attractive young couple smiling and gently embracing. That image alone says “swoony girly flick.” I have a problem with any film that “takes you back to the greatest hits of Nancy Meyers, Richard Curtis and Nora Ephron” — aaggghhh! I have a problem with any film described as “two hours of romantic fantasy and real-estate porn, poured on so thick it’s almost lickable.” Anything wealth-porny makes me nauseous. And I have a huge problem with the critic who wrote “the only excuse you have not to see Crazy Rich Asians is because you hate love“…blecccch! I will see Crazy Rich Asians at the next opportunity, but I’m just saying.
Three years ago I repeated my long-held Taxi Driver perception that Travis Bickle died on the couch after that East Village shoot-out. Everything that happens in the epilogue — the newspaper articles praising him for having murdered a couple of pimps, Iris’s parents writing to thank him for saving their daughter, Cybil Shephard looking at him dreamily after he drops her off at her Grammercy Park apartment — is Travis’s dying fantasy. And then in the last shot he’s driving along and looks into the rearview mirror with a slight look of alarm, apparently sensing that something’s wrong and…zhhhoop! Bickle disappears.
It seems obvious as hell, but no one ever agreed with me. Until a week ago, that is.
“Last week, immediately after watching Martin Scorsese’s 1976 fever dream for the first time in more than a decade, I scrambled for my phone to confirm that I was not the only person who had completely misremembered the ending of the movie: I could have sworn Travis Bickle died.
“The last image I remembered from Taxi Driver was that famous, otherworldly slow-motion shot from above — a ‘priest’s eye view,’ Scorsese has called it — cataloging the carnage of Bickle’s killing spree as the police arrive. What I’d forgotten was the movie’s surreal coda, in which Bickle not only survives but becomes a vigilante hero in the newspapers, receives a letter from 12-year-old Iris’s parents thanking Bickle for saving their daughter from a life of prostitution, and, perhaps least plausibly, gets another chance with his WASP goddess, Betsy, even though she knows he has just murdered three people and the last time she saw him he showed up at her workplace to harass her, threaten her, and tell her she was scum just like everybody else. With all due respect to Paul Schrader, I liked my ending better. It had a certain closure.”
Wells to Zoladz: Schrader and Scorsese’s ending is your own. They’re obviously telling us that we’re watching Bickle’s bullshit fantasy about what happened after the Lower East Side shoot-out.
It happened over racial and tribal animus, over the blood-level resentment that white bumblefucks feel about the multiculturalizing of America [see Laura Ingraham clip]. It also happened due to their concern about having been marginalized or shunted to the side in the new 21st Century economy, particularly since the Great Recession. It also happened due to the left’s embrace of the godless LGBTQs. It also happened because the bumblefucks are “low-information voters” — i.e., uneducated, less than perceptive, etc. It also happened because tens of millions couldn’t stand Hillary Clinton, and because she ran a bad campaign and then got torpedoed by James Comey. I explained it all on 6.13.18.
[Starting around the 2:00 mark] “In some parts of the country it does seem like the America we know and love doesn’t exist anymore,” Laura Ingraham said last night. “Massive demographic changes have been foisted upon the American people. And these are changes that none of us ever voted for and most of us don’t like. Now much of this is related to both illegal, and in some cases legal immigration that of course progressives love.”
