Jeff Wells Martin Short‘s socks are totally killer. The black leather lace-ups (probably Italian) are great also. Nice black suit, olive taupe sweater. Easily the best-dressed Club Random guest in the history of this relatively young podcast. Seriously, the socks are wonderful.
Has Short had any Prague touch-ups? Apparently not.
I immediately dismissed that rumor about Short being involved with Meryl Streep.
I’m 17 minutes into it, and it’s relaxing. Loose-shoe Trump stuff.
After months and months of floundering around in distribution purgatory, Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire‘s Black Flies has finally landed a theatrical release date — Friday, 3.29.
Except it’s now being called Asphalt City.
John Huston‘s The Asphalt Jungle (’50) was a cooler title.
Exhaustion, screeching brakes, sudden jolts and grubby walk-up apartments, sirens, raw aromas and in-your-face whatevers.
I saw Black Flies in Cannes last May (nine months ago), and have written about it three or four times since.
“Black Flies Punches Through,” posted on 5.23.23:
Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire‘s Black Flies (Open Road), a pounding, brutally realistic New York City action drama about living-on-the-ragged-edge paramedics.
It beats the shit out of you, this film, but in a way that you can’t help but admire. It’s a tough sit but a very high-quality one. The traumatized soul of lower-depths Brooklyn and the sad, ferociously angry residents who’ve been badly damaged in ways I’d rather not describe has never felt more in-your-face.
In terms of assaultive realism and gritty authenticity Black Flies matches any classic ’70s or ’80s New York City film you could mention…The French Connection, Serpico, Prince of the City, Q & A, Good Time, Across 110th Street.
And what an acting triumph for Sean Penn, who plays the caring but worn-down and throughly haunted Gene Rutkovsky, a veteran paramedic who bonds with and brings along Tye Sheridan‘s Ollie Cross, a shaken-up Colorado native who lives in a shitty Chinatown studio and is trying to get into medical school.
Rutkovsky is a great hardboiled character, and Penn has certainly taken the bull by the horns and delivered his finest performance since his Oscar-winning turns in Mystic River (’03) and Milk (’08).
And Sheridan is also damn good in this, his best film ever. His character eats more trauma and anxiety and suffers more spiritual discomfort than any rookie paramedic deserves, and you can absolutely feel everything that’s churning around inside the poor guy.
At first I thought this 120-minute film would be Bringing Out The Dead, Part 2, but Black Flies, which moves like an express A train and feels more like 90 minutes, struck me as harder and punchier than that 1999 Martin Scorsese film, which I didn’t like all that much after catching it 23 and 1/2 years ago and which I’ve never rewatched.
“The eccentrics are really the only real critics these days. There are so many formerly respectable, self-styled film gurus who’ve just laid down and accepted their hackdom in the last decade. For anyone who prefers serious criticism, the nutters are all we have.” — comment about August 2010 article titled “Nutter Critics.”
It’s still true today. The only critics you can actually trust in January 2024 are the ones who aren’t on the take and are basically running on their own helium gas or spirit fuel. So who are the crazy good guys in today’s realm? Hollywood Elsewhere, of course, but who else?
Posted on 8.23.10: “Nutters are made, not born,” I wrote in 2003. “I’m kind of one myself, but I didn’t start out this way. I came into this racket as a relatively sane, even-tempered youth, wanting only to be spelled and lifted up by those wonderfully crafted confections I’d first seen as a child on late-night TV. Now look at me — delighted by those 20 or 25 movies each year that ring my critical bell, but most of the time oozing acid cynicism and choking from the residue of a thousand crappy films released over the Hollywood downturn period of the last 22 or 23 years.
“You could subject St. Francis of Assisi to the same experience, and at the end of the road he’d be a film critic version of Kirk Douglas‘s character in Ace in the Hole, or else a complete junket-whore sellout.
“One way of not giving in to a Douglas attitude is to isolate and perhaps over-praise any film that comes along that seems the least bit unusual or distinctive. Then, at least, you have something to root for.
“There are two kinds of nutter film critics — the good (i.e., scrappy, finger-poking, irreverent) and the bad (lazy, smarmy, go-alonger). But ask around about the nutters who irritate or tick people off the most, as I did last weekend, and you’ll find that most of them ignore the softies and take aim at the rarified elite. I guess it’s always the oddball malcontents in any society who get singled out for punishment.
“‘Good’ nutters may irritate people, yes, for their high-horse pans of movies many of us have enjoyed or loved, or for their praising of movies that only they and other nutters have seen at European film festivals, but at the end of the day their occasional support of obscure filmmakers and a general willingness to buck the popular tide obviously lives up to the job description of ‘film critic’, and is obviously better for us culturally than not.
“Whereas the easy lays who give passes and sometimes raves to big-studio dreck and whose pulses invariably race at the prospect of taking home another goodie bag…well, fill in the blank.
The leading good nutters, according to a poll that resulted in 30-something responses (i.e., extremely unscientific), were N.Y. Press critic Armond White and the then-L.A. Times critic Manohla Dargis. Runner-ups included, in alphabetical order, included Entertainment Weekly‘s Owen Gleiberman, Variety‘s Robert Koehler, the Chicago Reader‘s Jonathan Rosenbaum, the San Diego Reader‘s Duncan Shepard, and then-New Times critic Luke Y. Thompson.
You may have heard that most many film critics are politically subservient cowards and whores…obsequious lapdogs…damp-finger-to-the-wind weather vanes…dweebs who write within an elitist, self-regarding bubble and pretty much for each other…they wouldn’t dare admit to an honest Joe or Jane Popcorn emotion about anything.
Jacob Savage has conveyed all this and more in a 1.29.24 Tablet piece called “The Unbearable Fakeness of Film Reviews“.
“Popular film and television criticism once functioned primarily as an engine of recommendation and secondarily as a means of social and artistic commentary,” Savage writeds. “Increasingly it serves as neither. Lacking secure jobs or professional stature, and existing at the whims of politicized online mobs, today’s movie critics are the opposite of tart-tongued predecessors like Pauline Kael, Vincent Canby and Janet Maslin. Instead of priding themselves on their willingness to stand up for art against the variable tastes of consumers and studios alike, they surrender to the pack.”
Herewith the latest Oscar Poker, which alternated between agreeably plodding along and finding an occasional good groove…
How were things looking in early ’09, a time in the evolution of the species when Barack Obama was just settling into the Oval Office, MySpace was still a bigger thing than the five-year-old Facebook, Twitter hadn’t yet become an unavoidable big deal and the ensemble cast for this glide-along, critically scorned romcom included youngish, good-looking actors like Ben Affleck, Jennifer Aniston, Drew Barrymore, Jennifer Connelly, Kevin Connolly, Bradley Cooper, Ginnifer Goodwin, Scarlett Johansson and Justin Long.
Yes, the same Bradley Cooper (born in ’75) who would begin work on Maestro less than a decade later.
Mindsets and general attitudes naturally had to be challenged, broadened or deepened by the advancement of time and the eruption of disruptive social-media lava, and so films like He’s Just Not That Into You (produced by New Line, exec produced by Barrymore, described by Manohla Dargis as “a grotesque representation of female desire”) had to gradually go away.
IMDB review: “My girlfriend and I, late 40ish or just beyond, saw this in a theater that was absolutely filled with high-school girls. Which surprised me actually, given that that most of the costars are either mid 30ish or nudging 40 (the 25 year-old Johansson is the youngest). But the teens, like the rest of the audience, seemed to really enjoy this film, as did we. (Pic ended with a worldwide gross of $178 million.)
“The relationships were nicely intertwined without being contrived (Crash anyone?), and unlike the similar Love Actually, nothing portrayed was too outlandish. The convention of adding comments by ‘real’ people to introduce story lines was well done and amusing. All of the guys are presented as having relationship issues or as being total boneheads. Hopefully there are more ‘nice guys’ interspersed in society than what this film might lead you to believe this (although I must say that the attitudes presented are definitely not inaccurate).
“Overall a very nice film with 2-hour-plus running time goes by rather quickly. If you’ve ever been in or tried to be in a relationship, you’ll probably enjoy this movie.”
Again, the link.
I just discovered this five minutes ago. A first-time experience. All but ruined because of the red sweater. The font or calligraphy is completely wrong. I don’t know what the blue urban background is but it’s nothing. But there’s something in the eyes.
I would hate Madame Web (Sony, 2.14) even if it was good. Which doesn’t appear likely. I’ve been sensing trouble all along with this puppy. In the words of California Charlie, it’s “a wrong one.”
Consider this mid-November riff from The Guardian‘s Stuart Heritage:
Channelling William Goldman: I don’t like the idea of Adam Sandler and Carey Mulligan being a couple, and so, naturally, I’m not at all interested in a story about whether or not they work through their troubles and get back together. With or without the help of a third party. That’s the nub of it.
Wiki synopsis: “Sent on a mission to the edge of the solar system, an astronaut encounters a creature that helps him put his earthly problems back together.”
What has happened to our culture over the last 15 years….hell, over the last seven or eight years…has been seismic. Obviously, inescapably.
And yet there are bright people like “Cat’s Cradle” out there…tens if not hundreds of thousands of them…who will listen to what I’ve just said, think about it for three or four seconds, look me in the eye, shrug their shoulders and go “naah, don’t think so…you’re living in your own world, man…life moves on, things change.”
Fellows like Cat’s Cradle aren’t blind as much as they don’t want to see. Because seeing would make them feel antsy or threatened. It’s a stone cold fact that over the last seven or eight the monsters have not only infiltrated Maple Street but are pretty much running the show, at least by way of changing the language and introducing a new form of puritanism, not to mention political terror.
Edit: I meant to say “the difference betweeen 2009 and 2024 has been seismic.”
I’ll tell ya where. A black and an Asian dude turn up at the 1:24 mark so let’s not hear any shit talk about He’s Just Not That Into You (New Line, 2.6.09) being some kind of white-ass, whiter-than-white heart of darkness romcom. 15 years ago, and it feels like a half-century. The makers of this film knew they should’ve blacked it up more, but they dropped the ball.
Yesterday New Yorker critic Richard Brody posted the following comparison between Barbie and 2001: A Space Odyssey (which Barbie briefly spoofed, of course, by aping the “Dawn of Man” sequence):
This is primarily a political tweet, of course. Brody is giving Barbie director Greta Gerwig a sympathetc fistbump after she was snubbed for a Best Director Oscar nomination last Tuesday.
I also think Brody likes to throw around eccentric, extreme opinions. Does he really, actually think Barbie is a “better” film than Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 mastepiece? Maybe, but I doubt it. I think he mainly wants the congnoscenti and the wokerati to consider that he might be the Albert Einstein of film critics…that he’s seeing things on a white-light, laser-beam level no one else has quite managed…that he’s some kind of Rasputin-like genius.
I understand that sometimes the best writing happens when you don’t think it through that much in advance. Just go with it, jump off a cliff and see where it all lands. But once you get into the afore-mentioned Rasputin provocation game (not a fact but a perception on my part) what you write becomes more performative than persuasive.
Dev Patel‘s Monkey Man (aka “John Wick in Mumbai“) is not a Hollywood Elsewhere-type film. Did I even need to write that?
Monkey Man completed shooting in early March of ’21. or roughly 34 months ago. Why did the producers need three years before it was ready for release? Netflix had originally expected to release it in ’22, then it was pulled from their lineup. They sold it to Universal last year. That studio will release it on 4.5.24.
You know it has problems.
Actual narration excerpt from Monkey Man (1:17 to 1:21): “Every day I’ve prayed for a way to protect the weak.”
Ditto (:20 to :36): “A demon king and his army…they brought fire and terror to the land until they faced the protector of the people…the white monkey.”
Monkey Man is obviously bottom-of-the-barrel pulp exploitation, aimed at action-fan guttersnipes…the lowest of the low. It actually looks more like John Wick meets RRR sans musical scenes.
Logline: “A recently released ex-felon living in India struggles to adjust to a world of corporate greed and eroding spiritual values.”
Patel directed, produced (along with many others), stars, wrote the story and co-wrote the script (along with Paul Angunawela and John Collee).