“If a movie can be said to suffer from low-grade depression, this one certainly seems to be, shuffling in its socks and bathrobe through a not-quite-two-hour running time with an attitude that is closer to grudging obligation than enthusiastic commitment.” — Washington Post critic Michael O’Sullivan.
Sung to the tune of Randy Newman‘s “Short People”:
“Dark Phoenix got no reason to / Dark Phoenix got no reason to / Dark Phoenix got no reason to exist.”
I’ve been coming to Paris for decades, but until today I’d never visited the Last Tango in Paris apartment building in Passy with that musty-looking apartment that Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider had their anonymous encounters in.
In the film the address is 1 rue Jules Verne, but in actuality it’s located at 1 rue de l’Alboni. On top of which the bar/tabac where Schneider goes to call her mother on a pay phone is right across the walkway and down one flight.
The fact that I could sense a very faint residual after-vibe was entirely due to my own fevered imagination, but nonetheless this is the place where it all happened. Only Vittorio Storaro lives on.
There are sea-faring dramas (i.e., films that primarily take place on floating vessels making longish or otherwise difficult voyages) and there are submarine movies (i.e., films that mostly happen underwater in 20th Century submersibles). These are two different kinds of aquatic animals and should not be mixed up or confused.
Topping the list of HE’s finest sea-faring dramas: Peter Weir‘s Master and Commander, J.C. Chandor‘s All Is Lost, Alfred Hitchcock‘s Lifeboat, Peter Ustinov‘s Billy Budd, John Huston‘s Moby Dick, Lewis Milestone‘s Mutiny on the Bounty (no one’s idea of a great film but one that delivers excellent 18th Century sea-faring realism), Paul Greengrass‘s Captain Phillips, Wolfgang Petersen‘s The Perfect Storm, James Cameron‘s Titanic, Richard Sales‘ Abandon Ship!, Byron Haskin‘s Treasure Island, John Sturges‘ The Old Man and the Sea, Ang Lee‘s Life of Pi.
No good: Ron Howard‘s In The Heart of the Sea. Irritating: Baltasar Kormakur‘s Adrift w/ Shailene Woodley. Disqualifiied: the stupid Pirates of the Caribbean movies, Cabin Boy.
HE’s finest submarine movies, in this order: Das Boot, Crimson Tide, U-571, The Hunt for Red October, 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, Destination Tokyo, Run Silent, Run Deep, The Enemy Below, Ice Station Zebra, Up Periscope, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea….what others?
Steven Spielberg‘s Jaws is neither fish nor fowl — it’s basically a landbubber monster movie that concludes with a third-act voyage in which three men try to hunt down and kill the beast.
“Digitally restored concert footage and rare behind-the-scenes video show how Dylan embarked across America in ’75 with his bandmates and fellow musicians. 142 minutes long. Will open in select theaters on June 12th, concurrent with Netflix streaming debut,” etc. Reactions? I for one would love to see this theatrically when I return to Los Angeles on 6.5. Update: My plane lands at LAX at 6 pm, and the last Netflix screening that I’m aware of begins in Hollywood an hour later. I guess not.
Yesterday “High Sierra Man” took exception to an observation I posted about Steve McQueen‘s Le Mans that I posted in “Roar of Motor Oil, Smell of the Crowd“, to wit: “Le Mans marked the end of McQueen’s superstar phase.”
High Sierra wrote: “Except after Le Mans he famously got his name above Paul Newman (a clever battle of marquee placements) on blockbuster Towering Inferno, starred in breakout hit The Getaway, starred in the epic Papillon and a few years later died. So you’ve got that on your side. Worth noting: ten years after McQueen died he was still a brighter burning screen star than 95% of the wankers clogging up our current cinemas. McQueen Then, Now, Forever.”
“Filmklassik” agreed, calling my statement “frankly silly. McQueen was being offered EVERYTHING in the 1970s. Everything.”
HE to High Sierra Man and others: Agree about ‘then, now and forever.’ Always have, always will. But I was referencing Gabriel Clarke & John McKenna’s 2015 doc Steve McQueen: The Man & Le Mans. Their film stated very plainly that this ‘71 race-track pic was the film that broke McQueen’s spirit as well as his legend to a significant extent, and that things were never quite the same after it.
In my mind McQueen had a great 14-year run from ‘60/‘62 (The Magnificent Seven, Hell Is For Heroes) to his last quality spurt (Junior Bonner, The Getaway and The Towering Inferno) that ended in ‘74. Call it 15 years.
But his Godly McQueen aura, that quietly measured and invincible thing that peaked with Bullitt, that Zen-like, supercool man-of-few-words + awesome motorcycle and Mustang-driving era was shorter — The Great Escape to Le Mans or roughly an eight-year stretch.
Late last night I noticed The Longest Day playing on a huge flat-screen inside a Montmartre bar-cafe. Not in the tourist area but on rue de Ruisseau, which is strictly inhabited by locals. My thought was “wow, that’s odd….what Parisian would want to watch this heavily sanitized, conservative-minded, nearly 60-year-old war film that was produced by old-school Hollywood types?” The 75th D-Day anniversary aside, I can only surmise that oldsters have recollections of the trauma that their parents went through during the German occupation, etc.
Every day I wake up and ask myself why there isn’t a much larger groundswell of Democratic and independent voter support for Mayor Pete. He’s so obviously the best and the brightest, the most mature, the most gifted, the most eloquent, the best educated, most sensible and practical-minded candidate among the pack. And among the most principled.
JFK, RFK, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama…Mayor Pete has the same natural charisma, the same aura of destiny. Yes, Beto O’Rourke had that mojo earlier this year, but he somehow hand-gestured, Vanity Fair-ed, dentist-video’ed, table-topped and apologized his way out of that. Maybe he’ll find his way back but right now and for the foreseeable future Mayor Pete is unquestionably “the guy.”
Did anyone really care about JFK’s private sexual life? Or Bill Clinton‘s? Or, God forbid, Donald Trump‘s? In my mind Mayor Pete is the only guy…the only Democratic candidate about whom the only conceivable response is “yes, of course!…please!”
And he’s totally right about Avuncular Joe, who is nothing if not an old-guard symbol and defender of the system…of the moderately liberal, business-as-usual way of operating…who is nothing if not more of the same…a Washington, D.C. insider who believes that his Republican pallies will regain their sanity and change their tune if he beats Trump…who wants to adopt a middle-ground approach to climate change.
Tattoo this phrase on your brain: “The riskiest thing we could do is try too hard to play it safe.”
This may sound harsh, but in my mind the idea of Trump being re-elected is only slightly more depressing than the idea of Biden replacing him.
Imagine an alternate universe in which Jared Kushner had the agency and the character to answer the questions posed by AXIOS’s Jonathan Swan with absolute honesty. Instead of the laughably deceitful responses that Kushner gave to Swan, especially about whether he had ever seen Donald Trump do or say anything racist.
Kushner doesn’t have genuine candor in him, but in another world he could have said, “Of course my father-in-law is a racist. A racist and — let’s be frank — a rank, salivating sociopath. You’re asking me to confirm what has been fairly obvious for decades, and patently obvious since he became an Obama birther a decade ago?
“White men of my father-in-law’s generation, particularly those raised in the working-class cultures of Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island of the ’50s and ’60s, have racism in their bones. Listen to Travis Bickle‘s narration in Taxi Driver. Listen to that psychotic character played by Martin Scorsese in the back seat of Bickle’s cab when they’re looking up at that windowshade with the silhouettes. That kind of thinking was all over the place when my father-in-law was young. Hell, it was all over the place 30 years ago when he called for the death penalty for the Central Park Five. 20th Century New York City was throbbing with racism.
“Things are obviously different now in the blue cities and suburbs, but my father-in-law is nothing if not avaricious and opportunistic and practical-minded, and his main base of support consists of rural lowbrows and none-too-brights. Remember that woman in the red-T-shirt who told John McCain during the ’08 campaign that she thought Obama was an Arab? His core supporters are the dregs of society who want him to push back against the ‘other’, the non-white invaders, the immigrants, the multiculturals.
“C’mon, Jonathan…who is my father-in-law if not the Last Angry White Guy who’s stamping his feet and saying ‘no, no, no’ to the cultural and economic changes that the blues have embraced and run with over the last half-century and especially the last 20 or 25 years?
“The boomer-aged, Fox News-watching rurals see their white heritage…everything that this country used to be from the late ’40s to the early ’90s or thereabouts…they can feel it all slipping away. This and that old-fashioned notion of job security and homogenous communities…all that good-old-America stuff that Michael Moore has spoken of when describing the Michigan he knew as a kid.
“And my father-in-law’s only chance of electoral support is to appeal to these sad people. You can look at me cross-eyed and say you don’t approve, but that’s the cultural and mathematical reality.
“These slow-boaters — some call them bumblefucks — don’t care if my father-in-law is a fiendish autocrat and a submental sociopath. They don’t give a damn if he’s an American Mussolini. They just want him to protect their communities, save their bloodlines, and try and preserve at least a semblance of the America they once knew.”
Yesterday HE commenter “Jax” wrote the following assessment of Booksmart: “Just saw this. Breaking news: IT’S NOT THAT FUNNY. Sarcasm and snark [which] all the new comedies have, but no real wit, and no real dramatic tension between the leads until the end. The scene with the dolls was GREAT, but you can’t make a movie out of that.
“Plus the film is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It’s been talked up on the chat shows as a great coming-of-age comedy a la American Graffiti or Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Actually it’s a crypto lesbian comedy with a semi-hot lovemaking scene (with a gross joke) and a strong feeling for the sisterhood of two young women. Not what the audience signed up for.”
I’m sorry but the instant that I read “crypto lesbian comedy” I had to admit that this label is somewhat on-target, at least when you compare the actual content of Booksmart vs. how it’s been sold.
I happened to enjoy Booksmart for what it is (partly because it seems to be reflecting late-teen mores and attitudes among GenZ types in big-city cultures) but I also refrained from describing it as a semi-lesbian thing, as did almost every other critic in the world.
Because anything more than a cursory mention of a gay current can lead to wokester-wolf-pack suspicions of vague homophobia, so the smart thing is to discreetly allude to a film’s sexual atmosphere without saying “this is what it is”.
Which is why you’ll never read the term “crypto lesbian comedy” or anything like that from anyone who writes for Indiewire, the official journal of wokester politics and attitudes.
The marketing of Booksmart, in short, played the old “hide the ball” game — selling it as an edgy, whipsmart teen odyssey (which I for one bought into, having said it was “as fulfilling and well-honed as a 21st Century high-school farewell thing could reasonably be”) when in fact it’s a little gayer than what anyone has officially copped to.
Another thing we’re not allowed to mention these days is the fact that the LGBTQ community reps 4.5% of the U.S. population. Add your enlightened urban/suburban liberals and wokesters and the core allegiance factor is still on the marginal side.
Name some other significant “hide the ball” marketing campaigns, whether or not they resulted in a film’s commercial success.
Race-track flicks are naturally about serious pro-level drivers and their vehicles. (Renegade fast-car movies are a different breed.) The most enjoyably immersive race-track flicks, in this order: Claude Lelouch‘s Rendezvous (not shot on a track but all the more thrilling for that), John Sturges and Steve McQueen‘s Le Mans (the failure of which marked the end of McQueen’s superstar phase), Lamont Johnson‘s The Last American Hero, John Frankenheimer‘s Grand Prix, James Goldstone‘s Winning, Tony Scott‘s Days of Thunder, Ron Howard‘s Rush, the Fred Astaire race-car sequence in On The Beach.
Last weekend Joe and Jane Popcorn stood eyeball-to-eyeball with Warner Bros. and Legendary Pictures and said the following: “You can’t keep Monsterverse-ing us with the same old Godzilla crap and expect lines around the block. We’re not going to sit for this stuff endlessly, on top of which your new Godzilla is at least a couple of tons heavier than the five-year-old Gareth Edwards version…the first flat-out obese monster in the history of motion pictures. We’re fat enough on our own, bruhs — we’d rather not be reminded of the obesity epidemic when we go to the movies.”
Variety‘s Rebecca Rubin: “Godzilla: King of the Monsters didn’t have a roar quite as deafening as its franchise predecessors. The third entry in Warner Bros. and Legendary’s MonsterVerse opened with a middling $49 million at the domestic box office, a start well below 2014’s Godzilla ($93 million) and 2017’s Kong: Skull Island ($61 million).
“Like its series brethren, Godzilla’s umpteenth return to the big screen had a more promising start overseas, where it debuted with $130 million. Even so, that’s a potentially problematic drop in ticket sales for a movie that cost roughly $200 million to make. It also likely required a marketing spend in excess of $100 million.
