It all boils down to a lack of “consumer acceptance,” or more particularly general consumer perceptions “of our efforts to achieve certain…social goals, often differ widely and present risks to our reputation and brands.”
The Hill‘s Jonathan Turley: “Disney has reportedly lost a billion dollars just on four of its recent ‘woke’ movie flops, productions denounced by critics as pushing political agendas or storylines.
“Yet until now, the company has continued to roll out underperforming movies as revenue has dropped. What’s more, Disney stars persist in bad-mouthing its fabled storylines and undermining its new productions. The company admits that it has suffered a continued slide in ‘impressions’ (that is, viewership) by 14 percent.
Hurley excerpt #2: “You can bring movies to the public, but you cannot make them sell. Once an unassailable and uniting brand, Disney brand is now negatively associated with activism by a significant number of consumers. The company is now even reporting a decline in licensing revenue from products associated with StarWars, Frozen, ToyStory and MickeyandFriends — iconic and once-unassailable corporate images.
Hurley excerpt #3: “The question is how long Disney (or its shareholders) can tolerate falling revenues tied to its ‘misalignment with the public.’ A massive corporation, Disney can lose billions before facing any truly dire decisions. Yet even Disney’s CEO, BobIger, now appears to be seeking to ‘quiet things down’ after years of culture wars.”
With the overwhelmingly negative reaction to his lead performance in Napoleon, Joaquin Phoenix is hopelessly stuck between a rock and a hard place — people are sick of watching him play weird and sullen wackos but they also won’t accept any attempt he might make to play normal. His doleful nut persona can no longer be used without spurring mass derision on the part of Joe and Jane Popcorn.
“Joacquin Pheonix’s character in I’m Still Here is an actor who replaces performance with the actorly exhibitionism of mental illness. And that, in a way, has become the story of Joaquin Phoenix as an actor.
“Whether he’s taking on the role of one more morose everyman dweeb, a Batman villain, or Napoleon, he plays severely damaged people, but what he’s really doing is projecting the dramatic image of himself as an actor reaching into the lower depths.
“On occasion, he transcends the self-focused gloom and brings off something miraculous. I thought he was genuinely great in Joker, in part because the director, Todd Phillips, knew how to build and sculpt Phoenix’s performance; let’s hope that he helps Phoenix bring off a comparable feat opposite Lady Gaga in Joker: Folie à Deux.
“But as films like Napoleon and Beau Is Afraid reveal all too clearly, Joaquin Phoenix has become an actor who needs to be rescued from his worst impulses. Too often, he sinks into his own torpor, steamrolling his movies with the depressive wacked song of himself.”
For some reason I began to watch Sergio Leone‘s Once Upon A Time in America, which I’d seen twice in ’84 — the truncated 139-minute Ladd Company version, which was moderately awful, and then the sadder, more meditative 229-minute version, which played (and still plays) much better**.
Last night’s viewing, alas, didn’t go as well. I mostly felt bored and repelled, and then I started fast-forwarding from time to
time, and then more frequently. I eventually gave up.
My primary blockage was due to feekings of absolute loathing for the main characters…Robert De Niro‘s Noodles (imagine grappling with that absurd nickname throughout your life) plus all the other weaselly gunsels and thugs (James Woods, Joe Pesci, Burt Young, Treat Williams, Danny Aiello, James Hayden and especially the repulsive William Forsythe).
I hated the two gratuitous rape scenes, both perpetrated by Noodles with poor Elizabeth McGovern and Tuesday Weld suffering the assaults. Ennio Morricone wrote a moving, melancholy score, but I just felt bored and soiled by the damn thing…having to suffer the company of so many ugly and distasteful animals and sleazoids.
The 269-minute version deserves a certain “respect,” but I will never, ever re-watch this film at any length…life is too short. It’s a beast.
The version that screened at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival ran 251 minutes…imagine.
Posted on 9.10.11: Christopher Plummer‘s beguiling performance in Mike Mills‘ Beginners (i.e., a 70ish dad who decides to come out and live his waning years as a gay man) has looked like a strong contender for Best Supporting Actor Oscar all along.
But after seeing Plummer charm and electrify and ham it up and speechify in gloriously boozy Shakespearean fashion in Barrymore, which I saw a couple of hours ago at the Bell Lightbox, I’m all but convinced he has the Oscar in the bag.
Barrymore basically captures (and visually enhances to some extent) the stage show that Plummer performed in New York and Stratford in the mid ’90s, and lately performed again in Toronto earlier this year.
As long as the Academy sees this low-budgeted Canadian film, that is. Once they all see it, the game will be pretty much over. Because Plummer isn’t just portraying the late John Barrymore, and is so doing reanimating all the flamboyance and lamentations and exaltations of a once-great actor’s career in his last year of life, he’s also playing, in a sense, himself. There are, after all, certain parallels.
Add this performance to Beginners plus Plummer’s turn in David Fincher‘s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, and he’s going to be awfully hard to beat.
The book focuses on Hollywood’s traumatic, ethically fraught Red Scare era of the late ’40s and ’50s, and particularly the trials and tribulations of this once-blacklisted producer and author of High Noon‘s allegorical screenplay as well as several other classic, hard-hitting films (Champion, Home of the Brave, Young Man with a Horn, The Men, A Hatful of Rain, The Bridge on the River Kwai, The Guns of Navarone, The Victors).
I hadn’t seen Chetwynd’s film since an invitational Academy screening 21 years ago, but I keenly recall the excitement and controversy.
The controversy stemmed from Chetwynd’s doc having delivered a persuasive, highly damning portrait of High Noon producer Stanley Kramer, who went on to direct a string of urgent and respected social-political dramas including The Defiant Ones, On The Beach, Inherit the Wind and Judgment at Nuremberg.
Chetwynd’s film (assembled from Foreman’s corner) accused Kramer of cowardice and personal betrayal, and there wasn’t much of an argument to be made as Chetwynd had done his homework and then some.
I recall praising Darkness at High Noon in my then four-year-old column, which was then berthed at reel.com. The film is narrated by Richard Crenna with Foreman’s first-hand account read by Richard McGonagle.
My initial search this morning yielded a YouTube version that was posted a year ago by Carl’s daughter, Dr. Amanda Foreman. Alas, it looks like hell due to having been horizontally taffy-pulled. Chetwynd’s original version was composed in 1.37.
I’m figuring that a version that represents the original aspect ratio has to be accessible. (A MUBI version has disappeared.) I’ve just reached out to Chetwynd, etc.
From Todd McCarthy’s 4.10.02 Variety review of Chetwynd’s film: “Pic pivots on the charge that Kramer essentially robbed Foreman of his rightful credit as producer of High Noon after the latter had left the U.S. for England to escape the snare of the blacklist (his writing credit was protected by the Writers Guild).
“After firmly establishing Foreman’s right to that credit on what was bannered ‘A Stanley Kramer Production’ and demolishing the long-standing rumor that the film’s much-noted cutaways to clocks to reassert its real-time structure were not in the script but added in post-production, Chetwynd backtracks to relate his protagonist’s biography, from Chicago upbringing and apprenticeship in FrankCapra‘s WWII filmmaking unit to rising late ’40s screenwriting rep on Home of the Brave, Champion and The Men.
“That outspoken Hollywood conservative Chetwynd should be taking up the cause of former Communist Party member Foreman may raise an eyebrow or two. But the doc assumes a vigorously pro-Foreman position not only in opposition to HUAC but especially against [Kramer’s] alleged weak-spined duplicities.
“Kramer’s family is now disputing the film’s characterization of him, and while his side of the story goes unrepresented here, the sort of thorough documentation Chetwynd offers on Foreman’s behalf will be hard to refute.”
I had gotten to know Chetwynd in ’94 and early ’95 while writing a long Los Angeles magazine article titled “Right Face“. It focused on various Hollywood actors and screenwriters who had experienced varying degrees of suspicion and discrimination due to being conservatives in an overwhelmingly liberal town.
There are days when I feel like DennisHopper‘s Tom Ripley in The American Friend — “I seem to know less and less about who I am, or who anybody else is.”
But that’s just the proverbial doubt dog tugging at my overcoat. Mostly I feel fine.
Thanksgiving dinner at Jett and Cait’s was warm and cool and soothing, and familiar in the best ways imaginable.
I’ve just decided to re-watch Lawrence Kasdan‘s Mumford (Touchstone, 9.24.99). It’s about a fraudulent but extremely charismatic small-town therapist (Loren Dean), whom almost everyone loves to chat with and confess to. I loved it from the get-go (it has a dead perfect ending), but too many critics disapproved and it managed only a lousy $4.5 million gross. But it’s a really, really good film, I swear. Exudes a certain sly, low-key charm.
Roger Ebert, 9.24.99: “There are no earth-shaking payoffs here. No dramatic astonishments, vile betrayals or sexual surprises. Just the careful and loving creation of some characters it is mostly a pleasure to meet. And at its deepest level, profoundly down there below the surface, it is something more, I think: an expression of Kasdan’s humanist longings, his wish that people would listen better and value one another more. It is the strangest thing, how this movie sneaks up and makes you feel a little better about yourself.”
I don’t feel an obligation to state what I’m thankful for today, just because the calendar says this is the day to put your feelings on the table. For I feel thankful 24/7/365.
I’m especially grateful, very grateful, for the luck that has come my way. And for the bad luck, in a way, as all misfortune is character-building. And for the daily opportunity to show love for my two sons and the overall community (old friends, business pallies, colleagues, cats) and the general feeling of loving or liking or aligning with others in whatever way.
Plus I’m hugely grateful that I wasn’t born to a downmarket family in Nebraska or Montana or to some resigned, lethargic, drinking-class environment. I’m very thankful, in other words, for what my parents and grandparents bequeathed.
“In the early scenes [of RidleyScott‘s Napoleon], the titular figure seems to be another of JoaquinPhoenix‘s taciturn, unnervingly volatile, enigmatically damaged, violent men.
“The difference is that this Napoleon, with his bloat, scowls and consuming needs, often resembles nothing as much as an angrily petulant baby, one whose cruelty and pathological vanity make the horror he unleashes unnervingly familiar.” — from Manohla Dargis’s 11.22 N.Y. Times review.
It’s fairly uncommon for critics and the ticket-buying public to feel exactly the same way about a new release. To go by Rotten Tomatoes the elite know-it-alls and your Joe Popcorn types agree that Napoleon is the same kind of problem.
There’s a very significant difference between all the big-screen King Kongs we’ve seen since Peter Jackson‘s 2005 disappointment and Merian C. Cooper and Willis O’Brien‘s classic, stop-motion, herky-jerky version.
I’m not saying that Jackson and the others made the right or the wrong call in the fashioning of their Kongs, but here’s the thing:
Cooper’s Kong didn’t look like any gorilla, chimp or orangutan that had ever walked the earth. He was something between a prehistoric hybrid and an imaginary monster of the id…a raging nightmare beast designed to scare the bejeesus out of 1933 moviegoers.
O’Brien, the legendary stop-motion phtography pioneer, used three slightly different-looking Kong models during filming, but for me the master stroke was deciding to give his Kong a set of gleaming white teeth and a pair of very bright white eyes.
In some of the darker shots of Kong in the 1933 film those teeth and those eyes just pop right out, and the effect is still primal as hell. Those white eyes and black pupils look so fierce and almost demonic…contrasting as they do with that black bear fur that Kong was covered in…that they almost give you the willies, even now.
There’s no such aura with all the National Geographic Kongs we’ve seen this century. The realism element is awesome but the spook factor is nil. In going for anthropological realism Jackson and the others threw out that creepy, better-than-reality, only-in-the-movies element that gives the 1933 film a serious-nightmare quality.
It was Abraham Lincoln, remember, who, in 1863, officially proclaimed that Thanksgiving would be celebrated on the final Thursday in November. And that’s how it’s been ever since. I don’t know how Thanksgiving worked before that year — does anyone? All I know is that everything was cool until the wokesters came along and began to throw shade upon the origins of Thanksgiving, or more precisely the relations between white settlers and Native Americans.
