The curtain finally comes up on Martin Scorsese‘s The Irishman on Friday morning 9.27), followed by the L.A. premiere of Todd Phillips‘ Joker on Saturday evening. Quite the double-header.
The Irishman review embargo lifts at 8 pm eastern, 5 pm Pacific.
Message to those who’ve groaned about The Irishman‘s 209-minute running time: This is a movie about a man’s life, comprising some 60 years and covering a lot of bad business all through the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, etc. The decisions, events, history and the weight of same. How could this film be short or compact?
This morning a journo pally confided concerns about the de-aging CG and whether it’ll pass muster or prove distracting. My reply, more or less, was that all movies are unreal in this or that way. They all lay out their basic schemes and requirements, and you either buy into them or you don’t. Some movies feature actors with ornate makeup or wigs or moustaches. Black-and-white movies aren’t “real”, but no one’s ever called this a hurdle. Movies always pretend but we often buy what they’re selling regardless. The Irishman is no different.
In the comment thread for yesterday’s McCartney Colbert riff, a guy named “Silver” mentioned an amazing ending for Danny Boyle and Richard Curtis‘s Yesterday — one that would have blown 100 million minds and restored Boyle’s reputation to where it was around the time time of Trainspotting, Shallow Grave and 28 Days Later It goes without saying that this kind of ending is so far beyond where Curtis, a softball peddler of romantic formulas, lives and creates that it could never happen with Curtis’ involvement, but imagine the seismic impact!
HE alternative. Intrigued by Jack Malik’s visit to his beach house, the 78 year-old John Lennon (Robert Carlyle) attends one of Malik’s concerts. Lennon wanders backstage after the show to offer congratulations, and joins a throng waiting for selfies and autographs. Standing next to Lennon is the alternative-universe Mark David Chapman, who’s packing heat and looking to shoot Malik. Why? Because Chapman, like that older hippie couple Malik has spoken to in Act Two, knows all about Malik’s Beatle scam and is looking to punish him for being a fraud. The quicksilver Lennon notices that Chapman is beset by dark vibes, and leaps into action when Chapman pulls out his snub-nose .38. Lennon karate-chops Chapman in his Adam’s Apple and takes his gun. Malik is spared.
Alternate ending #2: Lennon tackles Chapman before he can shoot Malik, but is accidentally shot himself as they struggle on the floor. The horrified Malik cries out “somebody call 911!” and holds Lennon’s head in his lap as the elderly Liverpudlian slowly dies from his wounds.
Alternate ending #3: Malik is shot by Chapman but the assassin is quickly subdued by Lennon and other fans, and is arrested. Lennon kneels next to the wounded Malik, holding his hand and offering words of love and compassion as Malik draws his last few breaths.
You can laugh and make fun of these, but you know they’d play better than the bullshit ending that Boyle and Curtis went with.
In The Irishman, Robert De Niro, 76, plays Bufalino crime family assassin Frank Sheeran from his mid 20s to early ’80s, and allegedly quite convincingly through the magic of CG de-aging. The below photo is De Niro-as-Sheeran during his WWII combat service, which happened when Sheeran (born in’20) was between 23 and 25.
I know that Scorsese spent many millions on de-aging technology and I’m really not trying to be a nitpicking asshole here, but does Army helmet De Niro look like a guy in his early to mid 20s? Be honest.
When I think of wet-behind-the-ears De Niro I think of his young Vito Corleone in The Godfather, Part II, which was filmed in ’73 when he was 30, rail-thin and quite beautiful. Or his Johnny Boy in Mean Streets, which was shot when De Niro was 28 or 29.
De Niro looks 30ish in this Army helmet shot (he could even be in his mid to late 30s), and yet he’s supposed to be playing a guy who was a good five years younger than De Niro was when he played young Vito.
I love this screen saver — a shot I took last summer of one of the residential gates on Bel Air’s Chalon Road. Tatyana and I always park near the Bel-Air Hotel and then hike west. Half of the walk is about avoiding fast cars.
HE is looking to read News of the World, a script by Paul Greengrass and Luke Davies, based on the book by Paulette Jiles. Greengrass will soon direct the historical drama with Tom Hanks in the lead, and Universal will release the film on 12.25.20.
From Deadline: Set in 1870, the story’s about Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd (Hanks), a war veteran who roams from town to town as a non-fiction storyteller, sharing the news of presidents and queens, glorious feuds, devastating catastrophes, and gripping adventures from the far reaches of the globe. In Texas Kidd crosses paths with Johanna (Helena Zengel), a 10-year-old taken in by the Kiowa tribe six years earlier and raised as one of their own. (Natalie Wood in The Searchers.) Johanna is being returned to her biological aunt and uncle against her will. Kidd agrees to deliver the child where the law says she belongs.
$100 bucks says News of the World will end like a blend of Richard Brooks‘ The Professionals and current politically correct thinking— that Hanks will realize at the end of Act Three that he’s doing a bad thing by forcing poor Johanna to live with her perverse, pinched-sphincter-muscle aunt and uncle, and so he allows her to return to her Kiowa family. Because Native Americans are more spiritual than white people, etc. And because almost all white people are bad, Hanks’ character being an exception. Because he comes to recognize the evil of whiteness, and in so doing transcends himself.
Update: Incorrect assumption, I’m told. But “white people are inherently evil” is nonetheless a legitimate talking point in progressive circles.
…and, having just discussed John Lennon seconds before, they don’t mention Yesterday‘s most penetrating, head-turning scene? Because…what, they don’t want to spoil? The movie came out over three months ago. Spoiler whiners haven’t a leg to stand on after 90 days. I would have been completely fascinated to hear McCartney’s reaction.
Taika Watiti‘s Jojo Rabbit (Fox Searchlight/Disney, 10.18), an absurdist black comedy, is seemingly destined to rock the Oscar race if — I say “if” — the New Academy Kidz have anything to say about it. For this is definitely a New Academy Kidz type of film. It’s ballsy, cockeyed, nutso, out there…it is, after a fashion, sardonic hipness incarnate. In flagrant quotes. And it certainly resides in its own surrealistic realm, which I respected as far as it went. It doesn’t believe in anything other than its own determinations, and that’s fine.
It’s basically an Impressionable Hitler-Youth Perspective of Viennese Naziland, broadly played for satiric effect. Satire aimed at simpletons, I should say, but it’s all so saturated in winking irony so I actually meant that it’s aimed at, you know, “simpletons.” It’s a stylistic wank-off and about a quarter-inch deep, but there was a seasoned industry guy sitting behind me who couldn’t stop laughing, and heartily at that. At one point I half turned in my seat as if to say “what the fuck?”, but I didn’t turn all the way around.
I don’t know everything. I’m not God or the reincarnation of James Agee or some kind of Ultimate Arbiter. I’m just a bigmouth with a platform. If the guy sitting behind me found it hilarious, whom am I to say he’s wrong or short-sighted? Or that the New Academy Kidz who believe it’ll be nominated for Best Picture are living on Planet Uranus? They may be right.
Watiti’s basic message is that “ethnic hatred is not only evil but stupid and pathetic” and that “anyone with a heart and soul will understand the truth of this sooner or later.” I for one agree with this assessment. Anyone opposed?
Roman Griffin Davis plays the Hitler youthie, but he never seems radically committed to Aryan supremacy and/or notions of the thousand-year Reich. (He struck as a none-too-bright softie, a poseur.) Watiti plays an imaginary Adolf Hitler goofball by way of a lobotomized Soupy Sales figure. Plus the film has a progressive-minded mother (Scarlett Johansson) who was time-machined in from 2019. Plus Sam Rockwell — easily the best actor playing the funniest role — as Captain Klutzendorf, a Nazi captain who runs a Hitler Youth camp, and also propelled by 21st Century hipster attitudes. (I just lied about Rockwell’s character — his name is actually Captain Klenzendorf.) Thomasin McKenzie plays Elsa, a take-charge Jewish girl hiding out in JoJo’s attic.
My second favorite character and performance is Jojo’s fat Nazi pally, played in a likably laidback way by Archie Yates.
The strongest influences noted by Toronto critics were Mel Brooks’ “Springtime for Hitler” number in The Producers and a kind of highly poised, deliberately antiseptic Wes Anderson aesthetic — a certain toy-shop tweeness or ironic “lay on the fake icing” quality. I agree with these measurements. JoJo Rabbitis Wes Anderson meets “Springtime for Hitler.”
I honestly prefer the Max Fischer Players in terms of realism, production design, wit, visual panache. But I understand and “respect” what JoJo Rabbit is up to. The people who love it aren’t wrong — they’re just easy lays. There’s nothing wrong with being an easy lay. I’ve been one myself from time to time, and I’ll be one again when the right film comes along.
Yesterday on Facebook agent Justin Ptak posted a list of the best movies about filmmaking, and then he asked me, among others, if he’d missed anything.
Yeah, I said. He missed two Vincent Minnelli whoppers — The Bad and the Beautiful (’52) and Two Weeks In Another Town (’62).
Among Ptak’s favorites: Barton Fink (1991), The Player (1992), In a Lonely Place (1950), Day for Night (1973), Adaptation (2002), Sullivan’s Travels (1941), 8 1/2 (1963), Bowfinger (1999), Saving Mr. Banks (2013), Singin’ in the Rain (1952), Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019), Sunset Blvd. (1950), The Artist (2011), Hail, Caesar! (2016), The Disaster Artist (2017), A Star is Born (1954), Tropic Thunder (2008), Postcards from the Edge (1990), Shadow of the Vampire (2000), Living in Oblivion (1995) and The Stunt Man (1980).
In the comment thread for yesterday’s “Hustlers and Fools” riff, which was mainly about Adam Sandler‘s performance in Uncut Gems, “pmn” mentioned that for all their hormonal or mannered sloppiness, directors Josh and Benny Safdie are at the very least “New York filmmakers” in the classic mode, and that this kind of attitudinal persuasion “seems like a dying breed as New York has morphed into a giant strip mall. The Safdies seem to be able to zero in on the last few pockets of character left in the city.”
To which I replied: That’s a significant thing. As the classically scrappy, Sidney Lumet-like depictions of 20th Century Manhattan (urgent, pugnacious, edgy, ethnic, pointed, blunt) are becoming more and more eroded and diluted and sanded down by corporatism and skyrocketing rents, the value of high-personality New York movies like Uncut Gems (which, don’t get me wrong, I found infuriating for its complete lack of interest in exploring anything but how it feels to ride on the back of a gambling edge-junkie tiger)…the ethnic, pushy atmosphere of such films is starting to seem more and more valuable as the social forces, aromas, attitudes and pulsebeats that fed into your classic 20th Century NYC culture are starting to lose more and more of their influence as the corporate, tourist-friendly strip-mall aesthetic creeps in and influences and even to some extent dictates the cultural tone of that town, certainly as far as Manhattan is concerned.
When was New York City really and truly a classic Lumet-like culture? The ‘80s were the last authentic gasp. The corporate clean-up began in the Mayor Giuliani era of the ‘90s. The peak era of feisty Manhattan movies ran from the late ‘40s to late ‘80s.
What are my all-time favorite New York flavor movies? The top two are Lumet’s Prince of the City (’81) and William Friedkin‘s The French Connection (’71). Followed by Sweet Smell of Success, Naked City, Midnight Cowboy, Do The Right Thing, Taxi Driver, Serpico, Manhattan, The Godfather, King of New York, Dog Day Afternoon, Bad Lieutenant, Detective Story, On The Waterfront, Across 110th Street, Shaft, Patterns, Metropolitan, Saturday Night Fever, 12 Angry Men, Marathon Man, After Hours. But NOTWest Side Story — too antiseptic and Robert Wise-y. And NOTFame. And NOTBreakfast at Tiffany’s or The Devil Wears Prada.
…and concludes that there was no quid pro quo between Ukranian president Volodymyr Zelensky pledging an attempt to collect potential dirt on Joe Biden and President Trump offering to unlock $400 million in U.S. aid…anyone who reads the transcript and doesn’t recognize or acknowledge what was actually being said is either (a) a liar, (b) a stooge, (c) five years old or younger or (d) a complete idiot.
“From a quid pro quo aspect, there’s nothing there,” said South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham. Absolutely!
Any news reporter or analyst who says, “Well, gee…Trump didn’t precisely and explicitly link the release of the $400 million to Zelensky pledging to investigate Biden for all its worth…there’s no actual smoking gun here“…any reporter or analyst who asserts this is either rock stupid or deliberately attempting to obscure the obvious.
Remember that third-act diner scene in Goodfellas when Robert De Niro asks Ray Liotta if he could fly down to Florida on vacation “and take care of this thing”? Mobsters and crime bosses never say “I want you to murder this guy because he ratted us all out” or “I want you to stick an icepick in this guy’s neck in order to keep him from testifying against me.” They say “I know you’ll take care of the problem”…enough said!
I was keen to see Mark Landsman‘s Scandalous (Magnolia, 11.15), a seemingly engrossing “deep dive” documentary about the National Enquirer, ten seconds into the trailer.
Favorite Landsman quote: “The real story behind the National Enquirer is like a classic monster movie from the 1950s where initially the creature doesn’t intend to harm anyone, but is soon wreaking havoc on the population. I was fascinated by the men and women who made that havoc happen, and thrilled to have the opportunity to tell the inside story.”
I’ve had the same basic attitude about the National Enquirer for a long time, which is that most of the stuff they publish is rancid upchuck but every now and then (i.e., rarely) they go above and beyond by reporting a credible story with hard facts, photos and other evidence. Like the John Edwards love child thing in 2008. And the Bristol Palin pregnancy story the same year. They’ve always seemed to excel at pants-down stories.
Otherwise I’m so disinterested that I don’t even flip through it during Pavilions checkout waits. The storied tab is primarily know these days for shilling (or “catching and killing”) on behalf of the Trump administration, etc. Believed by the stupidest people in the country, etc. The attempt to blackmail Amazon’s Jeff Bezos was a partisan attempt to serve Trump by undermining the owner of the Washington Post, etc.
The talking heads include Ken Auletta, Carl Bernstein, Iain Calder, Steve Coz, Jerry George, Gigi Goyette, Maggie Haberman and Barbara Sternig.
This Is Just A Test Media produced Scandalous with CNN Films and AGC Studios serving as executive producers. CNN Films will retain North American broadcast rights.
I’n leaving for my 2 pm screening of A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. I’ll have a little filing time at a Pico Blvd. Starbucks between 4 pm and 6 pm. Then comes a 7 pm encounter with Jojo Rabbit. And on that note…
