Tongues are wagging about how overexposed Nicole Kidman is, working nonstop in negligible-to-middling streaming projects, possibly since her agent represents a slew of names that aren’t working and Kidman seems to have some compulsion to be absent from her personal life. It diminishes the mystique of whenever she’s good in a film. Honestly? It’s gotten to the point that when Kidman is costarring in a new streamer or eccentric indie the general response is “oh, her again.”

From Deadline commment thread:

I’m such a huge fan of Russell Metty‘s cinematography on The Misfits that I’m almost tempted to purchase the 4K Bluray. But I won’t because the 2011 Bluray I own is quite the sharp-focused, perfectly lighted freshwater melancholy bath. Metty’s films include All That Heaven Allows, Written on the Wind, Man of a Thousand Faces, Touch of Evil, Imitation of Life, Spartacus, The Appaloosa, Madigan and The Omega Man.

I’m also a fan of Alex North‘s Misfits score.

I’m mentioning The Misfits because I’ve just watched a hugely interesting video essay about John Huston and Arthur Miller’s 1961 drama, and the maestro is none other than Isabel “Izzy” Custodio, otherwise known by her YouTube handle, Be Kind Rewind.

Two or three nights ago I watched Judd Apatow‘s Trainwreck again. God, what a cleverly written and affectingly acted hip romcom…loved it for the fourth or fifth time!

Amy Schumer is wickedly hilarious and a total pistolero, and that she also shifts into downshift mode and opens herself up emotionally in ways that truly floored me. I love how you can read each and every flickering emotion and thought that passes through her lightning-fast brain — all at the drop of a hat.

Schumer tears up and touches bottom and whacks the ball just as hard and long as Jennifer Lawrence did in Silver Linings Playbook, and we all know what happened there. She’s delivering something brand new (obviously based on her standup persona and whomever she is deep down) but at the same time channelling the freshness of Judy Holliday and Jack Lemmon during his peak period in the late ’50s and early ’60s.

Trainwreck is dryly hilarious and smoothly brilliant and damn near perfect. It’s the finest, funniest, most confident, emotionally open-hearted and skillful film Apatow has ever made, hands down. I was feeling the chills plus a wonderful sense of comfort and assurance less than five minutes in. Wow, this is good…no, it’s better…God, what a relief…no moaning or leaning forward or covering my face with my hands…pleasure cruise.

I finally saw Wolfs yesterday, and I found it…uhm, moderately absorbing. It’s a dry, droll “crime comedy” (i.e., the kind you might snicker at) that unfolds in grade-A fashion, and while I was never riveted or excited it never pissed me off.

The laid-back, wiseacre performances from George Clooney and Brad Pitt are quite skillful and effective, and the supporting cast (which includes Austin Abrams, a dorky-looking guy I’d never heard of, and Zlatko Buric, the fat, white-haired Triangle of Sadness guy) are certainly interesting. Plus the production values are above-average.

I therefore felt placated except at the very end when the soundtrack played Bill Withers‘ “Just The Two Of Us“…fuck you! Take your cloying suggestion that a Wolfs sequel might be a good idea….ram it sideways!

There’s a nifty little scene in which Richard Kind, playing Abrams’ oddball dad, goes into a riff about Frank Sinatra‘s notorious unwillingness to perform more than one take while shooting a scene. Kind talks about Sinatra refusing to fully give it up for the shooting of the stacked-deck Queen oF Hearts sequence in The Manchurian Candidate (’62) despite the dp (Lionel Lindon) having informed director John Frankenheimer that he’d screwed up the shot by failing to capture Sinatra in sharp focus. This was appalling behavior on Frank’s part. The blurry MCU of him talking to Laurence Harvey throws you off every time. Your mind keeps saying, “Why is Harvey in focus but Sinatra isn’t?”

And I really, really don’t care about what may be darkening the brow of Angelina Jolie.

In yesterday’s (9.25) Deadline piece about award-season hotties thus far, Pete Hammond explained the particular appeal of Ali Abassi’s The Apprentice, which HE has been steadily praising since last May’s Cannes Film Festival:

The Wild One’s Wikipedia page includes no mention of Hot Blood as an alternate title, but it was clearly in mind when the below publicity photo featuring Marlon Brando and costar Mary Murphy was captioned. I for one have never heard Hot Blood mentioned as a Brando-adjacent thing.

HE to friendly tipster: Okay, thanks much — I’ll certainly watch but you know something? I’m sick of this noise. There are too many streaming shows, too much content, too many urgent, over-the-top claims of this or that eight-episode limited series allegedly radiating a kind of greatness that hasn’t been felt before…a cross between an amazing discharge and “wait, hold up, I can’t breathe”…there’s just too damn much digital information surging in like a broken water main and suffocating the soul, and after a certain point of endless saturation this gradually results in an instinct to reject almost all of this shite because the avalanche of content-content-and-more-fecking-content instills a terrible feeling of emptiness and busy-ness…a feeling of chaos..a drowning of the spirit…a sense that there’s no real clarity in the air…a feeling of unchecked insanity.

A pair of all-media screenings for Todd Phillips‘ Joker: Folie a Deux will happen in New York and Los Angeles on Wednesday, 10.2. The film will begin playing in plexes all across the country the following night (Thursday, 10.3). This means that Warner Bros. marketing has very little confidence in the critical reaction being positive. Joker 2 was slammed not long ago by Venice Film Festival crickets. I for one am holding out hope that Phillips has thrown a great wackadoo curveball, at least according to the Hollywood Elsewhere rate-o-meter.

Three days ago (Sunday, 9.22) World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy reported that Martin Scorsese‘s Life of Jesus, in which Andrew Garfield was apparently set to star, won’t be filming in October after all. Or any time soon.

Two days later Variety‘s Clayton Davis reported the same thing as if it was totally fresh news. Davis ignoring the fact that Ruimy had the story first is impolite and unprofessional. The big trades have done this to Jeff Sneider repeatedly…par for the course.

Thanks to a confederacy of corrupt, clueless slowboats in India, Payal Kapadia‘s All We Imagine As Light is out of the Best Int’l Feature Oscar race. It therefore deserves and must receive a push for a Best Picture Oscar nom.

People need to see this masterful film and come to an obvious realization. Yesterday the Indian film industry — technically the Film Federation of India (FFI) — not only dropped the ball but embarrassed itself. They look like whores, fools. The U.S. film industry needs to correct this. Seriously. Kapadia’s film is too good to be shunted aside.

Posted from Cannes on 5.24.24: “My head is spinning from last night’s surprisingly moving and undeniably artful All We Imagine As Light, a feminism-meets-impoverished-social-realism drama from Payal Kapadia, a 38 year-old, Mumbai-born, obviously gifted auteur.

Shot in Mumbai with a third-act escape to a beach resort, All We Imagine As Light is all about subtle hints, moods, observations and milieu. I knew within 60 seconds that it would deliver profoundly straight cards in this regard — one of the seven or eight humdingers of the festival.

It’s a quiet, soft-spoken, women-centric film but without any current of vengeance or payback or “look at what pathetic fools men are”…there are hints of militant #MeTooism but little in the way of thrust.  

What got me was the observational simplicity and restraint. I was deeply impressed with what can be fairly described as a reach-back to low-key Indian social realism, which is anything but the flamboyant Indian genre known as masala and regarded in some circles (I’m a little fuzzy about this term) as Dacoit cinema, which flourished in the mid 20th Century.

All We Imagine As Light, a title that’s very difficult to remember, focuses on three struggling women of varied ages who work in a second-tier Mumbai hospital (Kani Kusruti‘s 30something Prabha, Divya Prabha‘s younger Anu, Chhaya Kadam‘s 40something Parvaty).

There are only two noteworthy supporting males (a timidly amorous doctor and a bearded man recovering from having nearly drowned) — both are passive and of relatively little consequence.

The three women are all living in the massive, overflowing, sea-of-ants sprawl of Mumbai, and the tone is basically one of resignation and frustration or, if you will, “we’re all unhappy but social codes are very strict and so we believe in staying in our lanes…restraint and decorum…but we’re going a bit crazy underneath.”

And you can tell from the get-go that Kapadia knows what she’s doing.  Her film is solemn, visually plain, matter-of-fact, unsentimental — the work of a formidable, singular filmmaker who knows herself and isn’t into showing off. This is a truly masterful arthouse flick.