If you’ve ever seen a fight, you know they always involve a lot of wrestling and swearing, and are usually over within 30 to 45 seconds, and sometimes less. And that the combatants are always winded and whipped at the end.
The film was James Gray‘s The Yards, co-written by Gray and Matt Reeves. I remember telling Phoenix during a chat at the 2005 Toronto Film Festival how much I admire the choreography here, and his telling me that he and Wahlberg worked it out together, being careful to make it look unrehearsed. I didn’t recognize Charlize Theron in this scene — did anyone?
Discussion of Joker trailer and themes therein, echoes of present-day shooters lost in despair; Joaquin Phoenix and Mark Wahlberg‘s fight scene in The Yards; The King with Timothee Chalamet, “perhaps not the greatest casting call.” All eyes on Venice Film Festival. Ad Astra and Marriage Story screening tomorrow [Thursday, 8.29]. How will Marriage Story compare with Kramer vs. Kramer? Strong emotional current. Flinty, aggressive vibes emanating from ScarJo character? Attention spans have definitely weakened, hence sporadic complaints about The Irishman length, and why didn’t Netflix ask Scorsese (who spoke of “300 scenes” in the film during a May 2018 appearance) to create a six-episode Irishman miniseries? Reactions to The Laundromat, and Steven Soderbergh‘s wonderfully low-key sense of humor. A surprise Telluride flick? Not Dark Water but something? Jay Roach‘s Bombshell is more of a story of the Fox women who suffered through Roger Ailes‘ aggressions than a saga of the aggressor. Problematic gender quotas at film festivals.
1:20 pm Update: The Last Word‘s Lawrence O’Donnell has tweeted that he made “an error in judgment” last night by mentioning that a lone source had told him that some of Donald Trump‘s Deutsche Bank loans had been co-signed by Russian oligarchs close to Putin.
Donald Trump‘s personal attorney Charles Harder has threatened NBCUniversal with a defamation suit over last night’s The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell report, during which O’Donnell stated that a “single source close to Deutsche Bank has told me that…Donald Trump’s loan documents there show that he has co-signers. That’s how he was able to obtain those loans. And that the co-signers are Russian oligarchs [close to Putin].”
“This would explain, it seems to me, every kind word Donald Trump has ever said about Russia and Vladimir Putin, if true, and I stress the ‘if true’ part of this.”
Lonely, depressed, alone, miserable, haunted…”life is a comedy.” Obviously a tour de force performance from Joaquin Phoenix — instant Best Actor status. The film is basically saying that the cruel world we live in creates the villains that it deserves. And you can’t avoid thinking of the perpetrators of recent mass shootings, and about mental illness and how society so often just looks the other way.
And how ironic is it, by the way, to have Robert De Niro playing a Jerry Langford-like talk host (the character played by Jerry Lewis in The King of Comedy), and this time opposite someone who could almost a kindred spirit of Rupert Pupkin, not to mention Travis Bickle.
The only stumbling block, for me, is that Joker is an origin story about a famous super-villain, and yet portrayed by a guy in his mid 40s — and who easily looks 50 if a day. Who figures out their role in life at the half-century mark? What was happening during the previous 40-odd years? Was he gestating, marinating?
Previously: “Last night I read a 2018 draft of Todd Phillips‘ Joker, written by Phillips and Scott Silver. It’s Scorsese-ish, all right — set in 1981 Gotham, tingling with echoes of Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy with a little touch of Death Wish. The basic philosophy is ‘the world’s a venal, plundering place so who can blame Joaquin Pheonix for becoming a killer clown?’ It’s a stand-alone but at the same time it definitely feeds into the Batman legend.”
After telling myself “yes, this will be sly, smart and amusing…half broad, half deadpan,” my first question was “what’s with Gary Oldman‘s accent?” He’s playing the slippery Jurgen Mossack, the German-born Panamanian lawyer and the co-founder of Mossack Fonseca, the former law firm that was linked to a corruption investigation in Brazil into bribes paid to politicians by companies doing business with the state-run oil company, Petrobras. Mossack was born and raised in Furth, Bavaria. Oldman’s accent reminded me of that guy in those Italian Swiss Colony wine commercials (“That little old winemaker, me”).
Has Meryl Streep been aged up for her role as “Ellen Martin”? Or has she simply performed without makeup? Interesting choice.
I won’t be able to catch Ari Aster‘s director’s cut of Midsommar until next Tuesday, after I’ve returned from Telluride. The original version ran 147 minutes. This new unrated cut runs 170 minutes, or 23 minutes longer.
Earlier: The New York Film Festival has just announced that Martin Scorsese‘s The Irishman is 210 minutes. Very impressive. All in. Longer than The Godfather, Part II (202 minutes), Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (200 minutes), Titanic (195 minutes) and The Godfather (178 minutes). But shorter than The Last Emperor (219 minutes), Ben-Hur (224 minutes), Lawrence of Arabia (222 minutes), Dances With Wolves (236 minutes) and Gone With The Wind (221 minutes).
This is a month old, for Chrissake. Produced by Fox Searchlight. Very meta, just right. The concluding Thor: Ragnarok bit is excellent. I don’t know how this flew by me but it did.
Henry V was a young English king — driven, vigorous — who led British troops to victory at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, when he was only 29. He died six years later.
King Henry will be portrayed by 23 year-old Timothee Chalamet in David Michod‘s The King (Netflix, 10.11 theatrical, streaming 11.1). The great Laurence Olivier was 36 or 37 when he portrayed the same noble, aggressively spirited fellow in Henry V (’44). There’s no point in comparing the films or for that matter the two performances. We all understood we’re living through an Age of Collapse and Degradation. There’s no stopping the process.
The beheading scene clip presumably depicts the death of one of the conspirators (possibly Thomas Grey) behind the Southampton Plot. Has anyone who’s about to be beheaded ever cried like some pathetic, shrieking candy ass? I don’t think so, but movies like The King would have you believe otherwise.
Focus Features has announced that Todd Haynes‘ Dark Waters, a fact-based attorney-vs.-polluters drama in the vein of Erin Brockovich and A Civil Action, will open on 11.22.19.
November 22nd isn’t too far down the road. In a perfect world it would screen at Telluride this weekend. If they’ve got the goods, the word-of-mouth will follow.
The screenplay is by Matthew Carnahan and Mario Correra, and stars Mark Ruffalo (as Bilott), Anne Hathaway, Tim Robbins, Victor Garber, Mare Winningham, William Jackson Harper and Bill Pullman.
When The Wild Bunch opened it was regarded as the last revisionist wheeze of a genre that had peaked in the ’50s and was surely on its last legs. It was also seen, disparagingly, as a kind of gimmick film that used ultra-violence and slow-mo death ballets to goose the formula. Now it’s regarded as one of the best traditional, right-down-the-middle westerns ever made. This kind of writing, acting and pacing will never return or be reborn. Lightning in a bottle.
“What Citizen Kane was to movie lovers in 1941, The Wild Bunch was to cineastes in 1969,” Michael Sragowwrote, adding that Peckinpah had “produced an American movie that equals or surpasses the best of Kurosawa: the Gotterdammerung of Westerns”.
“After a reporter from the Reader’s Digest got up to ask ‘Why was this film even made? I stood up and called it a masterpiece; I felt, then and now, that The Wild Bunch is one of the great defining moments of modern movies.” — from 9.29.02 article by Roger Ebert.
Vincent Canby on William Holden‘s performance as Pike Bishop, from 6.26.69 N.Y. Times review: “After years of giving bored performances in boring movies, Holden comes back gallantly in The Wild Bunch. He looks older and tired, but he has style, both as a man and as a movie character who persists in doing what he’s always done, not because he really wants the money but because there’s simply nothing else to do.”
Edmond O’Brien: “They? Why they is the plain and fancy ‘they’…that’s who they is. Caught ya, didn’t they? Tied a tin can to your tails. Led you in and waltzed you out again. Oh, my, what a bunch! Big tough ones, eh? Here you are with a handful of holes, a thumb up your ass and big grin to pass the time of day with.”
The great Edward Norton reached the half-century mark on 8.18.19, or the weekend before last. Which is no biggie, of course, 50 being the new 40 and all. It’s just that his brilliant debut performance in Primal Fear doesn’t feel like it happened all that long ago. (Except it did.) I’ve been thinking of Norton because of the imminent Telluride premiere of Motherless Brooklyn, the ’50s noir that he directed, adapted, produced and stars in. And the roles and films that followed over the next four years — Holden Spence in Everyone Says I Love You, Alan Isaacman in The People vs. Larry Flynt, a jazz gambler in Rounders, a reformed neo-Nazi in American History X, the unreliable narrator in Fight Club — six knockouts if you include Primal Fear.
