Jeff Wells

“TAR” Is Only Ten Days Away

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From HE’s 9.4.22 Telluride review of Todd Field‘s TAR (Focus Features, 10.7): “The focus of this chilly but fascinating film is (a) the magnificent work and lifestyle of Cate Blanchett‘s Lydia Tar — I wanted to move into this movie and live there and never come out — but primarily (b) the fanatical determination of “Millennial robots” (as Lydia calls them) to destroy careers of people they see as cruel and abusive.

“It’s mainly about a faintly alluded to, stubbornly non-dramatized relationship between an ambitious student and Lydia, a powerful God-like figure in her realm, and how it went wrong and why, and how this resulted in a kind of blood feud — a deliberate act of career assassination and a form of sexual harassment.

“But who rejected who exactly, and why do reasonable intelligent viewers of Tar have to argue about this hours later and still not be certain about what happened?

“All kinds of exposition is deliberately left out of Tar, and it’s triggering. I’m sorry but Tar takes forever to get going (at least 45 minutes if not longer), and once it does it’s too elliptical, too fleeting, too oblique, too teasing and (I guess) too smart for its own good. It made me feel dumb, and I really hate that.

“But I loved the flush world of brilliant, arrogant, confident Lydia. Not to mention the textures, the autumnal Berlin atmospheres, the perfect scarves, the dinners….I wanted to live in it forever.

“The bottom line is that Field can’t be bothered to tell a story in a way that most people would find satisfying. He doesn’t show the stuff that we’d like to see and be part of, obviously because he feels that’s the most interesting way to deal the cards. But not for me. Elusive narrative games and coy hintings and teasings and dingle-dangle maneuvers…nope. Maybe if I watch it again it’ll somehow come together?
Note: I saw TAR a second time at Telluride and I’m afraid it didn’t improve much.

“I still can’t decide if TAR is a damning indictment of cancel culture or if it’s slyly dissing Blanchett‘s brilliant but callous conductor and more or less saying ‘well, she made her bed.'”

Dominik Has Damaged “Blonde’s” Oscar Cred

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We’re all conscious of a Best Actress campaign underway for Ana de Armas‘ Marilyn Monroe performance in Andrew Dominik‘s Blonde (Netflix, streaming on 9.28).

For what it’s worth I think de Armas has done an excellent job of bringing Dominik’s version of Monroe (wounded, broken, extremely vulnerable) to life. She gives it her all, and I would have no argument with her being nominated for Best Actress. Nobody would.

I wrote a while back that Blonde is “artful torture porn.” Because it is.

I also agreed that her performance as the relentlessly brutalized and victimized Monroe is analogous to Martin Scorsese‘s The Last Temptation of Christ. Excerpt: “I’m thinking not just of the incessant dismissals and degradations and spiritual uncertainties, but the anguished and agonized relationship between the main protagonist and the elusive ‘father.’”

Variety‘s Clayton Davis believes, with at least some sincerity, that de Armas is Netflix’s strongest acting contender and that her performance has the “best shot for Latina Oscar attention.” (Should Best Latina Performance become a new Oscar category? If Clayton wasn’t a Variety columnist he could become a top-tier Oscar strategist and lobbyist on behalf of BIPOC contenders.)

But let’s be honest — Dominik’s honest but demeaning remarks about Monroe in a 9.27 Sight & Sound interview by Christina Newland have hurt the film’s Oscar chances, and possibly even damaged de Armas’s campaign.

Actually it’s not so much the interview itself as Twitter-ized outtakes from her Zoom chat with Dominik that have caused all the trouble.

Fascinating Dominik quote: “Blonde is supposed to leave you shaking. Like an orphaned rhesus monkey in the snow. It’s a howl or pain or rage.”

Consider the following and post whatever reactions that may come to mind:

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A Bit Pushy, Even Unfair

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Chloe Okuno‘s Watcher (IFC Midnight, 6.3.22) is a quietly unnerving Polanski-like thriller. Filmed on a modest budget in Bucharest in the early spring of ’21, it has creepy undercurrents running beneath the standard urban-stalker plot. A meditation about feelings of isolation in an Eastern European city, about a cis relationship in trouble due to a lack of empathy on the man’s part.

Watcher is too intelligent and subtle for low-rent horror fans (it’s only made $2.5 million worldwide over the last three months) but it’s an agreeably creepy thing with a vibe all its own, at least in 21st Century terms.

And then along comes some downmarket competition from Ryan Murphy, Ian Brennan and Netflix — a seven-episode series called The Watcher. It’s like Netflix barging into the room and telling Okuno and her film that they can leave now (or at least will have to endure a brand takeover) because a bigger, richer, more American-friendly thriller has arrived.

My first instinct was to think “jeez, who invited you guys?…you can’t show a little respect for Okuno’s film by going with a different title? You have to muscle your way in and bulldoze her film to the side?”

What matters, I feel, is that Okuno’s film has been a respected elevated-horror thing for nine months now, going back to Sundance ’22. It has a place in the sun and should be left alone.

Based on a true story that happened in Westfield, New Jersey (HE’s home town), it’s about a normal, middle-class couple (Naomi Watts, Bobby Cannavale) being terrorized in somewhat the same that Maika Monroe is creeped out by Burn Gorman in Watcher. It looks to me like just another Amityille Horror thing…a formula flick about a suburban family getting freaked out and screaming and whatnot. Pure formula.

The Watcher costars Mia Farrow (!), Noma Dumezweni, theatre director Joe Mantello, Richard Kind, Terry Kinney, Margo Martindale and Jennifer Coolidge.

“Stop Busting My Balls” = “Die For All I Care”

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N.Y. Times writer Kim Severson shares some scoopy material in Charles Leerhsen‘s “Down and Out in Paradise: The Life of Anthony Bourdain.”

We’re mainly talking abut the contents of some “raw, anguished” texts between Bourdain and his ex-wife, Ottavia Busia-Bourdain, as well as Bourdain’s hellcat lover Daria Argento, whose aloof and callous behavior just prior to his death…uhm, may have had something to do with his decision to hang himself. Or not. Who knows?

AB to Busia-Bourdain: “I hate my fans, too. I hate being famous. I hate my job. I am lonely and living in constant uncertainty.”

HE comment: “Living in constant uncertainty, eh? I eat constant uncertainty for breakfast, hoss. But I certainly understand your despair about your job, and about being famous. What a shitty, soul-draining way to spend your life…God! Constantly travelling from one fascinating destination to another, eating scrumptious food, meeting fascinating people, discovering and re-discovering the soul of things in every new situation. We all have our crosses to bear, and you certainly had yours.”

AB to Argento #1: “I am okay. I am not spiteful. I am not jealous that you have been with another man. I do not own you. You are free. As I said. As I promised. As I truly meant. But you were careless. You were reckless with my heart. My life.”

AB to Argento #2: “Is there anything I can do?” Argento to AB: “Stop busting my balls.” AB to Argento: “Okay.”

Hours later he offed himself.

“Napoleon” For Christmas?

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The Ankler‘s Tatiana Siegel is reporting that Apple is seriously thinking about “crashing the Oscars” with Ridley Scott‘s Napoleon, if and when it opens in December. World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy has repeated the story sans paywall. If Scott brings the same intense historical realism to Napoleon that be brought to The Last Duel and especially The Duellists, his forthcoming Apple-distributed drama will almost certainly be a keeper.

The Camera is Predatory

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The term “male gaze” was coined 37 years ago by feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey. The basic idea is that men have been objectifying women for their physical appearance since…uhm, prehistoric times.

And this, perversely, has led to an artistic tradition where males get pleasure from looking at females who take on passive roles blah blah. In the world of Mulvey’s “male gaze” society is still teaching young girls that they need to look desirable in order to get attention from boys while also teaching young boys that it’s okay to view women as sex objects.”

Friendo: “This again? Who gives a fuck? They’ve all but obliterated men by now. There’s nothing left but a grease stain. And that’s still not enough?”

Nina Menkes’ Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power (Kino Lorber) debuts on 10.21 at Manhattan’s DCTV Firehouse Cinema; it will also open at the Laemmle in West Los Angeles. Some kind of national rollout wiill follow.

Reporters, Anchors Frowning at Italy’s Just-Elected Meloni

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Nationalist anti-immigrant sentiments have surfaced in several European countries over the last few years, and now Georgia Meloni, a hard-right, anti-immigrant politician whose principal affiliation is with the radical Brothers of Italy (Fratelli d’Italia), has been elected Italy’s prime minister.

It is fair to presume that Meloni’s’ victory is mostly about ground-level, Average Joe racism — wanting to protect traditional Italian culture from a feared flooding of the country and the culture by Middle Eastern and northern African immigrants.

The electoral ascension of the hard-right Sweden Democrats represents another cultural convulsion caused by this same concern.

N.Y. Times reporter Steven Erlanger: “European Union leaders are now watching [the Meloni] coalition’s comfortable victory in Italy…with caution and some trepidation, despite reassurances from Ms. Meloni, who would be the first far-right nationalist to govern Italy since Mussolini, that she has moderated her views.

“But it is hard for them to escape a degree of dread. Even given the bloc’s successes in recent years to agree on a groundbreaking pandemic recovery fund and to confront Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, the appeal of nationalists and populists remains strong — and is spreading, a potential threat to European ideals and cohesion.”

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Thumbs Down on “Pearl”

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Some are under an impression that Ti West‘s Pearl (A24, currently playing), the X prequel, is some kind of unusual, imaginative gothic slasher film blah blah. And I’ve been told “you really ought to see this.”

Well, I caught it last night, and shame on the above-described. They need to beg for forgiveness, take their shirts off and beat themselves with birch branches, wash their mouths out with soap.

That goes double for a friend who wrote that “while X is a generic slasher flick, Pearl does flesh out some of the X characters. X is X but Pearl is something completely different. I don’t know if you’ll like it or not, at the very least the cinematography is fairly stunning.”

Allow me to ask a question of the Pearl fan clubbers. The question is “what is wrong with you?”

Pearl is a facile, lazily conceived, sloppily written, incongruent American gothic slasher flick that basically asks “what if Dorothy Gale was an enraged, self-hating, mother-hating, animal-hating, everything-hating fiend who uses a three-pronged pitchfork the way Norman Bates used a kitchen carving knife?”

I know what strikingly handsome, wow-level cinematography shot in a wide-open farming locale looks like. Nestor Almendros and Haskell Wexler‘s lensing of Days of Heaven is one example. The bucolic farm images of Pearl (shot in New Zealand, pretending to be Texas) are decent but nothing to get too excited about. Bothersome at times…under-lighted, sometimes muddy compositions. It reminded me of the visual palettes of The Hills Have Eyes, I Spit On Your Grave and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Seriously, fuck this movie.

Random jottings during the screening:

(a) “This is low-rent crap…perverse, brainless, derivative psycho Americana“;
(b) “Pearl’s hard-nosed German mother (Tandi Wright) emphasizes that life is hard and they need to struggle to survive, but she refuses a neighbor’s gift of a stuffed pig?”;
(c) “An alligator living in a lake in Texas?”;
(d) “Mia doesn’t like to be stared at by the brown cow”;
(e) “For my money the cinematography is on the muddy and grainy and under-lighted side”;
(f) “Wright’s performance is pretty good”;
(g) “The 1920s silent stag film was diverting”;
(h) “Masturbating with the scarecrow was okay“;
(i) “The allusion to the 1918 pandemic was interesting”;
(j) “Why doesn’t she chop her father’s hands off with an axe and feed them to the alligator? Why doesn’t she feed herself to the alligator?”;
(k) “Stupid crap…wasting my life watching this shit…feed him to the fake gator!”;
(l) “Where does Pearl get the idea that she’s some kind of good singer or dancer? I know she’s delusional but why go to an audition if she doesn’t have some kind of half-reasonable hope that the audition guys will respond to her skill and talent? That said, the World War I chorus girl sequence isn’t bad”;
(m) “Pearl pitchforks the only nice, sensible guy in the whole film because he begins to realize she’s a bit of wacko, which of course she is”;
(n) “I’m soooo glad I never saw X. I’m ecstatic that I missed it.”
(o) “Ti West is an animal…a serious primitive…the polar opposite of a filmmaker like, say, Todd Field.”

RT Cooking “Woman King” Scores?

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At what point can The Woman King, which cost $50M to produce and another significant chunk of change to sell, be considered profitable? Theatrical revenues are, of course, just one aspect of the overall revenue stream these days, and The Woman King hasn’t really opened internationally yet. But right now the worldwide earnings after the second weekend are around $37.5M. Not bad, I guess, but not earthshaking.

The film has nonetheless connected to a decent or moderate degree. Will it end up as a break-even, which is to say earnings of well over $100M (as you do have to add marketing costs)? You tell me.

Right now I would describe The Woman King, all things considered, as a modest, respectable success. That’s fair, no? A friend says that “given its budget and lack of star power, it was never meant to break the bank. But it’s done quite well.” Sure, no arguments, respectable showing.

But this morning I looked at the Woman King audience scores on three aggregate sites — Rotten Tomatoes (99%), Metacritic (2.5%) and IMDB (6.1%). And the evidence seems clear (or strongly indicates) that the Rotten Tomatoes gang has “cooked the books” as far as The Woman King‘s audience score is concerned. With the other two aggregates reporting much lower audience reactions, what are the odds that RT’s 99% score is trustworthy?

Not even Goodfellas, which everyone likes or admires, has managed a 99% audience score.

Three days ago (9.22) Evie‘s Gina Florio took note of this incongruity. Her article is titled “There’s Speculation That The Woman King Audience Score And Reviews On Rotten Tomatoes Are Manufactured.”

Florio links to a Twitter dude named @fatherquads, who believes that a faction within RT is indeed posting fake audience numbers.

“The [RT] profile claims to have 99% audience score, and over 2,500 verified reviews,” he tweets. “The only problem is that [the blurbs are] all short, posted soon after one another, and don’t talk much about the content of the movie, rather how much of a YAS SLAY QWEEN Viola Davis is.”

Friendo: “RT is a totally corrupt and despicable entity that I’ve loathed from day one and never pay the slightest attention to. Their data is mostly meaningless (or so obvious that it tells you zilch). ‘Interpreting’ RT tells you nothing. And who cares what demo The Woman King is appealing to? Who cares what action fanboys think? The fact that black women had an action film to call their own is, I would say, a good thing. I mean, why not?”