Which well-known, big-name actors today have more or less admitted what Peter O’Toole‘s Alan Swann character shouted out in My Favorite Year — “I’m not an actor, I’m a movie star”?
Actors, in other words, who’ve acknowledged that they’re very good in a certain type of role but that’s all? Actors who’ve said in so many words that they’re not Daniel Day Lewis or Laurence Olivier and are more or less cool with this?
Perhaps not as baldly or bluntly as Steve McQueen copped to decades ago, but actors who’ve said they’re good within a certain perimeter, playing a particular kind of film and conveying a certain mode or mood or attitude, and have decided this is good enough and that it’s better not to step outside their zone?
Clark Gable was one of these — excellent playing Gable-type roles but careful to stay within his perimeter. Alan Ladd, Jean Arthur, Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis, Robert Redford, Owen Wilson…pretty much all movie stars have figured out what their big-screen persona is and have boiled it all down and figured what works best for them.
In a recent CNN interview, The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Roxborough obediently laments the presence of Johnny Depp during the opening-night festivities for Jeanne du Barry. We all understand that Depp’s louche, arrogant behavior (inflamed by alcoholism) was a factor in his turbulent marital relationship with Amber Heard, but wokesters should at least acknowledge the judgment of the jury in the Virginia defamation case, and allow for the possibility that Depp and Heard’s relationship was toxic from both sides and that she threw as many grenades as he did.
Roxborough says that the Cannes Film Festival “has a long way to go” in terms of gender parity, or a belief that an equal humber of male and female directors need to be represented on all the slates. Which means that celebrating quality isn’t as important as enforcing progressive political goals.
While choosing 19 films for the main competition, it’s conceivable that 12 goodies might be directed by women and 7 by men. Parity says that 3 female-directed goodies have to fall by the wayside (i.e., go to Directors Fortnight or Un Certain Regard) to make room for 3 slightly less satisfying films made by men.
Roxborough also pronounces Cannes like kick the can or can of sardines. It shouldn’t be pronounced with an “auughh” sound but with a middle-ground “Cahnnes.”
“It’s not a whodunit — it’s a who-didn’t-do-it?” — Martin Scorsese‘s press conference description of Killers of the Flower Moon.
Scorsese and Robert De Niro hadn’t attended Cannes together since the ’76 premiere of Taxi Driver — 47 years ago.
Lily Gladstone: “It wasn’t so much me finding the role as it finding me.” Her voice has an Indiana housewife sound…guttural, a bit twangy…she leans into her “rrrs” and pronounces golden like “gouhllduhn.”
Todd Haynes‘ May December, which I saw late last night, struck me as awkward and even silly at times. Haynes tries for a tone that mixes satiric whimsy and overheated emotional spillage while channeling Bergman’s Persona, but scene after scene and line after line hit me the wrong way.
It’s about a famous actress, Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman), paying a visit to the pricey Savannah home of Gracie Atherton (Julianne Moore), a somewhat neurotic and brittle 60something who runs a dessert-cooking business. Elizabeth’s plan is to study Gracie as preparation for a soon-to-shoot film about her once-turbulent life, which involved a scandalous sexual affair with a minor and a subsequent prison term. Elizabeth naturally wants her forthcoming portrayal to deliver something truthful, etc.
For her part Gracie is cool with the arrangement but at the same time a wee bit conflicted and anxious. She’s calculated that she’ll come off better in the film if she invites the pissing camel into the tent**.
Seemingly modelled on the late Mary Kay Letourneau, a former school teacher who was prosecuted and jailed for seduced a 13 year-old boy, Gracie is married to Joe Yoo (Charles Melton), a 36 year-old half-Korean dude who was also 13 when Gracie technically “raped” him while they were working together at a pet store, and with whom they now have two or three kids. (This is one of those films in which the exact number of kids in a given family is of no interest to anyone…zip.)
If I had the time I would list the eight or nine things that especially bothered me about this film. Suffice that my basic reaction was one of exasperation. I literally threw up my hands and loudly exhaled three or four times. I groaned at least twice. I’m pretty sure I muttered “Jesus!” a couple of times. I also recall slapping my thigh.
For what it’s worth Letourneau and Fualaau insisted from the get-go that their relationship was consensual; ditto Gracie and Jo in May December‘s backstory. After serving her prison term Letourneau married Fualaau and soon after had kids with him; same deal with Moore and Melton’s pretend couple.
** Exact Lyndon Johnson quote: “It’s better to have your enemies inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.”
When I learned of Jim Brown‘s death a couple of days ago, I immediately thought of James Toback‘s “Jim: The Author’s Self-Centered Memoir on the Great Jim Brown.” I realize I’m not allowed to mention Toback these days, but this ribald…okay, hedonistic and affectionate memoir is what sold me on Brown’s settled, come-what-may coolness.
Not to mention his appearances on The Dick Cavett Show in the late ’60s and early ’70s (particularly the Lester Maddox walk-out episode). And I’ve always loved Brown’s ringside commentary during the Muhammud Ali-George Foreman “Rumble in the Jungle”, and particularly his prediction that “I don’t think George is gonna make it.”
Before his directing and screenwriting career took off, Toback was allegedly assigned to write a negative magazine piece on Brown. But after getting to know his subject Toback decided that Brown didn’t deserve this, and was so taken with the ex-football player’s laid-back, cool-cat attitude that he decided to write “Jim” as a makeup. Brown was a bit of a Zen libertine back then, and the book relates how he and Toback embarked on an erotic adventure or two, or so I recall.
In last night’s Killers of the Flower Moon review, I failed to mention the general sense of pleasure and assurance and high-level articulation that you always get from a Martin Scorsese film. There are concerns, yes, about the occasionally plodding pace and the 206-minute length and a lack of sufficient dramatic payoff, but start to finish you know you’re in the hands of a master filmmaker who always works with good people.
Thelma Schoonmaker‘s editing never feels rushed or anxious or slapdash — every cut feels exactly right, barely noticed and smooth as silk. Early on Robbie Robertson‘s musical score ignites with a reverb-y guitar riff that heralds the mixed-blessing discovery of oil on Osage land, and soon after settles into a steady metronomic rhythm that suggests the sound of native drums in the distance. And every frame of Rodrigo Prieto‘s widescreen (2.39:1) cinematography is exquisitely framed and lighted.
The final import of Killers may win you over or not, but it’s always soothing to watch, and the moral undercurrent never dissipates.
Three films today — Simba Masaku‘s Hound at 1:30 pm, MartinScorsese‘s Killers of the Flower at 4:30 pm, and finally (11 pm) Todd Haynes‘ May December, about an actress (Natalie Portman) who visits the Maine home of a woman (Julianne Moore) she’ll be portraying in a film.
Cannes weather was warm and delightful when I arrived last Tuesday, but since then it’s been mostly unpleasant — cool temps and constant dampness except inside theatres.
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.
Yes, it’s one nerve-wracking traumatic event after another, and so it feels like a forced deck at times. And yes, it dive-bombs into a kind of too-sudden happy ending during the last 10 or 15. But this is one alive-on-the-planet-earth urban thriller that grips and holds and doesn’t let you go.
It’s obviously more of a guy film and certainly not for couples (I noticed at least four or five women journos bailing within the first 30 or 40 — an older woman sitting next to me walked out only about 20 minutes in), but by any brutal big-city standard it’s a wowser.
The excellent, go-for-broke supporting performances from Michael Pitt, Katherine Waterston, Mike Tyson and Raquel Nave are nothing to snort at either.
Based on Shannon Burke’s 2008 novel (\based upon Burke’s real-life experience as a paramedic) and written by Ryan King and Ben Mac Brown, Black Flies is totally balls to the wall.
Are you a fan of super-expensive, dutifully plotted, follow-the-formula, steady-as-she-goes tentpole reboots? The kind of flamboyant, highly energized, basically bullshit popcorn fantasies that most of us are cool with on occasion. And if not, do you at least feel a fondness for wackazoid, over-the-top, throw-out-the-rulebook, crazier-than-fuck endings? If so, you’ll most likely have a place in your heart for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (Disney, 6.30), which I managed to see this morning at 8:30 am.
Does Dial of Destiny have a soul? Does it move and breathe with something other than mere technical expertise and the relative comfort of a massive budget? The answer is “yeah, kinda” in the sense that imagination-wise it jumps off a cliff at the very end, and that, in itself, constitutes a kind of agreeable, Jesus H. Christ craziness that only screenwriters who’ve done psychedelic drugs could have come up with. (The writers are Jez Butterworth, John-Henry Butterworth, David Koepp and director James Mangold.)
I was obliged to sit in heaven (near the top of the Grand Lumiere balcony, which is angled at 45 degrees) and there was no leg room to speak of. For most of the 142-minute running time my knees were screaming. But I felt diverted and occasionally amused and…I don’t know, placated by this big, noisy, unsurprising, throughly whorish and very handsomely shot old-schooler — an imitation Steven Spielberg tentpole film that feels like it could have been made in 1992 or ’95 or ’01 if 2023-level CG had been available, and if 80-year-old Harrison Ford had been (duhh) 30 years younger, which wouldn’t have gotten in the way of anything plot-wise.
The pans that broke last night were written by soreheads. It is what it is, and it delivers the hand-me-down goods in a way that very few will find bothersome or underwhelming.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is a mega-budget serving of silly, rousing, formulaic, high-energy, fuck-all Hollywood wankery. If you pay to see it with that understanding in mind, it’s “fun” as far it goes, largely, I would say, because it also feels oddly classy…a well-ordered, deliciously well-cut exercise in which Mangold does a better-than-decent job of imitating Spielberg’s psychology, discipline, camera placements, cutting style, easy-to-follow plotting and generally pleasing performances.
In his 5.18 review, Irish Times critic Donald Clarke writes that “nobody with a brain in their heads will compare Dial of Destiny favorably to the first three films.” He’s right about that, but it’s definitely better than 2008’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. That may not sound like much, I realize, but at least it has this distinction.
The plot is basically another “Indiana Jones vs. frosty, cold-blooded Nazi fiends in search of a priceless archeological artifact” thing. Ford is steady, restrained and solemnly earnest in a gruff (okay, grumpy-ass) sort of way. Mads Mikkelsen is the chief German baddy-waddy, Phoebe Waller-Bridge is Indy’s younger half & partner in adventure and derring-do, Ethann Isidore is the new “Short Round” (the spunky Temple of Doom character, played by a young Ke Huy Quan) and so on.
One minor HE complaint: Waller-Bridge’s feisty-grifter character, Helena Shaw, is said to be the daughter of Toby Jones‘ Basil Shaw. There is, of course, no way on God’s good, green, chromosonal earth that the short, pudgy, gnome-like Jones (who stands 5’5″) could be the biological dad of the leggy, wafer-thin PWB (who stands just under 5’10”). No way in hell. I bought the crazy ending in a “is this really happening?” sort of way, but not this.
The presumption is that these four promotional documentaries will deliver the usual corporate gloss-over zoneout. What else are they gonna do?
Imagine all the fascinating material that won’t be included…truth-for-truth’s-sake stories that don’t necessarily enhance the stock value. I’d be there for that.
“Featuring insights and first-person stories from directors, actors, executives, journalists and historians, the four specials trace Warner Bros.’ underdog origins — from its founding in the early 1920s by four brothers from an immigrant family, through decades of creative risks and impactful storytelling, to the historic mergers of the 2000s that transformed the company into a global entertainment powerhouse.
“Directed by LeslieIwerks with narration by MorganFreeman and clips from iconic films and hit TV series, 100 Years of Warner Bros. offers a fascinating behind-the-scenes look into the indelible stories that have spoken to audiences around the world for generations. The first two #WB100 documentaries stream May 25 on Max,” blah blah.
